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R.S. Belcher Exclusive Interview
Interviewed by Jean Marie Ward

JMW: Hello, this is Jean Marie Ward for BuzzyMag.com. With me today is R. S. Belcher, the author of ‘Six-Gun Tarot’.

Welcome, Rod.

R.S. Belcher: Thank you. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

JMW: Our pleasure. Okay, you are living the geek dream. You’ve had an award-winning Star Trek story published, you’ve run a comic book store, and now you’ve got a great first novel out from Tor Books, ‘Six-Gun Tarot’. How did you manage it?

R.S. Belcher: Well, the Star Trek story, there was a contest that they - Simon & Schuster Pocket Books did called ‘Strange New Worlds’, which they were looking for amateur writers, they were looking for people who were not pros. And that was the whole sort of premise of the series, it was fiction written by fans for fans. I had never written a genre piece before, so I was kind of intrigued - and I love Star Trek. I’m a huge Star Trekkie. I tried my hand at writing a Star Trek story, and it was a little bit of a mash- up, which seems to be kind of the way I write. Took some things from several different eras of Star Trek and kind of stuck them together and submitted it. I didn’t hear anything back. I thought I hadn’t even placed at all in anything. Got a call from the editor with Simon & Schuster, [Elisa Kassin 01:42] I believe was her name, and she said basically you’ve won the grand prize. So I screamed and danced around a lot. My daughter, who was like 5 or 6 at the time, like looked at me like I’m crazy and said, dad, calm down. So that was my first published piece. Read More→