Episode 85: Christian (Miles) Cameron

An hour-long conversation with Christian (Miles) Cameron, author of more than forty novels, including the just-released epic space opera Artifact Space (Gollancz).

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The Introduction

Christian (MIles) Cameron was born in Pittsburgh in 1962 and graduated from the University of Rochester after an outstandingly long undergraduate career. He served in the US Navy onboard aircraft carriers and elsewhere, and then moved on to a writing career.

He’s written over forty novels, including The Red Knight from Gollancz and Killer of Men from Orion Books.  His latest novel is Artifact Space, an epic space opera set in the not-too-distant future. 

He lives in Toronto with his wife, daughter, and too many cats.

The Automated, Lightly Edited Transcript

(Check against recording before quoting)

So, Christian, welcome to The Worldshapers.

Well, thanks for having me. Should I call you Edward or Ed?

Ed is typical. Edward is my formal byline. Ed is what most people call me. And Eddie is what people called me until I left my hometown, so when somebody that calls me Eddie, I always know they knew me back in Weyburn when I was a kid or a newspaper reporter there.

So, what is a very useful, fabulous lesson I learned from my grandmother was to never refer to anyone by their diminutive unless they told me to.

Yeah, that’s good advice. So, I’m very happy to have you on. You have a very interesting background and an amazing collection of books. And we do share a connection through Mickey Mikkelsen at Creative Edge Publicity.

Yes.

And I always look for connections. This is not much of a connection, but I know that you were in the Navy in the US and I have a nephew who was in the Navy. And I know that the new book that you’re going to talk about had some inspiration from aircraft carriers. And my nephew served on the Harry S. Truman for, I think, two tours. So, there you go. That’s not much of a connection but it’s something.

So, here’s our age difference. Your nephew would have been going on board an aircraft carrier that I’m pretty sure was commissioned the year I left the Navy.

Well, he’s quite . . . I think he’s quite young, actually. I guess he’s forty something now, but we won’t talk about age too much. I’m pretty sure I’m still older than you. So anyway, so let’s start, as I always like to do with my guests, taking you back into the mists of time, and find out a little bit about your background and, you know, where you were born and grew up and how you got interested in writing—it usually starts with reading for most of us—and especially in writing . . .I mean, I know you write historical fiction as well, but especially in writing fantasy and science fiction stories. How did that all come about for you?

So, I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the USA, and I’m going to drop a dime right off on my mum. My mother was an actress and a voice actress or actor, we say now, her whole career. And one of the things that she was just glorious at was reading books aloud. And she read me The Hobbit when I was, I think, five. And it was such a success. We were in Tobermory in Canada on summer vacation and she read The Hobbit. And some days my dad would read to and, you know, he was an actor and a director and also had a good voice. And it was such a success that we moved straight on to The Lord of the Rings. And I fully admit that I did not really understand very much of The Lord of the Rings at age six or seven, but I really loved it. And I still, when I reread The Hobbit and I still reread The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, I can both hear my mom’s voice. But also remember just the sheer sense of wonder, like I could never go back.

And I’ll just add this story when I was in first grade, so, like seven. The year after being read The Hobbit during summer vacation, we were learning to read like good little first graders in Iowa. And I lived in Iowa at the time. And they handed us these  terrible storybooks. And I was like, my mom just read me The Lord of the Rings. I don’t care about Mr. Penguin. And I don’t think I ever went back to Mr. Penguin. And that actually caused me some troubles in first grade. But anyway, that’s where my love of fantasy started. It was like the first book I can remember, and I started right from there.

And continued. Any other books growing up that had that kind of impact on you?

Yeah, so weirdly, I mean, this may be too much information, but I was kind of late to reading. I was a very outdoorsy kid. You know, I’d spend my summers on a farm in upstate New York and where my grandmother, in a very traditional and somewhat 1930s way, would sort of kick me out of the house at nine in the morning and say, don’t come back till four thirty and that sort of thing. That sounds terrible. It was actually quite loving and fun. And I learned to, you know, make a fire and make my own cup of tea and all those things. So, my dad was worried that I wasn’t reading enough. And so, I think at age 10 or 11, he offered to buy me a model I wanted to build if I would read this book. And he handed me a copy of The Three Musketeers, which he had paid a quarter for at our church sale. And man, what a revelation. It turned out that The Lord of the Rings wasn’t the only book in the world. And, you know, I read The Three Musketeers because I was made to and then I can’t remember ever not reading again.

And my dad was a writer. I don’t know if you’re aware of that, but my dad was a writer his whole life. He just passed away a couple of months ago. And part of being a writer in those days, I kind of wish it still was, was that his various agents and publishers would just send him crates of books, not his own books, other people’s books from the same publisher. And so, we would always have these crates of books laying around the house with kind of utterly random books like romance novels, mystery novels, crime novels, thrillers, potboilers that no 14-year-old should have been reading at the time. And I would just read my way through the latest crate of books, and that caused me to kind of love genre fiction of all kinds, not just fantasy. And it also probably helped my vocabulary. And mostly it really caused me to fall in love with historical fiction and a particular writer, Dorothy Dunnett, whose work I still think is amongst the best ever, ever done.

So, when did you start writing?

Well, so, when I was 17, I wrote a novel, which I still have right here in this house, and you will never see it.

My first one’s right here on my on my desk.

Good. Well, it  was my attempt to channel the American Revolution, which I was in love with because I had started re-enacting, as a fantasy novel with vampires. Need I say more now?

Abraham Lincoln with vampires. Wasn’t that a movie not that long ago? Wrong war, I know, but . . .

So. Yeah, well, this was more sort of George Washington with vampires. But even then, even that’s not really fair because it wasn’t really the American Revolution. It was a sort of fantasy. Eighteenth century. I don’t know if you’ve ever read Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint, but she did it much better than I did anyway. It was really bad. But I keep it around from time to time and look at it and go like, “Wow, that’s really bad.” And that was my first attempt to write a full-length novel. And I hand wrote it on notebook paper and it was 217 pages long. So, I figured, OK, I could write a whole book.

And then, when I was in the Navy later, on night watches sorry, Navy Anti-Terrorist Alert Center, we copied in message traffic that had to do with terrorism from all over the world. And we basically built a file for senior politicians and military leaders to read in the morning. And so, it was a night watch that was important and involved a whole lot of, like, reading and analyzing. But some nights, thank goodness, there was no terrorism. And I finally sat down and wrote a novel which we will call Elves in Space. And it was also really, really bad. I was trying to be C.J. Cherryh and it turns out nobody can be C.J. Cherryh but C.J. Cherryh. So, you know, there you go.

And that was the end of my writing career until an afternoon camping with my dad. We were fishing in the Adirondack Mountains. And I said, “Dad, I have an idea for a novel.” Now, I would say that to my dad sort of every summer because he wrote novels and I always meant for him to write them. And when I said this, I was a full-time clandestine operations officer, which is like being a spy. And I had had an idea for a spy novel. And my dad said, he would always say, “You should write it.” And I feel like, “I’m not a writer. You’re the writer.” And then on this occasion, he said, “We should write it.” I’m like, “Whoa, that’s a great idea,” so we wrote that novel together and then we wrote seven more books together and we published all of them, and that’s how I became a writer.

Well, that long stretch in there when you weren’t writing, you were clearly doing some very interesting things. What else are you doing through there besides writing?

The truth is, I was writing a ton. So, being an intelligence analyst, which I was first, is really all writing. And, in fact, if you think of the Navy Anti-Terrorist Alert Center as a newspaper that just happens to be highly classified, you’d pretty much have it pegged. So, we were responsible—and this is like 30 analysts and some other officers—we were responsible for producing 50 to 100 pages of articles a day. And I was eventually the commanding officer of that, and that made me the editor of a newspaper, but before that I was just one of the analysts that, I would write articles all day, every day that the various, the sort of editorial staff, would decide if my articles were worth reading or not. So, that was like an incredible training school in writing quickly and accurately, in doing research and doing research that was accurate. And yeah, so that was writing. But yeah, I did other things before that. I flew off an aircraft carrier for three years. I don’t think that’s what my detailer thought I was going to do. Detailers in the Navy are the people who assign you your career. I was supposed to be an intelligence officer, but my squadron commander, thank heavens, decided that I would be better utilized learning how to run radars and sit in the back seat of an airplane and do things. And by sheer luck, and I have been a very lucky person, and by sheer luck, the skills that I sort of trained in were very valuable in the first Gulf War.

So, I got to fly a lot. And that was really exciting and interesting and way more what I joined the Navy for than the being an intel officer, being an analyst was. And so, I did that for a number of years and that  was very interesting. And I got to go to see and, you know, I don’t know if you’ve read a lot of my books, but I love the ocean and I love being at sea and sort of living on an aircraft carrier is the best way to be a tourist. We went all over the Mediterranean and Middle East and stopped at dozens of liberty ports. And I really enjoyed that. I had never been outside the United States except to go to Canada when I joined the Navy. And suddenly, I was in France and Israel and Spain and Italy and Palmerton, America and Jerusalem. And it was just fabulous. I really enjoyed to travel and I still do. And I think travel is incredibly formative. So that was all good. And then, yes, I was after that at the Anti-Terrorist Alert Center. I sort of went to the darker side of intelligence operations, and it is a little bit dark, where you recruit assets and do all that spy stuff, which I then did for some number of years before falling in love with a Canadian, marrying her and moving to Canada. The End.

It was going to ask about your connection to Canada as well.

Yeah. So probably my greatest lifetime passion, in addition to writing, is re-enacting. And for thirty-five years I re-enacted the American Revolution and I have almost always done either British or Loyalists, not so-called Americans or Patriots or whatever you want to call it, the side that ended up winning the war and forming the United States. Continentals, we might call them. And because of that, I spent a lot of time with aCanadian group called the Kings Royal Regiment of New York, which is a name that always makes Americans smile, Kings Royal Regiment of New York. But it was a real loyalist regiment during the American Revolution that fought bravely to protect their homes from the insurgent rabble who were trying to burn them out of the Mohawk Valley. I mean, that’s one way of telling the story. And they were Canadian, and I spent a lot of time with them. And eventually, I married one.

I’m going to go back to the the analyst work, I was a newspaper reporter and a newspaper editor, you know, not classified, but what I found during those years when I was doing that was, you know, that writing every day . . . and it didn’t matter that you weren’t writing fiction, just the mere act of putting words down on paper . . . I always found very helpful. Has that been, looking back on it, do you think that really was a huge contributor to your ability to, obviously, tell stories prolifically?

Now I do. And what I’m about to say may go against the grain for some readers. And I apologize. I don’t I mean, no offense to anyone, but I believe that the fact that I almost never have anything even vaguely resembling writer’s block is because the Navy taught me to write every day whether I was happy or sad, hungover or feeling great, whether I’d had my workout or not, had my workout, whether it was four-thirty in the morning or four-thirty in the afternoon, because I had a daily production quota. And it’s the military. No one cares whether you feel good. That’s not really true. I always had pretty good commanding officers, but you have to produce whether you’re feeling good or not. And that turned out to be a very useful lesson.

Well, the newspaper business is similar because the newspaper comes out on a specific . . . it was a weekly, but it came out on a specific day at a specific time, and you had to have the stuff ready. There just wasn’t any other option. So, I’ve always said that that work helped me not have writer’s block either. So, it’s interesting to hear. Did you ever have any formal fiction writing, training of any kind?

None whatsoever. I when I was in university, I had a fabulous poetry-writing course at the time I wanted to be a poet. Just let’s blur past that. But let’s just put that in the same drawer with the not-very-good first two novels I wrote, some not-very-good poetry. I wrote a couple of pretty decent poems and convinced myself I was going to be a great poet. Many people do, I find. But that class taught me a great deal of what I know about writing, sorry, about what I know about writing imagery. And, you know, writing imagery is a definite tool of the trade. I will confess to you that my dad, who, like I say, was a professional writer and who taught university for most of my adult life, was contemptuous, would be a good word, of writing courses and believed things that I don’t necessarily believe myself, and yet I probably have been influenced by them about, you know, learning to write and the relative importance of, let’s say, a university degree or university training and writing as opposed to rich life experience or whatever. And so, no, I assumed all that. I did medieval history in university.

When you started writing with your dad, were those historical novels?

No, those were spy novels.

Right, right.

We wrote eight of them together, which was super funny because I was, in fact, an intelligence officer while I wrote the first three of them, like an actual functioning intelligence officer. So, every word I wrote had to be passed through a security program before it could be published. And that that was an additional wicket that no author needs to have ever.

And I also want to ask you about the other thing I found on your Web site, looking at what you have to say there, and that’s the martial arts and historical combat aspect of all this. It seems like you’ve tried a lot of different kinds of martial endeavors.

Yeah, I did that . . . again, at the risk of sounding like a maverick, I think at some level they’re all kind of the same. They’re all simulations. And the more of them I do, the more I think like, “Oh, this is kind of like that one, which probably just shows what a dilettante I am.” Yeah. I started fencing after I watched a movie of The Three Musketeers when I was twelve years old, with Michael York and Michael Walsh.

I love that one!

Yeah, well, it’s probably got some of the best fight sequences in terms of authenticity ever filmed, because William Hobbs was the fight director and he was incredible. However, what I was going to say is, my dad, who is always full of surprises, revealed after the movie was over that he, in fact, had done a fair amount of fencing and stage combat and would I like to learn? And I’m like, “Yes!” So, we made swords out of aluminum because that’s what dad knew from the stage-fighting world. And we broke each other’s fingers for a while. That wasn’t so good. And then, I mean, it was totally fun. And then I went into the world of what we now call classical fencing or Olympic fencing, which I enjoyed thoroughly. And I was not quite good enough to make the big time, but I was pretty good.

And then, I don’t know, I sort of dropped the whole thing for a few years. And when I was in the Navy, of all things, I found lots of fencers in Washington, D.C., and went back to fencing. And I’ve never stopped since then. And so. in the ’90s, what we now call Western martial arts, which is not a term I particularly love, suddenly got very popular and people started researching all of the old European techniques. So ,I think when we say martial arts to each other, we conjure up visions of samurai and, you know, sort of Asian martial arts, and goodness knows, I’ve done some Asian martial arts and found them very enjoyable, I can do Aikido and I’ve dabbled in a couple of others. And they are most excellent. Um, but the little historian in me, the little re-enactor in me. I always had questions., I’m going to use Kendo as an example, and I was like, “I don’t think this is the way you would train to fight with a katana, any more than the fencing foil is the way you would learn to fight with a small sword or a rapier. I think this is pretty fossilized,” I thought.

Now, it turns out that now there are fabulous researchers in Japan and Korea and other places who are doing all the research to indicate what the roots of Asian martial arts are. But that wasn’t sort of around in the 1970s and 80s. And so, I was sort of just swimming along in the in the cultural artifacts of the time. Yeah, I can probably go on for too long about martial arts. I did some of them. And then I mostly continue doing Western or European fencing until the historical martial arts movement caught me. And then I was really excited. And I’ve landed in the 14th century Italian art of fighting and armor, which I adore, and which to me is sort of the culmination of all the things I ever tried to learn. And it’s I won’t say it’s sad. It’s just real life. But I’m about to age out of it. You know, I’ll be 60 in a year. I’m a little more brittle. I don’t bounce as well. Wearing 80 pounds of chain and plate is a little harder than it is for the 35-year-olds.

I think I’m three years older than you, so . . .

Yeah, and the last couple of times I fought in a big competition . . . so, speed degrades. Everybody knows this, from runners to tennis players, but the skill will compensate for speed up to a point. And then, yeah, last couple of competitions, I sort of hit a point where it’s like, oh, I see, any 25-year-old who’s fast can now pretty much beat me unless I’m boringly super cautious, which is sadly not my normal characteristic. So, that’s fine. I don’t mind losing. I do mind always losing. I’d like someone to create a seniors’ league for old knights. But anyway, it is great fun. It is, of cours,e a huge part of my writing. And yet I want to say to your listeners that to me it is key to understand that every martial art ever. No matter how it bills itself, they’re all simulations, none of them are real, none of them are like real fighting. And that that’s super important to remember as a writer. Like, you can get structure and so on out of. Almost any martial art, and you can imagine how a fight would work, and that’s extremely useful, and I think the more fighting you do, the easier it is to imagine this happens than this happens. And this happens in logical terms that are easier to write. All that is true. But years ago, I received a damning piece of praise from an SS officer in Great Britain who wrote and said, “I love your Greek novels, but you got to know that all of us who have actually killed people hand to hand, we don’t remember how we did it and we don’t think about it when we’re doing it.” And I was like, “Yeah,” and I’ve now heard that from enough other people. So, all of this careful description, especially first person, like, “I did this and then I did this and I did this.” Yeah. That’s not what happens in their mind. And it’s all got a certain element of construct to it.

There’s a group in Vancouver that does sword fighting and all that sort of thing, and I was at a convention out there and I actually somehow ended up on a panel about writing, writing fight scenes with all these people who actually did all of that. And one of the comments that came up at some point was, well, you know, everything happened so fast that you don’t necessarily need to describe all of that detail, depending on your readers are, I guess, and what they’re expecting. But I think what my take-away was, if you can’t be accurate, be vague. That’s what I came away with.

Yes. It seems it’s it’s funny. Maybe it’s not funny, but I have started to write more and more . . . sorry. There’s an author whose work I love named Patrick O’Brien, he writes historical fiction, wrote historical fiction. And he had a tendency to elide over fight scenes. He had a tendency to say like, “And then it happened and then so and so was dead,” and that can be very effective and I’ve now found times when that’s how I want to write it, especially because, and this is, “I’m going to stand on a soapbox here and it might be boring, but there’s a cultural meme throughout the English speaking world, which I’m just not that fond of, and that is that whether it’s James Bond or Captain America, the hero has to have the crap beaten out of him before he can win the fight. Ah, you know what I’m talking about.

Mm-hmm.

And sadly, my experience of both martial arts and actual war suggests to me that that’s nonsense. If you get the crap beaten out of you, you lose the fight. And I just can’t  write those scenes. So instead, I’ve started wandering off in the direction of fight scenes where the more skilled person just wins, which is fast and often maybe a little dull. And as I said on a panel at Worldcon a couple of years ago, you know, “Sometimes writing a fight scene should be like writing about a master carpenter using a hammer, which is not that exciting, you know, and then he hit another perfectly placed nail perfectly and then another one.” And we’re titillated by the idea of violence. But like, when you watch somebody who’s really good . . . I once watched a Navy SEAL use a submachine gun on a target range. And I had never fired a submachine gun at the time. And I had a great deal of trouble hitting a man-sized target at about fifty feet. And they called in this guy whose name I never learned, and he in one magazine put two or three rounds into each of five man-sized targets just by sort of waving his gun over it. And I said, tried to say something witty, like, “That wasn’t luck, was it?” And everybody just looked at me and I thought, Like, I see. That’s what you guys spend your life learning to do. And that’s why people like me would just die entering a room there. And I know that doesn’t make a good story because the plucky hero is supposed to be able to overcome years of skill with bravery. But yeah, anyway, it’s my soapbox.

OK, well, let’s go out and talk about your writing process, and we are going to focus on the new science fiction novel that’s coming out in June, called Artifact Space. And maybe the first thing to do is to give a brief description of it so people will want to rush out and read it.

Well, so, we all love genre titles. And I’m going to say unashamedly it’s space opera and it’s space opera based on four things. Hopefully this will excite everyone. One is a conversation I had with Alistair Reynolds about aircraft carriers and about how aircraft carriers kind of resembled giant spaceships. And he and I were sitting next together. I was being a fan—boy, I adore Alistair Reynolds’s writing—at Gollancz Fest in London. And he said, “I hear you were on aircraft carriers.” And that was all we talked about for the rest of the time. So that conversation sort of put in my mind, like, “Aircraft carriers in space. I wonder if there’s something there.” And then, last January, just as Covid was sort of beginning to exist, I was reading about the Venetian great galleys, the huge galleys they sent around on trade missions in the 15th century, and Venice had them, too. And I was fascinated by these huge galleys and how, you know, they went all the way to London and all the way to Antwerp and all the way to Alexandria, and the crews would sort of know all these people. That is the Middle Ages, where you don’t think of people traveling. And yet, even the oarsmen—who were not slaves, they were pretty well paid—are sort of going all over the place, from Egypt to Spain to England to Antwerp. And that cooked away in my mind. And then, just before Covid closed the theaters, my family and I went to see Little Women and I was sitting in my seat . . . I enjoyed the movie thoroughly, in case you care. But sometimes, I’m sorry, it’s a phrase from a ballet instructor friend of mine, she says, “Art makes art.” And I was enjoying this movie thoroughly, but in some part of my mind something was cooking, and suddenly I had the whole book in my head, like late in the movie, it’s related to a particular speech one of the characters gives, and it’s sort of about feminism and sort of about roles. And anyway, the whole thing, all the characters popped into my mind. It was done.

And it’s a space opera about long-range trade in the not-very-far future when everything has gone wrong on Earth and a heroic generation, a sort of golden generation like we think of the World War Two generation, got people off Earth into our ships, found other worlds, settled them, and in the process, lost a lot of contact with each other and with culture. So, what’s holding them together is these giant trade ships for a while. And when my novel opens, we’re actually almost at the end of that period. New technologies are being discovered, science is reborn. And I tried to give the novel a very, if you’ll pardon me, 18th century feel, that feeling of the Age of Enlightenment and everything being a little bit new. Time to throw over the old time, to look carefully at assumptions and decide whether they’re real or not. So, it’s like old-new old-new science-fiction space opera.

Well, that pretty much covers the first question, which was, “Where did the particular seed of this novel come from?” But looking at all of your novels, is that very typical for you, or is there any typical way that you get ideas for novels?

So, I’m always inspired by something, and it’s usually by history. I will say that Artifact Space, like one of my historical novels, Killer of Men, literally, it’s as if it was inserted into my brain. I wrote Artifact Space in 46 days. I wrote Killer of Men in, I think, 51 days. And that it’s like divine inspiration. I assume this is what the Greeks meant when they spoke of divine inspiration. It’s like someone is dictating to me and I’m just getting it down, which is a very different feeling from other books.

My most recent historical books are a pair of novels called The Commander Series—I’m not sure I chose that name—about Philopoemen of Achea, who, in addition to being a general—and he was a great general—was a master politician and, you know, sort of saved the Greek world for another 50 years from the Romans and various other competitors and created our modern idea of federal democracy, which probably is why anybody remembers him today. And those novels did not come to me by divine inspiration. I mean, they did. I was standing in Delphi with a tour looking at at the stone dedicated to Philopoemen. And I always get this feeling in Greece. It’s the most amazing thing. You know, there’s Philopoemen’s name. I can read ancient Greek, but it’s very hard carved in stone in all caps. And yet his name jumped out at me from like 20 feet away. And I always get this feeling like, “Oh, so it’s all real.” It’s hard to explain, but it’s as if one was somewhere in the deep forest and when suddenly found proof that The Lord of the Rings had actually happened. And that makes no sense for someone who loves history as much as I do. But I looked at Philopoemen ‘s name and went, “Wow, that’s real.” And that was so deeply inspiring. Call me crazy, but I had to learn all about him and read everything that had ever been written about him. And then I had to write a novel about him that took tons of research and time and effort and was not divine inspiration. That was just work. I mean, it wasn’t unpleasant work, but it was work. And that is a very different feeling from the feeling that I had about Artifact Space.

So, once you had the general idea, you wrote it, and the muse was dictating it to you. But did you do any planning ahead of time? And do you normally do some sort of planning or outlining?

These are questions, by the way, and you know, I’ll do my best for you—as I grow older, I do more planning. Artifact Space defied that. Nothing needed to be planned because, like I say, it was in my head and I had the whole thing beginning to end. But since I wrote the Red Knight series, the Traitor Son series, I now write much more extensive outlines and much more detailed character summaries and arcs. And that’s actually an artifact in part of the industry, which, you know, agents and editors now require those things, which always struck me as slightly amusing because I’d always go like, “But I’ve produced twenty-six novels already. Can’t we just believe I can produce a twenty-seventh?” But that being said, as I get older, I just can’t necessarily keep it all in my head and that that is a fact of life. So, it’s much better to write it all down. And so, now I have pages of character. I can tell you that when I was writing the Traitor Son series, all I had was a list of character names so that I didn’t forget them. And in the middle of the series, I learned that I needed to put a plus sign next to people I’d killed off because Phillip Dubos (sp?), a jousting character in the Red Knight series, I killed three times, which was, you know, kind of an error. And yeah. So, I’ve been developing that way.

Outlines I always find very interesting. And I’m fascinated to talk to other authors about this because I have always written some form of outline and then I almost never stayed with them because things happen organically and I just roll with whatever comes to me. And I’ll give you an example from today. I’m writing a fantasy novel right now and today . . . so, I ended yesterday with a pretty big and characterful fight scene, magical fight scene, not a sword fight. And that was good. And what I was supposed to write today was the consequent political follow-on from this duel. And instead, for no reason that I could name, I discovered that I was writing my character, who was badly wounded in the fight, basically lying on a featureless gray plain and discovering that to some extent he was dead and considering his whole life and wondering if he had ever done anything worthy and if he was about to be judged. And it turned out that was all just an artifact of the healing, the magical healing process. And I did not sit down to write that scene, not even sure where exactly that scene came from. But when I looked it over just before you and I started this call, I thought, “Oh, this is really good and far better than the banal political crap I was going to write. So, we’ll just roll with it.”

Yeah, it’s certainly my experience. I mean, I’m typically, with my publisher, I’m writing maybe a seven or eight single spaced page kind of synopsis at the most. Yeah. And then I start writing, but the one I’m writing now, The Tangled Stars it’s called, it’s a space opera as well. Humorous Space Opera I. It’s just not going where the synopsis said it was going. Not exactly. I keep surprising myself with it.

So does that worry you?

It worries me a bit in that this is not one of those books that the muse is dictating to me. I seem to be struggling with that. And I think partly that’s just the change in circumstances and not . . .I tend to write out of my house in a coffee shop or something, and I haven’t been able to do that. And I find I don’t work as well at home, which is odd, but . . .

You and me both, Ed. I’ve just discovered that we are brothers separated at birth. I have a coffee shop I adore. I have written . . .I couldn’t count the books I’ve written there. Eleven? And, you know, because of Covid I’m writing at a dining room table with, until a week ago, my daughter doing her high school homework. My partner has my office on the third floor because she’s working at home. So, she’s going by in both directions. And I don’t mind people, you know, I write in a coffee shop, but somehow, it’s deeply different.

Yeah, that’s exactly been my experience. And so,  I’m kind of struggling with it. But yeah, for me, it changes. From what I . . . you know, you have this . . . it all seems so clear in your head when you first think of the book, and you know what’s going to happen. But then as you write it, characters change and things develop and stuff you didn’t even know was going to happen happened. And it influences what’s going to happen further down the road. And so, one of the interesting things on the podcast is asking people that question, and everybody is so different in how it works for them. And I always go back to Peter V. Brett, who wrote The Demon Cycle.

Yeah, yeah. I know him.

I interviewed him, and he writes 150-page outlines before he writes anything of the book itself. And then he’s just basically filling in the outline. So, he’s put all that that work into the outline and then is able to just expand on it without wandering from it. And then there’s other people who just start writing and see what happens.

So, have you interviewed Evan Winter?

No, I haven’t.

I’m lucky in that I think I knew Evan a little before he was famous. And I believe he has said almost exactly the same thing, very detailed. And I mean . . . and that’s great. If that’s what works. I have always been friends with a bunch of other writers, and as you know, because you interview us, no two alike, you know.

Exactly.

But at the same time, I yeah, I wouldn’t write a 150-page outline because things change. Characters change. And I really do, I think I would say, I write by inspiration, it’s not seat of the pants. But my dad had . . . sorry, I’m very respectful of my dad’s writing ability, he wrote 42 books, he won prizes, he was a darn good writer. And my dad used to say there’s an idea and then there’s a book and they’re often very different and that you should never let the idea get in the way of the book. And I have often found that to be true, like I’ll have an idea and I am sometimes fooled and I think it’s a book, I have an idea and it’s usually a character, a situation, a moment, a fight scene, even an artifact, right? And I’m like, “Ah, there’s a saleable book.” No, that’s just a saleable idea. And even if I turn out an outline on it, it’s going to turn out that once I grapple with it really hard, that there was more or less. And sadly, occasionally, the answer is there’s less and I don’t really have a book at all, which is my horror, maybe everybody’s. But more usually, once I grapple with it, I go, “Oh!” So, I’ll give you a quick example. Then I’ll ask you for an example, since we seem to have some of this in common. I finished in March or, you know, earlier than that, the first fantasy novel in a series called Against All Gods. And it’s Bronze Age, and I’m very inspired by the Bronze Age. I’ll leave that alone. Somewhere about a third of the way through, I asked myself, like, “Why do we have so much violence in fantasy fiction?” And just out of nowhere created literally a race and family of pacifists and inserted them into the book, which they then began to take over. And they were not in the outline. They weren’t planned. I had to change the map to make room for them. I had to change the whole way mercantile behavior worked to justify how they survived as pacifists in a very nasty world. Yeah, good times.

I think the best example I have of things changing was a book called Terra Insegura, which is the second book in a two-book series collectively published as The Helix War when they put it out in an omnibus. The first one is Marseguro, because for some reason, I decided to use Portuguese titles, I don’t know why. But there was a character—and I’d only introduced him simply because I needed to have somebody, you know, multiple viewpoints, and there was something happening and I needed to have a character there who could be there for that scene. And then all of a sudden he had this backstory and he had different . . . he was supposed to be, like, the second in command on this spaceship, but he had a different agenda that came out of the backstory I kind of made up on the spot. And the next thing I knew, I was about two thirds of the way through the book, and I had to completely replot to the end of the book because my original plot just didn’t work anymore, because I’d introduced this character simply to solve a writing problem. So, yeah, it’s a fascinating process, which is why I have this podcast.

Yeah, well, it is a fascinating process. And like I say, I know a bunch of other writers and I really enjoy listening to them. And sometimes I, you know, I am capable of changing my modus operandi. And once in a while I hear something from somebody and I go, “That’s a good idea. Oh, yeah, that sounds very professional.” And I’ll just I’ll just take that on board. But what I can’t seem to fix is the difference between an idea and a book around page 250. I usually go, like, “And now it’s a book.”

I use a metaphor. To me, an idea is like this. When you think you have the book, it’s like there’s this shining Christmas-tree ornament, you know, it’s all silver and perfect and everything. And then you take it, and you smash it on the floor, and then you try to glue it back together using words.

That is brilliant!

And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

Oh, that’s so good. I will steal that, but not claim it for my own. I’ll give you credit for that. That’s good. Yep. And very accurate. I see that—rarely, talking to other authors—you and I may have a similar creative process.

It sounds like there might be some similarities for sure. Yeah, the books that have really worked for me, you know, I wrote 50,000 words in a week once because it was that sort of being dictated, and a 60,000-word YA in two weeks flat. You know, when it’s really working, it works. Which takes us back to your writing process. Are you . . . obviously you are a fast writer sometimes. Do you think of yourself as a fast writer? And also, you said you like to write in a coffee shop. Sometimes . . . I presume you’re a, you know, you’re clearly not writing longhand anymore like you did when you were 17.

No, no, no writing on a laptop. So, yeah, I didn’t think of myself as a fast writer until I went to my first WorldCon, where I took enormous amounts of teasing for my writing speed and came to the conclusion that I was a fast writer and I will just say, not entirely as a brag, I wrote five books last year. All of them will be published. And I say to younger writers and people who are starting out and stuff like that, that I literally believe that writing is like a martial art. And that is, the more you do it, the better you are at it. And so, I don’t think of writing faster or more as being . . . let me restart that sentence. I think F. Scott Fitzgerald convinced a lot of people incorrectly that there was some magic to the first novel and that you were magically great when you were very young and then you could never really do that again. It was an interesting thing that F. Scott Fitzgerald did, but I’m not sure that that’s a valid way of approaching the art of writing. And I suspect that you get better and better the more of it you do.

I look at people like Jack Williamson, right? Started writing in covered-wagon days and was still going 70, 80 years later. So, yeah, that’s my hope, anyway.

Well, it’s my hope too and, you know, I’m not really just here to plug Artifact Space, but I think it might be the best novel I’ve written. And that makes me happy because who wants to be getting worse, right? Like, it would be nice to think one is getting better even at the advanced age of 58, anyway. Yeah, I think I’m a pretty fast writer, but part of that . . . I find again, because I talk to other writers, I’m not as fast as Sebastien de Castille, who is faster than I am. There are definitely a bunch of people out there who write faster than I do. I find that what I do well is to just sit down and write every day. And we were talking about that, you at the newspaper and me at the Anti-Terrorist Alert Center. But just learning that there really wasn’t any reason not to write. You know, if you only produce 500 words a day but you produce 500 words every day, you’re going to get done. You are going to get done. You just plow through it eventually. That’s not my acceptable output, but I’ve had 500-word days and one of the biggest breakthroughs in my writing life . . . and again, this is something that I tell younger authors . . .it was learning to write in what I call scraps of time for the longest time. And I mean right through the first Traitor Son novel. I believed that I needed four to six hours to make it a valid writing day. And I would not bother writing if I didn’t have four to six clear, uninterrupted hours. And then I suddenly was writing two historical novels and a Traitor Son novel at the same time, you know, all with contracts and due dates. And I went, “You know, what I need to do is, if I only have an hour, I need to produce the words I can produce in that hour so that I just accept whatever time I have.” And that has been a major breakthrough for me because now I could just sit . . . right, I’ll give you an example. In 2014, if I had an interview with you today, I wouldn’t have written this morning because I had a bunch of yard work and stuff to do this morning and I didn’t really get done with it till ten in the morning. And that would make for a two-and-a-half-hour writing day. And it’s not enough time, right? Except instead, I wrote 2,100 words because I’ve learned that whatever time you get is the time you have.

Good advice. I’ve been like that sometimes, and sometimes I’d still let it slip away from me because I know there’s not enough time.

Well, I’m full of useful aphorisms that I don’t always follow myself, too. Please don’t imagine that I am perfect at this. But learning that it was true was very helpful. And I had to admit to myself, even my Navy veteran self, that telling myself that two and a half hours wasn’t enough time to write was actually just one of those excuses. It’s enough time once you . . . I’m sorry. No, you go ahead.

I was going to say, once you have a first draft, presumably, what does your revision process look like to you, a rolling revision, or how does that work for you?

I only have one draft and I do a rolling revision and it works like this. I start each writing day by reading the twenty pages before it and editing and correcting. About every hundred pages, which technically should be every week and a half, but I don’t always write that fast, I go either all the way back to the beginning or at least back 100 pages and do another layer of revisions. And often, by then, I’ve thought of things I didn’t like, which could be as simple as I’ve changed a character’s name or I’ve discovered how I want the alien language to sound or something like that. But it could be quite big. It could be that I’ve decided that that character doesn’t work and she’s got to go. And so, I do that revision. But when I write the last word, the next day, I’ll revise the last 10 pages and then it’s done. And I send it in.

Well, they’re we’re different. I tend to do a full draft and then rewrite from the beginning, although sometimes I have to do one halfway through because just to sort of break through a barrier or something, I’ll go back and do a revision of the first half of the book or something so I can sort of power through some place where I’m stuck. Do you use beta readers or anything like that?

Yes, but first I want to give a plug to my high school. I went to a Jesuit high school, which is funny because I’m not Catholic, but I went to a Jesuit high school and the Jesuits taught writing. And, you know, I was unfair earlier in the interview when I said I hadn’t taken writing classes, because they taught very intense writing classes and we did a ton of writing, I should admit that. But one of the things that they said that stuck with me and, you know, believe it or don’t, Father Abluski (sp?) insisted that usually your first idea is your best idea and you should roll with that. And it’s not always true, but I hear that voice often when I attempted to make a big change and I go like, “Really? Is it really better or are you just doubting yourself?” Anyway, I felt that truth in advertising required me to give some credit to the Jesuits if credit is what’s involved. Sorry. Now ask that last question, please.

Do you use beta readers or does anybody see it before you send it off to your editor?

Yeah. So, given the time it takes editors at Orion and Gollancz to get to a manuscript, I send it out to everyone at the same time because it’s going to be three to five months before my editor looks at my manuscript when I send it, and I know that because I’m a veteran, and so I will send it to my beta readers. So, I have a . . . I won’t call them a legion, but I have a number of beta readers. And dare I say, each of them has kind of a different purpose. Some of them are truly critical. Some of them are more what I would call appreciative. Some of them are big-picture and some of them are nitpicking. And that’s great. They’re like a team and they criticize different things. And they, you know, one beta reader I can think of will tell me what she feels about a novel, which I find shockingly accurate for what future readers are going to feel, you know, over the course of 10 books. And another beta reader is really good at catching story-arc errors. And he has always been sort of my favorite beta reader because he’ll say, “You know, like, I really didn’t believe it when X happened because of this, this, and this you’d already said. And I go, “And you’re right again, Joe. Well done. Thank goodness for you.” And I trust my beta readers. If they say something is flawed, I fix it. I don’t go through long questions with myself or whatever. I just fix it. And pretty much the same thing with editing. I believe in editors. So, Gillian Redfern, my editor at Gollanz, is one of my favourite editors ever. And if she says something has to go, I think nine out of 10 times I kill it, and if she says something, it doesn’t work for her, I believe her. And that’s a decision I decided at some point to roll with. Editors are not idiots.

Yes, I do a lot of talking to young writers. I’ve been a writer in residence at the Regina and Saskatoon Public Libraries, and I’ve done classes, you know, all that sort of stuff. And I do occasionally run into somebody who’s quite terrified of editors and that they’re going to somehow ruin their prose or something and I say, no, not in my experience.

You know, this is literally . . . so, I keep praising my dad. Now I’m going to say something the opposite of my dad. My dad believed that writing was a solitary, bohemian art. A very 1950s sort of ideal of what writing was or is. I think the opposite. I think it’s a team sport and I’m on a team. I’m not even always the captain. I have an editor. I have a copy editor, a copy editor is super important for me because I use, you know, ancient Greek and Chinese and stuff in my books. Got a cover artist, got betareaders. It’s a team, it’s not just me. I am not creating on my own, and it’s silly of me to ignore my teammates if they say something is wrong.

Well, that’s we’re getting close to the end of our hour here, so let’s move on to the big philosophical questions. I’m going to put that in reverb. There’s three. The first one is,. Why do you write? The second one is, why do you think anybody writes, why do human beings, if you want to be that general, write? And then thirdly, why stories of the fantastic specifically. So, you know, three questions.

Do we have another hour? Because I’ve got an hour’s worth of answers. So, I can tell you quite easily why I write. And it’s pretty banal. I love stories and I literally have found that when I don’t have enough to read, I just have to write because I’m literally telling myself a story, and that may sound terrible, but I enjoy telling myself stories, apparently, and I just hope the rest of you enjoy them too. But I couldn’t stop myself if I tried. I have to write sometimes and stories will boil up inside of me because whatever. And then I can kill the urge to write. And this is really weird because, as you know, Ed, we live in a world where we writers get ARCs to read for other people. And in fact, you know, we owe it to other writers to support them and read their ARCs and comment and say nice things. The problem is, the happier I am reading, the less writing I get done, so that I have to cut myself off from reading to some extent to let the story bubble up inside me. So, I want to tell it, so I write it. Anyway, there it is. I write because I want to tell a story and I think that in some ways that is the human condition.

And I’m just going to say, like, I’ve been reading a lot of Anglo-Saxon stuff lately, maybe you’re going to write a historical novel in that era. But also, just, I enjoyed old English in school and I had sort of let it go and I just gone back to it. And it’s been very interesting to read sort of early Germanic prose and the Icelandic sagas, which I’d never read before and stuff like that, and go, “Oh, we really need stories.” But unfortunately, in the age of, you know, antibacterials and Trump supporters and so on, sometimes the stories are wildly inaccurate or even false. And that is a, you know, if there’s an original sin in the human condition, I think it’s the ability to tell an untrue story. And I don’t mean a fictional story. I mean a straight-out falsehood. But we need to collect information, all of us, I think, and we tend to put it into a narrative, even if there’s no narrative. And I appeal to you, Ed, in your life, is your life a narrative or is it a series of events?

I like to think of it as a narrative.

Well, I like to think of mine as a narrative, but I promise you, at times it seems pretty damn random anyway. I think we want it to fit into narrative structure. We want it to be logical. So, we tell stories to force the events into stories. And I think that is a sufficient cause, maybe not a dramatic one, but sufficient.

And then the last question. Um. Why fantastical stories? That is a fabulous question and one I ask myself often, and I’m going to say that the answer is, much as I love history as a source for adventure, plot, character, the truth is that the history of the human race is slavery, degradation, force and horror to some extent to a pretty wide extent, it is very hard to find heroism in history. It’s very difficult to find people who were good. And the more research you do, the more of your own heroes you kill off. That doesn’t mean there’s nobody heroic in history. And I’m not an utter revisionist, but sometimes you want to tell a story about how people succeeded in bettering themselves, for instance. And it’s probably going to be easier to tell that story in a fantasy or science fiction. Or sometimes the opposite. You want to tell how it all fell apart in a dystopian manner and it’s probably going to be easier.

One of the problems that really exists with writing historical novels is that people carry a lot of mythological baggage with their knowledge or their supposed knowledge of history. And that can make writing a historical novel very dangerous. Something as simple as whether Alexander the Great was Greek or Macedonian can lose you readers and also just cause them to turn off and not accept anything else you say. Whereas if you chose to write a fantasy novel about a conqueror who turned out to not be a very nice person, that’s a different kettle of fish and it’s good to go out to a different audience. And I’m a very Aristotelian writer. I believe it is my job to moralize and teach, which I admit is not a popular 21st century point of view, but it is my Aristotelian job to write, you know, The Iliad, with purpose.

Which segues very nicely into the last question, which is, what are you working on now?

Bless you. So I went through a dry spell. It’s funny. I went through a very long dry spell and wrote a bunch of novels in Covid. And then just about the time I started saying to some of my writing friends, “I don’t get it. What is this Covid depression you guys keep worrying about?”, my dad died and suddenly I couldn’t write. So recently I’ve come out of that, and all of a sudden I’m writing two books at the same time. Yes, I am. So, years ago I started a novel which in my mind I called Rangers. And it’s a pretty complicated fantasy novel. And it was meant to be the prequel to Cold Iron and my Masters and Mages series. And I started it because Gollancz said they were going to buy it and then they didn’t buy it. And then I dropped it because I don’t write for free. Suddenly, the other day I picked it up, read it and went, “This is really good. I think this will be my first self-published novel. I think I’m going to experiment with how self-publishing orks.” So, I did that. And at the same time, I am writing the sequel to Artifact Space, which is called Deep Black, and that’s super fun too. And so, it’s been very odd because I’m sort of writing 1800 to 2500 words of each, each day, and I’ve never done this exact thing before and it’s odd.

And Artifact Space comes out June 24 from Gollancz?

It does. Swords in space. That’s my shout line.

And where can people find you and follow you online?

Bless you. So I’m focused on one, on Twitter, and I have invested a lot of social media time on Twitter. I enjoy Twitter. I know not everyone does. I’m @Christian_Cameron_Author on Instagram. And you know, I’m on Instagram every day doing my doing my best to keep everybody interested. Twitter is where I sort of talk about being an author and Instagram is often about martial arts or my other passion, painting little men and women and playing tabletop games. And I don’t really talk as much about being an author, because endless self-advertising is boring as I suspect you have a feeling you may share.

I’m bored by myself all the time.

Yeah, me too. And I have a Facebook author page, but I’ve spent less and less time on Facebook since the U.S. election. I was in the military. I have many conservative friends. I don’t happen to be a conservative myself and sometimes I don’t want to read what they have to say.

Yeah, Facebook can be well . . . yeah. Facebook can be bad for finding out what people you like think about things and you want to keep liking them, so you don’t want to know what they think about something.

Exactly. Exactly.

Yeah. I’ve had that reaction, too. All right. Well, thanks so much for being on The Worldshapers. That was a great conversation. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

I enjoyed it thoroughly. And I’d really like to meet you in person. And in fact, as one of the things I was going to say at some point is I have discovered since I started doing cons, which I came to very late in life, that I if I like the person, I like that person’s books, I am now going to go buy a bunch of your books.

That’s a wonderful thing to do if you ask me. Well, I’m sure I’m sure we’ll run into each other at some convention once they start up again. I hope. That would be great. 

Someday again. Yeah, a great pleasure. Ed, thanks for having me.

Thank you. Bye for now.

Episode 61: Jeremy Szal

An hour-long conversation with Jeremy Szal, author of Stormblood, Book 1 in the dark space-opera Common trilogy (Gollancz), author of more than 40 science fiction short stories, and former editor of the Hugo-winning online audio magazine Starship Sofa.

Website
www.jeremyszal.com

Twitter
@JeremySzal

Facebook
@ Jeremy.J.Szal

Jeremy Szal’s Amazon Page

The Introduction

Jeremy Szal was born in 1995 and, he says, “was raised by wild dingoes.” He spent his childhood exploring beaches, bookstores, “and the limits of people’s patience.”

He’s the author of more than 40 science fiction short stories, and his debut novel, Stormblood, a dark space opera, came out from Gollancz in June 2020 and is the first of a trilogy. He was the editor of the Hugo-winning Starship Sofa until 2020, and has a B.A. in film studies and creative writing from the University of New South Wales. He carves out a living in Sydney, Australia, with his family.

He loves watching weird movies, collecting boutique gins, exploring cities, cold weather, and dark humor.

The (Lightly Edited) Transcript

Welcome to The Worldshapers, Jeremy.

Thank you very much, Edward. Lovely to be here

Well, thanks so much for being on. I haven’t been able to finish your book, but I’ve delved into it enough to know that it looks really cool. So, I’m looking forward to talking with you about it. But before we do that, we will do…well, first of all, we should point out that we are talking across a vast expanse of the planet since I’m in Saskatchewan and you’re in… Sydney, is it?

Sydney, Australia, yeah. I think fourteen hours difference.

Fourteen hours.

Yeah.

So, he’s actually…you’re actually in the future, from my point of view. 

I am in the future. It’s not too bad here, you know. Another day has dawned, we haven’t, you know, destroyed ourselves. Aliens haven’t invaded. Not yet. Yeah.

Well, that’s good to know. I can get up in the morning without fear then. So let’s start, as I always do with my guests, by taking you back into the…I’m going to put reverb on this someday…the mists of time, and find out how you, well, first of all, where you grew up, and how you got interested in science fiction, and how you got interested in writing. So, how did that all work for you?

Yeah, I grew up here in Sydney, Australia. I was always a reader, and I never really thought of genre in any particular fashion. I just read the books I liked reading. But when I was ten years old, we moved to Austria for a couple of years, basically to a small mountain village, because my dad’s from Poland and my uncle and grandfather had died in a very short period of time and he needed to go out and sort some things there.

Anyway, so I’m living there in tall mountain regions of Austria. And for some reason, whatever reason, the local school library has a small English section. And, you know, obviously, they all speak German there. Alas, the world does not speak the language I speak wherever I go. You do have to learn the local tongue. And so, I hadn’t spoken German yet, and so I was still picking through what they had for me to read. And, you know, I quickly devoured a lot. But then, you know, my mother is an English teacher, and she was very, very determined to get me books. And so, whenever we would go to London, we’d always stop at the bookstore and I’d always, you know, devour whatever they had there. Like, I picked up whatever I still thought was interesting, you know, there was no, as I said, it was no genre, I didn’t think of fiction as science fiction or not. I just picked up whatever I wanted to pick up. And one of those things happened to be the Artemis Fowl series. And then I picked up the GONE series by Michael Grant. And then I picked up a few books by Stephen King. And again, I didn’t think of them…I just bought whatever I liked reading. And the covers appealed to me. I liked the action, I liked the adventure, I liked the weirdness of it.

And then, I remember distinctly seeing a cover from Iain M. Banks when I walked into a Waterstones when I was thirteen, fourteen, and something about it just appealed to me, you know, the spaceship, the planet, the weirdness of it, the technology. And I couldn’t put my finger on it. Like, I couldn’t think, “OK, why do I like this?” I just did. You know, obviously I’d seen Star Wars, I’d seen my own fair share of science fiction, I was an avid videogamer, and so I had a little science fiction, but I never really thought of it as sci-fi. But then, when I came back to Australia and when I, you know, finished, started going into high school, I took up a few creative writing courses, and I found that I quite liked it.

And then, I started reading the whole Song of Ice and Fire series, when I was way, way too young to read those books. And then I saw the first season of Game of Thrones, again when I was way, way, way too young for it–I don’t even think I legally could have seen it at the time–and something about the whole idea of fantasy just appealed to me, you know, the idea of a magical realm with its dragons and creatures and these different cultures and different landscapes and all this weird stuff going on like that, this really appealed to me. And so, when I started acknowledging, you know, the idea of science fiction through video games like Halo and Mass Effect, it just really grabbed me. And so, when I did finish high school, I just started reading, going to the bookstores, and going to a science fiction bookstore, science fiction section of the bookstore, deliberately, like, I started picking up The Witcher books, I started picking up Brandon Sanderson, I started picking up Karen Travis, Greg Bear, a bunch of other people and, you know, as I say, the rest is history.

Well, you said that you took some creative writing classes in high school. Were you writing outside of class at the time? When did you start writing your own stories?

Yeah, it was probably earlier. I just basically parroted whatever the hell I was reading at the time, you know? And, you know, I didn’t really think of myself as a writer. I just thought of myself as someone who, you know, I liked typing, and so I just started getting it all down. I mean, like, I don’t even think it was, you know, anything remotely cohesive. I just, you know, did whatever jumped to mind. But then, when I was in high school, and I started taking those classes, I did start thinking of the idea of writing to be published, you know, writing to be read. And one of the things that did that was reading the adaptation of Halo, one of the video games, novelizations by Karen Travis. And I just…it was very, very little action, but it was a very human story. And I just found that I could visualize it very easily because I’d played the video games. And so, it just…I was able to pick it up very, very easily. And I had a very short attention span, so that was, you know, priceless. And so I started thinking, “Hell, I’d like to do this!” And so, yeah, I started doing it seriously. And when I did finish high school, I started pursuing it seriously.

But you didn’t actually study writing when you went on to university. You did film studies, right?

I did both. I did creative writing and film studies. I don’t actually think the creative writing was anywhere near as much help as the film studies thing was. I think the film studies really did hone in on the nature of craft and the nature of scriptwriting and the nature of pushing your characters forward, always intriguing the audience, always having something behind the next corner. A lot of the creative writing classes were, “OK, how do we allude to metaphysical imagery that this obscure 1920s writer was trying to get out, probably while he was depressed, high, and on his deathbed? How can we apply that to our own, you know, creative process, our own creative lives?” And, you know, I zoned out pretty early on in most classes. But the film study was quite educational. So, I think it’s very good to get a diverse range of inspirations.

I often ask people who have taken creative writing in university how helpful they found it for the kind of writing they ended up doing. And you just answered that. And I often get that, especially from people who write in science fiction and fantasy.

Yeah.

It’s just still not a genre that is particularly welcome at university creative-writing programs.

Absolutely not. I straight-up had one teacher tell me that any sort of science fiction, fantasy, anything like that, is just bad. And you could just hear a groan go around the audience, and some girl put her hand up and said, “Yeah, but why?” And I don’t remember the answer because I was too annoyed to pay attention.

But I do remember this one creative writing class where this one girl literally showed up to class with, not a story, she just pasted together all these newspaper clippings of various things that happened around the world and then wrote her own sub-stories about the Salem witch trials, but not really. And so, there were newspaper clippings on this big canvas sheet, like a collage. But the thing is that there was a massive bloodstain on it. And we’re all sitting there, thirty of us, looking at this bloodstain, and wondering who this, you know, ultra-Goth writer, this girl who, what she’d given us. And the teacher’s like, “Uh, what is this?” And she’s like, “Oh, yeah, I was cutting together all these newspaper clippings with a box cutter and accidently sliced my own fingers. And I started bleeding all over the pages. But I’ve decided, you know what? Instead of that, instead of just getting a new one, I’m just going to keep it.”

And I looked at the teacher, waiting for her to tear her down, and she’s like, “Oh, yeah, I can see there that there’s a bit of an arterial spray around the word ‘pain’, there’s a big, big splatter around the word ‘witch,’ there’s a big clump of hair and, you know, residue of nails and tissue right there around the words, the time, you know, and  it’s like echoing back to the blood spilled by generations lost.” I almost flipped the table across. I’ve never been closer to picking up a chair and hitting someone with it in my life.

And because one of my friends at the time, she–who ended up ultimately beta reading Stormblood and is in the acknowledgments for Stormblood–she was a filmmaker, and she’d just come off making a short film that had been screened around the world. And a lot of the actors, some of the actors in the short film have gone on to do bigger things, like, one of the actresses, she’s in a movie, just finished a movie with Jason Clarke and Helen Mirren. And she’s in these, like, another TV show that’s going to be on HBO, and, you know. So, my friend basically helped discover her in short film. And so, we both of us had a background in what we were doing, a semi-professional background. So, we just looked at each other, and we were just boiling. And this other girl, of course, got top marks, for doing, like not even, she didn’t even do any writing. She just cut newspapers together and bled all over them. I think that, if nothing else, that summarizes what my experience at university was like.

Well, you’ve written a lot of short stories, and you’re not a particularly aged individual. So, when did you get started on the short stories, getting-published short stories,?

I think when I was 19, I started getting good news from short-fiction editors. The responses weren’t just, “No, we don’t want this,” The responses were, “This is interesting, but we’re going to pass.” And so, I kept sending them out and sending them out and sending them out, and eventually, one of them sold for actual money. And I was over the moon. I’m like, “OK, I’ve cracked the code. I actually can do this. There is actually a way for me to do this,” because, you know, if you look at that wall, that impenetrable wall between you and being a published writer, it looks unscalable. But now that I actually had done it, I’d actually reached out and found some measure of success, it boosted my confidence.

And so, I kept writing and kept writing and kept writing and I kept sending them out. And eventually, one of those stories, when I was 19, ended up selling to Nature magazine. So…and that was pretty amazing, for me to actually sell to a professional magazine published by Macmillan and to be able to have that, you know, see my story in print and know that it’s widely distributed all around the world. It was an incredible feeling and showed that I actually could do it. And so, yeah, I just kickstarted from there, and I kept writing short fiction over the years and getting them out, and I kept getting my stuff published. And it was, yeah, it was pretty interesting.

I still don’t think that I’m a good short-fiction writer, and I only say that because, as someone who has edited short fiction for about six years and has read thousands of thousands of stories, I think there’s a very, very, very specific sort of story that most short-fiction magazines want these days, all the sort of structure, the sort of style that they’re after. Short stories are not condensed novels. They’re not truncated novels. They’re not very, very quick stories. Short stories, I think, have a very, very specific sort of style to them, not just the way they’re written but the sort of writers that they appeal to. And that’s great, you know, the more, the merrier. But that sort of style generally isn’t for me. I say generally, because sometimes there’s a sort of freedom being able to just go wild and experiment with something, try a new POV, try a new setting, try any of that, you know, and I’m writing 180,000-word epic dark space operas, that are all from first person, voice-driven, and so sometimes it’s a relief to break away from that and just go crazy. But yeah, I don’t think I’ve quite cracked the sort of thing that most short-fiction readers and editors would like to read

I mean, if you look at something like Ted Cheung, he’s never written a novel, but he’s probably the best short-fiction writer living today. And he’s probably one of the only short-fiction writers, modern writers, who’s had his work adapted to an incredible film. That’s how good he is, not only how good his work is, but how widely it appeals, and that in itself is a skill. And I don’t think that’s something I have quite yet.

I did want to ask you about the editing for Starship Sofa. You’re both a short-fiction editor, but it’s also an audio…magazine, I guess. How has that fed into your own writing and the way that you work with words? Has it been…doing all that editing and reading those thousands of short stories, do you think that has benefited your own writing going forward? And also, how does the audio aspect of that fit in?

It absolutely has benefited me. I mean, it’s hard not to, because I’m reading all this fiction and, you know, you have to come to a conclusion. You know, there’s no, “I don’t know if I like this or not,” it’s, “Do I think this is something I want to buy and give money for? Do I want to accept this and be responsible for helping adapt it to audio and putting it on the podcast as something that I’ve edited? Do I want to work with this story?” The answer is yes or no. And in order to come to that conclusion, you have to look at a story, quote-unquote, “objectively,” and think, “OK, is it ticking the right boxes? Does it appeal to me? Do I like the genre? Do I find the style engaging? Do I want to keep reading? Do I like the ending? Do I like the approach that it’s taking?” You know, you do have to sit down and think, “Yes or no, this is something I want to read?” I mean, we’ve all read books that, we’re not quite sure we love them, but we kept reading them anyway. But doing the short fiction, I think, really helped me know, “OK, yes or no.” And one reason why I did that was, I’d read the first page, the first couple of pages, and think, “OK, do I want to continue.” And knowing, being able to say yes or no, would save me, not only so much time but so many headaches, because I’ve gotten fiction that’s made my eyes bleed, not literally bleed, but close to it, but thankfully that’s not the majority. The majority of the stuff is good, or it’s just OK. But, yeah, I would look at the fiction I was getting and make, come to a conclusion either way.

And it really helped me, I guess, nail down not only what I thought was engaging fiction, but what I liked, you know, “I like this!” And a lot of that…for a long time, I thought I was an epic-fantasy person. And now…I moved on kind of to cyberpunk, and then I started developing a taste for space opera. And so, being able to know that when I get something that was set in space or set in a future or set in an urban city, or something that, especially if it was first-person or especially if it was voice-driven, I’d always get excited, like, “Yes, this is my thing.” And knowing that helped me quantify my niche, I think. And that really helped me establish, “OK, this is the sort of thing that I’m into.” And so, when I’d be reading, I’d think, “OK, this is what I don’t do. And all this is a really good trick. This is a really good method of easing you into a universe.” And so, I did slowly accumulate knowledge in that way.

The last question, the answer to your next question, is slightly less interesting, I think. The audio version, the way it basically works, I read it, I decide if it is something that can be read aloud in audio, on top of whether if it’s a good story, I send it to a narrator, they do all the hard work of actually reading aloud the thing and editing it and cutting it together. They send it back to me, I just pop up on the show, I just pop it up to my the editor in chief, Tony, and he broadcasts it. That’s pretty much it.

How did you end up being the editor for Starship Sofa? How did you make that connection?

I think it was Neil Asher who shared a post by Tony C. Smith, the editor-in-chief at the time, and still is. The other guy had left…I don’t know why or whatever, I think just didn’t work there anymore, and so I just messaged him and said, “Hey, can I have the job?” And a short Skype interview later, I got the job. I wish everything in my life came to me as easily as that did.

You mentioned that, you know, sort of going through the different genres and seeing what you like. In your own short fiction, has it gone through various genres as well, or have you tended to write in one genre in your short fiction? Or subgenre, I should say?

Yeah, definitely. I think I started off very, very much sort of fantasy, a bit weird. Mythological sort of style, you know, like the sort of Skyrim, Game of Thrones-esque sort of low fantasy, Joe-Abercrombie-sort-of-style fantasy. And I still love Joe Abercrombie, but that’s not the sort of fiction I ever want to write. It’s just not me. And I think I did kind of develop more into cyberpunk, sort of New Age punk fiction, like China Mieville, Ian MacDonald, Paolo Bacigalupi, that sort of thing. But then I started, you know, getting more into space opera as I consumed, you know, Alastair Reynolds, Iain M. Banks, Peter Hamilton, that sort of thing. And I just felt, “OK, this is the sort of thing that I like.” And I thought, “OK, can I write this?” And of course, no one tells you what you can or cannot write. And so I thought, you know, I’m just going to take a stab at it. And I did.

But I found that short fiction was a little bit constrictive for the space opera genre, especially the sort of space opera that I wanted to write, and so I started developing it more into novels. And that’s more or less the trend. I think the transition that happened in late 2015, early 2016. I’d just come off writing an epic fantasy, a YA fantasy, that I absolutely loathed. I got about two-thirds of the way in, and I’m like, “I never want to read fantasy, write fantasy, ever again. I can’t stand it. This is not the sort of thing, that is not me,” because I go, you know, “OK, I just got rejected for a YA sci-fi novel and 50 percent of the rejections said, “YA sci-fi is a very hard sell,” like, “Science fiction is a hard sell, YA science fiction is an even harder sell.”

And I’d just come off reading Red Rising, and I thought, “You know, this is the sort of thing that I’d like to do.” But I was writing in a fantasy and I’m like, I felt trapped by the genre. And I thought, “You know, screw it. I’m just going to write whatever I want to write. If it sells, doesn’t sell, that’s fine.” I did look at the market a little bit and think, “OK, what’s the sort of thing that is appealing to agents?” And I’ve always loved crime, always loved murder mysteries, and I thought…I had the great, I had the barnstorming, original idea, “Hey, what if we had a murder mystery in space?” And so I wrote it, and I’m glad I did because I wrote that novel in three months, it was incredibly powerful for me to be able to just sit down every day, no matter what I had on, and just pour out a thousand words or two thousand words every single day. Just get it down. No thought of, you know, “Is this good? Is this not good?” I just thought, “I’ll come back and I’ll fix it later.” I just powered it down, punched it out, and in about three months, literally three months, I wrote a whole space-opera novel, and I must’ve done something right because a year later I got an agent with that novel. So, I’m very, very glad I did it. I did do that.

Now, it was that Stormblood or was that a novel before Stormblood?

That is a novel before Stormblood.

Because I didn’t think Stormblood was–it didn’t seem to be a mystery novel set in outer space.

No, it’s not. It was a previous one called The Rogue Galaxy. It was about, you know, the whole premise of it, basically, what if you were convicted for committing a murder you didn’t remember committing? And so that was…and you had to go to the other side of the galaxy to find that answer.

But no, I’d finished that. I’d written it in third person and about halfway through I’m like, “This would really work well in first,” because I was reading a lot of first-person fiction. And it was a little bit too late, and I thought, “OK, at the end, I’ll just go back and change it.” And when I did get to the end, I’m like, “OK, I can’t be bothered about changing it.” So I thought, “I’ll just write a novel,” I think about the end of that year, I decided to just punch out another novel. I mean, even if you do get an agent, having another project under your belt is always a good thing. Having another project, you know, in the percolator is, you know, it’s always good to keep those juices flowing.

And so I started writing in December, either November or December 2016, page one, chapter one of Stormblood. And I thought, you know, “What if we had, you know, a fiction that was very set in space, but it was also very voice-driven, it was first-person, it had an edge to it?” And that idea just appealed to me. And I wrote that first draft in six months, and I must have done something right because a year and a half later I sold it to Gollancz.

Well, this seems like a good place for you to give us a synopsis of it without giving away anything you don’t want to give away.

All right. Stormblood, yeah?

Yeah.

All right. OK, Stormblood. The basic premise is that the DNA of an extinct alien race is used as a drug, and it makes people addicted to adrenaline and aggression. And so, of course, this one empire injected it into those soldiers and got them to fight off a brutal invading empire. And, you know, all seemed well and good. You know, these soldiers are literally addicted to killing, they’re literally addicted to running headfirst into a bullet-storm. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, everything, because it’s permanent and the high didn’t stop when the enemy was over, and the high didn’t stop when the battle came to a close. And they also had these, all these soldiers restless and not knowing what to do with their own bodies. And it didn’t stop when the war was over, and they got sent home, and they had these tens of thousands of soldiers permanently addicted to being on a battlefield. And so, the main premise of this is that the main character is one of these soldiers, comes back from a war, you know, traumatized, ridden with PTSD, but looking for a way to get his life back together. Anyway, the main forces that injected the DNA into him, the Galactic Empire, whatever you’d like to call it, they call him back and say, “We need you to do something for us.” And he wants nothing to do with them, for obvious reasons, because they ruined his life. They lied to him. They’ve lied to millions of people, the cost of winning a war, but at great consequence. And he says, “Why should I talk to you?” And it turns out that his fellow soldiers, the ones that he knows and loves, are all being murdered, being killed off, being overdosed. And it turns out that his brother is the prime suspect. His estranged brother is the prime suspect.

And so, as the book unfolds, you find out his history, you find out his history with his brother, you found his history with his teammates, and their whole central conflict is that he was very, very close to his brother, they developed a very strong brotherhood, you know, when they were surviving together on a brutal backwater planet, when they were surviving an abusive father. And he transferred that same sense of brotherhood and camaraderie to fighting in a war where the only people who knew what it was like to have an alien organism actually, like, squirming around in your head and sniffing up your chest and sniffing up your backbone was to be with, and, you know, what it felt like to be in cover and see the enemy charging towards you and like, get excited, “Yes! There are people shooting at me,” to actually get an adrenaline spike. The only people who knew what that was like were his fellow soldiers. What it was like to want to be suicidal. And so, he developed a very, very strong personal relationship with them.

And he comes home, as I said, and finds out they’re being murdered, potentially by…his brothers are being murdered by his flesh-and-blood brother. And so, the whole central conflict is him keeping the balance between that, being able to hunt down his brothers’ killers while dealing with the fact that his own brother is murdering them. And, of course, because this wouldn’t be a good story without a central personal conflict, the more he investigates danger, the more addicted to adrenaline and aggression he gets. Because he’s been out of the war for a few years, so he’s able to control his body’s, able to control his urges, but, of course, when he’s going up against killers and a shadowy organization, that doesn’t quite work out. And so, the more confrontations he gets into, the more hyped up and the more dangerous he gets and the more dangerous his body gets. And so, there’s that balancing act of keep of trying to get this all done while still not going insane, basically.

Well, it’s a bit of a cliche question, but, you know, it’s still a legitimate one, where do you get your ideas? So what was the seed for this? Where did this the seed for this novel come from that then sprouted to do this trilogy?

Oh, it was just my original genius, just sitting in a dark room and just thinking at all. No, not at all. I borrow very, very heavily from cinema and gaming because I’m a very visual person. And so, the idea of a far-future society has always intrigued me, both in the ideas level and a visual level, to be able to go to some central city on a spaceship, you know, galactic skyscrapers, you know, kind of like Coruscant from Star Wars, and to go down in all these neon dark cities, on all these busy streets that are frantic with these different alien species and different spaceships. You know, that idea has always very, very much appealed to me. And so, I knew that I pretty much wanted to set my story in that sort of universe.

And one thing I found is that there was very little of a Star Wars-esque sort of fiction being written that is not tie-in. There’s a lot of, you get a lot of alien stories that are either first-contact stories or the stories that are basically war-driven stories, that these humans are fighting a war against these aliens, but there’s not quite as many stories about a future society where humans and aliens have, you know, have joined forces or, you know, there’s this multi-species society, like, sort of Mass Effect. And that’s my bread and butter of fiction, and there wasn’t quite as much a lot as I would have liked.

But, so, I wanted to write that, but then I thought, “OK, what about, you know, let’s make it a little bit weirder. You know, what if the idea of, you know, this, how will we people upgrade ourselves and what sort of modifications would we make?” And then I thought, “You know, what if the modifications we made were from the DNA of aliens, how would that work, and how would we grant ourselves with alien, you know, biometrics or whatever?” But then I thought, “Let’s make it a little bit more interesting. What’s the cost of that? Surely there has to be a cost.” And the cost was that it’s a drug and it makes you addicted to getting an adrenaline spike. It makes you addicted to your own body chemistry. And so, then I started developing the idea of a brother, of two brothers who had a very good relationship but then were estranged, and then started developing that relationship slowly as I wrote the book. But yeah, I am definitely a character-driven author. I am not a plot sort of guy. So, I definitely did combine the idea of this alien DNA with the idea of these two brothers and just mashed them together and just sort of went on from there.

Well, what did your planning process look like? You talked about developing the characters, as you wrote. Did you do a lot of outlining ahead of time or just…what did that look like for you?

That’s a pretty good question. I’m most fascinated by this question, as well, because it’s very hard to tell when you see a finished product, knowing what went into it.

And I get a lot of different answers.

Yeah, yeah. In my case, I outlined the broad strokes of it. I knew that I wanted to have this to happen and I wanted the antagonist to be doing this, and I wanted this sort of resolution midway, and I wanted to have this sort of scene, and I wanted to have this sort of arc, but more or less how I got slithered in between that, I pretty much just wrote on the go. But as I did that, I more or less figured out, “OK, this is not what I want to do.” And one of those things was one of the side characters. I’m like, “OK, I haven’t quite gotten his voice down. I haven’t quite gotten his approach, his personality,” and in order for me to write a character, I have to know the sort of person they are because who they are influences the behavior, the relationship, the dialogue. And I can’t just…you know, if I don’t get a concrete answer, it’s going to be wet clay. And so I went back a little bit and did a bit of character tweaking, but more or less, I just went, you know, started going from point to point and just weaseling my way through those points, deciding, “OK, this has happened, OK, how are they going to get to the next point?” And I just rocked up one day and decided, “You know, OK, they will do this, they’ll go here, they’ll do that.” But the broad strokes of the narrative, the big anchor points, were definitely outlined. And I think that comes from film, of all things, because I’ve said, I’m very inspired by film. And one of my favorite sort of films are films where I feel like the director has a very tight control over the narrative, over every shot, over every scene, of the emotion that you’re expected to get from every point in the film.

Like, I’m a very, very big fan of something like a film, like, for example, the film There Will Be Blood with Daniel Day-Lewis. You know, that film is so incredibly tight. You just know that every, behind the camera, he was in absolute control. Like, a director like Martin Scorsese or Christopher Nolan or Denis Villeneuve, you get like something like Blade Runner 2049. Like, this is what they want to do, and this is how we achieve this…they achieved exactly that. And so that sort of thing that I enjoy doing, being able to control my narrative.

Unfortunately, the human brain sometimes has other ideas. And as I’ve discovered with writing book two, and outlining book three, sometimes that doesn’t always go to plan. And so, sometimes being able to adapt and figure out, “OK, this is actually what I want to do.” I mean, you get to a certain point in the narrative, and you’re like, “Actually, my characters don’t want to do this. Well, I don’t want to do this.” Or, “I could think of something better.” And you have to adapt. You have to be able to go along with it. And I refuse to write anything that I don’t want to write because I feel like, “OK, the narrative needs it” or “this is what I planned.” I can’t do that. I need to be able to write something that I feel is what I want to write.

What does your actual writing process look like? Are you a fast writer, are you a slow writer? Do you use parchment under a tree in the backyard, or do you go to a coffee shop? How does it work for you?

No, I siphon the lifeblood of other authors’ dreams, and I distill that into pen and paper.

I should try that.

Well, I’m pretty sure that girl from university, I’m pretty sure she was doing that. No, what I do do is, I am a fast writer. I can do three thousand, four thousand, five thousand words a day. When I was writing Stormblood, that’s the sort of mileage that I was pounding out. I was doing approximately four thousand words a day. Sometimes only a few thousand of those words were good. Sometimes I would write a thousand words and all of them were good. I wish those days happened more frequently than they do.

But no, I do typically go to cafes because I have a studio apartment and I have a lot of things, all my books, all my games here, and a multitude of distractions, either from my dog or my family or anything else that comes along, take me away from my little world. And so, being able to go to a cafe…you know, for some reason being around screaming children and coffee and, you know, waiters and whatever, for that reason, somehow helps me to cope. You know, if I eat, it doesn’t matter what it is. If I’m away from home, I can write more easily than I can when I’m at home. And so, being able to go down to a beachside cafe near where I live and pound out three thousand, four thousand words, I go to the pub, pout out a few words there in the afternoon, it really does help me distill what I need to do. Editing is a little bit more tricky because I’m, as I said, I try to be in control of my craft, and so, being able to be at home and on my big monitor, I think, helps me more specifically. But being able to get out the raw words, nothing gets it out like I do when I’m going out to a cafe or going somewhere public. It really just helps me get those words down. And sometimes that’s just what you need to do, is to make a fiction work.

Yeah, I ask a lot of authors that, obviously, and I personally like to write outside somewhere when I can, hasn’t been a lot of that recently, but one of the things that I have found, and other authors have mentioned this to me, is that they’re fine with the wash of sound from a busy place but if you get a sort of a quieter place, but there’s somebody sitting close to you having a conversation with somebody else, those words can really interfere when they’re writing. At least, I find that. Are you able to just tune all that out in the background no matter what’s going on?

No, I definitely agree. Like, unless everything is so cluttered that it turns into a white noise, no, I can’t. If someone is having a conversation right next to me, it does filter in. I do have a very nice pair of noise-canceling headphones that I make very, very good use of.

That’s when I listen to music. Instrumental music, though, because words in the music are the same problem.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly the same. So I’ve just got this massive playlist of, you know, soundtracks, Hans Zimmer and John Johnson and Brian Eno and all these other great artists and great music soundtracks that really help me distill the sort of thing that I’m trying to write. It’s very, very useful.

You mentioned editing, so what does your revision process look like? Do you write straight through and then edit from start to finish? Do you do a rolling revision as you go? How do you work?

That’s an interesting question because working with an editor is far different than it is working, editing, self-editing your own project. And my editor is Gillian Redfearn at Gollancz. She edits Joe Abercrombie, Richard Morgan, Alastair Rennolds, Joe Hill, a bunch of other fantastic writers. So she very, very much knows her craft. So, the way that we did Stormblood one was that we edited the first half of the book once. Because we did structural changes. And so, she edited the first half of it, I went back, did my editing, made those changes. She looked at it, saw the sort of changes that I had made, and then edited the second half of the book to apply the ripple effects from the first half. So basically, the things that changed in the first half she then helped edit with those changes in mind for the second half.

And so, she basically edited the first half of the book twice, basically. And so, I’ve actually had to keep that in mind when I am writing, doing my editing, I’m thinking, OK, I kind of look at it as a concentric circle. “OK, what’re the big structural things that I’ve got to change? Is it character? Is it worldbuilding? Is it, you know, the big plot revelations.? What are the big things I’m changing?” You know, I’m not preoccupied with small things like one scene or, you know, chopping down an action scene, or at least I shouldn’t be. I’m trying to think of the big things. “OK, do I actually need an action scene here?” Because you can edit your life, your heart out of a scene, and this is actually applicable for something that I just did in book two. I had all these different plot points going on in those one scene that was taking up a lot of time, and it wasn’t getting too much. And so I’d wilt it down and wilt it down and wilt it down and chop it back, chop it back and chop it back, and it came to the point where I realized, “OK, this is getting me absolutely nothing. I’ve got three action scenes in one hundred or so pages. Why don’t I just chop two of those out and just make one big action scene, and that way I can stack on the tension instead of being a stop-start, stop-start sort of approach.” And being able to do that, being able to look at the whole thing in my head and being able to see, “OK, this is what I need, this is what I don’t need,” helps a lot as opposed to going in and picking up minute details, because I’ll do that forever. Honestly, my editors need to pry the final book away from my cold hands because I’m just, “Wait, no, no, no, there’s one word, I’m not sure to call it a spacecraft or ship. I’m not sure to call it a warp drive or hyperspace. Just let me change it, one thing.”

And so being able to look at the big picture really does help. I mean, to be able to say, “OK, I’m not going to be too preoccupied in this line of dialogue from this character. I’m going to be preoccupied with, is this what I want the background to be? Is this what I want their approach to these, is what I want their arc to be. And that really helps, being able to look at the big picture and hold the big thing in my head. It’s a great help. And being able to do that helps me, you know, really self-interrogate, I guess, the sort of book that I’m trying to write. And even if it’s a waste of time, even if you’re like,”OK, I’ve spent a whole day looking at this character. Yes. I’m happy with the way…I don’t want to change it.” That reaffirms in your mind. “Yes, I’ve made the right decision. This is what I want. And that can be a really good thing.”

You mentioned in your acknowledgments quite a few beta readers. Where do they come into the process?

They came in by telling me, not what I wanted to hear, but what I needed to hear. And yeah, they…one of the best comments I got was from a writer called Gemma Anderson, or she writes under G.V. Anderson, and she said to me, and she’s a writer on her own, she’s won a World Fantasy Award, she’s brilliant. And she said to me, “Your characters, these two main characters, they always clash professionally. They never clash personally. What they argue about is always about the job. It’s never about each other or about each other’s attitudes.” And so, that really helped me separate that when I’m writing characters. OK, are these people just arguing because of a small office problem, or are they arguing because of a big character flaw? And that really helped me shift, I guess, from plot to character, and I always try to get my books as character-driven as I can, And so that really, really helped. And so basically they all did help, you know, help me, you know, understand, come to an understanding of what works, what doesn’t work. And beta readers are always going to disagree. They’re always going to give you conflicting information, which is absolutely fine. But being able to hear from a bunch of people, “OK, this is the sort of thing I like. This is the sort of thing that I think works well,” I think that is more helpful than simply, “OK, well, I didn’t like this, or this isn’t working.” Being able to see, “OK, what’s ticking people’s boxes,” I think that’s a really good way to find out what’s working in your book.

How did you find your beta readers?

Well, I knew a few of them, from Starship Sofa partially, from a few other things, but I did, I emailed a few of them or told a few people, “Hey, I would like to do a beta reader swap,” and I read some of their books and they read mine and, yeah, they just, that’s basically how it happened. There’s no lottery, alas, there were not people clamoring to read my scribblings, it was just me reaching out to some people that I knew and asking them, “Hey, want to read my book?” And not all of them ran away screaming for the hills. So they’re the ones that didn’t run away screaming for the hills.

So the book came out in June. It’s your first novel. What was the experience like for you to get that first book and see it in print?

Oh, exhilarating. I mean, it was probably the worst time in the world to be having a debut novel.

Not great.

Yeah, well, you know, COVID, but case in point, the hardback got canceled for my book, but the reason it got cancelled is because Goldsborough Books, a very, very nice independent seller in London who collects first-edition, signed hardbacks and gives them sprayed edges, so they’ve got everything, they’ve got a signed edition of Catch-22, they’ve got all the signed editions of all the James Bonds, every major author pretty much gets, you know, a hardcover signed with them. Like, you know, I think I’ve got a very nice hardcover from Joe Abercrombie, and some of them are still going up for, like, five thousand, ten thousand pounds, for a first edition. Anyway, so, I got 250 copies from them, they decided to take 250 hardbacks, and I got a very nice, gold-sprayed edges. And so, they sold out within a week, 250 copies sold out in hardback, the week before the book had even come out officially, and according to my agent, that’s incredibly rare to happen for science fiction, although that happens all the time for fantasy, but less so for science fiction, apparently. But that was quite a shock to realize, “OK, wow, there is actually an audience,” because it’s impossible to gauge how many people actually know about your book, how many people actually know what people are interested in. And so, that was quite a bit of a shock

But nothing, I think, compares to being able to get that package and being able to open it up and see, you know, your name on the cover and all your words written in these pages. It was exhilarating. But being able to go out and see, go to the bookstore and actually see it in the wild, see it ready for purchase and see people walking past it, that is another thing entirely and being able to see who your neighbors are as well as quite interesting. My actual neighbors, I have pretty good neighbors in my name. I’ve got John Scalzi, Neal Stephenson, Tade Thompson, and Adrian Tchaikovsky and some little known hack called Tolkien. I imagine he’ll be quite big someday. That is more or less my neighbors, depending on what’s in the bookstore. But, yes, that’s quite fun.

As somebody with a last name of W, I tend to be on the very bottom shelf, which is always annoying, but I’m down there with Ted Williams. So that can’t hurt.

No, no, no, definitely not. But yeah, it is quite fun to be able to go there and say, “OK, it’s actually a real thing now,” because the way the industry works is you don’t actually know if anything is going to go pear-shaped at any time, but being able to see, it’s in the wild, it’s a real thing, it’s in people’s homes, people can buy it and read it. It feels real, feels done, like, this is a book that’s part of science fiction canon. And we’re all readers, and so to be able to know that you’ve contributed to that canon, you’ve actually contributed to literature, is quite amazing.

Well, that kind of segues nicely into my other reverb question, the big philosophical questions, which is really, why? Why? Why do you do this? And also, you know, this podcast is called The Worldshapers, and I often say that, you know, it’s a lot asking any fiction to actually shape the world, I think very little fiction has had a huge impact on the world as a whole. But you’re shaping readers in some fashion with your fiction. So, why do you write, and what do you hope your writing, what impact your writing will have on readers?

I write so the lambs stop screaming. No, no, no. I write because I enjoy it. I do actually enjoy the process of getting those words down. I enjoy being able to create something that didn’t exist and being able to transplant that idea of, something that prior to me sitting down and putting words to it, didn’t exist. It wasn’t a thing. And being able to have it be concrete and being able to put that in other people’s heads, is something that I quite enjoy, and being able to impact people is even better. But to answer your question, I’m getting a lot of people, quite a lot of people saying to me how much, how touched they were by the portrayal of brotherhood in my book, and how much they, you know, really felt for the main character and his feelings and how heartbreaking that relationship, that deteriorating relationship was with his brother and how heartwarming it was to see him gaining that relationship with his fellow soldiers and his friends and being able to see it slowly built up.

And that’s something that’s quite special to me, because in a lot of fiction, especially between men, I think there’s a lot of…it’s very rarely platonic, it always seems to be sexualized, and a lot of fiction as well, even between men and women, automatically, it seems to be sexualized or automatically seems to be building up to a romance. And my point–and that’s great, you know, and there’s definitely romance in my book, but I do come from a perspective of friendship, of brotherhood, of, you know, really doing what you can for your friends, no matter how much it hurts, and being able to see that it worked, that I actually…that’s something that appeals to me very much, of being able to see that my stab at it, that my attempt of portraying brotherhood and showing the heartbreakingess of it and showing the highs and lows and the benefits and being slowly built up and what it means to people and how, you know, guilt influences people and how people try to get redemption and go out of the way for forgiveness, just so the people that matters to them, that they can build that relationship back. You know, that’s a very messy and sticky, you know, sort of topic, and being able to see so many people have reached out to me saying how much this meant to them, is…it’s great. I mean, that’s all I could want. I mean, I could have people tell me the worldbuilding is good, the plot is interesting, I didn’t see this coming, but really, at the end of the day, if I can, if some people say to me, “These two characters, the emotions that they were feeling, I felt them, and it touched me.” You know, that’s all I can want.

And we are getting close to the end here, so what are you working on now? Obviously, book two and book three in the trilogy.

Yeah, book two and book three. Book two is done in the sense that the words are on the page. Not all of them are in the right order yet, but I am working on that. And I’ve just been talking about it with my editor. I’ve been slowly outlining what I’m going to do in book three, which is a little bit scary. I mean, when I first got the deal, way back in, like, 2018, when we could still go outside, I never, it didn’t cross my mind that I’d be writing a trilogy, because I try to just write my books as a singular product. So, now that I actually I’m sitting down thinking, “OK, I’m going to do that in book three, I’m going to have that plot thing happen in book three,” it’s quite a different feeling, I think. And so, that’s what I’m kind of doing now, really sitting down and distilling that, you know. But it is a slow process, it is happening slowly, but it’s keeping me out of trouble. So, that’s always good.

And have you thought beyond this trilogy to what might come next?

No. No, I’m not allowing myself to do that, I’m just working on this now, I mean, I have ideas, of course, I’ve got plenty of ideas. Not all of them are worth, most of them aren’t worth the page they printed on, and since mine are in the computer that’s absolutely none at all. But I am, of course, you know, always having things churning on back in the mental percolator, but not at the moment. I’m just really focusing on making these the best books that I can. I mean, even if I never get to write another trilogy, I just want to make sure that these count. So this is where all my attention is going.

And where can people find you online?

They can find me on JeremySzal.com, or on Twitter @JeremySzal, or on Facebook, or on GoodReads, all the usual places.

And Szal is S, Zed, A, L. Do you say zed in Australia like we do in Canada?

We say zed, yeah, not zee, not like Americans, you know, we are from English descent.

S, Zed, A, L. Well, thanks so much for being on The Worldshapers. I had a great time talking to you. I hope you enjoyed it.

All right, thank you very much, and thank you very much for checking out Stormblood as well. I really do appreciate it.

Well, I’m looking forward to finishing it. I found the writing really driving me forward and very rich and very descriptive and great characterization and all the stuff I like. And I’m a big fan of space opera. In fact, one of my proposals to DAW right now is for a space opera. So, yeah, so I’m looking forward to finishing it and then carrying on and reading the rest of the trilogy as it comes up.

All right. Thank you very much.

Bye for now. 

Bye for now. Thank you.

Episode 29: Christopher Ruocchio

An hour-long conversation with Christopher Ruocchio, author of the The Sun Eater, a space-opera fantasy series from DAW books (published by Gollancz in the UK), which began with Empire of Silence in 2018 and continues with Howling Dark in 2019, and assistant editor at Baen Books, where he co-edited the military SF anthology Star Destroyers, as well as Space Pioneers, a collection of Golden Age reprints.

Website
www.sollanempire.com

Twitter
@TheRuocchio

Facebook
@TheRuocchio

Christopher Ruocchio’s Amazon Page

The Introduction

Christopher Ruocchio is the author of The Sun Eater, a space-opera fantasy series from DAW books, as well as the assistant editor at Baen Books, where he co-edited the military SF anthology Star Destroyers, as well as Space Pioneers, a collection of Golden Age reprints showcasing tales of human exploration. He’s a graduate of North Carolina State University where, in his words, “a penchant for self-destructive decision-making” caused him to pursue a Bachelor’s in English Rhetoric, with a minor in Classics.

An avid student of history, philosophy, and religion, Christopher has been writing since he was eight years old, and sold his first book, Empire of Silence at twenty-two. The Sun Eater series is available from Golancz in the UK and has been translated into French and German.

Christopher lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he spends most of his time hunched over a keyboard writing. When not writing, he splits his time between his family, procrastinating with video games, and his friend’s boxing gym.

The (Lightly Edited) Transcript

 Welcome to The Worldshapers, Christopher.

Well, thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

We met…we’re both DAW authors, a you know, conflict of interest and all that, get that right there, and we actually met at San Jose last year at WorldCon at the DAW dinner. I think was when I first met you.

I think so.

And then you very kindly showed me around the…well, Dealer’s Room doesn’t quite cover it at DragonCon…

A shopping mall.

Yeah…when I was down there last year, so I appreciated that as well. So it’s great to have you on. And I have to confess I have not finished Empire of Silence, but I…

Neither has my fiancée, so I can’t throw stones at anybody.

But I’m well into it, so when I get you to do a synopsis in a little bit, and I say, “no spoilers,” that will be for me as much as for the listeners.

I’ll do my best.

So, I always like to start these things off by going into… I always say either the mists of time or the depths of time…into the past, to find out how you got interested, first of all, in science fiction and fantasy, and how you started writing it, You started early, apparently, at eight years old.

Oh yeah. Yeah. I think it was my dad’s fault mostly, because when I was really small we were a Disney family, and most Disney movies are…I don’t want to say are for girls, but they’re about princesses, and when you’re a three-year-old boy it’s harder to get into those necessarily, although I was I was very fond of, especially, Sleeping Beauty because there was a dragon and a sword fight…

Me, too.

But then I think I watched Star Wars for the first time when I was four or five, and then immediately after we got through watching the first three movies, you know, a week later and then two weeks later, because they’d spaced it out, I think I watched the original trilogy on loop. Because I wasn’t allowed to watch very much. I was allowed TV Land, the Batman cartoon from the ‘90s, with Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill, and then the Star Wars trilogy. And so, I watched those original movies obsessively, and I read a bunch of the books, and of course The Phantom Menace came out, and I was just young enough to think The Phantom Menace was awesome. And it’s, you know, actually, it’s fine. It’s Attack Of The Clones that’s bad.

But I went from that through to reading a bunch of Star Wars books. I think the first book I ever bought was the first Tim Zahn Thrawn novel. But then I found Tolkien, and Harry Potter, of course, came in. I hit…actually before Harry Potter was popular. I read it when I was like five, because I read very early, maybe even younger than that. I’d have to check with my mother. And so, all this was happening at once, and then I hit Lord Of The Rings right when the movies were starting to come out, around 2000. I tried watching the Bakshi version, and it terrified me, and I gave up. And I tried reading the books instead but struggled with those a bit more than the Star Wars books and Harry Potter.

And so, I started writing because my friends, you know, would play make believe on the playground, right? And they were playing Dragon Ball Z, which I of course had no idea what that was, because I was not allowed to watch it. And so, when I was asked,” Hey do you want to play Dragon Ball Z?” I said, “Yes! But can I be Batman? And after two weeks of careful deliberation, the other five-year-olds agreed that, yes. And so, over the years going through grade school up to about third grade, we would play make-believe, right, on the playground, and we spun out and made our own characters. So, Batman eventually got a lightsaber, and…you know all these other…he went to wizard school, I think, and became…he was very accomplished.

I think that would improve Batman.

You know, I like Batman a lot, so I hesitate to say that, but I would definitely read that.

At least with a lightsaber.

The light saber, yes…he needs one. Everyone needs one, really. But I…so I started writing down these adventures we had on the playground, and then as my friends grew up and discovered football and social skills, I sat on the edge of the parking lot with a notebook and would keep making stuff up. And, of course, once I made it to fourth grade, third-grade me didn’t know what he was talking about, and I would throw everything out and start again and again and again and again and again, until I finished a novel, I think in eighth grade, of which one copy remains printed and it is in someone’s lockbox somewhere, I don’t remember. And it is terrible, and I…I kept doing this through high school and college, mostly because, you know, Christopher Paolini got lot of flak, you know. But he wrote that book at fifteen, and he was another Christopher, and an Italian one, at that, and I was…you know, “By God, if he can do it, I can do it, too,” and…I actually got to meet him at DragonCon, when I met you, and thank him for that, because I…you know, it’s one of those things I always thought that you needed to be like forty to do when I was little and he sort of proved that wrong. And so, I kept doing this until I eventually had something worth reading.

Did you share that early writing with your friends and see how…you know, that you could tell stories that they enjoyed?

Oh, sure. That…I had…I have a few friends, actually…before we started the talk officially I mentioned my two roommates. My two roommates…I’m just moving out now, actually, into my first house, but my roommates are two friends I’ve been friends with…since third grade, I think…and them and a couple others I would…we would always pass things back and forth. We used to play, you know, like, not exactly Dungeons and Dragons but some like off-brand RPGs and stuff together, a lot of, like, Internet forum RPGs? So we would do a lot of co-writing and stuff. And I was always working on this side thing, and when I would finish, it’d be like, “Guys, look at this!”, and then hand it out. A couple of them have stuck with me and keep giving me feedback. I think one of them has that one copy that I referred to, ’cause he was always fond of this stupid story I’d written in middle school, so I gave him the last print copy I had, because God only knows what happened to the Word documents.

I always ask that because a lot of us started writing young. I wrote novels in high school and started well before that, and I talked to some writers who, you know, there’s no way they were gonna show that stuff to their friends, and yet, I always did. So I always ask people that. And I think it helps, because you get that sort of, “Oh, I could tell stories that people really enjoy,” so, you know, it’s a kind of a positive-feedback thing.

I still do…I have a couple of them. I have a little Facebook group discussion and I send them updated files of…I’m working on the third book in The Sun Eater now and so every four or five chapters I will send them another update and then wait until one of them tells me how it is. Because you don’t know, right? You don’t know if what you’re doing is really good until you get someone else’s eyes on it. It’s sort of like Schrödinger’s Cat. And it helps to have either some validation or some course correction.

Well, somewhere along the way I lost all that. So now nobody sees it until it goes to Sheila at DAW. That’s another thing I ask, and we’ll talk about that a little bit later on with your writing process, you know, whether you have people that help you out at that initial stage or not, giving you feedback. But we’ll talk about that a little bit…so, from, you grew up, then, in North Carolina, I presume, where you still live.

Oh yeah. Born and raised. I am the proverbial medieval peasant. I haven’t moved more than ten miles from where I was born.

And so, this was interesting, that you decided to get a Bachelor’s in English Rhetoric with a minor in Classics. I didn’t even know there was a degree called English Rhetoric. What does that involve?

So NC State was weird, right? It’s sort of…North Carolina, Raleigh in particular, has got a bunch of colleges right around. We’ve got the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, which is a pretty famous liberal-arts school, oldest public university in the US, and we’ve got Duke, which has sort of like a semi-Ivy League reputation, but NC state was founded as an agricultural school just after the Civil War. So it’s got more of a…it has a reputation for being kind of the, like, farm school, right? But now it’s one of the best engineering universities in the state, and, I think, even in the world. But I went for an English degree because they had this internship program for English students that had a 100-percent job-placement rate and I am, if nothing else, a practical man. So, I thought that would be better than a slightly more reputable name on my diploma. And it was a great program at any rate, just a less-famous one.

So, I went, and they do this thing where they split their English degrees into what they called focuses, so I could take a focus in literature or rhetoric or film, and the rhetoric one was the technical-writing one, really. So, there was a lot of tech-writing classes, that sort of thing, but also just journalism classes, you know, just making sure you could write, you know, nonfiction articles, that sort of thing. Make sure your grammar is correct.

Hilariously, I had this very bad graduate-level rhetoric class right at the end that taught no rhetoric, I think because the professor felt left out that when the scientists got particle accelerators and lasers the English department didn’t get any toys. So, we spent a lot of time talking about the “rhetoric of physical spaces” and how…and that’s not rhetoric. And I got in a lot of trouble for repeatedly informing her that this was not rhetoric, because I had the classics background, too, which I backed into because I didn’t want to take a world-literature course because I’m less interested in them, shall we say, than in the things that I grew up with., because that’s just who I am as a person. And I didn’t want to take a language class where I had to stand and do oral conversation components to my exams because I am bad at learning languages.

Unlike your character.

Yeah. So people who say that he’s just a self-insert are wrong. I can’t do it. And so I was taking three years of high-school Japanese and by the end it was, you know, (something in Japanese), and I’d be like, “Um…um…good morning.” I’m not that bad, but I was just embarrassed, and so I took Latin. And between the taking Latin and…I took for my world literature course. I did ancient literature, so we did a bunch of Greek and Roman stuff, but we also did some middle-Eastern stuff. The Enûma Eliš and the Epic of Gilgamesh, these things, and some early Far East stuff as well, which is also fascinating, so when I say, “world literature,” I mean contemporary stuff, because I just don’t think a lot of contemporary lit-fic is very good. I know that…it just doesn’t interest me, so…the old stuff, yes, by all means. And so, I backed into it because of my interest in ancient history and the classical period in the Near East and whatnot, and through  the Latin.

The rhetoric major still interests me. It doesn’t sound like it was what anybody would consider a creative writing class. It’s more like  just technically creating clear sentences and paragraphs and organizing your thoughts and all that kind of thing.

Yes. So, I had a bunch of classes that actually were your sort of traditional…the sort of rhetoric classes that Shakespeare was forced to do, right, where it’s like, “OK, give us, you know, write ten examples of tricolon, as like a, you know, overnight assignment,” right, things like that. And so I actually have…I won’t say something like an ancient education where you would be drilled constantly on how to speak and how to hold your hands to present a statement before the Roman Senate, right, because there were hand positions in these things, but I at least had something sort of winking in that direction, where it was, you know, “Be aware that if you phrase things in this way, if you employ devices like hendiadys or stichomythia, you know, these things that sound like Greek incantations, that you can have an effect on an audience in a certain way.” And I did a lot of Elizabethan theater classes, as well, and a lot of that was still used by people like Shakespeare and Marlowe, and the rest, in writing those plays, because they’re very…the play is a very oral medium, right, it’s meant to be heard, it’s meant to be spoken, and I think the best prose should be the same way. And so, the rhetoric stuff ended up being really useful, I think, from a creative-writing standpoint, because I’m a big audiobook person, and so I’ve been very much affected by the sound of the language. And so, those classes were all great except for that last one, which was like, “We’re going to talk about rhetoric in paintings,” to which I said, “Shouldn’t be a design class, three buildings down?”.

How to win friends and influence professors, maybe not.

No. It was my last semester and I was grumpy, let’s say.

So, with Empire of Silenceselling when you were twenty-two, clearly you were working on this while you were at university. Is that when this began?

Yeah. The book that became this one…people ask when I started writing. I’ve always been writing, air-quotes, “the same book,” but when I started writing it at seven, eight years old, you know, it was about Batman, and it’s not about Batman at all anymore, really, although Hadrian does wear a lot of black still, that hasn’t changed. But so do I, and I don’t know if that’s a chicken or egg thing.

And so, I started this one in my freshman, sophomore year of college, really, and it was quite different still. Hadrian wasn’t quite human in the original draft. There were some near-human aliens because I also played a lot of Japanese RPG games and there are a lot of aliens that are almost human…anyway, it changed dramatically. And as I got into my final year, I had the great fortune of having John Kessel for a professor. He’s a Nebula Award-winning short-story writer, he’s got a couple of novels out from Saga, and he is an all-around just great guy, and he gave me some advice on querying, and of course I’d started my internship at Baen, so I actually had access to a SFWA directory, which has all the agencies in the back, so, I photocopied that and started going through, querying people, with John’s advice on the letter writing. There was this awful frame narrative that was in the book at the time that he convinced me to cut out. And lo and behold the minute I did that, I started getting answers to my queries that weren’t, “Go away.” And I sold…rather, I got an agent a month before I graduated and then…so that was November because I graduated a semester off schedule, I had an extra, I was late, which is part of why I was so cross with my rhetoric professor, I just really wanted to be out. And so, I had about a month over the holidays because, you know, people aren’t working in December really, and then come January I got my job at Baen on Monday, and then that Thursday I got a call from Sarah Guan, who used to work at DAW, she’s with Orbit now, she loved the book and wanted to buy it. And so, I had about the best week of my life up until I proposed to my fiancée. So that was a good time.

Well, you said this book kind of grew out of all the stories that you’d been writing all along, but was there some initial seed or image? How does that work for you when it comes to a story? How do stories come to you, or begin?

I can’t remember where this one really came from. There’s no, you know, Robert Howard talking about Conan just appearing or J.K. Rowling having the same sort of conversation about Harry Potter just sort of appearing to her on the train, because it’s been so long. Hadrian and I…although Hadrian’s had like thirteen, fourteen different names, he’s been with me in some form or other since I was a kid so, I don’t…a couple of people have noted similarities between our personalities. You know, just…this is a common thing with authors, right? Like, I’ve seen people say the same thing about Pat Rothfuss and Kvothe, that they have some similar personality traits, things like that…but I don’t know which one’s me, which one’s him, because I’ve been writing this character in some form since I was a small kid. So, like, I was talking about the black clothes. Like, I wear black pretty much all the time and so does Haddrian, it’s his family color, and I don’t know if I’m wearing black because I’m sort of low-key cosplaying my own work or if my work is borrowing from my own fashion choices.

I thought I was a Johnny Cash influence.

You know, my dad makes that joke and I’m happy to accept it because Johnny Cash is the man.

I wrote a biography of him, a children’s biography of him. So…it was kind of cool.

Did you really? I’ll have to go track that one down. I’m a big fan. I’m not usually a country guy but Cash is excellent.

So, I don’t really know. There are some other stories that I will, that I’m working on that I have some ideas for. They’re just coming to me randomly. I don’t try to go looking for them. I’m not a very stringent researcher. If it’s something completely new, if it’s something I want to be devoting a lot of time to, they’ll just sort of pop up eventually, usually because I’ll be reading or watching something and I’ll like it, I’m like, “This is cool! But…” And then something will sort of spin out of an objection or a critique of something else. And I’ll want to do something from that. I’m a very argumentative person, to my detriment, as my educational history made brief reference to.

Well, if we’re going to talk about the Sun Eaterseries, perhaps you could give a spoiler-free synopsis of the first book for those who either have not read it or, like me, have not yet finished reading it.

All right. Well, what I usually do, because I go to a lot of conventions and I do a lot of floor selling with my friend Alexi Vandenberg of Bard’s Tower, is, I tell people that my main character, Hadrian, is sort of an Anakin Skywalker, but less whiney, if becoming Darth Vader were the right thing for him to do. The story is set about 20,000 years in our future in this big galactic empire. Hadrian is a nobleman, the son of a fairly minor but high-status house, that runs away from home, and he finds himself stuck in the middle of this war between humanity and the Cielcins, this alien menace, who are the first species of technologically advanced aliens in all that 20,000-year history who have ever stood up to humankind, who have ever rivaled us for control of the galaxy. Hadrian tells you on page one that he is the man who ended that war and killed all of the Cielcin, and the story is a memoir of why and how.

Yeah, talk about a spoiler on the first page.

Yeah, I…yeah. I don’t…I’ve always taken umbrage with spoiler culture. I think that if your story has to hang together on surprise, then maybe it’s not the best story. People have started to realize this about, say, M. Night Shyamalan, after The Sixth Sense. You know, his other movies have all hung on some twists that more or less haven’t delivered and I, you know, I don’t go out of my way to ruin things, but I think that if we can take the what-if, or what might happen, off the table, and instead talk about why and how, and the details, obviously, ‘case I’m not giving away the whole ending on page one, that we can ask some more interesting questions and have a different kind of story.

I suppose there’s no particular reason…I don’t think it even works very well to try to do an entire novel version of an O. Henry short story where everything depends on a sudden twist on the last page. I don’t think readers would actually like that.

No, no. And I’m not saying that every, you know, plot twist is like that, either. I just…I think…like, I’ve gotten a lot of people who complained that these memoir-style books take a lot of the tension out of the plot, and maybe that’s true for them. But I am one of those people who always looks at Wikipedia summaries of things because I like to know. I’m more interested in the journey than the destination and seeing how things get carried off and why, and what’s layered in there. And for those people who think that this story is something that I’ve given away completely at the beginning, that presupposes that all there is to this story is this one action that I tell you about on page one, which I think would be a mistake.

Well, I was gonna say that when it comes to memoirs it’s not like, if we were reading a memoir of a famous person…we know what he did, or she did, and yet we are still interested to find out how that all came about from the internal perspective of the person who did that thing. So, that should apply just as well. If I were…we’re currently reading, of all things, I’m reading out loud Boswell’s Life of Johnsonto my wife. We still have forty-four hours to go according to the Kindle.

Oh, my gosh.

And yet, you know, it’s still interesting even though, you know, well, he did the dictionary and he did all this, and then he died, you know. And yet it’s still interesting, even though you know how it ends. And it’s not like, you know, Romeo and Julietis any less powerful because you know when you go into it how it’s going to end. In some way it’s going along the journey along the way that makes it interesting.

Right. And there’d be no point to read classical literature anyway, right? Like, take The Count of Monte Cristo, right? Like, everybody knows it’s about a guy who goes to prison unjustly and gets revenge. And now, that he gets revenge, which is usually how the book sold to anybody when you’re trying to get them to read it, presupposes his success. But the details, right, you know, and how and why and the catharsis of those moments, right? That’s why you read the thing, you don’t read it to figure out what happens.

Did I interrupt you in the synopsis of the book?

Oh no. No, no, no. That was pretty much all I wanted to say, because I don’t want to say the things in the middle, right? There are, you know, without putting anything together, there are gladiator fights and there is court intrigue and there are aliens and friendships lost and found and all of these things.

Well, that brings me around to the next question, which is, so far you’ve mostly talked about your character, but there’s an awful lot of worldbuilding going on in here and a detailed and complicated plot. What does your planning process look like? Do you outline in great detail, do you wing it, and then…how does it work for you?

So, I winged the first book because I didn’t have a deadline. I had years and years to figure it out. And so, most of it ended up gelling in my head over time as I was rewriting things and changing things. You know, “What if I did this instead?” I had to rewrite this one very quickly because my first editor, when she bought it, it was about half as long. She said, “I love it. It’s great. I read it in one shot overnight, but I have these two problems,” and I looked at the problems and they were, without getting into too much detail, they were really fundamental worldbuilding problems, and it was the sort of thing that the only way I could fix them and be sure I fixed them and it wasn’t sloppy was to rewrite the whole thing. And so, I locked myself in my room, basically, for three months. I think it took me 108 days, because I kept a spreadsheet of my progress because this encourages me. Or discourages me, at least, when I fail to write enough on one day and my spreadsheet looks bad. And I would go to work, and then I would come home, and I worked…I think I slept only, like, four hours a night for most of that period. It was not good. But I shot through the whole thing all at once, and because I had just written it, right, it was all still very crystal.

But for the second book…I’ve become pretty friendly with David Drake, working at Baen, and Dave writes these enormous outlines, you know, you can…they’re basically like fifty or sixty pages for everything he does. And Dave ticks through and writes them…he writes his books…we, you know, we can almost plan our schedule around Dave. He’s like clockwork. It’s amazing. And so, he’ll turn in a book, we’ll know how long it is, we’ll know when we’re getting it, we know how early we’re getting it, we know how clean it will be. He’s so consistent. He’s just a real pro. And he does it because of these, I think because of these, amazing outlines, and so when I wrote book two, Howling Dark, I thought, “I’m going to be like Dave Drake.” Bold, bold statement, I know, but we have the Rome thing in common, so I thought I was I was off to a good start.

So, I started this big outline, and I wrote it and then, having written it, I realized that I knew basically everything that was in it. So when I would start a chapter I would look again at the page or so I’d written for the chapter, refresh myself with it, and then not look at it again. And for book three I did kind of the same thing. Because this story starts with at least intimations of its ending. I had kind of both ends of this plot string nailed to the table and I’ve been trying to untie the knot ever since. Which is kind of hard to do. So, I’ve been clipping at it and moving things around, so when I start outlining, I will put a bunch of scenes I know need to be in the book down on sticky notes. I had this big door on my closet that was just flat, right, so I used it kind of like a like a chalkboard, and I would stick these things to it and this sort of cloud of notes would turn steadily into a column marching straight up and down the middle of the door as I knew which scene/chapter was gonna be where and what would happen. And I turned that big string of post-it notes into a sixty-page David Drake outline. And I’ve done that for the last two books. And in doing that, I haven’t taken, you know, fifteen years to write it. I did book two in about nine months and book three is going to take about six all told. So I’m getting this down to a science, I think. I hope, rather.

What length are they? I’m reading it in Kindle, I don’t know how thick it is.

Oh gosh. Empire was 238,000 words. Howling Dark was 260, and I think this one’s going to be a little bit longer than that, the third one.

They are substantial.

Yeah, I try to write about 2,000 a day, when I am not moving house (I’m moving right now, I think I said), I can do two to three pretty reliably. At least, now that I have a due date and the fear of God is in me.

Sixty pages is pretty impressive from my point of view—my synopses are more like twenty, twelve to twenty, fifteen to twenty, more or less. But you don’t win the medal for people I’ve talked to on The Worldshapers. Peter V. Brett does a 150-page outline.

Yeah, I have no ambitions of trying to take that title from him.

He’s certainly…and there’s also, you know…I guess it was Kendare Blake I talked to, whose episode just came out before this interview with you, and she basically wings everything. So it’s always interesting to hear the different approaches that people take.

You mentioned Rome, and clearly that’s a lot of influence in there, in the book. So, going back to the worldbuilding side of things, it seems like you were drawing very much on your interest and study of history and philosophy and religion, all that seems to really find its way into the story.

Yes. So I thought, when I was writing it, that it was mostly Greek and Byzantine. I was wrong, but that was what I had in my head. And I think…I had thought that a lot of the Roman influence was because I post a lot of very stupid jokes just, you know, meme images, that are about the Roman Empire and Roman history generally, because I think they’re funny and I think maybe two people I’m friends with get them all, but I share them anyway. And so, I think this impression that I had been primarily a Roman scholar sort of emerged from my stupid Facebook use, and I’ve sort of steered into the skid a little bit, because most of what I’d read was, of course, Greek, because there’s more of it, at least, dramatic literature, right, and most of it the Romans appropriated in one form or other, sometimes improved, depending on who you ask.

And because, also, I was raised and am Roman Catholic, I went to a Catholic school up through high school, up to the beginning of high school. And so, I grew up with a lot of classical history because it’s so integral to the genesis of the religion. So we talk about Egypt and Israel and the Near East generally, and then moving through to the Greeks and…the Seleucids, the Macedonians, you know, and Rome later, and the Byzantines afterwards. And, of course, much of early medieval history, which is steeped in a lot of classical philosophy. Aristotle’s influence cannot be overstated. And my best friend is an Aristotelian scholar at, he’s finishing his Ph.D. at Princeton. So, I have him check a lot of my work and give me ideas, things I wouldn’t have read because I was mostly interested in the myth and the drama, and he had the philosophy. So he helps me out a lot.

And so, a lot of it really comes from, I think, that religious background, just because, you know, you can’t escape Rome’s shadow as a Catholic, certainly. Both the Empire and the city and the church after. And a lot of that left its stamp, but I think as far as my reputation for it goes, it’s probably mostly just those stupid jokes.

You never know what you put on line is going to follow you down…

No, and you never know what thing is going to be the useful detail in your world building, right? You know, I might have only read I think a few pages of philosophers like Epictetus, right, like I…of course. your readers will think you’ve read all of it. Don’t tell anyone. But you know, you might find a line or two and that’s all you need. You know, the fiction writer’s world-building game, I think, ought to be consequensive of a pretty light touch. You know, I talked to Lois Bujold, because I did a brief stint doing the other side of the interview thing here when I did the Baen podcast for a couple of months, and I asked Lois Bujold about worldbuilding, and she told me she won’t make up anything until she needs it. And once I heard her say that, I was like, “All right, I’m not going to spend hours filling notebooks with information anymore. I will make up details as I need it and then try to stick to the rules that I have established.”

Well, I’m a stage actor and playwright and director and a lot of this bears in common with doing something on stage: you only put on there what you need to suggest the reality and the viewer, in that case, the audience member, fills in everything from that. You know, that one flat with a view over the Roman hills in the background or whatever. It’s really just a light little touch, a little detail, and yet it suggests a depth and richness that in many ways the audience actually provides.

It’s amazing how little the audience really needs in order to generate a picture, right? Like, Shakespeare…Elizabethan theatre didn’t use set design at all, right? They might, they had the balcony above the stage, but there were no  tables and chairs. It was all done by costume. You had your props and what not. You know, I think it’s Measure for Measure when they say, “Exit pursued by a bear.” There was a bear-baiting pit across the street from the Globe, so I’m sure there was a real bear, but they weren’t building, you know, castle displays and these things. That’s why, at the beginning of Henry V, the chorus comes out and says, you know, “Imagine that this dome, you know, contains the varsity fields of France,” and so, you know, just a light suggestion, just an off phrase is going to generate crazy ideas in people. I remember as a kid looking at maps of Middle Earth and looking at places Tolkien doesn’t even talk about, right, like a ruin barely comes up, and thinking, “Well, I want to I want to go there,” right? That’s all it takes is literally just one name on a map and the audience is running with. And they think that you have it all planned out, and you don’t have to.

We have talked about a little bit about your actual writing process: 2,000 words a day on a good day, 2,000 to 3,000 words. You are very…it sounds that you’re very organized, like, “I sit down, and I work when it’s time for me to work.” Is that pretty much the way you work?

Yeah. Well, especially now. They give me a deadline, and it was a month sooner than I had anticipated for book three. So what I do, I wake up at about 6 a.m., I eat breakfast, and then I will write until I have to go to work just before 9, and then I will go to the office and work 9 to 5, like a good soldier, and then I will come home, make dinner, and then I will work until I hit that word count. And I try to hit, at the very least, a thousand words in a day. These days, I’m trying to bottom out at 1,500, just because I want to get it to Katie on time, and if I can do it early, because they know the deadline surprised me and wrong-footed me, then I will look really cool. And I am trying to look as cool as possible so…fortunately I had that deadline.

You’ve mentioned, also, you know, that you have these friends that you still get some feedback from. Especially when you’re working to a deadline like this, do you actually even have time to show this to anybody before you’re gonna have it done and then hand it in?

They might not…their feedback at the very end might not be that useful, but I try to get it to them in stages, you know, so they might read three chapters at a time and just sort of follow behind me. I very briefly had a stint in the noughts as a middle schooler writing fan fiction and reading it. I sort of fell out on it because I realized that I would do better writing my own stuff. I know I could make money doing that, I can’t make money writing Legend of Zelda stories. But, you know, they would update a chapter at a time every couple of weeks, right? And it was exciting. Same with comic books, right? You know, I’m  a big fan of Berserk, the Japanese series, and that might get a chapter every, like, three months or something, and waiting for that little update’s really exciting. And so, my friends who came out of the same space as me no objections to getting these things in dribs and drabs and getting back to me. I have a couple who were faster than others, and some people might not answer, but that’s the virtue of having about five or six. I’ve got a couple who will read pretty reliably.

My friend the philosophy guy usually spot checks things for me. I’ll have specific questions for him or a couple of other people. My…I mentioned my friend’s boxing gym in my bio. My friend Wes runs a gym here in Raleigh. He trains boxers to actually fight, because most boxing gyms are actually aerobics studios. Not to put that down, but they’ll just stand in lines and they’ll just do drills, and their technique is not actually competitive at all. So, Wes trains people to fight, and he also does fencing and HEMA (Historic European Martial Arts) and he used to teach summer camps where he would teach kids like medieval military tactics and have them in lines with spears and stuff, it was very cool. And so I’ll have him check a lot of my action scenes, things like that.

I was gonna ask, what specific kind of feedback are you getting from people? I guess that’s one of them. Action scenes, and specific questions you have for your philosophy friend…philosophical friend?

Yeah, yeah. Marcus. He’s actually, he is who Gibson—if you’ve read the book, Gibson is Hadrian’s tutor.

Yes.

Sort of the scientist monk. And they all take names, in much the same way that when you’re confirmed Catholic you take a saint’s name, these monks will take old scholar names, and he has borrowed my friend’s name, as a nod to my friend for his long years of service.

So what does your revision process look like when you get to the end? Do you revise as you go? Do you do a big revision at the end and then submit it? How does that work for you?

I do…when I have time, and I won’t this time with book three, I let it sit for a week, ideally, and then start reading it over again, and I’ll make notes about what needs to be changed and things as I go. I’ll fix, you know, bad-sounding sentences. Because I try to read aloud. The most important bit of writing advice I ever got, and I think the most important bit of writing advice I can ever give, is “read your work out loud,” because if you wrote a bad sentence it will sound stupid and you can fix it, but you can’t fix it if you can’t hear it. And so, I try to read everything aloud and catch those as I’m going and then catch things. I also find my memory is much better with things I’ve heard, so I’ll remember details better and catch things like someone’s eye color changing, which…even proofreaders are going to miss that sort of thing.

Yes, those things do crop up, and if you don’t read it out loud to yourself while you’re doing that, you will certainly find those errors when you’re doing a public reading sometime.

Oh, yeah. Every time. There’s a word missing in the first line of dialogue in Empire of Silence, I think. It’s something like “the mother of wisdom in” and it should be “is in” and that missing “is” haunts me to this day. I fixed it in the mass market, but it just…it’s in the audiobook, and every time it just…it’s too late.

It must be in the electronic ARC I’m reading, so I’ll have to look that up.

Yeah, it’s…it’s just embarrassing. But I try to do that, and I’ll do spot fixes. I try to go and find words like “very” and see if it’s an instance of the word “very” that needs to go. Words like “seems.” I have a whole list somewhere, I forget other words…

Quite a few authors have told me that. Let’s see, it was Kevin Hearne, I think, who said he suddenly became sensitive to the phrase “I couldn’t help but,” and he said, “Well, of course you could.” And so he goes through and tries to get rid of all of those. For me…I…well, of course, there’s the, you know, the basic, if you do a search for “wases” and “weres” and stuff you can see if you’re using passive tense sometimes you shouldn’t. But, I often find that my characters make animal noises too much. They’re always growling dialogue or snarling something. I try to catch some of those.

So, when it gets to DAW, and Katie, your editor there, what kind of editorial feedback do you get? I haven’t worked with her, so I don’t know how she works.

Katie is great. Katie catches a lot of things. My favorite thing about working with Katie is that Katie and I have more-or-less diametrically opposed worldviews and philosophies and backgrounds. I come from a deeply Catholic conservative background. Katie is very much a progressive. I think she was, I think she was an activist, like, a professional activist before she was an editor. And we live in very divisive times, let us say, and without getting into anyone’s opinions on anything, because I really don’t, especially publicly, don’t want to be a political person in any way whatsoever, I really appreciate that we can work together with these very different…because there are just things that you’re blind to, right? When you have opposing…when you have a different way of seeing things, there are just some parts of the world you don’t see because you’ve never seen them, these sorts of things? And Katie is conscious of things.

’Cause I’m not trying to hurt anybody with writing, so just, you know, stupid, you know, thoughtless things that might creep into your writing because it doesn’t…you don’t encounter it, right? It’s not exactly…I’m not describing, like, sensitivity reading issues, because my response is usually not…it’s not changing anything that’s in…I don’t change any of my…things that are in the text. It’s not that kind of thing. It’s…she will catch where I haven’t presented myself very clearly or I’ve sort of taken half-measures in order to express an idea or to negotiate a plot point, these sorts of things. The way I like to think about it is, in Dostoyevsky and Brothers Karamazov, right, he’s got Ivan and Alyosha, and Alyosha is kind of dim, but he’s a really decent human being. Ivan is viciously brilliant, right? And Ivan wins every single argument that he has against Alyosha, but Alyosha wins in the long run because he is a decent human being. He ends up at the end of his life better off, right? And Dostoyevsky has more in common worldview-wise with Alyosha than he does Ivan, but he makes Ivan as strong a foil as he possibly can. You know, Nietzsche used to say that he did philosophy with a hammer, well ,Dostoyevsky did literature with a hammer, right? He built the strongest possible…you know, I don’t want to say arguments, because fiction isn’t necessarily an argument…but the strongest possible avatar of things he didn’t believe in, right? He made his villains, his antagonists, as strong as he could. And Katie helps me to pull out places where I have been a weak writer because of our differences of opinion and vision and clarity of vision. And, you know, I find that absolutely wonderful and indispensable. And so, in addition to that, obviously there’s the usual stuff about, you know, just usual editing, you know, this might not work here, move this scene, that kind of thing, but that, I think, is the most useful, the most indispensable, bit of editorial help that I get.

So, Empire of Silence came out last year, right? 2018?

Yes. Yeah. July 10.

Trying to remember what year it is.

I know.

And the second one, which is called Howling Dark, is coming up very shortly. We’re recording this in early June and the book comes out in July.

Mm-hmm.

I should know because there’s this guy on Twitter that’s running a daily countdown of how many days it is.

Yeah. I thought that would be fun. It’s been a lot of work.

I was looking at that, thinking, “I could do that for Master of the World,” which is my next book from DAW, but I thought, “Boy, that looks like a lot of work,” so I don’t know if I will do that or not.

Yeah, I did that all in advance, thank heavens. I don’t do it every day. I did a countdown for book one like that, where I did the one quote from each chapter per day for each number of chapters. But I had eighty chapters in this book, and doing one for three months, is…

So, what has the response been to the first book?

Overwhelmingly positive. I think I’ve got about 1,200, 1,300 reviews on Goodreads. Fifty percent of them are five stars, which is just absolutely mind-boggling, because to me this is still a bunch of goofy nonsense that I made up because, really, you know, for all this talk of, you know, differences of opinion and stuff, my only aspiration is to entertain people. It truly, truly is. People can read the book if they agree with me, if they disagree with any of this. And I hope that they have a good time, because that’s what this is about. I am ultimately no different than a medieval harlequin juggling in the streets, and that’s all I want to be, only more serious.

Well, that actually is my next question. This is the point in the podcast where I ask the big questions, and the first one is, “Why do you do this? Why do you write?” And, on a broader scope, why do why do you think any of us write, one, and two, why do you and I and other people write this kind of made-up stuff, science fiction and fantasy?

Well, I have two answers, because of course I have artistic pretensions, right? And any artist does. And I do really think that literature in particular, that the thing that separates human beings from the animals isn’t, you know, tool-building, obviously crows do that sort of thing, it’s not language even, really: it’s storytelling. The reason…we tell stories so that our narrative persona, our narrative avatars, right, our characters, can suffer and die so that we don’t have to.

Stories are instructional. The most basic story is, “I went out into the wilderness. There was a tiger. It killed the other cavemen. Bring a stick next time.” You know, that’s why fables have morals. And all stories do this. And what we’ve been trying to do with our stories…and the oldest stories, in addition to being, you know, daily news, like the tiger one, are religious, right? Religion, literature—these things overlap pretty significantly in the way that they try to define an ethic of, like, how we’re supposed to act in the world, what the right way to behave is. That’s what the hero’s journey is, right, the hero’s journey is like the Dao in Daoism, right, it’s like the eightfold path in Buddhism, it’s like the imitation of Christ in Christianity, it’s the right way to act in the world, you know, being heroic, right? Now, we can argue about the details of what that is, and that’s part of the experiment, right?

You know, I started writing this because I read Iain Banks’s Culture series, where he’s like, “Well, the minute we get into space, government’s finished,” like, you know, no one will ever control anybody. And as much as I love those books, I was like, “That’s not right. Like, well, it’s really hard to get off planets, Mr. Banks. Like, they just won’t let you.” And so, I made an empire that doesn’t let people get off planets. So, you know, it’s all part of this argument about society and how people function.

But beneath all that, and at the same time, you know, I think it was Edgar Rice Burroughs said, you know, “You have to entertain first.” Right? Maybe it was someone else, or maybe he said it, too. And all I really want to do…the reason why most of what I post online are links to obscure metal songs and stupid jokes about the Roman Empire is because I am not here to change anyone’s heart or mind. I am not. I don’t think I have the wisdom or the clarity of mind to do that, and I would be very suspicious of anybody whose job is to write stories about wizards and spaceships who tries to tell you how to live your life. All I want to do is tell you a story about wizards and spaceships.

And as for why we write stories about wizards and spaceships, you know, I think…there are a lot of people, a lot of my creative-writing professors, John Kessel aside, because the man is a rarity…hated that I was writing science fiction in my creative-writing classes. They in fact tried to stop me, and I had to negotiate with them pretty early in the class, like, “Look, this is what I want to do, like, professionally, I would really appreciate your feedback, can you please work with me?” And they very often would. A couple of them were like, “No, you must write literary, you know, lit-fic minimalist hyper-realist pieces.” Maybe magical realism, because that gets a pass for some reason. But all the old stories are fantastic, right? Literally the oldest story we have is the Enûma Eliš, or the creation myth from the Sumerians. And it is a dragon-slaying story. It is about Marduk, the God of Attention, right, he’s got eyes all around his head, right, and his ability to speak magic words, and to take the Dragon of Chaos, Tiamot, apart. He cuts her to pieces and builds the world out of the dragon’s corpse, right? So this is a dragon, and magic words, and, you know, he’s got superpowers, he can see everything, right?

It sounds like a Marvel movie.

Yeah, exactly. And that’s what it all is. Science fiction is modern mythology, because a lot of modern people have a hard time with other forms of mythology, because they go out into the world and they’re like, “Well, I don’t see anyone turning water into wine. So these stories aren’t true,” and I’m like, “Well, but what does the story mean?”, right? The story represents something. Whether or not that something is metaphysically true is irrelevant—those stories have meaning. And it’s the same…and I think it’s more digestible if we know those stories are fake to begin with, right? Like, I’m amazed by the number of people who dislike religion on principle who are Tolkien fans, right? It’s just absolutely mind-boggling to me, because it’s the same story, you know? King Arthur is literally the same story, right?

And so, I think we’re doing this because writing… because we don’t live in a society where popular culture is hagiography anymore, where we’re not writing the lives of the saints. So, instead of talking about St. George killing a dragon—because that’s the same story, too. You know, talking about St. Barlaam, who is actually just the Buddha, you know, that story traveled across Asia and arrived in Europe in a different form. You know, instead of telling all these stories as popular entertainments, instead of talking about the quest for the Holy Grail, right, which is of course a very religiously centered story, we tell stories about different dragonslayers, right? You know, Euron Greyjoy just killed a dragon in Game of Thrones, right? Now, that’s a terrible person, but it’s still the same motif, it’s the same kind of story, and it’s scratching a similar itch. Even if the ending of Game of Thrones…that’s an issue, you know, we can get into another time. But it’s still…it’s still hitting that same spot for people.

I think that fandoms are…I don’t want to say cults, but, like, cults in the Roman sense, where they’re these little tiny micro-religions, right, without the pejorative content at all, I think. People come to these things looking for meaning, and they find them in these other places.

And, you know, I think some other people just like dragons, right? They like knights, you know, because in their real life they’re pizza-delivery guys or, you know, they drive trucks, or they work in an office, or they teach school, and, you know, they…it helps. You know, Tolkien talks about writing escapist literature, because, you know, in its truest sense, because you need to be let out of prison, right, because you don’t want to go to the office every day. I work at a science-fiction publisher and I don’t want to go to the office every day, it’s an office. You know, and I love my job, but sometimes it’s Tuesday and you don’t want to go.

I don’t know if it’s Tolkien or Lewis who said that people who…who’s against escapism? Well, jailers. So, people who say, “You shouldn’t read that escapist stuff” are the jailers.

Yeah, that was my problem with those professors.

It’s interesting. I’ve talked to a lot of authors, some of whom had creative writing, and that is…that, unfortunately, it’s still there, those creative-writing types who have this deep-seated prejudice against the fantastic, which…not always. there have been some exceptions in the people I’ve talked to, but it is something that comes up quite a bit.

I will say this though, against those professors. That’s what every student in those classes wanted to write. Almost to a man and woman, every single person who was in those classes with me wanted to write science fiction or fantasy. Maybe they wanted to write, like, a thriller, right, you know, some sort of military story, spy story, but they weren’t writing, you know, literary minimalism, you know, about some person in their ordinary life having ordinary experiences. Everyone was in there with dragons or robots. So they’re losing. And I think people like Dr. Kessel will be more the mainstay in the profession here in another generation or so.

Well, we’re just about to the end of the hour. We’ve talked about the new book and you have mentioned that what you’re working on is the third book. Anything else that you’re working on at the moment?

No, none at the exact moment because I have to power through book three here and finish it before Howling Darkcomes out July 16. And so, I owe them book three August 1. I’d wanted to turn it in before this one was even out, because I turned in book two before book one was out, because it would be nice, you know, to do that. But I have some other ideas. Most of them are fantasy. I want to…there’s a famous story about the Emperor Caligula, who’s famously mad, although I think personally that he’s been defamed by oligarchs throughout history, but it’s his famous story about him ordering his soldiers to attack the ocean. And, you know, that happened up in the Netherlands, so he sounded crazy to everybody in Italy, but I’m a big Tim Powers fan and, you know, Tim Powers’s thing is, he tries to find fantastic explanations for these sort of coincidences in history and, you know, what if Caligula were actually attacking something that came from the sea, you know? That, I think, is something I want to work on after I finish this, but after I finish book three it’ll be time for book four. And then book five. So I have to do that first.

Because it’s not a trilogy, then. It’s more than that.

Oh, no, no. I’m allergic to trilogies, because everyone…it seems every time there’s a trilogy out I find people who are like, “Oh, book two is bad, oh, don’t read the second one, really dropped it in the middle,” or, “You get through the second one, the third one fixes it.” And I thought, “Well, instead of having one awkward middle book, I’ll have three. That’ll fix the problem.”

Well, I did a five-book series, so I’m right there with you. Although they were much shorter. I mean, I think the entire five books would have fit into one and a quarter of yours, but…

I just talk too much, as you can tell.

And where can people find you online?

I am on Facebook and Twitter @TheRuocchio. Someone had already taken my last name, it’s like a third cousin of mine in Pennsylvania, so I put the “The” in front, which makes me sound famous, even though I’m not.

Oddly enough, that’s why this is called “The Worldshapers” instead of just “Worldshapers,” because worldshapers.com was taken. And they offered to sell it to me for, I don’t know, $5,000 or something. I said. “You know, I think I’ll just put a ‘the’ in front of it and I’ll be fine.”

Yeah, that’s the easy solution. I wasn’t gonna try and shake down this cousin I’d never met, so…

So, Twitter and Facebook, both the same thing?

Yes. And my website is sollanempire.com. I figured that’d be easier to spell than my name.

Well, thanks so much for being a guest. I really enjoyed the chat. I hope you did, too.

I did. Thank you for having me. I’ve been really looking forward to this. I really enjoyed the episode you did with Dave Butler, who is a really good friend of mine, and a couple of the others, and been real excited.

Well, thank you. I think it’ll be…I’m sure that listeners will enjoy it as much as we both did. I hope, anyway.

I hope so, too.

Okay, bye for now.

Bye. Thank you.