SPFBOX Interview with William I. Zard

Our SPFBOX interviews continue with William I. Zard, author of Metamancer.

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 WILLIAM I. ZARD

Tell us a little about yourself and let our readers know which blog you’ve been assigned to for SPFBOX!

I’m assigned to Fantasy book Critic (Chelsea). The career that pays the bills is independent consulting helping businesses large and small with enterprise document search technology (custom search engines). I have many hobbies, including Go, Autocross racing, Building/Modifying my race car, Computer games (Sim Racing, Space Sims, RPG/fantasy games, Civ, text MUD), reading Fantasy/Sci-fi and lately I’ve become interested in Aviation/flying. There’s also a bunch of dormant hobbies could resurface at any time such as bird-watching, 3d printing and photography.

What inspired you to write this book?

Many great fantasy books, a desire to create, and a desire to share.

Can you tell us a little bit about your writing or editing process? What’s most exciting to you about writing or editing?

The fun part of writing comes at that moment you realize you have an idea you really like. Then there’s a degree of restraint required to not just blab it to everyone in raw form. The restraint comes from remembering that the idea will be a thousand times cooler if you craft a story around it and reveal it carefully. There are some parts of the third book in my series (I am still writing #2!) that I have been dying to tell people about for over half a decade. In some sense a big part of what got me to knuckle down and complete book one was the realization that I needed to do that to reveal the later parts of the series. It was that or give up and just waste the idea by spoiling it.

When I start a brand new area I will begin with some description. I want the reader to be “in the world” and I never want the reader to feel “lost and confused.”

Who or what have been your major literary influences?

Well I’m no spring chicken so it’s things like the Belgariad, Wheel of Time, Earthsea, The Black Company, Darwath, Dragonsinger, The Last Unicorn, anything with Drizzt in it and Dragonlance, but also more recently Game of Thrones, Hairy Potter, and Kingkiller. I also recently enjoyed Arcane Ascension and related series by Andrew Rowe, but it’s too recent to really claim much influence on what I’ve written other than admiration of the rapport between his characters. Also the stories I write are very unlike his stories. He’s very combat focused, and I am more character and setting focused. Also notable in the too recent category is Sword of Kaigen which was good fun. I also have fondness for Sci-Fi and that includes Foundation series, The Matador series, and my all time favorite Sci-Fi: The Dragon Never Sleeps by Glen Cook.

What makes your SPFBOX book unique?

Well, I haven’t read all the others, so I can’t really say how it’s unique among that set of books, but I can highlight some things I think people will want to know about my book. At the highest level it’s a story about how a good kid with all the advantages winds up pursuing an apprenticeship to become a wizard in a world where wizards are generally feared and reviled. Regarding the feel of the book, it’s meant to allow you to sink into and imagine the world. When I start a brand new area I will begin with some description. I want the reader to be “in the world” and I never want the reader to feel “lost and confused.” I also try to take care that the reader only gets the wrong idea when I want them to for story/suspense/surprise reasons. Revising a wrong notion about a character, place or anything else can be very distracting to me as a reader, so I try not to do that to my readers. Another thing I worked hard on is ensuring that the characters do things that make sense given what they know and their emotional state. Having said that it’s worth noting that, the story does take some unexpected turns too, but these turns are not because the MC suddenly got a crazy idea or did something strangely dumb. There is a magic system behind this story, which will be partly revealed in this book and fully explored in book two so fans of magic systems should look at this book as an appetizer. Another thing to know is that this book exists in a world that can support political factions and many competing interests, but *this* story is not about those things. This story focuses on the MC’s journey and the transition to becoming a wizard. So if you are looking for another Game of Thrones, you won’t find it here. You can of course expect more complexity as the MC’s world view and perspective expands in future books, but we are not there yet. This book is the beginning. You (and the MC) still have much to learn about the world in my book.

Do you have a favourite character from your SPFBOX entry? Tell us about them!

I don’t know how to answer that. I’m not really the sort of person who thinks in terms of favorites. I have trouble deciding what my favorite ice cream is, let alone my favorite character. What I can say is that a few readers have mentioned the “grumpy female wizard” and the MC’s father as ones they enjoyed.

The fun part of writing comes at that moment you realize you have an idea you really like. Then there’s a degree of restraint required to not just blab it to everyone in raw form. The restraint comes from remembering that the idea will be a thousand times cooler if you craft a story around it and reveal it carefully.

How does your work fit into (or challenge) its genre?

That depends on how you think of genre. If the genre is “Fantasy Fiction” it’s dead center, very little challenge. It’s got wizards, goblins, knights etc. If you narrow things a bit, the first place you run into friction is the YA vs Adult distinction. Amazon categorizes it as YA, which is generally how any coming of age story winds up categorized. However, it’s written with the intention of being suitable for ages 11 to 111. I had ARC readers that ranged from 11 to 80yrs old. The 11yr old was from France, and right after release, I had a small burst of sales in France so I know she really did like it. On the other hand, I also have a couple of very glowing reviews on Amazon that are clearly from older adults (one mentions her grand-daughter). Narrowing things further to the “Wizard coming of age” sub-genre or trope, readers will find that while the necessary transition from non-magical to magic wielding of course does happen, the way it happens is quite different than other familiar works. There’s a common element of that trope that I left out… the one that normally eases the MC into magic in fact. So a key challenge in writing my book was to make the transition still seem reasonable. Also, the feel of the way wizards relate to each other and the rest of the world may be somewhat different. I don’t want to get too specific though or I might spoil some things for my readers.

What do you hope readers take away from your SPFBOX entry?

Enjoyment! I am not trying to preach to my readers, I’m trying to entertain them.

What are you currently working on?

Book two of course! >50% of my reviews ask for the next book so I think I’m in trouble with my readers if I work on anything else!

Metamancer

Fate never asks your opinion…

Baby in a basket delivered under mysterious circumstances, Johnny is raised unaware of his heritage by a knight and his wife on the outskirts of a kingdom in a town constantly at war with elves. All he wants is to be a knight like his father, but death and intrigue interfere. Soon, he finds himself on a path he never dreamed of, apprentice to a wizard and friends with an elf. He yearns for stability but increasingly the unseen machinations of others pull him in new directions as he tries to take control of his own life.

It doesn’t help that he turns out to have the most feared talent of all Metamancy, the magic of altering magic itself.

This book introduces a brand new world, and begins to reveal a detailed new magic system. Though this world will have some familiar elements (elves, goblins, wizards) this young wizard treads a fundamentally different path vs the likes of Garion, Pug, Rand, or Harry and not all is as it initially seems.

Add Ritual Metamancer on Goodreads.

Purchase Metamancer from Amazon.

William I. Zard is the pen name for Patrick G. Heck’s fantasy fiction writing. He was born in Ohio, but moved to Massachusetts at the age of ten. His originally intended career was Biology, and he earned a Bachelors and a Masters in Biology at Clark University and S. U. N. Y. Buffalo. However, he soon found that his hobby of computer programming offered substantially more lucrative opportunities. He spent most of a decade writing Java Web applications and then transitioned to enterprise search systems. Since 2012 he has been a successful independent consultant and is a committer and PMC member for Apache Solr and Apache Lucene. Despite his distinctly non-literary career thus far, he has always been an avid reader of fantasy and science fiction. His first book, Metamancer, started as the final project for his creative writing class at Clark University. Since the assignment was to write a “short story” and his writing quickly expanded to twenty-seven pages, with a lame tacked on ending, it wasn’t much of a success as a final project. However, the story wouldn’t leave his head and as new ideas arose he kept writing them down and sometimes adding to the text. After many years bursting with ideas and repeatedly having to re-read his own half written novel to get going again, he finally resolved to push forward and finish it. Nine months later it was ready for publication. In addition to science, computers, and fiction he also enjoys autocross racing, computer games, the game of go, and flying airplanes. Only time (and sales numbers) will tell if he can turn his writing hobby into a third career.