Read Fantasy Book Critic's review of Fortune's Fool
Q]
Welcome back to Fantasy Book Critic Angela. How have you been since your
finalist turn in SPFBO 2019?
AB: Hello, and thanks for having me! It’s been an
exciting few years since 2019, hasn’t it? They’ve certainly had their ups and
downs for me personally, but I’m still hanging in there J. I’ve
been writing a lot, though!
Q] What was the main inspiration
for THROUGH DREAMS SO DARK & the
world within? Where did the idea come from and what compelled you to see it
through to the end?
AB: I feel
like I should tell people to make a cup of tea or get popcorn whenever I start
trying to tell the story of how this book came into existence, because it’s
been a very long and winding road. Some of these characters have been around
since I was a teenager, and the idea really kind of came together when I was
finishing college. (A very long time ago.) I think it sort of amalgamated out
of all the books I had read and loved when I was growing up. This was before
YA, so around the age of 11 or 12 I just wandered over to the adult side of the
library and started reading my way through all the espionage thrillers and fantasy
novels. There were a lot of old school portal fantasies on those shelves—like
Barbara Hambly’s Windrose Chronicles and Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar
Tapestry—and I think the ideas just sort of mashed together in my brain. In
a way, Dreams is my tribute to all the people I grew up with, and a
tribute to all the books that made me into the person and the writer I am
today.
Seeing it through to the end,
though…that’s been a real journey. Some people trunk their early novels and
write new ones; I fell in love with these characters and just kept rewriting
the book until my skills and my experiences caught up with them. And as the
book evolved, so did the emotions I was able to put into it. While most of my
personal background is nothing like Sergei’s, we do share one thing in common:
I also lost my mother quite early. She died in childbirth, and I never really
knew her, but I’ve carried her presence with me my whole life. That made
working on this book sometimes challenging, but also, as with most of the hard things
in my life, the characters kept me company and helped me process what it’s
really like to deal with this kind of grief, for someone you never really even
had a chance to love and remember.
Q] Let’s talk about the stunning
cover for THROUGH DREAMS SO DARK.
Please tell us how you and your cover designer Brad Bergman worked together to create it?
AB: Brad
likes to actually talk through ideas instead of trading emails about
them, and somehow, he was able to translate all my rambling over Discord about
what the story was like and what the world was like to come up with this
amazing cover that I use as my lock screen so I can look at it every time I sit
down at my computer. I knew I wanted the cover to signal to readers right away
that it was a portal fantasy, so that was the first thing we had to decide on
when Brad sent me his idea sketches. After we narrowed those down, then Brad
worked on weaving in the emotion of the story with the art and then the
typography, and I think he really nailed it.
Q] What was your first reaction
when you saw it? How does it hold up (in your opinion) to what the main story
is about?
AB: My first
reaction was: “OMG, that’s my book!!!”
(I looked exactly like one of those Excited gifs in the gif search). Seriously,
I think it captures so much about the story. It’s clearly a portal fantasy
cover, and the font has that 80’s vibe, and well, it looks… dark. More than
that, it gets to the central problem of the novel: Sergei’s mother has
disappeared, and he’s determined to find her, no matter the cost to himself. The
image of Sergei on his knees in the pouring rain, reaching through asphalt,
echoes how desperate and stubborn he really is. He gets knocked down a lot,
physically and emotionally, but somehow, he just keeps going. I think it’s
perfect, and I love it.
Q] Let’s talk about THROUGH DREAMS SO DARK, a lot of authors
have a harder time writing a second book after their debuts? How was the
experience for you? This is a completely different genre as compared to your
debut. How difficult was it as compared to your debut?
AB: Well, Dreams
is a little different than, say, Fool’s Promise, which is the sequel to
my debut and which has caused me a lot of headaches. I’ve actually always
worked on the Eterean Empire books and the Rai Ascendant books in tandem, from
the very beginning. This came about because the book that would evolve into Dreams
actually started out (many years ago) in collaboration with a friend of mine which
ended in disaster. That iteration of the book was a very newbie author version,
the kind of manuscript most of us usually have to write at first to learn how
to write, but it was still really painful to have to go back to square one.
(For the curious: Sergei has always been my protagonist, but the story was far
different, and Cam was a character who only came about because I had to start
over.) I actually trunked it at that point, and that’s when I wrote the first
version of Fortune’s Fool. At the time I finished the original draft of Fortune’s
Fool, e-books were just getting started, so trad publishing was
really the only game around. If you’re trying to break into trad publishing,
you have the opposite strategy you have as an indie: instead of writing an
entire series, you write a bunch of Book Ones and you see which one sticks.
So, a friend of mine talked up Fortune’s
Fool to an editor in an elevator at Worldcon, which got me a request for a
partial…and a rejection with a request, “If
you have anything else, please send it.” I decided to revise the version
zero of Dreams that had fallen apart and send it to her. She liked that
version (let’s call it 1.0) enough to request a full, but then I never heard
from her again.
And at that point, I was having
babies, and I was tired. So, I put both books in my closet. In 2017, I decided
I loved writing too much to give it up, so I pulled my crate of old manuscripts
out to put my rusty skills to work again. The book I decided to start with
actually wasn’t Fortune’s Fool; it was v 1.0 of Dreams… but I scrapped it
completely. 225,000 words straight in the trash. I got rid of old characters
that didn’t work (all mine, this time), revamped character relationships, gave
everybody more agency. I brightened a story that was too dark by adding
more romance and awkward banter and humor and, most of all, I decided to focus
on Sergei’s friendship with Cam. I wrote a giant, rambling book I suspected was
actually a sketch of 2 or 3 books… and then I let it sit while I thought about
it, and I pulled out Fortune’s Fool, which was closer to being done, and
decided to use what I had learned about revision to publish it while I decided
what to do about Dreams.
So, I guess, after all of that…
the answer is yes and no. There are struggles involved in writing a second
book, all of which I have had to grapple with in revising Dreams—worry that I
don’t disappoint readers is my biggest issue, because I really don’t
want to let people down—but because it’s been such a long process, I also
circumvented some of the second book anxiety. But mostly Dreams was
harder to write because it was more complicated than Fortune’s Fool. True
second book anxiety is reserved for Fool’s Promise (which I’m determined
to get out in 2023.)
Q] Can you tell us more about the
world that The Rai Ascendant series is set in and some of the story’s major
characters? What are the curiosities of this world?
AB: It’s
basically a multiverse, with different realities connected by a “place” people
access in their dreams called The Lake of the World. I based the magic in Dreams
loosely on quantum physics, so I got to exploit ideas like the Heisenberg
Principle, which in my world translates into buildings whose walls don’t stay
in the same place, a giant Wall that moves… You can’t count on anything to
really be what you think it is, including objects, flowers, plants, people, any
of which might actually be magical spirit-creatures in disguise.
In
our world at the time of the story (1988), there have been a lot of shady Cold
War experiments going on to try to connect these worlds, which is how the book
ends up being like an urban fantasy stuffed into an epic fantasy. On our side
of the Lake, the action takes place in an Illinois college town in 1988; on the
other side of the Lake, there’s an epic fantasy world which is kind of post-post-apocalyptic.
The current world order has grown out of an empire ruled by gods who were
overthrown by their subjects, leaving two groups of people who have been
fighting each other for hundreds of years: the Miroko and the Tarani. Peace has
been tenuously kept in the recent past by a giant magical wall erected between
them by the Miroko, who are pro-magic; the Tarani execute magic-users so their
gods can’t choose new avatars. The book begins with a proclamation that upsets
the political balance: the Tarani have decided that this is a foretold era when
the gods are going to return to bring about a new and better Deiocracy.
So, everybody’s scrambling, trying to figure out what this really means and
trying to play it to their advantage, and this is the situation Sergei stumbles
into as he’s looking for his mother.
The
book has six POV characters:
Sergei is the protagonist, and he bears the
brunt of my many years of parental sleeplessness, because mostly what he needs
is just a good night’s sleep. He’s been plagued by terrifyingly realistic
nightmares of his mother’s death for years, and he’s going along with these
shady experiments because he’s convinced his mother is alive and nobody else
will try to find her, so he’s going to throw himself into the breach even
though he really has no idea what he’s doing.
Cam is his best friend. On the outside he
seems like a jock—he’s very athletic because he has a physical sense of what
will happen in the very short-term future—but this sense also tends to manifest
as anxiety as he worries about things that might go wrong with people he loves.
I feel like Cam might be one of the more complex characters I’ve ever written,
because on the one hand, he’s fairly tough and pragmatic, and on the other
hand, it’s a wonder he’s never been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. But
that’s basically how magic manifests in our world…it shows up in lots of little
mental quirks that the characters often have to hide in order to live “normal”
lives.
Maddie is Cam’s dyslexic, poker-playing
sister, who has dreams about what could happen in the future. I really
liked writing her, and I enjoyed writing her romance with Sergei because
they’re fun together. But writing her was also a challenge because she’s very
mathy, and I can do math, but I don’t consider myself a Math Person. Maddie
lives in a world of probability, where she’s always trying to figure out if she’s
altering the future with her intentions, and whether that’s okay or not okay,
because sometimes things don’t pan out quite how she expects them to.
And
then the secondary world POV characters…
Kaija, is a Cassandra-type character, but
also, I enjoyed being able to gender-flip the trope of the reluctant
middle-aged male character who’s very much “I’m too old for this” but does the
Thing anyway… She’s lived in disgrace for years after being accused and sentenced
for the accidental death of a friend, supposedly committed when she was
“spirit-sick” from grief, but there are a lot of questions about what actually
happened. In spite of this, she’s determined to fulfill the promises she made
to her people, even though most of them think she’s insane.
Ináwé is her adopted daughter, who was
subsumed by the Wall as a child after her biological parents—a Miroko exile and
a Tarani bondservant—died. Now she’s a smuggler, she goes back and forth
through the Wall, and she has a chip on her shoulder about how she’s been
treated by larger Miroko society, which has denied her status because of her
background. She gets roped into working on a mission for the Miroko government,
and that leads to a whole web of intrigue that runs along parallel to what
Sergei, Cam, and Maddie are doing and crashes together at the end.
Jisel
is an empath healer among the Tarani
who is probably one of my favorite characters ever to write, because he isn’t
at all like the stereotyped version of “empath healer”. Healers are
second-class citizens among the Tarani, and their magic is only tolerated because
it’s useful. Jisel is snarky and cynical and also fairly angry, and his desire
to get revenge for his sister’s disappearance and probable death has led him to
work as a spy, using his talents to do things which are not always things you
would expect a healer to do.
Q] So 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 pitch for THROUGH
DREAMS SO DARK?
AB: I write
sprawling, twisty, character-driven stories about messy people in need of
redemption, searching for hope and love in dark worlds. Whether it’s the
secondary world epic fantasy of Fortune’s Fool or the mulitverse portal
fantasy of Through Dreams So Dark, that’s the common thread running
through everything. Along with that core, I also love big, intricate
worldbuilding and romance and magic, so most of my stories will involve some
combination of those elements.
My pitch for Through Dreams So
Dark—Stranger Things meets epic fantasy! More than that though… if
you like found family and bromance, complex characters who don’t always do the
right thing, a magic-infused world with lots of twisty intrigue, a touch of
nightmare horror and romance with a little bit of spice… and you like it set in
a world that can be gritty and dark and emotional but is never truly hopeless…
you’ll probably like Through Dreams So Dark.
Q] So what can readers expect
from THROUGH DREAMS SO DARK and what
should they be looking forward to according to you?
AB: It’s
definitely an Angela Boord book—the plot is twisty, it’s big but I’ve tried my
hardest to pace it fast, the worldbuilding is intricate…but the characters and
their relationships are at the heart of the story, and they drive the plot. In
fact, that’s one of the reasons the book is as big as it is. I needed to take
time to build the relationships and to make them deep and believable.
Q] THROUGH DREAMS SO DARK is book 1 of The Rai Ascendant series. How
many books are you planning to write in this series?
AB: The
short answer is six, with the option for more. The longer answer is: I’m
planning on writing the books in groups of three, and then I also have the
starts of a couple of spin-off novels and novellas hanging around on my
computer and in my closet. The first three books are coming out of a manuscript
I broke into three parts because I was obviously trying to do too much for one
book. That means I do have actual material for the first group of three (I
hesitate to call it a trilogy, because the third book should close out a major
arc but there will still be some threads to pull you on into book 4).
Q] Will
it be beneficial for readers to checkout “Forget Me Not”? I
believe this story is set in the same universe. Can you tell us where it fits
in with the chronology and what advantage would readers have if they read this
story before grabbing a copy of THROUGH
DREAMS SO DARK
AB: Actually,
I just updated “Forget Me Not” and I’m planning to offer the updated version to
my newsletter! I’ve changed some of the worldbuilding since Strange Horizons
first published the story. It is set in the same universe, but much earlier in
the timeline of the secondary world—back in the days of the Rai Deiocracy.
Technically, it’s a standalone and can be read at any time—it’s the story of
how a little girl became the God of War, from the point of view of her mother
who let her go—but if you read it after Dreams, you’ll probably have some aha
moments.
Q] In closing, do you have any
parting thoughts or comments you’d like to share with our readers?
AB: I’d just
like to let all my readers know how much I appreciate them! Dreams was an
emotional book to write, but I also had a lot of fun with it, and I’m excited
to share that experience with all of you. I hope you enjoy meeting Sergei, Cam,
and Maddie as much as I enjoy telling their story!
*---------------------*---------------------*-------------------*
Add Through Dreams So Dark on Goodreads
OFFICIAL BLURB: Sergei’s mother sacrificed herself to get her family through the Iron Curtain. Now it’s Sergei’s turn to save her…even if he has to cross realities to do it.
Sergei is determined to put his broken family back together, no matter the danger.
Not-rats and bugs hiding in his walls, listening to his conversations? He can live with that. The shadowy government organization trying to dig encoded information out of his nightmares? He’ll play along to learn what they know about his mother.
If he has to destroy his college career, his love life, and the best friendship he’s ever had—with his roommate Cam—he’ll do that, too, if that’s what it takes. He’s the only one who believes his mother is still alive.
Nobody else needs to get hurt if he doesn’t tell them what he’s doing.
But however hard Sergei tries to keep his double life a secret, Cam still shows up to save him whenever he’s in trouble, like Cam has some kind of magical sixth sense—a sense that keeps them bonded together no matter what. And when Sergei finally breaks through his dreams into a world where monsters lurk and reality changes on a whim…where having magic carries a death sentence…the stakes of this game could be far higher than Sergei wants to pay. Now it’s not just his life on the line—he’s dragged people he cares about into danger with him.
He thought he could risk himself alone. But will his single-minded mission to find his mother be worth the price everyone he loves has to pay?
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