A profile piece just came out from my local arts paper, Nuvo. It’s always been a dream to make the cover of it one day. So I can scratch this item off my list.
On a Saturday in late September, I sat for an hour with fantasy and horror writer Maurice Broaddus at Provider, a coffee house off East 16th Street. We sat outside with a view of the Monon Lofts apartments that popped up in early 2018, not long after Provider served its first latte.
Broaddus, who lives near Eagle Creek Reservoir on the northwest side of Indianapolis with his wife and two sons, is a busy guy. This past spring he scored a $175,000 three-book deal with TOR Books for a forthcoming fantasy series titled All the Stars. Tor Books, a subsidiary of Macmillan, is the largest publisher of science fiction and fantasy in the United States.
Broaddus, 49, also was coping with the death of his father the previous week, but this wasn’t slowing him down.
“One of the ways I tend to cope with grief,” he said, “is to go into high production mode.”
To contain that grief, he wrote a short story, figuring that the word count would be around 5,000.
“But it turned out to be 20,000 words by the time I was done,” he said. The story, “Bound by Sorrow,” will soon appear in the online sci-fi/fantasy magazine Beneath Ceaseless Skies.
He hopes to turn in the first installment of the All the Stars trilogy — Sweep of Stars — to his publisher by his December deadline.
Often his writing has a local angle…
[continue reading Maurice Broaddus: Afrofuturist Author, Conversation Guy, and Mentor]
