We wander through the mist and the mud, the land brown and desolate. I know in my heart that I’ll never see my Solenn again, that this fairy woman whose hair was glossy, thick and blonde like my dead mother’s, whose eyes were the colour of mossy boulders, whose skin was like silk has tricked me into roaming this part Breton, part fae countryside forever, a spectre trapped between two worlds. There’s no point asking why she did it, enchanting herself to look achingly beautiful, or what made my sense of self-preservation fade as I spent the night in her bower. I could ask her, but she’ll never answer.
                                                              *
We wander through the mist and the mud, the land brown and desolate. This man who I’m sure I’ll be cursed to drag along beside me until time itself gives out won’t even look at me now my back is bent and my skin wrinkled, my lips dry and my gossamer dress ripped to black rags. He won’t admit that it was his lust that made him forget his new wife, that magic had little to do with it. If he asked, I could tell him that my form-shifting spell was a test and he failed it. I could tell him that I am his moral conscience. I could tell him that all he has to do is utter sorry and mean it and he and I will both be free. I could tell him, but he’ll never ask.

The Wildcard is your debut novel. Tell us a bit about how the novel came to be and the journey you went on to publication.

I wrote the first draft of The Wildcard when I was studying professional writing and editing at RMIT University, with a 15 month-old-baby and a day job. I’d write on the train, as a passenger in the car, in my lunch break, or when the baby slept. Except my baby never slept. So I’d push him around the streets in a pram going over plot problems in my head.

For six weeks I obsessed over this story, until the first draft was written. Then almost five years, many more drafts, two job changes, a million re-writes and another baby (who also didn’t sleep) later, I had the final version that ended up published by IFWG.

I’m the sort of writer who writes every day and have been doing so since I was about ten years old. But I didn’t start taking it seriously until I was in my mid-30s. That’s when I enrolled in the writing course, started submitting short stories to magazines, and committed to writing novels with an aim to be published. It took almost ten years to the day of making that decision before I had my first book contract, with IFWG, for The Wildcard.

I guess if there’s a moral of the story it’s that writing and publishing doesn’t necessarily move fast, and hanging in there for the long haul is more important than just about anything. Except writing. You’ve always got to write.

On your website you mention working with libraries/in archives and records/with information management and even as a business corporate writer. Does any of that experience influence your writing? How does it manifest in your debut, The Wildcard (if at all)?

I often find my ‘other’ non-writing career bleeds into my fiction in unexpected ways. During the day, I work with information in a myriad of formats and forms, developing ways to capture and classify it, to manage and store it, to protect it, and most of all, to ensure those who need to access it can find it and use it.

Information is also at the heart of the underground subculture of card players in The Wildcard. This is a world which relies on information to operate—who is playing and in what games, who wins those games, what the bets are, what the bets mean, because they’re never straight-forward monetary amounts. Who owes what to whom and who gets to collect on those debts.

It all comes down to who controls the information, who determines its veracity, and who derives power from doing so. Though I never deliberately drew parallels with my career in information management and governance, it was undoubtedly an influence. The world of The Wildcard is one dealing with the shift from analogue to digital, where the old guard are clinging on against change. Libraries, records and archives have been successfully managing that same shift for some three decades now, so I was on familiar territory when writing such themes in the novel.

You also say you write about dark stuff and the political. Could you elaborate on that a bit? How does it show up in The Wildcard?

I wrote The Wildcard as a fun, exciting, thriller adventure with a twist. I certainly didn’t aim to write anything dark and political.

And yet, the world of these card players is one in which businesses gain advantage by using what is effectively slave labour, politicians trade secrets over the cards, and political movers and shakers bet information and favours between themselves.

Money, power and influence corrupt what was intended to be “only just games.” When Anna, one of the card players in the novel, cries out that nobody should die for a game, she is genuinely shocked it’s reached that point. Yet as Jem, the protagonist, understands, when you get those kind of stakes involved, of course it’s going to end up like that.

So I guess I got a bit dark and political with this story anyway, despite my best intentions.

It seems like you love to read and write across a broad spectrum of genres. Have you mashed them up in The Wildcard? In your published short fiction?

I love a good story, no matter what the genre. And I do tend to mash up genres as suits me. The Wildcard certainly does this, slipping between the cracks of several genres. It is a thriller that is part heist-fiction, except they’re not stealing anything. Part murder mystery, except everyone knows who the killer is. Part dark underworld crime story, except they’re not criminals or gangsters, they’re just card players who want to play games.

It’s a con artist story without the con artists, and owes a great deal to my growing up obsessively watching The Sting and similar movies as a kid. It also draws a lot on my love for speculative fiction, which is where I feel most at home when it comes to genre.

The Wildcard isn’t speculative—it’s set in the real world and everything in it obeys our real world laws of physics and nature. Yet, the subculture the story is set within is entirely fictional and couldn’t realistically operate. It’s a community with its own intricate rules for operation and organisation, which required just as much worldbuilding as anything speculative I’ve ever written. It’s kind of like the world of secret assassins in John Wick, or the underground of Fight Club—both stories ostensibly set in the real world, but which couldn’t actually operate for real. At least, we hope not.

In The Wildcard, Jem (the protagonist) is thrust into a world where people bet on everything through card games. What made you choose to write about card games and gambling? Was it a particular experience or situation that spoke to you?

Honestly, the very first, earliest spark of an idea for this story came from a game of strip poker when I was about 19 and an undergraduate at university. Which sounds more exciting than it really was—the actual strip poker game fizzled into nothing pretty fast as we all chickened out in the first few rounds.

However, that game did leave me thinking about card games with bets other than money and I subsequently wrote a short story about a gathering of card players on a city rooftop making strange, non-monetary, slightly sinister bets on the cards.

Fast forward twenty-odd years and I stumbled over that short story in my archives. Something about the world described and the strange bets still grabbed me. So I decided to rewrite it and see where it took me … which was to this book, The Wildcard.

The book is very different from the early short story, but the Rooftop Games are still in there, as are the characters of Jem and Anna, whose friendship remains the beating heart of the tale.

Speaking of Jem, tell us about him and why the reader will love him (or not). 

Jem is a young man, a uni student, who is smart and kind and resourceful and loyal, and who finds himself trapped in something he has no way of understanding. His girlfriend—ex-girlfriend, as he quickly points out—tricks him into signing for her debt, only it’s not money he ends up owing, it’s his loyalty. Eleven years of it.

Which he has no way of understanding. So in steps his best friend from uni, Anna, who does understand, because these card games are her life … only she lives her life like she plays a game of poker, and has her own issues with her on-again/off-again relationship with a powerful player in this world, and isn’t entirely reliable. Then there’s Crispin, another player Jem meets, a young man who Jem’s increasingly drawn to, but who he isn’t sure he can trust…or if Crispin should trust him, either.

I love Jem, he’s fiercely intelligent in some ways and utterly naïve in others, and he is thrown into this world of twisting rules nobody ever explains, except that the stakes are really high. Which is kind of like real life: you’re left to flounder around trying to figure it out, while everybody else seems to have it together and know what they’re doing.

And I think we’ve all been there at times.

If you were to elevator pitch this book to a reader, how would you sell it to them? Are there other books you’d compare The Wildcard to?

Others have described this book as: “John Wick for card players.” Which I love. It’s not that there are gun-toting assassins shooting each other in this book, but it does have a twisting underworld society with its own strict rules and complicated hierarchy and power games and organisation. And a community which adheres to all these complex rules and policies them without mercy. All mostly hidden from the everyday world of everyone else going about their lives.

What research, if any, did you do for The Wildcard? Do you enjoy this part of the process?

One of the challenges of writing The Wildcard was the fact I was writing a character who is, in many ways, so much smarter than I am. Jem is a mathematician with an interest in applied mathematical computing, doing his PhD at uni. While I failed maths in high school.

As subplots revolve broadly around Jem’s research interests, I really had to figure out what I was talking about. Fortunately, my brother has a background in robotics and is a software/hardware guru, and he put up with my incessant questions, talking me through the current and future directions in the field, and giving me lots of feedback. I also researched various aspects of mathematics and probability online, looking for layman’s explanations I could understand, which was fascinating.

When it came to the card games, I haven’t actually played cards for twenty years. But I do know how the standard games work and I researched online to get the terminology right. I also spent a lot of time watching card-trick buskers in the city and asking them questions, such as how long they’d practiced to develop their skills, and why they first got into playing with cards. They had no idea who I was, but they were always very generous with their time and answers.

In other words, the research for this book was definitely great fun.

What do you love about crime and speculative fiction as genres? Do you have any favourite novels you’d like to share? Why do you love them?

Speculative fiction is my first love. It’s what I grew up reading and where I feel most comfortable. Even when I’m writing “real world” stories, such as The Wildcard, there’s usually some speculative element of them, such as in this case the card playing subculture with its twisting rules and underground organisation and elaborate player hierarchy of ranked power.

But I do love all genres and I love playing with genre when I write. That is, understanding what the genre expectations are, and something of what the audience will bring to the text when they’re reading, and then either supporting or subverting that in order to tell the best story.

As for favourite novels … that’s a massive question to ask a lifelong reader and writer! My all-time favourites are classics, actually—The Count of Monte Cristo and Jane Eyre have long been tied for my favourite ever novels. They both touch on the gothic and the dark, they’re both very subversive novels in their own ways, with complicated, flawed characters and twisting plots, and most of all, they’re rollicking good tales.

As for more modern favourites … that depends on what I’m reading on any given week, but I’ll tell you what I’m currently reading and loving: The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt and The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel.

What’s next for you on the writing horizon?

I have a book coming out next year, a Western with a feminist twist—a stranger rides into a highly authoritarian town and she shakes things right up.

I’m also mid-draft on a couple of other works-in-progress: a speculative fiction novel set amid the urban decay of a near-future city verging on post-literacy, about the ways we use stories to understand ourselves and each other. And a quirky murder mystery set in an academic library overnight, with poisoned books and obsessive librarians, with an unconventional love story at its centre.

Thanks so much for your interview, Kathryn!

You can read more about Kathryn’s novel here with The Wildcard available for purchase in all good eBook and print outlets. It is distributed through Gazelle (UK/Europe), Novella (Australia) and IPG (North America).

Kathryn is a Melbourne writer of speculative and thriller fiction with a taste for blending dark genres in twisting ways. Her short fiction has been published in several anthologies and magazines, including Aurealis and Midnight Echo. When not writing, she works in archives, libraries and records management, and has a couple of small children to keep her busy. The Wildcard is her debut novel.

Here’s the blurb to kickstart the interview:

Nobody likes you when you’re the ugly new kid. A hoodie and a new foster home won’t hide the creeping dread that you are dangerous. So, when you’re offered the chance to meet a grandfather you never knew, you jump on a plane to the bush-covered mountains of New Zealand. 

Slate longs for a home when he finds himself living among an ancient race masquerading as travelling performers. Dispossessed and disillusioned, Slate fears being trapped in a life hiding from the world; one his own father had to run from.

However, the decision to stay or leave is taken from him when he is held captive by hunters on the trail of the ultimate game trophy. Tortured and alone Slate fears that the only way to escape is to become the monster he never wanted to be.

And welcome, Piper!

Tell us a bit about the impetus for Dispossessed.

In some ways, the novel is autobiographical. Not that I am exactly like one of the creatures in the story, but the main setting (the hill), characters (travellers) and even some plot points (being an outsider) parallel my own childhood. When I first decided to write the novel, I was also inspired by the picture books that I was reading to my own children, where monsters were the people and people were the monsters.

Are there any comparison titles you’d compare Dispossessed to?

I definitely drew inspiration from Frankenstein (a product of his environment) as well as Dracula (a hidden danger). But I was also inspired by general fiction aimed at teenagers, stories of regular kids dealing with loss and identity. As an English teacher, I try to keep up with popular titles, which continue to be stories of growing up and finding happiness in yourself.

You’re known as a writer of horror and science fiction, but Dispossessed doesn’t sound like it’s strictly in either genre (the publisher classifies it as young adult urban fantasy). Did you find ways to work elements of horror and/or sci fi into the story? Have you written in the urban fantasy sub-genre before or was this the first time? Did the story come easily too you or was it difficult at first? 

Ironically, Dispossessed was the first thing I ever wrote with an aim to have published, but after writing it I realised that I did not know how to write well enough and so spent the next 10 years learning my craft through short horror. Inspired by Isabel Allende, my short stories include elements of magical realism rather than science fiction, which is why it is considered speculative horror. My first collection The Better Sister, (published by Breach in 2020) contains 9 short stories that explore the trio sister relationship (I am one of three sisters), which is a motif we see repeated throughout literature.

I am used to people discussing my writing as not the horror they expect, but rather a disturbing feminist lens on the horror people inflict on themselves and the people they are supposed to care about. I guess that I feel that real horror is the terrible things that people do to each other so even though this novel is classed as an urban fantasy, it contains the same elements as my short stories, people being cruel to people just because they believe they can get away with it.

What did you find challenging about writing the novel? How did you overcome them?

The main challenge with writing Dispossessed was not ideas, I have hundreds of ideas, and it wasn’t even time as though I work full time, I make time to write. The real challenge was keeping faith in that what I was writing was worth the time and effort. It is not that I was crippled by doubt but rather that I am in love with good writing, and I wanted my novel to be engaging despite any faults. Fortunately, by joining Tauranga Writers in 2010 and Spec Fic NZ shortly after, I became a part of a wider community of writers who were, and continue to be, outstandingly supportive. They give crucial critic and a much need kick when I need it. Without them, especially Lee Murray, I would have never published a single word, let alone a novel that I am so proud of.

You’ve done a lot of work with YoungNZWriters. Tell us a bit about your advocacy work and why it’s important (as well as maybe how people can get involved). Do you think doing so much work with young people helped you write Dispossessed’s young protagonist, Slate? How?

In 2011, a good friend of mine (author Lee Murray) and I were discussing the lack of opportunities to be mentored when we were young. As with many authors we had started writing very young but had never been told that we could be writers. So, right then and there we decided to form Young NZ Writers with the aim of providing mentorship and opportunities to be published for Intermediate and Secondary School students.

10 years later we have had:

·       23 free-to-enter national writing competitions, including intermediate, secondary, and youth laureate novel events, ranging from 375 entries to almost 1000, and involving as many as 236 schools annually.

·       1 national book cover competition for junior artists and 1 regional primary school art and writing competition.

·       19 national youth publications, including one award-winning anthology and two novels.

·       a dedicated website for New Zealand youth writers, receiving around 400 unique hits daily.

·       6 national Youth Day Out workshop events (with up to 258 students in attendance)

·       1 virtual webinar event (2020), which received more than 1000 unique hits daily in its first month of release.

·       4 free teacher professional development workshops (including several teacher scholarships to lower barriers to attendance)

·       numerous school visits and book launch celebrations

·       ongoing mentorship of youth writers

·       more than a thousand book prizes delivered to students over the past decade.

·      numerous graduates of our programme have gone on to study creative writing at tertiary level, becoming writers and poets themselves.

Running YNZW has meant hundreds of hours of rewarding work, and though I have enjoyed every minute of it I cannot say it has helped my writing. In fact, the biggest influencers of my writing have been my children and my students, who continue to inspire me every day.

In past interviews, you’ve mentioned a tendency to write about women to challenge narratives of society that are white male dominated. Slate is a male protagonist. What made you decide to go with a male lead? Are there ways you explore women and feminism and/or dominant narratives of power in the Western world in Dispossessed? 

When I wrote Dispossessed Siren had been my protagonist, but I quickly realised that she was not angry enough at the world nor did she have any specific adversary to overcome. Slate on the other hand, is an amalgamation of the many young men I have taught over the years and I couldn’t see how he could ever be female. So, it was definitely a conscious decision not to have a female protagonist. I was also conscious of falling into the trinity trope of one girl and two guys, but in this case, it is their cousinship that creates the bond between Siren and Slate. A deeper discussion around feminism would take too long, however, if we agree it is the advocacy for equity then this novel is that, the characters’ advocate for their own voices to be heard, to be accepted as who they are, to accept themselves and the lives they choose to live.

What kind of research did you do for the novel? The blurb mentions foster homes, remote bush covered mountains, hunters and travelling performers. Did you do any particular research on these topics? Did any real life experiences of your own come into and/or influence the novel?

I grew up with travellers, people who lived in house trucks and waggons pulled by Clydesdales. My parents’ friends were painters, potters (which included my mother), and  bone carvers; people who lived off the land, lived communally and bartered for goods and services. My dad gave lectures on sustainable living at festivals like Nambassa and Sweetwater and for a brief period of my life I rode my horse 3 kms out of the bush to catch the bus to school.

As for foster homes, both as a child and as a teacher I have known way too many young people who have been in and out of foster care, passed around like an unwanted parcel, a situation that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. It is these young people who keep me grounded as a teacher, reminding me that my priorities are not theirs. To be honest, it is their stories, the ones they are willing to share which are at the core of everything I write, my short horror and the novel Dispossessed.

This is just a bit of fun, but in your bio you mentioned laughing as a kid at horror films and that you still enjoy them now despite the many plot holes. What are some of your fave bad horror films (and chuck in some good ones too if you have some)?

As a teenager, my sister, Toka, and I would stay up late to watch the Sunday Night Horrors and Tales from the Crypt. I loved Elvira so much that I gave my eldest daughter Elvira as her middle name. The ones that stick with me are some written by Ray Bradbury, like the hikers that are turned into soup in a hot tub or the woman who is killed by her creature brooch. As an adult my absolute favourite is Cabin in the Woods. To me these are fun to watch as they are so far from reality, whereas in my own writing, I try to keep it to stories which are possible but not probable.

If I can mention, there are three movies that are touchstones to my own writing. The first is Seven (a movie that my sister Becky is still angry at me for convincing her to watch), the second is Shallow Grave and the third is The Last Supper. Of the three only Seven is classified as (neo-noir psychological thriller) horror, whereas the last two are considered black comedy, but to me they are so scary because they are possible. The terrible things people do to each other can only be horror.

What’s next for you on the writing horizon? Is Dispossessed a standalone or will it have a sequel?

The world I built for Dispossessed has room for other stories, of which I have plotted at least two more. However, I dip in and out of that world and into a completely new genre – space opera – it is a lot of fun but I’m not sure if I’m skilled enough to pull it off yet. In addition to these novels, I have two more collections of short stories that I am slowly putting together, one aimed at teenagers and another one for adults. Unlike my first collection which was a standalone project, the stories for these collections are coming out of various short story competitions that I enter but never win. I figure I only need another year to have enough stories to publish.

Sounds great, Piper! Readers, you can learn more about Dispossessed at the publisher’s website here. The novel will be released in Australia/UK/Europe/NZ 5 April 2021, and North America 15 April 2021 and will be available in all good ebook and print outlets. It is distributed through Gazelle (UK/Europe), Novella (Australia) and IPG (North America).

Piper Mejia is an advocate for New Zealand writers and literature. ­Her short fiction ­has been ­published ­in ­a range of magazines and anthologies, including Room Enough for Two, which appeared in the Sir Julius Vogel Award winning anthology Te Korero Ahi Ka ­(2018).­ A ­collection of her original short stories,­ The Better Sister,­ was published ­by ­Breach ­in 2020. ­In addition to ­writing, ­Piper is a ­founding member of Young­NZ­Writers ­–­ a non profit organisation dedicated ­to providing writing and publishing opportunities for young writers.­ As ­a child,­ Piper ­stayed up ­late laughing at horror films.­ As an adult,­ she has never lost her love for science fiction and horror,­ two genres that continues to ask the question “What if…”

Tell us a bit about Shadows in the Stone.

Shadows tells the story of the intrigues and vast gatherings of the Last Days: the epic saga of the struggle between the true creator of our multiform universe and the demiurge, who is the dark angel known to the Gnostics as the demon god Yaldabaoth … and to us as Jehovah. And it details the journeys and comings together of the dark companions, a fellowship of disparate characters who are destined to lead the apocalyptic battle against the Demiurge who wants to put an end to all that was, is, and will ever be.

Like Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, my story takes place in slightly different parallel universes and different (yet simultaneous) time periods, which are linked to our own. Thus, although Shadows in the Stone is set in a variant version of 15th century Italy, one of its major young protagonists was born in Virginia in 1846.

I’ve written Shadows as an epic on a grand scale. But it is also a coming-of-age novel. As my protagonists seek to fulfill their destinies—as they discover love and loss, power and limitation, angels and demons, venality and honor, jealousy and trust—they must also learn what the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno calls the tragic sense of life.

This may, or may not be of interest, but, as I see it, Shadows is also a novel that pushes the boundaries of the alternate history genre. I’ve tried to create a completely divergent ontology/universe/whatever you might want to call it—a ‘possible world’ in which the objects of religious belief are real and perceivable and their actions consequential. It re-imagines an Italian Renaissance that is permeated by Gnostic doctrines rather than the familiar culture and religion derived by the decisions of the Council of Nicea and extrapolates an entire system of myth and belief presented through the points-of-view of characters who have a bicameral mindset, a different form of consciousness which ‘allows’ them to see and hear the projections of their belief.

So the idea was to create this layered universe, a Renaissance version, so to speak, of Milton’s Paradise Lost. But in my version, Jehovah is a lesser god and a threat to humanity. In my version, the fate of Heaven and Hell and the universe hinges on both spirits and ordinary characters. And we enter this universe through the perspectives of angels such as Gabriel, historical characters such as John Dee, and a young woman who takes a balloon ride over a Civil War battleground and lands in the … underworld.

What books/authors would you compare Shadows in the Stone to? Were there any particular authors or books that influenced and/or inspired you to write Shadows?

Hmm. I’m not idiotic enough to compare Shadows with Paradise Lost. I’ve compared Shadows with Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy regarding his use of parallel universes. But, frankly, it’s difficult to compare Shadows with other novels. I could compare it to The Memory Cathedral, but as that’s one of my own books, I don’t consider that a fair comparison. Let me just get out of jail by saying that Kim Stanley Robinson compared it to Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

It’s easier to list books and/or authors that influenced me to write Shadows. The poem Paradise Lost, of course. And John Dee, Meric Casaubon, and Edward Kelly’s Dr. John Dee’s Action With Spirits: A True & Faithful Relation of What Paffed For Many Yeers Between Dr. John Dee (a Mathematician of Great Fame in Q. Eliz. and King James Their Reignes) and Some Spirits: Tending (had It Succeeded) to a General Alteration of Moft States and Kingdomes in the World. How’s that for a mouthful! And there’s Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind; Luca Landucci and Jodoco del Badia’s A Florentine Diary From 1450 to 1516; The Gnostic Gospels: The Sacred Writings of the Nag Hammadi Library, The Berlin Gnostic Codex and Codex Tchacos; Alice Turner’s The History of Hell; Giulio Lorenzetti’s Venice and Its Lagoon; and I could go on and on, but, mercifully, I won’t …

Shadows in the Stone is subtitled, ‘a book of transformations’ – why? What kind of themes does this novel explore and what interested you about them?

Well, the book is transformative. It is about transformations in terms of the characters and the entire described universe. Human beings gain powers they could have never imagined. Gods lose powers they assumed were everlasting. Long ago, Philip K. Dick gave my publisher a quote for my novel Junction. He wrote “It delightfully deconstructs your notions of time and space and reality, in ways I myself never thought of—but would have liked to.” That’s what I tried to do with Shadows. What Phil said is my version of transformation.

Themes … Well, in a real sense, some of the themes are the same as those of the too many times aforementioned John Milton’s Paradise Lost. It’s about upsetting the universal hierarchy, the War in Heaven; and, in my version, the War on Earth. It’s about treason and loyalty and self-sacrifice. It’s about what might be the apocalyptical Last Days.

But the main theme is about upending all of our traditional ideas about traditional religion and re-imagining the Renaissance as being influenced by the religious ideas that were thrown out of the Christian corpus by the church: that being the writings of the Gnostics. So, I guess the themes are big ones: good and evil, love and loss, destiny, and life and death, which includes the life and death of the (aforementioned <Grin>) universe itself. How’s that for big?

Tell us a bit about your two protagonists Louisa Morgan and Lucian Ben-Hananiah. Why will readers love them/want to follow their journey?

Okay, Louisa is sixteen years old, has green eyes and curly, fly-away red hair; and although she has no fear of heights, she is claustrophobic and afraid of the dark. She has reason to be: her mother locked her in a bedroom closet when Yankee deserters invaded her house; and she broke out of the closet just in time to see her mother raped and murdered. Her father is the captain of a Confederate paddle wheeler that has been commissioned to transfer a barge and a fully-inflated twenty-four foot diameter hydrogen balloon from the Richmond Gas Works to General Langdon at Chuffin’s Bluff. When the ship is attacked and sunk by a Union battery—and when the corpsmen trying to free the balloon are cut down by withering fire—Louisa imagines she sees a crack open in the sky.

She is the only one who manages to escape; and she passes through the crack in the sky—passes from one universe to another—and lands in a dark, icy hell, where she is attacked by creatures who would take her soul.

Louisa is no ordinary young woman. She is called Filia Lucis, the daughter of light; and although she has not yet awakened to her potential, Louisa is none other than the incarnation of Sophia, the mother of the demon god Yaldabaoth, the snake goddess. She has undergone thousands of reincarnations and now she must learn how to access her power and her memory before she is herself destroyed.

Well, I did say the book was about transformations …

Lucian Ben-Hananiah is a Palestinian Jew who is falsely accused of murder, simony, and usury and sold into slavery. He escapes to Constantinople, studies occult philosophy and hermeneutics in Greece, and then makes his way to Milan where he lives in the streets and survives by teaching the children of Milanese burghers, craftsmen, and the lower clergy natural science, mathematics, and philosophy. The doctor/magician Pico Della Mirandola rescues him from a mob that is going to hang him for necromancy.

Lucian is tall, skinny, frail, swarthy skinned, awkward, and delicately built; and he looks much older than his seventeen years. He has a flattened nose, piercing eyes, and a white scar that encircles his throat like a necklace: he has been touched by a dark angel; and like Louisa, he witnessed the murder of his mother and father.

Maestro Mirandola considers him to have special talents, which he, Mirandola, wants to acquire. The angel Gabriel has chosen Lucian and has given him his seal, which contains a terrible power. And so Lucian part of the Dark Companions who protect and assist Louisa, the Daughter of Light.

You ask why readers will love Louisa and Lucian and follow their journey. I could blather on about how they are fully-realized characters and that I’ve maintained narrative drive to hold my readers, but that’s not really saying anything. If readers care about my characters, it’s because they are real. They are real people in unreal situations. They are, at base, like us; and if I done my job, if I’ve brought them to life as people rather than cardboard cutouts, then you’ll care about them and worry about them as they fight for their very lives and for the fate of the universe.

What brought you back to Renaissance Italy and history mixed with magic in Shadows in the Stone?

I’ve never really left the Renaissance world of The Memory Cathedral; I spent so much time dreaming that universe into my version of historical ‘reality’ that I didn’t surprise myself when the idea of Shadows In the Stone began to invade my dreams. I had intended to write another novel about Leonardo and Machiavelli, but I think it was a confluence of images and ideas that set me off into the fantastical: I had been reading and researching the alchemist John Dee while I was also rereading Paradise Lost.

Often an image will excite me, will focus my mind, will preoccupy me, which is what happened when I was reading Paradise Lost. I could not get two illustrations by John Martin (“Pandemonium” and “Satan Presiding at the Infernal Council”) out of my mind. I had to ‘bring them back to life’. I had to write a novel around them. And so magic and the Italian Renaissance and a God’s eye perspective of the greatest cosmic battle began to form the gauzy outline of this novel.

How much research did you do for this particular novel? It seems like you like to use primary sources where you can, and research extensively. Can you tell us a bit about your process? (cheeky extra question: In another life do you think you’d have been an archaeologist or something else related to the province of the historian?)

Well, yes, you got that in one. I find that primary sources are invaluable; they contain those interesting ‘nuggets’. They are where I often find the odd details that can bring a scene to life, that can add to the ‘layering’ of reality that enables the readers to suspend their disbelief and join the author’s fictive dream. But those ‘nuggets’ can also be found in secondary sources.

For instance, I found a Wikipedia entry entitled “Vacuum Airship”, which described the Italian monk Francesco Lana de Terzi’s proposal (in 1670) for “a hypothetical airship that is evacuated rather than filled with a lighter-than-air gas such as hydrogen or helium.” Of course, the problem is that (and I’m mashing together some quotes here) with a near-vacuum inside the airbag, the atmospheric pressure would exert enormous forces on the airbag, causing it to collapse if not supported. And any structure strong enough to withstand the forces would invariably weigh the vacuum airship down and exceed the total lift capacity of the airship, preventing flight. To make my balloon fly, I’d need what engineers wryly refer to as ‘unobtanium’. And all that gave me the idea of using captured souls as the ‘skin’ of a Renaissance airship.

Okay, my process. Yes, it involves extensive research, research to get into the novel—to begin the novel—and ongoing research as I come upon unexpected plot twists and different scene changes. Research often leads to plot twists, which, in turn, add more of those ‘layers’ I described earlier. I’ve got to know my characters—what they see, how they think. How they go about their daily routines. I’ve got to know my characters and their environment just as I know my own. And once I’ve gotten to that ‘knowing’ point, I begin to hear the characters whispering in my head. I begin to hear snatches of dialogue and visualize scenes; and it is then that the characters almost demand that I take their dictation. And so it begins … at least that’s the way it happens for me.

Ah, yes, your question of another life. Well, when I was a kid, I was certain that I’d become an Egyptian archaeologist. Go figure, hey?

What draws you to historical fiction in general, and especially the historical meeting the speculative?

Well, I think that writing a historical novel is very much like writing science fiction. I’ve discussed this with other writers, and they all agree. In both forms of fiction, the place becomes a major character. The specific tools needed to write science fiction—extrapolating information, conveying information skillfully without “narrative lumps”—give the science fiction writer an edge when writing about the past. I have found the past to be as “alien” as the future; and in order to bring it to life—to make it “alive”, I extrapolate every detail and utilize all the skills of a futurist and science fiction writer. I figure that Renaissance Italy is as alien a world as Philip K.  Dick’s Blade Runner.

I guess what draws me to historical fiction is the same ‘carrot’ that draws me to write science fiction. To bring the past—or the future—to life. But with historical fiction, my goal is to get beyond what so often passes as costume drama, to depict the ‘alienness’ of the historical world, to recreate how people might have really thought and felt. I don’t know if that answers the question, but it’s as close as I can get to it.

You’re a Jewish atheist (according to Wikipedia). You’re also a New York expat. How has your heritage influenced your work? What impact did your sense of place and/or culture have (if any) on Shadows in the Stone?

There is no one-to-one relationship between my sense of place and culture on Shadows. However, one could, of course, dig deeper. In a larger, general sense, a writer’s experience must influence their work to some degree, as plot and theme involve a myriad of choices. My choice of a subject such as Jehovah, my selection of an ostensibly religious subject/theme, could be interpreted as the author’s processing or rejection of the ‘faith of our fathers’. Who the hell knows? I certainly don’t. I suppose I must conclude that anything is possible!

Your wikipedia page mentions you came to writing after getting involved with a local gang and then having a near death hospital experience. You also served for a bit in the military. Have those experiences influenced Shadows in the Stone? Your other writing? How?

There is so much information on the WWW. And so much misinformation. For a time I was three years younger in Germany than I was in the USA. I did indeed have a near-death hospital experience, many of the details of which I described in my short story “Camps” about a young man dying in a hospital and dreaming his nurse’s memories of a concentration camp. I didn’t serve in the military, as I was draft rejected because of the extent of my surgeries. I did, however, attend a military school for a time: as I had a tendency to be what we might call a bit wild, I was given the option of reform school or military school. But that’s another story of days long, long ago.

However, after I recovered from some two months in hospital, I was determined to become a writer. I remember keeping Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast on the wheeled table beside the bed; and, although I remember not being able to conceive what it might be like to be free of agonizing pain, I would pat the book as if it was a talisman. After I recovered, I figured that I’d died in a way and was now free, free to take chances, to live without a net. Whether that was a wise choice or not, I’m still not sure.

Did those experiences influence Shadows? A novel about life, death, God, the Devil, and eternity? Maybe. In some sense. But probably not directly. I’d have to be a Jungian psychologist to figure it out. But those experiences certainly influenced other stories and novels, such as my mainstream novel Counting Coup.

What’s next on the writing horizon? Something historical or something completely different?

I’ve always got multiple projects percolating. A series of chapter books targeted at 7-9 year olds called The House of Time. A novel called Being Gatsby, which is, I suppose, by definition historical. Several anthologies. A short story collection for Centipede Press’ Masters of Science Fiction Series is forthcoming. I’m writing a book called How to Write Alternate History: a Handbook on the Craft, Art, and History of … Counterfactual Fiction for IFWG Publishing. A poetry chapbook is also in the pipeline, as are a number of short stories for various publishers.

And I still wonder every morning if today will be the day that a new idea will carry me completely off my planned road map.

Wow! There’s so much interesting content in this interview and I have to give a big shout-out to Jack for sharing so much with us. You can learn more about Shadows in the Stone at the publisher website here. Shadows in the Stone is available in all good ebook and print outlets. It is distributed through Gazelle (UK/Europe), Novella (Australia) and IPG (North America).

Jack Dann has written or edited over seventy-five books, including the international bestsellers The Memory Cathedral, The Rebel, The Silent, Bad Medicine, and The Man Who Melted. His work has been compared to Jorge Luis Borges, Roald Dahl, Lewis Carroll, Castaneda, Ray Bradbury, J. G. Ballard, Mark Twain, and Philip K. Dick. Library Journal called Dann “… a true poet who can create pictures with a few perfect words,” Best Sellers said that “Jack Dann is a mind-warlock whose magicks will confound, disorient, shock, and delight,” and bestselling author Morgan Llwelyn called his novel The Memory Cathedral “a book to cherish, a validation of the novelist’s art and fully worthy of its extraordinary subject. I can only say Bravo!” 

Jack is a recipient of the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award (twice), the Australian Aurealis Award (three times), the Chronos Award, the Darrell Award for Best Mid-South Novel, the Ditmar Award (five times), the Peter McNamara Achievement Award and also the Peter McNamara Convenors’ Award for Excellence, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the Premios Gilgames de Narrativa Fantastica award. He has also been honored by the Mark Twain Society (Esteemed Knight). He is the co-editor, with Janeen Webb, of Dreaming Down-Under, which won the World Fantasy Award, and the editor of the sequel Dreaming Again. He is the managing director of PS Australia, and his latest anthology Dreaming in the Dark is the first volume in the new line: it won the World Fantasy Award in 2017. Dr. Dann is also an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow in the School of Communication and Arts at the University of Queensland.

Cary J. Lenehan is a former trades assistant, soldier, public servant, cab driver, truck driver, game designer, fishmonger, horticulturalist and university tutor—among other things. His hobbies include collecting and reading books (the non-fiction are Dewey decimalised), Tasmanian native plants (particularly the edible ones), medieval re-creation and gaming. Over the years he has taught people how to use everything from shortswords to rocket launchers. He met his wife at an SF Convention while cosplaying and they have not looked back. He was born in Sydney before marrying and moving to the Snowy Mountains where they started their family. They moved to Tasmania for the warmer winters and are not likely to ever leave it. Looking out of the window beside Cary’s computer is a sweeping view of Mount Wellington/Kunanyi and its range. Welcome, Cary, as we celebrate the publication of your latest Warriors of Vhast novel, Gathering the Strands!

Gathering the Strands is Book 5 of The Warriors of Vhast series. Just in case new readers are jumping in, tell us a bit about Vhast, what the series is about and why fantasy readers will love it.

It is an epic fantasy covering a broad sweep of story with parts revealed as the books progress. It is a classic good versus evil with a twist that becomes apparent over time. I have been a poet and a story-teller for forty years and this shows. A warning to those who are just starting out with Vhast, do not ignore the poems at the start of each book. They are, in some ways, clues, and in others, summaries. I like leaving clues and Easter eggs.

I have characters from diverse ethnic, social, and other backgrounds to reflect real life and I try and allow those characters to react as realistically as I can in reaction to the situations that they face. At the same time I try and avoid being too shackled to the tropes. I think that readers (at least from feedback) enjoy strong female characters with agency and my slightly different approach to the genre.

Are there comparable fantasy titles similar to your series for readers to know where you fit in the genre? What fantasy do you love to read?

In the way it moves from being (without giving too much away) straight fantasy to science fiction it shares elements with Darkover. In the broad sweep of history (and attention to culture) it shares elements with Tolkien. It shows roots running back to the authors that influenced my childhood reading: H. Rider Haggard (She, King Solomon’s Mines) and the Russians. More people survive than in Game of Thrones.

My time is occupied with writing and I rarely get a chance to read now, but I have a continued addiction to Pratchett.

From Gathering the Strands, I can tell you put a lot of thought into world-building. Why do you think world-building is so important in fantasy writing and what does it bring to a story? What new aspects of worldbuilding (if any) did you need to think about for Book Five?

I’ve actually just taught a world-building class to some YA writers this week for the local Writer’s Centre and this is how I got into writing, sharing a panel with George R R Martin many years ago and he told me to put my gaming to use and start writing. I did.

I do not believe that you can write a story without building a world first. You may decide to take the one we live in and just tweak it a bit. That is OK. We call that Urban Fantasy. You may do what I have done and build something with a history going back 15,000 years. That is OK as well. You may create a 100-acre wood and populate it with a child and group of curiously animate stuffed animals. That works.

The more detail you have in your world (although not necessarily put into the stories) the easier it is to get the reader to suspend disbelief and to accept the world and reality you present them with. I have stories where people are being moved from a prison to a ship in the middle of the night. The readers do not need to know that they are being kept quiet to avoid disturbing the rich folk they pass, but I know that. All the readers need is that they are being kept quiet. I, however, have a map and know who owns the houses along the way. Making noise will cause major issues for you.

If you have done the world-building before you get to writing you do not need to break the flow of thought to stop and work something out. You open the right file and have these things.

Gathering the Strands, like your previous books, features many switching points of view to tell the story. Why was it important to have so many main characters and what were some of the advantages and challenges of doing so?

Remember what I said about Russian influences? Tolstoy, in particular, was fond of the big cast. I don’t hold with the ‘great man’ idea of history. Everything happens as a result of a dedicated group changing things and bringing them to fruition. Because no one character is Superman or Wonder Woman ot a ‘Mary Sue’ who gets the skills they need when they need them, each has their limitations, and needs to rely on others to fill the gaps. Besides, each person has a different view of what is happening and has their own thoughts on the matter.

Astrid has a certain directness to her. Theodora is a 120-year old teenager. Rani comes from a sheltered high-caste background. Thord is swept up in the achievement of his dreams. Hulagu is following a prophecy. Bianca is feeling secure in having a family after growing up as an orphan. Stefan, well he is an a bit of a state of shock with all of the things he keeps coming up to (two wives he loves, killing a dragon, becoming a general) when he just left home looking for a bit more than leather-working. Each brings different things to the story.

What was the hardest part of writing Gathering the Strands? What was the easiest?

It may get people hating me for saying this, but it has not been hard (apart from fussing over words in the re-writes and keeping the calendar straight). It’s been fun and a continued pleasure. I enjoyed it immensely. I knew my characters. I set them up with situations and then I let the pen do the talking and sat back and watched where they went.

You’ve had a very eclectic life, with a range of interests and jobs. How are these experiences reflected in your Warriors of Vhast series?

Everything comes into play. I can judge how hard a shot is with a bow, as I have used enough of them. From working for a Coroner, I know how bodies come apart. I never look at a scene myself without considering the plants and what belongs there. People react in predictably unpredictable ways (and I have the background in sociology, statistics, and maths for that).

Even with my magic I can think of spells as having the effect of rockets, of grenades etc. By the way, according to my gaming system I can tell you how each spell works and some I wanted to use I could not as the character lacked the strength to pull it off. I had to find another work-around (one of the big examples here is in the death of a dragon in an earlier book).

You have a Patreon where you share with Patrons content from behind the scenes of your writing and your world. Do you want to talk a bit about how Patreon has worked for you as an author, what having a community brings to your writing life and what people can expect if they join up to become your Patron?

My Patreon gives me a chance to express my skills even more than just the writing. For instance, if a food gets mentioned in the books or stories, I have cooked it. Some recipes and foods are made up by me from bush foods of my local area and from a sense of ‘this should work’ and I play with it until it does. I publish these at my Patreon. So you can eat the foods as approved by the author.

That is also where I put the maps to the settlements, the drawings and descriptions of the plants and the details of the animals so that a gamer can use them to play an RPG in my world (and the rules for that are starting to come out as well). We even have a Tarot deck (my wife makes the cards) to go with what I started making up for the books.

I made a conscious decision, when I started writing, to avoid including endless back stories and side stories. It is actually why I started doing Patreon to give an outlet to these. So far I have been putting stories (along with maps, recipes, drawings etc) this since April 2016. So far 39 stories have come out. Some have just been one part (an average is 6,000 words). Most have been 2-part and some three (and so a lot longer).

The stories go back 10,000 years into the history of Vhast and, while they are not essential to reading the books, provide a lot more context. Some of the more recent stories give background to the main characters, talking about their birth and things that happened in their childhood. Others tell what else is happening in Vhast. The Kingdom of Freehold is virtually ignored in the books, although it has one of the larger armies in The Land. Its story is told in Patreon.

The Land, where the books are largely set, is just one continent on a world that is larger than Terra and with far more ocean. Other stories are set on other continents and islands and say what is happening there, often concurrent with the books. Sometimes a reference in the books will mean more if you have read a story. Although none are essential reading, I like having Easter eggs for my Patreon subscribers to give them an extra ‘moment’ in their reading. They seem to like this.

Patreon works well for me and lets me do things (like go to Conventions) that I would not otherwise be able to do. You can read more about my Patron levels here.

You’ve developed games in the past. How did they prepare you for writing novels? Is there much crossover?

It does not matter if you are writing a game, a story, a poem, or a book. It is all story-telling. It is just the canvas that changes. I developed by first two games before crowd-funding. One was a set of miniatures rules (with examples from an early version of Vhast). It was designed to be a 1:10 scale (1 miniature is 10 people) and able to cover almost any situation from the earliest history with no magic to full-on fantasy. We play tested rules for da Vinci’s weapons, for a Dragon worth as much as a single army, for mages, for priests, for the different potential armies of Vhast. It worked with simple rules summarised on a laminated card. We made our price-point low because we knew our production costs and did not want to rip people off. People thought it could not be any good because we were charging so little.

The other was a Cyber-punk game set in the excellent near future of Marianne de Pierres Nylon Angel trilogy. Among others Steve Jackson loved it. Between them they also nearly sent us broke. I had fantastic critical reviews and received an offer to lecture in games design at a University, but financially we lacked the capital to exploit what we had. Nylon Angel has rules for grenades that get Special Forces soldiers excited for being just like the real thing, it has rules for drugs based on research from MIMS, it has animals and plants based on my years spent in the bush (and yes I have met most Australian snakes, and eaten a few, run into a crocodile when I dived in a river, seen a White Pointer close up without a cage, can crack a whip, can survive off the plants around me, and all of the other Australian tropes). I am still very happy with it.

Vhast is now a game as well as books and stories and one day it will come out as an RPG. Still not sure how, but we will probably start dribbling it out through Patreon before doing a crowd-funding release.

Do you have a favourite/fun/interesting teaser passage from Gathering the Strands you’d like to share with readers?

Brother Joachim

Looking ahead of me I can see clumps of spearmen, being joined now by some of the archers from among those annoying riders. It looks like they have spread out into small units to avoid being easily surrounded. They are showing more planning than I thought that they would. I had expected that my holding the chariots back would provoke a charge.

I wonder if those heretic heavy cavalry are anywhere around. I cannot see them yet, but they probably will not appear until I commit my forces. I need to wrap them up quickly, but there are probably no more that twenty or thirty of them and Brother Job has orders to hold his fire with the weapons of the Archangels and take them out of the battle first when they finally appear.

He looked around the battlefield. It is getting to be time for us to attack. There is no need to try for fancy tactics here. We will just sweep this rabble aside with the chariots and then head for the village quickly. It is probably being abandoned as my army moves up and this lot are trying to buy time for them.

Some, probably, will not even stand when I charge, but will ride back to their families and try and help them flee. I cannot have that as they will warn the next village and they will warn the one after that. I will give them no mercy. The men must die, and the women and children pay for their heresy by being made slaves for seven generations.

Our traders, always with one of the Flails of God in their numbers, have told me that this creek bed dips, but that chariots can just ride through it and then easily, but slowly ascend up the other side to the top of the ridge. This is what we will do. Once we are there we will continue straight on and encircle them.

Brother Joachim called out his orders and the chariots began to form up into their new positions as they moved. The light chariots shifted to the flanks and the four-horse chariots moved up into an extended line that ran far to the left and right two deep.

There are only two short paces between them. The second rank line up behind the gaps of the first. The books, written down from the words of the Archangels themselves, say that this is the way to sweep aside a rabble on foot. They halted. We are just out of range of the missiles of the infantry who stand there ahead of us.

He looked around and raised his hand with the loud-speaking token and pronounced a blessing on them all before calling his army to advance at the walk. He had scarce done so when he noticed that his crossbowman had fallen, and his loader was trying to untie him and take his place.

My chariot has already been hit by several of those tiny arrows that the Khitan like to use at long range as we move forward. Now one can be seen in the eye of the man. A pity, the man has been with me for several years and was a devout believer who has even helped at the higher ceremonies when he was called to.

The Khitan arrows have been harassing my people, and it seems my chariot in particular, for some time and my man has just been unlucky. Still, that luck is going to change. They moved closer and, using his magic, he called first for the chariots to go to a trot and then, once they were all moving at that speed, for the charge.

A roar erupts from my people as they rush forward into the ordained attack. It was a roar so loud that it prevented even his amplified voice from being heard when, looking ahead, he finally was able to see what was now unfolding there ahead of their advance.

When can we expect Book Six in the Vhast series and what do you think your next project might be after Vhast?

Following the Braid is with IFWG, my publisher and the release date is up to them. Book 7 is written, but I want to rewrite it again. I do this a lot. The last book is The Fall of the Adversaries and I am indecisive over the last 30 or so pages. In other words it is nearly done.

There is no ‘after Vhast’. I have 34 stories promised to Patreon so far. Of these only eight are not complete at present (although I will keep re-writing until stories are released). I look forward to finishing them and, when the books are finished hopefully there will be a demand for the stories to be collected and come out. They only last on Patreon for a year or so before I take them down; so many people have yet to read the early ones. Because I am writing fantasy, I can do sub-genre stories. I have written horror, romance, a western, crime, all set in the one world.

Vhast is a whole world and I am just scratching the surface. There are continents where I have yet to set stories (and I am trying to avoid giving a spoiler on stories that I know I will write soon). This needs to be remedied, but in many cases this needs more time for world-building (an addictive exercise). I can bring out a cook book, Atlases, and books on the plants and animals. There is so much that can continue on …

Thanks so much for your responses today, Cary! Readers, you can read more about Gathering the Strands at the publisher’s website with the book available for purchase in all good ebook and print outlets. It is distributed through Gazelle (UK/Europe), Novella (Australia) and IPG (North America). You can also sign up to Cary’s Patreon here or visit his website here.

Barbara Howe lives on the third rock from the sun, while her imagination travels the universe and beyond. Born in the US (North Carolina), she spent most of her adult life in New Jersey, working in the software industry, on projects ranging from low-level kernel ports to multi-million-dollar financial applications. She moved to New Zealand in 2009, gained dual citizenship, and now works as a software developer in the movie industry. She lives in Wellington, in a house overflowing with books and jigsaw puzzles, and wishes she had more time time to spend universe hopping.

What appeals to you about writing and reading stories that are rooted in fantasy and magic? 

Fantasy is fun! There’s the escapism factor, certainly, and the only limits are in what we can imagine. Another selling point for me is that magic scrambles the pecking order. Physical strength and privileged position can be forced to give way to other qualities, like intelligence and compassion.

Your bio mentions you are a software developer in the film industry. How have your experiences in this field affected your writing (if at all). You also mention a house of games and jigsaw puzzles. Do either of these feature in your writing or influence it?

My background in software development certainly has had an influence on my writing. The notable characteristic of the society in the Reforging series is its dependence on four ancient magical entities: the Earth, Air, Fire, and Water Offices. These Offices are essentially rule-based AIs, driven by magic rather than electronics. Each one works through the witch or wizard heading the respective magic guild. The Fire Office is responsible for the country’s defences, the Water Office oversees the judicial system, etc.

Like all software, the Offices are buggy. Also like many legacy systems, they are well past their use-by date, and impossible to maintain with the original designers long gone. This, by the way, is the central issue driving the plot arc for the full series: the Offices can’t be simply repaired; they must be stripped down and rebuilt from scratch. That’s the Reforging—rebuilding these magical entities, rather than recreating some physical object like a sword—and the process is quite dangerous and disruptive.

As far as working in the film industry goes, perhaps it has made me think a bit more about providing details about the setting, rather than just dropping the characters onto an empty stage or in front of a virtual green screen. I have to work at grounding the action in time and space, so that the reader doesn’t get frustrated wondering where they are.

And puzzles … I’ve been honing my puzzle solving skills since childhood. After a tough day at work, solving software puzzles, I’ll often pick up a crossword or sudoku to relax. And aren’t plots puzzles? A writer has to keep the big picture in mind all the time, while still drilling down into the details of making sure the pieces fit together. Working out a complicated plot is an interesting challenge.

It seems to me that the Reforging series is about issues such as sexism, classism, power imbalance and ordinary people having the moral courage to do the right thing. Would you agree and why were these important for you to explore? 

Yes, absolutely. I didn’t set out to explore those weighty issues when I started writing these books; I simply had what I thought was an entertaining story. But as I dove into this world and explored its society, these issues kept popping up. I couldn’t make the world real enough to be believable and engaging without including them.

One of the principles I attempt to live by is that there is inherent worth and dignity in every human being. All of these “isms” blind us to that divine spark in others across the divide. I can’t yet imagine a world without those issues, but I can imagine worlds where we work harder at mitigating their impacts. I can imagine I’ve done something worthwhile, if my little bit helps move us in that direction.

You describe yourself in your website bio as an ‘unabashed liberal feminist.’ Can you talk a bit about what that term means to you and how it influences your work and/or characters in the Reforging series?

That’s a lot to unpack in a few lines! For me, the main points are that we all—men and women both—should be allowed to develop into our full selves, even if we don’t fit nicely into preconceived roles, and we should be judged on the choices we make, not on our starting conditions: skin colour, gender, wealthy or poor parents, etc. My characters push back when pushed into roles they’re not fit for. My female characters don’t wait to be rescued; they rescue themselves, and sometimes the men in their lives, too. And my women support other women; female friendships matter to them.

On that note (and because I am also an unabashed feminist who likes to support female writers who write gender well), could you recommend some other great female fantasy books you’ve read recently and let us know why we should all seek them out?

Always happy to share good books. Here are three, all with likeable female protagonists who act decisively in a crisis:

The Silence of Medair, by Australian author Andrea K Höst, is an emotionally gripping story dealing with failure, loss, and reconciliation. This is satisfying both as a fast-moving, engrossing story and as a terrific character study.

The Lord of Stariel, by New Zealand author A. J. Lancaster, is the first book in a four-part series combining fairy tale magic, mystery, family drama, and sweet romance.

American author Arkady Martine’s Hugo-winning novel, A Memory Called Empire, is science fiction rather than fantasy, but I loved it. Most of the characters are women, and they’re all terrific. Space opera at its best.

What was the impetus for the Reforging series?

My daughter is an auditory learner. She reads well on her own, but gets more out of a story from listening to someone else read it. She’s now in her mid-twenties, once more living at home, and I still read to her.

In her teens, we read quite a bit of juvenile and young adult fiction, and we’ve always been eager to find new stories about intelligent, proactive, strong-minded women. Some of the books we found were terrific. Some others made me think, I can do better than this. If this drivel can get published, what’s stopping me? I got frustrated with grimdark dystopias, and female characters who—if they appeared at all—were either ditzes, doormats, or window dressing. Plot-induced stupidity is one of my pet peeves, and I’ve read way too many books featuring supposedly smart women making asinine choices.

In 2010, when my daughter was 14, we had a run of bad luck in our book choices. We had just moved to New Zealand, I was still looking for a job, and I had more free time than I’d had in years. I started the Reforging series then, because I wanted  a story with a female protagonist whose behaviour wouldn’t make me cringe, or blush, or roll my eyes. I was writing for my daughter, but I was writing for myself, too, because I wanted a story I could read to her with as much enthusiasm as she put into listening.

Besides, I had a good story to tell.

Tell us a bit more about The Wordsmith, which is Book 4 in the Reforging series. Where did the idea for the novel start?

First, let me describe how The Wordsmith fits into the overall series. (Mild spoilers here.) I’ve already mentioned the Offices. The five-book arc involves gathering the people needed to reforge them, and the impacts that effort has on both those individuals and the society they’re a part of. 

The first three books introduce the Fire and Water Guilds, and deal with reforging the Water Office—the one in charge of a judicial system that had dispensed mostly injustice. The upheavals that come as a result are still playing out in The Wordsmith. With commoners finally getting a fair go in the courts, the nobility have woken up to the fact that they’re losing privilege. They’re furious, and threatening civil war with the magic guilds. In trying to keep the situation under control, the magic guilds use the new judicial system to force the nobles to honour the terms of their ancient royal charters, which set some minimum requirements of fairness to the people the nobles rule over.

That’s where Irene van Gelder, my Wordsmith, comes in. She’s a young widow with two small children, struggling to make ends meet with a job that’s breaking her health. She’s also an air witch with an unusual talent. The primary manifestation is that she sees written words in different colours depending on the intent of the writer. She can pick out lies, errors, and heightened emotional states with a single glance at a page.

The inspiration for this came at least 20 years ago, when I read an article on synaesthesia, a real-world neurological phenomenon that integrates different senses in unusual ways. I was fascinated by the subject; it seemed to me like a magical talent, and I’ve been playing with ways to incorporate it into stories ever since. Irene’s talent is an extrapolation of one common form, where the synaesthete sees individual letters on a page in different colours.

Her talent is useful to her as a writer or editor, but it isn’t readily demonstrable, and that makes her life very difficult. Her own guild, the Air Guild, don’t believe in her talent. All they know is that she can’t sing, or talk to another person at a distance, or follow the wind with her mind’s eye, or do anything a normal air witch can do. It’s not that she veers out of her swim lane—it’s more like she’s  not even in the same pool. It’s no wonder, really, that the Air Guild call her a fraud, or that some of them bully her, especially when the head of her guild won’t stand up for her.

When the Fire Guild recruit Irene to search for the often intentionally hidden or partially destroyed charters, she jumps at the opportunity. Her discoveries prove instrumental in swinging a court case against a duchess who is also an air witch, and the entire Air Guild turns on her. She takes her children and runs to safety with the Fire Guild, but with the Fire and Air Guilds already snarling at each other, her life gets even more complicated.

Tell us more about the protagonists of The Wordsmith. What do you think will appeal to readers about them and their journey? What was the hardest part of writing this novel? What was the easiest? 

Irene is a new character, but the two protagonists from the earlier books, Lucinda and Duncan, also appear in supporting roles, following two other intertwined plot threads. At the beginning, Irene is far from the centre of action, but is gradually drawn in closer until the action revolves around her.

The easiest parts of writing this were the interactions Lucinda and Duncan have with each other and other recurring characters. I’ve lived with them in my head for so long (more than a decade) that they are old friends, and I know exactly how they will behave.

Irene is by nature quiet and self-effacing. The hardest part was to work her into the early chapters in such a way that Lucinda and Duncan didn’t overpower her story. Because that story, about an under-appreciated woman discovering what she’s capable of, is one many of us can appreciate, particularly anyone who has ever been mansplained to or passed over for a promotion.

Do you have a favourite/intriguing passage you’d like to share with this blog to tease readers of The Wordsmith?

Here, Irene is demonstrating her talent for Warlock Quicksilver, the country’s pre-eminent wizard, who is pre-disposed to appreciate her. Oliver is her late husband, who is believed to have written a well-received book of spells.

Quicksilver turned to a bookmarked page, then laid the book and paper on the table.

“Can you read either?”

“No, sir.”

“Have you ever seen this book?”

“No, sir. The alphabet is new to me.”

“The script is Devanagari; the language is Hindi. The manuscript is a translation of this page. What can you tell me about them?”

“There are inaccuracies in the original: here, and here. The translator fixed one, here, but not the other, and introduced several other mistakes accidentally, here, here, and here. Further, the entire third paragraph is a deliberate mistranslation. For some reason, the translator lied.”

He almost purred. “You could be a very useful young lady. Very useful indeed.”

The spell book appeared in his hand, and he paged through it. “It is obvious now why Oliver’s writing was so polished. Many authors would benefit from an editor of such calibre. This exquisite little book of spells, for instance—did you help him with the wording?”

Never, ever lie to a warlock. She hesitated a trifle too long. He looked up, expression intent. There was nothing sensible she could say. He repeated the question.

Panic crept into her voice. “No, sir, I didn’t help with the wording.”

His eyes were hard. “You are evading the question. Did you write these spells?”

“Yes, sir,” she whispered, and cowered as Warlock Quicksilver slammed the book down onto the table.

“How dare you perpetrate this monstrous fraud!”

What’s next for you on the writing horizon?

I’ve already handed The Forge, the last book in the series, over to the publisher, and have two new projects I’ve been bouncing between. One is a romance, a prequel to the Reforging series. The other is set in an unrelated fantasy universe with different rules. This one will be a familiar fairy tale recast as a Mary Stewart-style romantic suspense fantasy. 

Thanks so much for sharing with us today, Barbara! Readers, if you’re keen to learn more about The Wordsmith, check out the blurb and purchase information below:

Irene van Gelder’s drudge job is killing her, but how can she earn a living as an air witch when her own guild calls her a fraud?

The Fire Warlock doesn’t ask for her credentials, but with tensions rising between the Fire and Air Guilds, proving her value to him is not a safe move. With the White Duchess and her son intent on revenge, what defences can a failure as an air witch muster? All she has is words. Will that be enough to save herself, and Frankland?

You can read more about the book at the publisher’s website with The Wordsmith available for purchase in all good ebook and print outlets. It is distributed through Gazelle (UK/Europe), Novella (Australia) and IPG (North America).

Shirley Jackson award-winner Kaaron Warren published her first short story in 1993 and has had fiction in print every year since. She was recently given the Peter McNamara Lifetime Achievement Award and was Guest of Honour at World Fantasy 2018, Stokercon 2019 and Geysercon 2019. Kaaron was a Fellow at the Museum for Australian Democracy, where she researched prime ministers, artists and serial killers. She’s judged the World Fantasy Awards and the Shirley Jackson Awards.

She has published five multi-award winning novels (Slights, Walking the Tree, Mistification, The Grief Hole and Tide of Stone) and seven short story collections, including the multi-award winning Through Splintered Walls. She has won the ACT Writers and Publishers Award four times and twice been awarded the Canberra Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Her most recent novella, Into Bones Like Oil (Meerkat Press), was shortlisted for a Shirley Jackson Award and the Bram Stoker Award, winning the Aurealis Award.

In the ‘about’ section of your website, you say you wrote a novel at 14 called ‘skin deep’ which you need to type up. What sort of story was it and have the ideas in it shown up elsewhere in your writing? How? 

I have typed it up now! This story was hugely inspired by The Outsiders, and followed a very similar story line. Two groups in suburban Melbourne battle it out. I moved beyond this kind of realist fiction into horror and science fiction, for a number of reasons, but I’m still looking at the way we treat each other and the way we judge each other at face value. 

What appeals to you about speculative fiction, particularly horror, as a genre? What do you think makes you keep coming back to that horror space?

I love that anything is possible in spec fic. In horror, this means I can explore the afterlife and ghosts, think about what happens to us when we die, and look at crime and punishment in a new way. I keep coming back to horror partly out of habit now! But it’s also because that’s where a story tends to lead me. I’m not sure why, but I’ve always been fascinated with the darker side of life, and I’m not a fan of contrived happy endings, so I think that’s a part of it.

In November 2020, Screen Canberra announced development funding to adapt your excellent novel, The Grief Hole, into a film. Are you able to say anything about that project and where it’s at? What’s your role in the collaboration and how are you finding the experience? 

This is such an exciting adventure! Josh Koske approached me a couple of years ago, having read The Grief Hole. He saw the filmic possibilities in it and wanted to have a go at making that happen. He’s the main scriptwriter, with me helping as far as elements of character and plot. I’m really loving the experience. It makes me look at my work from a different angle and really forces me to re-examine why I did the things I did on the page. Once you start to collaborate, the work changes, as does the story. We’re having lots of cool discussions about motivations and that sort of thing. I’ll keep you posted on developments! 

You’ve lived in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and even Fiji for three years (aside: what were you doing there and please tell me more). How does place come into your story-telling (whether through theme, setting or something else)?  

Place is absolutely vital. You absorb the atmosphere of a place you’re in, even if it’s only a visit. The sounds, the smells, the sights. All of that imbues my work. In Fiji, the air is different, and the colours. We were there as part of the diplomatic corps, an amazing experience in itself. I got the chance to make friends with people from all over the world, and to connect with Fijians as well. I explored the streets and shops of Suva, ate food I’d never eaten before, had amazing conversations with fascinating people. It was an unforgettable experience. 

And now let’s talk about Slights. Here’s the blurb for those unfamiliar with this novel:

When Stevie Searle almost dies in the accident that kills her mother, she doesn’t see a shining path or a golden light. Instead, she sees everyone she’s ever slighted, waiting to take a piece of her in a cold, dark room. The person whose place she took in the queue, the schoolmate she cheated off, the bus driver she didn’t pay? All waiting. All wanting to take their revenge when she finally crosses over.

Stevie is fascinated by the dark room so she sends herself there again.

And again.

And Again.

Slights is a re-print of one of your novels (first published 2009) and features a pretty disturbing protagonist. Can you tell us a bit about how the idea for that novel started and how you created Stevie (and coped with being inside her head haha). 

It was a really intense six months or so, living in Stevie’s head. The first draft was written with a grant for the ACT Government, so I was at home writing solidly for that time. I’d never done that before (apart from a couple of weeks here and there) and I think that total focus helped the intensity of the character.  

Stevie was really created out of the concept that hell is a place where everyone you’ve ever slighted is waiting to take a piece of you. I can’t remember how I came up with that idea! But I wrote it as a short story first, then realised I wanted to tell the story of all of those slighted people, so it needed to be a longer work. Once I started to tell their stories, Stevie began to emerge. Each slight helped build her as a person. 

I wrote the book three or four times. The final version I completed in Fiji, when my kids were little. So I had that weird situation where I was in Stevie’s head during school hours, then slipping back into my own real life when the kids were home! 

Is there a favourite/interesting passage from Slights you could share to tease readers?

I do have lots of favourite bits! There are scary bits and funny bits and sad bits. Part of what I wanted to create around Stevie was a sense of loneliness, even though she has people who care about her.

SO here’s a funny little bit. It’s an essay Stevie writes at school!

The Sacking of Troy

by S. Searle
There are great things afoot in the workings of mankind. Only one man can save the day and it is always a strong man, a good man, a man who shows up on time to work and does not take sickies. A man who has only one girlfriend at a time and does not keep three women waiting while he performs nebulous duties. This man is always honest. This man does not steal food from his employer.

This man is not Troy.

Troy got his job at Woolworths because his big brother worked there for years and was now head manager of the cigarette booth.

Brad had an attendance record which was being noticed in high circles, and he never blew his nose on his sleeve. He was popular because he was going places and there was always a chance he would give out free cigarettes when the floor manager took her tea break.

Brad looked good in his short red coat. He had a smile which was quite believable and a laugh which didn’t shock anybody.

There was no reason to think his little brother Troy would be any different.

Brad knew, but he was under the control of his mother, who insisted Troy be given a chance. She could not see Troy in the light everyone else saw him in, because he was charming and he gave her kisses still, although he was fifteen.

The Starting of Troy caused a stir of anticipation. The customers were no cause for gossip – only the ones who liked to catch the cashiers out in errors. They received slow, painstaking service. The best gossip to be had was about each other.

Troy arrived with sunglasses on, greasy hair, sandshoes. Brad received a word of warning; had he not drilled the dress-code into his brother?

Troy wore scuffed school shoes the next day and declared that his ignorance of the difference between a Naval orange and a Valencia would remain just that.

He began to feel besieged the next day when he did not properly pack a customer’s bags, and he lashed out. Brad was called to speak with him.

“Troy, you must be careful. The people here are very unforgiving. They don’t like temper or any other emotion. Perhaps if you were in Paris things would be different, because the French are a passionate race. But you are here, where we are dispassionate, and you must abide by the laws, however unfair or invasive you find them.”

On his next shift, Troy was discovered having sex with Diana, who had gone out the back for a cigarette and been surprised.

“What can I say? He’s built like a horse. I could hardly resist.”

With that, Troy was sacked.

THE END

What’s next on the writing horizon?  

I’ve had some good story sales this year so far, but not sure they are all announced yet! I’ve written stories set in a failed world, stories set 5000 metres in the sky, stories set in mythical pubs about cursed brooches. All out this year, I hope! 

I’ve got the next two re-releases coming from IFWG. Walking the Tree and Mistification. Really looking forward to having those out in the world again! 

Thanks so much for sharing with us today, Kaaron! You can read more about the book at the publisher’s website with Slights available for purchase in all good ebook and print outlets. It is distributed through Gazelle (UK/Europe), Novella (Australia) and IPG (North America).

Venero Armanno is the author of ten critically acclaimed novels, including his recent book Burning Down (2017). His other well-known books include Black Mountain (2012), The Dirty Beat (2007) and Candle Life (2006). Further back, Veny’s novel Firehead was shortlisted in the 1999 Queensland Premier’s Literary Award; in 2002 The Volcano won the award with Best Fiction Book of the Year. His work has gone on to be published in the United States, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Holland, Israel and South Korea.

His latest novel, The Crying Forest, enters the realm of speculative fiction. Agata Rosso, a once-mighty yet now prematurely aged European witch, believes that the special gifts in a young girl named Lía Munro can restore youth and vitality both to herself and her bedridden husband. She sets a deadly plan in motion to capture and use Lía-but will the girl have enough power to protect herself, plus the father she loves so much?

Without further ado, welcome Venero!

On your Wikipedia page, it states you wrote 10 unpublished novels over 14 years before getting picked up. What made you keep going and do you have any advice for other writer hopefuls still struggling to get published? Have any of those unpublished novels been picked up since?

So yes, that’s true, I did write a lot of novels before having something published. I was young enough in those days to think I could do anything, so I launched in when I was 17/18 and started writing a horror vampire novel that I was sure would bring me instant fortune and fame. When that didn’t happen I realised I knew less than zero and that there was a long learning road ahead if I was to take this thing called writing seriously. However, still being young, I thought I could teach myself what I needed to know and do this by writing non-stop.

That part of the idea was good, but I set myself the formidable task of writing a novel a year until one got published. A novel a year doesn’t leave room for a lot of rewriting but that was part of my ignorance – I’d dash off 80 to 100,000 words, over the course of a calendar year, spend a week or two polishing what I had, then would start sending the ms off to every publisher I could find in the telephone book. This was in the late 70s into the end of the 80s, so there was no Internet, everything was hard copy on a typewriter with lots of time spent at photocopy machines and in post offices. Anyway, once I’d finish a ms I’d start on the next. I seemed to have no problem with new ideas, though maybe the ideas weren’t all that good. I wrote in any number of genres.

Once I got through my Stephen King phase, I had my Fitzgerald, Greene, Hemingway, Cheever… you understand what I mean. Rejections came thick and fast but to specifically answer your question here, what kept me going was a lot of fear – I dreaded being either stuck in an office job or spending the rest of my life working as a bricklayer’s labourer, which is what I had to do in my teens and twenties. Probably a more important point is that some rejections would have a nice note attached to it: “We can’t publish this ms but we like your writing so please send us your next book.” I recall I had lots of messages like that, so if an aspiring writer needs any greater encouragement, then they’re probably not all that serious about their craft and should think about something else. 

So any advice I might have for aspiring writers is along the lines of what I wrote above – keep persisting, keep trying. Don’t worry about time. Don’t want it all straight away. You might take years to find your true voice, something that’s original and new and completely yours. That’s what publishers are after – a new voice. You’ve got a lot to learn so give yourself every opportunity to learn it. Early success only comes to a few, and that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong in taking a longer road – because you want a writing career that is a very long road anyway, with strong foundations. That takes time and effort and every shortcut short-changes you.

Most of my unpublished mss deserve every bit of their non-publication, though I have a soft spot for the first one. It’s about a Sicilian-migrant-vampire who has an underground lair at a university and who kills students by night. In the end he gets bored with his life (i.e. I got bored with the book) and so commits suicide. Now, I’ve never read a book about a Sicilian-migrant-vampire who commits suicide. Somebody should publish it! Of the other books two did get published but in new forms. These mss became Strange Rain and My Beautiful Friend, two books that did very well, but they changed a hell of a lot from the drafts I’d first written in the 80s.

In addition to writing, you’re also a teacher at the University of QLD. How does teaching affect and inform your writing work and vice versa, particularly with your latest, The Crying Forest? 

I won’t complain because I love my job and I’m very happy to have it, but of course it certainly takes up most of my time – meaning I have less time to write. This could be a good thing actually; maybe it’s better to be forced to slow down, though I would have liked to have written more books over the last twenty years that I’ve been at UQ. Having said that, though, teaching creative writing forces me to engage more with the form – to really think about what I’m doing and how. It also gives me a direct look at readers i.e. students who love reading. Why do they read? What are they reading? Which books do they avoid like the plague? All of this is really interesting for a writer. It’s true that a teacher can learn more from their students than vice versa.

You’ve written novels for adults, young adults and children, as well as several short stories. How do you think trying out these different modes has shaped your writing, particularly your current novel?

I think writing short stories is one of the best ways possible to find your voice and to learn and improve your craft. The end of my little tale above about all my unpublished mss is that around 1988 someone said to me, “You spend a year or two writing entire novels that don’t get published… why don’t you try short stories instead?” It was a lightbulb moment. Yes indeed. Why not write short stories and send them out and get rejected (or maybe one day published) even faster? So then I embarked on a campaign of always having stories in the post to editors at whatever magazines or competitions I could find. That was my real start, when stories started being accepted and I started winning some prizes. My first published book was in fact a collection of these stories, Jumping at the Moon, not a novel.

This sort of writing experience does affect all my novels, including The Crying Forest. How? I think because it gives you the tools for shaping sub-plots into their own discreet arcs. The difference is that these sub-plots (which are stories in themselves really) have to feed into the main plot of course. However short story writing skills help you/me actually make those sub-plots so much stronger (I hope!).

You were born in Brisbane to Sicilian parents. Does that background influence your writing in any way, particularly with The Crying Forest? If so, how?

Yes, all my writing is informed by the migrant experience. Of my parents coming to this country when they were young (they met here and married) and me being a child of a father and mother who didn’t understand much about their new country at all. I’d be a completely different writer without these experiences, or, more likely, not a writer at all. It’s the outsider syndrome—growing up I never quite felt part of Australia even though I was born here. The family home was very Sicilian and the family and friend network was also almost purely Sicilian. So in a way it was as if I was new to this country as well: home was one world, outside of that was something completely different, and I really didn’t fit in. So as something of an outsider one becomes very observational: of everything around and also of the past, if I can put it that way.

Many of my books are based on Sicilian history and research, and The Crying Forest ultimately came together in the same way – I was researching something completely different and accidently came across myths and legends that weren’t Sicilian (but from the north, in Friuli) but that had resonances in Sicily. These legends had to do with witches and werewolves, and so my research deepened, leading me to think, well, Australia is a country of migrants, what if these legends had travelled across the seas with the migrant diaspora? That was really part of The Crying Forest’s germinal idea—and where I live, in an area that was once completely rural and has its own forest lands, felt like the perfect place to take up these mythologies.

Are there particular themes and ideas you return to again and again in your work? Why do you think that is? Do you revisit such ideas and themes in The Crying Forest?

As you might have gathered by now, recurring themes have to do with the migrant diaspora, leading to themes of loss and belonging—and, even, of the longing for the old world left behind. I’ve always felt sort of floating between two cultures – not quite part of one or the other, so that forces me back to writing inside these themes.

You’ve written in a diverse range of genres. What sort of books and authors inspire you and why? Are there stories you’d compare The Crying Forest to?

I think The Crying Forest is a sort of literary supernatural tale, in that characters’ emotions, their relationships and personal baggage really drive the plot—as well as a lot of “real” history. So I’d consider books in the same ballpark might be The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova and even The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. But that’s setting myself a very high bar!  A writer/reviewer I was just speaking to said the book reminded him very much of the writing my Peter Straub, and I can see that – If You Could See Me Now and Ghost Story in particular.

Writers who have had a huge impact on me I’ve already mentioned: from Stephen King to Graham Greene, F Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway. I’d add Truman Capote, John Cheever, Raymond Carver, Oscar Hijuelos, Ray Bradbury (who I had the immense pleasure of meeting once, in a Parisian bookstore) and Haruki Murakami. In fact at present I’ve just been rereading The Illustrated Man, The Golden Apples of the Sun, The Martian Chronicles, plus The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and South of the Border, West of the Sun. I love going back to my literary heroes.

Tell us more about The Crying Forest. What inspired the novel?

In 2001, newly-married and with my wife Nic pregnant with our first (and only) child, we travelled from our rundown inner-city Queenslander-style home to see an even more rundown old house in an outer-west suburb I’d never even heard of. We went because we’d seen a picture of a house in the real estate pages of a newspaper, and I’d never seen anything like it. The place was like some Gothic old English country manor that a louche rock star would buy and fill with drugs, booze and groupies.

We discovered the place was located on land that once had been part of immense hectares of farming property. Built in 1932, it sits at the top of a small hill and was (and still is) nicely isolated. With all good sense thrown aside we bought the property and moved in.

Some people, tradespeople for instance, don’t like to be alone in our home; we however find it inviting and perfectly peaceful. It became the “red house”—Rosso House—of The Crying Forest. And that forest itself is nearby; overgrown trails are where I walk my dog almost every day. So, for that matter, is the wider fictional region the book calls “Grandview”.

So in terms of inspiring the novel, other than a very spooky home, an isolated property and endless state forest, another thing that informed this book were the wild packs of escaped dogs in our region, howling at night and raising hell, plus the proliferation of deer—an introduced species not native to the region. Dogs and deer wage their own battles. It all just seemed to cry out for a novel about the supernatural, and I’d wanted to write this book for years, even though it was well outside of my usual genres.

What was the hardest part of writing The Crying Forest? What was the easiest? Did you have to do any research?

All novels are hard, in their own way, even the ones that come pouring out. The Crying Forest did come pouring out… I wrote the first draft longhand in a series of notebooks, then revised and revised endlessly on my computer. The hardest part was finding the time to write. Work at the University can be very intense, and the more senior I become the less extra time I have. So there were a lot of 4am mornings, doing as much as I could before getting ready to head off by six or so.

There was plenty of research for this book, a process I always like very much. While reading texts about several things I wanted the book to touch on I came across information about Italian witches: this interested me because when I was growing up my parents would take me to our local Sicilian witch if I needed medical attention, not a traditional doctor. I remember this crazy old crone treating me for neck aches (which she made worse) and a broken finger (thanks to her, it’s still crooked). My parents used to talk about the way this woman’s potions could cure all manner of illnesses, and that she was more knowledgeable than any fool-doctor with medical training. Remembering her, I read more about witches (and werewolves) in Sicilian and Italian mythology, and in particular I discovered the Benandanti: 

“The benandanti (Good Walkers) were members of an agrarian visionary tradition in the Friuli district of Northeastern Italy during the 16th and 17th centuries. The benandanti claimed to travel out of their bodies while asleep to struggle against malevolent witches (malandanti) in order to ensure good crops for the season to come. Between 1575 and 1675, in the midst of the Early Modern witch trials, a number of benandanti were accused of being heretics or witches under the Roman Inquisition.” (from Wikipedia)

It really didn’t take too much imagination to put all these disparate elements together: house, forest, Italian folklore.

What do you think’s different about The Crying Forest to your other books? 

I’ve only published in the supernatural once before, with My Beautiful Friend in about 1995. So The Crying Forest is a real departure into witches and werewolves, and people with special powers.

What’s next on the writing horizon for you?

I’ve got two novels on the go which are more my own traditional sorts of works, but I’ve got more of The Crying Forest planned, if circumstances allow me to go that far. I’m not one for sequels but I feel like there are more stories to come from these characters, some really fascinating threads that I’d love to explore. The book is mainly set in Brisbane, Australia, however many of the characters are European—I’m excited to follow them into places like Rome, Sicily, Barcelona and Paris… you know what the writer’s imagination is like!

Thanks so much for your considered answers Venero! I’m pumped to read your novel now! For you readers out there keen too, you can read more about the novel here (and watch a cool book trailer). The Crying Forest is available for purchase in all good ebook and print outlets. It is distributed through Gazelle (UK/Europe), Novella (Australia) and IPG (North America).

From the blurb of Midnight in the Chapel of Love:

Jonny Trotter has spent the last fifteen years running from tragic memories of the country town where he grew up but now that his father has died, he can run no more. Returning to Waterwich for the funeral with his partner Sloane, Jonny must confront old resentments, his estranged best friends, a strange, veiled woman the locals call the White Widow and the mystery surrounding the fate of his first love.

A morbid and reckless city girl, Jessica Grzelak lived to push the limits and explore the shadows and no-one has seen her since the night she and Jonny went looking for the Chapel. Rumoured to be found in the woods outside Waterwich, mentioned in playground rhymes about local lovebirds Billy and Poppy and their killing spree in 1964, the Chapel is said to be an ancient, sacred place that can only be entered by lovers, a test that can only be passed if their bond is pure and true. Before he can move on to a future with Sloane, Jonny must first face the terrible truth of his past and if he can’t bring it out into the light at last, it might just pull him and everything he loves down into the dark, forever.

So now you’ve had a small intro to Matthew’s writing and life, let the interview begin …

In your bio, you mention a lot of different creative pursuits in your life, including filmography, photography, and musicianship. How do these interests influence your writing?

The more you see and do, the more experience you can pull from for your writing. I’m not a photographer, but spending so much time with a shutterbug (Meg Wright aka Red Wallflower Photography) has increased my interest in the craft and our exploration of abandoned locations has given me enough ideas for a novel on the subject; my love of song, and especially my time in bands, has proved a rich seam of inspiration for stories about music and musicians. I’m into many different artistic disciplines and they all feed into each other to give me a deep pool of experiences, and experience combined with imagination is all you really need to get those ideas flowing.

What’s your favourite short story that you’ve written and why?

That perfect tale I’m yet to write and probably never will. An artist spends their life striving to reach an ideal they can never truly articulate, but through that struggle, great work may be produced.

What speaks to you about the horror genre? Any other horror writers you’d recommend to readers?

I could write an essay or two answering that first question! In a nutshell: I love the freedom, the transgression, the imagination, the universality – not everyone’s been a spy or a detective or a selfish college lecturer who’s unnaturally appealing to beautiful young students, but everyone’s been afraid. And I guess I’ve always just been a bit morbid, because dark subject matter has always appealed to me.

My answer to the second question could just go on and on (and on), but in an effort to be succinct, I’ll limit myself to one old favourite, one modern master, and one new voice. Ramsey Campbell has been a big influence on me since my teenage years, and he’s essential reading for anyone with an interest in sophisticated chills; Laird Barron is an author I follow closely, and his blend of cosmic horror, hardboiled crime, and mind-bending weirdness is unparalleled; and Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth are terrifically enjoyable novels packed with necromancy, mordant humour, and unfettered imagination.

How important is the writing community to you? What kinds of support have you found on your writing journey?

I’m fairly solitary and insular as far as my craft goes – I don’t have a writing group or beta readers or anything like that. I sit in a room and I write and rewrite, and usually the editor of an anthology I’ve submitted to is the first person to set eyes on a story after myself. But I have made a lot of friends in the writing community, both locally and globally, and they’ve proven to be very supportive and helpful – decent, dependable, authentic people. And why wouldn’t they be? Our whole thing is making people up and seeing through their eyes, which requires a certain amount of sensitivity and empathy. Some writers do turn out to be raging arseholes, but the ones I know personally are thoughtful and caring individuals – especially the horror authors.

On the day I’m writing this, I went out for lunch with fellow Adelaide scribe Chris Mason and talked writing and writers for over four hours; Steve Dillon, who published my collection If Only Tonight We Could Sleep, has been a notably helpful figure in my nascent career and through him I’ve met a lot of delightful fellow authors; Scarlett R. Algee, the JournalStone editor who picked up Midnight in the Chapel of Love for publication, has proved an enthusiastic and understanding collaborator. I’m lucky to know these folk and all the rest, and I’m looking forward to meeting many more.

You’ve written and published a lot of short stories, including publishing a short story collection. Midnight in the Chapel of Love is your first novel. Was it hard getting into that novel writing space and do you have any tips for people trying to make the jump from short stories to novel writing?

It wasn’t hard at all, as I’ve been writing novels since I was in high school! This is merely the most recent I’ve written and the first one to actually be published. So as far as tips go, I’d say: if you plan on being a novelist, read widely and start writing novels as soon as you feel up to the challenge… and understand that your first few attempts will be terrible but highly educational. Then, just write and write until you finally crack it. I’ve written eight novels so far and half of them are unpublishable by my current standards. But I learned so much from writing them, and I’ll always love them for that.

Tell us more about Midnight in the Chapel of Love. What inspired the novel?

The initial inspiration came from listening to Something for Kate’s “The Fireball at the End of Everything” as I drove between Port Pirie and Adelaide one afternoon. There’s a line about a passenger putting their feet up on the dashboard and that got me thinking about a couple driving between the city and the country in the summer sun. I asked myself why they were doing this and decided they were heading back for a funeral, that the guy had grown up there and had a past he’d been fleeing for many years. Everything else fell into place after that over the course of the next six months or so, and then the writing began.

How do you think Midnight in the Chapel of Love is different to other books out there? (Give us your elevator pitch.)

“Midnight in the Chapel of Love takes the Australian Gothic by the nape of the neck and drives it deep into the dark, fathomless depths of cosmic awe!”

I don’t really know how this book is different, other than that it was written by me and other books are not, but I do feel it has something substantial to offer. There’s a lot going on under the surface of what appears to be a fairly straightforward mystery, and while the implications are chilling to contemplate, there’s more here than a simple horror story. I’m not trying to distance myself from genre at all – this is just one tale I wanted to tell a certain way, and while it’s intended to keep you guessing and make you shudder, it also turned out to be an examination of the small town/big city divide, variations of Australian masculinity, the intricacies of romantic love, and so much more.

Some friends recently asked me to describe the book and I said, “It’s like Picnic at Hanging Rock with more sex and drugs.” That’s a crassly simplistic and reductive answer, but they laughed and wanted to know more, so I guess that works, too!

What was the hardest part of writing your novel? What was the easiest? Did you have to do any research?

I suppose the hardest part was getting the plot elements to click seamlessly together. There are certain questions that plagued me throughout the writing and only found solid answers as I neared the end. The easiest part would have to be the actual writing – once I knew what I was doing and where I was headed, I could just kick into gear and let the words flow.

Research has become a very important part of my process, because I can’t bear the thought of someone more knowledgeable on a subject than me reading my work and thinking, “Pfft, that’s not how it is.” In this case, I had to look into a great many things – chart hits of the year 2000, post-WWII Polish history, what kind of radio a car in 1964 Australia would have, and so on. I read books on the Narungga people and Australian cave systems. I used to be a lazy researcher, but the advent of the internet means there is no excuse for that. Don’t be a Donny Didn’t-Look – Google that shit or check out a book, and make sure you’re getting it right.

What’s next on the writing horizon for you?

I’m trying to decide which of the short stories clamouring for my attention need to be written next and I’m plotting out two future novels, both of which are proving more complicated than I’d expected! I’m always looking for new opportunities to get my work out there in front of people, new ways to raise my profile.

Thanks for a fascinating interview, Matthew!

More about Midnight in the Chapel of Love …

Matthew R. Davis, winner of two 2019 Australian Shadows Awards, follows the well-received release of his first horror collection If Only Tonight We Could Sleep with the publication of his first novel, Midnight in the Chapel of Love, by JournalStone on January 29, 2021. The book is available for preorders through the publisher’s website with more options available soon. You can find Matthew at his own website here.

Well for starters, the red-gold leaf was as big as my face. Which is why it was kind of bad it stuck to my forehead, nose, mouth, chin like glue. I wrestled with it, and you’d think I’d have won easy-peasy on account of it being a tender sugar maple versus a boy, but it wouldn’t budge. I think I had a panic attack – certainly, it was hard to breathe, and I soon hated the taste of crisp bitterness and dirt mixing with saliva. I bashed into other trees in the national park (I’d gone for a picnic and wandered off), seeing blue stars behind my lids, none of which helped either. Falling in a heap, crying and a-shivering seemed the only thing to do.

That’s when the coven found me.

I should have expected something of that nature, living in New Orleans and all, but usually they’re fake new agey types rather than, you know, actual witches. These ones prodded, the wood bristles of their broom poking into my arm and chest as they whispered.

That’s when one drew my hand in hers, kissed the inside of my palm (I later learnt that meant ownership, that she’d sealed me as personal property). “What’s your name, kid?”

“Troy,” I said, “and I’m thirteen, which is old enough to fight if I have to and young enough my parents will come find me if I’m not home by dark.”

“Why is there a leaf on your face, Troy,” she snickered. “I bet you’re no crash-hot fighter with that obstructing your vision and your parents won’t want a leaf-boy for a son neither.”

She had a point. “It won’t come off,” I said, looking at my feet.

“No,” she said, way too calmly. “We’re trying a new enchantment. Good to see it worked. It’s more interesting than rats, rabbits, or a pumpkin, don’t you think?”

“If it’s all the same to you, miss, I preferred being a boy, and I’m getting mighty dizzy and sick in this darkness. I’d be much obliged if you’d help a kid out.”

She placed a cool finger to my leaf, muttered an incantation, carefully ripped the waxy cells so I had eye and mouth holes. “Will that suffice?” The other witches cackled around her.

“As I said, miss, I was really hoping to get back to straight homo sapien.”

“But you see, I need a new familiar, and you crashed right into our circle.”

That’s how I came to live in a forest looking like a freak with Betty McLean, leaving school, friends and family behind.