Brie lives in British Columbia with her boyfriend and naughty black cat, somewhere not too far from the sea. She enjoys trips to the local farm, chatting with her long-distance friends on a rotary phone, and roflstomping video games from the nineties.
Brie's favorite authors include Anne Rice, George Orwell, and Hunter S. Thompson.
When human experiment Lukian Valentin escapes the Empire to save his crumbling sanity--through a grimescape of fissured highways, collapsing factories, putrescent sewers--he realizes the fight isn’t only for his life, it’s for his mind. Torturous flashbacks from a murky past spur him on a quest for freedom, while the Empire’s elite retrievers remain at his heels, determined to bring him home for repair.
Lukian needs one doctor to remove the implanted chips from his body, and another to serve him a tall glass of answers. Lukian attempts a psychedelic salvage of his partitioned mind, gleaning fragments of the painful truth about his identity.
A scorching, clothes-ripping rendezvous with a mysterious woman offers Lukian a glimpse of his humanity, and respite from his nightmarish past. It also provides the Empire the perfect weakness to exploit for his recapture.
To rise to the challenge of protecting his new life, his freedom of thought, and his one shot at love, Lukian must reach deep into his mind to find his true identity. To defeat the Empire, he requires the deadly power of his former self--a power that threatens to consume him.
Q) What inspired you to write this story?
The fascinating subject of the nature of assassins, combined with my rabid schoolgirl crushes on Jason Bourne and Kenshin Himura, were definitely points of inspiration for my subconscious in writing Kain--the idea of being so strong, so powerful, so physically capable, yet so psychologically lost in being used as an object in another's quest for power. Maybe it's the contradiction in the dichotomy that's so interesting to me.
That, and, I became sidetracked with researching the non-fiction elements of mind control, much of which goes back to Joseph Mengele and MK Ultra. I read Behold, A Pale Horse by William Cooper and it rattled me. I don't think anyone digging into the subject of programmed assassins can entirely separate fact from conspiracy theory, but applying both to fiction in the right amounts can make for a wild story. My mind runs amok with the "what ifs."
Q) How long did it take you to write?
Kain was a spinoff of an uncompleted manuscript (now slated to become much of the Sex, Drugs, and Cyberpunk series), the backstory of a single character. Writing the book was an off-and-on project for seven years; I always liked to write, would work on it for a bit, come back to it, forget about it again. When I decided to get serious, I knuckled down, rewrote the whole thing and polished it for publication in about six months.
Q) What is your favorite thing about writing?
I get to be everyone, everywhere, all at once! I'm the hero, I'm the villain, I can make up my own world with my own rules. Writing is a blast, but more than that, it's something I have to do, or I'll go insane. The stories are coming out of me, I might pretend I'm the characters, but I honestly have no idea where they come from. Sometimes it scares me to think that I extracted an entire book from my brain.
Q) What is your least favorite thing about writing?
Sometimes it takes me a while to get started. Like, stare-at-a-blank-screen-for-three-hours while to get started.
Q) If you could be any famous person for one day, who would you be and why?
Plato. That guy knew what was up. And if he didn't, he could rationalize his way out of anything. Plato had the Kykeon, but all I ever had were those little Mott's apple juice boxes.
Q) What is the oldest thing in your fridge and how old is it?
A half-empty jar of capers, dating back to unknown. There are lots of garden-fresh cucumbers and zucchini waiting to be eaten. (I also just moved, so lots of the prehistoric offenders were laid to rest.)
Q) What can readers expect from you in the future?
Lots of books packed with sex, swearing, fist fights, ray guns, strange states of mind, and suspicious ideas.
