Theft of Swords (The Riyria Revelations #1-2)

Why did you choose to use such established fantasy tropes in your series?

For years now I have heard fans of the traditional “Tolkienesque” fantasy novels lament the repetitive themes and exhausted archetypes of the genre. They are tired of the same old hero-vanquishing-evil and want something new, something more real, more believable. Which to me sounds like someone saying they love chocolate, they just wished it wasn’t so chocolaty and that it tasted more like vanilla. Many writers struggle to appease, whether that means turning an old theme on its head or going for the gritty and morbid. During the past few decades this trend has resulted in fantasy going dark: Evil often wins. Heroes don’t exist.

This happened before.

The motion-picture industry turned out happy endings for decades, then in the sixties things began to change. Gritty, realistic films began to pop up, and antiheroes like The Man with No Name arrived in the Italian Western. The trend solidified in the seventies, with moviemakers like Scorsese, De Laurentiis, Coppola, and Kubrick, who often focused on complex and unpleasant themes. It was theorized that the public was tired of the old good-triumphs-over-evil stories because it was so out of sync with the realities of the American experience during the age of Watergate, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement, and the Sexual Revolution.

Then Star Wars debuted in 1977 and everything began to change again.

I remember seeing Star Wars the weekend it opened. I wasn’t expecting anything, and I was debating between it and the cartoon movie Wizards. Only one early review for Star Wars was out, a small block article in the Detroit News that slammed it for being unoriginal and using just about every movie cliché that existed, but the review did add that it was surprisingly entertaining. It was the comment about movie clichés that tipped the scales for me. I never cared for the gritty realism of Midnight Cowboy and Taxi Driver. I liked the old films, the ones I saw on television that I was too young to have seen at a theater. When the movie ended and the credits were rolling, I had one thought—so that’s a movie.

I saw the same scenario play out to some degree in the fantasy book world. This time it was a novel series by a new author who made the unforgivable mistake of writing a hero story using every clichéd trapping available. It was actually the tale of a young boy destined to defeat an evil dark lord and save the world from destruction. It even had an old mentor wizard guiding him as well as a motley crew of humorous sidekicks (not unlike Star Wars). According to the professed mentality of the consumer, the books should have been laughable. In serious times, people don’t want trite tales of do-gooders with happy endings. They should have been panned as the worst kind of old-fashioned echo. Instead, there is a Harry Potter theme park in Florida now.

So I have to wonder—what’s the deal?

An aspiring writer friend of mine was working on a book in which a talking cat plays an important role. He presented part of his story to a writers’ workshop and the overwhelming response was that the talking cat was cliché—a tired device as old as Alice in Wonderland. He was depressed afterward, and over drinks he asked me if his story was even worth pursuing anymore, as it wouldn’t work without the cat. I told him that the cat doesn’t matter. All that matters is if the story is good and if it is well written.

You see, I don’t think people so much hate to read the same type of story, they just hate to read bad stories. There are an infinite number of ways to combine old ideas to create new books. If the plot is good, if the reader cares for the characters, if the setting feels real, then it doesn’t matter if it’s about talking cats or boys destined to defeat an evil dark lord. And trying to write a completely original story is sort of like trying to compose music with all original notes. It’s not necessary, and I’m not even certain it’s possible.

Some people have told me that I should alter the names of things to make the world more unique, less generic, but I chose to use elves and dwarves, kings and queens, castles and churches, precisely because everyone knows what they are—I don’t have to explain them. The less time I have to take explaining the basics of my world, the more time I have to tell a great story and the less work readers have to go through to imagine themselves in the world.

How did you get published?

Well, as I mentioned, I wasn’t planning on publishing. I had put that aspect behind me. But I did want my books to be read … Heck, all authors do. Originally I gave it to a few friends and they, not surprisingly, expressed their enjoyment … but, hey, they are my friends so I wouldn’t expect less.

I mentioned that my daughter is dyslexic. This means she has a few strange quirks. She is easily distracted by the color of the background on a computer screen, whether a door is left ajar or a light is on in another room. When I finished The Crown Conspiracy I presented her with a stack of double-spaced 8? " x 11" pages, and she looked at me as if I were crazy.

“I can’t read it this way … you said you were writing me a book … I need binding; I need a smaller page size.”

I just sighed.

For anyone who has read my blog, or read or listened to any of my other interviews, you know that my wife is the engine behind my writing. She is an extremely competent person who will break any door and rise over any challenge—even something as daunting as publishing. And she is a great businessperson. So when I finally resigned myself that I should give publishing one more chance, I laid my plan well. I wrote a terrible query letter and presented it to my wife, along with my inept plan of mailing it to one agent a month for the next twelve months.

“Seriously?” she told me with a raised eyebrow. “Send me a copy to rewrite and go back to your editing … I’ll take care of this.”

Yes! I thought. Now I just might have a chance.

Robin was the one who, after a hundred or so rejections, got Aspirations Media (a small independent press based in Minnesota) to publish my first book. They had planned on putting out the second book in April 2008, but in March they informed us they really didn’t have the cash for the printing. We negotiated the rights back and published the next four ourselves under the Ridan Label, a publishing company Robin set up. When the original print run of The Crown Conspiracy sold out, that reverted to us as well. By October 2010 we had kept up the breakneck pace of releasing one book every six months and saw a nice following both from readers and book bloggers.