Our SPFBOX interviews continue with Tam Chronin, author of Elemental.
SPFBO (the Self-Published Fantasy Blog Off) is a free online contest run by author Mark Lawrence. 300 authors compete across ten judging teams to see who will be the winner! You can read more about the contest here.
INTERVIEW WITH TAM CHRONIN
Tell us a little about yourself and let our readers know which blog you’ve been assigned to for SPFBOX!
I’m Tam Chronin, a figment of the imagination, and I’ve been assigned to Before We Go Blog. I like long walks through still graveyards, flights of fancy, and adventures of the imagination. I’m a queer author and most of my characters tend to be somewhere on the LGBT+ rainbow because of the whole “write what you know” thing.
I started out in the fanfic world almost 25 years ago, where I got a reputation for well written but dark stories, exploring grief and death, forbidden love, trauma, and hope in the darkest of places. I took what I learned from fandom and began quietly putting out my original works in hopes of finding the people who need my particular brand of, “The world sucks, but at least I’m still here so I can make it suck a little less for those around me.”
What inspired you to write this book?
I like to tell the story of how I was chatting with a friend and reading the manga Demon Diary for the bajillionth time, and the change from the first volume to the second kept me questioning where the series would have gone if the author had remained the same. That prompted me to explore some of those dropped threads in my own setting, with my own characters, and I suppose some of that original DNA is still there in the bones of the story.
Deeper than that, though, I wanted to explore the ideas of gender. I paired the soul of a goddess with the body of a young boy to feel out what makes a person one side of the coin or the other. (Spoiler: it’s not a coin.) I’d gone from a childhood of religious indoctrination to being terminally online with my queer friends, and I wanted to sit with and understand my new trans friends more. I wanted to understand my own shaky feelings about gender, power, and expectations a little more.
It all came out as a coming of age story, because I was exploring something new(ish) to me, and because my kiddo had just hit the age where they enjoyed reading. I hoped that when they were old enough they’d sit and enjoy the book and pick up on the empathy I was pouring into the pages. (Turns out, my kid grew up to be not much of a reader, but that’s how the chips fall sometimes. Fate has a sense of humor. At least my step-son loves my books, and they’re both very proud of me, so I’m calling it a win.)
Can you tell us a little bit about your writing or editing process? What’s most exciting to you about writing or editing?
I’m a pantser, or a discovery writer, and my brain never shuts up. I have ideas all the time that are enticing and exciting, but most of them peter out after a few days. I learned early on to set up a mental gauntlet, essentially not letting myself write until the idea has survived 24 hours or more without shutting up. If the story is that persistent, I’ll open up a new document page.
No typing starts until I have a title. Once upon a time I had a pile of scraps of paper, or abandoned documents, that were just bits of scenery or random dialogue. That’s when I made the rule that the idea had to arrive with a title or it wouldn’t get past the blank page stage. If each chapter has a title, I don’t start the chapter until it has a title.
From there, it gets a little less stringent. If a later scene to an established story grabs me I’ll jot it down so I don’t forget it. Mostly, I just tell myself the story until I get to the end.
My editing process is fairly boring compared to that. Again, it has to sit for at least 24 hours without being touched. Then I open up a new document and set it side-by-side with the old, cleaning up loose ends, adding foreshadowing, clarifying ambiguities, that sort of thing. I got in the habit of doing fairly clean rough drafts, so I don’t have a whole lot of “write this boring exposition here” notes to fix. The hardest part is switching modes from storyteller to story consumer and fixing the bits I wouldn’t want to read if I’d bought that book.
I write about subjects like grief, trauma, and other “dark” subjects so that people don’t feel alone when they’re at their lowest point. I write in a fantasy setting so that people feel like they can escape from, take a break from, what they’re dealing with in the real world.
Who or what have been your major literary influences?
I cut my teeth on classic sci fi and fantasy, so I picked up a lot of ideas of story structure from Tolkein, Heinlein, McCaffrey, Piers Anthony, and other giants of the era. I moved on to devour books by V C Andrews and Stephen King. I could list favorites for days, and they’d all have an influence on what I’ve written, but I have to say one of the surprisingly biggest shapers of how I tell stories and build my world is the webcomic Dominic Deegan. I started reading it when it was fairly new, less than a year old, and I’ve been a loyal reader ever since. There are elements in it, particularly death and necromancy, that really shaped my world.
What makes your SPFBOX book unique?
What makes any book unique? Every person has their own unique sets of experiences and ideas, their own questions and conclusions. As soon as someone figures out how to distill the essence of my unique brand of creativity into its base component descriptors, feel free to let me know what you’ve come up with.
Do you have a favourite character from your SPFBOX entry? Tell us about them!
I have to admit, Krecek is my favorite. In the first chapter he comes across as this dark force of evil, preying on a helpless child. He’s this terrible antagonist, the face of all wizards who are hunting down Agrad, this innocent and confused child. He does some terrible things, but beneath it all he’s more terrified and less powerful than he seems. Krecek has been put in a no-win situation that unfolds as the story goes on, and I really started to feel for him by the end of the book. He’s complex and conflicted, which makes him a lot of fun to write.
I’d gone from a childhood of religious indoctrination to being terminally online with my queer friends, and I wanted to sit with and understand my new trans friends more. I wanted to understand my own shaky feelings about gender, power, and expectations a little more.
How does your work fit into (or challenge) its genre?
You’ve got your typical high fantasy setting with elves, dwarves, magic, hints of a rich history, and all the rest. I looked at that and listened to Ursula K Le Guin about how these settings are very white, and how humanity usually isn’t. I didn’t do the blue-eyed hero, I didn’t go for the pale protagonist. I don’t make a big deal of it, either. When I started writing Elemental, most LGBT stories were coming out stories, and I wanted to subvert that by just letting my queer characters be queer without the need to announce it and make a big deal of it or agonize over their identity. I think Elemental fits in with what’s coming out today in queer high fantasy, because all the voices that inspired me to write the way that I did when I did have finally been heard and answered. It makes me wish I hadn’t let my fears hold me back from putting my book out for so long.
What do you hope readers take away from your SPFBOX entry?
What are you currently working on?
I am working on books 5 and 6 in the Godslayers Series, The Madness of Verwyn and Children of Chaos. They’ll wrap up the series that started with Elemental, putting these characters to rest and giving them the ends they deserve.
Elemental
Orphaned at a young age, Agrad is hiding from god-like wizards, and from the gods themselves. His life, and the future of all Kayan, is at stake as he tries to blend in, to live a normal life. But…how can he be normal when it is his destiny to be an elemental, a type of wizard, himself?
Agrad falls in with a wild troublemaker whose desire to remain hidden rivals his own, and an artist with ties to the wizards he is so desperate to avoid. Agrad only seeks peace, but his powers grow every day, and his nightmares promise danger to come. All three have their own secrets which might thrust Agrad into an impossible decision: to either align himself with the wizard responsible for his parents’ death, or to let the goddess of chaos destroy the world.
Purchase Elemental from Amazon.
Tam Chronin is a figment of the imagination, which might be why she lives there often enough to find her main characters and convince them to share their stories.
Before becoming an author she slayed trolls for many years in the wilds of the internet. She was occasionally granted the legendary weapon, Ban Hammer, to aid in this quest. It was a relief to retire from such harrowing adventures, but for a coin and a stiff drink she might recount them over a campfire.
She lives in Phoenix, Arizona, with her family and beloved pets, including a vicious attack tortoise who guards the back yard.
