EXCLUSIVE Author Interview: JASON ANSPACH!!!
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In our inaugural author interview for the Sit-Rep Substack, we’d like to invite Mr. Jason Anspach to the chat! Jason is a Dragon Award-winning, bestselling author of multiple military Science Fiction (Mil-SF) series, including Galaxy’s Edge, Forgotten Ruin, Wayward Galaxy, and Able Bodied Soldier. He is also the CEO of WarGate Books, the tip of the spear for new and exciting Mil-SF. Let’s get to the interview!
Sit-Rep: Hello, Jason and welcome to Sit-Rep! Would you please tell us a little about yourself?
Jason: Let’s see here… I’m a Christian. Married father of seven children. I’m native to the Pacific Northwest and we’re still here and fighting against the gloom, a word which adequately describes the weather, politics, and spiritual tendencies of Washington state. In addition to the book stuff, I’m active in my local church, I coach at the local High School, and genuinely try to make myself available to others in my community.
Sit-Rep: That’s awesome! In addition to all of your “in real life” activities, you are also the author/co-author of many bestselling books. What made you decide to become a writer?
Jason: I love storytelling in all forms and when I came out of college and seminary, I would still think up stories or explain to my wife how a movie we watched could have been better or why a character or key moment didn’t work and how the writers could have fixed it before filming it… things like that.
My wife is a very good writer and had tried to get a manuscript published in the Christian fiction realm, but after acquiring an agent, it never went anywhere. Publishing seemed like a daunting proposition, so I never thought about writing books until I saw what guys like Michael Bunker were doing and realized that I could self-publish. So, I wrote my first series, had a huge hit with my fourth book, Legionnaire, and saw my life’s work shift as a result toward storytelling.
Sit-Rep: What made you choose military science fiction? Especially with such an 80’s action edge to it?
Jason: I loved Star Wars growing up, plus all the 80’s cartoons, which all had elements of sci-fi even if they were fantasy in nature. He-Man had hover bikes, right? Plus, I watched a lot of movies that I shouldn’t have at my age. I saw Predator when I was eight or nine years old and it scared me to death but I couldn’t stop watching.
Westerns, mostly film and television, also were a big influence and I think science fiction is ultimately a retelling of the American West.
All of that worked together with my growing up in a military family with a Mom who was busy in the USO while a lot of her friends were protesting the Vietnam War… so it all came together in what interested me. I was the kid wearing the Aaafes SR-71 Blackbird or A-10 Warthog shirts to school, going to parades and air shows at Fort Lewis or McChord near home… it was just a part of everyday life and that’s often what writers incorporate into their stuff.
Sit-Rep: Which of your books did you find the easiest to write? Which was the most challenging?
Jason: No books are easy to write, at least not for me. The difficulty level tends to be just how much time is involved either in thinking up something original, or going back and fixing what doesn’t work. On books where I do the lead writing, that happens faster unless I work with a supremely talented author like Nick Cole who typically nails it on the first pass.
The other big difficulty is writing in a series with shared ownership like Galaxy’s Edge. By shared ownership I mean an investment level from the readers that rivals your own as creator. It can be difficult because you don’t want to let them down, but you know not everyone is going to like the direction a story goes, even if they like the books and universe as a whole.
And then there’s the deadlines and demands of publishers. That made GE Season 2 a chore, unfortunately.
Sit-Rep: Which of your series do you most look forward to returning to?
Jason: Galaxy’s Edge. We’ve said what we can say about the main storyline, but there is such richness to that first season that I’m excited to explore some of the things that were only briefly touched upon like the Featherheads of Reaper Squadron.
Sit-Rep: Very cool! As a long-time reader of Galaxy’s Edge, I can attest to how vast a universe it is that you and Nick Cole have created!
To pivot, right now you are gearing up to launch a Kickstarter for your book Wayward Galaxy that you co-authored with JN Chaney. What was the genesis for that particular story?
Jason: Wayward Galaxy was going to be a solo title because Nick Cole is always after me to do something for myself, but I couldn’t do that and run the company and make sure readers were getting enough of the stories they already loved. But I figured I could slowly put something together by writing extra at night, so I worked on an outline.
The original idea was something closer to The Last Starfighter, where a regular guy (Reach) gets swept up into a science fiction realm. J.N. Chaney and I had an outline that was remarkably similar and we realized that we would have competing titles with the same storyline (only his entire series would be finished before my second book had a chance to come out, haha).
We were already friends at that time and decided to work on the project together. As I drafted it, a character that I’d created named Brody–a battle android who learned culture and combat solely from action movies–became more and more prominent. I was having too much fun mentally going back to those days of constantly quoting films to my friends, and the Max Headroom stutter gave it all a surrealist, 80’s vibe that I loved.
So the story evolved to feature him more prominently in the series, because I knew that would be the most fun. But I needed a plausible reason for Brody to even be there, because in the first version he was just part of a crew that picks Reach up and had Brody’s sense of humor, but not the action movie culture. That required a big rewrite of the outline that brought in the Rangers, Marines, and Earth’s destruction and by the end, the first draft Jeff put together was a completely different book than what we first envisioned.
So I took my crack at it, tightened up the military aspects, did my editing magic, added several chapters, consolidated characters… the works… and made Brody 999% funnier with 999% more movie quotes… and we ended up with a hit almost as big as Galaxy’s Edge!
Sit-Rep: B-B-Brody is awesome! Everybody loves him! Now, is there anything exclusive you can reveal about that Kickstarter to our readers?
Jason: That depends on when your readers read this! But… we’re going to include a new Wayward Galaxy or Wayward Earth short story and special backers are going to get to submit their favorite 80’s & 90’s movie quotes, and then I’ll have to figure out how to make Brody deliver them in a sensible fashion.
I’m sure they’ll try to stump me by giving me something from Ski Patrol, but I’m looking forward to the challenge.
Sit-Rep: Depending on the success of this Kickstarter, what other plans do you have for other special editions?
Jason: Legionnaire does turn ten next year…
Sit-Rep: Yes it does! An intriguing thought …
Recently, major Substack author Paul Kingsnorth released his manifesto Writers Against the Machine, asking others to take a stand against using generative AI in writing and publishing. WarGate Books had already taken that public stance, for a while now marking the back covers of the books as “AI Free - Made with Soul.” What drove this decision to not use AI at all in the writing, artwork, or publishing of the books?
Jason: When we started that, it was when writing wasn’t even a thought and artists were on the chopping block. We have prided ourselves on our cover art for a long time and we’re close friends with M.S. Corley, who has designed nearly all of our covers and illustrated several as well.
I don’t want to represent us as using no AI whatsoever in publishing, because AI is really helpful for things like going through a manuscript and telling you what color eyes you said a character had ten chapters earlier but forgot exactly which chapter and forgot to run it down. It’s also a huge timesaver for reviewing previous books and asking, “Did this ship have this kind of a weapon before?” and getting an answer in a minute.
But, while publishing is a business, good writing requires applying our God-given creativity. I don’t think it’s possible to prompt an AI with an outline and get a good story and if one were to rely on that, they would likely lose the ability to write compelling works of fiction.
Pandora’s box is open, however. I was recently working on a book that was written a year or two before generative AI was everywhere, and there were multiple phrases and sections that read like AI wrote them. That’s not too surprising, since it is our work that trained the AIs to begin with.
Over at Variant, Wayward Galaxy’s publisher, the editors have all been trained on how AI writes so they can flag work that reads like the machine wrote them… which in turn is just another way of AI changing the way we write. Like, I’ve always loved to use the em-dash, but I found out last year that using it means AI is involved. So now I try to use more ellipses like Nick, which will work until AI starts using ellipses… There’s no turning back.
AI is here until the machine is shut down (which also shuts down publishing as we know it, because we’re talking about a global digital blackout) or… until AI becomes so expensive that it no longer makes financial sense to use it in generating books.
I think the latter is the plan, actually. Get enterprises hooked on AI and then raise the cost once businesses are so integrated that they can’t function without it. Real Savage Wars stuff.
Sit-Rep: Final questions - which is your favorite character that you’ve created? What is your favorite book? And what is your favorite movie?
Jason: My favorite characters are essentially miniature versions of an aspect of my personality, allowed to run amok. These would be Brody, Masters, Captain Keel, and Lao Pak, specifically.
It’s tough to pick a favorite book, but I owe so much to Legionnaire that it has to take the prize.
The movie I usually distill down to genres, but if I have to pick just one… Big Trouble in Little China. We could talk about movies all day, though!
Sit-Rep: Thank you so much, Jason, for sitting down with us and telling us a bit more about yourself and your new Kickstarter!
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The Kickstarter for the Maximum Action Collector’s Edition of Wayward Galaxy is launching soon! Get in on the action ahead of time by signing up!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/variantpublications/wayward-galaxy-maximum-action-collectors-edition?ref=android_project_share
Jason Anspach can be found at the following locations:
www.jasonanspach.com
https://x.com/TheJasonAnspach
Great interview. Hopefully continues to grow, I keep recommending it.
Good job! I don't know why it's so hard to get published in the Christian realm. I have a critique buddy who lives in New Zealand. She's won a few big contests with her story, but she's been stuck getting it published.