Today’s special guest is Joshua Grant, a fun, enthusiastic, and supportive member of the writing community. As a highly successful author, he has multiple books AND comic books published! Are you a fan of Peter Pan AND action filled comic books? Well, Joshua Grant has the story for you! According to Joshua, “I pulled all the characters from J.M. Barrie's original classic and looked at the core of their character and how I could be true to them, how I could show them in a new and fresh way, and how they could fit into this sort of noir detective world.” I’ve already purchased my copies and am looking forward to diving right in! I met Joshua in the writing community awhile back, and he’s shown great support for my spy series, “Perception and Deception” by not only reading them, but also writing up reviews (the highest form of praise to an author)! Joshua is one of those amazing blessings from God to those in the writing community. If you’re an author, I would highly recommend checking out his website to get to know Joshua as well as look into his programs for supporting other authors (see link for Diabolic Shrimp below).
Joshua has also released a brand new YouTube channel that has already gained tons of views and subscribers in just a couple of weeks! He interviews important people in the artistic industry including people who have worked with Jay Leno AND Star Wars! And guess what…? Guess! Joshua has so graciously invited ME to be interviewed on his new channel! I’m super excited for this incredible opportunity and will be posting the video to this website in the near future! Be sure to subscribe to his channel here (this channel is obviously going to make it big, so be sure to secure your bragging rights today by being an early supporter of this channel NOW):
On top of all that awesomeness, he’s a TEACHER (AKA a hero). As a former teacher myself, and as someone who was raised by a teacher (my Super Mom) I obviously have a lot of respect for the challenging yet rewarding profession.
So without further ado, let’s begin the interview!
Joshua’s Biography:
Joshua Grant is a self proclaimed Bond villain and a thousandaire philanthropist (like a billionaire philanthropist, just with a lot less money). He has survived a flash flood, encountered numerous bears, and sailed the ocean blue. Josh loves to read, write, play video games, and occasionally read up on the crazy science that’s happening in the world, but most of all he loves just getting people together to love, laugh, and grow alongside each other. Currently, Josh makes a living teaching and working with kids in various environments, with the occasional novel always in the works. To learn about his work, come visit www.diabolicshrimp.com
Which of your novels can you imagine being made into a movie?
I write in a very cinematic way, especially because I love movies so much, so all of my novels would work well as movies. My first horror novel Pandora would make an excellent movie as it was inspired by classics like The Thing and Alien. Currently, I'm working on the bestselling comic book series The Lost Boy, a gritty modern retelling of Peter Pan where Peter becomes a vigilante crime fighter, which would be so much fun to turn into a flick!
What inspired you to write The Lost Boy?
Several things kind of smashed together all at once, inspiring me to create The Lost Boy. I write novels typically, but my brother Nate is a huge comic book collector. He's working on a couple comic books and we were talking about that one day and I thought that sounded like a lot of fun. I also was watching The Dark Knight trilogy (Batman) and Karate Kid around that time and thought it'd be fun to mash something like that together in this moral comic book that examines justice, morality, and sort of make it this inspiring coming of age thing. I also like the Peter Pan story, especially growing up with things like the movie Hook, so this bizarre idea starting forming in my mind to mix Peter Pan into this gritty story and I just sort of fell in love with the idea and had to make it.
Can you tell us a little bit about the characters in The Lost Boy?
I pulled all the characters from J.M. Barrie's original classic and looked at the core of their character and how I could be true to them, how I could show them in a new and fresh way, and how they could fit into this sort of noir detective world. It was (and still is) a super fun process! We have some of the main staples like Peter Barrie (Pan) who is a homeless kid in Los Angeles trying to make his way by working for a criminal organization. He ends up seeing too much and gets shot, being left for dead in the desert, thus starting his journey. There's of course J.M. Hook, the mayor of LA but also secretly the head of a criminal empire. He still has two hands by this point, so the comic shows the journey of what happens there and just who Hook is and how he ended up becoming the person he is. I also really wanted to tell the story of Peter Pan's lesser known or represented characters and make a bigger focus on them, so Wendy and Tinkerbell show up, just not in the way you think. Two of my favorite characters are Lily and her grandpa John. John and Lily are two Native American characters who find a dying Peter and nurse him back to health. They're sort of the backbone of this story and its moral core as they help Peter walk that thin line between justice and revenge.
What did you enjoy most about writing this comic?
As with all my books, I love getting to wrestle with some deep moral themes in a fun actiony book, and that's true here, but I think the thing I'm enjoying most with this one weirdly, is the writing process! Writing a comic is a really different process. Soooo much thought goes into literally every aspect of each page, from spacing, to how many words people are saying, to even what's possible with what ink you're using! It was a bit challenging at first, because in a novel you can write a zillion things and just edit them out later, but trying to do that with a comic is like building a house of cards and yanking out one each time you make a change, causing everything around it not to match up. You really have to have a good idea of the end product you're aiming for as you write. It's really challenging, but I'm really enjoying it and from an artistic standpoint it really adds to the art and telling of the story.
If you'd like to check out the bestselling series, come visit The Lost Boy's Amazon page:
You can find the rest of Joshua's books here!
Thank you for joining us today! God bless!
-Andrea Hintz
Comments