FIVE Questions with Cindy Koepp!!!!!!

- What has inspired your writing?
My inspiration comes from all kinds of wild places. Sometimes, I'm watching a movie or reading a book and think, hmm... What if ___ happened instead? Sometimes the events in my life lead to story ideas. Sometimes, the idea just sort of shows up in the mental voicemail box with no hint of the sender or forwarding information.


-Do you have any pets? If so what?
I currently have an African Grey named Masika. She is a rescue baby, and I'm owner #4. We (me and Owner #3) think she's about 30ish years old, but no one is entirely sure how long she was in her original, not-friendly-to-living-creatures situation, so that's just a rough guess. Masika is very nervous around people and other critters. Getting her to trust me enough to step onto the back of my hand took 5 years, and now, 2 years later, she will actually let me move with her on my hand if I go slowly and don't go too far.

Although African Greys are known for the phenomenal talking ability, she is not fond of talking. She has a few phrases she's really good at like "Hello!" in about four different voices including a couple different pitches of a near-Cockney accent ("'Allo! 'I there!'). For the most part, though, she is a sound effect machine. I've tried teaching her specific sounds and phrases, but if she's not interested, she won't repeat them. Sometimes she learns sounds I'd've rather she'd taken a miss on.

For example, one summer, the batteries in my smoke alarms decided to go out. Naturally, this happened at 3 in the morning on 2 different nights because they couldn't both go out at once during daylight hours. I think that's a corollary to Murphy's Law or something. A couple days later, I heard "BEEEP... BEEEP... BEEEP!" spaced out about a minute or two between beeps. I thought it was another alarm losing its battery, but as I wondered around the house trying to figure out which was the offending alarm, I tracked the beep to the bird. She continued that beep now and then.

My folks were here one day and the bird started her BEEEP... BEEEP routine. Pa came into the bird's room, where I was doing school work, and asked if I knew which alarm was going off. I pointed to Masika. Right then, she cut loose with another BEEEP. Pa rolled his eyes and went back to the living room to watch TV.

Fortunately, she doesn't do that too often these days.

-How did you get started as an author?
I don't remember, actually. My mother has a pile of short stories I wrote when I was in school, but I don't have clear memories for anything that happened before I was 12. Really, I don't think I was there. (There is a reason, but it's not very interesting, so I'll avoid boring you with the details).

When I was a teenager, I wrote (really bad) fanfic based on the comic books my friends and I read. Toward the end of high school, I decided to try my hand and writing up my own brilliant ideas. The first few were some of the better fanfic tales reworked to remove the references to the comics. Eventually, though, I started doing original ideas. The first of those was a set of short stories inspired by a GURPS Space RPG some pals and I played through. Those stories -- after many, many mutations -- became my first published novel, Remnant in the Stars.

-What are your musical tastes? Do you write to music?
I listen to a variety of different musical groups, but it really is group-specific, rather than by genre. I listen to Kansas, Yes, Thousand Foot Krutch, Pillar, Red, Mozart, Ravel, Mussorgsky, Apologetix, Weird Al, and a few others.

Most of my music-listening is in the car or when I'm doing something around the house that would benefit from a little extra noise but no specific focus. I require no noise when I write. Well, you never have complete quiet when you have a parrot, but as close as I can get will do.

-Name your Top 5 Favorite Movies.
OOOoooo... There are so many!
Let's see. In no particular order...
1. Star Wars (all 6 of them ... Yes, including the more recent trilogy, which I like better than the original trilogy).
2. X-Men: First Class
3. The Princess Bride
4. Ladyhawke
5. Agatha Christie: Poirot (with David Suchet, pretty much all the ones I've seen).

Drop by Cindy's blog:https://cindykoepp.wordpress.com/2015/10/02/the-first-worldwide-dictator/