It was kind of unremarkable in a way that I think when anyone first gets published, they're probably expecting it to be dramatic and life-changing. And I mean, it wasn't at all. It was quite understated. I didn't sweep down a marble staircase in a white linen suit with a dirty martini in my hand. Rapturous applause. from the media as I had anticipated. I just sat at home waiting.
And nothing happened. Because, you know, even if you sell a few books, no one reads them straight away. It was very low-key. And also... Because I was published along with two other guys, so Tom Lloyd and Scott Lynch. So Tom Lloyd was published, I think, a month after me and Scott Lynch a month before. And Scott Lynch was like, ooh, Scott Lynch, ooh. I'm still a bit annoyed about it as you can tell
So Scott obviously got a deal in the States. And, you know, his lies a lot more. He did lie really well. And in fact, obviously, I didn't really appreciate how well it had done. It had done stratospherically well as a fantasy debut. And actually, Blade itself did really good. But to me, it always seemed like, oh, I've not done as well as Scott Lynch. This is my mind. Life is over.
What is up everybody? You're listening to episode 153 of SFF Addicts. I'm your host Adrian M. Gibson and welcome to your weekly dive into the world of science fiction, fantasy, and writing craft. Joining me this week are both of my co-hosts for the first time this year. First up is the true to my Han Solo, the Joker to my commander.
I'm Jake Coon. How you doing, girl? Hello, I'm Dream Lovely, and I'm excited to be back! Welcome back. Yeah, it's my first proper episode this year. Yeah. Life just going crazy. Well, you're back. Yeah! And then also with us is my bestie from the Midwest, the queen of my days, my dear Greta Kelly. How are you, girl? Hey, I'm good. So glad we've got the trifecta going. Yes, for the first time.
And if you want to support MJ and her quest to quit her day job, you can pick up her novel Among Thieves. If you want a good old heist with hatchets and lots of swearing, because you know there's going to be swearing in this episode, because we're talking to Joe Abercrombie. y'all fans can find Among Thieves, and you'll be right at home. Oh my gosh. And if you want to support the lovely Greta Colley.
She has many, many wonderful books out. This is The Frozen Crown, which is book one in the Warrior Witch duology. But also... Queen of Days, as was mentioned in the intro, which is another lovely heist book featuring a bunch of chaos gremlins. It's great. Check it out. I think there's less swearing than Among Thieves. I think there's less swearing.
I aspire. Someday. And of course, go and support Adrian and his little chaos gremlin boys. Get Mushroom Blues for your fix of murder, mayhem, and mushrooms out now in whatever format you like. As well, if you want to support SFFatics on Patreon, you can get a ton of cool extras like bonus episodes, author readings, and more. So check the links in the description to support what we do here. Also, don't forget to rate and review the podcast in your favorite podcast app.
and subscribe to the Fanphatic YouTube channel where this and every other episode of the show is available in full. And now, we already teased it, welcoming to the podcast, Mr. Swearer, the great Joe Howard Cronley, author of the first book, Age of Madness, and more, including his newest release, The Devil's Welcome, Joe Howard. I'm good. I'm good. I'm alright. I'm good. No, I'm fine. We'll see how it goes. I'm fine so far.
Take a poll at the end, too. Looking forward. It'll be like a debate style where they have a pre-debate polling and a post-debate polling to see who wins. We won't release the end one if you're worse, because, you know. I'm feeling outnumbered, too. Don't worry. I feel like I've got to take one of you out early. I've got to have a chance against the other. Greta's the newest. She's the new one.
Well, Joe, for anyone who isn't familiar with you and your work, can you tell us a little bit about your work? What, who are these poor, sad people? It's really, really tragic. Are there such fantastical beings out there? I am a fantasy author. I have been writing for Nearly 20 years. Blade itself was my first book, came out in 2006. It's going to be the 20th anniversary next year.
And The Devils is my thirteenth novel, if you can believe that. Unlucky for some. So I'm having a hard time portraying myself as a fresh new voice. I'm still trying. You know, a maverick newcomer ready to revolutionise this stale genre with my fresh new voice. That's me. I wrote a trilogy called The First Law and then six other books in that world. And also...
a trilogy called The Shattered Sea, and most recently The Devils is out. Well, I'm not sure when this will be airing, but from time of recording... It'll be out today. The devils is out today. The devils are on the loose. In that case. Watch out. The end of the world is nigh. I feel like you pulled a really...
a really good trick with book number 13 where you wrote about the devils. Dude, I was just thinking that as you said 13. Yeah, a bit of a fuck you to whatever bad spirits are out there. Yeah, I mean... bad spirits have already taken a piece out of me and I'm ready to fight back. I'm done.
Yeah, I mean, in the end, the book's the number 13. You can't really avoid writing a 13th one. Right. You could just, like, pretend like they do on hotels sometimes and just be like, no, this is my 14th book. Oops. You know? Just skip the 13th floor. Skip the 13th floor. Maybe I should have done that. Too late now. Try to get your publishers on board for that. I will suggest it.
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with the release of Transcendence in the summer of 2025. Transference by Ian Patterson is available now in paperback and ebook. Get your copy today. And now, enjoy the rest of this episode of SFF Addicts. Well we always like to also kind of kick off the intro part by diving into our guest's nerdy origins. Because we're all just big nerds here in a very fun and loving way.
Speak for yourselves, I'm a jock. I've always been among the cool crowd. I've only been writing fantasy for 20 years. I am super cool. Stuffing people in lockers. naturally well between locker stuffings what books movies games were you watching reading that got you hooked on sci-fi and fantasy Um, well, Lord of the Rings I'm sorry to be so basic.
here but lord of the rings was my gateway thing the hobbit as a very small child and then lord of the rings as soon as i could my dad's editions and then from there I kind of got very into role-playing games of the I suppose Dungeons & Dragons Middle-earth role-playing RuneQuest
lots of odd shaped dice, lots of character sheets, lots of maps and alongside that I read anything i could find but this was um 126 years ago before the internet was invented and so is jacob like your version of an autobiography Well, I mean, certainly they say, write what you know. So you wrote a morgue. You're like, I can't confirm or deny. Yeah, exactly.
Before the internet. So there was no, you couldn't go to the forum and ask, you know, if I like this, what should I read now? So I ended up reading the kind of most obvious things that were in the window of the local bookstore. And that was David Eddings. and Dragonlance and a lot of very straight ahead heroic fantasy of that 80s and 90s era.
And then I kind of drifted away from fantasy as I got older. It felt like I was reading the same thing over and over a little bit and so went on to read a lot of other things, westerns and thrillers and all kinds of other stuff. But I still had this kind of, you know, my heart still belong.
in Middle-earth with the elves, right? Not in the lockers. Not in the lockers, no. And I was shoving elves in the lockers. And then when I was kind of in my, I suppose... mid-twenties I must have been, early twenties, someone gave me a copy of a book you may not have heard of, a little known writer called George R. R. Martin.
I think he's going to be big and he's got a bright future. Yeah, very niche. And he, this friend of mine gave me that book and said, you used to read a lot of fantasy, you should read this. And I looked at that book and it had like a knight on the front and a wizard and a princess and a castle, I think. And I looked at that and thought... I've seen this before. I know where we're going with this. And of course I got my doors blown off. That naughty Mr. Martin.
pulled the rug out from under me and i thoroughly enjoyed that experience of being shocked and and horrified you know i like things that are character focused and shocking and kind of raw and that's why been enjoying in the thrillers and the westerns that i've been reading and suddenly here was someone doing exactly that with with fantasy and i just thought I should try something like this. And that's how I got started writing. Becoming naughty, Mr.
So did you start off off the bat with writing novels? Because I think you also went to TV production as well. Was it film that came first or writing novels for you? Well I had an abortive attempt at writing just after I left university. I had no education because I did a psychology degree. therefore emerge with zero skills of any kind. And so I thought I'll teach myself a skill of touch typing, something I can sell.
The way I'll learn practice is by writing this fantasy novel I often had in my mind. And so I wrote a few chapters. Of the same book that would become The Blade itself in the end, but it had a very different tone, it had a much more pompous, self-serious, classical. sub-Tolkien kind of a tone to it. Heroic, romantic stuff, you know.
Then I went away from it. I got a job in TV, as you say. Ended up working as an editor, doing documentaries and live music. And then because I was freelance in that profession, as most people are in the UK. I kind of just ended up with a fair bit of time on my hands, even if you're successful, which of course I was superb at that job. Even if you're successful, you still have 10 weeks off a year, 12 weeks off, because the jobs don't matter.
And so I played video games for about five years and then thought I've got to do something worthwhile with my time. And it was because I had the time in my hands, I thought I'd pick up that terrible fantasy novel I was writing and have another go. And I'd read Game of Thrones at this point, or the first three, some of us.
And that had an impact and I'd read a lot of other things and I'd kind of, I don't know, was maybe taking myself less seriously and the genre a bit less seriously and just straight away that second time. I started to just be interested in what was coming out in a way I hadn't been the first time. And it felt like... had a kind of voice and a personality that seemed somehow exciting. Not to say that it felt like someone else was writing it but...
There was a kind of some sort of additive element to it that it was very different to the first time around. I just started to become interested in how to structure a scene, how to go about writing and the technicalities. of doing it and went from there really I think after a few months of that i hadn't produced much because i kept going over and over things which i think was very sensible at the time was kind of how i learned to do it um but i've kind of been bitten you know and i think
But at that point I thought I'm always going to be writing something even if it's just a sort of hobby in the middle of the night But the sensible thing to do obviously is start with a short story or something tightly contained that you can... easily sell, and so I began with a giant epic fantasy trilogy. Because, you know, what could go wrong? What could go wrong? I made a panned out, so... Yeah, in the long run. Yeah, in the long run, it has worked out. I suppose that, you know, I wrote...
As people do, they wrote what they want to read and they wrote what they have read. and fantasy to me was a genre of big-ass trilogies. And so you go for the classic form, right? I've never been afraid of the classic form. Yeah, but at the same time, it's like when it clicked with you, it was because you were starting to find your own voice as opposed to...
Yeah, I think like most of us writers end up copying the people that we admire in the books that we read growing up, and you said like your first iteration of... what would become the Blade itself was quite Tolkien-inspired.
This is no offense to anyone who's out there writing their first book, but first books tend to be quite trite. You start to learn, this is how I want to be a writer, this is how I want to write my story, and it's still going to have influences from Tolkien or whoever you admire. But once you find that moment where it starts to click with you and you find the words are flowing out of you a little bit.
easier and more naturally then it's yeah it's a beautiful thing but you have to get through you have to wade through the shit in order to It takes a little bit of practice. And with your experience in, you know, like film editing and working in music videos, documentaries, all that kind of stuff. What are some of the big parallels that you can kind of draw between storytelling in these various mediums, whether it's visual or prose? I mean, there's a lot in common, in a way. Obviously...
There's differences in the sense that the toolbox is different, slightly different. As a visual artist, if you like, on film or TV, you have the huge advantage of lots of collaborators who are expert in their own area you know when you have actors for example in a drama and an actor can do an awful lot with one eyebrow that has a writer You might spend pages trying to get the exact sense across. that as a writer you have access to inner monologue and kind of addressing the reader.
describing things and using metaphor and concepts that the visual guy doesn't have so you know you've got a slightly different toolbox but at the same time there's a lot there that's universal I mean a surprising amount I think I found the experience of being an editor gave me a kind of natural sense of how to pace a scene perhaps. compared to my first efforts long before.
My first efforts tended to be, okay, so you start with the big description of the place, and then you come into the people, and you describe the people, and then you set up what they're doing, and then you maybe give a bit of background, and then someone says a line, hello. And then after having had the experience of being an editor, I had a much better understanding of how you come into a scene.
On the dialogue, you come into the scene on the door slamming. You come out of the scene on a sharp moment, on a cliffhanger, on something that drives you on to the next part. And an editor will... Use the motion within the frame and the sound of what's being said to lead between one sequence and the next.
that pacing and that timing that that skill is kind of the same bizarrely when you're writing and so i think it was hugely helpful to have that you know grounding in how to structure a scene and also you know what you can cut out what you've got to focus on and what you don't need and i think The most important skill a writer has is cutting. The most important tool is the scissors.
You know, the first question always to ask yourself about a line or a paragraph or anything is, do I need this? Or is it better without? You know, and often you find, often if something is a bit like, oh, I'm not sure about this, how am I going to wait in this work? try cutting it first and it's amazing how you know in the end if you're
If your book is made up of good parts, average parts and brilliant parts, if you cut the average parts out, then it's just good and brilliant. And if you cut the good parts out, it's just brilliant. I mean, it's not quite as simple as that. But in the end, cutting it down is... think very valuable especially in a genre where often you know it can be it can be sort of
There's a lionization of weight and scale and size. You know, we've got into this kind of cycle of bigger and bigger series and bigger and bigger books. Remember when I was a kid, you know, Lord of the Rings was the biggest. Thing one could read. You've read Lord of the Rings Amazing!
Whereas now Lord of the Rings seems tiny. I mean, the first Lord's longer than Lord of the Rings, and that's not that big a series. So I think tightness is underrated in the genre, and tightness is always a good thing to go for. Control scene. Yeah. Or delete. If you want to be bold. Control X. Sorry. Control X. Sorry. If you want to be bold about it, just delete this shit.
Yeah. It's funny. I feel like I can see some of your like, uh, film or television background when, uh, like with regard to when you switch. povs sometimes uh because like i'm i'm reading best serve cold right now as well um i was just like doing a double dip co-reading the devils and best serve cold i was like i'm just gonna do and and all of all of this wonderfulness But I was, there was this one section and I was like,
I feel like you've done that at some point in the first law as well, where it's like the last sentence of one person's POV is like, they weren't going to do this. And then the first sentence of the next one is a line of dialogue that's like, and then he did this. I do feel like that's a very compelling and film whatever. I really enjoy that as a reader personally. It's the kind of thing that as an editor, as a TV editor, you know, the directors kind of say. Yeah, you think you're a small...
Can we cut that? Never cut it out. I adore it. As a writer. I was no director. Yeah. You just go, yeah. We're as much of a smart ass as I like. No one will tell me not to be. Well, the editor will tell me not to be, but I can always say. I overrule you. You can be like, nah, son. That's my shtick. I love it. I love it. Well, this conversation about film and TV kind of leads us to a question from one of our lovely patrons.
David Hopkins, where David says, I really loved the episode Mason's rats and love death and robots. Did you already have that short story written or did they come to you asking for something? What's the story about and how did it come about? Yeah, so I've been working with a guy called Tim Miller for many years now. Many years. Almost as long as I've been writing. Twelve years, probably.
He's the creator of Love, Death and Robots, as it happens. And so I've ended up writing a couple of episodes. Now, I didn't write the stories. They're based on. So most of those episodes are based on stories. that Tim has found and likes. loved for many years.
then they're adapted into some sort of screenplay format. And so that's the job I did on Mason's Rats. And Neil Asher wrote the story, the original story. So I didn't really have to worry too much about the story. I had to reduce it and re-version it. I think it was in the end...
made up from two or three different stories in the same milieu. So anyway, Tim asked me to write one, and that's the one that I did, and I've written a couple in the next... season which again are based on other people's stories. Um, So yeah, that's how that happened. I do quite a lot of film and TV. It's nice that you get to adapt to other people's work.
I feel like. Oh, it's fantastic. Yeah. It's like. You smash it all up. Yeah, yeah. Just like make it a nice mishmash of different ideas. This is again. This is again. But, you know. But you don't have to take scissors to your work. You can take it to others. oh, well, that's absolutely the dream. You don't even have to write it yourself. I mean, my God, that's the writing would be great if it wasn't for the writing. And then all the editors out there are just like, yeah, no.
Well, steering away from the TV and film part of your career, I touched base a little bit more on First Law as well. When you were taking that book out of the drawer, after how long you ended up after abandoning it? I mean, did you ever imagine that it would? become what it has become and like how how did it go from being in your drawer to being on the shelves everywhere Well, over the course of quite a long time, partly, I think.
Yeah, I suppose when you are writing for the first time as a hobbyist You both think, this is amazing. And I'm going to be a massive international success.
And also think no one's ever going to be interested in reading this crap, ever. Because it's awful. You know, you have those two voices simultaneously, right? You fantasise about the possibility of success, but at the same time, it seems like this is... ridiculous really and naff and absurd so I suppose I went from the point of being a hobbyist
Writing, you know, in the middle of the night, a couple of hours a night and, you know, weekends and now and again. And after a couple of years I had a book. Three years. I say a book. I had a book-length assemblage of words that wasn't a million miles away from what The Blade itself would end up being. And then I started trying to get an agent. Didn't have much luck and as I say it was in the days prior to the internet and so you'd send your stuff off in a...
with a self-addressed envelope inside. You'd send your sample off to the agent and then six weeks later your own envelope would come through the door and you would know. You know, you'd got and picked up another rejection. So that was terribly soul-destroying, but I manfully struggled through it. You know, it's a noble and impressive tale, without a doubt. And then I was, luckily, just complete randomness.
A friend of mine who knew I was doing it ended up working for a publisher and he was on a desk editing course and he met this woman, Gillian Redfern, on that course who'd just started work at Galantz as an assistant editor. And when he found out she worked for a sci-fi and fantasy in print, he said, oh, this friend of mine has written a book. He submitted you out of pity. Oh, no. She said, oh.
That's a good friend right there, though. I know, I know. I love that. He was too young. And we usually came to this reader because now we all get to read these awesome books, so. Wow. Well, that's what happened, of course. She read the book and was like, wow, this is so amazing. She wasn't, actually. She was like, this is pretty terrible. And then she got to the second chapter and was like, this is interesting. And so we cut the first chapter off.
Later. But yeah, she read it and I got an offer a couple of weeks later. And there you go. And then it got published and it was kind of unremarkable in a way that I think when anyone first gets published. they're probably expecting it to be dramatic and life-changing and i mean it wasn't at all it was It was quite understated. I didn't sweep down a marble staircase in a white linen suit with a dirty martini in my hand. A rapturous applause.
from the media as I had anticipated. I just sat at home waiting. And nothing happened. Because, you know, even if you sell a few books, no one reads them straight away. And you won't get the numbers underway either. No, no. No, not at all. It was very low-key. And also... Because I was published along with two other guys, so Tom Lloyd and Scott Lynch. So Tom Lloyd was published, I think, a month after me and Scott Lynch a month before. And Scott Lynch was like, ooh, Scott Lynch, ooh.
I'm still a bit annoyed about it as you can tell So Scott obviously got a deal in the States. And, you know, his lies a lot more and did lie really well. And in fact, obviously, I didn't really appreciate how well it had done, had done stratospherically well as a fantasy debut. And actually, Blade itself did really good. But to me, it always seemed like I've not done as well as Scotland. This is my life is over.
crushed. Him and his gorgeous head of hair. Comparison. Goddamn eyes and wonderful hair. His hair and his US deal and French deal and everything. And so to me it was like, aww. This is a bit disappointing. But of course, over the course of the year, I started thinking, well, it's going all right. And then the second book came out and did a bit better. And the third book came out and did a bit better.
And then it started feeling like, oh, it's doing pretty good. And gradually I reached a point after, I suppose, after the fourth book came out. when I could consider going full-time, at which point, of course, I stopped writing entirely for about a year. Because that's generally what happens when you go full time, you know. It seems like all you want to do is be a full time writer. Imagine how fast I could write if I did that. And as soon as I gave up the day job. Couldn't write at all.
Hopeless. Isn't creativity just wonderful? My approach has always been to take all creativity out of the process as much as possible. you know creativity just gets in the way you want to treat it like laying brick Take all the magic and excitement and joy right out of that. And just grind through it. Grind through it. Like a miner at a coalface. Yeah. To all the aspiring authors. And then when you're grinding is when the creativity will appear.
That's true. See? Yeah. Creativity comes to the writer who is at work. That I definitely do agree with. Yeah. You just sit waiting for inspiration. I'm just like, I don't want to be a coal miner. I don't want to get black lung. Yeah, the black lung, I was just thinking that, absolutely. Just a little... But looking back, okay, so you I know your Twitter handle is Lord Grimdark, and you were inspired by Naughty George.
And now people look back and they're like, First Law, and they're very, very quickly associated with Grimdark as a subgenre. But looking back, why do you think your books, in particular the First Law universe, are now so... iconic and like intertwined with with this uh grimdark subject
Well, they're iconic because of the huge quality, the tremendous quality of the work. I set you up for the humble rag. Yeah, you did. I honestly don't really know. I mean, I think, you know, obviously I never thought of it. The word had never been used when I was writing it. And I suppose I first heard the word grimdark, you know, sometime after.
the books came out so probably in the kind of 2010 sort of time when the internet had started to appear as an important thing and chat rooms and blogs were And Tumblr were the places where people would speak of Grimdark. But when they used that word, they'd mean shit. You know, they'd mean it was bad. They'd say things like, well, you know, the blade itself is grimdark, but Game of Thrones isn't grimdark because it's good.
you know that they when they said grimdark they meant ludicrously cynical over the top edgelord you know it was it tended to be a pejorative but then over time people started to use it to kind of describe a style of fiction
they liked and then of course everything gets dumped in there so I've always found it a bit of a useless I mean, it's useful insofar as it can connect a reader with something they want to read, you know, to describe a style they like and help them to find other books they might like. It's not a lot of use as a sort of critical term because no one ever agrees on what's in it and what's not.
And if they don't like the idea, they kind of tend to shove out everything that might be worthwhile. And if they love the idea, they push everything from Game of Thrones to... I don't know, the films of Akira Kurosawa into the bucket along with everything else. And everything's grimdark. So I don't know. I mean... I suppose I just wrote what I was interested in writing. To me I was just writing epic fantasy.
My take on Lord of the Rings, really. And that happened to be a kind of gritty, cynical take, because I'd read a lot of very shiny, heroic stuff, and I wanted to do something surprising and different, I suppose. And to take the sort of approach that Unforgiven takes to the Western, you know, it has a lot of the classic elements, but it has this kind of more modern, more cynical take on it all.
Then I suppose other people were doing similar stuff at the same time, you know the aforementioned Scott Lynch with his great And then guys like, I suppose, Mark Lawrence appeared. And then there were guys like Pete Brett and Brent Weeks and others who appeared doing kind of not dissimilar.
And then it felt somehow like it was a bit of a movement. I mean, I don't know where literary movements come from. I think they tend to be quite spontaneous. Like if you look at something similar happened with... Mysteries and noir, like noir developed in a very similar fashion to something like Grimdark where it's like a more cynical take on mysteries and society and whatnot. I think only in hindsight can you sort of see these are like the tracks that were laid.
Because the people who are actually doing it... generally don't even know what the fuck is going on until someone says well exactly we've got we've got a lot of just writing mysteries or fantasy or whatever and then as you say in hindsight it becomes kind of obviously part of a wave of other stuff but I mean that's hugely fortunate for those who are in it because
You know, everyone adds to the kind of success of everyone else up to a point. You know, people read a Scott Lynch book and they go, oh, what next? Or people read a George Martin book for that matter and sort of say, oh, what shall I read next? And that way, you know, I think everyone, you get a certain amount of attention drawn to all the writers of a kind of...
in that loose bucket. Yeah. I'm going to send this to my friend Adrian over in Australia because he's the founder of Grimdark Magazine. Be like, you cornered yourself, bro. Where's the flexibility? All right. Well, we got to talk about your newest book, which we've made it like 30 minutes into the interview and we haven't even helped you pimp that yet. So sorry. Your newest book, The Devils. That definitely retains some of the hallmarks of a classic Abercrombie book.
got the humor it's got the banter it's got the charm it's got quite a bit of dark shit can you tell listeners a bit more about it and then like where did the idea for this book come from because it's not set in the same world as the First Law trilogy, just, you know, give us a pitch and a scoop. Well, the pitch is it takes place in a sort of alternate Europe.
I'm probably giving it too much respect by describing it that way. It takes place in a magic and monster riddled Europe under threat of elf invasion and follows a set of monsters employed by the ten-year-old Pope. to solve the problems the righteous are not equipped to handle. That's basically what it is. I spent about three hours describing it once to someone who then said, oh, so it's like medieval suicide squad. I said, no, no, no, it's not. Oh, no, it is like that.
So it kind of is a bit like Medieval Suicide Squad, frankly. They summed it up for you and you had more time to work on your eyebrows. Exactly. Exactly. I had that down already. That's the one writing tool I've truly mastered. That's what we should be doing in the masterclass. That and the glasses remove. A classic. Oh yeah. That is a classic. That's going to be one of our clips for this episode. Scott Lynch just appears out of the blue and swishes his hair.
Hair commercial. Like a Pantene commercial. So why did you decide to stick with Europe but alternate history versus just making your own Second World from scratch? I suppose partly just because I'd done Second World. And that was sort of my instinctive first thing that I'd done. Although my second world was very historical Europe inspired. I will admit it's quite a low magic world.
And I wouldn't want to say that it's just Renaissance Italy with the serial numbers filed off and the names of the places with like two letters swapped around or anything. But it's not not. So, I don't know. I suppose it felt like doing something set in medieval Europe would be something slightly different. A historical crowd who might find a secondary world a bit off-putting. Does that sound bad to be reaching out to a certain readership?
I don't know. Anyway. They're starved. So I thought, having done a low magic secondary world, I'd do a high magic Europe.
was kind of the vibe and so i'd do a very silly version of europe as i said alternate history is to giving it too much respect because really it's just Throwing stuff at the wall and saying what sticks so it's kind of you know female saviour therefore female priesthood in the church and it's Carthage won the Punic Wars and defeated Rome and it's Troy won the Trojan Wars and various other bits and pieces
But, you know, really it's a kind of crazy and inconsistent fever dream out of focus in the background so that the characters can be strongly in focus in the foreground. The people. At least that's my excuse. I'm sticking to that story. Well, I mean, real medieval Europe was also like a messy bitch fever dream, so I think you're fine. Yeah, no, no, you're 100% right. That's it. Exactly, exactly so. Exactly so. The stuff I love about, say, the Viking world is the stuff that gets...
across the alien weirdness of the mindset of the viking world you know because often fantasy is set in these medieval sort of worlds but has very modern people i mean i kind of do that myself because it's really about now it's not about And so... Sometimes the most alien stuff is not fantasy but historical fiction that is quite kind of authentic to the mindset of the past. So I felt like this weird fever dream which no one really knows where anything is or what anything's called.
Seemed faithful to the medieval experience. I think I'm sticking to that story also. We've got a sense. They've got a starting point and a destination. It's like they're going to try. Everything else is just... Whatever Joe decided just stuff How did you feel going through this fever dream and comparing your experience creating secondary worlds versus what it's like to, you know, pull influence, not direct influence, not historical fact necessarily, but pull influence from our own real history.
I enjoyed it. I mean, it's always enjoyable to start something new. There's a kind of enjoyment of new characters, new beginnings. That lasts a certain amount of time before it becomes grind again. Becomes work again. Before the coal miners back out. There, the coal miners back at it. But it was a nice change of a secondary world where you've got a certain amount of whole cloth that you've got to work with.
And, I mean, the nice thing about working in Europe, as it were, is you can very quickly describe a place and people know exactly what you're talking about or up to a point. You have a whole set of references that people will straight away bring with them. It enables you to make bad jokes about England, which is always a good value. And other places in Europe.
you can make Europe jokes which is sort of funny and you can throw Atlantis in and kind of all kinds of stuff so you can do the familiar and also the weird which I think is quite a nice tone to have in the background. So I found it a lot of fun. I suppose with a secondary world, you have this certain weight of responsibility when you've written nine books, certainly.
There's all this stuff, all this history, all these characters all this geography you've got to keep straight and relatively accurate and that's very useful to have all that stuff on the shelf, all that reference material. But it can feel, you know, like a bit of weight to carry and get in the way of just getting on with the story. So it was nice to kind of cut loose on something new. And there's also the thing of, you know, you can just... Get a map of Europe.
You don't have to draw your own map. Did you ask your publishers to be like, hey, at the very beginning, just like... your glossary is like get a fucking map and the great thing is when you draw your own map you know how it has like the journey It's all really detailed. But then there's all this white space off to the sides. What am I doing with that? Then if you're going to give that to an artist who's going to put the map on the flyleaf, then you've suddenly got to fill all this shit in.
Like where no one goes. It's really annoying. Whereas the maps of Europe, that stuff's awful. It's awful. It's all that! You can also take your pick. You got like... centuries of different kinds of maps different you got those ones with the funky animals and like creatures and monsters in the ocean yeah and then you could just rub a bit of it out and just put elves yeah if you want to Job done. Then you can get straight on with that stupid conversation.
Gotta fuck them out, people. Oh my god. So with setting it in a historical environment, I feel like you probably did some fun historical research. So I'm curious if you found any particularly fun or like fucked up historical facts that popped up during that research process that you would like to share with all of us. Yeah, I mean, I certainly read a lot of stuff about relics.
pilgrimages and sort of the nature of medieval Christianity, a lot of which is quite dry, but at the same time that the kind of the industry of pilgrimages and relics and how... obsessed people were with all that stuff and how seriously they took it. Again, getting back to the alienness of the past, it was quite a thing. You know, people would go on a pilgrimage and they'd be sold a bag.
visiting a certain shrine and they'd build up all their collection of badges so when they went home they could say look I was gonna say it's like a scout sash, like if you're like a boy scout and you have a sash of matches. that was entertaining I suppose you know I read a lot about about Byzantium and kind of the ancient world and about the Punic Wars and things before, which I suppose was stuff that all dripped into this and into the kind of...
version of history that I ended up with. Stuff about the Great Schism and arguments over the date of Easter and all of that, all those good things, the position of the soul and the body and, you know, people got into some quite esoteric stuff. Read a whole thing about stylites. Have you ever heard of these guys, monks who lived on top of pillars? No. Yeah. So throughout the East, throughout the Byzantine Empire, they were very popular.
The guys who, you know, climb up a pillar and live there for 30 years. What? And people would pass them food and stuff. I had a sequence of... of a set of stylites in it and then it didn't make the final cut and took it out in the end. But maybe I'll go back there, because it's a pretty crazy thing. How big were these pillars? They were just hanging out there. They were not big. I mean, they were tall, but they weren't wide. So were they standing the whole time?
Well, I think that maybe when they were sitting down, maybe they could just about curl up on there. You were supposed to be uncomfortable. Yeah. But I mean, too bad for everyone below. It's like, you shit. That shit goes off the side and everyone else has.
They didn't bring that up and that didn't come up a lot, actually. But I suppose it should have. Obviously, they had to bring food up in the bucket and stuff. So I guess something was going down the other way. What a life, man. It's quite a life. Bring me a sandwich and I'll send you some.
What a trade. What a trade. He attempted to go and become a stylite now. Very much not. I think there's a future in it. Missed opportunity for a character in The Devils. Finally. Could finally get some writing done. That was his version of, like, writer's block. It's just, like, there's a guy standing on a pillar for 30 years. He's like, goddammit, what are they going to do?
Well, let's talk about your cast of characters in The Devils and your little suicide squad. How did you assemble these little chaos gremlins? Did someone come first in your mind when you were first drafting the story?
It's a good question actually. It's always a little bit hard looking back to pull out exactly where... different elements come from and I suppose one thing I'd always quite enjoyed doing and it tended to work quite well in previous Books was a sort of group of assorted, mismatched idiots on some kind of quest. falling out with each other and generally talking and interrelating and striking interesting sparks from each other.
And when I wrote the Age of Manless, which was my most recent trilogy before this... There wasn't very much of that. People tended to each be in their own section of the story, doing their own thing, and there wasn't so much of the groups. And so I felt like I wanted to base this around... A small and intense group of weirdos, basically. And monsters. High magic in this case, so...
Werewolf vampire pairing. Obviously a classic. You know, you can't really go wrong with that. So that was one that had to be one element. And I suppose... the male werewolf and the kind of sultry female vampire as classics. So I went for the female werewolf and the sultry male. because this is the kind of revolutionary subversion I'm all about. And then, elves are obviously part of this world. They're the kind of existential threat of this world, and so it seemed appropriate they'd have an elf.
And she ended up being invisible, I don't know why. She's just an invisible elf. That's the concept. And then, uh, You need some sort of magician or sorcerer of some kind, definitely. And, I mean, necromancy just seems... Like it has the most potential for silly action sequences. But it dabbles in demonology because you want to get that in there somewhere too.
So, necromancer. And then, I'm not sure about the cursed knight. I suppose I felt like I needed to... When I wrote the first law, there's a lot of manly male man... They're quite manly books. It has been remarked upon occasionally that although the female characters are excellent, there are two. basically and there could be more than two and so I felt like it was important to get a lot of interesting female characters in there, but something for the
Something for the Alphas. And so that was where Jakob comes from. He's kind of the used up old man of violence. There's always been a... For all the edgelords who thought they may have been left behind. Exactly. If they're feeling a little bit uncomfortable in this book full of invisible gay elves. There's a woman with... This is the guy who's gonna pull you through
Yeah, my knees have gone and then gone again. So yeah, that's where he came from. And then I suppose you need some ordinary... to play against the kind of cast of strange magical monsters and so you have Alex who's the thief who's the kind of center of the mission. And the concept is they have a new priest every time who's kind of nominally in charge of this. It's like the red shirts of your world.
It is. It is. There's a new priest every time. And it's plain that the previous priest has not done well out of the arrangement. So I suppose it's the things I wanted to put in there and it's kind of balancing the different voices within the cast so that there's some... You know, they all feel distinct.
they're all bringing something slightly different to the party. That's the idea. Yeah. Well, each of them has like such different personalities. They've got their different quirks, their different magical abilities or lack thereof. But how do you kind of use that to play into the shift of tone from scene to scene? Because there are many chapters where you have perspective shifts going throughout all of the different characters in the group.
Um, and some of them are more humorous and satirical, others are just like, outright fucking batshit, like, like, Vega. I love Vegas so much now. And then others who are more on like a contemplative, more philosophical side. So how do you kind of go up and balance all? Well, I suppose you're saying it in a way. You want someone like Brother Diaz who's pretty straightforward.
relatively normal. He's an outsider who's not used to this madness and so to him the whole thing seems crazy and weird. He's coming at it as a normal guy. And then you want, you know, some who are intense in one way or another. So you want a kind of variety of, I suppose, more cultured voices. So then you have someone like Balthazar who is as very complex.
self-important, over-the-top vocabulary he's always trying to use to show how incredibly clever he is. And then you have someone like Vigor who uses very simple kind of constructions. and also in her case is constantly forgetting you know where she is and what's happening and losing the thread or if she wants to eat something or f-
Yeah, basically. Led by the nose, led by the primal urges. Pure id. She's pure id, whereas Malthazar is all superego, I suppose. So it's kind of mixing and matching there. The gender. and And the kind of age and the concerns and the kind of formal voices with the very informal ones and just trying to get a mixture that is interesting. But most of that happens in the writing anyway.
You start out with an idea and then pretty quickly start trying to put it into practice and seeing how it feels writing from the various points of view. As you do that, some things work, some things don't, and you start to push the characters further into certain directions and make them more intense.
you know when something works well you repeat it and you try it again and you riff on it and that becomes a feature of the character and when something doesn't work you cut it out and you gradually they take on a shape which you then hopefully Once you've finished a draft, you're kind of trying to apply throughout. Well, and so you write multi POV so well. I want to dig into that a little bit more because it's something that is.
It's a challenge for a lot of writers. And a lot of readers, I think, pick up on, I don't know, you see readers a lot of times that are like, oh, I hate multi POV stuff. But I think it's because a lot of times they're not super. distinct right sometimes yours always are so what advice would you give to authors writers out there that are looking to write multiple points of view while keeping them interesting and still maintaining the paces
Why would I do that? You're like, uh, excuse me, I'm not giving away my secrets. That can be better. I hate to tell you, the next episode we record is gonna be rough. That's going to be like a reverse masterclass. It's just going to be all dope. I'll be like, no comment. No comment. Oh my God. Well, I suppose some of it's instinctive, I suppose.
in that this has always just seemed like the right the natural mode to me I suppose and the thing I've always responded to In other people's writing is that voice that is unique to them and unique to a certain character. And that I could never do myself. So, you know, I think of books where there's a character with a particularly powerful voice. I mean, I think of someone like Tyrion in The Game of Thrones.
Has anyone read Junot Diaz's Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wilde? I have, yeah. That just has. such a distinct voice that is unlike anything else you'll read you know I would never ever come up with that and so that's what I want to read and that's why I try I try to write in that way where
Each character feels very distinct and has their own voice and you feel like you're inside the head of the person, you know, really pressed up uncomfortably close against them and feeling what they feel. That's the ideal. And I suppose it comes again from reading a lot of fantasy as a kid that... has quite a neutral voice, quite an omniscient presence where the characters are. small within a huge detailed world. I suppose I always wanted to do the opposite and that felt natural to me.
How do you do it and get the voice distinct? I suppose the only way I know to do it is just to start doing it, start writing it. and then see what works and what doesn't, and over a process of revising and going through the book and steadily revising. you shave away what doesn't fit and you kind of intensify what makes the character what they are and hopefully you get a better and better grip on their voice until
It becomes instinctive, like putting on a different pair of shoes. That's the hope. When I was writing the first one originally, over time, I started to get a feel for what the voice of the character was. and then it'd be automatic to the point where it became easy with those characters. I wasn't prepared for how difficult it suddenly was when I started Besser of Cold, my next book, and there were new characters and I had to work the whole thing out again.
And I suddenly realized, oh, I don't actually know how to write this at all. I need to start from scratch. But I also use some kind of... you know, blunt tools in a way of structure and word choice. You know, if they're an educated character, they'll use more complex rhythms and more complex... constructions and words like Balthazar does. He uses these long, florid sentences which are completely silly and unnecessary and give a sense of his self-important kind of high opinion of himself.
whereas other characters will use quite like Jakob uses these short, very short, punchy little sentences because he's very, he's on it, he's structured, he's thinking about what to do next, he's a planner, he doesn't have time for the twirls, you know. And he speaks very little, doesn't say much dialogue, his words are quite spare. Whereas Balthazar goes on and on and on and on. You might do things like the structure of the words on the page. So Sonny speaks in this or thinks in this kind of...
Joke Punchline structure so she has like a long paragraph then a little punchline often so the paragraph and then a thought that acts as the punchline then a longer paragraph then a thought that acts as a punchline which gives a certain sort of rhythm to the way she thinks which is distinct from the others.
And then sometimes I do things like Farrow in the first law, she's colorblind, and so obviously there's no colors in any of her description. It's always just light or dark. And that, again, contributes to this sense of her being a very... seeing the world in very black and white terms as well. Morally, she has a very kind of black and white view of the world. And so, you know, some of those work well, are ideas that you deliberately try. And then sometimes...
Like Logan Ninefingers and his many catchphrases and repeated kind of ideas Say one thing for Logan Ninefingers, you can never have too many knives, all of these things. They're just things that came up in the writing and seemed, oh, that somehow encapsulates the guy, that seems appropriate. And so then they naturally come up again and then they become a repeated joke. play around with and mess with so
You throw the kitchen sink at it, you try everything you can think of to sort of make it distinct. And sometimes they work, I won't say effortlessly, but very easily. Sometimes they just happen and they're there. You know, the bigger chapters. I just wrote quite quickly without much effort to revise because part of the nature of them is they sort of splurge out and feel unstructured and a mess. And they were quite easy to write, quite natural to write.
And others took much more time to, sometimes a character takes much more time to develop. It's not until you get to the end of the book, you really get a sense of who they are and who they need to be, and then you go back and apply. Or just have ramblings about dumplings. That was a wonderful scene. We are assuming, hoping that The Devils is going to be book one in a new series for you. Can you give us any hints about what the future might hold for the Chapel of the Holy Expediency?
Oh yeah, it is a book one. I suppose it's a... It's a book one in the way that, you know, a detective series. has individual books but they're sort of stories in a bigger whole and hopefully they don't need to be in too set and order. You know, I don't want it to be... Full of big long arcs. I want them to be books people can pick up and kind of read on their own. But the current deal is for three, so I probably should do those or I'll become very unpopular.
my publishers um so there'll be three anyway and i'm getting towards the end of the second one now uh the end of a draft which is where the work begins in a way you know once i've got a draft then i can start thinking okay now what do i need to do to me a lot better than it is now But what can I say about it? I suppose, you know, that features many of the same characters, the stories.
Much different. The first one's a journey from A to B, and this one much more takes place in one place. And it's about witches. about an inquisition and witches and a mysterious will and some tombs. Working for you. It all gels together, really. It really comes together nicely. That's exactly the pitch I gave to my editors. They were confused. But we'll get there. You'll find your Suicide Squad in Alternate.
It'll get there. That's my hype. That's my hype. All right, well, Joe, closing out, I've got a two-parter for you. If you can give listeners a good bit of soundbite writing advice and be a weird or random fact that you find to be utterly fascinating. Soundbite writing advice, the one I usually do is my mother's advice to me. which when she first read some of my stuff, when I first plucked up the courage to show it to my mother, she read it and... She read one particular section and said,
See, the thing is, you've got to be truthful when you're writing. You've got to be honest. Because if you use some lazy metaphor that sounds like it sounds good but doesn't really get at the essence of the thing... It kind of spoils the reader's sense of being comfortable within.
control of someone who really knows what they're doing so you've always got to be asking yourself is this true And if you keep true, then hopefully even the most kind of familiar characters and settings will become interesting once again. passed on from my mother to you. Oh yeah. Your mom is very wise. Oh, very wise. Yeah. She'd like you.
And what was the second part of the question? It was just a weird random fact that you want to share. Oh, weird random fact. Well... I suppose I was looking at various historical things in my... imagining of Europe and it was clear that London in 1066 had 15,000 people in it. 15,000 people in London. So it was... Well, it was, what, six the size of Bath now? That's like nobody. Tiny. Yeah, that's itty-bitty. Tiny. It's like, I grew up in a town of like 20,000.
I thought that was medieval London the greatest city in Britain and I think Florence was about 40,000, and so it was three times, three or four times the size of London. That's still smaller. Constantinople was 400,000. Sideways. 30 times the size of London, and Baghdad was 1.5 million people. So it was 100 times the size of London. Take that, England. And so the degree at which England and Northern Europe as a whole was just a total.
backwater footnote to history. It's kind of unimaginable now. We think of ourselves as the centre of the world, the Western world. We certainly weren't in the Middle Ages, in the medieval period. We were proper backwater. That is a fascinating random fact. I love that. Take that and ponder. British people are the most self-deprecating so they'll take it in. It's all a sham though, you know that, right? I know. It's all just a...
But it's an external stride as opposed to internally. All right. Well, Joe, thank you so much for chatting with GretaMJNight today. Pleasure. If you could please let everyone know where they can find you online. Yes, I suppose my website is www.joabercromby.com and I'm also on Twitter still. at Lord Grimdark and I'm on Blue Sky these days on occasion as well and I think I'm JabbaCromby.com? Huh?
And I do have a Facebook page but it doesn't really just stick up links to my blog there. I'm kind of not massively active but you can find stuff on there. Um... Yeah, that's about it. Perfect. And you can go support Joe. I mean, you got a bunch of books to choose from. You got 14. No, not 13. And The Devil Is Up Today. Devils is out today. So yeah, you got standalones, you got trilogies.
You got short stories, you got all kinds of fun stuff. So go support Joe. Because he's a great guy. Everything anyone could want. Whether you be alpha or romantic. equally disappointing for all kinds of reasons no one will be satisfied That's the dream, isn't it? That's the dream. When everyone's complaining to an equal amount. You've crushed it. You've crushed it. Oh, man. All right. Well, you can also follow SFFatic.
all across the board at SFFAddictsPod. You can follow me at Adrian M. Gibson. You can go pick up Mushroom Blues if you want a little bit of fungi in your life. MJ, where can people find you? Yeah, you can find me Technically across all the main socials, but I'm most active on Instagram. And I just revitalized my TikTok. I'm back, babies. That didn't sound very enthusiastic. I know. I'm back on TikTok, okay?
Or MJKoon.com is where all my links are. Amazing. And go buy MJ's book so you can support her cat. Go buy my book so that I can feed my cat. Thank you. Yeah. He's chilling on the couch. He's hungry. Yes. Greta, what about you? Yeah, I'm on Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram at Greta K. Kelly, and you can get my book. wherever you buy books, most recently, Queen of Days, if you ever wanted to know what your D&D party would be like if they fought a fallen god and rolled natural ones on everything.
Greta's just killing it with these- Critical failure! With these pitches. All right. Well, that's it for this episode. Stay tuned next week for part two with Joe for a writing master class where he's going to give you no advice at all on how to write unlikable characters. Until then, keep reading, keep imagining, and see you next time on SFF Addicts.