Meet Erec Stebbins - Spotlighted Author! New Novel, Extraordinary Retribution Coming December 5th!

Hi, my name is Erec Stebbins and I’m a biomedical researcher in New York City who writes “on the side”. I have hopped around genres from thrillers to science fiction, “mystic junkyard lit” to storybooks. There was no plan in this, only that the ideas for narratives came to me in many different forms.

Glenda has been kind enough to feature several of my books and guest blog posts over the next few days.  With my second thriller set for release December 5^th, it is a timely marathon session!

I have loved to write since an early age, and through college put in quite a bit of effort at producing fiction and poetry as well as essays for “underground” magazines I co-founded with others. Once children and graduate school came along, I found it much more difficult to find the time (and energy) to write, and there was a period of relative stasis. I did manage to write a novella in that time period (Junk Man).

In 2008, feelings engendered by the attacks of 9/11 led me to write The Ragnarök Conspiracy, a thriller dealing with a lot of the conflicting emotions in our War Against Terror. Many of these conflicts between security and liberty continued to find their way into plots and characters in my second thriller coming out in December: Extraordinary Retribution.

 Most of my writing stems from deeply emotional events in my life, either personal or as part of a cultural experience. I rarely find myself in the mainstream on any issue, and that gives me additional motivation to provide a dissonant voice to a chorus that too often seems dangerously homogenous to me.  This tends to produce polarizing responses to what I write, and when that is political, often the reaction someone has (positive or negative) to the politics can unduly color their response to the narrative and characters. But such is the danger of “hot button” topics.

In my science fiction (e.g., the Daughter of Time series), I tend to tackle much more metaphysical issues. Of course, these often relate back to religion and spirituality, so that there is no escaping controversy here either!

But in order for me to be able to tackle the mountain that is writing a novel, it requires passion. Often passion is about topics society and individuals struggle with. Perhaps to the detriment of my sales, I have not shied away from putting my own voice out there on many difficult issues.

My hope is to find a community of readers who respond to my narratives and perspective. Stories are told to be heard, and, at the next level, to involve and move readers. In the end, those are my goals.

As Tolkien once wrote: “The prime motive was the desire of a tale-teller to try his hand at a really long story that would hold the attention of readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times maybe excite them or deeply move them.”

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