Please tell us a little bit about yourself and your writing.
I’ve been a creative person my entire life. I started to play music seriously and to write when I was a teenager in the 1970s. I came close to selling a historical fantasy novel — but not quite close enough. It was painful to get that far and fail. I got busy with life, career, family, and put music before writing for the small amount of time I had. I didn’t start writing again until I retired.
I had a thought rattling around in my head for years, to write a series about a minstrel mage whose magic worked through music; the result was the Eternal Muse series, which I self published through winter 2021-2022. I also wrote all the music for the songs that appear in the books, recorded them and made videos for them as well.
I’m currently working on a new series, The Skin of the World - Gods of Chaos. The Skin of the World is a term that refers to the thin layer between our world and the supernatural, ripped open by Mischief the Trickster. Chaos magic, accompanied by every supernatural god or creature ever imagined by man, crept through the tear. My characters need to figure out how to manipulate the magic to survive.
To world build for the series, I wrote a 35 episode serial novel that I’m sending out through my newsletter twice a month. It was quite an exercise writing it — a serial story is a very different beast from a novel, trying to keep the episodes tied together, reminding the reader of what went before. I’m now working on what will be at least a trilogy in that world.
Who would you say your biggest literary influences are?
I started to read fantasy in the 1960s and 70s, when LOTR was huge, and the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series came out. Obviously Tolkien, Guy Gavriel Kay, Ursula Leguin, Lord Dunsany, Fritz Leiber, Robert E. Howard, and on and on, too many to list. I always find it difficult to find other authors’ influence exactly in my writing, but…I’ve read an awful lot of fantasy, many different kinds, and it’s all sunk in, in its own way.
How has the history of the middle ages impacted/influenced your work?
Kind of underpins everything, doesn’t it? I was having discussions with my critique group about my current work and it’s lack of proper medieval nobility levels, and during the Eternal Muse that level of culture reference was always coming up. How would you act if you were X in front of Y. What kinds of clothing, what kind of money, how would they interact. So even though it’s fantasy, and you can in theory do what you want, if you’re writing second world epic/high fantasy, that knowledge, those concepts of how things worked in the medieval period are always there, and you have to work around them, or at least, you feel you do.
Do you feel like your writing has been impacted/influenced by Tolkien? If so, in what way(s)?
When I was in elementary school, grade 2 or 3, we didn’t have a library. We had a ‘book bus’ that came a couple of times a year, and they would feature a book. This one time it was the hobbit, and they had a paper mache map of Bilbo’s journey on the wall. My head pretty much exploded at seeing that, it was what I wanted to read. A few years later I read LOTR, and I read it three times in a row. So Tolkien’s entire feel, the cadence of the books, the sense of wonder, was engrained in my brain. The words were so completely beaten in that when the movies came out, I could tell what was dialogue from the books. So Tolkien got me into fantasy in the first place, and everything since then I’ve viewed in comparison; for me, it’s the wellspring. Do I write like him? No, I don’t think so. But that sense of wonder has never left me.
What do you think the current innovations in your genre(s) are?
Honestly not sure about innovations. I’m not seeing a lot of wildly original books, just a lot of good ones. It’s hard to come up with entirely new stories when so many have been written, and the tried and true can’t help but leak into your own work. It is interesting that format variety is coming back; when it’s an ebook, people don’t seem to care so much whether it’s a novel, a novella, or a short story, as long as the length works for the tale being told. For the longest time in print it was novels only. Now you see writers creating series using novellas and short stories, and of course there are serial platforms like Vella available as well.
What is something in your genre(s) you'd like to see more of?
I’m a bit tired of epic fantasy, of long heroic quests, massive, universe threatening struggles. One thing I always liked about the sword and sorcery I read when I was young was that it was often just about a couple of people trying to make their way in a fantasy environment. Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, by Fritz Leiber, is a classic example. So, less epic consequences, more personal ones.
What is something in your genre(s) you'd like to see less of?
I’m pretty tired of graphic violence and sex that does nothing to drive the plot. I’m not sure detailing rape or torture is useful at any time. As to steam, I’ve read some relatively steamy books where the sex was well integrated in the story and the relationships there, and drove the character arcs. But too often, it all just seems like cheap thrills tossed in. Which is fine, if that’s what readers want. But it feels like lazy writing to me.
Is there anything else related I didn't ask a question about that you'd like to add?
I feel we are in a state of transition. Amazon is constantly being filled by a river of new books, and now with ChatGPT making it ‘easier’ to write, magazines and agents are being buried by volume. The days of the Indie gold rush, where it was relatively easy to put your book up and make money, are done. Time to buckle down, put in a bit of extra polish, make your good books better, because I think that’s the only way to stand out from the crowd. Certainly what I’m going to try and do.
Where online can our readers find you and your work?
My website is https://rickwaughauthor.com. You can find listings of my books there, and a signup for my newsletter. You’ll also find links to my music there, which is recordings of all the songs I’ve written for my books.
No comments:
Post a Comment