Magic In Common – Interview with Maurice Broaddus and more

Prepare yourself for a unique treat—a Magic In Common interview with the author who says

my approach for it was that magic would stand in as a metaphor for homelessness: both are all around us if we know what to look for.

For more on how modern day grit and Arthurian legends clash together with a little help from magic, check out this interview with Maurice Broaddus: http://mauricebroaddus.com/uncategorized/guest-blog-a-ken-hughes-interview-of-maurice-broaddus-on-magic-in-storytelling/

It’s a juicy, thought-provoking set of answers. Maurice weaves in everything from mythology to Christianity to comic books in the course of ten questions. But there’s one that interests me most:

Several of his answers have to do with characters struggling to accept magic when it’s completely out of their world-view. It’s a delightful shock to write and read, seeing who can adapt and who just stares at the unknown demanding “a logical explanation.” (Those people always seem to forget that the whole point of logic is for beliefs to give way in the face of evidence, sigh…) For an urban fantasy like Maurice’s Knights of Breton Court, leading street warriors into the roles of King Arthur, it can be the absolute flashpoint of the conflict.

It only makes sense. We expect a brush with magic to be, well, magical, and to do justice to the moments of coming across it.

But I wonder, how does that impact compare to some of the other positions a hero and magic can move through? Just who has how much magic, and where does that put the balance of drama?

If the hero simply isn’t allowed that kind of power, you can get:
- a more familiar, relatable hero, without the wilder chances and temptations he might have had. Conan instead of Harry Potter (or Captain America instead of Thor).
- magic serving people or rules other than the hero’s, forcing him to deal with it on its own terms. Plot devices.
- or just a stronger, spookier villain if most of the power goes there. Horror in all its forms.
If the hero has to discover magic and do justice to that shock:
- she’s not only relatable, we get the most out of that journey’s impacts. The same startling change for the character that we readers are flirting with by reading the story.
- meanwhile the times before and after that transition get to push the other buttons, of course!
and if (or once) the hero does have full access to magic, that opens up horizons like:
- more time to see the power itself in use. A natural for action stories and the like.
- character reactions that are even more unusual than being awestruck: showing someone who’s used to what we find so unusual. (“So he rides a dragon; he still gets airsick.”)
- then again, nobody said all magic had to be routine. Getting used to one level of it can be just another way to make us appreciate some much stronger force—especially a Vastly Darker threat that’s suddenly unleashed!
- or if the heroes have magic and they keep the advantage in that field… often the main threat used is a public attitude against magic itself. More or less the X-Men approach, and a thousand YA tales of finding what makes you unique makes you misunderstood and a target for the status quo. As if the only thing besides magic strong enough to threaten it is a worldful of ignorance.

For myself, my writing seems to be on the later stages of this cycle, if cycle it be. In Shadowed, Paul is the main person with any power and he’s trying to unravel mysteries all on his own. (Whether it stays that way or not…) The High Road begins a bit earlier, with Mark and Angie just discovering their flying belt, and then facing a deadly but mundane threat that has its own surprises in the wings.

But it’s a question any writer has to decide in dealing with magic. How close can your center character come to the power, and when in the story, and what other roles does it play?

And as readers, whose eyes do we want to see it through?

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Magic In Common – interview with J S Moran

What’s the best thing magic can add to a story? How many different meanings does the paranormal have for writers, and readers? This week I’m launching an ongoing exploration into what might be my favorite part of fantastic fiction—the fantastic.

Used right, there’s nothing like magic to give a tale mystery, or excitement, or heart. It can:

be a direct consequence of a world’s history, or sometimes the clear cause of it all
make unforgettable characters who know what it’s like to incinerate foes with a finger, or grow up half-aware of some greater truth
blast open a story with the sheer geeky fun of how to use power to face different challenges, and how much can go wrong with each

There’s no part of storytelling that magic can’t influence. Not that every writer makes the best use of all its dimensions… or wants to, or that every fan looks for the same thrill. So I’ve decided to open the question up by interviewing other writers about the subject, and hope it sparks a few conversations, comparisons, and some musings of my own.

J. S. Moran on Magic

This week I’ve interviewed a favorite of mine, whose books have given me hours of pleasure: J.S. Moran, author of the Twinborn books and the Black Ocean series. You can find his answers on http://www.jsmorin.com/2016/02/ken-hughes-interview/, and his own blogs about his different systems.

What you”ll find there is a fine picture of an author who considers everything from game-detailed magic rules to Tolkien’s famous vagueness about what wizards do, and then settles in to create his own challenges with it. (And when a wizard keeps starships flying by winning arguments with the laws of physics, you can tell how much creativity goes into it.)

–And I do have to say, I’m glad Jeff has been the first author to help me on my search here. Not to be too subtle about it, but one of the many things I appreciated about the Twinborn books was their sheer wish-fulfillment. Pick up Firehurler and watch the dedicated but sheltered Kyrus (a professional scribe, no less!) begin to dream of his other self and use that knowledge to bring magic into his own life… then see how it brings him into conflict with two worlds of dragons, pirates, warlocks, ancient secrets, and several fascinating ladies. And flying warships, of course.

I’ve never been a fan of omens, except the foreshadowing I write in myself. But for a study of how many doors magic can unlock, it’s a good place to be starting.

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Enhanced Senses in Shadowed

The ability that has changed Paul Schuman’s life is easily described—he sums it up as:

What we have is the power to increase our five senses by connecting them to whatever we focus our attention on. That’s all it is.

but it has many uses and hidden pitfalls that, at the start of Shadowed, Paul has spent the last two years trying to understand.

“Opening” – how it works

Paul calls his power “Opening,” for how it opens him up to whatever sensation he focuses on.

That focus is the key to its nature, as he understands it. It operates by amplifying one specific perception out of many, allowing him to take in his sense of one specific thing much more powerfully than ordinary senses could.

At the start of Shadowed, Paul has spent the last two years struggling to control this power and also to make a secret living without anyone knowing about it. He can Open with a thought, while standing or walking, and give no outward sign that his attention is elsewhere. (If its weakness hasn’t triggered; see below.)

Opening Sight

Paul can increase the precision of his sight and the degree of distance and dim light he can see in. This appears to him like a form of tunnel vision; if he searches a dark street for a car of a specific color, he sees the colors of each car he looks at “jumping out at him” in the darkness until he finds the one he needs. Within those limits, his sight can be better than most binoculars, night vision glasses, or magnifying glasses. (Since it’s his own senses that are enhanced, he can’t see behind an object or where there’s no light at all.)

A technique he sometimes uses is to position himself where an object has a tiny reflection in a patch of glass. By Opening, Paul can then see that image clearly without revealing that he’s watching his target.

Opening Hearing

Paul has found that his hearing can be the easiest sense to use. This is simply because he doesn’t need extra study to understand a whispered secret or the footsteps of a guard approaching from the next floor, once he spots them, and because he doesn’t need to look toward someone to hear them. Opening’s use of focus makes Paul a master of “parabolic” listening over distance; in an otherwise quiet environment he can follow a whisper from more than a hundred feet away. On the other hand, complex conditions can be worse than distance; in one chapter he struggles to hear across the street, when two glass windows and busy traffic all run between him and his target.

Since he’s still limited to sounds his ears can still perceive, he can’t catch ultrasonic or other exotic sounds. But by focusing closely, Paul can spot electronic devices (such as burglar alarms) by hearing how the faint electric hum sounds more complex than it is through ordinary wires.

Opening Touch

Touch is a challenging sense to enhance. Paul can best use it by improving his precision with specific tasks he can practice; for instance he can learn to pick a lock quickly if he has a sample to work on (which he usually does). Enhanced touch doesn’t make him stronger or faster, but it can sometimes make a particular movement more efficient, if nothing interferes with it.

Opening Smell

Paul tries to avoid enhancing scents. In theory his nose could pick out a smell better than many animals, but he’s had trouble recognizing or remembering scents when he catches them, since (like most people) he had almost no practice analyzing them before his power appeared. Smell can also be the most overwhelming sense since it triggers memory directly.

Opening Taste

Like smell, taste is a sense Paul doesn’t have enough experience in deliberately using, enhanced or not. Paul uses taste mostly as a reward for himself, savoring the best foods he can afford. A fresh-baked roll can be a banquet to him, although too often he has to make do with stale food and fight to keep his sense from Opening.

A Note about Reading People

Paul’s senses can be awkward in focusing too intimately on other people. He knows he should be able to read people’s emotions and spot deception easily through tiny expressions and changes in voice, but he tends to shy away trying from it. Since he has had to learn to ignore most of the sensations of his own body, focusing too closely on others can be disorienting.

The Other Side of the Gift

Since Opening is triggered by his will, Paul’s senses are no better than average when he’s not using it. He can overlook signs or clues as easily as anyone else when he isn’t paying attention, and he can be surprised normally. Since he lives in hiding and in fear of being found out, he’s more likely to keep his guard up than many people, but this is more about attitude and having that extra awareness available if he needs it.

Also, the effect can be too available: it can be activated not only by full concentration, but sometimes by simply putting his attention on a thing. Paul can be intrigued by a sight or sound (or worse, caught up in a pain) and suddenly find he’s slipped into a trance and lost a minute or longer in taking it in. Much of his training in the two years before Shadowed begins was learning to control that effect.

As a result, Paul often uses his power by shifting rapidly from one focus to another, and never lingering on any one perception for long. By moving his attention around, combined with practice, Paul can usually keep himself under control.

The Source?

After years of searching, Paul still has no answer for where the power came from. His last memory was visiting a friend in a hospital, but nothing he can find connects the doctors to anything suspicious. His family history is just as ordinary.

But as Shadowed begins… could he have given that power to someone else?

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Star Wars: Is there a Fast Lane to the Force?

It’s New Year’s Eve tonight. I could lay out my thoughts about what I’ve done and what I haven’t done this year, and my vows to be more of the kind of writer I need to be.

Or I could talk about Star Wars.

I’ve Got a Good Feeling About This, Luke….

As Han made a point of saying, “It’s all true.” The Force Awakens really is a solid return to that galaxy we visited a long time ago, and it pushes all the buttons it needs to. Lightsabers and stormtroopers, cute robots, and sheer adventure for the sake of liberty and a good ride. And you’ve probably heard it’s more a familiar return than a try at any new territory, and that’s true too.

(After all, would anyone really want a Star Wars movie to mess with the basics? Their strength has always been trusting the story’s simplicity, with just the right added wrinkles. And Lucas showed us what happens when someone thinks they can get too careless with it.)

One thing I’ve been saying for years is that everything with the brand on it since the original movies is simply fanfiction. It might be expertly done (Timothy Zahn writing books, or Genndy Tartakovsky applying his Samurai Jack animation magic), or with all kinds of claims to be canon. But everyone who claimed their own story actually connected to that core always struck me as fooling themselves.

[bctt tweet=”All the #StarWars between Return and now has been fanfiction. http://bit.ly/StarWarsFastLane”]

Until now. We finally have a real sign that the magic is starting up again, that the new journey’s going to be worth taking—and I think the whole world’s been surprised to see how much we want to go there together. Credit J.J. Abrams (once again), along with the marvelous Daisy Ridley, Harrison Ford himself, and all the rest for making it possible.

Rey’s a Marvel – not a DC

One thing does stick in my mind watching the Awakening. One often-forgotten gem about the original trilogy was how slowly its “chosen hero” grew into his role. In the first movie Luke only got his lightsaber out for one round of training (and for that much more iconic poster), and spent most of his time being led along by Ben, Han, or Leia until the Force helps him make that one climactic shot. A couple years later, it’s still all he can do to summon his dropped saber, and Yoda’s training doesn’t entirely change that. It made the Force seem more a real part of the Star Wars universe, that truly understanding it might take a lifetime.

But Rey… for her, “potential Jedi” means working the Mind Trick, seeing visions, and winning duels within a day of discovering her power. Hmm.

The easy answer is that it’s simply to put the action at a faster pace. Let us see the new hero jump up to her flashier level in the one movie, instead of trying to hold our interest with mostly-human tricks all te way through. It gave us a good battle and all, but as a pacing decision I kind of miss the orginal New Hope‘s humility there.

Or there might be other reasons for it.

To go a little off-track, it reminds me of other points we can see, in some of the comic book achetypes:

DC Comics made its name with heroes like Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman that had a destiny for most of their lives. They’ve grown up trying to control or learn what’s going to make them unique, and they rarely pretend they wanted to be anything else. Or consider Tarzan, King Arthur, Sherlock Holmes… or Luke’s own feeling trapped on that farm and his slow, earnest (if delayed) growth into a hero once he got his chance.

Marvel came of age during the “atomic scare” 60s, but I think there’s more than that to the early Marvel attitude. Once those heroes get their powers (a saying you can’t even use for the Superman types), the Thing only wants to be human again, the Hulk is his own and everyone else’s worst enemy, Spider-Man is even more of a misfit than Peter Parker, and the X-Men find their genes have drafted them into a race war. The more suddenly change comes with a radioactive spider bite—or a vampire bite, or a computer file full of spies’ bytes—the more a reluctant hero can think the rest of his life bites too.

(Irony check: it was mostly those “bitten” heroes that Marvel made famous enough to sell off the movie rights to, so they were left with their more DC-like lifelong warriors and inventors to launch the Avengers universe. Meanwhile DC’s TV spotlight is now on their lightning-charged Everyman the Flash…)

They’re both fine ways to set up character and abilities, of course.

A hero who was human yesterday and never forgets it stays closer to the reader’s experience, plus it makes the most of those wild scenes where he first finds himself trying to control his new gifts. I’ve written that myself; The High Road is all about picking up a magic talisman and realizing how much you can suddenly do, and what a target you might be.

On the other hand, Shadowed let me start Paul as someone who’s had years to get used to his ability—if not all the history behind it. Slower-growing heroes like him and Luke can seem more organic, though not many modern action movies take the time to follow that the way A New Hope did. Then again, that side of his arc now seems more like a mainstream military or sports story, where the team and the mission get more attention than the new hero who’s earning his place there.

Rey doesn’t do that. But just what this means, we don’t know yet.

The very first Star Wars mention of the Force was Ben saying it “was strong in” a Jedi. I wonder, does that mean some Jedi really are just that much more gifted than others, more than Luke or Vader ever were? Could be.

And does it mean Rey’s going to find herself in over her head as fast as some of those other hurried, harried heroes? Just how strong is she, and how much will she have to cope with soon? Since Force Awakens was a clear parallel to A New Hope, that’s an ominous sign for how dark the next movie might turn.

Or it might just mean that Rey was already more confident and able to look after herself than young Luke. Maybe she’d been using the Force a little over the years already (say a bit of persuasion to keep those oasis thugs away?), and just needed Han to tell her it was real. She might already have been closer to her Jedi potential than she knew.

Only time, and the next movie, will tell. But I can’t wait to see Daisy Ridley do it.

(I’ve written a bit about Star Wars before, as a guest in Janice Hardy’s blog. That time it was about Luke on the farm, as an example of how a writer can keep the “oridinary moments” interesting—call that a study in making the most of whatever destiny was there at the moment, before the Force and the Stormtroopers kick the door down: http://blog.janicehardy.com/2014/09/your-scene-needs-problem.html.)

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Shapechanger Dreams

There’s nothing like prepping for a Christmas visit with the family to keep us busy… and then there’s all the editing I’ve been doing on The High Road and planning the books to follow. So with all of those thoughts of the people in my life, and the sky-riding tricks in my book, my mind naturally took the “powers we wish for” question in my last post and came up with a whole different wish.

Of course I’ve wanted to fly since forever; that’s always driven that story. But right now, I find myself thinking of another of the classic magical gifts. I’ve always liked the idea of being a shapechanger.

After all, this is a power so versitile many of us don’t think of it (or write about it) in its full form.

Some people promptly think of Mystique (X-Men) and other tricksters who disguise themselves as people.
Or there’s the whole world of animal changes:
- to travel unseen just “go crow” and flit by unnoticed,
- or shift to a hawk or bloodhound to improve the senses ,
- or use anything with wings to get around
- and even you need even more, add claws or an elephant’s size…
And then there’s specific fine control, shifters who sprout claws on their human hands or will their wounds to close, and much more.

The classic question might be “invisibility or flight,” but a total shapeshifter would have stealth and mobility, plus healing as just the first of other bonuses to come with them. It’s hard to get more versitile than that.

And… thinking back over the musings from my last post, I know I’m most drawn to the animal side of that dream, for a whole set of reasons.

Yes, I can see myself just in the moment catching an updraft as a hawk. And, it’s one of those powers I could wish for knowing I can just shift secretly back and get on with my day—who wants to have the CIA banging on your door when you’re trying to write? But most of all, I like the whole world it unlocks the more I want to explore:

Imagine it. How does the city through a hawk’s eyes, sharper and all spread out below with miles all in view at once? Or to a rat, down there on the ground, snuffling its way through all the back corners and crates and refuse we’ve piled up? Just thinking of it reminds me how long it’s been since I’ve hiked through anything but blocks of concrete. But to look at every bush and know I could be a squirrel inside it… or not just walk past a lake but be a fish to see how deep it goes…

They’re simple dreams, I admit. As an adventure writer maybe I ought to be tracking down muggers as a wolf. (Or else identifying them for the police as a bloodhound.)

Still, there’s a whole world out there to explore, both by venturing farther out and by looking deeper into each thing there. And I realize that the more I’ve been writing, the more of that exploring I’ve let slip by. So if I wanted a gift to change my life, it would be tempting to not have to choose between them.

What would you wish for? What worries, hopes, and maybe regrets would draw you to one power or another—and how will we each make the most of what we have right now?

Merry Christmas, Happy (belated) Hannukah, and goodwill to all of you and yours.

–Ken

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A Choice of Power

It’s a harmless, playful question: “What superpower would you want?” Or magic talisman, ultimate gadget, or any other way to phrase the one thing you know you won’t be getting for Christmas… so what does it matter what we wish for?

I think it does matter. Not only because dreams always do—especially for those of us who spend hundreds of hours reading about dragons and telepaths. But, because it might tell us something about how we see our everyday world too.

So, ask yourself that question, and think about your answer. Then, take a look at a few ideas I’ve put down here.

Of course, it’s not always that simple. If we could all look at our favorite heroes and instantly spot some great missing piece of ourselves, we’d all be doing just that and the world would be a simpler place. (More exciting too. There’s a book in that, I’m sure…)

What I think is, none of us even hear the question the same way as other people, and none of us hear it the same at different times either. Which can tell us a few things too, or keep us guessing.

The Wow Moment?

Your first thought might be a single Moment of Awesome. Buzzing over crowds with flight, or seeing into someone’s mind what they really think of you. Clear, primal satisfaction of using a gift in its most obvious form, just for those pure instants.

If that’s the kind of image that comes to mind, enjoy it, but I wouldn’t suggest trying to see much more in it. You never know: one person might latch onto flight as a way to get away from people, and another loves it because they like spending all day juggling different people’s needs but think of flying away for the few moments they dream of taking a break. And a third might want to fly because she lives near an airport.

A Day in the Life?

Or, you just might picture something more than a moment with that gift, and have a sense of how you might build a life around it. Not just swooping down on those crowds but planning how you’d gear up for a rescue, or a search, or how that power’s being almost impossible to conceal barely matters if it means you become famous for your aerial adventures. It might be you don’t just picture the moment, but pieces of a different life it could bring you.

When my wishes come out like that, I often wonder if the life I picture around the magic tells me more than which power’s at its center. Sure, common sense says that if I want to see the future it’s a sign I’m concerned about my own… but it might just mean I wish I had more to talk about with my neighbors, both to help them and just to practice convincing them I had something to say. If I wanted to protect them without persuading them, I‘d have pictured myself with super-strength.

An Edge on Reality?

There’s one other form that wish might take. Namely, to see ourselves just fitting a gift into our daily lives and barely changing them at all, but with that one great advantage to what we already do. These are the dreams of being the telepath who has the right words to help everyone get along… or walking to work as usual knowing no disease or mugger can touch someone invulnerable.

I have to say, a wish that comes out in that form might be the most interesting. What can I say, these are times I’m dreaming of something I actually could have in some form, if I spent more time in the gym or on Google or wherever else the answer might be.

So, which form did your wish come out in? Did you picture one of those moments, or part of a different life, or as a plus to your real one? What degree you saw the answer in might tell you more than what power you saw in it.

One way or another, dreams always matter.

The High Road cover reveal

Getting a cover for a book I’ve written is well beyond feeling like a “kid in a candy store.” For The High Road it was closer to Christmas morning… if you’d spent months and months living the creation of what you’re going to use your present for… and if you’d sent off your Wish List knowing this Santa Claus was guaranteed to read it and use all his skill to make you the perfect toy.

Yeah, it’s that cool. If it works.

Since I’d already decided to spring for a full-value cover, one of the key questions became choosing the right St. Nick. And this step I simply lucked into. Friends at the Greater Los Angeles Writers Society suggested one service that has a history of award-winning covers for fairly affordable prices: Damonza.com. Plus, when I began searching Joanna Penn’s suggestions for different designers at http://www.thecreativepenn.com/bookcoverdesign/, it didn’t hurt that Damonza was at the top of her long and varied list.

But the other part is planning just what I wanted in my cover. And, even though I had a first choice for a designer, working out my plans was the best way to check just how good they’d be.

Judging a Cover by its Book

So just where do you start, learning to see a stack of words as a single picture?

–Alright, let’s be honest. It’s more, how do you un-see all the pictures you’ve got and find what parts of them really matter?

As a reader (geek and general crazy person) I’ve got a lifetime of colorful covers on my shelves, plus movies, TV, and comics for more exposure to what puts a story into a frame. The real work is backtracking from my assumptions and trying to find what a good designer needs.

(See what I always think of as the Engineer’s Question, from Spider Robinson’s Stardance: get past a user’s assumptions of what a thing should “be” and ask “What do you want it to do?”)

After asking friends, remembering author interviews, and digging around the net, I found that a lot of the best early-stage advice fits neatly into one handy blog post: Anna Lewis at Publishing Talk, http://www.publishingtalk.eu/self-publishing/four-steps-to-create-a-great-book-cover/. Her method begins with a “mood board” of related images, and a study of other covers of similar books.

–She continues the process with DIY steps for getting good images and learning how many formats the cover needs to be in. These would be the points where I’d switch from doing the work myself to helping out the designer and just checking how well they’d handle them.

Mood, and examples? The mood for The High Road was no secret to me: it’s all about thrills. In fact, it’s about taking that to the edge of desperation Mark and Angie have knowing that one gravity-controlling belt isn’t enough to put down an organized gang of enemies with worse things behind them.

Other covers? My search for good samples started on my own shelves, on Amazon genre lists, and on the scores of varied (and very awesome) covers on the Damonza site. A cover artist that doesn’t encourage you to think in terms of the other covers out there isn’t doing his job—but Damonza both asks and emphasizes the value of that, so points for them.

–Sub-point: Anna Lewis makes it clear that the covers to study have to be for the right genre; no matter how many dark alleys my characters use, they don’t see them the same way as an (earthbound) mystery hero does, and the cover shouldn’t either. And if you want to go deeper into that, check out the writer juggernaut Kristine Kathryn Rusch in her exploration of how to re-invent cover styles for a genre: http://kriswrites.com/2015/07/22/business-musings-the-branding-surprise/

What’s worth NINETY thousand words?

Now for the heart of it: what kind of image should the cover be?

(Note, that means images, not “what scene should it capture.” That’s another piece of advice that turns up often, how all the treasured specific moments in a book are usually too complex to make good cover material. It’s also another point Damonza makes very clear to a client.)

That might be the fastest choice I ever made about The High Road. This is a book about flying—it’s meant to be the book about someone flying. Sure there’s also Mark deep in the woods or racing through the hospital, or Angie’s signature gaze looking for a horizon, or her toppling a car… but who am I kidding?

Flying. Done.

But what kind of flying, and what other images are part of that?

And here can begin the most varied, complex, and fun part of cover planning: just how far you can mine your own imagination, but meshing it with someone who should know everything except the book itself far better than you. I already knew what a sweet surprise that could be when another designer helped me with Shadowed.

SHADOWED cover (not by Damonza)

For that cover (since I was young and bossy back then) I started with my own very specific concept. That one figure in the crowd that’s so much clearer than the others was my way to suggest how Paul’s senses can pick out a single target, and for all the secrets he’s trying to search through.

And yet, I never even thought of Paul in a hoodie, until this came back. No matter how much fun we writers have imagining a cover, a good designer is a true eye-opener.

The High Road had its own specific cover needs, even though I’d learned not to micromanage parts of it. I wanted to touch on its urban setting and especially its literally dark world—that Mark and Angie know better than to try flying by day and still keep the magic secret. But most of all, there was the problem of “the Superman silhouette:”

I admit, I’m a little smug about having written Damonza into a corner like this. If someone does look up and glimpse a shadow going by at night, generations of comic books mean anyone would at least recognize a human outline stretched out to slide through the air. In the book Angie (being Angie) naturally figured that out, and so when she or Mark fly it’s usually huddled up into a nondescript ball shape that’s easier to take for a balloon or a trick of shadow. But that’s hardly a good dramatic pose for a cover, so I suggested the moment of leaping up or landing might be more promising.

And of course, I was also explaining how Mark was only just learning to control the magic, and the frantic tone I try to build in my scenes.

What I got…

was THIS:

THE HIGH ROAD cover

One word: Squee!

(Or maybe: “Zha-daruath. Zha-daruath. Zha-daruath, dammit!” if I think of it as him just learning the magic.)

Mark, falling—or desperately dropping—out of the sky. And they did that without even hearing about Chapter Ten, and the moment where he makes a barely-controlled drop down the side of a skyscraper in search of his elusive enemy. (And it’s almost within a page of the section that was so central the first draft made it the flash-forwarded opening page.)

And it hints at the climax too, Mark in so much control that he finds he’s maneuvering around skyscrapers—

And there’s that hint of the nighttime action, but plenty of light to suggest the magic that’s carrying him (without it quite seeming like it’s a visible glow).

And—

Wow.

There’s a reason for Damonza’s tagline: “Books made awesome.”

One part of me thinks it’s going to be a lot easier to make my next round of edits, to be sure the book is good enough for an image like this.

The other part hates slowing down. I just want to show this thing off, and start telling fans how many bits of the story I’m learning to see in it.

Book Covers – Build or Buy and How and Why

Here’s a tasty bit of irony: deciding on a book cover for The High Road has been making me dig past my own surface, and ask some hard questions about what kind of writer I’m trying to be. Both about capturing the appeal of my story, and about my plans and my whole approach to building my career. Deep stuff.

The cover’s always been a writer’s rite of passage. Even after years of living in characters’ heads, there’s something about seeing those words not just “try to paint a picture” but actually appearing in one that makes it more real: I made a frickin’ book here! I’ve heard dozens of stories of authors reveling in that moment, or moaning when some artist mangled it, and I have my own tales of the fun times people have sat down with me and complimented the cover for my other book, Shadowed.

Like Deepik Tuli says, it’s like looking at your own new face (http://magazine.oditty.me/2015/10/24/selecting-my-book-cover-was-like-selecting-a-new-face-for-myself/).

And yet…

How Much Coverage?

Right there on the long list of writing issues that have been knocked on their ear by technology, is how book covers may not mean what we think anymore.

For one thing, us fearless self-publishing types can take full control of something the traditional author has to entrust to the publisher and some talented but very busy artist. In other words, With great power comes the proverbial great responsibility (or as Mark would say based in the book, great disaster if you don’t watch your step). If I got a cover that didn’t do my characters justice, that would make it a self-inflicted wound.

Of course, a proper, quality cover is a basic hurdle of a successful book: Rachel Aaron sums it up neatly, the four basic steps of hooking a reader through the cover, the title, the blurb, and the first page. (See http://thisblogisaploy.blogspot.com/2015/09/writing-wednesdays-cover-title-blurb.html for more.) There’s no way around that.

Or is there?

[bctt tweet=”Every #book needs a good #cover, title, blurb, and first page. Or does it?”]

Maybe today’s book cover isn’t quite as vital, if the book’s natural habitat is in the Amazon jungles (and Kobo forests) more than it’s going to be competing for glances on a shelf. Hugh Howey and Bella Andre (at http://www.hughhowey.com/iconic-cover-art/ by the way) spell out a humbling fact: what looks like a good cover when it’s in your hands will only shrink down to the “Amazon size” of an online poster when you’ved walked back to one hundred feet away.

A hundred feet. Hugh’s point is the need for good but “icon”-type art that makes an impression on that postage-stamp scale. His Exhibit A is 50 Shades of Grey, and how readers simply learned to match its cuff link to what they’d heard about the book. Shades isn’t a typical success story, but it does remind me that covers don’t have to make the first impression any more. And the whole article stirs up two other dimensions in the self-publishing world:

How much time and money would be better spent on getting readers to see that art, rather than fine-tuning the tiny image that’ll greet them if they get there?

And, where’s the exact best balance between those—because I really can take control of that cover, with anything from degrees of outsourcing to total Do It Yourself.

Decisions, DIYcisions…

Could I design my own cover?

Of course I could. One of the perks of my being a steady reader of Joanna Penn is seeing her step-by-step instructions at http://www.thecreativepenn.com/2013/10/20/book-cover-design-ms-word/ that put the total cost for one great method at $80; how many Facebook ads would that savings free up? And the whole technical process can be done in about an hour, if I separate it from the searching and the creative choices that really make or break it.

So forget the fancy “design,” it’s more that: could I plan my own cover, good enough for “Amazon size,” without ruining it?

It’s the kind of question that starts whole voices in a hapless author’s head.

“But I’m not an artist!”

I can barely make my handwriting readable, and I’m thinking of entrusting the “face” of Mark and Angie and all the rest to my own anemic sense of visuals? After all the effort and all the hope I put into the story and the series, this is no time to forget what I’m here for.

“But it’s only choices.”

There are only so many kinds of layout out there, and background types, and combined with the right foreground image… I can start to see a cover lining up as just one decision after another, with each step not as hard as it looks. And all the time I spend writing my books is also learning to see each scene’s walls and skies and people and how they fit together. I love showing off the art I got for Shadowed, but what if I made The High Road completely my own?

And that’s only the start of what that choice brings up. With so many steps in building a cover, each one is a chance to spend or save more time and money, and they’re all tied into how I see the book, and myself. Could I make a simpler cover, because I don’t know how many people will see it if I don’t save up for ads and networking? Could I split the difference by hiring someone to find the perfect central image, and do the rest by common sense? Are covers even something I should be getting that deep into, when I’m a wordsmith instead of an artist?

(And of course: Mark Petrie, at the center of The High Road, actually is a would-be artist among his other dabblings. I swear I didn’t plan it that way…)

My Answer

Tempting as it is, the notion of a self-made cover feels wrong to me. The odds are I could assemble a decent picture and call it “good enough”—but I don’t want to say “enough” and think The High Road is never going to be famous enough for the cover to matter. Because I think it will be.

Besides, putting a cover on a book isn’t only an investment: it’s a reward. It’s a gift we writers can give ourselves for finishing the story, of a kind we can share with the reader. And I swear, when I look at Michael Whelan’s classic creations and all the other people I’ll never be able to draw like, I wonder if the book is partly an excuse to get some awesome artist to give me their time.

(And if I’m not big enough to lure Mr. Whelan into some contemporary fantasy yet, that’s just one more thing to aspire to.)

That’s my own decision about what a cover means to me, and how it balances with the rest of the book launching process. If any of you visiting authors have worked through the same logic and put the balance at a different place, I’ll be delighted to get a Comment or an email from you on how you do it.

Next time: the cover itself, and why it’s glorious

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Dark Fantasy and Darker Horror – Common Webs

If dark fantasy and some of the other delightfully edgy shades of storytelling draw on horror (like I said last time), just how many variations does horror have? What kind of sinister heart does it have at the center of all those, how far can it stray away from that, and what does it have in common with Jane Austen?

–I admit, I’m not a full-time reader of horror (or Austen) over the other styles I follow. I’d also never say a tale “isn’t horror” if it crosses some specific line, but I’m interested in what all the genres have to lend each other and different ways to strike a balance. So let’s take a look:

First off, dark fantasy… it may draw on the “darker” side of the “fantastic” (you’ll meet more demons than angels), but it’s not writing with the same aim as horror. You can find plenty of articles like Alan Baxter’s at The Creative Penn, http://www.thecreativepenn.com/2009/07/19/dark-fantasy/, that spell out how full-on horror takes its name seriously: it’s out to scare us.

Or take Alien. And then, Aliens.

The first is well-known as “a horror movie in space,” and it’s a doozie: dark tunnels, a literal “monster within,” and even Sigourney Weaver’s survival making her a “Final Girl.” The sequel has the same danger, but instead of one xenomorph terrifying a handful of crew, the suspense shifts to dozens of critters and hundreds of bullets fired by doomed soldiers. Still dark, still a fine tale in its bloody way, but “Game over, man! Game over!” isn’t the same kind of spooky, is it?

Call it an ironic pattern:

[bctt tweet=”Other genres tend to creep into and take over territory that used to be #horror’s. http://bit.ly/1M1jdfB”]

Consider how vampires—even not counting the romantic spins on them!—seem less and less likely to be a sinister, unstoppable Dracula classic or a Salem’s Lot. Instead, they more often build up their own vast but killable hordes like The Strain. Or more often still, the monster-fighting heroines (or heroes, yes) have more supernatural power as the beasties themselves: Buffy, Blade, Kate Daniels, and whole shelves of anime super-action seem to be making Jonathan Harker’s very human struggles obsolete.

Or zombies. “First the zombies overrun the world, then comes the hard part,” pushes the fear to a whole different scale. Dodging a few Walkers, or even blowing them away, becomes only the punctuation for the real question, of what it takes to survive for days and years in that world. Like any apocalypse, that’s more an extra-dark Speculative Fiction than pure horror.

Do we take horror for granted?

So here’s a question: with all the demon-powered Slayers and horde-kicking survivors on our book covers, does that mean we’re less and less interested in simply being scared?

Horror certainly never goes away, but it can seem like it loses ground sometimes. But here’s a theory: how does that pattern of horror’s shift look, from the viewpoint of the storytellers—or the horror story itself:

Horror’s easier to sell (in some places!) than action or other genres, because fear is so primal.
Good horror can starts varying its base, to stay fresh; bad horror-makers lose track of it before they know it’s gone.
Result: it can be true horror that gets its foot in the door, and then it spreads out and takes on other forms.

(Hope that description was as spooky as it deserves!)

To look at that second step again:

It’s often said that horror draws a lot of its power from the unknown, the sense of facing a kind of danger we can never truly understand. I think that puts an extra pressure on horror writers to either start with concepts the reader doesn’t know as well, or show how they can mutate them. –Same as for any other genre, of course, it’s only that “Same old vamp” can be a bigger letdown than “Same old gangster.”

Even horror’s plot shows some of that evolution. Watch any number of old Universal Studios monster movies and you’ll see the creature shambling slowly toward its prey, showing off how many bullets it can shrug off. But the more “so it’s armored” began to seem like a cliche, the more movies had to look for other kinds of unstoppability. (Not that that can’t have its uses: consider the original Terminator, something you can’t shoot and that only needs a phone book and a clear view across the room to shoot you.)

But, compare to ghosts. Ghosts (fittingly) never seem to go very far out of fashion, and neither do possessing demons and other less-than-solid horrors. I’d say that’s for one simple reason: it’s a huge head start to have an enemy you can’t see until it wants you to, and that you can never simply hurt. Build a story around a ghost and the hero has no chance except to enter the spirit’s own world of rules and try to find a weakness that makes no human sense. Not many werewolves inspired as deep a terror as the victims scrambling to make it through The Ring, let alone The Exorcist.

Horror’s eye of the beholder?

Then again, “unknown” is a matter of perspective, and we storytellers own perspective. Some monsters may make it easier to force the heroes out of their comfort zone, but it’s better still to simply bring that hero’s comfort zone to life and show how any evil that really tears into it is horrific enough.

For instance:

Stephen King wrote two famous books both about girls with paranormal powers pushed toward becoming monsters. But Charlie and Carrie (ah, those matching names! King was having fun, wasn’t he?) take different routes, simply because the former had a loving father who gave her a reason not to burn up the world. The latter never had a chance.

[bctt tweet=”#Firestarter < #Carrie: one has running from The Shop, the other has teen bullying and child abuse.”]

It’s more than a rule about villains, monstrous or not. What really brings a predator to life is the right prey and making us believe we’re there in that hunting ground, hoping Jamie Lee Curtis can turn the tables on Michael. It’s the whole connection between villain, hero, and everything else lining up to make the fear real. And any of those can let the story down; it’s often said:

[bctt tweet=”Bad #horror’s first sin is a boring villain. Its *worst* sin is a boring hero. http://bit.ly/1M1jdfB”]

Or look at gothic horror, that can build up so much atmosphere it barely matters if the threat turns out to be the Devil himself or “only” a madman. And consider, how much of that menace comes from the sheer dependency of the hero(ine)’s position: usually a destitute bride or helpless orphan child (or both), she’s vulnerable in whole other ways. Even if the lurking danger doesn’t kill her, if that enemy turns out to be the one man in the world who was willing to take her in, much of her life is over anyway.

–And that’s what I’d call the connection between horror and Jane Austen. No, Pride and Prejudice isn’t a long study in terror, no matter how many men (who didn’t read it) say it is. But any romance of the time has at least a bit of a thriller edge behind it: who a 19^th-century woman marries has much higher stakes than a modern prom date. One wrong choice or twist of fate could leave a woman the property of a man who gambles away their money, beats her, or worse. And any romance that focused on that would count as full-blown horror.

I’d call that the essence of horror, something that it mixes with other genres any way it wants: taking us to a place of helplessness.

Many genres say the villain isn’t complete without a vicious, devastating “gun,” facing down a hero who has a right to his own “gun.” Horror says the villain has a devastating “gun” and the hero has a set of antlers.

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Dark Fantasy – or Just Dark Enough

For me, every hour could be Halloween. My mind never goes far from what makes the stories I love work, and for me the ultimate sweet spot of genre is a kind of dark fantasy adventure. I’ll live and die for other styles too, maybe fired up into straight action or epic fantasy, or dimmed into true horror… but there’s nothing like that shading where we know just how sinister the villain’s essence is and the hero’s just able to turn some of that against him.

A lot of it’s that horror-tinged threat, of course. Give me a villain who leaves no doubt where he’s going to hit you in, and has something original about just how he does it. (Or something classic, done well. We still bring out the Sleepy Hollow Headless Horseman with his good old sword for your neck, and there’s not much that’s cooler.)

Call it a contrast from how easy killing is with a gun in mainstream stories or in real life—all too damnably easy. A story ought to make the most of its specific danger and the suspense around it. A story that embraces how clearly, eerily dangerous the enemy is is better yet. And maybe best of all is when the story can take its time in the plot and in the attacks themselves to let us worry. Give me a mist with ghosts slowly taking shape, or that one perfect moment when a witch proves she doesn’t need fireballs when her victim’s already standing in a spooky thicket that her power can tighten around him.

–And yes, I’ll take witches over ghosts. I blogged about this a few years ago (No Creatures Needed); monsters work, but there’s something about keeping to a character that’s still human that seems more truthful, more flexible. Besides, look at the legions of fey and partly-fallen angels that fill modern fantasy. Their names are as flashy as their powers, but under that the way they lie and seduce and redeem themselves is so human, I’d say storytelling’s embraced that rule in everything but name.

Or put it another way, especially for the hero: Superman or Batman?

That word “hero” is all over fiction, and it deserves to be in one form or another. But which is more appealing: a hero who’s usually untouchable and only fighting to make the world as safe as he is? Or one who’s mortal and already been hurt, and he’s able to take that same pain to the enemy with all of their own tricks? A man who seems like he barely knows what the wrong choice is, or one who always could be on the edge of losing control? (But never does, of course.)

I’d say that once we position a story around who lives and dies, a bit of the “dark” in our heroes is simple honesty. Some idealized cop (or knight, father, priest, or all the rest) might be held up to us as tireless examples of restraint, but we know whoever has to deal with this much danger will have issues. He’ll face the same pressure as his enemy, just struggling to handle it better, and he’ll either use some of their own weapons or work out exactly how to counter them. There’ll be edginess on both sides.

So, that pressure in something I try to keep in mind when I write. The title of Shadowed means not only Paul’s enhanced-sense surveillance but how he’s haunted by the blind spots in his memory. In The High Road I’m trying to give Mark and Angie that sense that even flying can’t get them away from their enemies… and every time a certain owl dives in, or even Rafe with his simple gun finds the worst possible moment to strike…

I wonder, can that mist ever be thick enough?

In two weeks I’ll have more about this marvelous Halloween season: Dark Fantasy and Darker Horror – Common Webs.

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Character Interview with Mark Petrie (THE HIGH ROAD)

(Mark Petrie settles into his chair, moving slowly and tiredly for someone nineteen years old. Then he turns on a friendly smile that pushes the fatigue away from his face.)

Mark: Right off, I’m not sure I can help you here. I guess you heard about my bragging how I’d be the best bicycle courier in Lavine. But, well, I don’t have that job any more.

author: It’s not about that. I wanted to talk about you, and the belt.

Mark: What? I don’t know what you mean.

author: The belt the Dennards had. The one that had you floating over Rosewood Park. The Blades gang hunting down Joe Dennard. And what you’re going to do about it.

Mark: So… you know about all that. Then, maybe you should tell me what you’re going to do. How’d you find out? Are you going to help us? Hell, just give me a straight answer why Angie hasn’t gotten the belt’s magic to work for her. I only found the thing, but it’s her family’s, isn’t it?

author: I’m afraid I’m not here to help you. I’m here because I wanted to get to know you better, and what it’s like being you, before and after this happened.

Mark: Come on, not even a hint? (Mark tries another smile, and then he closes his eyes for a moment to think.) I guess I can’t make you answer. So, ask me what you want. Maybe when we’re done, you’ll want to return the favor.

author: All right. Let’s start with: what part of what’s happening has made the biggest impression on you?

Mark: Good start, I like that. And the answer’s easy, it’s knowing there’s a whole gang of punks out to kill us, and all the plans we started yesterday with are history. That and… under it all, finding out I was right about what happened when we were kids, that Angie’s father didn’t just save her and me from the Blades, he went on to attack them right when he could trigger a gang war. I always thought he must have done it except there was no way to get there in time… and now I know the missing piece is that he flew there! Crazy as it gets, it’s one thing that makes more sense now—too much sense for Angie, that her father really did that after all. Say, I wonder…

author (quickly changing the subject): Sounds like it really bothers you, to see Angie in pain like that.

Mark: Of course it does! We’ve known each other since we were kids, even before that moment with the gang. But that doesn’t matter now; what matters is that she and Dennard get out of the city before Rafe and the rest of the Blades try something else, because the gang will never stop, and you can’t fight something like that. The sooner both of them just disappear, the sooner we can all try to start something like normal lives again.

author: So you think you can get things back to normal?

Mark: They’ll be alive, won’t they? And I know I’ll have to keep looking over my shoulder, but the gang’s not after me, so I hope that’ll die down. It should, right? (Mark pauses, hoping for a hint from the author.) Sorry, I had to try. What’s your next question—work, family, my feelings about flying, or what?

author: I’d like to know about what you were like before this happened. How would you describe yourself?

Mark: You mean yesterday? I’d say… I was trying to figure myself out; that’s what you’re supposed to do when you get out of school, right? So I was working different jobs and scrambling to get shifts when I could, and keeping track of everyone I’d worked with. I’d drove and ridden around town so much I guess I had to try being a bike courier next, until the Blades moved in and blew that away. –And you know, I think I was dating on the same plan, just looking around, and the latest thing got shut down by the same problem. You can’t exactly tell Lucy I was late because I was floating over the city! But… I’d say things had been good, until then.

author: Good? Were they always that way for you?

Mark: Good enough. First with my uncle and aunt, then when my cousin Henry stepped in—

author: First? I think you’re skipping something.

(Mark’s teeth clench, for a moment.)

Mark: You do know a lot.

author: I’m trying to get the whole picture of what it’s like for you.

Mark: Yeah. And I’m trying to come clean here… So yes, my father sold drugs and my mother died from them. He’s been in jail almost all my life; mostly I remember Uncle Stan and Aunt Maria. I don’t know if they even liked kids, but they took me in, and I guess they did the best they could. Then when they split up, my mother’s nephew Henry took over—just in time for me to hit teenager.

author: Ouch.

Mark: I mean, I was grateful for the chance and all, but there were a few days that… But we got through that, and now I’ve got my own tiny place where I can cover the rent—well, almost—and I try to think by now I’ve learned a bit about looking after myself and remembering who I can trust. Now I’ve got all the time I need to figure out what I want to do, I’ve got my friends, I’ve stay in touch with Angie and her father… and I admit, sometimes I’m just trying to impress Henry.

author: (The author can’t resist grinning.) Only Henry?

Mark: I don’t know what you’re trying to say. But of course with all this now, it’s not about impressing anyone any more. Well, maybe convincing the police, but we don’t think they’ve got any kind of protection that’s permanent enough for what Dennard did. So he and Angie have to get far away and make sure they never leave any traces back. I just wish I knew how the Blades found out what he’d done all these years later. Just our kind of luck, right? (Mark pauses, trying to get the author to answer.) Come on, you have to give me something.

author: Since you keep asking, I can tell me this… don’t give up on Angie.

Mark: Don’t give up on… sure, you tell me not to do one thing I’d never do anyway? Is that a way to make me stop trying to make you talk?

author: (says nothing)

Mark: I know when I’m beat. And I guess that’s what this is all about, with the gang—I hate quitting, but I know enough to change the rules in a game I can’t win. And Angie… she’s stubborn, but she really just does the same thing, she finds a way. And if it wasn’t all the Blades, I’d be putting my money on her, even without the belt.

author: Yes, the belt. The thing we haven’t talked much about.

Mark: Because it doesn’t change things. –Oh, sure it changed everything, that Angie’s family had a secret like this, but none of them will tell us a thing about it. And just knowing it’s possible, that somehow, somehow an old belt lets you fly… Or it’s more like, I float on the wind, or I jump, but it’s still defying gravity. I even think it was the magic that let me lift Dennard up when the Blades had hurt him, and run all the way to safety carrying him. And the way that felt… or the moment up there when I forget I’m not sure why I’m not falling, and all I see are the night sky and the streets I’d been biking through laid out as line of lights… a sight like that ought to mean something.

author: Something like what?

Mark: (Mark shakes his head.) What it really means is that I’m in over my head—yes, even if I’m floating above it all. I don’t know how the belt works, or if there are any other impossible things out there about to jump out at us. I just want to send Angie where nobody can find her, and so I can stop thinking what a better person than me could do with a power like this.

author: A better person?

Mark: Yeah. Me, I could make one slip and ruin everything for us, and I’m not going to let that happen. Whatever it takes. –Anyway, I think that’s it. Is there anything else you want to know? Anything else you want to cover before we stop?

author: I think that’s just the note to leave it on.

(Chronology note: this interview would be set in the middle of THE HIGH ROAD’s Chapter Four. Mark has no idea what he’s in for.)

And: this post now has a companion interview, with Angie.

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Interview with Ciara Ballintyne

What drives a writer, and what drives a story?

I’ve been interviewing Ciara Ballintyne—

How do I describe Ciara? She’s the creator of three different fantasy worlds and counting (Seven Circles of Hell, Vows of Blood, and Symphony of Magic), and the two of us have been bouncing her nuggets of writing advice all over the Twitterverse. She likes to tell how she “sings American country music with an Australian accent,” and she’s a financial lawyer who can ride a horse and tell you how to remove an arrow from your arm.

No, scratch all that. She’s a writer.

And someone with a passion like Ciara’s always makes me wonder, just how does she see storytelling, and what do her findings mean for the rest of us?

You say you’d settled on your love of epic fantasy when you were ten, with authors like Robert Jordan and Terry Goodkind. So why epics, what draws you to that kind of story?

Ciara: It’s the battle between good and evil. It’s heroes doing what’s right and what needs to be done, even when it’s not fair. It’s great love and great sacrifice. It’s totally about the good guys always winning.

We see so much misery and pain and suffering and evil in the news it’s downright depressing. I’ve stopped watching or reading as much as I can, because there never seems to be anything I need to know or want to know. Just terrible reminders of how depraved humanity can be. And then I start thinking dark and terrible thoughts indeed – like how hard would it really be to take over the world?

So the villains in epic fantasy are less interesting to me than the heroes. The world is full of villains, and probably heroes too, but the heroes are less visible. So villains are really just a necessary foil for the hero.

[bctt tweet=”The fact that people read and write epic fantasy gives me hope -@CiaraBallintyne”]

The fact that people read and write epic fantasy gives me hope that maybe humanity as a whole isn’t as much a waste of space as the majority of the news might lead you to believe.

I have no time, on the other hand, for so-called ‘gritty fantasy’.

And for your own writing? What kind of feeling or themes do you see in other writers (or maybe missing from them) that you’re driven to capture in your own stories?

Ciara: Heroines with real women’s issues. I don’t mean angsty romance, I’m more alluding to the fact that often women in fantasy are one of two things – useless, or if written strong, they often read like a man in a woman’s skin. So I try to capture a strong woman, who still has all the vulnerabilities of her gender. These are the vast majority of the women I personally know, so the other kinds don’t resonate with me. Also, there are no chain mail bikinis.

Personal villains. Epic fantasy is so often the clash of great good against great evil that it’s a little faceless or its motivations don’t ring true. Evil for evil’s sake and trying to destroy the world…. For what? What does the bad guy do after a triumph that makes everything cease to exist? What’s in it for him? I’ve seen this complaint in a lot of reader forums, too. I think you can still have conflict on a global scale that threatens to ruin everything for everyone while still making it personal to the hero and having villains with genuine motivations. Terry Goodkind did this well, I think. Jagang had global ambitions, but oh man did you hate him on a very visceral level, and the things he did to Richard made it all so very personal.

The last theme is embodied in my tagline – that all of us can be evil or do evil if placed under enough pressure. So when we suffer, our soul cracks, and the more damaged our soul, the more likely we are to lose our way and do bad things. I have a lot of anti-heroes because of this theme – people who have suffered and crossed the line and who are now trying to find their way back, but who are prone to relapse. There are many elements of tragedy in my books because of this theme.

You’ve got a marvelous motto, “The cracks in our souls bleed darkness,” and your works are full of both demons or undead that people can call up and human traitors ready to call them. How do you go about setting up a story where someone stirs up that much trouble?

Ciara: For me it all comes from the characters. A story usually starts from a seed. What would happen if a man fell head over heels in love with a woman sworn to the goddess of death? A line like ‘The tentacles hardly ruin it at all’ (that was Confronting the Demon). What happens when you save the world but everyone still blames you for everything that went wrong? That seed usually comes with a main character, perhaps a love interest, and a villain.

Upping the stakes to create all the trouble you’ve mentioned is done in the nitty gritty. I outline and I use GMC charts (goal, motivation, conflict) to find where all the various characters intersect in their goals, because those are points of conflict. As I write, I add in any inspiration I have along the way. But above all, I live by this rule – make things as hard for the protagonist as you possibly can, and then make them a little harder again.

One question every writer wonders: when you have a vision of storytelling like that, how does it help you get the story written?

Ciara: My tagline embodies the kinds of stories I like to read, and therefore write. My best and most favourite stories are always those most true to that idea. Not sure why it fascinates me so much – maybe because my personality type, INTJs, are said to be susceptible to the lure of becoming an evil mastermind. Though I’d call myself ‘chaotic good’, I can see the potential to go bad bad bad in the right circumstances. A friend even gave me a card once that read ‘She had not yet decided whether to use her power for good or evil’. Circumstance dictates so much for us all.

I have one story idea that at the moment doesn’t tie in strongly to this notion, but the story concept itself, the world and the magic, is novel – but until I find a main conflict that resonates, I suspect it will sit there languishing. It has time though, I have plenty of other ideas to go on with.

Once that overarching idea beds down into a plot outline, though, it’s full steam ahead. The more detailed the outline, the less likely I am to go astray and wander off into story porridge.

Ultimately, it’s being in love with the story that gets it written.

If there’s one thing you simply have to put in a story, what would it be?

Ciara: I’d like to say dragons, but it’s not – as you know, there are no dragons in Confronting the Demon, although I did obliquely add them as part of the world-building in the sequel. It’s not tentacles either – they’re only in The Seven Circles of Hell.

Probably it’s magic. I can’t think of a story I’ve written off-hand with no magic. I regard magic as a very integral part of the epic fantasy genre, which is part of why Game of Thrones is fun but not one of my all-time favourites – not enough magic. I like to give my villains magic because destroying the world or taking it over with purely mundane armies is so boring and tedious – and so is writing that many battles. Magic is fun and opens unexpected doors and plot possibilities, so long as you put limits on it, otherwise it sucks the conflict out of your story. I also like to give my heroes magic, but usually it’s something they never wanted and need to learn to control, so it acts as a major disruptor and source of conflict in their lives.

Magic makes so many opportunities for plot twists and emotionally torturing your characters.

Do you ever think of experimenting with that, trying that out in a different kind of story and seeing how they mix?

Ciara: I’ll be honest and say I’ve never wanted to write anything but epic fantasy and I wouldn’t know how. So far, the only stories in me are epic fantasy. You can see from what we’ve been talking about that my story preferences, my passions, all put me squarely inside that genre. One of my reviews says that I tried too hard to sound ‘epic fantasy’ in Confronting the Demon, but the honest truth is that I’ve been reading almost nothing but epic fantasy for 23 years, I’ve been writing nothing but epic fantasy for almost as long, and on top of that I’m a lawyer with an expansive vocabulary. I don’t try to write that way – I would have to try very hard to not write that way. And no other genre really has that same sound. I would sound pompous in any other genre.

But if you put magic in another genre, that’s paranormal isn’t it? I’ve been called paranormal, by readers in that genre who are apparently unfamiliar with epic fantasy. While I’m thrilled they enjoy the book, it’s definitely not paranormal by my definitions.

All that aside, I do have a potential joint project on the side where I’m co-authoring a kind of sci-fi thriller. It’s paranormal in the sense that it involves werewolf-type elements, but they are not magic-derived, so that’s why I say sci-fi thriller. I’ll be relying on my co-author to keep my pompous wordiness in check, while he’s relying on me to add some vivid imagery to the story.

So now, what’s the next thing you have for us, and how does it show some of that in action?

Ciara: In the Company of the Dead is the next project I expect to release. It is not another instalment in The Seven Circles of Hell series, although there will be more coming in the future. This is an entirely new fantasy in an entirely new world and currently clocks in around 100,000 words. It’s got magic (and dragons), gods, and battles, and politics, and love. There’s a brave hero drowning in grief, and a tragically lonely heroine, set apart by her power over death and feared by everyone. An insecure prince makes trouble for the hero, and an ambitious duke makes trouble for them both, while in the background the black priest of an evil god is manipulating everyone like chess pieces on a board. There are quite a few people who all want different things, so that creates loads of opportunities for conflict. While the evil god could be regarded as the villain, it’s really the prince and the priest, both of whom have very personal motivations. Both the heroine and the hero have flaws and issues in their lives that push them down darker paths.

Sounds definitely dark – and with dragons too, finally!

Thank you again for sharing a little of your vision, Ciara. Knowing you, your hero and heroine will show us all how they’ll have to earn that victory. Can’t wait!