Do you recall how your interest in writing began?
Boredom and Role Playing Games (RPG), as I recall. When I was in high school, I started running various role-playing games for my friends. I enjoyed making up the plotlines for the games (the twists, the turns, the Final Confrontation with the Evil Overlord, etc.) more than I enjoyed the mechanics of dice and numbers and so forth. Eventually I started writing the stories down, and went from there.
Can you tell us a little more about the RPGs? Was that online?
It was the old-fashioned face-to-face. It was basically homegrown; I made up the plots and systems and statistics and whatnot. Of course, I’d often ignore the systems, and change the rules to get the result I desired. They often ended with the player characters slaughtering each other in fits of pique.
Several of my characters, like Mazael in Demonsouled, Raelum in Black Paladin, and Marugon the Warlock in Worlds to Conquer first originated in my RPGs, though they’ve undergone some rather serious evolution since then.
Do you still have an interest in RPGs or online video games?
Yeah. Though I hardly ever have time to play anymore. I haven’t done a paper-and-pen RPG for almost six years. I do play computer games on occasion. I bought Wizardry 8 a year and a half ago, and still haven’t finished it.
What are your current projects?
Right now I’m proofreading/editing Black Paladin, another sword-and-sorcery (or, “action fantasy”, if you will) novel, and hope to begin trying to sell it by August. In a few months, I should have to do the edits for Worlds to Conquer, my urban-fantasy novel from Mundania Press that should be available sometime in 2006.
I’m also working on a couple of short story projects I hope to sell in the coming months.
Tell us a little bit about the premise of Worlds to Conquer.
Worlds to Conquer is mostly about its villains. The first villain is Marugon, the last of the Warlocks, who figures out how to go from his world to Earth. On Earth, he links up with Thomas Wycliffe, a directionless graduate student, and strikes a bargain with him. Wycliffe will provide Marugon with guns and bombs, and Marugon will teach Wycliffe black magic.
Marugon goes back to his world and slaughters the opposition, who are only armed with swords and lances and bows. Wycliffe uses the black magic to become a powerful and influential Senator with presidential ambitions.
Article comments