Interview with The Interminables author Paige Orwin

Paige Orwin is the author of The Interminables that has just been released by Angry Robot Books. Welcome to SFFWorld Paige, many thanks for giving us some time here. In your own words, who is Paige Orwin?

A reader, writer, and gamer who has too much fun analyzing RPG systems and is mostly human. Probably.

First of all can you tell us a bit about The Interminables?

It’s a book about a wizard who steals time, the war who loves him, and kaiju. It’s a buddy-cop story. It’s a book that takes superhero-type characters and drops them into a world that isn’t built for superheroes – there’s far-reaching consequences, and a lot of politics, and the problems they face are too complicated to be neatly solved by a bit of strategic punching. It’s full of DRAMA, basically.

How did you get the idea in the first place and what do you feel is unique about your story?

Many of the characters were developed in a now-defunct MMORPG – City of Heroes. When that shut down in 2012, I didn’t want the characters to go with it (I liked them too much), so I decided to write a book so they would survive.

As far as uniqueness… well, I’ve called the final product a “puzzle-box” fantasy before. This is a style where there’s a lot of information packed into a relatively small space, and left for the reader to extract and then put together. I was very stingy with my words — there’s no “throw-away lines.” Just about every description is skewed by the perspective of who’s giving it, the characters rarely speak directly about what’s bothering them (as real people often don’t), and there’s many details about the world and how it works and its history that I hinted at or left scattered around for readers to pick up and extrapolate and figure out on their own.

I personally find that kind of thing more fun to read than a book that lays out everything straight, because I love complex systems and figuring out how things fit together. It makes reading more of a hands-on assembly process — more active.

Tell us a bit about your main characters Edmund and Istvan? Did they turn out as you originally intended or did they change a lot during the writing process?

Funny thing — they started out either narrowly avoiding being or actively being villains.

The time-stealing wizard, Edmund (who wasn’t my idea, originally), has his origins in City of Heroes, where he was at first just a neat costume and morally dubious set of powers. He ended up “going blueside,” or heroic, because there were more players with superheroes than supervillains…. and developed as a real character from there. His personality was pretty well set by the time I started writing The Interminables, though I did necessarily expand on things that were tough to address in-game, such as his alcoholism, his panic attacks, his exceedingly boring house, and so on. The joke while writing was always that he was boring — that he puts on this flashy persona but he’s really just this grammar pedant with a cat, and would rather be reading. The other joke was that he’s the “princess” of the story, but that might be best left for another article.

Istvan, the ghost/surgeon/conceptual embodiment of WWI, has a longer history — he started on a roleplaying forum year or two earlier, and was designed by myself and two other people to be a villain for a one-off plot. I put him into City of Heroes as a mad doctor-type, and then… well, he met Edmund, mostly, and proceeded to do a complete 180 and turn into the character who ended up in the book. There’s still signs of his original concept — he veers towards extremes, he’s dramatic, he can be abrasive and cruel and completely unsettling when he wants to be — but he’s a much more complicated person now, and better for it. Tying him to WWI was a late development, and added a whole dimension of feeling on violence and loss and morality under pressure that really “made” him as a character.

What are your expectations now that your first novel is being published?

I expect everyone to buy it.

Really, though, I’m a bit wary of expecting anything — life is surprising, and I tend to take it as it goes. I do have a phenomenal team backing me up, though, so I’m overall hopeful. I do still have a day job but, hey, maybe one day I won’t need one. My family and friends keep joking about movie deals and best-seller lists and I mostly just go “well, that would be nice.” This might be a sign that I’m insufficiently ambitious, but honestly a lot of my concerns at the moment revolve around things like remembering to vacuum my apartment (see also: boring Edmund).

Can you tell us a bit about your road to being published? Is it a dream come true being published by a big publisher such as Angry Robot Books?

My first serious move towards publishing started after graduating from college, when I spent the last of my scholarship money to attend the Pacific Northwest Writer’s Association Conference. There I stayed in a flea motel and learned about the process of getting an agent. In a series of workshops, I wrote a query letter, refined it over and over and over, pitched to the poor agents in attendance, refined it again… and then went home and worked on sending the query out to anyone who seemed like they might find The Interminables even vaguely interesting.

Then I waited. I sent off a few requests for more pages. I waited.

Then Sara Megibow called me around Christmas to offer her representation! Much flurrying of emails was had. I fixed up the manuscript again and then she started sending it to publishers.

More waiting. I lost my job and was unemployed for six months. I signed on for a catering gig in Seattle, and furtively drank leftover cream when no one was looking.

Suddenly Angry Robot wanted my book! I had no idea who that was. But that didn’t matter! Angry Robot! They were a real publisher and they would print my book in actual print and that was what mattered!

Eventually, of course — after they kicked down my door and forced me to swear fealty to our future laser-spewing overlords — I figured out that they’re kind of a big deal. I’ve never stopped being grateful.

How did you start writing, have you always wanted to be a writer?

I have always wanted to be a writer. I was told to go ahead and try, but never to get my hopes up. Being the kind of child who glued people to chairs, I have boxes full of notebooks going back to fourth grade, anyway.

What books inspired your career as an author, and what authors do you enjoy now?

I always cite Patrick McManus, but I’ll do it again. If you’ve never read “The Deer on a Bicycle: Excursions into the Writing of Humor,” do so. Also read everything else he’s written while you’re at it.

Growing up, I had access to my mother’s collection of Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and other classic science-fiction books (including such luminous works as “Tom Swift And His Atomic Earth Blaster”). I re-read Black Beauty probably sixty times. More recent loves include anything by Terry Pratchett, anything by Tamora Pierce, and China Mieville’s “Perdido Street Station,” mostly for its bizarre inhabitants and cityscapes. Vernor Vinge is awesome. Naomi Novik is awesome. I have a list of books I need to get to by other Angry Robot types, like Adam Christopher.

What’s next? Do you have more new and exciting projects you’re working on?

The sequel! Also possibly a graphic novelization of The Interminables, given that I know a fantastic artist (who lives in my same apartment, and has been repeating her desire to draw action-packed panels for years). I also have a backlog of more sci-fi-type ideas that might need attending to at some point, like the one about the forcibly-retired, officially non-existent supersoldier who now works as a curry cook in an arcology. Who knows.

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