Official author info: Patrick Samphire started writing when he was fourteen years old and thought it would be a good way of getting out of English lessons. It didn’t work, but he kept on writing anyway.

Patrick has worked as a teacher, an editor and publisher of physics journals, a marketing minion, and a pen pusher (real job!). Now, when he’s not writing, he designs websites and book covers. He has a PhD in theoretical physics, which means that all the unlikely science in his books is actually true. Well, most of it. Well, some of it. Maybe.

Patrick now lives in Wales, U.K. with his wife, the awesome writer Stephanie Burgis, their two sons, and their cat, Pebbles. Right now, in Wales, it is almost certainly raining.

Hey, thanks for having me! I’m Patrick Samphire. I’m a former scientist, teacher, editor, and administrator. I’ve lived on several continents, but I’m now settled in Wales, U.K., with my wife, Stephanie Burgis, who is also a writer, our two kids, and our cat, Pebbles.

Not so much a day job. I’m a freelance web and book cover designer, and I’ve got kids, so it’s a matter of shuffling everything about to times when I can manage it. It’s kind of like juggling, in that I’m terrible at juggling and also terribly and managing all these different things.

That’s a tough one. I have strong emotional attachments to all the places I’ve lived, but I think that the one that I still think of as my second home is Guyana, even though I only lived there for two years. I loved my time there. It’s a great country with incredible people.

Ah, man! My favourite writers? What a question! Ben Aaronovitch is great, the best urban fantasy writer out there at the moment, and he is probably one of my biggest current influences. Dyrk Ashton is absolutely amazing and writes the most epic urban / contemporary / mythological fantasy I’ve ever read. George RR Martin, Django Wexler, Steven Erikson, Julian May, Robin Hobb, Connie Willis, and P.G. Wodehouse have all had enormous influences on my writing. And Papa Tolkien, of course. I could go on.

I’ve been writing for a long time, on and off. I started when I was a teenager, when I was reading things like David Eddings, Raymond Feist, Terry Pratchett, and Piers Anthony, and I just wanted to tell stories that made me feel the same way that those books did, but I pretty much stopped for ten years when I went to university. Too many distractions. I don’t think I started again until I was 28 or 29 and stuck in an incredibly boring job. While surfing around, I came across an online critique group called Critters and decided to join. So, I spent a few hours a day at ‘work’ reading and critiquing other people’s stories and submitting my own. Having other people pick apart my stories and my writing was incredibly useful, if sometimes traumatic.

A year or two later, I went to the Clarion West writing workshop in Seattle, which was when I started taking writing really seriously. The instructors were all professional writers and editors, and big names in the SFF field (our instructors were Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, Bradley Denton, Connie Willis, Ellen Datlow, and Jack Womack, and if you can’t learn from them, you’re not going to learn at all). All of the participants were serious about being professional writers, too.

I spent the next ten years or so writing and publishing short stories (I have a short story collection, At the Gates and Other Stories, coming out in January 2021, which includes quite a few of those stories), but I’d always wanted to write novels, so I decided to make the switch. Long story short (ironically), I ended up trad publishing a couple of Middle Grade novels, before finally switching to adult fantasy, which brings us up to now, by a very winding route, which is where I kind of wanted to be when I started writing as a teenager all those years ago.

Believable characters, mystery, vivid settings, twisting plots, and humour.

I was very much on the edge with this right up to the last moment. For most of the time I was writing Shadow of a Dead God, I was fifty-fifty on whether I would self-publish or try to traditionally publish. I had actually got to the stage where I was starting to send out query letters to agents while at the same time designing a cover for the book.

The truth was, though, that I had been kind of burned by my experience of trad publishing my two Middle Grade novels. It had taken the publisher *four years* between buying the first novel and publishing it. That’s an absurd amount of time, and they don’t let you publish anything else in the meantime. You can’t have a career like that. After a couple of months of hearing nothing in response to the query letters I had sent out, I thought, “Screw it. I don’t need this. I can do it myself, faster and better.” So I did. A month later, the book was available.

Speed, control, freedom. Success or failure is entirely in your own hands. I like that.

You have do everything yourself when you self-publish. Everything. And some of those things you might not be very good at. When you trad publish, you have a lot of support: editing, design, distribution, publicity, and marketing (although sometimes you don’t get much of that). Oh yeah. And a nice chunk of money up front.

One of the big challenges with self-publishing is finding readers. Was that your experience? 

Absolutely. I did have the advantage of having published some things before, short stories and novels, so there were some people already willing to buy my book, but that was still a small number, and reaching beyond that is incredibly difficult. There are a lot of self-published books out there, and why should people take a chance on someone they’ve never heard of? Which takes me to the next question.

I came across SPFBO a few years ago, and it was what introduced to indie published fantasy. I had read some self-published stuff before, but only from people I knew or trad authors who were self-publishing a spin-off or something like that. When I came across SPFBO, I started trying out the winners and finalists, and they blew me away. I think the first three I tried were Michael McClung, Rob J Hayes, and Dyrk Ashton, and all three were brilliant. (I’ve gone on to plenty of others since who have been just as good, including Virginia McClain, ML Wang, Levi Jacobs, Alicia Wanstall-Burke, Devin Madson, and a bunch more, including this year’s finalists.)

I figured that if I was using this as a place to find good self-published fantasy, others were as well, and if the judges liked my book, that would get it noticed. And it worked. Becoming a finalist in SPFBO gave Shadow of a Dead God the biggest boost it’s had. I recommend the contest to every self-published fantasy writer and to anyone curious about what good self-published fantasy is out there.

Retire? An early night? :D To be honest, I would probably have some good wine, then go back to writing the next book. I’m not that exciting in person!

How would you describe the plot of Shadow of a Dead God if you had to do so in just one or two sentences? 

A dead god. A brutal murder. So what’s a second-rate mage supposed to do when everyone thinks he’s guilty?

What was your initial inspiration for Shadow of a Dead God? How long have you been working on it? Has it evolved from its original idea? 

Ha! Yes, it’s evolved! This book actually started out as a book set in 1920s London, a kind of blend of P.G. Wodehouse, H.P. Lovecraft, and Arthur Conan Doyle. It did not work. It was a mess. The next attempt with it involved shifting the plot to an epic fantasy with lots of different characters, battles, and so forth, but I didn’t get far with that, as the story just didn’t fit that setting either. Then, finally, I took one of the minor characters I had planned for the epic fantasy and told a completely different story from their point of view. At one point, it had orcs in.

Basically, there’s almost nothing from the original novel left, other than it being a mystery involving gods.

Snarky, twisty, tense.

For me, it’s an open-ended series. Each book is designed to be complete in itself, so a reader could stop at any point and not feel that they hadn’t had a satisfying ending. That said, there are bigger stories going on in the background that will reveal themselves as time goes on.

My current plan is to write it in ‘phases’, each phase being about three books. So, the first phase will include Shadow of a Dead God, the sequel, Nectar for the God, and a third book, whose working title is The Hated God. The next phase starts when there is a big change in the world of the story. The first book in that phase is very tentatively titled A Fall of Ash. So, yeah, I don’t know how many books! But you won’t be left hanging when you do stop reading or the story finally ends.

Our main protagonist is Mennik (Nik) Thorn, a second-rate mage trying to get by on simple jobs like breaking curses, hunting ghosts, and spying on cheating spouses, and trying to avoid the corrupt politics of the city’s high mages. His ‘sidekick’, his best friend, is Benyon (Benny) Field, a thief, who gets him into the mess that starts this story. There is also Sereh, Benny’s incredibly scary and deadly daughter, Nik’s estranged sister, and a captain of the Ash Guard, who police mages and magic. I’m not telling you who the bad guys are, because that’s part of the mystery…

Magic comes from dead gods. If a god dies in the mortal realm, its body decays and the effluent from the decaying body is raw magic that mages can use.

There are several places in the book that made me laugh out loud when I wrote them and still do when I think of them. I love it when readers find those bits funny as well.

I have my short story collection coming out on January 2, 2021, then Nectar for the God was supposed to come out in May, but I managed to catch Covid, badly, twice, which is almost a bad joke, so now it’s not coming out until the second half of 2021.

It’s been a pleasure! All I want to say is that no one (sane) writes to get rich. We write because we’ve got stories that we have to tell and we can’t help ourselves. The best thing about self-publishing is that you can tell the stories that you are passionate about without anyone telling you what to write or not to write. I hope you’ll enjoy reading my stories as much as I enjoy writing them.