Ken Scholes

Ken Scholes's latest book is Hymn: The Final Volume of the Psalms of Isaak.

From his Q&A with Martin Cahill at the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy blog:

You’ve been very open about the losses that occurred over the course of your work on The Psalms of Isaak, and it’s not hard to see you working through that in this series. What did it mean to keep writing through everything that happened?

I wrote four of these five books through the hardest circumstances of my adult life: between burying my parents and one of my ex-wife’s parents, along with a grandparent, a nephew, a couple of aunts and a best friend, and ultimately, a marriage. I was already fairly familiar with grief and loss, but my experience with them grew exponentially. The part I wasn’t familiar with was the impact the grief and loss would take on my writing process. I didn’t realize there were things that could simply shut down my writing, and that I did not really have control over it. After a long stretch of years where I could pretty much write whenever I wanted to, this was a difficult discovery, and I resisted to the point of making an even bigger, tangled mess.

Of course, one of the benefits is that it was pretty fantastic research to experience so much stress and loss while crafting this particular series, and I think that it lent an air of truth to the story. It makes the loss and grief [of the characters] palpable. And I think...[read on]

Learn more about the author and his work at Ken Scholes's website.

The Page 69 Test: Lamentation.

The Page 69 Test: Antiphon.

The Page 69 Test: Requiem.

--Marshal Zeringue