Hi Annie, thanks for giving us some time here at SFFWorld. The four first books in your The Twenty-Sided Sorceress series is now being released as an omnibus edition in Level Grind. Can you tell us a bit about the series?
It’s about a sorceress who is hiding out from her crazy ex-boyfriend in a town that has a lot of latent magic and plenty of other supernatural creatures around. Of course, hiding out doesn’t work for long, and the series is about her coming to terms with what she is and figuring out how to defeat her ex and keep her friends safe.
How do you feel Jade Crow as a character has evolved throughout the series?
At first she’s hiding, and used to running away since she believes that facing her problems just gets people she cares about killed. She also really doesn’t want to accept how sorcerers gain power and she doesn’t want to hurt anyone, but over the course of the series she realizes that people get hurt no matter what you do or don’t do and she learns to take more control over her life and her power. She also learns to let people in and to accept help. At her core though, she keeps who she is, which is someone who cares about others and wants to do the right thing.
Do you try to set yourself new challenges for every new book you write?
Always. I think as a writer you always have to be growing and looking forward. I’m always thinking of stuff I want to try out and how to make each book the best thing I’ve ever written. That’s what I aim for. If I finish a scene and don’t feel like it’s the best yet, I throw it out and rewrite it. So that’s one pretty big challenge I give myself with every book.
What is it with urban fantasy you find so fascinating?
I love that it’s our world, but not quite. There’s all the familiar stuff, but also all the stories humans have told themselves over the millennia can be real, too. So it’s a good blend of fantastic and familiar that I think allows characters and settings to resonate with readers like myself.
Dungeon Crawl, book number eight in The Twenty-Sided Sorceress series is being released later this year. What can your fans expect, anything you can reveal?
The title kind of gives a lot of the book away, but let’s just say there’s gonna be a lot of undead problems. Because that’s what a good Game Master throws at characters when they get powerful, right?
What sort of challenges, as a writer, might you have faced over the years? Any insights you would be able to share for those aspiring writers seeking advice?
Poverty? Ok, only half joking. I don’t know that I can share insights that aspiring writers haven’t heard a million times. There’s so much advice out there, and a lot of the most cliched stuff is true. Don’t give up. Don’t stop learning and growing your craft. Rejection is normal and happens to everyone. That kind of thing. I guess if I could emphasize anything, it’s to focus on telling a great story. Everything in building a writing career begins with that. Also, I’ll go against the usual advice and say that if your goal is to quit your day job, it’s possible, though you aren’t really quitting your day job. You are trading one day job for another when you write full time. But if that’s what you want, go after it. Learn to write books people can’t put down. Have fun. Make money. Art and commerce aren’t opposite each other. Always choose “and” instead of “or” if you can in life.
Have you ever struggled between what you would like to happen to a character and what you considered more sensible to occur? Can you tell us when and what did you do at last?
Not really. I write fantasy, so sensible doesn’t have to factor in too much, haha. I always try to go big if I want to. One of my favorite things to read about and thus to write about is larger than life characters and I think you can’t shy away from ridiculous if it has to happen when you are writing those. I think if you make enough of it feel “real” then readers will follow your characters through some crazy stuff.
I do really hate killing characters off, but sometimes it has to happen, so there’s that. I always figure if I’m crying during the really tough scenes while I’m writing them, I’m doing something right, so I just do it and let myself feel it all the whole way through.
How do you feel you have evolved as a writer throughout your career?
When I started writing seriously, I wasn’t very good. I had a good grasp of pretty prose from my years of writing poetry, but I didn’t really understand how to make character and plot work within my prose. After writing a few novels nobody will ever see and getting a lot of rejections, I started to figure stuff out. Took a couple years of heavy practice. Now, I feel like I have a lot still left to learn, but I also feel like I don’t make too many beginner mistakes anymore and that I don’t make a ton of the “big” mistakes in general, the kind of stuff that breaks a story etc.
I started out writing short fiction, too, and one big evolution is moving into longer and longer works. I’m still happiest under 50,000 words, but I’m working on keeping the things I love about fast-paced, tightly written books and expanding them properly to be closer to the 80k-100k novels that people seem to prefer to read.
What kind of books do you read, any favorite authors?
I read everything. I counted a few years back, writing down every book I read and after 400 I had to stop. I think I read about 450 that year. Favorite authors would be Elizabeth Moon, Jim Butcher, Richard Stark, Elizabeth Hoyt, Nnedi Okorafor, Lee Child, Patrick O’Brian, Robin McKinley, Kit Rocha etc…
Your website says, AUTHOR, GAMER, NERD. Does that somehow sum up who you are?
I’d be pretty simple human if three things summed me up, no? They are definitely aspects of myself. I’m really nerdy, I love gaming, and being an author is my job.
What’s next, do you have more new and exciting projects you are working on at the moment?
Finishing up the next books in the series and getting ready for the launch of Boss Fight in January (that’s the second half of the paper omnibus editions and completes the Samir storyline). Book 8 and the coming omnibus launch are pretty much my life right now, though I also have a side novel coming out soon about Harper.
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Interview by Dag Rambraut – SFFWorld.com © 2016
