Author Interview: Erik Buchanan
By Angela Roberts
Nov. 3, 2010
Erik Buchanan is the author of two fantasy novels from Canadian publisher, Dragon Moon Press, Small Magics (2007), and Cold Magics (2010). The Gloaming's managing editor, Angela Roberts, met up with the author last October at Montreal scifi convention, Con-cept, to talk about writing, reading, and his works.
Angela: Was Small Magics your first professional sale?
Erik Buchanan: It was. It took a long time to write, because it’s your first book, and when you’re writing your first book, it takes longer to write than all the others and then selling it takes longer than all the others.
A: How long did it take to get sold?
E: The time I started writing it to the time I sold it was seven years. And that was because I was working full-time, I had a job. I’m also an actor, so I was working part-time on that and then part-time on writing so it took me about three years to write the actual book. And then the actual sale was a very slow process because I’m un-agented, and so it’s sending it to publisher after publisher and seeing who wants it. And fair enough to the publishers, they don’t want you sending out your manuscript to everyone at once…
A: No simultaneous submissions.
E: Exactly. Everyone’s favourite phrase. Except for those who have to do the postage. And in my day, when I started, it was postage. The whole move to email submissions really only happened in the last two or three years. There are a lot of houses, so you send out the packages, and drop them a polite email afterwards saying, “It’s been six months and I haven’t heard anything from you; as this is how long you say your submissions take, I’m going to submit it to another company, so you know”. And that way, you’re being polite to them, and at the same time you’re taking care of your needs which are to keep the process going. And then I sort of worked my way down from Tor, I did all the major ones, and then over to Canada’s small presses. And Dragon Moon Press, which is a small royalty-paying press, and I always say royalty-paying because it’s an actual small press; it’s not me paying for the books but them recognizing good authors and bringing their works to the public. And so they liked my book, they got me an editor, and we started working together, and out came Small Magics.
A: Do you have a favourite genre to write? To read?
E: I like fantasy, but I don’t have a specific genre that I write. Which can be problematic. I know of one author who writes under three different names because she writes in three different genres.
A: For marketing.
E: Yeah, exactly. I like writing fantasy; I like the examination of the human experience and the chance to play with mythical elements. And magical elements in a way that you don’t get to in normal fiction. I like historical fiction, something about the past fascinates me because it draws us a picture of how we got to here, and the joy of historical fiction is being able to look at the past and ask, what if this one thing were different? What if this one event didn’t occur? Or this one thing was slightly changed? What happens if, during this major world event that we know about, something minor but very important was occurring? So that’s where historical fiction becomes fascinating to read.
In terms of genres I read, I don’t really have a favourite. I read science fiction, fantasy, murder mysteries, horror; I read literary fiction, and I read a lot of non-fiction, tons of books on history, on archaeology, on philosophy, on the way the human brain works, on chaos physics, everything, because all of that informs the writing.
A: Do you have any favourite authors? If you were writing your grant application right now, and you were asked to list your influences, have you got any?
E: Neil Gaiman, Barbara Hambly, Tonya Huff, C.J. Cherryh sort of. Earlier influences would have been Heinlein, Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Tolkien (of course, because you can’t write fantasy unless you’ve read Tolkien; even if you don’t like Tolkien-type fantasy, you need to read it so you know you’re not writing it.) But yeah, there’re a lot of them. Right now, Neil Gaiman is my personal favourite. I want to be him when I grow up.
A: Don’t we all? At least have his level of fame…
E: I don’t want his level of fame; I want his creativity.
A: You don’t want that giant line at Worldcon that he had?
E: Well, the amazing thing is; I read recently on Neil Gaiman’s blog about it. He charges a very large sum of money for every appearance, and he explains why. It’s not because he wants a large amount of money; he doesn’t need it, he does very well for himself. He does it because he’s asked to come to so many events and that’s not what he’s paid to do. What he’s paid to do is to write. I want to be paid to write. I want to have the level of creativity and brilliance that this man has; if you’ve read American Gods, if you’ve read Anansi Boys, if you’ve read Coraline, there is just something magical about the way he expresses the human experience that completely brings you and traps you and fills you with those wonderful, horrific, brilliant worlds that he creates. And so when I say that I want to be Neil Gaiman when I grow up, I want to have that level of creativity. The lineups are nice, the money is nice, and it’s good to be known. Lord knows I’d like to be a New York Times bestseller; but let’s face it, who doesn’t? But the genius behind his work, why he’s my current favourite, is just stunning.
A: All right, this is the “Big Canadian Writer” question…
E: More snow.
A: (Laughs) Yes, more snow. Do you find there’s anything different about being a Canadian writer in genre fiction or in any fiction? Do you ever feel pressure, even writing speculative fiction, to deal with that sort of Canadian Pressure?
E: I really don’t feel the Canadian Pressure, you know, this must be Canadian fiction, with a Canadian element, Oh Canada… No. I don’t feel that because that gets in the way of a good story. I was on a fascinating panel with Ed Greenwood and a lot of other people talking about the different ways of writing, and some people create a world and write the story to it. I write a story and create the world around it. And so, if the novel takes place in Toronto, or in the imaginary city of Hawksmouth, or happens to take place in a little town that I don’t have a name for, whether a Canadian town or whatever, I don’t feel pressure to be the Canadian Writer. What I do find is that being Canadian hugely influences my writing. My second book, Cold Magics, which came out this April and has been very well received, is about a war that’s taking place, and our hero is called up to try and help with it, in the middle of winter. In a very cold, flat area of the country. And if you read it, and you know about Canada, what you see there is southern Saskatchewan where I grew up in the winter; where it’s cold, it’s bitterly cold, and it’s flat, and there’s snow but not a lot of it, and it skims over the earth, and the winds when they pick up and howl, they can take your skin off with the cold and the blowing snow. And so all of those things about being Canadian, I grew up there, I grew up in Nova Scotia, I spent part of my life in Alberta, I spent part of my life in Toronto; it’s given me a richness of experience that living in one place wouldn’t and the real different view of what it is to be a person living in an area and how much the elements of an area affect a person, rather than say one person who lives in one place all their life, whether they’re Canadian or American or Australian or New Zealander or Zimbabwean, or whatever. So the joy of living in a country that’s this big is that you get to experience all sorts of different places, all sorts of different ways of living, all different sorts of people, without ever actually leaving home.
A: How much world-building did you do for Small Magics? I’m at Chapter Four or Five right now, and I can kind of see the historical basis… You’re doing a secondary-world setting, right?
E: Yes.
A: I see the historical basis you’re working from, even if you didn’t think about it when you were writing. How much did you think about world-building?
E: As I said before, I tend to write the world to the story, not the story to the world, but I did have a place in mind, and a time in mind. I’m also a fight director; my favourite weapons are the rapier and dagger. I love the elegance of it, the lines of it, and the sheer brutality and ruthlessness of it. And so that’s a Renaissance weapon; that’s something that came in with the rise and the empowerment of the middle and merchant classes in the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries where we found civilians carrying swords just for the fun of it rather than just to get into a fight. So the period became Renaissance. I left out the gunpowder because guns are kind of boring. And it detracts from the sword-fighting if someone shoots someone at the beginning. Can’t have as much fun as with a blade. I picked a semi-Irish milieu. If you look at it, listen to the way they talk, just add a bit of a lilt, it could almost be Newfoundland or perhaps Nova Scotia where I grew up part of my life, so you can see the influence there. I wanted very specific things in it; I wanted the stone circles because they’re fascinating, but I didn’t want the giant Stonehenge things that are sort of the leftovers of a very ancient civilization, so they’re part of the landscape. I wanted to see a rising working middle class. I wanted to see a sort of Northern temperate zone forest so that we could have the different trees. So those all came into it, but those all were nebulous things in my head as I wrote it, and more of them got added or taken away in the editing process because first of all, it’s the story of a young man who discovers magic in a world where no one believes in it except for one person who’s willing to kill to possess it all. So that’s the story. And so, it’s like, what is this world like? When was there magic? Why doesn’t it exist? Who are these Four Gods that I created that were part of it and why did the Church take over? But a lot of that isn’t important to the story. It’s important to my understanding of the story, but it’s not something that in the midst of the forest, I’ll say, “By the way, let me tell you about the history of the Four Gods.”
A: So, you finished Cold Magics; you’re selling that now. What are you working on now?
E: About five different things. Right now, I’m editing a book that I wrote in between Small Magics and Cold Magics. That book, The King Below, got set aside to finish Cold Magics. And then I moved. And so now that those things are done, I’m going back to The King Below and I’m beginning the editing process on that. I mentioned historical fiction before. I have a really great idea for an historical fiction novel that I think would be really cool and I’m not telling you what it is. The reason for that is that I find when I tell people, the idea begins to fade in my head. So I’m keeping it to myself; it should be really neat and I’m going to write that as well. And, of course, I have to do a third book in the Magics series because if you only do two, all of the other fantasy writers make fun of you for not writing a trilogy.
A: It's a duology.
E: A duology. Yeah, it’s like, couldn’t think of a third book, could you? And then, there is also a young adult one that is just sort of percolating in my head, it hasn’t completely formed itself. So those are the major projects I’m working on; in order, it’s going to be The King Below first because it’s already written so I just have to edit it. The problem with it is that it’s historical fantasy and the difference between world-building in pure fantasy and world-building in historical fantasy is that when you world-build in pure fantasy, all you have to be is consistent. In historical fantasy, you have to be accurate. So there’s going to be a lot of research making sure that the clothes are right, the hair is right, the weapons are right, the houses are right, the land is right, the timing is right, the behavior of individuals is right, the ranking and file and all that. It’s a really neat project because I get to spend time reading and studying books on history, which I love, so it’s very exciting.
Links:
Click here to read a short review of Buchanan's novel, Small Magics.