I'm in the middle of reading Django Wexler's debut novel, The Thousand Names, right now and am extremely impressed so far. My review will be up in the next week or so, but for now, enjoy this interview with the man himself.
Hi
Django, welcome to Wilder’s Book Review! And a big congrats on the
publication of your debut novel, The Thousand Names!
Thanks
so much! I’m very excited.
So,
first up, give us three words that best describe The Thousand Names.
Hmm.
I’ll go with “military”, “muskets”, and “magic”,
because it’s nicely alliterative!
Can
you give us a little more detail on the series the novel belongs to?
How long will it be and what was your ultimate inspiration and
motivation behind writing it?
The
series, The
Shadow Campaigns,
will be five books in total. It got started when I first began
getting into military history and read a really excellent book about
the Napoleonic wars. I thought, “Man, I want to do that!”
So originally, it was supposed to be a fantasy retelling of the
career of Napoleon, but as I added stuff it diverged pretty wildly
from that.
I
wrote about this in a little more depth over at the Del Rey UK site:
http://www.delreyuk.com/
Much
has been said about this being one of a few debut novels in 2013 that
have started a new wave of epic fantasy with settings that feature
fantasy worlds based in post-industrial societies. Was this always a
particular focus you had when planning The Thousand Names, or did the
setting grow more organically in the writing?
Well,
for me, the setting came with the basic idea of the books -- if I was
going to do the life of Napoleon, I need the Napoleonic trappings,
with muskets and cannon and cavalry charges and so on. But after
George R. R. Martin’s A
Song of Ice and Fire,
I got really excited about the idea of a “realistic” fantasy
world drawing heavily on actual history (as his does) and I
definitely didn’t want to just do the usual knights-and-castles
setup.
The
idea of an epic fantasy world which has moved on from swords, knights
and medieval values is one which, I think, has serious potential for
authors when telling some of these vast fantasy stories.
Post-Industrial fantasy aside, it seems to me that even eras such as
early-modern Europe and the Renaissance are ripe for fantasy authors
right now, looking for a slightly different take on epic fantasy
settings. Would you agree, or is there still plenty of room for more
medieval-based fantasy?
It
has always seemed a little weird to me that with all of history to
choose from, so many fantasy authors model their secondary worlds on
a pretty narrow slice of time and space -- basically Western Europe
in the 13th
or 14th
centuries. (Or, more accurately, that time and place as filtered
through Mallory, Tolkien, and Gygax.)
Even
without leaving Europe, there’s a huge amount of variety to be had
-- I’d love to see a world based on Byzantium in the 1200s, or
Swiss republics during their heyday -- and that’s not even counting
the
entire rest of the world.
So I think authors are realizing there’s a lot of rich veins for
world-building and mythology out there that have barely been tapped.
It’d
be unfair of me to represent it as something that’s just starting
now, though. It’s been a steady undercurrent in fantasy throughout
the years (check out the works of KJ Parker, Ellen Kushner’s
Swordspoint,
Elizabeth Bear’s Range
of Ghosts,
Guy Gavriel Kay’s Under
Heaven,
etc) that’s just getting a lot more attention. But I hope the
trend continues -- as a history buff, this is the kind of thing I
love to read!
In
The Thousand Names you focus particularly on two main point-of-view
characters. For such a large epic fantasy story, was this a stylistic
choice, to narrow down the focus, or are you likely to broaden the
POV cast in later books?
In
general, I like to keep the number of points of view down to a
minimum, because I think every page the reader spends with a
particular point of view helps build sympathy and depth for that
character. Spreading the narrative too thin can really hurt the
character development, and over the course of a series lead to a kind
of narrative fragmentation. (Because we want to know what happens to
everybody we care about, but there isn’t a good reason for them all
to stay together, so the story wanders all over the place.)
In
The
Thousand Names
I knew I needed at least two POVs -- one to hang around with Janus
and help talk about command decisions, and another “in the ranks”
to show what things were like looking up from the bottom. I toyed
with including another one, but ultimately, with a few short
interludes from side characters, I thought I could get away without
it.
The
second book, The
Shadow Throne,
will introduce the POV of Raesinia Orboan, Princess Royal of Vordan
and heir to the throne. (And bearer of a nasty magical secret.) But
I think that should be it for the series -- if things go as planned,
I shouldn’t need any more in books three, four, or five.
My post last Monday at Anne Lyle's blog talks a bit about POV, and why it can be a
mistake to spread it too widely. See it here.
What
were some of your main genre influences in writing the series?
George
R. R. Martin’s A
Song of Ice and Fire
was a big one, as I said. I loved how he put a little
I’m
a big fan of how Joe Abercrombie does his battles and fighting in the
First
Law
series, and a bit of that definitely made it in. A lot of the magic
and more fantastical elements were influenced by Steven Erikson’s
The
Malazan Book of the Fallen,
with its gigantic, ambitious world and very slow build-up. In
particular, I love the way he gets you into the story but only hints
at the ultimate very quietly; I’m definitely hoping to achieve
something similar with The
Shadow Campaigns.
You’re
quite heavily into the study of history. What were some of the
particular eras of research you looked into for The Thousand Names?
A
lot of my ‘research’ never really felt like research, because
it’s just the sort of thing I read for fun anyway. The
Thousand Names
is rooted pretty closely in the period of the Napoleonic Wars, from
around 1790-1815. So I obviously read a lot about the French
Revolution and the wars that followed.
In
particular, I’m always on the lookout for books that bring together
first-hand accounts to give a soldier’s eye view of things. It’s
(relatively) easy to grasp the higher levels of a campaign, but
finding out what it was actually like
to be on the ground is surprisingly difficult.
The
nice thing about fantasy is that you don’t have an obligation to be
100% accurate. An actual historian reads a neat story or telling
detail and has to go look at other evidence to see if it’s true or
not; as a novelist, I can just say, “That sounds great, let’s go
with it!” I grabbed pieces from quite a few sources outside the
period proper (from the American Civil War, for example) and fit them
together, hopefully without introducing too many anachronisms.
When
did you decide you wanted to become an author, and can you tell us a
little about your first attempts?
I
knew that I liked
writing by about the end of high school. (Before that, my creative
efforts were mostly limited to RPGs, as detailed here) I tried my hand at short stories and sent a few to SF magazines,
but never really got anywhere with it. Then I drifted into
fan-fiction for a while and ended up writing some really long pieces.
Around my junior year of college, after three novel-length fan-fics,
I decided I was going to write something that I could potentially
sell.
I
still wasn’t planning to be a full-time author, at least not until
the distant future. The book I wrote was called Memories
of Empire,
which I sold to a small publisher called Medallion Press. I wrote
one more for them, Shinigami,
but between them they only sold a few thousand copies total. The
next book I wrote, Gaze
Into Shadow,
was part of an absurdly over-ambitious fantasy project, intended as
Book One of Seven Million, and I never managed to do anything with
it.
After
messing around with that for a while, I ended up putting it aside and
starting a fresh project with the explicit goal of getting an agent
and a “big” publisher -- that ended up being The
Thousand Names,
though it took a while to get it there.
What
kind of writer are you? Do you plot down to the last detail, or just
start writing and see where the words take you?
I
used to be very much a “discovery” writer and hated outlines, but
a couple of years ago I had something like a conversion experience.
My agent said that before he could sell The
Thousand Names,
he needed outlines for the rest of the series, so the publisher could
see that I knew what I was doing. Over the course of about a month,
with much grumbling, I wrote four outlines, and somewhere along the
way I came to appreciate how amazingly helpful the process was. When
the time actually came to write book two, it was so
much easier
because I didn’t keep running into blind alleys.
I
still don’t plot out everything,
especially character development. A lot of that arises naturally from
the twists and turns of dialogue, and I don’t want it to seem
forced. My outlines are pretty flexible, too, and sometimes the
finished product only resembles the plan in broad strokes. I’m
still very much working on my process, so in a couple of years I’m
sure I’ll have learned a lot more about it.
What’s
next in the pipeline for you Django? Is it Book Two of The Shadow
Campaigns, or is there anything else to come in between?
It
really is a pipeline -- there’s a long
stretch of time between when I finished The
Thousand Names
(in this case, in fall of 2011) and the final release. While I was
waiting to see if it sold, I decided I wanted to write something a
little lighter and simpler, which turned out to be a children’s
fantasy. (I have no idea how to write a children’s fantasy. It’s
just the same writing I always do, without sex, gore, or swearing.)
Long story short, my agent sold that one as well, and it comes out in
April 2014 as The
Forbidden Library,
beginning another five-book series.
After
that I started work on The
Shadow Campaigns Book Two, now called The
Shadow Throne,
and finished a first draft of that around summer of 2012. Then I did
the second Forbidden
Library
book (which still doesn’t have a title), a novella (which is still
searching for a home) and Shadow
Campaigns
short story (which ended up on io9 as ThePenitent Damned ).
Now, finally, I’m back to work on The
Shadow Throne,
which needs to go through rewrites and editing over the summer so we can
get it ready for (hopefully) a release next year.
What’s
something the people reading this interview might be surprised to
learn about Django Wexler?
A
lot
of people have been surprised to hear that Django Wexler isn’t a
pen name. I’m named after Django Reinhardt, a famous jazz
guitarist. Other than that, though, I’m an almost archetypical
SFF/software geek -- computer games, D&D, anime, cats.
And,
finally, what are you reading right now?
I
tend to have several books going at once, usually one fiction, one
non-fiction, and one audio. At the moment, I’m reading Daniel
Abraham’s A
Shadow in Summer,
which was recommend to me by Aidan over at A Dribble of Ink and which
I’m really enjoying. Non-fiction-wise, I’ve got Rick Atkinson’s
An
Army At Dawn,
about the Allied invasion of North Africa in WWII. And on my MP3 I
have Joe Hill’s NOS4A2,
which is fantastic
even if I have no idea where he’s going with it.
Thanks
Django!
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Django Wexler graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh with
The Thousand Names is Django Wexler's first novel, and is available now. You can find him at his website, DjangoWexler.com or follow him on Twitter at @DjangoWexler.
1 comment:
I was very pleased to find this web-site. I wanted to thanks for your time for this wonderful read.
Post a Comment