Take Five with Matt Forbeck, Author, ‘Carpathia’

Matt Forbeck is the contributor for this week’s Take Five, a regular series where we ask authors and editors to share five facts about their latest books. Forbeck  is the author of Carpathia, available this week from your favorite book retailer.

It’s Titanic meets 30 Days of Night.

When the survivors of the Titanic are picked up by the passenger steamship Carpathia, they thought their problems were over.

But something’s sleeping in the darkest recesses of the ship. Something old. Something hungry.

Matt Forbeck:

1) I once designed a board game called Dracula’s Revenge — and also wrote a two-issue comic book miniseries for IDW based on it. (I’m also writing a Magic: The Gathering comic for IDW these days, which features vampires too.) The research for that fed directly into writing Carpathia.

2) I used a number of real-life people as characters in Carpathia. This included a number of historical figures, as well as the winners of a competition to remix the theme song for my publisher, Angry Robot, which I wrote with John Anealio. You can download the original for free, and get the remixes for free too.

3) I like wordplay, and that directly led to the spark for this book. The name of the book comes from two things: the name of the ship that rescued the survivors of the Titanic (the RMS Carpathia) and the name of the mountain range in which Castle Dracula sits (the Carpathians).

4) Dale Chase, the man who won the remix contest, is African-American, but there were no records of any African-Americans on the Titanic. However, research turned up an African-American toast tradition song called “Shine and the Titanic,” about an African-American stoker who survived the sinking and swam all the way home to New York. I worked that legend into a chapter about Dale’s namesake and his terrifying doom.

5) Right after I finished Carpathia last fall, I launched a plan called 12 for ‘12, in which I plan to write a 50,000-word novel every month in 2012. I set up a Kickstarter drive to raise money for the first trilogy, and it was a huge success. We’re in the middle of the second Kickstarter drive right now.