Ask the Author: Luke R.J. Maynard
Answered Questions (2)
Luke R.J. Maynard
I've got a couple of stages at various stages of completion:
1.There's "Heartblood," a revisionist take on a classic fairy-tale, which is much different from most of the fantasy I write;
2.There's "The Season of the Cerulyn," the next book in the Travalaith Saga;
3.I'm working on a crooked retelling of Beowulf in the style of a popular children's book. It's murderously hard because I'm trying to maintain a modern rhyme-scheme popularized by Dr. Seuss and others AND the alliterative metre of Old English poetry simultaneously:
"HOW WE HAVE HEArd of the legends and lays
Of the ever-wise earls in the eldest of days..."
There are a few other side projects too of mixed seriousness. Right now, almost all my time is going toward "The Season of the Cerulyn." The first book in the series has been really well received, and I feel that now I owe it to those generous readers to get Book II to press as soon as I can. Nobody should ever badger an author to hurry up; but by the same token, I don't want to troll readers by dropping a cliffhanger and then going off to work on ten other things.
1.There's "Heartblood," a revisionist take on a classic fairy-tale, which is much different from most of the fantasy I write;
2.There's "The Season of the Cerulyn," the next book in the Travalaith Saga;
3.I'm working on a crooked retelling of Beowulf in the style of a popular children's book. It's murderously hard because I'm trying to maintain a modern rhyme-scheme popularized by Dr. Seuss and others AND the alliterative metre of Old English poetry simultaneously:
"HOW WE HAVE HEArd of the legends and lays
Of the ever-wise earls in the eldest of days..."
There are a few other side projects too of mixed seriousness. Right now, almost all my time is going toward "The Season of the Cerulyn." The first book in the series has been really well received, and I feel that now I owe it to those generous readers to get Book II to press as soon as I can. Nobody should ever badger an author to hurry up; but by the same token, I don't want to troll readers by dropping a cliffhanger and then going off to work on ten other things.
Luke R.J. Maynard
Like probably almost everyone, I'm inspired by what I take in. That's part of the reason why I take a breather and never read the same genre I'm currently writing in: writers consciously echo what they take in, and if I read high fantasy while writing high fantasy, there's a chance what I'm doing will turn out too much like what they're doing. I love the Tolkien comparisons I've been getting with "The Season of the Plough," but I don't want to *copy* JRRT or anyone else in fantasy.
So I mostly read other things. For "The Season of the Plough," I took a page out of William Faulkner: he also spends a lot of time writing about small towns growing up as a community in the shadow of a civil war only a couple of generations past. I wanted to begin the Travalaith Saga with a look at a small town.
It eventually became a town of refugees from all across the Travalaithi Empire because I wanted a diverse cast without the feeling like I was just shoehorning one into the standard English Medieval setting of most high fantasy. I wanted a small town like Faulkner's for Aewyn to grow up in, but I also wanted a rich background of people from all over, with past lives and stories from far away... something like the alien cantina in Star Wars.
If you imagine a world where that's not a spacer bar, it's just a bar where all the local farmers go, but all the local farmers came here from other worlds to get away from their lives, I guess that's what Widowvale is like.
I also wrote the book while studying for a law degree. So I had Aewyn's story from the beginning, but the idea for the setting grew out of William Faulkner's short stories, plus Star Wars, plus a few medieval land conveyances and tax evasion case law.
The upcoming sequel, "The Season of the Cerulyn," has its roots in Guy de Maupassant's short fiction from the French decadence. But that, as they say, is another story...
So I mostly read other things. For "The Season of the Plough," I took a page out of William Faulkner: he also spends a lot of time writing about small towns growing up as a community in the shadow of a civil war only a couple of generations past. I wanted to begin the Travalaith Saga with a look at a small town.
It eventually became a town of refugees from all across the Travalaithi Empire because I wanted a diverse cast without the feeling like I was just shoehorning one into the standard English Medieval setting of most high fantasy. I wanted a small town like Faulkner's for Aewyn to grow up in, but I also wanted a rich background of people from all over, with past lives and stories from far away... something like the alien cantina in Star Wars.
If you imagine a world where that's not a spacer bar, it's just a bar where all the local farmers go, but all the local farmers came here from other worlds to get away from their lives, I guess that's what Widowvale is like.
I also wrote the book while studying for a law degree. So I had Aewyn's story from the beginning, but the idea for the setting grew out of William Faulkner's short stories, plus Star Wars, plus a few medieval land conveyances and tax evasion case law.
The upcoming sequel, "The Season of the Cerulyn," has its roots in Guy de Maupassant's short fiction from the French decadence. But that, as they say, is another story...
About Goodreads Q&A
Ask and answer questions about books!
You can pose questions to the Goodreads community with Reader Q&A, or ask your favorite author a question with Ask the Author.
See Featured Authors Answering Questions
Learn more