Tom Smith
One of the major projects we’re excited about in 2017 is the joint venture grimdark occult horror Grimdark Magazine is putting together with Dirge Magazine. We have a crack team of fantasy authors with Jesse Bullington (Alex Marshall), Anna Smith-Spark, Michael R. Flectcher, and Angela Meadon charging into a shared world collated and managed by Games Workshop alumni Matthew Ward.
Titled Landfall, we have a world built upon the Australian First Fleet and American Pilgrims, a team chomping at the bit to explore it, and a Kickstarter almost ready to go. We can’t wait to show it to you.
When we first planned out the project, we knew we had to go big with not only brilliant authors and worldbuilders, but also with finding authors with a dearth of shared world work experience. As our Lead Writer, we’ve entrusted our overarching story and continuity to none other than Richard Lee Byers.
Richard has written over 15 Forgotten Realms books, has written for Warhammer and released several on his own including his more recent Blind God’s Bluff. I have talked to Richard online for several years and I’m excited to sit down and pick his brain.
Mr. Byers has had his hands full with Landfall and his own projects, but he took time out of his busy schedule to sit down with us.
[TS] Richard, thanks for joining us.
[RLB] Happy to do it.
[TS] A lot has happened in the fantasy writing world during your time in it. What would you say is the biggest or most drastic change?
[RLB] This isn’t a very profound observation, but the most fundamental change is that everything keeps getting longer. Back when dinosaurs walked the Earth and I was a kid discovering fantasy, short stories were often considered significant works as were short standalone novels. That started to change when Tolkien hit big, the change was well underway by the time I became a pro writer, and it continues today. Everything has to be epic. I realize there are exceptions, but short stories don’t loom large in the average fantasy fan’s consciousness, novels tend to be long, and even when they’re not, they tend to be episodes in a lengthy series. I’m not saying that’s good or bad—it probably depends on whether a particular idea merits that sort of exploration—but it is how things are.
[TS] Not a lot of people know that you like to fence in your spare time. Would you say that has had any impact on the way you write fight scenes, or is it just an enjoyable pastime for you?
[RLB] I feel like a bit of a fraud answering this because, much as I love fencing, I haven’t made it to the salle in a while. Here’s hoping I get back before too much longer. Anyway, fencing has definitely influenced the way I write about combat. Modern fencing is, of course, a very safe sport and thus vastly different from a martial art where you study real fighting involving real pain, real injury, and real death. Still, fencing gives you an understanding of timing, distance, deceptive actions, blocking, and other elements that would come into play in an actual sword fight or what have you.
[TS] How do you approach worldbuilding? Do you outline many ideas first or kinda just go for it and write it all as you go and tweak later?
[RLB] I’m somewhere in the middle. I figure out the broad parameters of the world and work out the specific area where the story begins in greater detail. Thus, I’m neither one of those guys who begins by figuring out the whole history of a continent going back a thousand years in excruciating detail nor one of those other guys who just sits down at the computer and sees what bursts forth from his mind.
[TS] In the upcoming Landfall series, you will be sharing writing duties with grimdark scribes Michael R. Fletcher and Anna Smith-Spark. How is writing in a shared world different for your process than writing in a world entirely of your own imagination?
[RLB] In shared-world fiction, you have to maintain consistency lest you make it impossible for readers to suspend disbelief and enjoy the stories. That’s true in non-shared world fiction, too, but maintaining consistency with only yourself is easier than keeping track of what other writers are doing. You also have to avoid writing things that, however cool you think they are, would impair everybody’s ability to tell good stories going forward. Many shared words are built around fundamental conflicts and mysteries, and the first impulse of some writers who aspire to work on those franchises is to resolve the basic conflicts and solve the core mysteries. There are exceptions, but in general, those are the very stories you absolutely can’t write unless the series is ending.
[TS] You aren’t usually who springs to mind when someone says “grimdark”, although an argument could be made for your Szass Tam books in the Forgotten Realms. What is your opinion of the darker side of fantasy that has emerged in recent years? Why do you think it appeals to so many fantasy readers?
[RLB] I’m a horror writer as well as a fantasy guy, so I’m fine with grim, dark stories. To me, they’re just a particular flavour of good old sword-and-sorcery. There’s plenty of darkness in Robert E. Howard and Karl Edward Wagner, for example. To that, I’ll add that to me, fiction is one big pie, and genre and subgenre categories are how we slice the pie. A particular slicing system can be useful in various ways, but we should keep in mind that it’s ultimately arbitrary and there are other reasonable, useful ways to slice. So while I may have genre definitions firmly in mind when I’m trying to sell to a particular market or group of readers, when I’m just being a guy who muses about fiction, I’m not all that hung up on them. I’m not someone you’ll see locked in a bitter, deadly serious debate about whether something is or is not grimdark, steampunk, or whatever. Now as to why grimdark is in vogue, I can only look to my own response and suggest that other readers may feel similarly. I like stories that are suspenseful and feel true to my perhaps cynical ideas of what people and social systems are actually like. Much as I enjoy Tolkien, The Lord Of The Rings didn’t fill me with anxiety as to whether everything was going to come out all right, and Frodo, Sam, Aragorn, and the rest of the gang are too nice for me to completely believe in them. I have to go to grittier fiction for nail-biting suspense and fully credible characters.
[TS] When growing up, who were your earlier go-to writers? And which early writers steered you in the direction of fantasy?
[RLB] The first fantasy (on in his case, science fantasy) writer who wowed me as a kid was Edgar Rice Burroughs. From him, I moved on to Fritz Leiber, Robert E. Howard, Michael Moorcock, Karl Edward Wagner, Roger Zelazny, Poul Anderson, L. Sprague de Camp, and Fletcher Pratt. And many others, too, but those were the main fantasy guys.
[TS] Which character of yours would you say is the most grimdark? Do you have a character you’ve written that you modelled more or less after yourself?
[RLB] Who’s most grimdark is a tough call. Many of my antagonists are hardcore enough that it’s tough to choose among them. Whereas my protagonists mostly turn out to have the right stuff when crunch time comes even if they aren’t all that thrilled about being involved in the big crisis to begin with. I guess my protagonist Matt Brown (from my post-apocalyptic superhero series The Impostor) might be the most grimdark guy. He allies himself with some really nasty super-villains in pursuit of his goal. It’s a lofty, important goal, but still. As to who’s most like me, it’s tough to say. Perhaps my character Selden? I’d like to think he’s shrewd, tough-minded, but also compassionate because I have a bit of those same qualities myself.
[TS] What genre do you prefer to read when you have time, and what was the last book you read?
[RLB] I’ve been reading a lot of horror, but I don’t read it exclusively. I’m currently reading The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge. I honestly don’t remember what book I read immediately before that, but one novel I highly recommend is The Fisherman by John Langan. It’s a brilliant horror novel that just won the Bram Stoker Award.
[TS] If you weren’t writing, what career could you see yourself doing?
[RLB] I wish I could say astronomer, physicist, astrophysicist, cosmologist, or something like that, but I don’t have the math chops for it. Archaeology would be cool. I could also see myself as a private investigator, although probably not quite in the grand Raymond Chandler style.
[TS] Besides the aforementioned Landfall, what other works are you releasing in the near future?
[RLB] As though engaged in some fiendish conspiracy to gaslight me, my various publishers have all started shuffling their schedules around, and as a result, I don’t have firm release dates for anything. But over the course of the next few months, you’ll see (I hope) Black Crowns (Privateer Press), This Sword For Hire (Rothco Press), Ire Of The Void (Fantasy Flight Games), Dark Fortune (Crossroad Press), and The Things That Crawl (Crossroad Press.) I’ll also have short fiction cropping up in various places. The best way for interested parties to keep track of it all may be to connect with me on Facebook, where I’ll plug each new thing as it becomes available.
[TS] RLB, thanks for taking the time to sit with us today!
[RLB] Thanks for asking me![GdM]