Our SPFBOX interviews continue with Astor Y. Teller, author of Them Old Bones.
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 ASTOR Y. TELLER
Tell us a little about yourself and let our readers know which blog you’ve been assigned to for SPFBOX!
I’m a Norwegian author/artist gone rogue (swapped to writing in English after a quarter of a century’s futile efforts to publish in Norwegian and I’m painting (contemporary?) fantasy art which is you are not supposed to do after completing a Master in Fine Arts, but to my defence I’ve been a gamemaster in TTRPG since my teens) and I’m assigned to Before We Go Blog
What inspired you to write this book?
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 discovery writer who feels more like a witness to the story unfolding than having any kind of mastery over it, so I write non-stop for a week or two to churn out the first draft (it’s like binging a series that is run in your head). The interesting thing is that I’m more in a humorous mood when writing in English compared to Norwegian.
When I do editing, I’m doing my best to keep the characters as they are. After all, this is their story, not mine, and then I leave the pruning to my editors. It’s also interesting to hear what my editors think as they see perspectives of the story I haven’t thought about (but my subconscious obviously has).
“I have written a couple of books in other series and there is one now bursting in my head, but if I tell you what that is, it will [be] instant death.”
Who or what have been your major literary influences?
What makes your SPFBOX book unique?
Do you have a favourite character from your SPFBOX entry? Tell us about them!
“I’m a discovery writer who feels more like a witness to the story unfolding than having any kind of mastery over it.”
How does your work fit into (or challenge) its genre?
What do you hope readers take away from your SPFBOX entry?
What are you currently working on?
Them Old Bones
Behind a veil of treachery and haunted bones, a dragon curse is about to set the world ablaze…
Dragons didn’t exist until recently.
Neither did traitors, until Miriam Huckerpucker started nosing around in The Vault where she and the other undeads are holed up, when they are not out in the countryside picking up haunted bones, which is what they do for an unliving.
For Miriam, who has been in the game for a while, with a refined skill set in magic spelling and swordy gymnastics and mourning classes, the hard part is not bone picking but catching homing pigeons which like all living beings don’t fancy the undead at all.
When no pigeons arrive from the undead expedition to barbarian lands, where the first known dragon’s bones lay waiting, Miriam suspects a traitor is messing about with the pigeon post.
Mustering someone who is literally dying to get a new occupation and also getting an undead dog into the bargain, her investigations unravel a sinister plot far bigger than The Vault.
Everybody makes a story about themselves. Here is my take:
I started out
1) as a kid telling myself stories using my imagination, then
2) growing up to tell stories to others as a gamemaster (which I still do), then
3) getting sucked most unwilling into occult stuff (the flip side of quantum physics?), escaping that to
4) hesitantly get an education in programming, then
5) surviving dull years surrounded by the machines that go ping and keeping the weekends occupied by reading and being artful and conjuring exhaustion for the work week, then
6) saying enough is enough and submitting myself to another long streak of education, this time in art, where I started out painting (and still do) but graduated in spontaneous storytelling (or bearing witness to my imaginary worlds if you want a fancy way of saying it) then
7) start writing down these stories instead of telling them to an audience, ending up like
1) the kid I began as, telling myself stories using my imagination…
…which is the nation I prefer to be in (after doing my stint of travelling abroad) and where I go by the name of Astor Y Teller.
The rest of me can be gleaned from the books and if not, it’s not worth telling.
