Tuesday, August 18, 2020
SPFBO Semifinalist Interview with Todd Herzman (Interviewed by Adam Weller)
Hi
Todd! Thanks for taking the time to answer a few questions for us. First, tell
us a little bit about yourself!
Thanks for interviewing me!
I’m from Canberra, Australia. I work in legislation
publishing by day and write in all the pockets of time I can find around that.
I’ve always been a huge fan of SFF. As a kid, it started with Harry Potter,
Garth Nix, and Isobelle Carmody and went from there. Video games like Final
Fantasy and Guild Wars, plus TV shows like Buffy, Stargate, and Firefly had a
huge influence on me as a teen. I fell in love with comics for a few years
before going back to fantasy novels in my early twenties. The Riftwar Cycle by
Raymond E Feist got me reading again, and I must have read twenty of those
before broadening my horizons.
I’ve also had some varied hobbies. I’ve done my fair
share of Taekwondo, Muay Thai, parkour, and fire twirling in my teens and early
twenties, but these days I spend far more time hunched over a keyboard.
Pre-pandemic, my girlfriend and I had started archery (for writing research, of
course), but new hobbies are difficult to maintain during quarantine!
Can
you tell us about your writing background: when you started, how you got to
this point?
I started writing when I was 23 at the end of 2014. My
best friend showed me something he’d written, and I had a blast reading it. Before
then, authors had been these mythical beings. I had this weird notion that
writers were born, not made. But here my friend was, giving it a shot.
The second I got home I opened a google doc and
started writing (I still have that first unfinished story somewhere) and never
stopped. Two months later, I quit my full-time job (I was a postman, riding
around on a little red motorcycle delivering letters) and started a Bachelor of
Writing degree. It was actually Brandon Sanderson’s writing lectures available
on YouTube that helped inspire me to go to university for writing—along with my
best friend’s encouragement—though I can’t say my classes were ever quite as
good as Sanderson’s lectures!
I wrote a lot during my degree but had trouble
finishing novel-length projects around all my writing for classes. I had a few short
stories published in the university’s fiction anthology and ended up working on
the editorial committee for a couple of years, finding a joy for editing.
A Dark Inheritance isn’t
the first novel I’ve written, but it’s the first novel I’ve finished. I started
writing it at the end of 2018, waking up early to get some words in before
work, then some more on my hour-long lunch break. I think the most important
thing to becoming a writer—to getting work finished—is creating
reliable writing habits. Book two is coming along much faster. I started that
back in January and have already completed the second draft.
I spent a year listening to podcasts on
self-publishing while writing A Dark Inheritance, and it just seemed
like the natural way to move forward.
Twenty-three certainly isn’t old, but to not have discovered your
love for writing until a few years ago must have been an exciting revelation!
It definitely was. I was honestly somewhat
adrift until then. Ever since I began writing, it’s driven me forward. Neil
Gaiman talks about his writing goal as a mountain, and every step he took along
the way brought him closer to the mountain instead of farther away from it.
Now, every decision I make, I ensure it brings me closer to my mountain.
Are there any authors that you’ve
tried to model your writing after, or directly influenced your writing style?
I’ve never tried modelling my writing off
of anyone else—I think it’s important for an author to develop their own voice—but
there is one writing exercise I use when I want to get a feel for a writer’s
style. I take a chapter or two of their work and retype it word for word. It
helps me decipher why a writer’s writing works, and I believe it helps
my own writing develop that much faster as I gain a deeper understanding of
effective prose on a line-by-line level. So far, I’ve done this for Patrick
Rothfuss, Lois McMaster Bujold, Brandon Sanderson, and Joe Abercrombie. They
each have such different styles of writing, and I always feel like I learn
something new during this process.
As for writers who have more directly
influenced my style, I think Stephen King has a lot to answer for. Our writing
styles differ (a lot), but I read On Writing as a new writer, and his
emphasis on cutting needless words and his aversion to adverbs and adjectives
influenced my writing as it developed. In your SPFBO review of A Dark Inheritance,
you mentioned my writing as being lean. That’s something I strive for,
so I’m glad it’s showed!
A Dark Inheritance is a
book I particularly enjoyed, as you are well aware of. What was the thought
process behind planning this story, and was it different from your approach to the
rest of your publications?
I’m a
discovery writer at heart. Perhaps I can blame Stephen King for that, too, as
he talks about being one in On Writing. That’s one of the reasons A
Dark Inheritance starts off in a small village, with characters that know
little about the world. I learnt about the world, its magic, the different
empires and kingdoms, right alongside the characters.
When I
begin a story, I usually have certain broad strokes in mind, but these ideas
can often change drastically. Originally, I thought the material used to create
Starblades was radioactive. I had this whole backstory in mind where the main
characters’ father had died of cancer because he worked with starstone—starstone
is a metal found in meteorites in my story’s world—for too long. By the time I
got to including Starblades in the story, that side effect no longer fit
properly, so I had to kill my darling, so to speak.
A Dark
Inheritance has
three siblings as the perspective characters, Ruben, Ella, and Marius. One thing
I did to ensure a consistent structure was restrict myself to alternating through
their point of views in a predictable pattern as well as making the chapters
similar lengths. Even though I didn’t always know what happened next, I knew I
only had so much time to move the story forward before switching to another of
the three siblings.
My
thought process behind writing this novel was… well, I just wanted to write
something I would enjoy reading. That’s my thought process behind all my
writing, especially in the first draft. As Stephen King says, the first draft
is writing with the door closed, the second with the door open. I write for
myself first, then in revision I make sure what I wanted the story to be is
actually on the page and not just in my head.
My other
publications on Amazon, the short stories and novelettes, were mostly written
as university assignments and tended to be in response to specific criteria. The
Dreamer is an exception. I wrote a short story for a class, but later
expanded it into a novelette (about 11k words). The bones of the story stayed
the same, so it was sort of like writing from an outline.
When I
wrote The Seeker and the Sword (available for free when joining my newsletter), a prequel novella to A Dark Inheritance,
I tried outlining for the first time, purely because I couldn’t let the
word count get out of hand. However, the story that resulted only resembles the
outline in the sense that the beginning and ending are the same—the road
getting there diverged quite significantly.
What
were your goals when you entered SPFBO?
To win!
Okay, well, while I am competitive, I
didn’t enter with any expectation to even get this far. I’m pretty blown
away by A Dark Inheritance becoming a semi-finalist at all. The
competition is fierce, and I’m just glad my book has been thrown in the hat.
As a new indie author, I’m still learning
the marketing side of this wild endeavor. One of my goals by entering this
competition was the hope that my debut would get a little bit of exposure. And,
so far, it has! I’m very happy with the review it received on The Fantasy Book
Critic, and now I’m being interviewed for the first time.
One thing I’m hoping to do, but haven’t
quite done yet because like most authors I’m an introvert, is network with some
of the other entrants. There are some amazing books being entered this year,
and I’d love to get to know the authors behind those works. So, if there are
any other SPFBO entrants reading this interview, feel free to get in touch!
Also, I just want to take a moment to thank
the community around SPFBO. The readers, for taking a chance on indie books,
the bloggers who volunteer their time, attention, and platforms, and Mark
Lawrence for organizing it in the first place. I’m glad that I get to be a part
of it.
The author community within SPFBO has spawned various
friendships and networking opportunities over the past few years. One of last
year’s finalists, Virginia McLain, organized a volunteer-led QuarenCon featuring
panels of self- and traditionally-published authors that were recorded live,
and are still available on YouTube. Even for authors who have been cut early in
the contest, there have been great opportunities to stay socially active in the
community and promote their work.
I watched
one of the panels with all of last year’s SPFBO finalists—they spoke as if
they’d been friends for years. It was a wonderful thing to see.
Can
you recommend any books, shows, or albums that have been keeping you busy
during these unprecedented times?
A lot of
my reading time has been sacrificed to writing, but I’ve managed to get through
a fair number of books this year. The first one I’ll mention is another SPFBO
entrant, who’s also in The Fantasy Book Critic’s batch. As I was reading the
book, I kept sighing and thinking, “Well, there’s no chance I’ll be a finalist
if I’m up against this!” That’s Shoreseeker by Brandon M Lindsay.
It’s a really strong debut and impressed me a lot. The book has some great worldbuilding
and a lot of well-developed characters. For fans of epic fantasy, I highly
recommend it.
The
series I’ve read the most of this year is Cradle by Will Wight. These
books are often called progression fantasy. The main character, Lindon, starts
off fairly weak and grows in strength each book. It reminded me of the animes I
used to watch as a teenager. It’s fast-paced with great characters and awesome
fight scenes. I’ve read six of them so far, and the books grow in strength as
they go along.
I know
I’m late to the party, but I just started reading The Wheel of Time. I’m
about twenty pages into The Great Hunt. I love big books and big series.
Longer books have a way of immersing me into a story more fully than shorter
ones—probably why I love epic fantasy so much, and why my favourite series are The
Kingkiller Chronicles and The Stormlight Archives. I can see The
Wheel of Time being one of these great, immersive series for me.
As for TV
shows, my girlfriend and I are devouring Bones, a crime procedural
following a forensic anthropologist. We’re also huge fans of Grimm, Castle,
Supernatural and, well, too many to list. We love watching shows together and, as we’re
both writers, are always chatting about the storylines.
Will Wight’s Cradle
series is quite the adventure; progressive fantasy is a good descriptor! I hope
you enjoy The Wheel of Time. It has a little bit—well, a lot—of everything,
kitchen sink included. As a student of Sanderson, I think you’ll appreciate how
he finished Jordan’s work.
Will Wight is fast becoming a favourite
author for me. He’s got a long career ahead!
As for getting to the end of The Wheel
of Time, it might take me a while, but—you know what they say—journey
before destination. I look forward to seeing how it concludes.
Thank you so much for
taking the time to speak with us here at FantasyBookCritic! Best of luck going
into the next round, and I’m looking forward to book two of the series!
Thanks for interviewing me, it’s been a
pleasure. And I promise, book two is on its way! I’m aiming for it to be
released later this year.
12:00 AM | 
Posted by
Łukasz |
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1 comments:
Congratulations on getting your first book out into the World at Large - and in such a timely way! My first book took me about ten years from go to whoa.