September 27, 2024 • 38 mins
In this special episode, I'm delighted to be joined by returning guest and bestselling author, Stephen Aryan.
Stephen has just released his latest fantasy novel, The Blood Dimmed Tide, and on 1st October, he's releasing his first-ever crime novella, New York Minute.
We chat all about New York Minute, writing novellas, mixing fantasy and other genres together, crafting characters readers love, and navigating the world of self-publishing.
It's an interview packed with advice and insights—you're bound to learn something new. And if you enjoy it, why not check out Stephen's awesome new novella? You can find the link below.
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https://stephen-aryan.com/2024/08/01/new-york-minute/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
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(00:23):
social media or with anyone who you think may be interested.
Thank you very much for listening.
Enjoy the show. Welcome to another episode of
the Fantasy Writers to Shit. I'm your host, Richie Billing,
(00:45):
and I'm delighted to welcome back best selling author Steven
I. And Steven, how are you doing?
I'm all right, Richie. Thanks for having me.
Thank you very much for joining me.
Lovely to see you again. Last time we spoke on the on the
show, you just released The JewsBlossom, which is a brilliant
Persian inspired historical fantasy.
Yeah, go and check it out. Brilliant, brilliant story.
(01:07):
And since then you've you've been very busy, haven't you?
You've had the second instalments.
That's called The Blood Thin Tide.
Yeah. Congratulations on that one.
Thank you. Yeah.
So, yeah, Book 2 in the trilogy that came out in July, Book 3 is
written that will be coming out next year and wrapping up the
series. Yeah.
Very nice. This one's gone down very well.
(01:28):
I mean, the Judas Blossom went down a storm.
I think this one's gone down even even better.
Yeah, I've heard from a lot of people, they've sort of said it
doesn't suffer from middle book syndrome and a trilogy, it
really kind of, you know, kicks the pants of the first one.
There's a lot more going on. There's a lot of action and it's
not like a slow book and in, youknow, where you might get
(01:50):
sometimes in the middle book of a, a trilogy that some of the
complaints that some people say about series.
So a lot of people are like, Oh,this is amazing.
And then some people are saying,well, what's this series?
And now they're reading the first book and going, Oh, this
is really good. And they can jump straight into
book 2. So I, I keep seeing a lot of
people discovering Judas blossomnow a year on, which is good
because they get to read book 2 immediately, but then they still
(02:10):
got to wait a year for book 3. So, you know, it's less than
that less than a year now, but you know, it's good.
It's it's, it's building an audience for sure.
Yeah, I think obviously it's such a unique setting and so
richly described as well, which is all down to your research.
Yeah, a lot of research. Yeah, we talked about that.
I think. I think we did, yeah.
(02:31):
Yeah, and what what the the bestthings I loved about the first
book is that all of the characters ended in positions
where it was all set up so nicely for an action fact second
book so. Yeah, yeah.
Thank you. Yeah, very nice.
And you, you haven't stopped there, have you?
Because you've got another book coming out very soon, on the 1st
(02:52):
of October. Yes.
So this is my first self published project.
It's it's been in the works for a couple of years.
I've been thinking about it for quite a while.
I wrote it between kind of drafts and edits of other
things. I had a bit of time and it was
an idea that wouldn't kind of leave me alone.
And so eventually I wrote it. Then I sat on it for a while and
(03:14):
I kept thinking, what am I goingto do with it?
It was novella. It was long for a novella at
42,000 words. And I thought, OK, do I, do I
make it a straight crime novel? Do I make it a straight fantasy?
Do I try and make it a full novel?
And I played around with it and nothing really kind of worked.
I was basically trying to, you know, put a square peg into a
round hole. It was what it was in the end, I
(03:35):
thought right, because it's suchan unusual story, it crosses a
lot of genre borders. And the fact that it's novella,
this will make a good first kindof project for me to self
publish it, learn the ropes. Because I've been talking to
authors, self published and traditional for like 4 years now
on my on my YouTube channel since COVID kind of times.
(03:56):
So I had learned some things, but I'd never done the process,
gone through the process myself.So this was a good opportunity
to learn it and actually do it as well.
No, it's, it's, it's really cooland it's, it's called New York
Minute New York. Minute, yeah.
I'm about 100 pages in, so I'm near the end.
You're nearly done. Yeah, and.
I think it's about 40 pages. That's what I love about
novellas. Jordan snapping.
(04:19):
Yeah, yeah. But it's I love the set and more
than anything, tell us a bit about how you what it, what it's
like and how you came up with it.
Yeah, so I, I describe it as a noir story set in alternate New
York. So it's it's not fantasy.
There's no magic, there's no monsters, there's no Dragons.
It is a Crime Story. It is kind of a hard boiled Pi
(04:43):
investigating a missing woman inthe New York underground.
He's kind of going through the underworld.
He's dealing with gangs and, youknow, prostitutes and crime.
And there's lots of violence andlots of adult content.
And it's, it feels very much different to anything I've done
before. And yet it's still a slightly
(05:05):
speculative novel because it's not our New York and it's not
21st century technology. So there's no cars, there's no
mobile phones, there's no, you know, modern technology of
anything like you'd imagine. It's a lot more primitive in
some ways. But the reasons for that are
built a kind of baked into the story and baked into the setting
(05:26):
for the why it is the way it is.And so there's, there's lots of
layers. There's there's the primary
story on the surface about this guy who used to be a cop and now
he's API. His foot has a case forced on
him. Essentially, he's told to go and
find this missing woman. And he can't say no because the
person who's asking is the most notorious crime boss in in New
(05:47):
York. And he has to kind of take the
case on, find this missing womanbecause otherwise it's his skin.
But he's also doing it for the right reasons because if he
doesn't, it will erupt in gang violence.
And he may not care about the gangs, but he cares about the
innocent bystanders that would get hurt in the process.
And so that's why he's doing it,not just because he's kind of
(06:10):
had his arm twisted into lookinginto this case really and trying
to find this woman. Yeah, I thought main character
is very refreshingly different for a sort of Crime Story.
I read a lot of crime novels. I love Ian Rankin and Rebus, but
Rebus is like the archetypal thedrunken detective.
(06:33):
You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But your characters aren't like that, and I really like that
aside to it. You've got the main character
who likes to sort of feel in thein the sticks out of the thick
of it a bit, but he's not afraidto get stuck in.
And there's a few really like, nice fight scenes that show just
how sort of competence and skilful he is.
(06:55):
Yeah, he's a kid who actually grew up in New York.
He was a city rat. You know, he spent his entire
life on the streets mixing with gangs as a kid growing up, and
then eventually joins the policeforce and spends even more time,
of course, dealing with criminals and the criminal
underworld. And eventually he becomes quite
jaded with the whole process andleaves and becomes API and he
(07:17):
moves out into the sticks and hestarts to discover things about
himself that he never realized that after having, you know,
thought that the cement and the the city was in his blood.
He realizes that he kind of likes the quiet and he kind of
likes being away from the rush. And he prefers to kind of do the
job, but then retreat back to his house and his home where
it's quiet again. So he's kind of rediscovering
(07:39):
new parts of himself as he goes,but he still has to work in the
city. And because he knows it, because
he grew up with it, he understands how it works and how
it operates because he's been through it every kind of level
and dealt with people who've committed crimes, but also those
who've been on the sufferer, thesufferers, those who've been
kind of caught up in innocence and those who've been victims of
(08:02):
crime. So it's it's a really kind of
typical Crime Story in some ways, because he's trying to
solve the case, but the setting is really atypical.
It's just not what you would expect.
And there's some other things that I've thrown in that I don't
want to spoil that kind of coloraround the edges that give it a
bit of a unique twist to do withthe world that it's in and some
(08:25):
of the kind of problems for the characters and then some of the
history as well. And it all kind of weaves
together. So it's it's a story about
people, but it's just in a very kind of different city.
But it will feel fairly familiarfor readers up to a certain
point. Yeah, it's that difference that
makes you want to explore and read with all the different
(08:48):
gangs. It reminds me like a little bit
like the Warriors. And that was like such an
exciting adventure. Even the acting was a bit
shocking for that film. Cult classic The cult classic
the film the. Film itself is so rich, you
know, these like different gangsand you do, it feels like so
(09:10):
unique and original. And as you're going through it,
you're discovering these new anddifferent angles all the time.
So yeah, it's it's, it's very cool.
And so how did you approach likethe creation of coal?
Because I think the crime novels, the, the, the central
character, they are quite often the focal point.
(09:30):
So I mentioned like Rebus for example.
Yeah. Like Ian Rankin can't stop
writing them novels because people kick off.
Do you want Rebus, Rebus, Rebus?Well, it's like Lee Charles with
Jack Reacher. He'd done like, you know, 25 of
them and like do more, do more. So he's not doing it for someone
else's now or, you know, DresdenFile novels.
I'm, I'm a culprit. I love those books and I want to
(09:52):
see more Harry Dresden books. So I've, I've read lots of crime
novels with a very central, strong character, you know, the
jaded kind of guy. And I wanted to do something a
little bit different. So to begin with, this Novello
is first person, which I've never done for a project
completely before. I've, I've dabbled around with
it, I've done short stories, I've done bits and pieces, but
(10:12):
no one's ever seen me publish anything in the first person.
So doing it this way was new in an experiment and allowed me to
get under the skin of the character even more.
So I started thinking about Coleas Cole Blackstone as the main
character and thinking about himat length, really thinking
about, you know, if he's this guy who has grown up in this
(10:32):
city as a kid, He's seen it right from the beginning, from,
you know, 2530 years ago up to the present and how much the
city has changed in his lifetime.
And I think about the cities where I've lived and how much
they've evolved. And then of course, he's been on
the side as a cop and he's trying to enforce the law
suddenly. And so he's he's dealt with all
(10:52):
of that. So it's all that kind of thing
of he's had a lot of experience.He's dealt with the worst of
humanity. And so it has left him a little
bit jaded. I didn't want to make him the
typical alcoholic, you know, divorcee who can't maintain a
relationship with a woman. And because as I thought, you
know, it's been done 1000 times,I don't want to do that.
And while he is cynical in some ways, because he has dealt with
(11:16):
so many bad people over the years, he still has that kind of
spark of of hope and optimism for humanity.
And it's up to his friend Bracken to remind him.
Bracken, who's his his best friend from childhood that grew
up on the streets together and went in very different ways.
But he kind of grounds him sometimes.
So when Cole does get dragged down and he starts to think, you
(11:39):
know, why am I still doing this?Why am I trying to help someone
who doesn't want help? Why am I dealing with the worst
kind of people ever? It's up to Bracken to remind him
to say, yeah, but even in the worst places, there's still
hope. There's still family, There's
still friendship. Some people are in these
situations not because they chose it, but because they've
been born into it or they've hadmisfortune fall upon them.
And so it was creating this balance between the two
(12:01):
characters, I think. And that's where every time I
started to drag too much down with Cole and thinking he's
making him so dark and brooding.And I thought, no, he's, he's
not that kind of a guy. And if he is, Bracken would have
shaken him, you know, shaken outhim over the years.
So I wanted to make him feel as realistic as possible given what
he's been through, but I didn't just want to make him an awful
(12:23):
cynical drunk the entire time, because that gets kind of
tedious, especially if I'm writing it first person.
Yeah. How did you find right in first
person? I've I've only told a few short
stories with it and I have really enjoyed it and I don't
know why I haven't done more. But what was your experience of
it? So there's the challenge of you
(12:43):
have to craft the story in a waythat the character comes across
everything organically. Otherwise it's like, oh,
suddenly you get a phone call and then that gives them the
information they need to go on to the next level of the
investigation. That can feel a bit kind of
contrived. So you have to be careful of
that. If you're writing a really big
world story, you can never move away from that one person's
(13:06):
point of view. So a big fancy Nova from 1:00 to
point of view can absolutely work, but you can't then jump to
the other side of the wall, the other side of the world.
It's all just what they see and hear and experience.
So if you're trying to kind of zoom out and do a more macro
story, you can't. There's tricks away.
You can get around it. But equally I'm thinking, well,
(13:27):
if you're going to do that, why not just do third person have
multiple points of view? So that's one thing.
The second thing is because you've only got this one
person's perspective of the world, you have to craft it
quite carefully. So think of if you've read the
Dresden Files, you think of of how he Dresden, he's this very
optimistic, very upbeat guy. He always believes the best in
(13:48):
people. He's always trying to help
someone. He's quite naive in some ways.
He's quite noble. He's very kind of old fashioned
and so you have to see his view of the world and you have to
find a way to it's convincing. So it doesn't just feel like you
with writing first person, it's very easy.
(14:09):
Just kind of like start talking as yourself through that
character. And I think writing someone
who's quite different from you is the biggest challenge.
Yeah. I mean, people always say, oh,
which which character is more like you?
And you know which in any book and thing to an author.
And the answer is all of them and none of them because I
created all of them. Every author's created all their
(14:31):
characters, but equally they're all pieces of me.
But it's that case with first person.
You have to be careful that it isn't just you the entire time
talking to the audience, preaching to them about
something. So I think Cole represents some
of my cynicism perhaps, but thenagain, wrap the character of
Bracken represent my optimism, my hope that and my belief that
(14:53):
people can be better, that can things can improve.
And even in the darkest times, you can still find hope.
So it it was it was a really interesting experience because I
want people to have a very specific viewpoint of the story
in the world from Cole's point of view.
And I think getting the balance right, that's, that's the
biggest challenge, I think, because I don't want people to
(15:15):
go and read like, oh, he's an awful part of person.
I really hate him and blah, blah, blah.
I'm thinking, no, no, I want himto be funny and likable.
And, you know, so it's that kindof thing.
You need to get good feedback tomake sure you're crafting it in
a very particular way. Yeah.
And how did you do that when they came to cold?
Did you get a lot of basically? Basically read the feedback and.
Stuff I got yeah, I got some feedback from friends because I
(15:37):
I kind of kept asking them aboutthis character and getting there
impressions of him and saying, you know, what do you think of
him and how how do you feel about him?
And, you know, there, there is some humor in the book because
it, it sounds like a very dark story and it is a very adult and
quite brutal story, but there's still humor in it.
There's still comedy moments andstill some levity and dark humor
(15:57):
because it would be in the situation.
And so I think it was just trying to make it feel organic.
That's what I kept asking to people who've read it and
saying, does this feel real? You know, what are you getting
from this character? How do you view him?
You know, do you think he's funny?
Do you think he's miserable? Do you think he's, you know, on
the right path and all that kindof stuff?
So. And yeah, it's it's getting the
(16:19):
right voice, I think for the character in first person is the
biggest challenge. Yeah, I think you've done a
great job. Oh, thanks, yeah.
I've, I've, I'm quite a slow reader.
I've been through this quite fast.
And it's because you've you've formed that connection with the
character and you want to see how they go on.
Yes, yeah. I I don't think every character
has to be likeable, but I think you have to find something about
(16:44):
them that's either interesting or good, however you interpret
that. You know the phrase good.
Like Dexter Morgan, the character from the Jeff Lindsay
novels, is a serial killer and, you know, he kills people and
that's awful. But he's really funny.
And I really like him because he's sarcastic and he and he he,
he does what he says about people.
And that endears him to me, despite what he does.
(17:05):
That's very different from Cole.Like, Cole is generally a good
guy who's just trying to do the right thing.
So it's. Yeah, it took a lot of work, I
think getting it right. And how does it feel right in
something that wasn't fantasy? Because you.
You, that's what you're most well known for.
The Battle Maze. The cameras, the baby born.
(17:25):
So to depart from that genre, what how does it feel?
Is it quite liberating or is it something that you want to do
for a while? I've been wanting to do it for a
while and I've kind of dabbled in it a little bit already
because Blood Mage my, my secondnovel is Crime fantasy novel.
Essentially, it's about a guy who's essentially a cop in a
(17:47):
city trying to find a serial killer.
That's one of the three characters in the main
characters in the book. And I kind of scratched that
itch then. But I'm a big fan of crime
fiction, in particular TV shows.I've watched them, you know,
since I was a kid all the way back to, you know, NYPD Blue and
Law and Order and all these kindof cop shows over the years.
So that's always been in the back of my brain.
(18:09):
And blood doing Blood Mage was good and it helped for a while.
And I kept thinking, oh, I want to write more stories with that
character. But then I got kind of very busy
with the other fantasy novels and the other kind of the next
trilogy, and then, you know, thecoward and the warrior and
stuff. So I think this is scratching
the itch to do a Crime Story. But because it's still
(18:30):
speculative fiction, because it's not just pure 21st century,
it's still kind of feels slightly fantastical to me.
So it's still, it's not, it's not fantasy, as I said, there's
no magic and monsters and stuff.But it's not a pure crime novel.
I might do one eventually, some point in the future, maybe, you
know, do do something like that.But having differences in there
(18:52):
allow me to do certain things inthe story that I couldn't do if
it was a straight crime novel. Like it's not a giveaway in the
front cover. There's two moons on the on the
cover of the book. So it's like straight away, you
know, we're not in Kansas anymore, you know?
So it's a lot of a difference. Yeah.
It's it's good that you you sortof you've blended too.
(19:13):
But in a way it's it's like you've got the the fantasy
elements with the the world. Yeah.
But it's still very much a humanstory.
Yeah. And that's what I really like.
It's brilliant. It's.
I think by having quite a few things in there that are
familiar in this story. But I always say within my
(19:35):
fantasy novels, the more things you have in there that are
familiar, the easier it is for people to get into a story.
Like with the Judas Blossom, it's 13th century Persia.
I don't know anybody who knows alot about that.
I didn't until I started doing any research.
But if I just filled it with so much detailed world building and
(19:55):
so many new terms, readers are going to stumble into that.
Like I talk about it like you'retrying to run the hurdles.
The more hurdles you put in place, the more the reader will
slow down. Rather than engaging with the
story and the characters in the world.
And so you kind of, you drip feed the information in, but you
give them enough stuff that's inthat that it feels familiar.
(20:16):
And so I, I did that on purpose with this world, that the fact
that I've set it in a city called New York, straightway
people have an idea of what thatis.
You know, I talk about other things and there's little nods
to other things within our worldthat people will recognize, you
know, so there's all these little tricks you can kind of
use to hook the reader so they engage with the the fate of the
characters. And that's ultimately what I
(20:37):
want. I want them to care about the
characters, not be thinking, well, how does that work and
what's this and what does that? What does that do?
And what's the thing it's like that's less important how it
works as engaging the charactersand their fate and care about
what's happening and the story. That's what I want from from my
readers, really. Yeah.
And do you think a novella worksquite well for that?
(20:58):
Because I've been writing novella as well, and I've quite
enjoyed the fact that you can just get rid of like all the
fluff and just focus purely on the characters and what they're
going through at this moment in time and then fill in the gaps
as you go. And it's I found it quite OK.
Yeah, it's a more gripping to edit, let's just say that
(21:19):
because. And fastest it was.
Well, it's just because the story's leaner.
It's, I don't know, I found it alot more engaging anyway.
Yeah, it is because you still have world building in there and
you still have all the importantconversations and dialogue in
the story, but you you strip outsome of the other things in
there. So I've just been reading the
(21:41):
Sebastian de Castell Great Coatsnovels and his books are all,
you know, 34500 pages, 550 pages.
But they read more like a crime novel or a novella because
there's a strong focus on dialogue.
There is will building. I can tell you all the
characters are like, I can tell you who they are.
I can tell you, you know what they're thinking.
(22:02):
But most of it is done through dialogue in his stories and
which makes them incredibly fastreads.
Despite being 600 pages, all of the chapters are really lean as
well. So you can just whip through a
chapter and like, I want to knowwhat happens next.
And that's a great kind of writing technique that he's
mastered. The I'm just like devouring the
books. And so you have you have some of
(22:24):
that with a novella, I think, because if you have 20 pages of
just world building description of stuff, that's a massive chunk
of the book you've already just used up.
Like so do do people really needto know all that?
Is it, are those 20 pages critical to the plot?
Probably not. So it's you strip out a lot of
the kind of fluff. I mean, you think, I think about
(22:45):
thriller novels that I've read over the years too.
Like I'm very kind of Dean Koontz and he can write some
chunky books. But there again, the pace is so
fast that you just whip through every book because the chapters
end on a cliffhanger. They're really tense or there's
a strong emotional beat that youwant to know what's happening
next. And so it's bringing some of
that paciness and just keeping that in the back of your mind as
(23:06):
I'm working on on a novella. And that's what I think helped
me because it's like 130 pages, maybe something like that, the
whole story. Yeah, like 135 pages.
And that's it. Job done.
Yeah, it's it's a very quick read, especially when you use
dialogue because like you say, that is one of the the best
tools you could use to quicken the pace.
(23:29):
Yeah, yeah. You just, you express the
character more so through their dialogue.
You still have their actions, ofcourse, but you, you hear what
they think a lot more and you see them, you know, through
conversation. And it works really well I
think. Yeah, it does.
Yeah. And what did you feel like when
it came to like, edit in a novella?
Because I've just come off the back of edit and a novel and
(23:51):
then into a novella and it's been brilliant because novella
and the novelist is a bit of a chore.
Write a novel. Write a novel takes a long time.
It's always a marathon. And editing a novel is the same.
It's just, it's just a lot of work to beat it into shape with
a novella, the whole process wasjust a lot faster.
(24:12):
I really enjoyed it. I really got great feedback from
my editor as well, of course, because I'm self-publishing it.
I chose my editor for the first time and I worked with the
artist to design the cover. And so, you know, I've done all
of these things. You know, I've been involved in
every stage before when I've been traditionally published, I
was involved in the cover designand all that kind of stuff.
(24:32):
But this time I chose the cover,final decision and I chose my
editor, which I've never done before.
So that was quite new. And proofreader as well.
So yeah, it's been a lot faster process because I'm managing it
all myself. People still got deadlines and
they've still got, you know, other work they fit me in
around, but it doesn't take nearly as long.
And with the novella, it's even shorter for them.
(24:52):
So it's even shorter for me to get the book finished.
Yeah. Do you think readers have got
appetite for short of fiction? I know it's just everyone
perhaps on about like people's attention spans are getting
shorter and whatnot, but I do feel like there's a lot to be
said about different types of fiction, yeah, rather than just
(25:13):
novels and like 3-4 hundred pages.
Yeah, because if you go back to the 60s and 70s, novels were
only two 3400 pages. A long novel will be 400 pages.
You go, you go back far enough and you people talk about the
greats like, you know, Charles Dickens and, and all those kind
of things. And you say, yeah, but he used
to write in newspapers and he was paid for the words.
(25:35):
But, you know, per word, that's why there's 8 pages about the
smoke coming out the chimney at the start of Great Expectations.
And I was like, oh, it's so wonderful.
And that, you know, yeah, it's great.
But he was paid by the word. That's why his 8 pages about
smoke. It's being clever. 60s and 70s,
you think about some of the really classic sci-fi novels and
all of them, you know, you got to through the Gollans
(25:56):
masterworks. Now some of them are really lean
books, really lean. And they tell a perfectly good
story in 300 pages. I love big fancy, you know,
books. There's a bunch on my shelf
behind me. I read lots of them.
I love them. But equally, if you give me a
300 page, really fast-paced, gritty crime novel, fancy novel,
(26:16):
sci-fi novel, whatever it might be, and I can soak that up in,
you know, a few sessions and read, that's, that's fantastic.
I think shorter fiction works hand in hand with long fiction.
Sometimes you need, you want to soak into a world and just spend
as much time as you can in it. And other times you need like a
sort of palette cleanser before you go into something completely
(26:37):
new. Like you finish a series and
you've got a book hangover and you're like, oh God, you know, I
don't want to start another massive series.
I'm not ready for that kind of commitment yet.
You can read a couple of short novels and have a great, you
know, pellet cleanser and and novellas are great too.
They're they're good for that. And there's more of them
recently, I would say a lot morein the traditional space.
But you think about tour.com that's now react.
(27:00):
Yeah, sorry, tour.com. They're now doing like Martha
Wells did all of her what's the one with the robot that she did?
You know, like all of her novelsshe did 3 or 4 novellas and then
she's done some novels set in the same world.
T Kingfisher has done a bunch ofshort books based upon things as
well as bigger novels. So I think, I think it's
(27:22):
creeping in more and I think forsome traditionally published
shows like myself and others, they found a way to be hybrids
where like Brian McClellan did abunch of Powder Mage novellas
alongside his novels and he selfpublished the novellas.
Bradley Bollier with his, you know, his series, he did the
same thing. He had 6-7 book series, but he
(27:43):
had a bunch of novellas too thathe self published to expand the
world if people want more. So there's, there's ways to do
it. I think it's just finding a
project that you're passionate about that you want to explore
and you can, you can experiment with it as well because it's not
as big a commitment. Like if I'm writing a book a
year, I can't really squeeze in another book a year alongside it
(28:05):
for myself, but I could do a novella that I've got time to do
that alongside writing a a traditionally published novel,
you know? It's interesting that you say
that the publishing well just become worth a bit more
receptive to it because when I Iwas playing and doing research
with novellas a few years ago, everyone just seems to be so
adverse to them. It's not cost effective for
(28:26):
them, that's why they're. Effective.
I was thinking because there's less pages to print it's it's
better for them because it's to produce.
It's not that's the problem. It's not cost effective because
if you, so if I, you know, if you put out a novella and it's
150 pages, the cost of printing is is going to it's not.
(28:46):
In some ways these machines are so big, it's time on the machine
that's being paid for rather than, you know, the paper is a
factor. The ink is a factor, sure, but
equally it's time on the machinethat they need and they can.
There's only so many of these big machines to print and
there's only so many, you know, spaces and stuff and a novella.
You've got to pack in the cost for the advance.
(29:08):
You've got to pack in the cost for all the artwork and the
editing promotion and and then, you know, a portion for profit.
It's just not cost effective forthem.
So there aren't many of them that do it in the traditional
space. A smaller publisher isn't
operating on the same economies of scale.
So they can do it because they're not printing minimum
10,000. They might print 500 and that's
(29:31):
a big run for them, but they're not using the giant machines.
They're not paying at the same kind of scale, and they're not
trying to make the same profit margins as a larger publisher
who's part of an even bigger group, who's part of the Big 5.
So there's all these kind of business decisions that factor
into it. And there are some that do it
like like tour.com, like TachyonPress, but they're much smaller
(29:51):
businesses, so their overheads are much smaller.
So their costs are much lower. So the advances they might pay
might not be nearly as big. You're not going to get like a 7
figure deal for a novella compared to a three book giant
epic fancy series. But then again, it's probably
not going to sell at the same level.
So there's, I didn't write that thinking, oh, this novella
(30:11):
thinking, oh, I'm going to do itmyself before all these business
reasons. I wrote it because it was right
for the story. The fact that he ended up
self-publishing it is because itis such a weird one.
It crosses so many genre borders.
That's why ultimately I, I went,we, we tried a couple of the
smaller publishers and they werestill a bit kind of twitchy
about it because I think it wasn't quite right for them
because it is such an odd story.So I, it, it worked out in the
(30:34):
best, I think for me because I've learned so much from, from
doing this. But yeah, it's being a published
author, whether you're self published or traditional
published these days, you have to be business minded.
You have to have that. And I know something like, oh,
it's really boring and I don't want to have to think about
this. So I haven't got time for that.
That's when maybe traditional isbetter, better approach because
(30:55):
a lot of people are taking care of a lot of those other things
for you. You still have to do, you know,
promotion and social media and events and all that kind of
stuff. But there's a bunch of stuff
that you don't ever see that's taken care of by other people.
So it's about you as an individual and what you have
time for to fit in around everything else that's going on.
Your life, like a day job, family, you know, having a life
(31:17):
outside of writing, you know, all that kind of stuff.
I know it's there's a lot if yougo alone so, but like you said,
you mentioned some really good benefits to like having that
complete creative control and not being bound by the
preferences of editors and stufflike that, so.
(31:39):
Yeah, so. Share it with your readers.
Traditional publishers, some people complain that they they
don't buy certain books or booksfall out of fashion according to
them, and they're no longer alone, no longer buying them.
The reason that happens is, you know, tastes change and they're
keeping an eye on the market andeditors talk to agents and
(32:01):
obviously an agent isn't going to take on a new client for, I
don't know, a Cthulhu style horror novel.
Let's say that they've not been selling that well recently.
So editors tell agents, yeah, don't send us any of them
because we're not, we're not going to buy them.
That isn't to me. That doesn't mean there aren't
readers out there who still aren't readers that were still
(32:23):
enjoy, enjoy those kind of stories, but it means the agents
aren't looking for them. The editors aren't buying them.
So the big publishers aren't selling them.
If you've written one of those kind of stories and you think
it's really good and you want tostill get it out there and how
people read the book, you can still put it out there and get
and find an audience and you know, make some money that
hopefully can do some more in the future.
(32:45):
Traditional publishers play catch up.
Sometimes things come in tradition in the self published
space and they out new wave begins and they jump on board
and transfer it over. Romanticy.
That's really, really big in thetraditional space.
It started somewhere else. There are a lot of, there are
probably half a dozen authors I can think of that were big on
TikTok that did massive deal, massive sales.
(33:07):
Their self published so big they've now become traditionally
published. So, you know, traditional
published companies are really big organizations.
So they're like those oil tankers out at sea.
They're really slow to turn. Smaller publishers are a lot
nippier. That can change and jump around
a lot faster. Self published.
(33:27):
There's no giant corporation. If you can write a book fast
enough, you can put one out every three months or faster if
you really want to. And nobody's saying no because
it's not selling right now. You might put out a bunch of
books and sell 3 copies each. You might put out a bunch of
books, you know, and they sell acouple of hundred, couple of
1000 each. You just don't know.
But I think that's the main difference.
(33:48):
Like I've written this weird cross genre book.
I want to put it out there. No one says no, you can't do
that because we're not buying it.
It's like, well, I'm just going to, you know, someone will like
this book, Someone will read it,someone will enjoy it.
Feedback so far from, you know, beta readers and authors give me
cover quotes and early reviews. I've all enjoyed it.
So, you know, people are enjoying, people are liking it.
(34:10):
I'm happy with that. I'm I'm glad that people are
liking the story that I've created.
It's a bit different. So there isn't, I never try and
denigrate self-publishing or traditional publishing.
And you know, I'm, I'm quick to debunk myths on both sides
because it's, it's all about finding what path is right for
you. Not saying 1 is better than the
other because they're just not, they're very, very different in
(34:32):
their approach. And you know, in the last 10
years since I started with the traditional publishing, you
know, it's changed so much. The landscaped has massively
changed. Now some of my friends who are
self published authors have got their books translated into
other languages. They've got literary agents now
who do those deals for them. That was unheard of 6-7 years
(34:55):
ago, didn't exist, wasn't possible, no way it would
happen. And now it's it's, it's
happening all over the place. So the landscape is constantly
shifting and constantly changing.
And you have to be aware. I think of it just to be just so
you know what's going on really in the business.
Definitely. I suppose that's why it's so
exciting to expand what you're doing by trying different
(35:18):
projects and experimenting and seeing what works.
Yeah, yeah. Because, you know, I've always
done something different with every project.
So the first two trilogies are, you know, they've got mage in
the title, kind of gives you clues, a lot of magic, a lot of
stuff, very kind of slightly more traditional style fantasy.
Then I did a duology that was very different.
(35:38):
I was kind of looking at the oldfantasy quest trope and
reinventing it and doing something different whilst
talking about a bunch of different things.
Then I did historical fantasy trilogy that I'm halfway through
now because it's stretching different muscles.
It was a different challenge. It was a lot of research and I
never want to do the same thing twice.
I just kind of get bored doing it.
(36:00):
And if it's boring to write, it's probably boring to read.
So New York, NY Minute, very different again.
First person, multiple genre crossover, a Crime Story.
Yeah, it's, it keeps it fresh for me, keeps it interesting.
And it's still within the kind of speculative space which I,
you know, I'm probably always going to write stories in here.
(36:22):
It's in some capacity. You know, I'm never going to
move away from fancy. I might do other bits and
pieces, but I'll always come back and write more fantasy
stories in some way. That's what we like to hear.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not good anywhere.
So New York Mayor comes out on 1st of October.
It's a brilliant read. Go and check it out.
(36:43):
The world is fantastic, the characters are really engaging
and the story is nice and interesting crime.
It's what we love, all those intriguing thrillers and.
Lots of. Intense and lots of like rich
and curious characters along theway.
So yeah, definitely recommend them.
Cheers. So, yeah, it's e-book, it's
(37:04):
paperback, and it is on, it willbe on Kindle Unlimited from the
1st of October as well. So for those on Kindle
Unlimited. So yeah, that's, that's the
plan. And I'm doing a couple more in
the same world with the same characters.
I'll start writing the second novella in January.
That's the plan. So yeah.
Watch this space for more stories about Colin Bracken.
(37:26):
Stephen, where can we learn moreabout you?
If anyone wants to sign off for your newsletter or check out
your website, where's the best place to go?
Yeah, my website stephen-rn.com on there there's links to my
newsletter. I'm on Twitter and I'm on
Instagram. Those are the best places to
find me. I've got a YouTube channel.
If you are a writer and you wantsome writing advice videos,
(37:47):
there's a lot of interviews withauthors about how they got to
where they are, but equally there's, you know, over 100
videos of me debunking myths andtalking about various writing
aspects. So check out me out on YouTube.
Yeah, I'm not on Blue Sky. I'm not on TikTok so you won't
find me on there. YouTube but yeah, videos of
brilliance as well, so. Cheers.
Thank you. I always.
(38:08):
Like them? Yeah.
Thank you very much again, Steven.
It's been a pleasure chatting with you.
As always. Hope all goes well with the
book. Cheers, Richie.
Yeah, and thank you everyone home for listening.
Thanks everyone. Bye.
Thank you for listening to the Fantasy Risers Tool Shed.
If you'd like to join our writing community on Discord and
get access to fantasy writing classes and books on Patreon,
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And if you don't want to miss any future episodes, be sure to
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(00:23):
social media or with anyone who you think may be interested.
Thank you very much for listening.
Enjoy the show. Welcome to another episode of
the Fantasy Writers to Shit. I'm your host, Richie Billing,
(00:45):
and I'm delighted to welcome back best selling author Steven
I. And Steven, how are you doing?
I'm all right, Richie. Thanks for having me.
Thank you very much for joining me.
Lovely to see you again. Last time we spoke on the on the
show, you just released The JewsBlossom, which is a brilliant
Persian inspired historical fantasy.
Yeah, go and check it out. Brilliant, brilliant story.
(01:07):
And since then you've you've been very busy, haven't you?
You've had the second instalments.
That's called The Blood Thin Tide.
Yeah. Congratulations on that one.
Thank you. Yeah.
So, yeah, Book 2 in the trilogy that came out in July, Book 3 is
written that will be coming out next year and wrapping up the
series. Yeah.
Very nice. This one's gone down very well.
(01:28):
I mean, the Judas Blossom went down a storm.
I think this one's gone down even even better.
Yeah, I've heard from a lot of people, they've sort of said it
doesn't suffer from middle book syndrome and a trilogy, it
really kind of, you know, kicks the pants of the first one.
There's a lot more going on. There's a lot of action and it's
not like a slow book and in, youknow, where you might get
(01:50):
sometimes in the middle book of a, a trilogy that some of the
complaints that some people say about series.
So a lot of people are like, Oh,this is amazing.
And then some people are saying,well, what's this series?
And now they're reading the first book and going, Oh, this
is really good. And they can jump straight into
book 2. So I, I keep seeing a lot of
people discovering Judas blossomnow a year on, which is good
because they get to read book 2 immediately, but then they still
(02:10):
got to wait a year for book 3. So, you know, it's less than
that less than a year now, but you know, it's good.
It's it's, it's building an audience for sure.
Yeah, I think obviously it's such a unique setting and so
richly described as well, which is all down to your research.
Yeah, a lot of research. Yeah, we talked about that.
I think. I think we did, yeah.
(02:31):
Yeah, and what what the the bestthings I loved about the first
book is that all of the characters ended in positions
where it was all set up so nicely for an action fact second
book so. Yeah, yeah.
Thank you. Yeah, very nice.
And you, you haven't stopped there, have you?
Because you've got another book coming out very soon, on the 1st
(02:52):
of October. Yes.
So this is my first self published project.
It's it's been in the works for a couple of years.
I've been thinking about it for quite a while.
I wrote it between kind of drafts and edits of other
things. I had a bit of time and it was
an idea that wouldn't kind of leave me alone.
And so eventually I wrote it. Then I sat on it for a while and
(03:14):
I kept thinking, what am I goingto do with it?
It was novella. It was long for a novella at
42,000 words. And I thought, OK, do I, do I
make it a straight crime novel? Do I make it a straight fantasy?
Do I try and make it a full novel?
And I played around with it and nothing really kind of worked.
I was basically trying to, you know, put a square peg into a
round hole. It was what it was in the end, I
(03:35):
thought right, because it's suchan unusual story, it crosses a
lot of genre borders. And the fact that it's novella,
this will make a good first kindof project for me to self
publish it, learn the ropes. Because I've been talking to
authors, self published and traditional for like 4 years now
on my on my YouTube channel since COVID kind of times.
(03:56):
So I had learned some things, but I'd never done the process,
gone through the process myself.So this was a good opportunity
to learn it and actually do it as well.
No, it's, it's, it's really cooland it's, it's called New York
Minute New York. Minute, yeah.
I'm about 100 pages in, so I'm near the end.
You're nearly done. Yeah, and.
I think it's about 40 pages. That's what I love about
novellas. Jordan snapping.
(04:19):
Yeah, yeah. But it's I love the set and more
than anything, tell us a bit about how you what it, what it's
like and how you came up with it.
Yeah, so I, I describe it as a noir story set in alternate New
York. So it's it's not fantasy.
There's no magic, there's no monsters, there's no Dragons.
It is a Crime Story. It is kind of a hard boiled Pi
(04:43):
investigating a missing woman inthe New York underground.
He's kind of going through the underworld.
He's dealing with gangs and, youknow, prostitutes and crime.
And there's lots of violence andlots of adult content.
And it's, it feels very much different to anything I've done
before. And yet it's still a slightly
(05:05):
speculative novel because it's not our New York and it's not
21st century technology. So there's no cars, there's no
mobile phones, there's no, you know, modern technology of
anything like you'd imagine. It's a lot more primitive in
some ways. But the reasons for that are
built a kind of baked into the story and baked into the setting
(05:26):
for the why it is the way it is.And so there's, there's lots of
layers. There's there's the primary
story on the surface about this guy who used to be a cop and now
he's API. His foot has a case forced on
him. Essentially, he's told to go and
find this missing woman. And he can't say no because the
person who's asking is the most notorious crime boss in in New
(05:47):
York. And he has to kind of take the
case on, find this missing womanbecause otherwise it's his skin.
But he's also doing it for the right reasons because if he
doesn't, it will erupt in gang violence.
And he may not care about the gangs, but he cares about the
innocent bystanders that would get hurt in the process.
And so that's why he's doing it,not just because he's kind of
(06:10):
had his arm twisted into lookinginto this case really and trying
to find this woman. Yeah, I thought main character
is very refreshingly different for a sort of Crime Story.
I read a lot of crime novels. I love Ian Rankin and Rebus, but
Rebus is like the archetypal thedrunken detective.
(06:33):
You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But your characters aren't like that, and I really like that
aside to it. You've got the main character
who likes to sort of feel in thein the sticks out of the thick
of it a bit, but he's not afraidto get stuck in.
And there's a few really like, nice fight scenes that show just
how sort of competence and skilful he is.
(06:55):
Yeah, he's a kid who actually grew up in New York.
He was a city rat. You know, he spent his entire
life on the streets mixing with gangs as a kid growing up, and
then eventually joins the policeforce and spends even more time,
of course, dealing with criminals and the criminal
underworld. And eventually he becomes quite
jaded with the whole process andleaves and becomes API and he
(07:17):
moves out into the sticks and hestarts to discover things about
himself that he never realized that after having, you know,
thought that the cement and the the city was in his blood.
He realizes that he kind of likes the quiet and he kind of
likes being away from the rush. And he prefers to kind of do the
job, but then retreat back to his house and his home where
it's quiet again. So he's kind of rediscovering
(07:39):
new parts of himself as he goes,but he still has to work in the
city. And because he knows it, because
he grew up with it, he understands how it works and how
it operates because he's been through it every kind of level
and dealt with people who've committed crimes, but also those
who've been on the sufferer, thesufferers, those who've been
kind of caught up in innocence and those who've been victims of
(08:02):
crime. So it's it's a really kind of
typical Crime Story in some ways, because he's trying to
solve the case, but the setting is really atypical.
It's just not what you would expect.
And there's some other things that I've thrown in that I don't
want to spoil that kind of coloraround the edges that give it a
bit of a unique twist to do withthe world that it's in and some
(08:25):
of the kind of problems for the characters and then some of the
history as well. And it all kind of weaves
together. So it's it's a story about
people, but it's just in a very kind of different city.
But it will feel fairly familiarfor readers up to a certain
point. Yeah, it's that difference that
makes you want to explore and read with all the different
(08:48):
gangs. It reminds me like a little bit
like the Warriors. And that was like such an
exciting adventure. Even the acting was a bit
shocking for that film. Cult classic The cult classic
the film the. Film itself is so rich, you
know, these like different gangsand you do, it feels like so
(09:10):
unique and original. And as you're going through it,
you're discovering these new anddifferent angles all the time.
So yeah, it's it's, it's very cool.
And so how did you approach likethe creation of coal?
Because I think the crime novels, the, the, the central
character, they are quite often the focal point.
(09:30):
So I mentioned like Rebus for example.
Yeah. Like Ian Rankin can't stop
writing them novels because people kick off.
Do you want Rebus, Rebus, Rebus?Well, it's like Lee Charles with
Jack Reacher. He'd done like, you know, 25 of
them and like do more, do more. So he's not doing it for someone
else's now or, you know, DresdenFile novels.
I'm, I'm a culprit. I love those books and I want to
(09:52):
see more Harry Dresden books. So I've, I've read lots of crime
novels with a very central, strong character, you know, the
jaded kind of guy. And I wanted to do something a
little bit different. So to begin with, this Novello
is first person, which I've never done for a project
completely before. I've, I've dabbled around with
it, I've done short stories, I've done bits and pieces, but
(10:12):
no one's ever seen me publish anything in the first person.
So doing it this way was new in an experiment and allowed me to
get under the skin of the character even more.
So I started thinking about Coleas Cole Blackstone as the main
character and thinking about himat length, really thinking
about, you know, if he's this guy who has grown up in this
(10:32):
city as a kid, He's seen it right from the beginning, from,
you know, 2530 years ago up to the present and how much the
city has changed in his lifetime.
And I think about the cities where I've lived and how much
they've evolved. And then of course, he's been on
the side as a cop and he's trying to enforce the law
suddenly. And so he's he's dealt with all
(10:52):
of that. So it's all that kind of thing
of he's had a lot of experience.He's dealt with the worst of
humanity. And so it has left him a little
bit jaded. I didn't want to make him the
typical alcoholic, you know, divorcee who can't maintain a
relationship with a woman. And because as I thought, you
know, it's been done 1000 times,I don't want to do that.
And while he is cynical in some ways, because he has dealt with
(11:16):
so many bad people over the years, he still has that kind of
spark of of hope and optimism for humanity.
And it's up to his friend Bracken to remind him.
Bracken, who's his his best friend from childhood that grew
up on the streets together and went in very different ways.
But he kind of grounds him sometimes.
So when Cole does get dragged down and he starts to think, you
(11:39):
know, why am I still doing this?Why am I trying to help someone
who doesn't want help? Why am I dealing with the worst
kind of people ever? It's up to Bracken to remind him
to say, yeah, but even in the worst places, there's still
hope. There's still family, There's
still friendship. Some people are in these
situations not because they chose it, but because they've
been born into it or they've hadmisfortune fall upon them.
And so it was creating this balance between the two
(12:01):
characters, I think. And that's where every time I
started to drag too much down with Cole and thinking he's
making him so dark and brooding.And I thought, no, he's, he's
not that kind of a guy. And if he is, Bracken would have
shaken him, you know, shaken outhim over the years.
So I wanted to make him feel as realistic as possible given what
he's been through, but I didn't just want to make him an awful
(12:23):
cynical drunk the entire time, because that gets kind of
tedious, especially if I'm writing it first person.
Yeah. How did you find right in first
person? I've I've only told a few short
stories with it and I have really enjoyed it and I don't
know why I haven't done more. But what was your experience of
it? So there's the challenge of you
(12:43):
have to craft the story in a waythat the character comes across
everything organically. Otherwise it's like, oh,
suddenly you get a phone call and then that gives them the
information they need to go on to the next level of the
investigation. That can feel a bit kind of
contrived. So you have to be careful of
that. If you're writing a really big
world story, you can never move away from that one person's
(13:06):
point of view. So a big fancy Nova from 1:00 to
point of view can absolutely work, but you can't then jump to
the other side of the wall, the other side of the world.
It's all just what they see and hear and experience.
So if you're trying to kind of zoom out and do a more macro
story, you can't. There's tricks away.
You can get around it. But equally I'm thinking, well,
(13:27):
if you're going to do that, why not just do third person have
multiple points of view? So that's one thing.
The second thing is because you've only got this one
person's perspective of the world, you have to craft it
quite carefully. So think of if you've read the
Dresden Files, you think of of how he Dresden, he's this very
optimistic, very upbeat guy. He always believes the best in
(13:48):
people. He's always trying to help
someone. He's quite naive in some ways.
He's quite noble. He's very kind of old fashioned
and so you have to see his view of the world and you have to
find a way to it's convincing. So it doesn't just feel like you
with writing first person, it's very easy.
(14:09):
Just kind of like start talking as yourself through that
character. And I think writing someone
who's quite different from you is the biggest challenge.
Yeah. I mean, people always say, oh,
which which character is more like you?
And you know which in any book and thing to an author.
And the answer is all of them and none of them because I
created all of them. Every author's created all their
(14:31):
characters, but equally they're all pieces of me.
But it's that case with first person.
You have to be careful that it isn't just you the entire time
talking to the audience, preaching to them about
something. So I think Cole represents some
of my cynicism perhaps, but thenagain, wrap the character of
Bracken represent my optimism, my hope that and my belief that
(14:53):
people can be better, that can things can improve.
And even in the darkest times, you can still find hope.
So it it was it was a really interesting experience because I
want people to have a very specific viewpoint of the story
in the world from Cole's point of view.
And I think getting the balance right, that's, that's the
biggest challenge, I think, because I don't want people to
(15:15):
go and read like, oh, he's an awful part of person.
I really hate him and blah, blah, blah.
I'm thinking, no, no, I want himto be funny and likable.
And, you know, so it's that kindof thing.
You need to get good feedback tomake sure you're crafting it in
a very particular way. Yeah.
And how did you do that when they came to cold?
Did you get a lot of basically? Basically read the feedback and.
Stuff I got yeah, I got some feedback from friends because I
(15:37):
I kind of kept asking them aboutthis character and getting there
impressions of him and saying, you know, what do you think of
him and how how do you feel about him?
And, you know, there, there is some humor in the book because
it, it sounds like a very dark story and it is a very adult and
quite brutal story, but there's still humor in it.
There's still comedy moments andstill some levity and dark humor
(15:57):
because it would be in the situation.
And so I think it was just trying to make it feel organic.
That's what I kept asking to people who've read it and
saying, does this feel real? You know, what are you getting
from this character? How do you view him?
You know, do you think he's funny?
Do you think he's miserable? Do you think he's, you know, on
the right path and all that kindof stuff?
So. And yeah, it's it's getting the
(16:19):
right voice, I think for the character in first person is the
biggest challenge. Yeah, I think you've done a
great job. Oh, thanks, yeah.
I've, I've, I'm quite a slow reader.
I've been through this quite fast.
And it's because you've you've formed that connection with the
character and you want to see how they go on.
Yes, yeah. I I don't think every character
has to be likeable, but I think you have to find something about
(16:44):
them that's either interesting or good, however you interpret
that. You know the phrase good.
Like Dexter Morgan, the character from the Jeff Lindsay
novels, is a serial killer and, you know, he kills people and
that's awful. But he's really funny.
And I really like him because he's sarcastic and he and he he,
he does what he says about people.
And that endears him to me, despite what he does.
(17:05):
That's very different from Cole.Like, Cole is generally a good
guy who's just trying to do the right thing.
So it's. Yeah, it took a lot of work, I
think getting it right. And how does it feel right in
something that wasn't fantasy? Because you.
You, that's what you're most well known for.
The Battle Maze. The cameras, the baby born.
(17:25):
So to depart from that genre, what how does it feel?
Is it quite liberating or is it something that you want to do
for a while? I've been wanting to do it for a
while and I've kind of dabbled in it a little bit already
because Blood Mage my, my secondnovel is Crime fantasy novel.
Essentially, it's about a guy who's essentially a cop in a
(17:47):
city trying to find a serial killer.
That's one of the three characters in the main
characters in the book. And I kind of scratched that
itch then. But I'm a big fan of crime
fiction, in particular TV shows.I've watched them, you know,
since I was a kid all the way back to, you know, NYPD Blue and
Law and Order and all these kindof cop shows over the years.
So that's always been in the back of my brain.
(18:09):
And blood doing Blood Mage was good and it helped for a while.
And I kept thinking, oh, I want to write more stories with that
character. But then I got kind of very busy
with the other fantasy novels and the other kind of the next
trilogy, and then, you know, thecoward and the warrior and
stuff. So I think this is scratching
the itch to do a Crime Story. But because it's still
(18:30):
speculative fiction, because it's not just pure 21st century,
it's still kind of feels slightly fantastical to me.
So it's still, it's not, it's not fantasy, as I said, there's
no magic and monsters and stuff.But it's not a pure crime novel.
I might do one eventually, some point in the future, maybe, you
know, do do something like that.But having differences in there
(18:52):
allow me to do certain things inthe story that I couldn't do if
it was a straight crime novel. Like it's not a giveaway in the
front cover. There's two moons on the on the
cover of the book. So it's like straight away, you
know, we're not in Kansas anymore, you know?
So it's a lot of a difference. Yeah.
It's it's good that you you sortof you've blended too.
(19:13):
But in a way it's it's like you've got the the fantasy
elements with the the world. Yeah.
But it's still very much a humanstory.
Yeah. And that's what I really like.
It's brilliant. It's.
I think by having quite a few things in there that are
familiar in this story. But I always say within my
(19:35):
fantasy novels, the more things you have in there that are
familiar, the easier it is for people to get into a story.
Like with the Judas Blossom, it's 13th century Persia.
I don't know anybody who knows alot about that.
I didn't until I started doing any research.
But if I just filled it with so much detailed world building and
(19:55):
so many new terms, readers are going to stumble into that.
Like I talk about it like you'retrying to run the hurdles.
The more hurdles you put in place, the more the reader will
slow down. Rather than engaging with the
story and the characters in the world.
And so you kind of, you drip feed the information in, but you
give them enough stuff that's inthat that it feels familiar.
(20:16):
And so I, I did that on purpose with this world, that the fact
that I've set it in a city called New York, straightway
people have an idea of what thatis.
You know, I talk about other things and there's little nods
to other things within our worldthat people will recognize, you
know, so there's all these little tricks you can kind of
use to hook the reader so they engage with the the fate of the
characters. And that's ultimately what I
(20:37):
want. I want them to care about the
characters, not be thinking, well, how does that work and
what's this and what does that? What does that do?
And what's the thing it's like that's less important how it
works as engaging the charactersand their fate and care about
what's happening and the story. That's what I want from from my
readers, really. Yeah.
And do you think a novella worksquite well for that?
(20:58):
Because I've been writing novella as well, and I've quite
enjoyed the fact that you can just get rid of like all the
fluff and just focus purely on the characters and what they're
going through at this moment in time and then fill in the gaps
as you go. And it's I found it quite OK.
Yeah, it's a more gripping to edit, let's just say that
(21:19):
because. And fastest it was.
Well, it's just because the story's leaner.
It's, I don't know, I found it alot more engaging anyway.
Yeah, it is because you still have world building in there and
you still have all the importantconversations and dialogue in
the story, but you you strip outsome of the other things in
there. So I've just been reading the
(21:41):
Sebastian de Castell Great Coatsnovels and his books are all,
you know, 34500 pages, 550 pages.
But they read more like a crime novel or a novella because
there's a strong focus on dialogue.
There is will building. I can tell you all the
characters are like, I can tell you who they are.
I can tell you, you know what they're thinking.
(22:02):
But most of it is done through dialogue in his stories and
which makes them incredibly fastreads.
Despite being 600 pages, all of the chapters are really lean as
well. So you can just whip through a
chapter and like, I want to knowwhat happens next.
And that's a great kind of writing technique that he's
mastered. The I'm just like devouring the
books. And so you have you have some of
(22:24):
that with a novella, I think, because if you have 20 pages of
just world building description of stuff, that's a massive chunk
of the book you've already just used up.
Like so do do people really needto know all that?
Is it, are those 20 pages critical to the plot?
Probably not. So it's you strip out a lot of
the kind of fluff. I mean, you think, I think about
(22:45):
thriller novels that I've read over the years too.
Like I'm very kind of Dean Koontz and he can write some
chunky books. But there again, the pace is so
fast that you just whip through every book because the chapters
end on a cliffhanger. They're really tense or there's
a strong emotional beat that youwant to know what's happening
next. And so it's bringing some of
that paciness and just keeping that in the back of your mind as
(23:06):
I'm working on on a novella. And that's what I think helped
me because it's like 130 pages, maybe something like that, the
whole story. Yeah, like 135 pages.
And that's it. Job done.
Yeah, it's it's a very quick read, especially when you use
dialogue because like you say, that is one of the the best
tools you could use to quicken the pace.
(23:29):
Yeah, yeah. You just, you express the
character more so through their dialogue.
You still have their actions, ofcourse, but you, you hear what
they think a lot more and you see them, you know, through
conversation. And it works really well I
think. Yeah, it does.
Yeah. And what did you feel like when
it came to like, edit in a novella?
Because I've just come off the back of edit and a novel and
(23:51):
then into a novella and it's been brilliant because novella
and the novelist is a bit of a chore.
Write a novel. Write a novel takes a long time.
It's always a marathon. And editing a novel is the same.
It's just, it's just a lot of work to beat it into shape with
a novella, the whole process wasjust a lot faster.
(24:12):
I really enjoyed it. I really got great feedback from
my editor as well, of course, because I'm self-publishing it.
I chose my editor for the first time and I worked with the
artist to design the cover. And so, you know, I've done all
of these things. You know, I've been involved in
every stage before when I've been traditionally published, I
was involved in the cover designand all that kind of stuff.
(24:32):
But this time I chose the cover,final decision and I chose my
editor, which I've never done before.
So that was quite new. And proofreader as well.
So yeah, it's been a lot faster process because I'm managing it
all myself. People still got deadlines and
they've still got, you know, other work they fit me in
around, but it doesn't take nearly as long.
And with the novella, it's even shorter for them.
(24:52):
So it's even shorter for me to get the book finished.
Yeah. Do you think readers have got
appetite for short of fiction? I know it's just everyone
perhaps on about like people's attention spans are getting
shorter and whatnot, but I do feel like there's a lot to be
said about different types of fiction, yeah, rather than just
(25:13):
novels and like 3-4 hundred pages.
Yeah, because if you go back to the 60s and 70s, novels were
only two 3400 pages. A long novel will be 400 pages.
You go, you go back far enough and you people talk about the
greats like, you know, Charles Dickens and, and all those kind
of things. And you say, yeah, but he used
to write in newspapers and he was paid for the words.
(25:35):
But, you know, per word, that's why there's 8 pages about the
smoke coming out the chimney at the start of Great Expectations.
And I was like, oh, it's so wonderful.
And that, you know, yeah, it's great.
But he was paid by the word. That's why his 8 pages about
smoke. It's being clever. 60s and 70s,
you think about some of the really classic sci-fi novels and
all of them, you know, you got to through the Gollans
(25:56):
masterworks. Now some of them are really lean
books, really lean. And they tell a perfectly good
story in 300 pages. I love big fancy, you know,
books. There's a bunch on my shelf
behind me. I read lots of them.
I love them. But equally, if you give me a
300 page, really fast-paced, gritty crime novel, fancy novel,
(26:16):
sci-fi novel, whatever it might be, and I can soak that up in,
you know, a few sessions and read, that's, that's fantastic.
I think shorter fiction works hand in hand with long fiction.
Sometimes you need, you want to soak into a world and just spend
as much time as you can in it. And other times you need like a
sort of palette cleanser before you go into something completely
(26:37):
new. Like you finish a series and
you've got a book hangover and you're like, oh God, you know, I
don't want to start another massive series.
I'm not ready for that kind of commitment yet.
You can read a couple of short novels and have a great, you
know, pellet cleanser and and novellas are great too.
They're they're good for that. And there's more of them
recently, I would say a lot morein the traditional space.
But you think about tour.com that's now react.
(27:00):
Yeah, sorry, tour.com. They're now doing like Martha
Wells did all of her what's the one with the robot that she did?
You know, like all of her novelsshe did 3 or 4 novellas and then
she's done some novels set in the same world.
T Kingfisher has done a bunch ofshort books based upon things as
well as bigger novels. So I think, I think it's
(27:22):
creeping in more and I think forsome traditionally published
shows like myself and others, they found a way to be hybrids
where like Brian McClellan did abunch of Powder Mage novellas
alongside his novels and he selfpublished the novellas.
Bradley Bollier with his, you know, his series, he did the
same thing. He had 6-7 book series, but he
(27:43):
had a bunch of novellas too thathe self published to expand the
world if people want more. So there's, there's ways to do
it. I think it's just finding a
project that you're passionate about that you want to explore
and you can, you can experiment with it as well because it's not
as big a commitment. Like if I'm writing a book a
year, I can't really squeeze in another book a year alongside it
(28:05):
for myself, but I could do a novella that I've got time to do
that alongside writing a a traditionally published novel,
you know? It's interesting that you say
that the publishing well just become worth a bit more
receptive to it because when I Iwas playing and doing research
with novellas a few years ago, everyone just seems to be so
adverse to them. It's not cost effective for
(28:26):
them, that's why they're. Effective.
I was thinking because there's less pages to print it's it's
better for them because it's to produce.
It's not that's the problem. It's not cost effective because
if you, so if I, you know, if you put out a novella and it's
150 pages, the cost of printing is is going to it's not.
(28:46):
In some ways these machines are so big, it's time on the machine
that's being paid for rather than, you know, the paper is a
factor. The ink is a factor, sure, but
equally it's time on the machinethat they need and they can.
There's only so many of these big machines to print and
there's only so many, you know, spaces and stuff and a novella.
You've got to pack in the cost for the advance.
(29:08):
You've got to pack in the cost for all the artwork and the
editing promotion and and then, you know, a portion for profit.
It's just not cost effective forthem.
So there aren't many of them that do it in the traditional
space. A smaller publisher isn't
operating on the same economies of scale.
So they can do it because they're not printing minimum
10,000. They might print 500 and that's
(29:31):
a big run for them, but they're not using the giant machines.
They're not paying at the same kind of scale, and they're not
trying to make the same profit margins as a larger publisher
who's part of an even bigger group, who's part of the Big 5.
So there's all these kind of business decisions that factor
into it. And there are some that do it
like like tour.com, like TachyonPress, but they're much smaller
(29:51):
businesses, so their overheads are much smaller.
So their costs are much lower. So the advances they might pay
might not be nearly as big. You're not going to get like a 7
figure deal for a novella compared to a three book giant
epic fancy series. But then again, it's probably
not going to sell at the same level.
So there's, I didn't write that thinking, oh, this novella
(30:11):
thinking, oh, I'm going to do itmyself before all these business
reasons. I wrote it because it was right
for the story. The fact that he ended up
self-publishing it is because itis such a weird one.
It crosses so many genre borders.
That's why ultimately I, I went,we, we tried a couple of the
smaller publishers and they werestill a bit kind of twitchy
about it because I think it wasn't quite right for them
because it is such an odd story.So I, it, it worked out in the
(30:34):
best, I think for me because I've learned so much from, from
doing this. But yeah, it's being a published
author, whether you're self published or traditional
published these days, you have to be business minded.
You have to have that. And I know something like, oh,
it's really boring and I don't want to have to think about
this. So I haven't got time for that.
That's when maybe traditional isbetter, better approach because
(30:55):
a lot of people are taking care of a lot of those other things
for you. You still have to do, you know,
promotion and social media and events and all that kind of
stuff. But there's a bunch of stuff
that you don't ever see that's taken care of by other people.
So it's about you as an individual and what you have
time for to fit in around everything else that's going on.
Your life, like a day job, family, you know, having a life
(31:17):
outside of writing, you know, all that kind of stuff.
I know it's there's a lot if yougo alone so, but like you said,
you mentioned some really good benefits to like having that
complete creative control and not being bound by the
preferences of editors and stufflike that, so.
(31:39):
Yeah, so. Share it with your readers.
Traditional publishers, some people complain that they they
don't buy certain books or booksfall out of fashion according to
them, and they're no longer alone, no longer buying them.
The reason that happens is, you know, tastes change and they're
keeping an eye on the market andeditors talk to agents and
(32:01):
obviously an agent isn't going to take on a new client for, I
don't know, a Cthulhu style horror novel.
Let's say that they've not been selling that well recently.
So editors tell agents, yeah, don't send us any of them
because we're not, we're not going to buy them.
That isn't to me. That doesn't mean there aren't
readers out there who still aren't readers that were still
(32:23):
enjoy, enjoy those kind of stories, but it means the agents
aren't looking for them. The editors aren't buying them.
So the big publishers aren't selling them.
If you've written one of those kind of stories and you think
it's really good and you want tostill get it out there and how
people read the book, you can still put it out there and get
and find an audience and you know, make some money that
hopefully can do some more in the future.
(32:45):
Traditional publishers play catch up.
Sometimes things come in tradition in the self published
space and they out new wave begins and they jump on board
and transfer it over. Romanticy.
That's really, really big in thetraditional space.
It started somewhere else. There are a lot of, there are
probably half a dozen authors I can think of that were big on
TikTok that did massive deal, massive sales.
(33:07):
Their self published so big they've now become traditionally
published. So, you know, traditional
published companies are really big organizations.
So they're like those oil tankers out at sea.
They're really slow to turn. Smaller publishers are a lot
nippier. That can change and jump around
a lot faster. Self published.
(33:27):
There's no giant corporation. If you can write a book fast
enough, you can put one out every three months or faster if
you really want to. And nobody's saying no because
it's not selling right now. You might put out a bunch of
books and sell 3 copies each. You might put out a bunch of
books, you know, and they sell acouple of hundred, couple of
1000 each. You just don't know.
But I think that's the main difference.
(33:48):
Like I've written this weird cross genre book.
I want to put it out there. No one says no, you can't do
that because we're not buying it.
It's like, well, I'm just going to, you know, someone will like
this book, Someone will read it,someone will enjoy it.
Feedback so far from, you know, beta readers and authors give me
cover quotes and early reviews. I've all enjoyed it.
So, you know, people are enjoying, people are liking it.
(34:10):
I'm happy with that. I'm I'm glad that people are
liking the story that I've created.
It's a bit different. So there isn't, I never try and
denigrate self-publishing or traditional publishing.
And you know, I'm, I'm quick to debunk myths on both sides
because it's, it's all about finding what path is right for
you. Not saying 1 is better than the
other because they're just not, they're very, very different in
(34:32):
their approach. And you know, in the last 10
years since I started with the traditional publishing, you
know, it's changed so much. The landscaped has massively
changed. Now some of my friends who are
self published authors have got their books translated into
other languages. They've got literary agents now
who do those deals for them. That was unheard of 6-7 years
(34:55):
ago, didn't exist, wasn't possible, no way it would
happen. And now it's it's, it's
happening all over the place. So the landscape is constantly
shifting and constantly changing.
And you have to be aware. I think of it just to be just so
you know what's going on really in the business.
Definitely. I suppose that's why it's so
exciting to expand what you're doing by trying different
(35:18):
projects and experimenting and seeing what works.
Yeah, yeah. Because, you know, I've always
done something different with every project.
So the first two trilogies are, you know, they've got mage in
the title, kind of gives you clues, a lot of magic, a lot of
stuff, very kind of slightly more traditional style fantasy.
Then I did a duology that was very different.
(35:38):
I was kind of looking at the oldfantasy quest trope and
reinventing it and doing something different whilst
talking about a bunch of different things.
Then I did historical fantasy trilogy that I'm halfway through
now because it's stretching different muscles.
It was a different challenge. It was a lot of research and I
never want to do the same thing twice.
I just kind of get bored doing it.
(36:00):
And if it's boring to write, it's probably boring to read.
So New York, NY Minute, very different again.
First person, multiple genre crossover, a Crime Story.
Yeah, it's, it keeps it fresh for me, keeps it interesting.
And it's still within the kind of speculative space which I,
you know, I'm probably always going to write stories in here.
(36:22):
It's in some capacity. You know, I'm never going to
move away from fancy. I might do other bits and
pieces, but I'll always come back and write more fantasy
stories in some way. That's what we like to hear.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not good anywhere.
So New York Mayor comes out on 1st of October.
It's a brilliant read. Go and check it out.
(36:43):
The world is fantastic, the characters are really engaging
and the story is nice and interesting crime.
It's what we love, all those intriguing thrillers and.
Lots of. Intense and lots of like rich
and curious characters along theway.
So yeah, definitely recommend them.
Cheers. So, yeah, it's e-book, it's
(37:04):
paperback, and it is on, it willbe on Kindle Unlimited from the
1st of October as well. So for those on Kindle
Unlimited. So yeah, that's, that's the
plan. And I'm doing a couple more in
the same world with the same characters.
I'll start writing the second novella in January.
That's the plan. So yeah.
Watch this space for more stories about Colin Bracken.
(37:26):
Stephen, where can we learn moreabout you?
If anyone wants to sign off for your newsletter or check out
your website, where's the best place to go?
Yeah, my website stephen-rn.com on there there's links to my
newsletter. I'm on Twitter and I'm on
Instagram. Those are the best places to
find me. I've got a YouTube channel.
If you are a writer and you wantsome writing advice videos,
(37:47):
there's a lot of interviews withauthors about how they got to
where they are, but equally there's, you know, over 100
videos of me debunking myths andtalking about various writing
aspects. So check out me out on YouTube.
Yeah, I'm not on Blue Sky. I'm not on TikTok so you won't
find me on there. YouTube but yeah, videos of
brilliance as well, so. Cheers.
Thank you. I always.
(38:08):
Like them? Yeah.
Thank you very much again, Steven.
It's been a pleasure chatting with you.
As always. Hope all goes well with the
book. Cheers, Richie.
Yeah, and thank you everyone home for listening.
Thanks everyone. Bye.
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