Lauren Smith: What is your book about? The cover describes it as "Mormon cyberpunk."

Hunting Gideon

Lauren Smith: Where do you get your ideas from?

Jessica Draper: The idea fairy drops them off overnight. Seriously, I find the best ideas come from paying attention to all the random things that happen in real life. News stories, funny incidents that happened to friends, disconnected facts, magazine articles, dreams—there's a wealth of material out there, just waiting for somebody to pay attention to it, work its bits and pieces into a story framework. Knowing the characters helps, too, because it's fun and sometimes useful to think, "How would they react to that?" In this case, though, Hunting Gideon actually started as a joke—my sister had a part-time job reviewing slush-pile manuscripts for a publisher, and she was rolling her eyes telling me how horrible they were. My brother-in-law, listening with great amusement, mentioned that I'd missed my calling (since I'd written several unpublished science-fiction novels) assured me, "Hey, you could write that badly!" We joked about a few silly plots based on stereotypical romance tropes, but I as I thought about it, I decided to write a real story instead—one that featured an intelligent, strong main character and put her into a challenging, exciting storyline that had less to do with clichéd "female" themes and everything to do with "real" events in an exotic online context. At the time, I wrote technical training and software documentation (which often counts as speculative fiction), and several high-profile cyber crimes (mainly identity theft, viruses, and other security violations) had been in the news, so I decided to push "20 minutes into the future" and see how Sue Ann Jones, a female, FBI hacker, and Loren Hunter, her former-cracker partner, would operate in a virtual world.

Lauren Smith: Your book is described as "edgy" what do you think makes it edgy?

Jessica Draper: Ironically, the book isn't "edgy" in the ways you might think of initially—it's imaginative, with fantastic futuristic settings and fast-paced action and dialogue, rather than the more typical modern-day, real-life tone and content of most "literary" fiction, or the depressing, bloody, vulgar stuff that you run into with "mainstream" science fiction and fantasy. I'm most interested in creating engaging characters involved in challenging situations, and I find it fascinating to explore the ways in which real belief intersects with life.

Lauren Smith: What was your publishing experience like and what has surprised you most about being a published author?

Jessica Draper: I've enjoyed my experience publishing with Zarahemla, especially because they were willing to take a chance on something unusual. I'd actually submitted Hunting Gideon to another publisher, but they felt it was too technical and strange for their audience. Unfortunately, they defined their audience strictly in terms of housewives with an eighth-grade reading level, so I had to agree with them on that point. I don't think that accurately describes the audience I'm aiming for. (And the Seventh Seal series, which I wrote with my father, Richard Draper, seems to have done very well without being dumbed down.) And meeting members of that audience has been the most surprising, as well as the most fun, part of being a published author. I've had enthusiastic responses from everybody from eighth graders to eighty-year-old grandmothers, and a disconcerting number of them happily come over and quote a line or phrase from one of my books that I completely miss as a reference until they remind me which character said it. It turns out that people who read my books actually remember what happens in them better than I do!

Lauren Smith: What's next for you?

Jessica Draper: I've written a prequel, Dancing with Eddie D'Eath, to give the backstory of the characters in Hunting Gideon. After-the-fact backstory: another fine science-fiction tradition! I've also got another manuscript under consideration with a different publisher—a foray into "urban fantasy" featuring the (mis)adventures of the Magic & Mayhem squad.