I had the opportunity to make the acquaintance of Fantasy author, Michael Dellert, at a recent book signing. When his vivid book covers
caught my attention, I had to know more about his novels, Hedge King in
Winter and A Merchant's Tale. He was featured at the Readers' Fantasyland event at the Brains to Books Cyber Convention and presented his books to new fantasy readers. He is a writer, editor, and writing coach, but today we are going to discuss what motivated him to create these wonderful books.
Book Genre:
Fantasy.
Suggested Reading Audience:
13 and up.
Content Warning:
Some graphic violence, some strong language.
Book blurb:
Hedge King in Winter:
The King has been crippled! Can the King’s brother Eowain
defend the realm against the machinations of their rival cousin?
When his brother is dangerously wounded, young Lord Eowain
is faced with a desperate choice between the law, his family, and the good of
his kingdom. And when the mysterious Order of the Drymyn, sorcerer-priests with
their own occult agenda, pressure him to take the throne, Eowain has to wonder
whether there isn’t something darker and more dangerous a-foot. Why should
kings far and wide suddenly take an interest in him? What dark powers have
awakened in the Kingdom of Droma? How will they threaten the future of his
kingdom, the destiny of things yet to come, and even his own soul?
Purchase the Hedge King in Winter!
A Merchant’s Tale:
Corentin, a young foreign trader of the House Pelan arrives
in the uncertain lands of Droma, tasked to deliver a mysterious chest to a
far-away sage in a remote corner of the kingdom. Accompanied by his mercenary
bodyguard, a native scout, and the young local priest named Adarc, he sets out
on a journey that will change his life forever.
A Merchant’s Tale
is the second installment in The Matter
of Manred series, a new cycle of medieval romances, action adventures,
heroic fantasies, mysterious priests, and their dark and forgetful gods.
Purchase A Merchant's Tale!
What made you decide
to become an Author and write a book series?
I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was a teenager: I took
writing classes, served on the board of school literary magazines, studied
literature, and practiced, practiced, practiced. I worked in the traditional
publishing industry for twenty years so that I could understand the
cradle-to-grave process from manuscript to bound book and digital formats. When
I was asked during a job interview in 2006 what I really wanted to do with my life, I said, “Start my own publishing
company and publish my own books.” (I didn’t get that job, by the way.)
Then about three years ago, some challenges came up in my
life and I couldn’t work full-time for about six months. But I needed something
to fill my time. I’ve always wanted to be a published writer, but traditional
publishing takes too long and there are no guarantees. And here was this world
I’d been using as a story sandbox since time out of mind.
So I decided to do something meaningful with those stories
and started laying the foundation for that little publishing empire I’d dreamed
off. I’ve been investing my retirement savings into it ever since.
Why did you choose to
write Fantasy and what are some of the difficulties associated with the genre?
I grew up on sci-fi/fantasy stories from Tolkien, CJ
Cherryh, Terry Brooks, Stephen R. Donaldson, Andre Norton, Ursula K. LeGuin and
many others, as well as Greek and Roman myths. From a very early age, the genre
has always fascinated and enthralled me.
But no doubt, it presents some unique challenges, especially
when one’s stories are set on an alternate world, as mine are. The time-period
in which the story is set as well as fundamental things like the length of the
year, the constellations, the political history, and the social structure, all
these have to be taken into consideration.
More than that, once one knows these things, one has to
consider how knowing these things and
only these things influences the thoughts, behaviors, and attitudes of the
characters.
For example: To a modern person, a case of the flu is a
fairly low-impact event: a few days in bed at the mercy of an impersonal virus,
with some chicken soup and some TheraFlu, and that’s that.
But to the average citizen of my fantasy world, there’s no
TheraFlu, no antibiotics, no modern germ theory. A flu is a potentially deadly
assault by other-worldly forces, calling into question one’s life-choices and
running the risk of exile from one’s family and friends. It’s a very different
kind of mind-set, and this kind of world-building and research can take up a
lot of time and energy. One can easily wander off into a rabbit-hole of
procrastination, and that’s the real struggle. Keeping oneself focused on the
story, and not on the history behind
the story.
What is your favorite
book you have written? What was the
hardest part to write?
You’re going to make me pick favorites?! But they’re all
special little darlings. At least, that’s what I tell them.
Between us, though, I like A Merchant’s Tale better (of those I’ve published so far). It’s a
smaller story than Hedge King in Winter,
and a little more intimate in some ways. Hedge
King has a lot of great stuff that I like, battles and politics and
possibly sinister religious figures, but I feel like I overreached myself for
the shorter novella format and sacrificed a bit on character development.
In A Merchant’s Tale,
however, I feel like I mixed character and action more successfully. I also
featured the setting much more strongly, dramatizing bits of the world-building
without overloading the reader with exposition. But the hardest thing about
writing it was the pacing of the scenes. I actually flip-flopped several major
moments in the story during the last draft because the pacing just wasn’t quite
right, and that led to some heavy-duty rewriting.
Who is your favorite
character to write for and why?
As much as I love my main characters, sometimes it’s the
minor characters that steal my heart. In A
Merchant’s Tale, the heroes encounter a young tinker-girl and her dog on
their travels. She came out of my head as bold, brash, proud, and plucky, and I
just loved her from the minute she
opened her mouth. As one of my beta-readers put it, that girl and her dog are a
force to be reckoned with. She outdid herself and may have bought herself a
larger role in the series.
What is your writing
process? Do you have the story planned
out or does it surprise you as you write it?
Do you write at night, or in the morning? Do you listen to a play list?
I know there’s this whole “plotter vs. pantser” debate, but
honestly, I’m a bit of both. I do a lot of planning: number of chapters,
overall structure, number of words per scene, number of scenes per character,
the timeline, the weather, the terrain, the effects of terrain and weather on
character movement and timeline, which damned things and unfortunate events
will happen, and on and on.
But what I don’t plan out in advance is how the characters
will develop through the story. I know they will
develop, but how they handle their personal problems in relation to the story
I’ve planned out is always a mystery. And yes, it often surprises me, like how
my tinker-girl developed from this early note, “characters meet lone trader on
the road,” to become the little scene- and heart-stealer that she is. Or how
Corentin’s voice and thoughts developed once I started writing his dialogue in
French and then translated it into English, to get the “foreigner” aspect of
his character just the way I wanted it.
I like to write in the morning. I’m a creature of habit:
rise, coffee, walk with dog, oatmeal over email, then more coffee as I dive into
the writing. Developing a habit like this was the best thing I ever did for my
writing, because I miss it when it’s not there. And getting my work in before
my kids get up and start their day helps me keep the howling monkeys of life
from interfering with my work.
I do have a playlist. It’s a very eclectic mix, but Celtic
folk rock features heavily, from the Pogues to the Waterboys to the Chieftains
and beyond.
I’ve actually been sharing my process on my blog recently,
under the tag #13WeekNovel. I have two completed novels waiting in the wings
that I wrote using this method, and I’m currently writing another one. The
process doesn’t lead to a “good” novel, but it’s great for a first, dirty draft
and feeds into the sausage grinder of my thirteen week rewriting process really
well. So to complete a first and second draft, my process takes about six
months per novel.
Looking ahead, what
can we expect to see from you in the future?
What are you working on?
I’m currently re-writing The
Romance of Eowain, my third book and the first full-length novel that I’ll
be publishing. It continues the story of Hedge
King in Winter, but the full-length novel format gives me the space to
include both the character development that I felt Hedge King missed, as well as retain the elements of action and
adventure that I enjoy. It’s also a stretch for me as a writer, because the
primary story line is the romance between the Hedge King and the foreign,
head-strong bride that’s been arranged for him. We see the first hint of that
relationship at the end of Hedge King,
but in Romance of Eowain, I take that
hint and crank it up to eleven. On my calendar, the rewrite will be completed
in the next few weeks, and then it goes into Production and should hit the
shelves in early July.
Beyond that, the novel I’m currently writing is another
stretch goal for myself: another romance, but with a female protagonist, and a
third person point of view limited to her. It’s a big stretch: Can I write
“like a woman”? I don’t know yet, but I think it’s coming along pretty well so
far. A beta-reader of the early chapters did tell me, “she sounds like a dude,”
so I’ll have to go back and polish that dude-ness out of it, but it’s on my
calendar to hit shelves sometime in Autumn 2016.
Still further in the future, I have a completed novel that
will publish in early 2017 called Heron’s
Cry. It’s the fifth story in my Matter of Manred series, and will finally
pull together all the threads that I’ve been introducing in the first four
books. It’s already finished, but I’m going to give it one last major rewrite
later this year to really fine-tune the interconnected story-lines from the
earlier books. All of the major characters will be involved, some new ones will
be introduced, some mysteries will be revealed, and we’ll finally have our
first major glance at the ultimate villain of the series. And there’s a dragon! I’m really
excited for that one.
After that, we’ll have to see. If this writing thing takes
off, who knows? Maybe 2-3 more novels per year until the series is finished. I
know what stories I want to tell, but
we’ll see how the readers respond. Reader feedback makes a huge difference: I
love hearing it and trying to imagine how to work ideas from readers into the series.
What would you like your
readers to know about you or your books?
I created a big world for the Matter of Manred series, and I
have several books planned that are set in this universe. But it’s not a
traditional series like, for example, Lord
of the Rings. In many ways, the overall structure of the series owes its
inspiration to medieval Irish romances: there will be a main “cycle” of stories
that follow the major characters through a developing and increasingly
malevolent throughline of action, but there will also be a handful of
subsidiary stories in the orbit of that main cycle. These subsidiary stories
(called remscela in Irish) will
follow some secondary characters along subplots that at first seem unrelated,
but serve to expand on the setting, introduce secondary characters who will
grow in importance through the series, and develop the fundamental threat that
is facing this world of mine. Despite the changes that arise as the series
progresses, the “ultimate villain” (whom my readers haven’t yet met) will
always remain the same and his role will grow and grow.
To give just one example of how this is already at work in
the series: In Hedge King in Winter,
some of the main characters are involved in a complicated strategy board game
similar to chess. To dramatize that game, the character of Medyr explained its
rules and symbolism to his unnamed acolyte. The acolyte’s name was unimportant
to the story of Hedge King, but that
character was Adarc the Acolyte, one of the main characters in A Merchant’s Tale. The story of Adarc
and Corentin in A Merchant’s Tale is
set in the Hedge King’s kingdom, but their story is seemingly unrelated to the
Hedge King’s troubles except at some key points. These two threads begin to
braid together in the forthcoming Romance
of Eowain, and we’ll start to see the emergence of a deeper, more sinister
threat whose time is yet to come.
I think it’s really exciting to write like this. While each
story is satisfying in its own way, I think the real pay-off is in seeing how
all these stories come together over time and what becomes of all my favorite
characters. I want to jump in a time-machine and skip to the end to see how it
all turns out!
Author bio:
Michael Dellert lives in the Greater New York City area.
Following a traditional publishing career spanning nearly two decades, he now
works as a freelance writer, editor, publishing consultant, and writing coach.
He is also the sole writer, editor, and publisher of the blog MDellertDotCom: Adventures in Indie Publishing.
He holds a Master’s Degree in English Language & Literature from Drew
University, and a certificate from the Cornell University School of Criticism
& Theory (2009). He is the author of two fantasy fiction novellas: Hedge King in Winter and A Merchant’s Tale.
Contact Michael:
Amazon Author Page: http://Author.to/MichaelEDellert
Goodreads Author Page: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14849380.Michael_E_Dellert
Facebook: http://FB.me/mdellert.editor
Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/mdellert99
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/michaeldellert/
