Age of Rust -
Excerpt 1:
We say that we would do
anything for each other, but in the worst times will they listen to
me? Will they be able to comprehend what is at stake? Will they rise
above themselves and meet the challenge? Can they possibly understand
how wrong this can all go? We call ourselves warriors, but I question
if they know what that title entails.
The howl of a lone wolf found
Tavin’s ears, making them hum with the steady tone despite the
miles between. As if to listen closer, Tavin pulled away from the
girl, peeling his lips off hers and craning his neck to look out the
chapel window. Hauntingly, the howling stopped, slipping off at the
end of its note, but Tavin kept his gaze beyond the stone walls.
Something about the timbre had snapped him to attention. Outside the
night was cool and still, the moon and its light had disappeared
behind the mountains around the town and on the horizon was the hint
of sunrise.
“Do you not like wolves?”
asked the girl. “Do they scare you? I think they are beautiful
creatures. Lovely, when you get past the teeth.”
Tavin turned to her again. She
was soft in the gentle light of night, a thin thing who was admirably
young and energetic.
“No, I’m not afraid of
wolves.”
He flashed her a reassuring
smile. It was his smile that people were always drawn to. They could
not help but smile back. He touched the woman on the jaw and rubbed
the same place she had been rubbing his beard moments earlier. Their
eyes locked for a lingering, peaceful moment.
Feeling the hardness of the
ground against his knees, Tavin stood to relieve it. He covered her
kindly with the blanket they had borrowed from the chapel offices,
and then walked to the window of their steeple hideaway. Tavin had
looked forward to sneaking up here with a woman for the past week,
but now something chewed at his stomach.
“Do you even remember my name?”
she asked with charming accusation.
Tavin could feel the arrogance in
his automatic grin.
“Of course, Marlies. Marlies,
Marlies, Marlies,” he echoed.
“I’m impressed, all you
soldiers tend not to care about the details.”
“Well I’m not most soldiers,”
Tavin said, his eyes, now adjusted to the moonlight, on the
flickering lights in the distance. He propped his elbows on the cold
hard surface and tried to look closer. Campfires, he assumed, but
they looked different. The drift of chilled air through the window
had an anxious scent.
“I thought as much when I first saw
you in the tavern. You have such serious eyes for how you danced
around.” She made more room beneath the blanket again and adjusted
herself. “Here, I’m cold, get under the blanket. What interests
you so much about the window anyway? Are you trying to see the
Western camps?”
Tavin paused, then turned and
rejoined her as she requested. It was much warmer beneath the blanket
and she was much softer than the stone walls.
“Perhaps I was,” he said,
“there are three thousand of them out there in the fields. We
should be able to see them from up here. But it’s still too dark.”
“Three thousand? Really?” she
asked with a tone of false surprise. “My father was saying that
there are only four hundred of you here to guard the town. Is that
true?”
“Yes, it's true,” Tavin
sighed. “I did not think it a point of discussion.”
“Don’t be naïve.” She hit
his shoulder. “It is the only point of discussion these days. Why
do you think they haven’t attacked yet? It makes me so nervous, the
way they sit out there and burn their fires and ride their horses
close to the walls and shoot arrows at the blockhouses.”
Tavin sighed again. The horizon
was a bright purple now but there would be another hour or two until
the sun rose.
“Well,
they don't exactly know how many of us there are, so… we'll let
them take their time. At least until reinforcements can get here. As
soon as that happens my friends and I can finally rotate to the
fortress.”
“It figures. I didn’t think
this was going to last long,” she replied. “You and I, I mean;
though the war as well. I suppose I never thought either would drag
on like it has.”
“Drag?”
“No offense, the war drags,
whereas you have been a welcome surprise.”
“Well the reinforcements still
haven’t come. And there’s been no word to suggest they are coming
soon. You might have to put up with me a little longer yet.”
But there was a chewing at his
stomach that made Tavin feel the beginnings of terror. The way his
words reverberated off the stone walls of the chapel pinnacle, cold
and hollow, he could feel that they were wrong. He stirred beneath
the blanket again, agitated.
“What would happen if the West
takes the town? What would happen to us? Am I just another notch on
your scabbard? I think that we could still be happy no matter who is
in charge.”
Tavin glanced to where his
swords lay propped against the wall. For a second, he regretted
having ever removed them. They were a defensive comfort in times
where comforts were few.
THAD’S ANSWERS
Where did you come up with the names in the story?
-This world is supposed to feel like a
place out of time, so I took a bunch of different world cultures and
threw all the names in together. You’ll see names ranging from
Greek to African to modern American.
What makes a good story?
-It’s a bit of a cliche, but a good story should create an
emotional response. More specifically I think there’s a bit of a
contract between a writer and their audience. The audience agrees to
follow the writer on their journey. They invest themselves into the
storyline and the characters, and they begin to form expectations. In
exchange the writer should “pay off” those expectations to at
least some degree. Subversion can also be a great tool in modern
stories, but there always needs to be some reward for the audience’s
time and attention.
Do you try more to be original or to deliver to readers what they
want?
-This ties in well with my previous answer. There has to be a
balance between delivering original ideas (which often means
subverting audience expectations) and giving readers what they crave.
Readers don’t want to be able to predict everything that will
happen in a story, but they also don’t want their time wasted. I
struggle with threading this needle at times, but here’s an
extremely simple example. Let’s say that a story has a mailman for
a main character. One of his struggles is that every day he is
worried about being attacked by a dog. If you don’t eventually pay
off that plot thread, by having him confront a dog, your readers will
be disappointed, but at the same time you can be original about it by
having the interaction with the dog go completely against what the
audience is anticipating.
What is your writing process? For instance, do you do an outline
first? Do you do the chapters first? What are common traps for
aspiring writers?
-A consistent writing process is absolutely critical when working
with a partner. We have always tried to get a 30,000 foot view of a
story first. Where do the characters begin and most importantly where
do they end up? Then we like to zoom in a bit and go through the
events chapter by chapter and figure out what the main story beats
will look like. Finally, after we agree on how everything will play
out, we can start working through the actual writing. We like to
focus on the main action and the dialogue first, and then work on
prose second. The first draft will resemble a fleshed out screenplay
and the second draft will finally take the shape of a novel, and then
from there comes the back and forth of editing.
A common trap would probably be the resistance to plan out their
stories. It can seem tedious and it's so tempting to just get right
into the story, but often writers will write themselves into a
corner, and end up creating more work for themselves.
Do the characters all come to you at the same time or do some of them
come to you as you write?
-I find that most of the characters will reveal themselves during
the initial storyboarding. A few more will come along later, but it's
rare that I am writing the meat of the story and discover a new
character that should inhabit a scene. That could be a flaw in my
writing where I might have tunnel vision and not want to stray from
my initial plan, but other than a few minor inclusions it hasn’t
really occurred to me that I was missing a key character.
More often than not I have included too many characters. As a matter
of fact, while writing the first book, we deleted an entire villain
from the first half of the book because the character was a
redundancy.
What kind of research do you do before you begin writing a book?
-For Age of Rust I had to do a considerable amount of
research on the American landscape, and geography. The story’s
technology is horse and buggy and the characters move around a lot so
understanding distance is critical. I want to make sure that the time
it takes for characters to traverse from point A to point B is at
least plausible. I would also have to take into account terrain,
obstacles, and the time of year. Would there be snow on the ground in
this part of the country? What time is sundown in March? These
elements could be tedious to collect but it’s amazing what little
details will pull a reader out of a story.
What is your favorite part of this book and why?
-I don’t want to spoil anything so I will just say that my
favorite part of the second book is that we didn’t end the saga
after two books. We originally wrote a complete end to the series
after this latest book, and felt like we’d run out of ideas. I had
always envisioned at least a trilogy so I was fairly disappointed,
but thought it was a solid ending. Eventually inspiration struck and
we formed a third story that both expanded on the first two books and
brought the story to a much stronger and more satisfying conclusion.
We ended up rewriting the last quarter of book two into the story we
have today and we couldn’t be more proud.
Tell us about your main characters- what makes them tick?
-The one consistent element with our main characters is that they’re
young people who are completely over their heads. They’re all part
of this generation that had its life upended by war. No matter who
they are, danger is lurking somewhere. Sometimes the danger is
frantic and right in front of them. Sometimes danger is something
they’re heading towards, or running away from. Sometimes the danger
is far away on the horizon but they know it’s only a matter of
time. I enjoy exploring how different people react to these
pressures. Some people collapse, some people rise to the occasion.
This is a collection of characters who feel the wolf at the door
almost every moment of their life and it makes for a harrowing
existence.
The fun thing about these characters is that the quiet moments,
those rare times that the wolf is nowhere to be seen, are beautiful
scenes to write.
What book do you think everyone should read?
-And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie. It is the perfect
mystery novel from the perfect mystery writer. Forgive me if I spoil
anything (though it was published in 1939 so I think the statute of
limitations is up). The way she structured the events made it
virtually impossible to solve the crimes, and at the end of the book
you are left guessing who could have been the murderer. She actually
had to add an epilogue from the perspective of the killer, confessing
their crimes, for the audience to have any clue what really happened.
I think a huge struggle when constructing a mystery is telegraphing
your moves to the audience, and she never made that mistake. Riveting
novel.
Do you have a favorite movie?
--Yes, Blade Runner. I first watched it in High School and my love
for the film has only deepened with time. Blade Runner is a full
sensory experience. The visual elements are astounding and the sound
track basically invented a genre, but the ideas it presents are
simply profound. The idea that an android, designed to kill and given
no emotions, could discover its own humanity in the face of
annihilation is staggering. The movie blurs the lines between hero
and villain better than any other story I’ve ever watched/read. I
cannot recommend the movie enough.
If you could tell your younger writing self anything, what would it
be?
-I would tell my younger self that comparison is the enemy of joy.
Obviously many things that I’ve written have not worked as a story,
or they were missing critical elements. They could never measure up
to better works but they still had value. I practiced, I made
mistakes, and I got a tiny bit better as a storyteller. No writer
should ever feel ashamed of their work.
How long on average does it take you to write a book?
-We’re currently at about 9 months or so to go from the storyboard
to completed work. I don’t know whether we should speed that up or
draw it out, but the timeline seems to be fairly consistent.
How long have you been writing?
-I’ve been writing since I was 11. I started out writing Star Wars
fan fiction. Yes, you read that correctly.
Do you prefer to write in silence or with noise? Why?
-I am easily distracted, so silence is a must, but I also enjoy
sounding my dialogue out at times, and music or TV can interfere.
That said, some nature sounds in the background can be a plus.
What did you enjoy most about writing this book?
-This series has given me an opportunity that not all writers get.
It’s been a chance to craft a book series with my best friend.
Every idea, story beat, character, has to be agreed upon, and has
made us better writers than we would have been on our own. There were
many three or four hour phone calls spent discussing chapters, or
trying to figure out how to make certain plot points work. The
feeling of finally getting past a hurdle never gets old. Those
conversations are some of my favorite memories, and I will cherish
them the rest of my life. I don’t necessarily think it would work
for everyone, but I’m glad we’ve had this opportunity.
If you knew you'd die tomorrow, how would you spend your last day?
-Just one day? Well, traveling the world is out so I would try and
talk to as many family and friends as I possibly could. I would
apologize that I didn’t spend more time with them, tell them my
favorite thing about them, and tell them I love them. Then I’d
spend the last part of the day with the love of my life and make sure
she knew how much she made my life better.
What kind of world ruler would you be?
-I would try to be the kind of ruler that can admit what I don’t
know (There is quite a lot). I would try to bring experts together
and listen to people. In the words of Nelson Mandela, leaders talk
last.
Where were you born/grew up at?
-I was born in Butler Pa and lived in a little town called
Saxonburg. My father was a Lutheran minister and my mother raised
children and eventually became a social worker. Butler was a tiny
farm community 30 miles north of Pittsburgh. I lived there until I
was 8 and then we moved to Erie Pa by the Great Lakes. I lived there
until I was 14 and then we moved to central PA in a town called York.
All in all I’ve lived in 7 places around Pennsylvania and Delaware.
Pennsylvania is, oddly, one of the most unique states in the country.
Not because of the way that it looks but just that it doesn’t fit
into any one specific region. It’s not in New England, it’s not
on the coast, it’s not in the Midwest, it’s not in the south.
It’s entirely its own thing.
