Since I wanted to offer some more content for my reader's, I've decided to try some Q&As with some of my favorite authors. Here's the first, which Amanda and Michael were gracious enough to have with me. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
Bookwyrm: What
made you both decide to sit down and start writing the world of
Ismae? What made you say to yourselves "this is what I want to
do"?
Amanda:
I express myself better through the written word than spoken—I kind
of ramble when I talk—and I’ve always wanted to write fiction
professionally. I love creating characters, who become a weird kind
of friends, and seeing what they do in different situations. When I
worked corporate, I wrote just about everything non-fiction—marketing
copy, news articles, training manuals—but never had the chance to
write what I wanted to write. So when I left corporate life, we
started work on the Ismae stories. We’d been developing the
characters and world since 2004 when we ran a persistent gaming world
online, so we already had a huge world bible, which made it easy to
get started.
Michael:
It never occurred to me to ask that. I’ve been involved with
writing and world and character building in one form or another most
of my life. Were it not for Amanda and the rise of self-publishing I
doubt I would have ever taken the initiative to write novels. It’s
not an opportunity I foresaw in my life.
Bookwyrm: Is
there a genre you don't write in that you are a fan of, that you
might consider writing in one day? If so, which one?
Amanda:
Honestly, I don’t read much fantasy. I love watching fantasy TV and
movies and RPG gaming, but fantasy books rarely resonate with me. I
lean toward horror, science fiction, mysteries, and magical realism.
I have several half-started stories in those genres in my notebook,
but I’m focused on finishing the Ismae novels before I dive into
those.
Michael:
I don’t plan on writing in genres other than SFF, but I fully
expect you’ll see my love of other genres reflected in our Ismae
stories as we progress.
Bookwyrm: Who
are some of your favorite writers? Either inspirational or just for
entertainment?
Amanda:
Wow, that could be a really long list, so I’ll just pick my top
five that I read for both entertainment and inspiration: Rex Stout,
Raymond Chandler, Patricia Highsmith, Kurt Vonnegut, and Haruki
Murakami. Stout can build a character in just one sentence—and it’d
be tough to find a better developed relationship than Archie and
Nero. Chandler just has this amazing way with the language. Sometimes
he goes a little overboard but it’s always a treat. Highsmith has
this wonderful understanding of and distaste for human nature that
makes all her novels slightly chilling. Vonnegut has a much more
affectionate understanding of human nature and presents it with a
wonderful sadness and smirk. And Murakami just looks at everything
sideways—I never know where he’s going with a story and I’ve
learned it’s no use guessing because I’ll always be wrong.
(Honorable mentions: John Irving, Bret Easton Ellis, Phillip K. Dick,
Jim Thompson, George Alec Effinger, Shirley Jackson, Walter Mosely,
Fritz Leiber, Scott Sigler, David Wong, William Goldman, Chuck
Palahniuk, Hunter S. Thompson, Agatha Christie, Stephen King, Martin
Cruz Smith, and I know I’m leaving out tons of others.)
Michael:
I am terrible at listing “favorites”—it quickly becomes a long
ramble, or I experience analysis paralysis. Here are some of my
favorites people might not expect, but have had a large influence on
me: Hermann Hesse, WB Yeats, Henry Miller, Gabriel Garcia Marquez,
Carlos Fuentes, William S Burroughs, Richard Matheson, Rex Stout, PD
James, Colin Dexter, Carson McCullers, Paulo Bacigalupi, George Alec
Effinger, Joseph Conrad, Iain M Banks, Agatha Christie, CS Forester,
Ambrose Bierce, Walter Mosley, Raymond Chandler, James SA Corey,
Bernard Cornwell, Frank Herbert, Ursula K Le Guin…
Bookwyrm: And
who are some of your favorite characters? What drew you to them?
Amanda:
That could take me a week to research and answer, so top three:
Archie Goodwin never fails to make me laugh. He’s so wonderfully
and unabashedly himself. Re-reading the Wolfe mysteries is comforting
for me, like talking to an old friend.
As a
young kid, I was nuts about Eilonwy from
Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles
of Prydain.
Back then, we didn’t have any Hermione Granger types, and Eilonwy
was one of the few young female characters with any depth.
When
I was a teen, I picked up The
Hotel New Hampshire
and latched onto the Berry family. Weird, funny, and horrible stuff
happens to them, and sometimes they’re strong and bounce back,
sometimes they break. Sometimes people look at me like I’m crazy
when I describe the novel as being so much like real life—what with
motorcycle riding bears, bomb-tossing anarchists, a floating dog, and
toilets that flush upwards—but for me life has been that unexpected
and strange—you deal with it however you can. Every few years, I
read that novel again with fresh eyes and it always says something
new to me.
Michael:
Blerg, that’s more difficult than answering the favorite author
question.
As a
child I gravitated toward old wizards; Gandalf, Merlin, and Obi-Wan
Kenobi specifically. In the summer of 77—after first seeing A New
Hope—my neighborhood friends and I would pretend to be the
characters and I always chose to be Ben, even though it meant being
cut down by my friend Rick who always demanded to be Darth Vader. Not
that I would stick to the scene as written, much to his frustration.
Gandalf
entered my life through my mother’s love of Tolkien. She’d buy
the calendars when she could—the ones by the Brothers Hildebrandt.
Gandalf battling the Balrog was probably my favorite painting from
those. Then there were the Rankin & Bass and Bakshi films. By the
time I read the books I was hooked on him. Sage protector of all that
is precious in life. And he had a cool horse.
Boorman’s
Excalibur is where I found a Merlin I could admire. This wasn’t the
goofy bumbler from Disney’s The Sword and
The Stone, this Merlin was a complicated,
brooding man who’d sacrifice love and his own happiness for the
good of a kingdom.
On
some level I probably gravitated toward this archetype because they
were characters on the periphery of life, involved with others only
when it had meaning or purpose. I was the only child of very young
parents who split up when I was in kindergarten. Before sixth grade I
changed schools five times. So, I suppose the outsider/influencer
persona resonated with me.
Amanda:
And these days he’s cultivating the “crazy old wizard” look to
make it complete.
Bookwyrm: Are
there any plans to possibly spin off some side characters into their
own adventures, like Schmalch? Or maybe a prequel?
Amanda:
While I won’t exclude the possibility of a Schmalch-led novel, we
don’t currently have one planned—though he and Sviroosa will have
meatier roles in the next Syl and Aliara novel.
That
said, we absolutely will
be spinning off Ismae
novels led by characters other than Syl and Aliara. Right now, we’re
working on a novel featuring Haus as the protagonist—which will
also bring back more of the horror elements from Things
They Buried. I love Syl, Aliara, and
Schmalch, but it’s been refreshing to step away from their dramas
from a whole novel.
Michael:
As far as characters from our first two novels specifically, there is
and will be short fiction and other novels featuring several of them.
That said, there are many more personalities in Ismae than Sylandair,
Aliara and Schmalch, expect to meet them in years to come if we are
fortunate enough to bring them to you.
Bookwyrm: I've
always heard the expression write what you know. How much of you both
is in your various characters?
Amanda:
We steal a lot of comments, scenarios, and characteristics from real
life, so there’s a lot of our own personal experiences in the
storytelling even if the setting is extremely different from our own.
There are parts of each of us in every one of our lead characters,
but none of them is entirely like either of us. Given how nearly
broken and unhinged most of our characters can be, I’m not sure how
many similarities I want to admit to.
Michael:
What she said.
Bookwyrm: I
know this question might be controversial, but are there any trends
in current SFF you aren't a big fan of? And conversely, trends you
are really into.
Amanda:
I think the trend I dislike the most is the constant chasing of
trends. Maybe we’d sell more copies if we did so, but then I
wouldn’t be writing what I want to write, and that was the whole
point of starting this to begin with.
Michael:
Pandering to the whims of social media and outrage culture. I’m
sick of it. It narrows our view of the world and robs us of the joys
of genuinely trying to know one another. Us and them mentalities (no
matter what their team colors) are to be avoided. That said, I am
happy for the side-effect of being exposed to more marginalized
voices. Bear in mind, one of my very favorite authors was a
gun-toting, cat-loving, misanthropic gay junkie…
Bookwyrm: Finally,
so where do you see the series going? Any finite plans for series
completion?
Amanda:
We have a plan for the end of the Nihal Savesti storyline, but that
won’t be the end of the whole Ismae series. We’re looking at the
Ismae stories as heroic fiction—each book with a different
stand-alone adventure—rather than as epic fiction, so while readers
will work their way through multi-book story arcs, the end of each
arc won’t mean the end of the characters’ adventures. We’re
also working on a second series focused on a different group of
characters in a different Ismae locale, but we’d like to close the
Nihal storyline before we start publishing that one.
Bookwyrm: Thanks
for sharing a bit of yourselves with the rest of us. Hopefully, we'll
have more Syl, Aliara, Schmalch and the rest of the gang for years to
come.
Michael: Thanks Steve. We
appreciate all the support you and our readers have shown us and
we’re doing our utmost to bring you as many titles as possible.
