Reader Question Day #47 – I interview myself
Manwe asks:
Maybe next week for reader question day, you can use the Sword and Sorceress questionnaire on yourself.
Well…why not?
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1.) Tell us about yourself.
My name is Jonathan Moeller, and I work in educational IT. When I’m not doing that, I write a lot, and I don’t sleep much.
2.) Why do you write?
Fame and glory! Actually, that’s not true, which is good, because writing is a bad way to go about acquiring fame and glory. Also, fame and glory are like candy – they taste good, but they’re actually quite bad for you.
I started writing when I was a teenager because I was bored and I liked telling stories. Later in college, I wanted to try getting published, so I started writing novels, which I eventually did – DEMONSOULED in 2005. Eventually, I got frustrated with the byzantine and archaic world of traditional publishing (of course, back then, it wasn’t traditional publishing, it wast just publishing) and spent more time writing for my tech blog and Choose Your Own Adventure stories on this site than trying to get published.
Then in 2010 I found out about the Kindle and ebooks, and so writing suddenly became profitable, which was certainly a new and novel (ba-da-DUM) proposition!
In the end, I write because I enjoy it.
3.) Sword & Sorceress is known for sword & sorcery centered around a strong female character. Is there any particular trick to writing strong female characters?
Yes. The trick is to understand that women are different than men, but as equally capable of evil as men are. Not less capable of evil or more capable of evil, but just as capable of evil.
This might seem obvious, but it’s not. The 21st century zeitgeist has one big assumption (among others) that usually goes unexamined – that that women are less capable of evil than men are. You can see this assumption play out in a plethora of fictional scenarios – when a man leaves his wife in a movie, he’s a faithless cad, but when a woman leaves her husband, she needs to discover herself, and have some “me time”, and her husband was probably an abusive jerk anyway. The reverse scenario is only rarely portrayed. (This is why the Julia Roberts movie was entitled “Eat, Pray, Love” and not “The Selfish Woman Who Abandons Her Faithful Husband To Sleep With Strangers While Wasting Large Sums Of Money.”) Anyway, this assumption is pretty much universally agreed upon in 21st century western culture, and colors a lot of fiction. This is why many heroines who are supposed to be “strong, independent women” are instead needy and disagreeable to the audience – they do stupid and selfish things, but those stupid and selfish things are portrayed as not their fault, even when they plainly are.
So the key to writing strong female characters is to ignore this assumption. When writing a character, whether male or female, the key is to give them agency – let them make decision and take actions, good or bad, and then deal with the consequences. In the end, a strong character cannot be passive. A “strong, independent heroine” who makes terrible choices and consistently refuses to take responsibility for them is, in the end, just as patronizing as a female character who spends an entire book waiting for her husband or her father to make her decisions for her, and yet is nonetheless portrayed as a “strong, independent heroine.”
4.) What would you say makes sword & sorcery different from other kinds of fantasy?
Scope. Sword & sorcery tends to be focused on individual characters, while high fantasy tends to deal with the fate of empires and nations and gods and universes and so forth. Granted, the scope can change during a story or even a series of stories.
5.) How do you think ebooks and the Internet will change the way we read & write?
In grand and splendid ways.
I think all the changes, in the end, will be for the better. The previously publishing system was byzantine and archaic, not to mention tremendously wasteful. (Think of how many unread books end up at pulping plants.) So this means it’s a lot better for writers, who (unless they choose to do so) don’t have to deal with the arbitrary demands and restrictive contracts of large publishers, or deal with agents, many of whom were notoriously dishonest. It’s also a lot better for readers, since there is now a limitless supply of reading material, and you can carry around four thousand books on a $99 Android smartphone that weights about 1/10th of a hardback book.
I think we are on the beginning of a renaissance of literature for both readers and writers.
Finally, I think this post by Dean Wesley Smith is a good summary of the changes, but I like this quote:
2012 was a year that started to prove that being able to sit in a chair and produce is a valuable skill in writing once again, just as it was in the first golden age of fiction in the 1930s and 1940s. Readers want more books and stories from favorite authors and don’t understand the “only one book per year” thinking of traditional publishers.
Granted, if the apparatchiks at the UN manage to get control of the Internet, it could all fall apart, but for now, things are looking good for writers and readers. Less so for publishers, granted, but many of them kind of deserve it. The publishers that survive will be smart and nimble and add value to books, rather than acting as entitled middlemen who deserve a cut simply by existing.
6.) Tell us about your Sword & Sorceress story.
GHOST PYRES is the sixth (!) story I have written for SWORD & SORCERESS about Caina Amalas, a nightfighter of the Ghosts, the spies an assassins of the Emperor of Nighmar. Caina is also the protagonist in my THE GHOSTS series of novels.
(A bit of a note about continuity – the short stories have gotten somewhat separated from the novels. At the end of GHOST IN THE STONE, the latest novel, Caina is only twenty-one. By the time of GHOST PYRES, she’s almost thirty.)
Anyway, in GHOST PYRES, Caina is in a rural town hunting for spies when she comes across a series of murder committed by a pyromancer. Caina hates sorcery, so she’s going to do whatever it takes to stop the pyromancer…which means she will face a particularly dangerous temptation, since her hatred of sorcery makes her willing to do things she would not otherwise consider.
7.) Can you share an excerpt from your Sword & Sorceress story?
Absolutely I can:
“Someone just cast a spell nearby,” said Caina, looking
around. She and Lucan stood in one of the main dockside streets
of Caer Belaen, a small town southwest of the Imperial capital. A
few passing sailors cast odd looks at the nobleman and his
indisposed companion, but no one stopped to offer help.
Sailors had a good eye for trouble.
“You’re sure?” said Lucan.
“Aye,” said Caina. “A powerful one, too.” Another wave of
sharp prickles crawled over her skin. “And it’s still active.”
“No magi live in Caer Belaen,” said Lucan.
Caina nodded. “Then we investigate.”
She would have investigated anyway, even if an entire chapter
of the magi lived in the town. She was a Ghost circlemaster, one
of the leaders of the Emperor’s spies, and she had sworn to
defend the people of the Empire from those who preyed upon
them. And very often, magi and sorcerers were the predators.
Gods, how she hated them.
8.) Recommend one other book or short story you have written that we should read.
CHILD OF THE GHOSTS, the first book about Caina in THE GHOSTS series:
9.) Recommend one non-fiction book that you haven’t written.
Since I wrote the interview questions, I will break my own rules and recommend three. 
The first is LET’S GET DIGITAL, by David Gaughran. If you want to start self-publishing your own ebooks, this book is a great primer on the topic.
The second and third books are THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE by Peter Heather and THE DAY OF THE BARBARIANS by Alessandro Barbero – both were direct inspirations for my novel SOUL OF SORCERY.
-JM
