Noahan Author - Issue #17

It seems like the hurricanes came, attacked the East Coast, and stole Summer away. It's actually been cold the last few days and the leaves are changing rapidly - mostly to yellow so far. I look forward to the reds, oranges, and even purples that will be here soon.

Thank you for joining us again. We are going to share three more author interviews with you today. As always, while most of you may have come here because you are already fans of one author or another, I hope you will stay and read all three. You might discover someone new you'd like to read books by.

I don't update my blog often, but I was moved to write a little something this week in reaction to all the abuse George Lucas has been receiving lately. If you'd like to read it, you can find my short article here.

And now, on to the main event:

Noahan Author Interview – Edwin Stark

Noahan Author:  Please tell us about yourself.

Edwin Stark: Ok, the name is Stark, Edwin Stark. Age: 44, near-sighted, single. Born in Caracas, Venezuela (that's in South America, for all the geographically challenged out there.) Being a descendant of German parents, I was always an odd fish here during my entire life. I started loving books at eight, when a nearly complete Jules Verne collection somehow found its way into my hands. Against popular belief, TV didn't cripple my imagination; it may have actually fanned it into a raging inferno. I wrote my first book at age nine, a very odd thing about Space Biped Rats chasing the last remains of mankind throughout the entire galaxy. I tried publishing in my home country for some time, but it's a very locked-down market. Since I love movies, I tried my hand writing screenplays. I have a very visual mindset. Nineteen years ago, one actually became optioned, but the obscure production company involved seemed more interested in gaining more obscurity.  Disappointed, I quit writing for the next dozen years. With the coming of the new self-publishing technologies, I finally saw a way to reach millions of readers out there. So I started to write again...

Noahan Author:  What can you tell us about Eco Station One?

Edwin Stark: Gladly. The book is basically an off-kilter comedy. It draws inspiration from various different sources, like LucasArt's Sam & Max computer game adventures, Monty Python and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I'm a guy with a very quirky sense of humor: just give me a party movie where a bunch of reckless fellows run amok in a high-class environment, wrecking everything in sight, á la "Bachelor Party," and you have got my undivided attention. So I practically wrote that book with an "anything goes" mentality.

A fun fact about its creation is that I wrote it during a very low point in my life. I had finished my first book, A.I. Rebellion, and had gone through a bad experience, doing a disastrous collaboration in a book called "Road Away from Redemption." (the final prose was mine, but the story is someone else's... Don't blame ME!) The only good thing that came out from that collaboration was that it gave me the necessary discipline to truly become a writer. But it had been an oppressive experience, so I needed to liberate myself. Alas, I was running on an empty tank, very much out of ideas. One day, someone in a chat room made a remark (which is explained in Eco Station's Author Note) and this crazy mental picture of a gorilla sitting in front of a PC and surfing the Web refused to go away. So I started to write Eco Station, practically in a white heat and having great fun in the process. The original Spanish version was written in less than ten days; the English one took considerable longer, for I had to make several adjustments to it.

Noahan Author:  The book is written in the first person. To what extent are you and Eduardo Sinnnombre the same person or different?

Edwin Stark: There's plenty of Eduardo in me. Eduardo and I run to catch the same buses, we have the same taste in women (we like them petite and strong willed), and we're individuals caught in the middle of situations that can easily sour in a moment's notice. However, the main difference between us is that Eduardo is a lovable scoundrel, while I'd absolutely balk if I had to face the shady moral choices he makes sometimes. That, and that he manages to get the girl in the end. 

Noahan Author:  One of the most compelling characters in the preview to Eco Station One is the rainforest itself. Can you talk about it a little?

Edwin Stark: One of the things I try foremost to tell my audience is, "Hi, my name's Edwin and I TRULY live in a rainforest."... Sort of an AA confession sort of thing. No kidding here, folks. A couple of times I got lost in my own backyard, with only a machete and a rope to find my way back. I got stung, bit and scratched by a myriad of unknown bugs and thorny vines. I've faced flash fires that desolate hundreds of acres in seconds. I live the compleat jungle experience down here. So I guess that I managed to perform a convincing and lively description of the rainforest, just because it's one of the things I have a very intimate knowledge about.

Noahan Author:  I understand that your work was not originally authored in English. You've done an amazing job at translating humor from one language to another. How do you do it?

Edwin Stark: Yeah, you got that right. It was originally written in Spanish. Fortunately, humor is a more universal language than many believe possible. Of course, many occasional glitches surfaced along the way and certain stuff just comes flat across different cultures. There's a lot of the humor that didn't make it through, however. For instance, I describe Mr. Thaddeus Barnum as a "Señor Barriga wannabe", which is a well-known character in a Mexican TV show called as "El Chavo del ocho", which is still popular nowadays, even though it got cancelled in the mid-70s. If I just tried to directly put that comparison in the English version, everyone would be left scratching their heads. So Mr. Barriga became Casanova's Mr. Ferraro. Another example is when I mention that a potato is a black market commodity. Only a Venezuelan will get it, whereas a guy from Chile or Ecuador won't. Sorry... no way to fix that.

Noahan Author:  You have some unusual obstacles which make it difficult for you be online as much as you'd like or to promote your work. Can you talk about this a little?

Edwin Stark: Yeah... mostly, these obstacles come from my actual location. Let me say from the start that I had absolutely no choice in living here, as much choice as a piece of floatsam has in landing at a particular beach. To be blunt, I just washed up here. This place is so far away from civilization that not even TV signals reach it. I'm fortunate enough to have electric power as it is. I was basically without internet for the best part of a decade and it was only due advances in cellular phone technology, and that they put a cell antenna relatively close to my home, that I was finally able to reconnect myself to he world.

Now, all was going well for the past four years, when all of a sudden the small device that allowed me to reach the web did pass away. Replacing it will certainly be an uphill battle. So now I'm limited to post through the tiny keyboard of a cell phone or walking to the nearest SMALL town (5 miles away) and rent computer time at a cybercafé. I consider myself rather lucky for that, because ten years ago, reaching the Internet involved the 5 miles walk PLUS a 50 miles-long bus ride.

Also, there's the factor that the government of my home country doesn't allow Venezuelans to use their credit cards abroad. This is because they implemented a very Draconian currency exchange control, so you can no longer freely convert from one currency to another. They generously (dripping sarcasm here, bring in a mop) allotted us a yearly quota for travel and Internet shopping. The limit to Internet use is US$400 per year, so this severely limits my advertising budget. I have to choose wisely how many review copies I'll send out and who will get them. The same goes for placing ads in several related websites. I also can't set up my own webpage, because I don't have a way to pay for the name domain, even though I have the money. It's just that all my assets are in Venezuelan currency... which is worth little more than toilet paper beyond the borders of my country.

Noahan Author:  You also have two other books available, Cuentos and AI Rebellion, can you briefly tell us a little about each of them?

Edwin Stark: Cuentos is a short story collection I put together, choosing the best tales I wrote during the years 2005-2006. They were the pick of the litter from a batch of nearly 200 shorts stories I wrote out from sheer boredom.

It was a spur of the moment thing. I just saw all these short stories gathering dust in my Writer's Trunk, arranged them in a haphazardly thematic fashion, and hammered here and there until the whole contraption worked together. It has gathered a small following. How small? I can count

the people interested with the fingers of my hand. Wait a minute... make it a Mickey Mouse hand.

AI Rebellion was my first novel and I committed therein many of the mistakes of a rookie writer. I became inordinately enthusiastic while writing that thing, and threw everything at it. In the end it became a bloated two hundred thousand words manuscript, and when I read it through the first time I saw the need to trim it down; more than half of its text went directly to the cutting floor. Yet, it shows the strains I was experiencing while perfecting the use of a new language, and trying to stretch a tale well past the ten thousand words barrier. 

Though it has a thought-provoking plot running in the background, when I compare it with my actual writing output, I see its many flaws. AI Rebelion is despairingly slow paced and rather byzantine. These days I just tell people to stay away from it because it's WRETCHED. Only someone with archeological interest in my work shall tackle it, as it's similar to those plaques you see in many Vermont and Connecticut inns, like "Washington Slept Here"... something in the lines of, "This is how Edwin Stark wrote in 2007"...  Ewww!

Noahan Author:  Do you believe the Earth has been visited by beings from other planets?

Edwin Stark: Ouch! My cover has been blown! Now, seriously, Man is a fool to think himself alone in the galaxy. Everyone comes out with "Show me evidence of life in outer space" dares, when life on Earth is proof enough of life in the Universe. "Want evidence? I'll slap your face with my hand!"

My hand is composed from atoms created in the inner furnaces of every dying star and supernova. The same could have happened elsewhere. How silly it is to believe, that the forces of chance that shaped us couldn't roll the same dice on the opposite side of the Milky Way! Ah, the next nutter in line is asking me to step down from the soapbox, but I'll finish by saying this: If there are other species in space that have finally mastered space travel and managed to avoid self-destruction during their technological rat race, they surely don't want to get too involved with a barbaric species like us. They're probably watching us from the other side of a barrier. I'm rather surprised that these guys haven't started to toss roasted peanuts at us.

Noahan Author:  Are you prepared for the end of civilization?

Edwin Stark: Being that I'm now living in the fringe of civilization as it is, I can honestly say I'm surviving without it's benefits. (Hmmm, civilization: what a quaint concept! I must run it through my memory banks).

Noahan Author:  Would you like to ask me a question?

Edwin Stark: What would be the most bizarre thing you'd do the moment you realize you have a bestseller book in your hands?

Noahan Author: The first answer which came to me was, “Write another book!” But upon reflection, I’m imagining a purple velvet suit, like the Joker would wear, and a long red velvet cape. And I wouldn’t just save them for special occasions. I’d wear them when I go to the gas station, the mall, down to the corner to get a gallon of milk. I mean – why wouldn’t I?

Noahan Author Interview – Liz Schulte

Noahan Author - Please tell us a little about yourself.

Liz Schulte - Eesh, start me off with the hard question. It is so much easier to talk about my characters than it is to talk about me. I am just a normal girl, nothing too terribly exciting or scandalous about me—I could make something up if you like.

I was born—it went pretty well, I think. Then I was raised in the middle of nowhere with very few people my age around. Those quiet country settings seemed to have started my imagination off on the right foot. I used to make up stories and always had a thing for scary anything. My best friend and I made up a Freddy Krueger-inspired in game in the second grade and used it to terrorize our classmates, not to mention the countless sleepovers we ruined by scaring everyone so much they had to call their parents to come and get them. What can I say, girls will be girls! Muahahaha! I developed a love for reading as well: loving RL Stine, Christopher Pike, and LJ Smith. It may seem like writing would have been a natural fit from all of this, but at the time I thought I wanted to be a lawyer. It wasn’t until I completed my undergraduate degree that I decided maybe law wasn’t for me. I took some forensic classes still trying to decide what I wanted to do—then writing finally came into the forefront.

Noahan Author - What can you tell us about Dark Corners?

Liz Schulte - Dark Corners is a story about a woman, Ella Reynolds, whose husband’s murder was left unsolved. Ella is trapped by her desire to find justice and the paralyzing fear of the house she lives in. Ella believes the home killed her husband while the community believes she is at fault. She is continuously isolated and terrorized to the brink of insanity with no end in sight. An offer of help comes from the unlikeliest of sources, the detective who investigated her, leaving Ella to determine what is real, who can be trusted, and where she will find the truth.

Blurb: Ella Reynolds knew from the first moment she walked into the old house someone or something was watching her. Waiting. Her husband's violent murder sent her spiraling into a world of grief and isolation, but Ella isn't alone. Who or what is responsible for her husband's death is still with her. Darkness has engulfed the past year of Ella's life. Everyday reality slips a little more between her fingers as she struggles to break free from her memories. She must look deeper into her past as well as the present to discover truth of her husband's homicide. A string of uncanny events takes place and practical explanations run thin as Ella follows the terrifying road to closure. As the past and present come to a head, Ella must decipher who or what the murderer is before it takes her as well.

Noahan Author - Who is Ella?

Liz Schulte - Ella is a woman who has been through a lot. She is tough, a fighter, but she is also very human. She wants to give up because life has become too hard, but she keeps stumbling forward determined to solve the mystery surrounding her husband’s death. She is far from perfect, and Ella knows it. She embraces her flaws wholeheartedly, which, honestly, makes it even harder for other characters to deal with her. Ella speaks her mind regardless of the consequences. She drinks too much. She is defensive, crabby, lonely, stubborn, and terrified out of her mind. She has a softer side that surfaces now and again, but she does everything in her power to protect that part of her from being hurt.

Noahan Author - What makes for a good scary story?

Liz Schulte - That is an excellent question that isn’t easily answered. I am a big fan of all things scary. Whether it is movies, books, haunted house, ghost hunts, I’m game. I have learned over the years that the movies and books I find most scary aren’t necessarily the ones other people find scary. For me it is less seeing something and more the anticipation of something being there. It is important not to reveal too much too soon and to only let pieces slip through to feed the excitement. So I feel like a really good scary story should have a lot of suspense. It needs to build and build fraying the readers nerves so they feel what they character is feeling. The stories that leave you jumping at noises, closing your closet door at night, running from your car to the house when it is dark outside, and checking under you bed are the very best. If the story sticks with you and makes you slightly more paranoid in the future then you know it was good.

Noahan Author - Do you believe in ghosts?

Liz Schulte - Ha! Um no, not really. I am willing to believe in the possibility of ghosts, but in general, I think any mystery that is attributed to ghosts can be solved and most likely proven otherwise given enough time and thought. Maybe I watched too much Scooby Doo as a kid. I like to keep the possibility alive though.

Noahan Author - Can you talk a little about your journey as a writer? How did you get to where you are today?

Liz Schulte - A couple years ago I had this idea for a story so I sat down and wrote it. I was very secretive about the whole thing. I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing because I wasn’t sure it would work out. For all I knew, I could have been horrible at weaving a tale. When I finished it, I shelved it and thought about it and eventually allowed a select few to read it. Luckily, I got the encouragement I needed to continue to work on it. I entered it into a few contests and wrote ten agency query letters, but never really came around to the idea of having to sell myself to an agent or a publisher. I just wanted them to read the story and tell me yes or no based on that (so not the way it works). Anyway, I left the book on its virtual shelf and wrote another book still thinking I should do something with my book. Then for Christmas I received an e-reader. I spend the first night downloading books, and I came across one that sounded pretty good and was only a dollar so I downloaded it. I read the book and noticed at the end the author didn’t have a publisher. I found her on Facebook and sent her an email asking about self-publishing. She answered a lot of questions for me and introduced me to this whole community of people. From there, I started to seriously pursue this publishing dream and in June I published my first book.

Noahan Author - What have you done and what are you doing to promote your work?

Liz Schulte - I am not a person who is into self-promotion. I know that is a barrier I will have to get overcome, and I am slowly working on it. So far I have mainly contacted reviewers, and I have a huge blog tour coming up with Mandie Stevens and her company Promotional Book Tours. I am hoping word of mouth, my blog, and general internet exposure will keep the momentum going. I have always heard the best way for a writer to promote is to write more so I like to make sure I keep time for writing. My next release scheduled to come out in November then the releases should come fairly regularly after that. .

Noahan Author - Are you ready for the fall of civilization?

Liz Schulte - If by ready you mean I want it to happen, then not so much. But if you mean am I prepared to conquer and take over then—yes, yes I am. I have my survival plan made, location scouted, and a hand-picked survival group.

Noahan Author - Is Pluto a planet? Why or why not?

Liz Schulte - I guess officially it isn't, but it always will be in heart. I mean it totally messes up the mnemonic device I learned for the planets. "My very educated mother just served us nine pizzas." No Pluto, no pizza. I don't want to live in such a world.

Noahan Author - Would you like to ask me a question?

Liz Schulte - What is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?

Noahan Author - I don’t know that – Aaaaaaaaaaaah!

Noahan Author Interview – D.P. Prior 2011

Noahan Author: Derek, thank you for coming back! I originally interviewed you for Thanatos Rising a year ago. (Noahan Author Issue #3) Since then you’ve published a number of books. How do you feel you’ve grown or changed as an artist since 2010?

D.P. Prior: Thanks for inviting me back, Noah. I really enjoyed the Thanatos interview and appreciate the opportunity to vent, rant, and waffle.

I’ve spent a lot of time editing other people’s books this past year. The focus is on deconstruction and then finding ways to present the material to the reader in the most engaging and dramatic way possible. It’s helped me with the process of writing my own second drafts. I’ve also learned not to rush anything to meet some arbitrary release date. I sift through my manuscripts until I’m happy with every aspect. I also use two editors and a proofreader for all my new work, but still perform numerous edits of my own.

Something else I’ve realized is that it’s possible to go for too much realism and too much originality. Readers need familiar motifs and easily identifiable character traits / character types to cling to if they are going to fully engage in a story. I’ve also increased the emphasis on sensations, thoughts, feelings to help the reader identify with my characters. The other thing that I’ve really worked on is simplifying the language to promote immediacy. It’s all about the story, and the reader’s enjoyment of the story.

Noahan Author: Please tell us about Cadman’s Gambit (SHADER.)

D.P. Prior: Cadman’s Gambit is the first book in the Shader series. The title is drawn from the course of action that initiates all the events in the first three books. Dr. Cadman is on the run from his former mentor, the Liche Lord of Verusia, Otto Blightey (whose name you may be familiar with from my other books). Cadman is a liche himself, but he’s afraid of what Blightey will do to him if he’s ever found (Blightey has a penchant for impaling that would make Vlad the Impaler green with envy).

Cadman disguises himself as a fat medical doctor and ekes out an existence in the city of Sarum, which is on the other side of the world from Verusia. He wants nothing more than not to be noticed, and like all liches associates action with risk. When his dreams are invaded by a demon from the Abyss and he is offered his heart’s desire, he is faced with a yes or no decision that will determine not only his own fate, but also that of the whole of Creation.

The series was originally entitled The Deceptions of the Demiurgos, but I decided to simplify it to Shader, as he’s the central character, the pivot upon which everything else turns. There are layers upon layers of history, mythology, and obfuscation - all part of the aeons old war between the three beings who fell through the Void from the Supernal Realm.

Cadman’s Gambit is very much focused on characters and tight point of view. It begins with the very human conflicts of the chief players, but gradually starts to reveal matters that transcend their individual problems.

It is set in 3,167 AD (908 years after the cataclysm known as the Reckoning). Technology was eradicated during the Reckoning, but it is rumoured that the technological know how of the Ancients is jealously guarded by the Templum, the religious rulers of most of the world.

Noahan Author: Who is Sektis Gandaw?

D.P. Prior:  Sektis Gandaw is  a scientist and another former pupil of Blightey’s. He was born in Germany in 1568 and studied under Dr John Dee in 1587 in England. He has a long history with Blightey, culminating in a war, which Sektis Gandaw won using technology he discovered with the help of the Homunculi, a mysterious race from the world of Aethir.

Sektis Gandaw came to dominate the world of the Ancients through technology and finance, but was forced to flee to Aethir during the Reckoning.

He’s extremely intolerant of imperfection and believes the only suitable answer for the problems of the cosmos is to unmake it (the Unweaving) and recreate it from first principles.

He has artificially prolonged his life with cybernetic augmentation and lives beneath a black mountain known as the Perfect Peak.

Noahan Author: What kind of a fellow is Shader?

D.P. Prior: I can’t say too much about Shader without spoilers as much of his nature is hidden from him and revealed bit by bit throughout the series. He was raised in England by a martial father and a saintly mother. He was taught by the philosopher Aristodeus and entered the Templum Elect in Aeterna. The Elect are fighting monks, in the vein of the Templars.

Shader is torn between his roles of warrior and monk and wants nothing but for the conflict to end. He tried a contemplative vocation at the Abbey of Pardes, but proved too restless. After a failed romance with a Sahulian woman, he tries to lay his demons to rest by fighting in a tournament for the Sword of the Archon, after which he plans to give Pardes another go.

Shader is a man doomed to fight. He also discovers that certain other people know him much better than he knows himself. There are very difficult revelations ahead for him.

I was once told by a literary agent that I couldn’t have a fantasy protagonist with a religious dimension. Obviously this agent had never heard of Solomon Kane, or David Gemmell’s Jerusalem Man. Shader has elements of both, but he lacks the singleminded fanaticism of Kane and the Clint Eastwood-esque grittiness of Jon Shannow. He’s a complex character and a damned good sword fighter.

Noahan Author: Your book opens with two wonderful maps of your world. They remind me less of the maps I’ve seen in fantasy novels and more of the ones I used to find in role-playing games. Gary Gygax’s Mythos system springs right to mind as he also took our continents and built his world on top of them. Can you talk a little about the maps which have influenced you and what role they play for you in storytelling?

D.P. Prior:  The maps were designed by Mike Nash and Theo Prior respectively. There’s not a lot to tell. I needed maps to orientate myself when writing as there’s a fair bit of traveling in Cadman’s Gambit. The map of the Nousian Theocracy gives the reader some sense of how vast the Templum’s empire is. It’s generally considered a force for good, but what if certain things were to change?

Noahan Author: In the early pages of Cadman’s Gambit (SHADER) we hear talk of Dwarves and technocrats, black holes and swords. Aren’t you crossing the streams? Isn’t your chocolate in someone’s peanut butter? What are your thoughts about mixing fantasy and science fiction together?

D.P. Prior: The mixing of fantasy and SF is decades old. Lin Carter was doing this with his Thongor books, and there are similar elements in Michael Moorcock and David Gemmell. And let’s not forget Star Wars - ostensibly a SF film, but the narrative is pure epic fantasy.

In my case it’s even more complex. The Shader series is set in a world very much like our own, only in a post apocalyptic future. Due to the past abuses of technology, the Templum has decided to keep the world at a technological level that roughly relates to the late medieval period. Occasionally there are leaks from the Templum archives, and bits of Ancient tech show up from time to time. If ever the Templum is threatened, it may advance the technological level just enough to gain the advantage.

In addition to that, there are at least two other habitable worlds (although they are in another dimension known to the natives of Sahul as the Dreaming). Some of the technological advances of the Ancients can be traced back to a race of creatures from the Dreaming called the Homunculi. They have an extremely worrying pedigree.

I didn’t want my series to be genre bound. I have no interest in writing yet another formulaic modern fantasy. Odd as it may sound for someone who runs a site called Indie Fantasy Review, I really don’t like a lot of modern fantasy. I discuss this idea elsewhere (Densewords blog, I believe). I’m very much a fan of old school fantasy/sword and sorcery. I’m influenced most by Edgar Rice Burroughs, R.E. Howard, Lin Carter, L. Sprague de Camp, Michael Moorcock, David Gemmell, and Stephen Donaldson. A lot of what is fashionable nowadays reads like tedious tripe to me. Some fantasy that has been popular over the past twenty or thirty years is probably best described as “pixie shit” (I thought Moorcock coined the phrase, but apparently it was someone else). It’s often predictable, pretentious, and heavily derivative. There’s a new obsession with naturalism, which gets in the way of the story telling and has more in common with Socialist Realism or soap operas than the imaginative tales of old.

I also don’t want to be bound by someone else’s rules, which often seems to be the expectation in genre fiction. I get sick of SF writers slavishly adhering to Asimov’s rules of robotics, or fantasy writers reproducing the D&D universe. It’s OK to do these things, but I’m wanting to stretch my wings a bit and write something that only this sad, twisted, unique individual could write.

To date, the only modern fantasy writer I have any time for is Joe Abercrombie, who at least has the guts to experiment and push the envelope.

It obviously makes financial sense to identify a niche genre and then write in the style of whoever is popular. That’s the advice I had from the aforementioned agent. But my motivation is not just financial success - I have other incomes, which pay the bills. I simply wanted to write a story I would like to read. There is enough diversity of characters for me to explore lots of issues - psychology, philosophy, theology - along the way, but the main thing is a good, action-packed, fun story. If other people enjoy the work and it brings me some beans, then I’ll be extremely happy. If not, I’ll keep up the editing and personal training businesses.

Noah - I couldn't agree with you more about modern fantasy. I can't read most of it. I'm amazed that "fantasy" is often the least imaginative genre there is. It's usually just a regurgitation of Gygax, Salvatore, and Tolkien, as if using the word "elf" is enough to make a story imaginative!

Noahan Author: I was struck by this passage, “To think there were still people who believed in a divine architect responsible for the mess out there. More of a petulant child, strewing its playthings chaotically about the crib before falling asleep and forgetting about them.” It made me laugh. (Inside, not quite out loud.) One of my maxims is that I refuse to believe in a deity who is less emotionally mature than I am – which exempts me from all the religions I’ve run across so far.  Do your beliefs run along similar lines, or was this the character speaking, not the author?

D.P. Prior: Oh, this is definitely the character. It’s Sektis Gandaw, after all. Like Chesterton was fond of saying, a good novel should tell the truth about its characters, not its author.

Sektis Gandaw epitomizes what Chesterton described as the “narrow but perfect circle” of the mind of the lunatic. He is rigorous in his thinking, utterly pedantic about the minutiae, and completely blinkered. He sees no argument besides his own (remind you of any populist evolutionary biologists?)

The problem with this kind of individual is that the deity they reject (the one having a tantrum in this case) is a projection of their own expectations. Jung, for example, had an image of God that was basically his own father (and he’s not alone there). These false images of God have been the bane of religious orthodoxy (actually they used to be called heresies for good reason).

If you look at the God rejected by Dawkins, for example, and compare that with the God written about by Meister Eckhart, Thomas Aquinas, the Ante Nicene Fathers, you’ll realize that they are talking about completely different things. Dawkins is stuck in the picture book language of the five year old. Scripture scholars are forever pointing out the evolution of thinking about God from the earliest parts of the Old Testament to the massively different perspective of the New Testament. Same God, different human understanding. It’s what’s meant by doing theology - it’s a verb, a constant wrestling with the implications of revelation and daily life; the pursuit of understanding, which is always mitigated by the level of philosophical and technological sophistication of a given society. The same is true for most religions (just look at the Talmud).

Sektis Gandaw is too self-absorbed to go on such a journey of discovery. He’s an ultra type-A personality, a narcissist, a neurotic who’s so enmeshed in his own complexes he might as well be termed a psychotic.

I have other characters with lesser degrees of this orientation in the book. Most are embarking on some sort of personal immortality project. Occasionally, though, someone reveals a selfless streak.

Sektis Gandaw might have a point about some aspects of the religion of the Templum, however. Since the Reckoning, elements from lots of philosophies and religions have been blended together in an attempt to make a universally acceptable religion for the masses to follow. When you discover that the architect of such a grand scheme was none other than a friar named Otto Blightey you have to wonder ...

Noahan Author: I understand that your story The Ant-Man of Malfen is now FREE on Amazon and thousands of copies are being downloaded. What has that experience been like?

D.P. Prior: It’s been really exciting knowing that thousands of people have access to one of my books. The Ant-Man of Malfen is part of a spin-off series from the Shader books. It falls midway between books 5 & 6 of Shader. I needed to release a book last year and so put that one out prematurely. Fortunately it’s been well received. It recently had a wonderful review from Red Adept. My hope is that it will lead readers to the Shader series.

It’s early days, but already there’s indication that sales of my other books, particularly Cadman’s Gambit, are picking with the exposure Ant-Man is achieving.

Noahan Author: Are you ready for the fall of civilization?

D.P. Prior: Always! Bring it on! Don’t get me started on the evils of Capitalism and the Distributist answer. If the end of civilization should come at the hands of a zombie invasion, however, I’m more than ready. I’ve seen a couple of “How to Survive a Zombie Invasion” films on Youtube and I have a sharp sword and an undead-slaying 9-year old with a spud gun.

Noahan Author: Is Pluto a planet?

D.P. Prior: Last time I looked it wasn’t any longer, but I heard there was some quibbling about that. I’ll defer to Valmore Daniels

Noahan Author: Would you like to ask me a question?

D.P. Prior:  Aleister Crowley: was he right to call his autobiography an autohagiography?

Noahan Author: If one is really interested in learning about magic, it turns out there is a vast literature readily available - which we can read at any time we want. (Most is more imaginative than the average fantasy novel.) If anyone out there is unaware, many of the greatest minds in history were of the opinion that magic was a real phenomenon and they worked very hard to explore the topic and come to a level of understanding.

In my case, I have so far read very little Crowley. I have read a great deal about Druidry, about John Dee, Jodorowsky, Asclepius, and others – I have a particular interest in the Druids. Lately I have actually been reading quite a bit about the stage magicians. So, I may not yet be entirely qualified to answer this question.

If by “Autohagiography” we mean the life of a saint… I would have to say, “Yes.”

To be strict, Crowley would be as far from a Christian saint as any man in the last few hundred years, but he was a magician. Surely we could find more than three “miracles” to attribute to him?

Perhaps the compromise would be to invent a new word which means, “The autobiography of a magician.” Lacking that word in our vocabulary, “Autohagiography” makes a certain sense.

Mr. Prior has been so kind as to share this artwork from Shader with us:

That's all for this week! I hope to see you all back here very soon when we will have three more authors to introduce you to. Now, why not grab some free previews from our featured artists and see if someone might suit you?

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