Hugely excited for today’s special/bonus 3Q’s! (Not gonna lie, I’m excited for every single guest!) BUT – today’s guest has me excited because Daniel Kraus is an award-winning, best-selling author who has worked with some of the biggest names in Hollywood, while also churning out his own phenomenal work! With his next release dropping in a few days, he kindly stopped by!

Please, do welcome Daniel!

Steve: What does your writing time look like? Do you try and write at the same time each day? Do you have a word count you attempt to hit?

Daniel: I run my operation like a factory, where I’m the foreman as well as the one who operates all the machines. And it’s been 64 days since our last accident! Seriously, though, that’s pretty much how I work: jump out of bed, shower, and eat breakfast in front of the computer as I’m getting started. I usually lunch break for an hour max, then work again. I get in about a full eight hours a day. Sometimes, I must divide my days between art in the morning (writing) and business in the afternoon (press stuff, editorial stuff, and on and on). If I’m in a period where I must write on two things at once, I’ll usually have an A project that I work on Mon-Thurs, and a B project for Fri-Sat. It’s all pretty repetitive but that’s what works for me. I want no surprises in my writing life so the writing itself can be full of them.

Steve: You end up at an estate sale and discover an unpublished manuscript from an author you love. Do you keep it just for yourself or do you share it with the world?

Daniel: Who would ever say keep it for themselves? What kind of maniacs do you have answering this thing? I’d probably make a photocopy so that there were at least two copies in existence, then, yeah, I’d route it to whoever it belonged to.

Steve: Tell me about your newest release (novel/story/poem/novella) and why someone should read it!

Daniel: That’d be WRATH, cowritten with geneticist Shäron Moalem. We’re hoping to fill that Michael Crichton-sized hole in the publishing world. It’s about a technology that’s not even near-future – it’s HERE, albeit so far only in countries with different laws on genetic editing. It’s about a company called EditedPets that is creating Sammy, an adorable, brilliant pet rat edited with human brain genes. The prototype Sammy finds itself able to communicate with a child with cochlear implants, who busts it out. The issue scientifically-speaking (and apocalypse-speaking) is that the scientists haven’t figured out how to turn off the brain growth. So, Sammy’s getting smarter as its brain gets bigger – but the brain can only get so big before it shoves up against the skull. That puts us into the Flowers for Algernon territory, where Sammy begins to go insane. And if Sammy sexually matures and multiplies? We’re talking full-on rat apocalypse, with brilliant armies of coordinated super-rats chasing all humans from cities within five years. Not good!

Steve: Bonus Question! You wake up in a comic book. What is your comic book character and what is your superpower?

Daniel: I’m not a superhero fan. So I’d say it’d be the power to get me out of the comic book ASAP!

So, I guess you’d be like, Transporting Man? HA! Thanks so much for doing this Daniel!

To find more of his work, check the links!

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Daniel-Kraus/e/B002O1RDT4/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/DanielDKraus

Website: http://www.danielkraus.com/