Steve Thomas's Blog

Unleash the Kobolds!

You can tell a bit about someone's history with the fantasy genre by asking one simple question:

What is a kobold?

Kobolds are one of those creatures from folklore that haven't really made as much headway into modern pop culture as fairies, vampires, werewolves, elves, and dwarves. They're B-tier, maybe even C-tier fantasy creatures. And since they aren't as common nowadays, interpretations vary wildly. There's really no archetypal kobold character like vampires have with Count Dracula.

Back to the question. Assuming you're talking to someone who has an opinion of what a kobold is, the answer you're most likely to get is, "A small, evil, reptilian creature with delusions of being related to dragons." This version of kobolds was popularized by Dungeons and Dragons (3rd edition, specifically) and has gone on to influence a lot of fantasy fiction. You can read more about that style of kobolds in the Pathfinder wiki here:

https://www.d20pfsrd.com/races/other-...

Going a little further back, we have the mammalian kobolds. Ironically enough, these were also popularized by Dungeons and Dragons (going back to the original edition of the game--you'd be amazed how many of your ideas about fantasy come from Gary Gygax). The kobolds were related to goblins, but had dog- and rat-like physical properties. This version also spread throughout fantasy fiction.

Other than physical appearance, both versions of kobolds fill a similar niche in the fantasy ecology. They are small, weak, tribal, and violent monster races. They are a common fodder enemy in video games, and generally which variant of kobolds you encounter will amount to a coin flip, with plenty artistic license on top.

You also shouldn't be surprised if you run into a kobold that looks a lot like a goblin. It's only natural.

Kobolds and goblins, you see, are basically the same thing in Germanic folklore. Traditionally, kobolds are in the sprite family, closer related to Keebler elves than dragons. Among those, the most common form was the house kobold. Most commonly depicted as strange, humanoid creatures the size of a small child, a house kobold was a shapeshifting, sometimes invisible, roommate. Treat your kobold with respect by leaving out food and beer when you go to bed, and the kobold will help with any chores you neglected, keep away pests, and generally makes your house a home. Mistreat your kobold, and I hope you have a good insurance plan. A scorned kobold will do anything from hide your favorite spoon to murder you.

In Mid-Lich Crisis, one of the primary characters is a kobold. I tried to combine the folklore roots of the creature with a modern fantasy flair. This led to Princess, a mischievous, cat-like housekeeper who always has a prank up her sleeve. You can enjoy her antics when Mid-Lich Crisis releases on October 11.

Mid-Lich Crisis: Behind The Scenes

I’m Steve Thomas and I like writing weird books. Mid-Lich Crisis is my seventh book, and it’s weird, even by my standards.

Like so many ideas, this one evolved from a very different concept. One piece of writing advice that stuck with me is that a good way to plan a character arc is this: First, establish what a character is good at. Then, make him do something else. I thought about how I could apply that to a villain protagonist in a funny story, and came up with the idea of an evil wizard who finally finds the key to immortality, but it comes with the stipulation that he can’t ever kill again, even indirectly. Simultaneously, he hates his arch-nemesis and wants him dead so incredibly much that his arch-nemesis, a classic fantasy hero, also gains immortality. The two of them would have to figure out what to do with themselves now that their rivalry could never be resolved.

As I thought about it, something about that concept wasn’t quite working for me. I eventually decided that the story would be more interesting if my villain protagonist, who by that point had picked up the name Darruk Darkbringer, made a conscious decision to stop killing--it’s often better when restrictions come from within a character than from external and arbitrary sources. From there, I came up with the concept of Darruk having a midlife crisis, and I was off and running.

So why do I say this story is weird? It doesn’t have a whole lot in common with the high-octane romp of Klondaeg or the gloomy cosmic horror of The Sangrook Saga. It’s a more introspective, character-driven book. Ultimately, it’s about perception. It’s about the friction between how we see ourselves and how we think the world sees us. Does Darruk want to be a better person, or does he merely want to be seen as a better person, and can he tell the difference? When you look back at your life, do you ever stop and think, “Wow, I was the asshole in that story,” or do you stand by your past decisions? It’s in a lot of ways a story born of my own baggage and insecurities packaged up in a twisted immorality play.

I also took a slightly different approach to the comedy in this one. There’s a little more cringe humor thanks to Darruk’s self-delusion, and it’s structured as a parody of the redemption arc and the loveable screw-up subgenre of fantasy. It’s more introspective and I made an effort not to be “on” all the time. I wanted to give the story and character development more time to breathe. So while the jokes may not be flying as fast, I hope they carry more weight this time around.

I realize as I wrap this up that I’m not selling this as a comedy at all, so here’s a few things you can expect beyond the navel-gazing and self-hatred: mischievous kobolds, glam-rock samurai, Darruk’s estranged wife who is completely over all the human sacrifice attempts, and a bizarre cross between Medieval football and Quidditch.

Mid-Lich Crisis Giveaway!

Hey,

I just wanted to drop a quick note. I'm currently running a Goodreads Giveaway for my upcoming comic fantasy novel, Mid-Lich Crisis. You can read the details and enter the contest at the link below:

https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sh...

The giveaway will end on October 10, just in time for the book to release the next day.

Thanks to everyone who enters and I hope you enjoy the read.

Mid-Lich Crisis

Subverting Expectations: How Plot Twists Work (and Don't Work) on Game of Thrones

After the finale of “Game of Thrones,” I’ve seen the phrase “subverting expectations” being used as a tongue-in-cheek euphemism for “bad writing.” So let’s talk about plot twists. I’m going to use a few major events from the show as examples, so if you haven’t finished the series, click away now because there will be spoilers.

When you want to surprise readers, or have plot twists, it affects how you write. As the author, your job is to control the flow of information, misdirect, build multiple sets of possibilities, and set expectations. You want the audience to think the story is going one way, then jerk the wheel to the left and drive the plot somewhere else. There are a lot of ways to handle this, and they often stem from the motives of the author.

To list a few styles:

Type A: The fair play twist. The audience knows that they are missing information and are looking for clues. This leads to a deep level of engagement, with water cooler talk and vibrant online forums full of fan theories. The audience treats the story as a puzzle, come up with many solutions, and as the story goes on, possible solutions get pruned one at a time. When they find the solution, the audience wants to rewatch/reread to look for all the clues they missed. Westworld Season 1 is a great recent example.

Type B: The genre subversion. After reading or watching a few stories in a genre, the audience has a pretty good idea of where these things go. The genre subversion throws out the usual rules of the genre to make some kind of statement about it. Protagonists die. The cavalry doesn’t arrive. The bad guys win. Sometimes it leaves the reader thinking, “Wow, they actually went there.”

Type C: The guarded secret. The writer badly wants to surprise the reader with a twist, so writes in a secretive fashion: unreliable narrators, missing scenes, time skips, and generally making it clear to the audience that information is being withheld. This can cause the audience to give up on theorizing because they don’t have the information to make a reasonable guess. It can also leave them feeling manipulated because they were denied the tools to see where the story might go.

Type D: The WTF. Again, the author badly wants to surprise the reader and guards information so tightly that the audience isn’t even aware that information is being withheld. This leads to the audience shaking their heads and asking, “WTF?” There will often be a faction who will try to explain how the twist works if you read between the lies while making certain assumptions, but at its heart, the writer didn’t lay the groundwork to make the twist feel fair. Other times, the author makes a seemingly random decision simply for the value of a surprise.

Type E: The non-twist. Characters say what they are going to do, audiences reject that idea and assume that a twist is going to happen, and then it doesn’t. The story can be taken at face value after all.

So let’s take a look at some of the major plot twists in Game of Thrones and classify them.
Ned Stark’s Death:

This is a classic case of Type B, especially if you read the book before Sean Bean was cast in the role. Ned Stark is the apparent protagonist of the series at that point. He’s advertised as the only honorable noble in Westeros. He’s caught up in the subplot about Robert’s heirs being illegitimate. He has a lot of unfinished story and a major mystery in his backstory (Jon’s mother). Sure, he was sentenced to death, but come on. He’s the hero here. Someone will convince Joffrey to see reason. Maybe he’ll listen to Sansa’s pleas. Maybe Tywin or Cersei will convince him of the strategic importance of not inciting the North to rebel. Maybe Joffrey will want to establish himself as a kind and merciful king.

Lol, no. Joffrey impulsively demands Ned’s head right then and there because he wants to feel like a badass. It’s a genre subversion, plain and simple. Just like Joffrey, George R. R. Martin is sending the message that he follows through on his threats. He’s trying to strip out the tropes. It’s not about how the story usually goes; it’s about how these characters in these situations would act. Joffrey is impulsive, short-sighted, and bloodthirsty. Of course he takes the opportunity to execute a threat to his power. GRRM put a character in an awful situation that would normally call for a heroic escape, then dashed our hopes.

The Red Wedding

This is a little of Type A and a little of Type B. The Type B argument is similar to Ned’s Death. Robb Stark had all the elements of being the next hero: he was the son of the previous fake-out protagonist, was charismatic and gifted in war...but he angered a lot of people and was assassinated. That’s how it goes sometimes in the real world. As to Type A, there were clues. Dissent had been brewing under Robb, such as the incident with the Karstarks. We saw Roose Bolton’s ambitions (and in the books he’s even creepier). We saw Tywin trying to make deals. We knew very well how spiteful Walder Frey was. GRRM established what kind of story he’s writing with Ned Stark’s death. All those elements mixed together to point toward Robb being assassinated, and while it was shocking because we thought he was safe in that moment, it’s not like no one could have seen his death coming.

Pretty much any character’s death that came from the book fits this profile. They were shocking, but fair. But what about after the show left the books behind?

Littlefinger’s Death

This one is a Type C. For the episodes leading up to it, there’s this arbitrary-seeming conflict between Arya and Sansa. It was kind of confusing and left the audience scratching their heads, because why are these sisters suddenly conspiring against each other? And then they kill Littlefinger and high-five each other over their awesome ruse. We find out that they were secretly staging a conflict to make Littlefinger drop his guard, and they fooled the audience while they were at it. Why? Because the writers wanted to surprise you.

Jaime Going Back to Cersei

Type E. He broke up with Brienne saying that he’d much prefer to go to King’s Landing and bang his sister some more, despite all indications being that he was over Cersei. The audience assumed it was some trick to keep Brienne safe in the North while he used his relationship with Cersei to get close and assassinate her. But no. There was no twist. He really was still in love with her despite seasons of character growth, and he just wanted to be with her when it all ended.

Mad Queen Dany

This is probably the most controversial classification here because Dany was such a charismatic character that pop culture latched on to. I think it’s a Type C that looks like a Type D and should have been a Type A. Let me explain.

Tyrion summed it up pretty well in the finale. Dany built her reputation on burninating evil men before she turned her wrath on the people of Westeros. She had developed a messiah complex and internalized a belief that her desires == good, and anything that defies her == bad and worthy of dragonfire. We never got that far in the books, but what we have so far shows that she is slowly inching into Targaryen madness. But here’s the thing. The show didn’t portray that very well and tried to patch it with exposition after the fact. They threw in a few hints, such as her growing isolation in the post-battle feast and Missendai’s death, but that wasn’t enough to overpower lines like, “I’m not here to be queen of the ashes.” Roasting Tarley and Son in Season 7 should have been where she crossed the line, but the writers let her walk it back. Her turn against Westeros could have been this inevitable tragedy, but instead, her character arc swerved around it only to suddenly back up and run it over. Because of her charisma and apparent status as a protagonist, many people didn’t even see what groundwork had been laid for her heel turn, and so to them it looked like a Type D.

In other words, Mad Queen Dany was almost justified in the show (and I think the book will do a better job of it), but instead the writer’s wanted to surprise us with a Type C twist instead of a Type A. They hid her motivations and plans so that rather than dreading it and hoping for a twist to redeem her that never comes, we got a surprise slaughter instead. Just an extra ten minutes of content where she was soundly rejected by Westeros or she said she planned to make an example of King’s Landing could have transformed this into a solid Type A.

King Bran the Broken

Type D. The Council of Lords elects the man who has been binge-watching all of human history for a few seasons, has renounced his claim to the North already, and has more or less lost interest in modern human affairs to be their new king. Also, his sister declares the North’s independence at the same time, meaning that the King of the Seven Six Kingdoms isn’t even a citizen. No one could have seen that coming and we still don’t understand why it did.

It seems to me that some of the complaints about the later seasons of Game of Thrones come from the style of plot twists that D&D prefer. They want to write moments that get people talking, like GRRM did. However, they want the audience to be totally surprised. They want to make sure the audience doesn’t see their twists coming. That leaves them justifying their story either through having other characters explain what happened after the fact, or talking about character motivations outside the text, such as in interviews. In my opinion, an author should rely on Type A and Type B plot twists. These enhance a story and keep the audience interested after they’ve experienced it once. They aren’t reading or watching solely to find out what happens, but to understand the context of it all, to watch characters struggle with decisions, and to see what they missed the first time through. The other types leave the audience feeling unsatisfied at best and betrayed at worst. GRRM relied Type A and Type B twists and that’s what makes A Song of Ice and Fire so engaging. It was when the show went beyond the books that the style of plot twists changed, and the audience satisfaction started to drop.

To writers, I suggest this: plot twists aren’t some prize to be guarded and kept away from readers. They’re a reward for the readers who love the thrill of a treasure hunt, who like guessing and theorizing. Let your readers explore your story on their own terms and remember that your story isn’t diminished if it’s predictable.

Comedy is Dead: Writing in the Shadow of a Giant

I sometimes say that my relationship with writing can be explained by the three Terries. As a child, one Terry made me think, “I want to write fantasy.” The second Terry made me think, “If people read this guy’s books, surely mine have a shot.” The third Terry still makes me think, “I shouldn’t bother. I’ll never be this good.” I’ll let you guess who the first two are, but Terry Pratchett is the third. He was a powerhouse of comic fantasy. His Discworld series, in a lot of minds, is comic fantasy. His are the books that other authors are compared to. He’s both the benchmark and the impossible goal. No one can live up to him and it’s futile to try.

To quote a review of one of my novels, “Not Terry Pratchett by any means, but fun nonetheless.”

And it makes sense. I personally idolize the man and his work. This was something I posted on reddit when I reflected on finishing reading the Discworld series about two years after Sir Terry’s death:

“Pratchett had an extraordinary insight into humanity and societies. He wrote about this uniquely cynical version of humanism, where being good is different from being nice, where goodness is a constant struggle, and where if any time we fail in that struggle, we open the door to injustice. But he never gave up hope. Gaiman is often quoted about how Pratchett’s humor is fueled by his rage, and it’s easy to believe. When Pratchett looked at the world, he was disappointed in us for failing that struggle. We need more people like Granny Weatherwax and Sam Vimes in the world and it’s a damn tragedy that we lost our only Terry Pratchett.”

As much as I admire the man and his work, I’ve always had this sense that I was writing in his shadow. I’ve internalized that feeling that I’ll never compare to him. How do I convince the world to give my comic fantasy books a chance when there are 41 Discworld books written by the master of the genre? Worse, I occasionally see this attitude that comic fantasy as a genre lived and died with Sir Terry. Is comic fantasy dead?


Well, no. I don’t think it is. Comic fantasy has always been a small genre, so it was easy for one man to dominate. I think an apt comparison is J.R.R. Tolkien's legacy. Just like Pratchett with comic fantasy, Tolkien defined the modern conception of epic fantasy. There was a time period when he was untouchable, when every epic fantasy novel was compared to him, when every publisher insisted that Middle Earth be the template for all new novels, and when readers both craved clones of his work and resented fantasy authors for trying to re-capture someone else’s magic.

I think comic fantasy is in that same place today. Sir Terry published his first Discworld book in 1983 and thirty-five years is plenty of time for his influence to start shining through with a new generation of comic fantasy authors. Obviously, most of us are influenced by Terry Pratchett. His integration of humor into plot lines that showed both the light and darkness of humanity without missing a chance for a quip has penetrated the genre. He showed us how to make comic timing work in prose. He sniped all the best jokes about fantasy tropes. But if comic fantasy authors can’t let go of our reverence for the man, we set ourselves up for failure. There will never be another Terry Pratchett, but that doesnt mean comic fantasy is dead. It just means that we can’t and shouldn’t let ourselves write in another author’s shadow. We need to learn what we can from the master and find our own voice, our own style of comedy, and hope that readers will laugh along with us.

Indie Beginning Podcast

The Sangrook Saga was recently featured on The Indie Beginning Podcast. On this podcast, one of the hosts (in this case, Marie Krammerer-Franke) reads the opening pages of a novel in the first episode, then follow up with a discussion among the hosts and the author the next week. I was very pleased to be on the podcast, and you can listen to my episodes here:

Part 1 (reading):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnYqy...

Part 2 (discussion):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bjrpi...

The Dark Souls of Books

I’ve always played a lot of video games and so it’s no surprise that they can be a source of inspiration when I write. This was especially true of “The Sangrook Saga.” For this book, I wanted to invoke a sense of mystery and underlying, untold myths. I wanted the readers to feel like they were discovering hints and clues that help them piece together a larger mythos. More specifically, I wanted to recreate the experience I felt playing “The Legned of Zelda: A Link to the Past” and “Dark Souls” for the first time.

Let’s start with Zelda. A few of my friends received an SNES before I did, and I have memories of visiting their houses and watching them play A Link to the Past. They would just boot up their save file and show me the world. I’d see glimpses of dungeons and boss fights, tour villages, and watch them explore the overworld. And I was enraptured. The world seemed so dense and rich and full of secrets to find. When I finally experienced the game myself, playing my own save file start to finish, I found another layer: the story. Now, I’m not one for story-focused games. I avoided RPGs as a child and loudly decried cutscenes during the Console Wars of the 90s, but that isn’t to say I ignore all narratives in games. A Link to the Past was one that caught my interest because it infrequently gave out sparse bits of the narrative of how Ganon rose to power and consumed the Dark World. You’d enter a cave and never know whether the reward was a heart piece, a new item, some rupees, or an old man with a few lines of lore. Because the story was so sparse and infrequent, what little I got fascinated me. I wanted to collect all the pieces and put them together. I wanted to seek out those old men in caves in case they had something new to add, and so uncovering the story became an integral part of the game. I always felt an undercurrent of untold legend that made the game that much more epic.

I just focused on one game, but the whole series is like that. Each game has its own mysteries and lore, and entire communities emerged online to discuss how the games fit into a timeline. Is Ocarina of Time the backstory of A Link to the Past? Which Link was dreaming in Link’s Awakening? Is Wind Waker the end of the story? Does the timeline branch into different parallel histories? Are the games a series of stories or a bunch of retellings of the same legend? Is Link an immortal circling around a time loop, slowly losing his sanity as he goes (of course not, the timeline is a triangle)? Nintendo didn’t release an official series timeline until 2011, and that didn’t do much to end the debate.

I also mentioned “Dark Souls,” and this series took a similar approach to lore. The storytelling in the Dark Souls series is very hands-off, but there is a story to be found by taking a careful look at item and enemy placement, environments, and item descriptions. Dark Souls II, for example, has you retracing King Vendrick’s quest and slowly learning how he planned to break the cycle of dark and fire. You can find many examples (check out Vaatividya on Youtube), but my favorite example is Ceaseless Discharge. Ceaseless Discharge is a lava boss found in the Demon Ruins at the source of a lava flow. When you first enter the chamber, he ignores you (which is unusual for a Dark Souls boss). He doesn’t attack until you loot a corpse at the far corner of his chamber to acquire the Gold-Hemmed Black armor set. The description of the armor tells you that it’s associated with the Witch of Izalith and her seven daughters, who have been mentioned many times. Much later in the game (tens of hours later), you come across the Orange-Charred Ring. The description of this one says it was made by the Witch of Izalith’s daughters to stem the pain of their younger brother, who was cursed to be constantly on fire and suffering, but he lost it.

If you put all that together, you can deduce that Ceaseless Discharge is that younger brother, who would have ignored you if only you hadn’t defiled his sister’s corpse! All this information can be synthesized to form a story, and that’s just one of many examples.

For “The Sangrook Saga,” I tried to use these methods. When you write a fantasy novel, there’s a strong temptation to infodump, to make sure that the reader has the pleasure of reading your fifty-page worldbuilding notebook. Fighting that temptation and doling out only what is necessary is a lesson we all have to learn. For this story, I went a step further. I set out to tell a little less than necessary, and to spread out those bits of worldbuilding to when they could appear most naturally and relevantly. I wanted to give the reader space to imagine, to form their own ideas of the unspoken details.

On top of that, “The Sangrook Saga” is a family saga told in seven parts. Each part covers a different member of the Sangrook dynasty. They are not told in chronological order. Like the Zelda timeline, the reader is invited to seek out connections and speculate on the timeline. Regarding the worldbuilding and the timeline, there are details and connections and smaller stories that aren’t going to be apparent to the casual reader. However, I was careful to make sure that each story worked in the order presented in the book. The book has to stand up to a casual read, after all. I can’t expect everyone to be obsessively looking for clues. My goal wasn’t to punish anyone who just wanted to read a book, but to reward readers who look for more. It’s a bonus born of emulating something I love. It’s my sincere hope that people who share my taste in video games will also enjoy this book.

I guess you could say that “The Sangrook Saga” is the Dark Souls of books.

The Sangrook Saga

Humor and Horror

If you've heard of me before, it was probably because of one of my comic fantasy novels. But if you're reading this blog post, it's probably because I'm promoting my dark fantasy novel, "The Sangrook Saga" (Releases on June 19, pre-order now!). And if you're reading this sentence, you're probably wondering how a comedy author ended up writing a horror-influenced dark fantasy novel. Comedy and horror are completely opposite things! What was I thinking? Stay in your lane, Steve!

Ahem.

I was nervous when I started this project, nervous that I couldn't pull it off, nervous that any horror elements would come off as trite and shallow, nervous that the story would fall flat on its face. But as I was writing, I came to a realization: Humor and horror have more in common than you might think. Some of the skills in one transfer over to the other. The main difference is that the punchline is replaced by a gut punch. Let me explain.

Humor is largely about a tension/release cycle. You start with a premise that makes the audience a little uncomfortable: Someone is acting oddly or inappropriately, rules aren't being followed, rules are stupid, someone is taking an odd path to a destination, etc. These things build tension. There's a sense of wrongness, of mental friction. But then the punchline comes, the audience realizes that there was no harm done, and they laugh. Let's use, as an example, the oldest recorded joke in the English language. It takes the form of a riddle:

What hangs at a man’s thigh and wants to poke the hole that it’s often poked before?

Ok, so I know what you're thinking. It's a dick, right? The oldest joke in the English language is a dick joke. How is this even a riddle? There's some discomfort here because I just told you the set-up to an ancient joke and the solution is obvious. Our ancestors are so juvenile and disappointing. But you're not ready to move on yet because you want to hear the answer, even if it's just for the satisfaction of confirming the obvious.

So here's the answer:

A key.

Did you laugh? If you didn't, I'll forgive you. This level of analysis is going to kill the joke, so go try it on a friend and see what happens. This joke is about building the tension that the person telling it is setting up an obvious dick joke and then taking it another direction. You've been surprised, the tension is released, and maybe you laugh. You're comfortable again.

There are some special cases and pitfalls and entire books have been written trying to define humor, but I’d rather focus on the similarities to this structure and horror. If humor is about a tension/release cycle that leaves the reader feeling at ease, then horror is about a tension/release cycle where you can finally stop wondering what’s about to go wrong, because it’s happened. Where humor makes you uncomfortable because things seem wrong, but are ultimately harmless, horror entices you to imagine multiple awful scenarios until the story finally picks one. A woman is walking home drunk from a bar and sees a menacing figure in the corner of her vision. She starts walking, and he follows her. The woman and the audience both feel a sense of discomfort, a sense of dread. That dread grows as she starts running and the man gives chase. It grows as she ducks into an alley, but reaches a dead end. It peaks when she spins to see him, and he’s smiling and holding a knife. She asks him what he wants, pleads for her safety, and weeps, but he doesn’t answer. He just smiles and brandishes his weapon. The scene ends. The reader doesn’t know what happened to her and their imagination runs wild. That tension remains. Sometime later in the story, we witness two detectives examining her corpse in that same alley. We finally know what happened to her, and we get some sense of closure, but that tension, that discomfort sticks with us. We’re reminded of all the ways our own lives can spin out of control.

So while humor uses that tension/release cycle to put people at ease and ultimately bring comfort, horror makes its goal to leave the reader shaken an uneasy, even after that tension/release cycle is over. It’s the same tool used two very different ways.

But what do I know? I’m just a joke man who tried to write something scary.

The Sangrook Saga
Klondaeg The Monster Hunter
Steve Thomas

Writing the Sangrook Saga

After I finished the Klondaeg series, I wasn’t really sure what was next. Between that uncertainty and the birth of my first son, I took a break from writing and tried to regroup and brainstorm. During that process, a start-up small press posted an open call for a dark fantasy anthology. It was a high concept piece, a family saga of a family of evil necromancers with twelve writing prompts to be filled from the submissions process, creating a mysterious and contradictory account of the family history (since the authors wrote each chapter independently). I was really intrigued by the concept, so I chose a prompt and wrote the story that became “The Curse of Sangrook Manor.”

I didn’t win that slot. The publisher did, however, contact me saying that there was a slot they weren’t able to fill from the open call and they wanted me to write it. I accepted and wrote that story. I was excited. I’d caught the attention of a small press, they liked my work, and I was going to be in an anthology. Somewhere in there, there was even talk of a graphic novel adaptation.

Alas, the company folded before the anthology was ever published. So there I was, with two related dark fantasy stories spawned from the same concept. I eventually decided that since I’ve come this far, I may as well write the anthology on my own. That’s the beauty of self-publishing, after all. Now that it was a single-author project, I was free to discard the prompts and generate a more consistent world, history, mythos, and magic system, but I wanted to hang on to some mystique, so many things go unexplained. In fact, I let the Dark Souls games influence my storytelling. Much of the history and the connections between chapters are left for the reader to infer; even the timeline of the chapters is a puzzle for interested readers to solve.

I adapted both existing stories to fit this new world, released “The Curse of Sangrook Manor” as a stand-alone, and got to work creating five more stories in that world, for a total of seven chapters of “The Sangrook Saga,” each dealing out a miserable fate to a new victim of the Sangrook clan, which taken together tell the dark history in of world reeling from a War of the Gods and the forces trying to bring order to it. I’m not sure if it’s better to call it an anthology or an oddly-structured novel, but I hope you’ll be interested in delving in and exploring it with me.

“The Sangrook Saga” releases on Kindle and paperback on June 22, 2018.

The Sangrook Saga