Official Author Website 
Order the book HERE
Read Fantasy Book Critic's review of The Thousand Names and The Penitent Damned
Read Django Wexler's guest post about the planning of a series
Read the prologue and chapter one HERE 

Django Wexler's flintlock fantasy debut The Thousand Names really made an impression on Liviu and me at Fantasy Book Critic. I was thoroughly amazed by the scope of the story and the way it was presented. A particular highlight were the POV characters especially Winter Ihernglass. Django was kind enough to accept my invite for this interview & so read ahead to find what makes Django tick. What's upcoming in the Shadow Campaign series as well as what he has previously written..

Q: Welcome to Fantasy Book Critic. For starters, could you please introduce yourself, and tell us what inspired you to become a wordsmith? 

DW: Hi! I’m Django Wexler. I’ve been doing writing of one sort of another as long as I can remember, first for elaborate table-top RPG campaigns and eventually making the jump into fiction. If there was something specific that inspired me, it’s lost in the mists of time. Doing it professionally is a pretty recent thing, though -- I always thought I’d be a programmer with a writing hobby.

Q: Could you elaborate more on the journey you went through in finding a publisher, what you think of Ace-Roc? And what you think the publisher saw in your book? 

DW: Depending on how you count, The Thousand Names was either my ninth or tenth novel. After doing a couple of books with a small press (I’ll talk about those in a minute) I decided I wanted to write something new that I could use to try and get a literary agent. My first attempt at that book, Gaze Into Shadow, didn't quite cut it, so I left that universe to sit in a drawer for a while and took on The Thousand Names. It was around this time I moved from Pittsburgh to Seattle, too, so between changing cities and changing jobs it took me a long time to get things going again.

Once I had a draft, I went through what I was always taught was the standard process. (It turns out that probably more people deviate from this than follow it.) I made a list of agents who I thought might like my work, and sent query packages to each of them over the course of a couple of weeks. I think out of fifty queries, I got two positive responses, and one of those was on the second try -- Seth Fishman, who ultimately became my agent, passed the first time around because he didn't have room in his schedule. (I’m glad he got to take another look, because he’s awesome!)

After Seth took me on as a client, I did another draft of the book with his advice and wrote synopses for the rest of the series, and he took those out to the publishers. As to what Roc saw in the book, you’d have to ask them, although I know the length was a potential sticking point. My experience working with them has been wonderful, from start to finish -- my editor, Jess Wade, did a great job and worked hand-in-hand with my UK editor so I didn't end up with two competing sets of notes, and their publicity has been excellent.

Q: So when and how did the idea for the Shadow Campaign series first come about, how long have you been working on it, and how much has it evolved from its original conception? 

DW: The Shadow Campaigns has gone through quite a few iterations over the years. It was originally conceived as a kind of fantasy history of Napoleon Bonaparte, and bits and pieces of that conception have stuck around, but the overall series has changed a lot as ideas are wont to do. The first thing that’s recognizable as part of the idea is from 2006 or so, but I tend to grab bits and pieces of failed project to use in new ones, so it’s hard to put an exact time-frame on it.

I wrote a little bit about going back through my notes for the series here.

Q: I was very intrigued by the character of Colonel Janus bet Vhalnich. He seemed to be a curious mixture of Sherlock Holmes and A.X.L. Pendergast. Pray tell us how his existence came to be and what is his character arc? I’m also curious as to whether he will be getting his own POV in the future books? 

DW: Janus was originally the Napoleon character, the military genius whose presence would dominate the scene. Again, I've moved on a lot from there, and his character definitely has big doses of Sherlock Holmes and Grand Admiral Thrawn, along with many others. My original plan was for him to be the main character, seen through the POV of a loyal follower, somewhat like Holmes and Watson, but it didn't work out -- Marcus, and later Winter, acquired personalities of their own, and the story became as much about them as it was about Janus. (This is probably a good thing. Winter’s story in particular has become one of my favorite parts of the series.)

Janus probably will not get a POV. When you've got a character who is supposed to be a genius, it can be very difficult to dip into his head without ruining some of the magic. We’ll definitely find out a lot more about him, though!

Q: Tell us about “The Penitent Damned”? How long ago is it set in the series and will any of the characters featured in it be playing a major role in the sequels to come? 

DW: For those who haven’t heard of it, “The Penitent Damned” is a prequel short for The Thousand Names, available as a free ebook (Here) or for $0.99 on the Kindle store.

It’s set just before Janus departs for Khandar, which puts it roughly six weeks (sailing time from Vordan to Khandar) before the opening of The Thousand Names. The characters from the short will definitely be making appearances in the series -- we’ll see Andreas and Orlanko again in The Shadow Throne, in fact, when the action returns to Vordan City. (I actually wrote the first draft of The Shadow Throne before writing the short, so I had all the maps and references for Vordan City handy!)

Q: I noticed on Fantastic Fiction that you have two other books listed as your previous publications, Can you tell us about Memories Of Empire and Shinigami? What genres are they set in and how did those books come about to be? 

DW: I wrote Memories of Empire as my first attempt at getting a fantasy novel published, after a string of fan-fiction and other internet stuff. It takes place in a world where a Roman- or European-style civilization has been conquered by a Japanese-style one, and revolves around a mysterious, invincible swordsman named Corvus and a girl, Veil, who he rescues from slavery. I’d probably call it swords and sorcery, I guess?

It was printed by a small publisher, Medallion Press, and did well enough that they asked me for another one. What I came up with was Shinigami, a dark (at times, very dark) fantasy. It’s the story of two sisters from our modern world, Lina and Sylph, who die in a car accident and find themselves in a world called Omega, ruled by tyrannical Archmagi. Before long, Lina is proclaimed the prophesized Liberator who will free the people from oppression and leads the fight against them, while Sylph tries to figure out who engineered the whole setup. Both books are out of print now. I do have the rights back, though, so it’s quite possible we’ll see them again at some point.

Q: For someone who hasn't read any of your novels, how would you describe the type of stories that you write? What would be your elevator pitch for the Shadow Campaign Series? 

DW: I write all kinds of stories (I have a middle-grade fantasy, The Forbidden Library, coming out in April) but The Shadow Campaigns specifically I would call military fantasy. I vary the elevator pitch depending on who I’m talking to -- I've used both “Sharpe with magic” and “Game of Thrones with guns”, though I always quail at comparing myself to awesome writers like Cornwall and Martin.

A slightly longer version of the latter goes like this: when I read A Song of Ice and Fire, I was really taken with what Martin did, bringing the “traditional” fantasy setting with knights and castles and so on back to its realistic medieval roots. That idea of blending a dose of historical realism with magic really appealed to me, and so I eventually decided to give a try. Instead of 13th century England, I used early 19th century France, loosely scaffolding the story around the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Q: Speaking of the series, how many volumes are projected, how far along are you in "The Shadow Throne", and is there anything you can tell us about it (additional POVs)? 

DW: The Shadow Throne is actually finished, and has been for some time. I wrote the first draft last summer, while I was waiting for edits to come back on The Forbidden Library. Right now I’m working on the first big edit pass, which is due to my editor in a couple of weeks. It’s been a bit of a struggle, but now it’s coming along nicely!

I’m really excited about it, I think there’s a lot of cool stuff in there I can’t wait to show everyone. There’s one additional POV character, Raesinia Orboan, Princess of Vordan and heir-apparent to the throne. She was part of my very first drafts of The Thousand Names (which included big parts of what is now The Shadow Throne) so in a way this is kind of a completion of that original story.

Aside from a few short “asides” (like Jaffa and Khtoba in The Thousand Names) she should actually be the last POV character added to the series. I planned The Shadow Campaigns to be five books, and thus far it seems to be sticking pretty close to the original outline, so I think that’s fairly solid.

Q: You also have a middle grade title coming out next year “The Forbidden Library”. Tell us about it and how do you plan to write in two different genres? 

DW: The Forbidden Library is the story of a girl named Alice and the evening in 1931 when she comes downstairs to find a fairy talking to her father in the kitchen. When her father disappears soon after under mysterious circumstances, she’s sent to live with an uncle she’s never heard of, who lives deep in the woods with an enormous library Alice isn't allowed to enter. When she does sneak in, trying to find out what really happened to her father, she discovers that fairies are the least of her problems.

Writing in two genres, or at least for two different audiences, has been surprisingly easy, which I think is mostly because I have really excellent editors. When I started The Forbidden Library I didn't really know it was a children’s book, and I mostly wrote it just the way I would normally write anything else. (Once I caught on, I decided to leave out any explicit gore, sex, or swearing, but the rest is the same.) Kathy, my editor, helped me go through it and make it a little more appropriate for the audience, but we honestly didn't change that much.

Q: For some authors it’s easier writing their second novel, while for others it’s more difficult. How are things going for you with “The Shadow Throne” and did you learn anything when writing “The Thousand Names” that helped prepare you for the new book? 

DW: It’s a little bit harder now that I’m going through The Shadow Throne to make sure it’s consistent, because I have to keep checking details against my notes or the text of The Thousand Names. In another way, it’s easier, because I have a much better grasp of Winter, Marcus, and Janus than I did when I started writing the first book.

Every book is a learning experience, but it helps that The Shadow Throne isn't really my second novel. (Depending on how you count, The Thousand Names was something like #9, and I wrote The Forbidden Library in between them.) I have learned a lot about the publishing process, and I think working with my other set of excellent editors, Jess and Michael, has done wonders. The one thing I've had to work on most of all is patience -- everything in publishing takes forever!

Q: Can you tell us more about the world (nations, lands, religions, etc) that “The Thousand Names” is set in and some of the series’ major characters? 

DW: I could fill a book with the backstory and world design of The Thousand Names, easily, but obviously I can’t put all that here. One major aspect we’ll see come to the fore in the next book is the division in the Vordanai religion, between the Sworn Church (whose members swear loyalty to the Church hierarchy in Elysium) and the Free Church, made up of hundreds of small, independent congregations. Vordan is officially a Free Church country, which puts it at odds with Borel and Murnsk, its neighbors to the north, where the Sworn Church is the state religion. To the east is the Six Cities League, led by Hamvelt, a rich, mountainous city-state.

Q: In epic fantasy, some authors like to put an emphasis on characters or worldbuilding; others on storytelling. Where do you fit in this picture and what do you feel are your strengths as a writer? What about weakness or areas that you’d like to get stronger in, especially in future books? 

DW: Characters are always foremost for me, because I think they’re really what sticks with the reader. I’m probably better at worldbuilding (it comes from years of GMing) but creating memorable characters is really the heart of fiction; the world is just there as scaffolding to hang them on. It’s something I’d like to be better at, although I suspect that will always be true no matter how many books I write.

Q: Please tell us about the books and authors who have captured your imagination and inspired you to become a wordsmith in your own right. Similarly, are there any current authors you would like to give a shout out to? 

DW: I mentioned George R. R. Martin above, who more or less directly led to my current series. Another big influence was a series called The General by S. M. Stirling and David Drake, where they retell the campaigns of Belisarius in an SF setting. Getting a jacket quote from Stirling was a huge thrill. I’d also have to mention David Chandler, whose non-fiction is as exciting as any epic fantasy. His Campaigns of Napoleon is probably most directly responsible for The Thousand Names and its sequels.

Among current authors, there are way too good ones to list, so I’ll restrict myself to mentioning fellow Penguin debut M. L. Brennan, who was in writing class at Carnegie Mellon with me more than a decade ago. Check out Generation V, it’s a great, unique take on urban fantasy.

Q: In closing, do you have any last thoughts or comments you’d like to share with our readers? 

DW: Only to thank them for staying with me through all of that! And if you’re going to be at New York Comic-Con, make sure to drop by and say hello!

Official Author Website
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AUTHOR INFORMATION: John Lawton is a producer/director in television who has written 1963, a social and political history of the Kennedy-Macmillan years, seven thrillers in the Troy series and a stand-alone novel, Sweet Sunday. He spent most of the 90s in New York but currently lives in Derbyshire UK. He has also edited the poetry of DH Lawrence and the stories of Joseph Conrad. He is devoted to the work of Franz Schubert, Cormac McCarthy, Art Tatum and Barbara Gowdy.

OFFICIAL BLURB: Joe Wilderness is a World War II orphan, a condition that he thinks excuses him from common morality. Cat burglar, card sharp, and Cockney wide boy, the last thing he wants is to get drafted. But in 1946 he finds himself in the Royal Air Force, facing a stretch in military prison . . . when along comes Lt Colonel Burne-Jones to tell him MI6 has better use for his talents.

Posted to occupied Berlin, interrogating ex-Nazis, and burgling the odd apartment for MI6, Wilderness finds himself with time on his hands and the devil making work. He falls in with Frank, a US Army captain, with Eddie, a British artilleryman and with Yuri, a major in the NKVD and together they lift the black market scam to a new level. Coffee never tasted so sweet. And he falls for Nell Breakheart, a German girl who has witnessed the worst that Germany could do and is driven by all the scruples that Wilderness lacks.

Fifteen years later, June 1963. Wilderness is free-lance and down on his luck. A gumshoe scraping by on divorce cases. Frank is a big shot on Madison Avenue, cooking up one last Berlin scam . . . for which he needs Wilderness once more. Only now they're not smuggling coffee, they're smuggling people. And Nell? Nell is on the staff of West Berlin's mayor Willy Brandt, planning for the state visit of the most powerful man in the world: "Ich bin ein Berliner!"

FORMAT/INFO: Then We Take Berlin is 400 pages long divided into two hundred and five chapters that are spread out over three titled sections. The main POV characters are John Wilfrid Holderness and Nell Burkhardt who are presented in third-person along with a few others. This is the first book in a new series by the author.

September 3, 2013 marked the hardcover publication of Then We Take Berlin and was published by Atlantic Monthly Press.

ANALYSIS: I’ve never read John Lawton book before this one. He’s had a previous series, which featured a character set in the pre-WWII era. This book however featured a whole new character and is mostly set partly just after the WWII & then in the 1960s. The story was a strong one but I was partially wrong in regards to the nature of the book.

The story begins in 1963 wherein John Wilfrid Holderness is happily married to Judy but has fallen on rather lean times. He gets called into New York City; by his old wartime associate Frank Spoleto. Frank is a member in the Carver, Sharma and Dunn advertising agency. Joe is a person brought up on the East end side of London. He’s gained his wits after his mother’s death in the German blitz and since then has been brought up by his grandfather. Joe's grandpa Abner is a cat burglar with a particular eye for cracking safes. He moves into Joe’s house with his paramour Merle who sometimes moonlights as a street lady. Joe’s father is a brute who works in the army & whenever he’s home beats Joe, threatens Abner & generally makes life miserable for everyone. Christina Helene Von Raeder "Nell" Burkhardt is an orphan sent to live with her uncle by her mother as Berlin falls. She however faces the brutal impact of the German loss after WWII. Her acceptance of her familial losses leads her to become a very morally hardened person that will thrive in the post war black market. She currently is the person that is tasked by the mayor of Berlin with creating President J.F. Kennedy’s itinerary for his 1963 trip to Berlin.

With these POV characters, we are taken to their teenage years as we are shown how the war has affected Britain and Germany and then we are shown the different career paths taken by Joe and Nell both. The main story unfolds in post war Germany as the author portrays a bleak if not entirely abject atmosphere. The reader is shown how both these characters come to become the characters we have met at the start of the book in 1963. The author’s research is where the main story gets its backbone from & while I’m no expert, to me it was a very captivating read. The author shows us how the black marketers went about and how Joe and Nell meet each other while doing their own things.

While these are the main POV characters, there’s a big side character cast who are equally enigmatic, interesting and flawed. They are the people that Joe meets such as Lieutenant Colonel A. Burne-Jones & Rada, who shape his worldview while saving him from his self-destructive tendencies and wizen him for the world. There are also Abner & Merle who in turn become parent figures to Joe but because of their own acts scar his psyche in small but significant ways. With Nell, there’s a whole range of folks that come across her path and mold her into the person she is by death, savagery, sympathy & even a little serendipity.

With this book, I thought it to be a standalone but I was sadly mistaken about that as the climax proved oh so strongly. But to get to the meat of the plot, it is about the tragic circumstances that were prevalent in Berlin divided into East & West sections. Firstly the main group of characters used to smuggle goods like cigarettes, alcohol, coffee, etc. but now nearly fifteen years later are tasked to smuggle people and therein lies the whole Herculean quandary as to how to go about it.

The book serves like a prologue to the lengthy events that are to come as the author goes all out in building up his world for the modern readers to visualize & imagine. The characterization is competently handled as all characters are given pages & time to entrance the reader but the book suffers from this as the pace stutters quite a bit in the first half of the book. While the author shows the growth of the world and the main characters, he takes his time and therein lies the catch-22 situation, for some readers will love the author for this move while others will castigate him for taking his time to get to the meat of the plot. I found myself hoping that the slack pace would pick up but it wasn’t something that happened quickly.

Lastly the ending is a bit of a stunner and would have been better appreciated had I know that this book was the first of a series and not a standalone. As the climax occurred, I kept flipping pages to see if my ARC was missing pages but afterwards I learnt that this was how the book ended and perhaps a line saying, “to be continued” would have been nice. Overall I have to say while this book had its faults; overall it is still a good book for its strengths make it all worthwhile in the end.

CONCLUSION: This was my first tryst with John Lawton’s works and I have to say I’m impressed. He seems to be utterly fascinating with his historical thrillers and herein he does his best to introduce a new cast of characters for fans of his Inspector Troy series. Then We Take Berlin is simply a good historical thriller that perhaps needed bit of tightening in its middle to liven up its pace.

When not frantically grinding the sausage that is the next Spellmason Chronicles book (such as the just releasing Stonecast), I try to give back to the writing community that gave me my first shot. My chance at being a Published Author was a short story submission in the mid 2000s that came from attending the Writer’s Symposium at Gen Con, so I feel I owe it to try and pay my career forward by passing along any type of advice I've come up with that wish I had had back in the day.

Not that I've Mastered My Craft (a term I deplore), mind you. With four Simon Canderous paranormal detective novels and now writing the third in the Spellmason Chronicles, I’m still learning new things every damned day.

As part of my paying it forward, I read a lot of submissions during read and critique sessions at conventions. Some see me as the Simon Cowell panelist, which I don’t mind. I consider him brutal but honest, and if you put your ego aside and listen, you’ll actually learn something. And when I do these sessions, I do hope the new or unseasoned writer trembling before me does learn. I want them to succeed, but first they need to contend with what I see as the number one problem that comes before me in these sessions.

WORLD BUILDING:

Look, new and fragile writer, I get it. You came up with an awesome idea set in a world that is blowing your creative mind. You've thought about the climate, the currency, the society, the monsters, how people survive for a living… you've given it your all.

Here’s the thing to remember: I don’t give a crap about your world.

At least, not yet.

Why? Because time and time again I see the new writer spend the first twenty or thirty pages showing me all his clever world building. Lush descriptive passages of the climate or a village, the fact that in your world it rains from the ground up into the sky…

Thing is, you’re not writing Fodor’s Guide to Rigel Seven, writers. I don’t care about you spelling out your world to me like it’s a travel guide (and this is how they do read almost every session). That’s stuff the author needs to know but readers don’t. I’d argue that that level of telling us about the world you crated doesn't need to be included in the book very much at all.

So what do I care about? Your characters, and I’ll only care about the fact that it rains from the ground up in your world once a character steps out their front door and water rushes up their pant leg because they forgot to tie their weatherproof pants shut. Now, I know it rains from the ground up and I care because your poor hero’s underwear is soaked and most of us can identify with their misery.

The trick of world building—as I see it—is: I only want to know about your world as far as it affects your characters in the moment of the plot.

If you want to see it done well, read Patrick Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicles. When his main character is reduced to being a beggar/musician, I learned exactly how the currency of the world worked because he needed to scrape together x amount of money for the most basic of needs—food. Nowhere does Mr. Rothfuss stop to give us a lecture on how the currency of the world works. Only through Kvothe’s needs do we learn it, and Pat is such a master world builder that while I was reading the book I found I easily knew how to make change in the currency.

And that didn't come from reading a conversion chart in a travel guide. And, yes, as a writer of modern fantasy, I've got it a bit easier. I can type out “the Empire State Building” and I don’t need to describe it to 95% of you. Your knowledge of our modern world fills in the rest.

That said, the burden of modern era fantasy writers then becomes making sure you tell readers what is different from reality in your book’s world. I don’t need to go on and on describing the Empire State Building, except to let you know that my main characters are about to contend with an infestation of zombies on the 36th floor. It’s also probably in my best interest to let the reader know how the Average Joe on the street would react if he saw one: Would he run or is seeing zombies normal in this world? Again, seeing how the characters react to the monsters would inform the reader what the tone of your world is. Reactions add richness.

Now, writing urban fantasy isn't a walk in the park, world building wise. Writing the modern fantasy comes with its own special brand of burdens, but in either modern or traditional fantasy, the world building is for the author’s notebook more so than being something to fill the opening chapters with. Trust me, when an editor sees that, they can’t put your submission down fast enough.

You've got a lot of cool ideas about how your world should be built, all the particulars. Write them down. After all, you as the author should have a full working knowledge of them, but treat those details of your world like salt, not the actual meat of the book itself.

They are ingredients that help make up a well seasoned pot of plot. Too much salt, you ruin it. You’re trying to improve the flavor of the book stew, not overwhelm it, so think twice before dumping the whole thing of salt in.

You don’t want to leave your readers with a bad taste in their mouth, do you?