An Interview with Mike Chen

Mike Chen is the author of the well-received new novel, Here and Now and Then, a unique emotional genre-bending debut that captures the perfect balance of heart, playfulness and imagination. It tells the story of an everyday family man with a hidden past as a time-travelling secret agent – faced with a decision between two lives – present and future. Mike Chen is a lifelong writer, from crafting fan fiction as a child to somehow getting paid for words as an adult. Mike Chen has contributed to major geek websites (The Mary Sue, The Portalist, Tor) and covered the NHL for mainstream media outlets. A member of SFWA and Codex Writers, Mike Chen lives in the Bay Area, where he can be found playing video games and watching Doctor Who with his wife, daughter, and rescue animals.. Please enjoy my interview with Mike Chen.

I say I’m a writer, which is true. I have a number of jobs writing — my primary job is writing technical documentation and marketing articles for a tech company. Then of course, there’s fiction, which is primarily novels though I have dabbled in short stories from time to time. I also write articles for geek media (Tor Dot Com, The Portalist, The Mary Sue), in addition to being a former sports journalist covering the NHL.

I have a young daughter, so the hours that she’s awake are pretty packed. I tend to get up around 6:00, earlier if I’m on deadline, and I try to write for 60-90 minutes before logging into work. I’ll work until my daughter gets up, then we’ll have breakfast and I’ll take her to school. Then it’s off to the day job (which sometimes works from home) until the afternoon. If my daughter is having quiet time or is occupying herself, I’ll sneak in some light editing or emails — day job or book related — until it’s time for dinner and bed for her. Then the evening is either time with my wife, reading/video games, or writing until bed.

We Are Mayhem by Michael Moreci. I loved the first book of this series, the snarky space opera Black Star Renegades, and I’ve had the ARC of Mayhem for a few months but things kept getting in the way. So I’m ready to dive back into this Star Wars-meets-Guardians universe — which I enjoyed so much that I actually wrote some fan fiction.

My parents told me that they thought I could read by 3 because I would recite the Cinderella storybook to them. Turns out I just totally fooled them cause I memorized when to turn the pages. Outside of that, the earliest thing I can remember reading is the Mister Men series of books.

Page folder. On hardcovers, I also use the book jacket.

I think it’s always been there. I used to have a giant storage box under my bed just filled with books, and I can remember constantly reading all over the house growing up. Reading in bed has always been a bit of a comfort zone for me, and my parents had a rule that we could get anything we wanted at a bookstore — which was surprisingly progressive for Chinese parents!

I wrote a lot of fanfiction when I was young, drawing from classic PC game Space Quest and the 1980s anime epic Robotech. Most of this was in comic strip form. I do remember two particular creative assignments I wrote in elementary school. In 3rd grade, I was inspired by The House With A Clock In Its Walls by John Bellairs and wrote a riff on that which ended by the main character stopping an army of blob monsters with a squirt gun.

And in 5th grade, I remember an assignment where we were supposed to write a sequel to something we’d read. I wrote a sequel to The Sign of the Beaver by Elizabeth George Speare, and it was about Matt and Attean being trapped somewhere when they’re attacked by a bear. To survive, Attean sacrifices himself because he was more adept at fending off the bear. I remember thinking at the time that it was a touching story about friendship and what people will do for each other (also, I was blind to the racially problematic concept at the time). My teacher hated it and said she didn’t want any “disgusting Freddy Krueger stuff in her classroom.” Which still kind of boggles me — I mean, yeah, that was some heavy shit, but I remember thinking at the time that the violence wasn’t excessive or graphic and it was a story about friendship.

Anyways, now I’m a published writer, so I guess that instinct was right. Sorry Ms. Kronk (not that I’m bitter).

It’s hard for me to say given that I’ve read a lot during those years. I’d say that at either age, Save the Cat by Blake Snyder would have been helpful in understanding what 3-act structure was. And more importantly, learning how to infuse character and emotion into it.

Everything starts with an idea, and it’s usually a “this meets that” type of thing, often influenced by whatever media I’m consuming at the time. From this idea, I draw out very loose characters (often named after a particular thing I like; for example, my next book A Beginning At The End (January 2020) characters are almost all named after 90s indie rock musicians with their first and last names tossed in a blender, and my current WIP has all the leads named after Assassin’s Creed characters — it’s easier for me this way, otherwise I’d never actually choose a name) and a rough 3-act outline. If the outline feels like it works, I’ll drill down even further and see if I can write a query pitch or even a 1-2 page synopsis of it.

If that stage works, then I draft pivotal scenes taken from the outline. These sketches may or may not live on in further drafts, it’s really about observing the characters in extreme situations to get a feel for their voice. Once that feels real and grounded for me, I’ll go back and try to start a draft on chapter 1. The first full drafts are fairly thin — they’re about half the typical length and are mostly dialogue and “he goes here” stage direction. The goal is to get a skeleton foundation that solidifies the plot. Then subsequent drafts get the prose in place, add world building, strengthen beats, etc.

These are my go-to books when I need inspiration. For atmosphere, Interview With The Vampire by Anne Rice is still one of my pinnacle examples. For voice and dual POV mechanics, About a Boy by Nick Hornby (see our interview with Nick Hornby) is fantastic. And just general inspiration, one of my favorite reads in the past decade is An Unkindness of Magicians by Kat Howard, which is basically just perfect in every way and has one of the best opening chapters I know.

It’s tempting for me to list the author friends I’ve made over the past, simply because I’d love to hang out with them for a night. But I’ll revert to the more traditional answer:

Carrie Fisher, because it would be non-stop laughs, plus Star Wars stories.

Neil Gaiman, because I hear he is legitimately super nice and he always seems to have a pragmatic opinion on social media.

Mary Shelley, because all of her quotes make her seem like a legit badass. I’m pretty sure Carrie Fisher would be fawning over her the whole time.

Nick Hornby, because I still can’t believe he didn’t like Radiohead’s Kid A.

And then I’d grab an ancient Greek scholar, like Herodotus, just to tell us all what the hell life was really like back then.

The City In The Middle Of The Night by Charlie Jane Anders. I absolutely loved All The Birds In The Sky and I obviously know Charlie Jane’s work from iO9. So with all of the advance buzz for City, I cannot wait. My only real issue is I just don’t get to read anywhere near as much as I’d like to due to the combination of parenting and writing, so I’m not totally sure when I’ll be able to get to it.

Everything? I think the only thing that I don’t like about reading is the time it takes, because the further I get into adulting, the less time I have.

I’m fortunate that I’ve read only really good books, and I’ve recently adjusted to listening to audiobooks as a means of getting through them faster. So with that in mind, I’ll pick two particular ones. Mem by Bethany C. Morrow is a harrowing and heartbreaking journey into a speculative early 1900s, where memories are able to be extracted from people and turned into living beings captured in that moment — except one of them grows sentient. It is beautifully written (and short, which I appreciate these days) and a wonderfully creative way to examine the meaning of memory and the impact of moments on your life trajectory.

The other is an advance copy of The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep by H.G. Parry, which comes out in July. This book is one of the most bonkers things that I’ve ever read, but it pulls it off in the most wonderful way. A short description is that it’s a tale of brothers Rob and Charley, and Charley has the ability to summon fictional characters out of books — and one day, Charles Dickens’ Uriah Heep manages to escape, leading to an indescribable adventure. It’s really fantastic and unlike anything out there.

I absolutely adored The Frame-Up by Meghan Scott Molin, and I would insert myself in there because I’d love to hang with MG and her crew. They’re totally my geek people, and like MG, I don’t like Tolkien.

The first would be to learn story structure. I think a lot of people feel they have a natural instinct for some aspect of prose — I always knew my dialogue was strong and natural. What’s lacking, then, is story structure.

There are many touchstone books for me — A Royal Pain by Ellen Conford, The Haunting At Cliff House by Karleen Bradford, Anne Rice’s first decade of work, the Robotech adaptations by James Luceno and Brian Daley all were significant parts of my first 20 years for different reasons. But for my writing career, I think High Fidelity by Nick Hornby is probably the book that has made the single biggest impact. That’s the book I read right after I took creative writing in college (a class where my teacher encouraged me to keep writing), and something about Hornby’s voice locked me in and made me think “I really want to try this.”

One of the nice things about becoming an author is discovering that the creators of your favorite books are wonderful people. These are some of my favorite books of the past year or two, and the authors are just amazingly kind. I already mentioned Kat Howard, but I’ll also add in Jade City by Fonda Lee, which is this badass mashup of The Godfather, martial arts movies, and magic. Hunting Annabelle by Wendy Heard, which is a fast-paced and intense Dexter-esque mystery set in the 1980s. And The Book of M by Peng Shepherd, which is like Station Eleven as imagined by Neil Gaiman, has hit a level of commercial success that is important in particular for someone who writes character-driven speculative like myself.

I have been waiting for Titanshade by Dan Stout ever since it was announced. The pulpy cop-buddies-with-aliens cover makes me grin every time I see it and I hear that it is amazing. One of the most frustrating things about being both a parent and an author is the dwindling amount of reading-for-fun hours, so I really can’t wait to carve out the time to dive into that book.