Hi! We’re Lisa Henry and M. Caspian, the authors of FALLOUT. We’re touring the web talking about our influences, our processes, anything we can think about actually, and even giving you guys a sneak peek or two! And what would a blog tour be without a contest? Check out the details at the bottom of the post to see what you can win!

Today, Lisa interviews M.:

So, what was co-writing with me like? Feel free to use the word “awesome” as much as you like?

Awesome Lisa is awesome. No, seriously, you are. I think I had to do this weird dissociative thing where I put Lisa Freakin’ Henry to one side of my brain, and just concentrated on writing the book with some other woman co-incidentally called Lisa, who is hilarious and witty and spends her grocery budget feeding wild animals who undoubtedly have more Facebook friends than I do. Because if I didn’t put blinkers on so I couldn’t see Lisa Freakin’ Henry I would be too scared to touch my keyboard. But I’d just get a handle on it, and then you’d shoot out a thousand words of first draft that had me drooling vowels in textual envy. You’re all like, “Hey, l have a coffee break now, let me just whip out an insightful interior monologue to make hearts shatter and bottom lips quiver. No worries.” (You have to say all that in the accent.)

It actually took us 7 months, start to finish, to write FALLOUT. Which included you going to GayRomLit and me moving house. And from August 2014, when we started, to the end of Feb 2015, when we finished, I learnt a great deal about characterization, and pacing, and making the arc drive the story. And much of that I learned from you. So, with Kraken — which was just me going, “I want tentsex with a plot!” — the whole first two-thirds of that leaves people with furrowed brows because I’m just telling them what’s happening, and they’re all “WTF am I reading?” And then somewhere about 67% I worked out, “Oh, I supposed to be making people feel something! Gotcha.” (Please imagine here that Stiles gif where he does the wink and a flaily hand wave, while clearly not knowing what he’s doing). So the end of Kraken is as if it’s from a different story. ‘Cos I worked out how to write better. And when we finished FALLOUT, I had to go back and edit much of what I wrote in the beginning. Which is the point, I guess. And is what keeps me getting out of bed in the morning every day.

So that was the most awesome thing about writing with you; getting to be a better writer.

I expect sometime around 2020 I will actually work out how to tell a story decently. But it’s so much fun working it all out on the way!

Do you have a favourite character in Fallout?

Nope. I love them all. Even the dead ones. Especially the dead ones.

We’ve also bonded over our shared love of Teen Wolf fanfiction, and of Steter (Stiles/Peter) in particular. Do you have a favourite fictional sociopath?

Okay, admittedly it’s hard to beat Peter for a sociopath I wanna drag home to a locked room. Especially when he does that head-tilt thing. But my top-of-the-list sexy sociopaths are fully ¾ of the cast from Weiss Kreuz fanfic. It’s a grab bag of sociopaths: a red-haired German telepath, a dark haired, well-built, possibly American pre-cog, a gorgeous skinny Japanese guy with a katana and suicidal ideation (and also two undoubtedly unstable underage characters). The only one I don’t adore is the Irishman who in canon wears a straitjacket and kills nuns (!?) and even then, in Viridian 5’s Glass Houses, I ship it! Weiss Kreuz fanfic writers, I worship you all. (Hint: there are nearly 7,000 WK fanfics on AO3. All eight main characters are men. It’s Xmas!)

Romance. It’s problematic sometimes to wrap everything up in a HEA or a HFN. Do you think we managed it in Fallout?

You know the kind of books I like the best? The ones where you can tell stories in your head about the characters after you finish the book. Where all the ends aren’t perfectly wrapped up. That’s what I like most about the ending. It’s happy, they’re together, but they’re still fucked up enough that it will be such an interesting next decade for them. I wanna make them like the Sims and watch them work out how to work together to live in their new world. And maybe poke them with a stick once in a while.

What are you working on next?

Right now I’m finishing up my story for Vivian’s awesome prompt from the Goodreads’s M/M Romance Group’s annual fiction event. It has a dragon. A dragon beats . . . everything. Also Vivian used the phrase, “no one ever suspected I’d be the one. The one to burn it all down.” I get to burn it all, muahahahaha . . . cough sorry. I am easily over-excited.

So, when that’s finished, I am subjecting a virginal eighteen-year-old to nonconsensual vinesex (oh, dear God, I’m going to hell, aren’t I?). And then after that I have my Story That’s Set in a Bar to complete. It’s eighteen months old, and still only half finished. I shall prevail!

So, yeah. That should be my 2015.

About FALLOUT:

High-school boyfriends Jack Haldane and Bastian Wade thought everything would be perfect once they reunited at college, putting disapproving parents and small-town attitudes firmly in the past. Now Jack’s on track for a PhD scholarship and a career as a researcher, and Bastian . . . well, living inside a broken body and trailing along in Jack’s shadow didn’t feature in his lofty teenage ambitions. A weekend camping trip back home offers a chance for them to reconnect, but an ugly confrontation with the local motorcycle gang is only the start of their problems. When disaster occurs and the world unravels, will Bastian and Jack manage to hold on to each other, or fall further apart as they try to survive?

You can check out FALLOUT on Amazon or Smashwords.

The Giveaway:

Thanks for following our tour! To celebrate our release, we’re giving away a $20 Amazon gift voucher for you to spend on whatever you’d like. Hey, you should buy Fallout, I hear it’s pretty good!

All you have to do is leave a comment on this post with a way for us to contact you, be it your email, your twitter, or a link to your Facebook or Goodreads account. Please put your email in the body of the comment, not just in email section of the comment form, because we won’t be able to see it otherwise! On April 22, 2015, we’ll draw a winner from all eligible comments! Be sure to follow the whole tour, because the more comments you leave, the more chances you have to win the prize!