Fantastic Metropolis

Gabe Chouinard: So, I’ve just finished reading Blade of Tyshalle... and to be perfectly honest, I feel like I’ve just spent a week in Tijuana sampling every bottle of tequila I could find. That’s a compliment.

Matthew Woodring Stover: Thanks. I’ll take it as one. Now just imagine how I felt when I finished writing the book.

When Joseph Conrad finished Nostromo, he sent a telegram to a friend saying “I feel I ought to be congratulated, as one who has recovered from a long and debilitating illness.” When I finished Blade of Tyshalle, the email I sent to my family and friends read “DONE, BY CHRIST! Don’t bother calling for the next two or three weeks. I’ll be asleep.”

Gabe Chouinard: The first word that comes to mind in describing Blade of Tyshalle is, for me, relentless. It’s an intense storyline, which most authors would be tempted to lighten up with some humor, or even a sugary romance. You’ve avoided those things… what kept you from lightening things up?

Matthew Woodring Stover: What, you didn’t think it was funny?

Maybe I should have thrown in an absent-minded wizard, or a wisecracking dragon… Too often, comic relief is an author’s way of telegraphing to the audience, “Hey, just kidding. It’s only a show, folks.”

Well, guess what? I’m not kidding.

Which is not to say there are no smiles in the book—they’re just the hard kind, the ones people share when they’re fighting for their lives. Hesse put it well in Steppenwolf: “All humor is gallows humor, and it is on the gallows that we are constrained to learn it.”

Gabe Chouinard: Don’t get me wrong… I think that’s a strength! I’ve never been one for sugary romances or absent-minded wizards… but then, that isn’t the audience you write for. Just out of curiosity, DO you have a specific audience in mind when you write?

Matthew Woodring Stover: Yes, in fact, I do.

Me.

I’m just that arrogant, I guess. I am my own ideal audience. I’ve said it before: I write the kind of books I like to read. If lots of other people were writing books like mine, I wouldn’t bother; I’d just read theirs. Reading is a lot less work.

So, yeah. When I start to wander in a story—I fall into that “can’t see the forest for the trees” trap pretty regularly—the way I find my way back is to ask myself what would work for me as a reader. What would I be itching for? Then I try to find a way to scratch that itch in a way that’s satisfying not only viscerally, but emotionally and intellectually—and would leave me itching for more.

Gabe Chouinard: Almost everyone in the novel suffers. A lot. When things seem at their worst… they get even rougher.

Matthew Woodring Stover: Kind of like real life. But—also like real life—there is the occasional ray of sunshine. Just not always coming from the direction you expect. Part of surviving is learning to take your happiness where you find it.