Interview with John Hornor Jacobs
Hello John. Thanks for joining us.
Happy to be here.
You are just about to have your first novel published by Gollancz, The Incorruptibles. For those who don’t know, can you tell us a little about the novel?
The Incorruptibles is a story about two auxiliary legionnaires working as scouts in a wild, untamed wilderness called Occidentalia, also lovingly referred to as The Hardscrabble Territories. It’s set in a world loosely based on the question what would happen if the Roman empire never fell and they’d reached the point in westward expansion where they begin encountering new continents, races, and creatures. This world – obviously a fantasy world – runs on infernal combustion, the summoning and binding of daemons inside engines – and is populated with a host of supernatural creatures.
These days, getting a novel noticed is often all about being different. What do you think makes your book different? Is it a book that crosses genres? Were you determined to be something different from the start?
The Incorruptibles does have a somewhat mongrel lineage. Actually, I’d been calling the stripe of fantasy I write “rough and tumble” (to separate it from the grimdark label which it truly isn’t) but now I realize mongrel fantasy might be a better description of all my books. For example, Southern Gods is crime noir meets Southern gothic meets Lovecraftian cosmic horror, The Twelve-Fingered Boy series is a prison-break meets superheroes meets bildungsroman, and with The Incorruptibles is western meets alternative history meets demon-punk meets classical mythology work.
I wasn’t determined to something different – actually, I worried it was too different to sell – I just tried to write a book that would entertain me, both as something I’d want to read and something I’d want to spend the months to write. It’s a quirky book, like many of my favorites that don’t exactly fall into easy classification like Gun With Occasional Music, Eco-topia, World, Enough & Time, Earth Abides, and pretty much anything written by Tim Powers.
How long have you been writing the novel?
The Incorruptibles? Or novels in general?
It took me thirteen months to write The Incorruptibles, and eleven months to write its sequel, Foreign Devils, which hasn’t gone through the editing and revision process yet. As for writing “the novel” in general, I began to write Southern Gods in November of 2007, for National Novel Writing Month. Since then, every novel I’ve completed has been published or slated for publishing. I’m still a little wet behind the ears, I guess.
Why did you write The Incorruptibles? Where did you get the original idea from?
The original idea for The Incorruptibles came to me as I was reading a Louis L’Amour western. Before L’Amour, the only westerns I’d read were Portis’ True Grit, and Elmore Leonard’s early works like Forty Lashes Less One, The Bounty Hunters, Escape from Five Shadows, The Law at Randado, etc. True Grit is a singular novel and not really comparable to anything else: Leonard’s westerns are much like crime noir books, but crime books with horses. The characters move with the inexorable determination and hard-bit demeanors more reminiscent of post-WWII noir than any western story-telling heritage.
But as I read the L’Amour novel, the prose and plot was markedly different than all the westerns I’d read before. It was more flowery, to be true, and all the characters were drawn in clear terms of good versus evil. And I kept thinking “This reads more like fantasy than western.” And then a silly thought occurred to me: what if Elmore Leonard had written a fantasy? What would that be like?
And that was the enciting movement towards the beginning of The Incorruptibles.
Without too many spoilers, do you have a particular part/character in The Incorruptibles that you’re proudest of?
There’s two characters especially dear to me in The Incorruptibles – the narrator, Shoestring (or Dveng Illys) and a young Ruman patrician woman named Carnelia Cornelius. I enjoyed writing Carnelia so much, I expanded her role in the following books to become much more than I originally planned.
Oh, that is good news: I liked Carnelia!
To wider issues now. What made you want to write in the first place?
I’ve said this many times before, so forgive me if this is repeated elsewhere, in other interviews. I think all writers had some sort of formative reading event when they were children or they were, at least, still impressionable, mutable. Some moment when they lost themselves in a book, became entranced, fell in love with a character. For me, it was reading either reading Robinson Crusoe, The Hobbit, or Dracula as a very young boy.
The movement to become a writer is part adulation and part audacity. The adulation comes from an appreciation of all the voices that have come before. The audacity comes in raising your own voice to join the chorus.
Have you read much genre outside your own work? What were your first influences?
I read quite a bit outside of the genre. My early influences were definitely fantasy, science fiction, and horror. As I’ve aged, I find I have less tolerance for poorly written books, so I abandon them easily if they’re not holding my attention. I read a lot of non-fiction, usually for research purposes. I’m trying to read some of the classics I’ve missed in my education, and those books by friends and colleagues I’m asked to, paying it forward, as it were. I enjoy mystery and crime novels and have a soft-spot in my heart for a good, door-stop historical novel. If you can mash up a mystery and historical novel like Lindsey Davis or Steven Saylor, all the better. Only recently have I begun reading fantasies again. Have you heard of this guy named something like J.R.R. Martin? He’s got this big series that’s pretty good.
And now a discussion of your writing process, please. Are you a writer that prefers to work to a routine or is it a case of panic-near-the-deadine?
I am by nature a ‘pants-er’, but by necessity I am a plotter. Recently, the way I’ll outline a book is I’ll have a discussion with my agent, over drinks, where I just verbally outline what I’m thinking for the book, and I’ll make a recording of that conversation with my iPhone. Then, I’ll type it up in a traditional Roman outline, just the bare outlines of what happens, keeping theme, tone, character emotions and intention all in my head, until it’s almost bursting to get out. I’ll labor over first sentences and key scenes. I write somewhat slowly, though I always thought it was fast until I discovered it takes other authors two months to write books the same length as Foreign Devils which is my longest book to date. But I’ve distracted myself.
So, once I’m writing, I’ll occasionally re-listen to the recording of the conversation with my agent that outlines the work, using it as what we in advertising call the “creative brief” and evaluate how far off the mark I’ve deviated and assess if I need to change course or keep plowing ahead in the new direction. The new directions usually end up the way I go.
Do you have set word limits? Or is it that you keep going when the mood takes you? Are you the sort of writer that can write anywhere?
I’m not a ritualistic writer. I can write on a plane, or in a coffee shop, or at home, or at my day job. I cannot, however, write when my kids are within earshot. Go figure.
Is there a book that you’d like to write, or a genre you’d love to write in, but so far haven’t?
I have two books I want to write, the first of which is a historical fantasy about Hernando de Soto that would require me to do about a year of research and learn quite a bit of Spanish, so I keep finding reasons to put it on the back-burner. The other is a super-secret project and I’m going to have to kill you after I spill. You ready? Here goes…
Your secret is safe with us. <cough>
What next?
Well, what’s next for me is the release of The Incorruptibles in the UK on August 14th and then, next year, the release of its sequel, Foreign Devils. Also, next year, I have the last volume in my young adult series (The Twelve-Fingered Boy, The Shibboleth) will be released, titled The Conformity. And I’ve just begun writing the last novel in The Incorruptibles series. And then I have to figure out what I’ll write after that. We shall see.
We wish you all the best at this exciting time, John. Many thanks.
Thank you so much for the opportunity. It was fun!
Our review of The Incorruptibles is HERE.
