N. R. Bates, Author of At The Sharp End of Lightning As part of the virtual book tour for Mr. Bates’ latest book, At The Sharp End of Lightning, we were pleased to have a chat with the author.  As an Oceanographer, his love of the ocean shines through in all that he writes. With this book, his love and knowledge of the oceans combine into a fantasy novel that young adults and adults will enjoy.  Grounding the fantasy within reality makes the story more intriguing. The book tour, running through the month of January, is sponsored by iRead Book Tours.  You can learn more about the author and his book by checking out the various stops he will make along the tour.  The schedule can be found here at the tour site. The Interview If you could put yourself as a character in your book, who would you be? Yalara Narika, the Sea Sprite in my stories, is my favorite character. She has an intelligence fierceness and strength that unfolds in the Oceanlight series. She loves to fly and breathe underwater: a couple of abilities I’d love to have. What is your next project? I really enjoyed my foray into short-stories (the collection “The Fall of Icarus”) and writing in the first person. I am presently working on minor edits of the second book in the Oceanlight series, The Gathering Places, and I hope to publish before the spring of 2016. The storylines of the three main protagonists from the first book continue and deepen. Several new characters are introduced including a human scientist who is dying and The Watcher who ties the storylines together. In the first book, the murderous Man in the White Suit disappeared. Some of my readers are hoping he will reappear. Although I haven’t been writing recently, I have been mulling over a couple of novella-length stories. I do feel myself drawn away from the genre of epic fantasy and science fiction towards magical realism and literary fiction, and so I expect that these two novellas will be based upon serious issues—with some fantastical and surreal elements to them. What is the last great book you’ve read? This may not be a familiar book to some readers, but the last “great” book I read recently was “Beside the Ocean of Time” by George...