Hi Edward! Thank you for joining me today! Would you kindly introduce yourself?
Sure! I was born in Silver City, NM, and moved with my family to Saskatchewan from Tulia, TX, when I was eight years old. I grew up on the campus of Western Christian College (WCC), where my Dad taught. The school was located in former World War II air force buildings at the airport about four miles outside the small city of Weyburn, where I attended elementary school and junior high before attending WCC for high school.
I studied journalism at Harding University in Searcy, AR, then began my career as a newspaper reporter/photographer for my hometown newspaper, the weekly Weyburn Review, eventually becoming news editor. I moved to Saskatchewan’s capital city of Regina in 1988 as communications officer of the then-fledgling Saskatchewan Science Centre, and have lived there ever since.
Since taking the plunge into freelancing, I’ve written more than sixty books (I’ve lost count) of science fiction, fantasy, and non-fiction for all ages. I’ve won a few awards along the way, such as the 2009 Aurora Award for best Canadian science fiction novel (for Marseguro, published by DAW Books). In addition to writing, I’m an actor and singer, who has performed in numerous musicals, plays, and even operas around Saskatchewan, both professionally and just for fun. I’m married to an engineer (good career move!), Margaret Anne Hodges, P.Eng., past president of the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Saskatchewan. We have a teenaged daughter, Alice, and a black Siberian cat, Shadowpaw.
As you just noted, you write in multiple genres such as fantasy, science fiction, and non-fiction. Do you have a favorite or does it depend on mood or what genre of book you’ve just finished working on?
It’s interesting—I always thought of myself as a science fiction writer, and still do, but the truth is I’ve probably written more fantasy than science fiction. Between the two, I don’t have a favorite. Which I write depends on which idea I’ve found a publisher for! In my file of story ideas, I have a mixture of both. And to be honest, my upcoming novel, Worldshaper, which comes out in September and will launch a new series for DAW Books called Worldshapers, is technically science fiction but effectively a portal fantasy, because the main character will travel from world to world through literal Portals (complete with capitalization!). I can’t choose between science fiction and fantasy, but I definitely prefer writing fiction to non-fiction. The latter has paid much better over the years, but given my druthers, I’d write fiction full-time.
Do you write one novel at a time or do you work on multiple books at once?
I’ll usually work on a single novel at a time, but I’m often working on multiple books at a time because it’s rare I can work solely on fiction without also working on one or more nonfiction projects concurrently.
While we’re on that subject, what’s your writing process (do you have any rituals or special places you work in, etc…)?
When writing fiction, I rarely work at my desk in my home office. Most of my first drafts have been written in coffee shops or pubs. Background noise doesn’t bother me, so long as it’s a general wash of sound and not a conversation I can overhear in detail. (Although such conversations have their own eavesdropping appeal: you can overhear the most amazing things in coffee shops.) If I am fortunate enough to be working just on fiction, I’ll probably write in two sessions of two or two and a half hours at a time, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. But I really don’t have any set rituals. Give me my laptop and a place to sit, and I can write.
How do you balance writing in multiple genres in terms of the writing itself but also promotion and marketing?
Badly, I suspect. The nonfiction I don’t have to do much promotion for: for the most part, it’s been work for hire, so my job is just to write and then everything else is the purview of the publisher or client. On the promotion and marketing side, I’m lucky to have recently signed on with Mickey Mikkelson of Creative Edge: he’s upped the number of print, radio, and video interviews I’ve done considerably. Otherwise, I’ve pretty much been limited to Tweeting and Facebooking and blogging.
One marketing challenge has been that I’ve written under three names for DAW Books: my own, author of Marseguro, Terra Insegura (collectively known as The Helix War), The Cityborn, and the upcoming Worldshaper; Lee Arthur Chane, author of the stand-alone fantasy novel Magebane, and E.C. Blake, author of the Masks of Aygrima fantasy trilogy. Each of them has a website and a Twitter account, and trying to keep all of that up has been challenging. (Although, rather to my relief, Lee Arthur Chane is kind of quiescent, since he only wrote the one book.)
How many books do you publish a year?
On average, a novel a year and two to three non-fiction books. Some years I’ve had more novels than that; I had four one year. This year I’ve already had two new non-fiction books published, plus two revised editions of earlier books. By the end of the year I know I’ll have at least two more non-fiction books published; possibly more. I’ve got a paperback release of a book that came out last year coming out; I’ll have my new novel for DAW coming out in the fall, and I’ve even got a poetry book coming out. I’ve also got a collection of short stories pretty much ready to go, but I’m still debating the best way to publish it.
Wow! That’s incredible! I don’t know how you’ve managed to accomplish so much.
What was your path to publication?
It depends on what you mean by publication. My first published work was in Cat Fancy magazine’s “Young Author’s Open” section when I was thirteen. My first published work as an adult was my writing for the Weyburn Review. My first published fiction was a short story called “The Storm,” an adventure about two boys caught in a blizzard, for Western People, the magazine supplement of the Western Produceragricultural newspaper. My first published book was Using Microsoft Publisher for Windows 95. My first published novel was Soulworm, published by a small publisher. So in a way, I didn’t have a single path to publication, except that I wrote (and still write) constantly.
That said, the way I got my New York publisher, DAW Books, is unique.
I wrote a science fiction book called Lost in Translation, which was published by Five Star, a publisher that catered only to libraries: books came out in library bindings, and libraries subscribed, so they might receive, say, two westerns, two romance novels, and two science fiction novels a month.
My editor at Five Star was John Helfers, and one morning, out of the blue, he called me and said that his boss, Martin H. Greenberg, wanted to speak to me. Greenberg packaged the science fiction titles brought out under the Five Star line. I’d never spoken to him before, but he came on the line and told me that DAW Books (with whom he had a long relationship, editing many anthologies for them) had contacted him because, in his words, they had a “hole” in their publishing schedule, and wanted to see if any of his Five Star titles might fill that hole. They’d reviewed several of his titles and picked mine, Lost in Translation, to bring out in mass-market paperback. With a contract in hand, I obtained my agent, Ethan Ellenberg, and just like that, I was a DAW author.
What I hadn’t done yet was sell them a book myself, though, so the next task was to come up with a proposal for my second novel from DAW Books. For that, I turned to a short story I had written (but never submitted for publication) at the Writing With Style science-fiction writing workshop at the Banff Centre I had recently attended, which had been taught by the great Canadian science-fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer. The short story had originated with a morning exercise Rob had given us, to come up with the opening line for a story. Mine began, “Emily streaked through the phosphorescent sea…” and ended with “…the water in her gills smelled of blood.”
That became the short story “Sins of the Fathers,” which in turn became the proposal for Marseguro, my second book with DAW, and the one that won the Aurora Award for Best Canadian Long-Form Work in English in 2009, presented at the World Science Fiction convention in Montreal. Sheila Gilbert and Betsy Wollheim, co-publishers and editors of DAW Books (Sheila is my editor) were there. (Since then, both have gone on to win Hugo Awards for Best Professional Editor, long-form.) It was an auspicious beginning to my years with DAW, and as of Worldshaper, I’ll have published nine novels there.
Who are your favorite authors to read and what genres do you find yourself particularly drawn to?
I love classic science fiction by authors like Robert A. Heinlein (of course; as it happens, my mother and he were born in the same small Missouri town, Butler), Andre Norton, Isaac Asimov, Robert Silverberg, and Arthur C. Clarke, and modern science fiction by David Weber, Robert J. Sawyer, and others, including YA author Patrick Ness. I also love fantasy, by classic authors like Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, and also modern writers like Scott Lynch, Patrick Rothfuss, Naomi Novik, Terry Pratchett, George R.R. Martin, J.K. Rowling…the list goes on and on. Recently I’ve read quite a bit of non-fiction, including Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton and a book about Icelandic volcanoes. Because why not?
Would you tell us about your newest fiction release?
I’ll tell you about two!
The most recent release is the audiobook version of my young adult fantasy novel Song of the Sword, published in print by Coteau Books here in Regina. It’s the first book in the five-book Shards of Excalibur series, in which Ariane Forsythe, a teenaged girl from Regina, discovers she is heir to the power of the Lady of the Lake of Arthurian legend. She and her slightly younger male friend Wally Knight have to scour the world for the scattered pieces of Arthur’s sword Excalibur, attempting to retrieve them before the evil Merlin, in his modern-day guise as computer magnate Rex Major, can do so: he intends nothing less than to re-forge the sword, seize control of Earth, and then use Earth’s military might to attack and conquer his own realm of Faerie.
The books magically transport my young protagonists all over the world, from a diamond mine in the Northwest Territories (in Song of the Sword) to southern France (Twist of the Blade), New Zealand (Lake in the Clouds), the Caribbean (Cave Beneath the Sea), and Scotland (Door into Faerie), but they always come back to Saskatchewan. Elizabeth Klett (www.elizabethklettaudio.com) has done a wonderful job of narration (not surprising, since she has something like 100 audiobooks under her belt), and will be narrating all of the books in the series as the year progresses.
I loved writing the Shards of Excalibur series, partly because they allowed me to indulge my sense of humor (something that also comes to the fore in my upcoming novel Worldshaper). My 16-year-old daughter would be the first to agree that young Wally, the boy who accompanies Ariane, on her quest, is just me in geeky-teenager guise.
My other recent release is The Cityborn, a stand-alone science fiction novel from DAW Books. It came out in hardcover and ebook formats last summer, and the mass-market paperback will be out in August.
The Cityborn is set in a world where the City, a massive corroding tower of metal, squats over a huge Canyon and has done so for so long it has filled the Canyon with rubbish and refuse. The City is ruled by a semi-mythical Captain but is managed by a ruthless First Officer and assorted Crew, who live in luxury on the upper tiers. Things get progressively worse the lower you go in the City, until you enter the Middens, the garbage heap below the City, where the lowest of the low, exiles and outcasts, scrabble for survival.
Alania, ward of a wealth Crew member, has lived a luxurious life as a virtual prisoner, a bird in a gilded cage. But one day a violent attack on the tier where she lives sends her fleeing in terror, only to end up literally dropping into the Middens—practically into the lap of Danyl, a boy who has grown up in the rubbish, scavenging to survive and wanting only to gain access to the City to maybe find a better life.
The moment they are thrown together they find themselves in danger, pursued, for no reason they can comprehend, by the Provosts who keep order in the City for the Crew. They must flee down the Canyon and eventually into the Heartland that surrounds it, in a desperate attempt to understand why they are being hunted…and the truths they uncover will determine, not only their own fates, but the fates of the City, the Heartland, and everyone who lives there.
You are a busy guy! How do you fit it all in and what keeps you motivated?
It’s just…what I do. I’ve been writing since I was a young teenager, and I honestly can’t imagine stopping. I’m motivated, and always have been, by a desire to tell stories that readers will enjoy as much I enjoyed the stories by the authors whose work I’ve loved over the years. I enjoy exploring my own mind and seeing where my thoughts and imagination take me. On the non-fiction side, I’m motivated by the desire to never stop learning. And with each book, I’m motivated by the desire to do something new—and, if I’m lucky, something better—than the last book I wrote.
Thank you so much for your time, Edward!
If you’d like to know more about Edward you can find him here:
Website: www.edwardwillett.com
E.C. Blake Website: www.ecblake.com
Shards of Excalibur Website: www.shardsofexcalibur.com
Twitter: @ewillett
Facebook: www.facebook.com/edward.willett/
Amazon Author’s Page: www.amazon.com/Edward-Willett/e/B001IR1LL6