When I considered resuming doing new interviews, I checked to see who was releasing something new in the near future, or had just published a new book, and of course Bradley P. Beaulieu's name immediately came up. Europe ) just hit the shelves and the timing was just about right to have a chat with the author!Enjoy!---------------------------------Honestly, I couldn’t ask for much more. It got a lot of attention when it came out in September of that year and again a few months later when it hit over twenty “Best of the Year” lists. My favorite part has been meeting (mostly virtually) so many new fans. People really seem to like the main character, Çeda, and that’s been immensely gratifying, because I really came to like her as well.I usually tell people to think ofcrossed with. The Song of the Shattered Sands is a sweeping epic fantasy told against a backdrop of cruel kings, fickle gods, sandships, blood magic, and a desert city as grand as the soaring palaces of its kings and as gritty as the back-alleys that house the desperate yet brutal resistance to their rule.There were a lot of influences roiling around when this book started to coalesce—things that sparked early ideas without it necessarily being aas yet. What really made me fall in love with it, though, was the notion of family and society and how those concepts can change over time. The main character, Çeda, is a pit fighter when we first meet her. Through flashbacks, we also meet her mother, who was murdered by the Kings when Çeda was young. Her mother had a purpose in the desert city of Sharakhai. She just hadn’t told Çeda about it by the time she died.Throughout the book, Çeda begins to see more of her mother’s purpose. She starts to connect with her mother’s past—herpast as well—and it’s through that journey that we start to see more about the Kings and the dark bargain they made with the desert gods to secure their power.Again and again, I came back to the notions of friendship, family, culture, and customs. Çeda thought she knew what the desert was about, what the city was about, but that all changed when she began uncovering more secrets about her mother’s past. Those ideas were emotional touchpoints that helped drive the novel and keep me interested in writing it.So far so good! Enough people seemed to be hungry for it that it got a decent bit of buzz when it hit the shelves.I was very nervous about it, though. This may come as a complete surprise, but authors areneurotic. I believed in the book, of course. So did my editors and beta readers. But there’s always that doubt. Will it really take off? Will it live up to the promise of the first book?So far, I’m happy to say that people seem to be digging it. The hope now is that the momentum continues through the rest of the series!The third installment is titled, and I’ve heard word that we’re targeting March of 2018, a year from now. I’m just now reaching the end of the book. It’s a hot mess, honestly. The longer I write, the more I leave minor details and massaging of prose to the next draft so I can simply get the bones down.is a small novel, a triptych of three novellas that tell a story that’s set a few years before. The story is about Çeda and an ehrekh, a djinni of sorts, who becomes … curious about Çeda. With the ehrekh’s curiosity comes mystery, intrigue, and danger, but when the ehrekh sets its sights on Çeda’s friends, she becomes desperate to stop it.It’s a prequel of sorts. I think it’s great for existing fans of the series who want to dive back into the world, but some have said it was a nice introduction that got their feet wet before biting off a doorstop fantasy. For fans of the series, there are also some cool plot threads that begin inand are picked up again inWhen I signed with Night Shade Books, they were a small, hungry company looking to expand into epic fantasy. They decided to give my books a shot, and for that, I was and remain grateful. I feel genuinely bad that Night Shade didn’t survive in their initial incarnation. (Their assets, as you alluded, were later sold off in a rather messy process for most authors.) Despite how it ended, they had good vision and put out a lot of strong, bold books while the original team were publishing. Their ship eventually hit choppy waters—which is no real surprise; publishing is a famously ruthless business, after all—but they still have a lot to be proud of.Things are always going to be different when moving from a mid-sized publisher to one of the Big 5, or one like DAW, who distributes through one of the Big 5 (in their case, Penguin Random House). They have bigger budgets for editing, artwork, marketing and publicity. They have longer, closer relationships with book sellers. They have more personnel to handle various specialized tasks.So the experience has been different, and welcome, because it’s given the books a chance at reaching a wider audience. I’m grateful to DAW and Gollancz for giving me a shot. And because the books have been doing so well, I’m glad I’ve been able to reward their faith.One of the primary themes I was working with in both series was the notion of how empire is viewed and what the consequences will be. Conquest isn’t easy. It’s bloody and painful and has ramifications that last generations into centuries. When a society is conquered and is so thoroughly outmatched, whether that’s through technology or magic or sheer might, there’s little left for the marginalized except peaceful protest, civil disobedience, or terrorist acts.I’ve long been struck by the notion of resistance movements, and that interest was only heightened by the Gulf War, 9/11, the Iraq War, and all of the US’s meddling in the Middle East. What one person views as a terrorist others view as a freedom fighter. I condemn all such actions, of course, but it’s not difficult to understand why constant occupation and bombing would lead to a strong, radical resistance movement. In fact, it’s ridiculous to think it would lead to anything else. Violence begets violence.All of that has been roiling around in my mind since then, and it’s come through in my writing. With The Lays of Anuskaya, I wasn’t interested in painting either side as right or wrong. I wanted more shades of gray between the various players to show how easily we can dehumanize the “other.” And to then ask the question: what do we do when confronted with the humanity of your enemy? We have preconceptions of what our supposed enemies are like, but if wethem, we’d likely be struck by how similar they are to us, how aligned our desires: to live, to worship as we choose, to raise children and see them prosper, to do what we love without interference.In The Song of the Shattered Sands, however, I made a conscious decision to make the opposition, the Kings, more traditionally evil. It did this partially to make sure that the two series had their own unique identities, and partially to tread new ground as a writer. I wanted a starker difference between the heroes and the antagonists.The Kings, while still human, are right bastards. And the Moonless Host, the primary opposition to the Kings,pretty ruthless in return. They do some terrible things in the city and beyond. Even so, I don’t consider them completely black or irredeemable. They are people who are dealing with centuries of oppression and, right or wrong, they’ve become desperate to even the scales.I suspect part of the issue inis that we view the Host primarily through two characters—Çeda and Ramahd—and both of them hate the Moonless Host for different reasons. If some consider the Host without gradation, it may be because Çeda and Ramahd view them that way. I don’t know. I can only say that there is a deep-seated anger in the scarabs of the Moonless Host that pushes them to try harder, to be as ruthless as the Kings have been. After all, if they aren’t, what hope is there for them?I don’t know that there’s any one answer. I let ideas marinate for a long time before I start writing a new series. Several years, in fact. My next two series are marinating now, and a several more are bubbling around inside my head in nascent form. Worldbuilding is really important to me, so I suppose that’s one of the first things I focus on. But I feel very, if you’ll excuse the pun,if I don’t get a few characters out pretty quickly after that. The two play off one another, because to me they’re inextricably linked: the world itself gives birth to the characters, and character ideas often necessitate certain aspects of the world.This creates a feeback loop of sorts. Ideas, be they world or characters ideas, grow and start to influence one another, and slowly but surely the story itself starts to accrete. Then it’s a matter of becoming the gardener, in George Martin parlance, to fertilize the soil and prune the story into a shape that’s pleasing to me (and hopefully readers!)From that process, the theme starts to make itself known. I don’t often focus on it heavily just then, however. If it does present itself, great. If not, I know it will come to me in the writing. By the time I’m done with the first draft of the book, I know pretty well what things I want to enhance and draw out on the subsequent drafts.I do! There are two more coming up in anthologies, bothshorts. One is going to appear in Ragnarok Publications’anthology. It features Djaga, Çeda’s mentor in the fighting pits of Sharakhai.The second is a story that will appear in Grimdark Magazine’santhology, which features a story from the perspective of the ehrekh, Rümayesh, whom we first met inI’ll also give a shout out to thecharity anthology, from Grim Oak Press, which came out last September. That one features a story about Dardzada, Çeda’s foster parent in Sharakhai after her mother was killed by the Kings of Sharakhai.Dardzada the apothecary was probably the trickiest to write. He was someone who loved Çeda’s mother, and loved Çeda in his own way, but became overly protective of her. He did some pretty nasty things to her, things no loving parent would ever do. He’s a man who bottles his emotions, which often makes them come out much later in cruel and ugly ways. It certainly did with Dardzada.I still wanted to paint him as human, though. He genuinely cared for Çeda. He just did a shit job of it. Having the young Çeda fall into his lap wasn’t something he was prepared for. That line between fumbling foster parent, an agent of the Moonless Host, and a man who wants to do right by the memory of Çeda’s mother was a difficult one to walk.No, not really. I think that’s a really dangerous path to head down. It can really stifle creativity, make you tentative, and nothing kills a story like being tentative. When I write, I try to stay bold. Sometimes when I read it back I realized I’ve gone too far and I pull back, or that I’ve been tentative and I push harder, but in doing so I do try hard to keep it my story, the one my inner self wants to read, not what Ireaders will like. The distinction between writing forand writing for yourmay seem small, but for me it’s crucial one, and I always try for the former.As a small aside, and perhaps a word of warning for other authors out there, you’ll eventually come across a critique of your work that hits home. Really wounds you. Someone hates a character you dearly love, or thinks your plot is simplistic, or that the world is dull. But you’ll find in thecritique someone who loves all the things the previous person hated about your story. You can’t please everyone. So don’t try to. Write for yourself. Write the book youwant to read.The time for editing will come. Trust your beta readers and your editors. They’ll (generally) steer you right. And by the way, this is not to say we can’t improve in our writing. We all can. But it’s counterproductive at best to listen to too many critics. At worst, it can choke your creative process so fully that it can stifle your career, even damage it irreparably.In the writing, stay true to yourself. Stay true to the story. The rest will work itself out later.Ha! I hadn’t read this question before I answered above using the gardener term.It’s funny. I come from a computer science background. I’ve been a programmer in the IT world since graduating collegeyears ago. I thought I’d be a heavy outliner. And I tried to be for my first few trunked novels. Tried hard. But it just never came to me. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t see the story until I was knee-deep in it.That said, I can’t just spin a story from nothing, either. This is partly why I take years to generate story ideas and to fill out the tale. Iplot, I just don’t do it heavily. I loosely work out the major turning points in the novel, as well as the ending, I plot out the first several chapters in some detail, and then I get into the writing.The writing immediately starts to advise me, not only on what’s happening in the here and now, but where the story’s, where it’s necessarily been in order to arrive atpoint incircumstances withparticular characters. I’m constantly course-correcting while I’m writing, though I tendto go back and re-write major pieces of the novel while I’m in progress. I don’t want to stall my forward progress, so I just jot down notes that I know I need to work on during the next draft.I’ve come to really enjoy the second and third drafts, by the way. That’s where a lot of the magic enters the story for me these days.Yeah, there are some that are quite emotional for me. The scene inthat does this to me is the one where Çeda visits this salt flat, and there are flocks of “blazing blues,” birds which flock in massive numbers like starlings. It was a touching scene, and one I added to create a bond between Çeda and her mother that had been lacking previously.There are also some where people do some heroic or dastardly things. Meryam of Qaimir (Ramahd’s companion) is one such. She’s become one of the main players in the story, and it’s been quite fun seeing her transformation from driven to nearly maniacal in her quest to further the interests of her kingdom.Heroism can be a tricky subject, especially for authors new to the craft. We want our heroes to do great things. But we can’t have them be shining paladins with perfect smiles, either. They have to be human. One of the more difficult parts of the story-making process is to place the hero into a situation where they can do great things without making it look too easy. It has to come hard. The heroes have to work for it. There has to be an emotional cost to it, because it’s only through that the reader is going to care about the outcome.I want my characters to do great things. I want them to be seen as heroic. But I want them to be believable too. They have to be human. They should celebrate their victories, certainly, because in that the reader feels a sense of release as well, but there also needs to be grief when they’ve made mistakes or made the hard choice. It’s a tricky formula to get right.I will admit that there’s a certain luster to that next book. There’s so much possibility. Things are still in your head, and they’re. They’ve not yet been marred by your inability to create the perfect novel.That said, I really do get invested in the current book while I write. I try to get myself into the emotional space to heighten what the characters themselves are going through. I don’t often get that on the first draft. It comes a bit more on the second and third drafts, when all the hard work is really starting to come together. There’s nothing more satisfying for a writer then reading a scene that feelsin the context of the greater story.I’ll admit that I’m often thinking about single-malt whiskeys while I write about araq in the novels, so I’m going to go with that. Something with a bit of bite, subtle smoke, peaty and buttery, notes of vanilla, oak, and leather. Sipped slowly, of course! Always savor.Now I need a drink. Be right back...On the off chance that any of your readers will be in France this May, I’ll be headed to Les Imaginales in Épinal, France, May 18-21. My next appearance in the US is likely going to be GenCon in Indianapolis this coming August 17-20.Thanks for having me by! This was an interesting talk.