Snapshot 2014: Nina D'Aleo

Nina D’Aleo, who wrote her first book at age seven (a fantasy adventure about a girl named Tina and her flying horse). Due to most of the book being written with a feather dipped in water, no one else has ever read ‘Tina and White Beauty’. Many more dream worlds and illegible books followed. Nina blames early exposure to Middle-earth and Narnia for her general inability to stick to reality. She also blames her parents. And her brother.

The Last City, Nina’s debut novel, was nominated for an Aurealis Award for best science fiction novel. Nina is the author of three novels including The Last City, its sequel The Forgotten City, and The White List, available now from Momentum Books.

You’ve just had a new novel come out, The White List. Can you tell us a bit about it and what some of the inspirations behind it were?

The White List is a story about secret agencies, supernatural powers, plots to take over the world and love – all the big stuff :) Inspiration sparked from a lot of different books, movies and artworks that I love such as X-men, Heroes, James Bond, all the superhero comics/movies/stories in all their variations, as well as a whole lot of urban fantasy books, where strange things happen under the surface of our normal world.

 
Your first two published books, The Last City and The Forgotten City, are set in the same genre-blended world. Was it the setting or the characters which came to you first for these books?

Good question. I think I’d have to say the characters and then the setting, as some of the characters grew from early drafts of other books that I was writing at the time (which was over ten years now).


What’s next on the cards for you? What can readers expect to see next?

Next, I’m hoping, will be book 3 of the Demon War series and hopefully a few other separate stories as well :)


What Australian works have you loved recently?

The most recent Australian work that I’ve read and loved was Amanda Bridgeman’s Aurora Pegasus (book 2 in the Aurora series) – very cool sci-fi! 


Have recent changes in the publishing industry influenced the way you work? What do you think you will be publishing/writing/reading in five years from now?

Another great question. I don’t think the changes have really influenced me, I’m writing the same way and the same type of story as I always have, but I do have an amazing agent who handles all the business side of everything. The biggest change I’ve made is swapping the majority of my reading to ebook. I resisted for a long time because I thought it would be like reading on a computer screen but discovered it really wasn’t, and now I’m addicted. In five years time, I’ll still be searching out and reading fantastic stories in whatever form they come and hopefully I’ll still be writing the kind of fantasy/sci-fi that I love as well.

 ~

This interview was conducted as part of the 2014 Snapshot of Australian Speculative Fiction. We’ll be blogging interviews from 28 July to 10 August and archiving them at SF Signal. You can read interviews at:

http://tsanasreads.blogspot.se/search/label/2014snapshot (here)
http://fablecroft.com.au/tag/2014snapshot
http://kathrynlinge.livejournal.com/tag/2014snapshot
http://bookonaut.blogspot.com.au/search/label/2014snapshot
http://www.davidmcdonaldspage.com/tag/2014snapshot/
http://tansyrr.com/tansywp/tag/2014snapshot/
http://randomalex.net/tag/2014snapshot/
http://jasonnahrung.com/tag/2014snapshot/
http://stephaniegunn.com/tag/2014snapshot/
http://helenstubbs.wordpress.com/tag/2014snapshot/
http://ventureadlaxre.wordpress.com/tag/2014snapshot/
http://mayakitten.livejournal.com/tag/2014snapshot/
http://benpayne.wordpress.com/tag/2014snapshot/ 
http://www.merwood.com.au/worldsend/tag/2014snapshot
http://crankynick.livejournal.com/tag/2014snapshot