Through masterly mis-timing, this interview was posted on the forum two months after Matt Farrer's latest 40K book Blind came out in summer 2006. Sorry, Matt.
Blind is the third in his series about Shira Calpurnia of the Adeptus Arbites (the other two are Crossfire and Legacy - click on the links if you want to know more).
In Blind, Shira investigates a murder in an Adeptus Telepathica space station where eye-witnesses are, quite literally, hard to find.
Matt has also written one book set in the Necromundan underhive: Junktion. Like all his books, it is well worth a read. And I'm not just saying that 'cos he's a forum administrator who can sweep away my account with a flash of his fingers across the keyboard.
1. How did the idea for the Calpurnia series come about?
The Calpurnia books grew out of a tiny, tangential reference in another story and a couple of lucky accidents. The very first GW-related writing I did was a series of tiny one-page micro-stories for the Necromunda campaign newsletter at the Belconnen Games Workshop. Towards the end of that campaign the organisers threw in a zombie plague, led by an intelligent "zombie king" who led the hordes against the Underhivers and the Hive Primus Arbites. I needed someone to be the figurehead of the other side for something I was writing so I did a couple of little stories about this Arbites commander who was trying to co-ordinate the defence against the zombies. I'd had the name "Calpurnia" floating around in my head ever since my Ancient History classes at school - it was the name of Julius Caesar's wife, among others, and I liked the ring it had. I came up with "Shira" because I wanted some soft sounds to balance the hard ones in the surname. And so there you went. Originally she was a high-up Arbites commander in Necromunda's Hive Primus, and she even got a name-check in the original version of "Badlands Skelter's Downhive Monster Show" although it got edited out. But Marc Gascoigne mentioned during the edits that he thought it was a great name, so I kept her in the mental bottom drawer while I tried some ideas out.
(And one of the scenes I wrote for the newsletter, now I recall it, was a scene of her visiting a Mechanicus genetor that evolved into the opening scenes of Crossfire.)
There were two that I boiled it down to. One was called "Wings of the Night" , about a mysterious figure that was uniting all sorts of elements in the Necromundan Underhive and defying the Arbites time and time again. You can guess who that was meant to be if I tell you that the Dark Angels were going to show up at the end of the story just as the Arbites were about to close in. The other one was called "Crossfire" and was about how the Arbites related to the twisted, introverted culture of the Spire noble houses. That was the one I submitted - it went through a couple of submissions, actually, as Marc Gascoigne and then Christian Dunn asked for rewrites.
It was Christian who suggested moving the stories off Necromunda. His initial idea was to locate Calpurnia on Armageddon, and tie the political intrigues of the plot into the betrayal by Von Strab in the last days before the Third War. I wasn't keen on that, because although the political side of 40K was what I wanted to write, if I had Calpurnia on Armageddon then there would be a finite time before the orks arrived again and she became another straightforward military defender or resistance fighter. I was the one in turn who suggested Hydraphur, and that was where we wound up. During the same process the initial story of Crossfire grew from a short piece for INFERNO to a novel, and, well, the rest we know.
2. Could you talk us through the process of devising a strong female lead? Was it difficult or easy?
I've had quite a think about how to answer this one, because while I was building Calpurnia in my head and then on the page I was never conscious that I was "devising a strong female character". I simply built her as I do all my characters: her appearance, her basic personality and drives, her temper and her sense of humour, how she thought, what she cherished, how she spoke and moved. Then I began putting her in scenes and letting her move through them and bounce off the other characters and she grew from there.
Calpurnia came together through the story exactly the way that Sinden Kass, for example, did in Junktion. I'm sure I drew on conversations with and observations of female friends and colleagues from over the years, but then that's just what every writer is supposed to do anyway: pay attention to everything, take an interest in everything, so that all those experiences are in there ready to crystallise and come out into a story when they're needed. It's a very fluid, organic sort of process, very intuitive.
I think that last part is important: if I let the character become a real person and react as I feel a certain sort of person will, then the character will work, whichever gender I've made them. The only thing I could see happening if I'd self-consciously stopped to remind myself I was writing a female character was that I'd have then messed it up somehow.
I've written female leads before this: when I'm experimenting with the early stages of a story one of my standard tests is to flip the main character's gender, age and so on to see if any one option seems better than the rest.
My first attempt at a novel many years ago, which was about six or seven chapters long before it petered out, had a female lead and I remember getting some very nice compliments from my female test readers about how I'd written her, so that may have helped me to not be fazed about writing a female lead in Calpurnia. As for feedback on Calpurnia herself, one of the compliments I'm proudest of was one on this forum, from a female reader whom I know to be pretty switched on about issues of gender in fiction, saying that while she was reading Crossfire she forgot that the female character she was reading had been written by a male.
3. How easy or difficult was it writing the Necromunda book? Will there be a follow-up to Junktion?
I'd already done a fair bit of writing in the Necromunda setting by the time I made the pitch for Junktion, so I certainly wasn't coming into it cold. I think that Necromunda is a slightly more approachable setting than 40K: the 40Kverse has a lot of influences visible in there but it's developed a mood and feel that's very much its own, as well as a detailed canon that touches practically anything you might want to write in it.
Technically Necromunda's probably pretty restrictive as well, but when I was writing in it, it felt a lot more open. There seemed to be a lot less weight of canon discipline bearing down on me, and more room to have fun and tell more straightforward adventures. It was definitely easier to write than the Calpurnia books from that point of view, although politics and intrigues made it into Junktion as well - seems like there's a bit of my brain that can't do without them.
There are no plans that I'm aware of for another Junktion story, although that doesn't mean there couldn't be one. If I did do one it probably wouldn't be a Sinden Kass book, though. I'm rather taken with the idea of a series of stories all set in and around Junktion, with characters who don't know one another very well or at all and barely cross paths. It's definitely a town where there's always something story-worthy going on.
4. Are you now a full-time writer?
No, I'm not yet at the point where I can chuck in the day job. I work in the Australian Public Service. It's not a bad job, as day jobs go. Initially I made the mistake of finding a day job that was actually too interesting, so it leached a lot of mental energy away from my writing. I'd get home and sit down to write and I'd have nothing left in the tank. When I downshifted, to a job that's demanding in its way but doesn't often require a lot of higher thought, my writing output increased exponentially. In conversations since then I've found that a lot of creative people seem to prefer that sort of day job for just this reason.
5. Who are or were the biggest influences on your writing?
The first answer to that is that everything's an influence. We're all influenced by everything we see or hear or read, everything goes into the big alchemical stew at the back of your mind where the ideas spawn.
With that said, obviously there are particular people or works whose influence is strong enough for me to perceive it, because I remember the effect they had on me, or I see the influence in my own work, or I consciously tried to emulate something I read or saw. The single biggest influence on my imagination would be Michael Moorcock, but others would be Ed McBain, Jack Vance, Clive Barker and Terry Pratchett. Then there are the technical influences, writers whose methods and techniques I've consciously tried to study and learn from. That list would include Thomas Harris, Thomas Perry, Stephen King, Ed McBain again and William Goldman.
6. Does that [the inclusion of William Goldman, an Oscar-winning screenwriter] mean you have screen-writing aspirations?
I don't have any concrete aspirations to write for the screen apart from a general desire to give every variation of writing a try sooner or later. But Goldman is an excellent and I think very underrated novelist as well, and in fact he's said that he still thinks of himself as a novelist who got sidetracked by screenplays. I'm a big believer in the use of style to reinforce a story's pacing and mood, I think careful arrangement of the rhythms of words and sentences can add whole new levels of force to writing, and Goldman can do some tremendous things with his pacing and style. He's particularly influenced how I write scenes of tension and action, and even his weaker novels have scenes so well put together that I can sit and admire them the way some of my revhead co-workers can sit and admire pictures of beautifully machined car engines.
7. 40K and Warhammer WFB. Are you a fan or player?
Yes, a player. I started playing Blood Bowl in 1993, started buying White Dwarf for the Blood Bowl articles, and found the 40K articles more and more intriguing until I ended up going halved halves in the second-edition set with a friend. My playing and painting has tailed right off over the last few years, though. These days the writing has colonised what used to be general hobby time.
8. Would you ever be tempted to write WFB fiction?
I have done; "Jahama's Lesson" appeared in INFERNO and later in Way of the Dead, and seems to have been well received. I did have goes at other short fantasy pieces - a High Elf story called "Fever Dream" and a horror piece called "The Strange Compassion of Doctor Manicheus" , with which I was very pleased but on which I was still trying to get the ending right when INFERNO wound up.
I'm not sure I'll ever do a Warhammer Fantasy novel, though. The 40Kverse is my natural territory. It isn't to say I don't enjoy the Warhammer setting, but it doesn't come as easily to me. I'm conscious of having to work to get my head into Warhammer fantasy, whereas with 40K I can slip into it very naturally.
9. What other work do you have underway?
With Blind out of the way I'm catching up on a clutch of embryonic short stories that were racking up while I was doing the last two books, which I'll be aiming at various markets in Australia and overseas.
There's also some work underway for an Australian company, part fiction and part worldbuilding, that I can't go into too much detail about at this moment. I'm also starting to draw together the threads and characters for a longer fantasy novel that I'm aiming to complete next year.
10. What do you think is the most common misconception of a writer's life?
I'd say a combination of two: underestimating the work and overestimating the income. So many people seem to take it for granted that writing a story is, at most, about as difficult as reading one, and that once you've done it it's just a matter of putting up the feet and letting the millions roll in. A lot of people who asked me, when Crossfire came out, when I was going to buy my lodge in the Blue Mountains and retire were joking, but a couple of them weren't.
I don't know if "misconception" is quite the right word for it, but I the disconnect I personally run into most often between my view of my work and other people's is the lag between finishing a book and the book appearing. By the time a book appears on the shelves it's generally well and truly gone from my mental workspace: it's done, finished, my job ended when I got the word it was at the printers. I've done my celebrating and I've picked up whatever my next project is and I'm now immersed in that. Talking about it to someone who's just seen it on the shelves or whatever gives me this weird time-slipped feeling. I occasionally find myself having to explain to people that yes, I am excited about the book coming out, really, I'm very happy about it, but the book has left the nest and is making its own way in the world now. It's not where my head is any more.
11. Books. Who is your favourite non-BL writer and whom are you reading at the moment?
I'm terrible at these questions. Either I freeze up, or I fall victim to a sort of mental hydra effect where every name I mention as a favourite brings up two more that I decide I can't possibly leave out. I'll try and keep it narrow.
Barker, mainly the early Barker, has a bloody (in the literal sense) and rich imagination, and a beautiful sense of the music and rhythm of words - there are times when I find myself reading The Books of Blood aloud to myself just to savour his skill at composition. Jack Vance has the same music to his writing and one of the most distinctive voices I know. I love his elegance and his lightness of touch. I think he could write wonderfully about the Eldar. Stephen King and Annie Proulx are very different writers but they both have an ability to grab you by the lapels, haul you into a book and keep you there no matter what else you ought to be doing. Terry Pratchett is skilful, witty and stands up to reading after reading after reading. I've also just discovered an American writer named Stewart O'Nan, who's written a brilliant and moving ghost story called The Night Country that's made me want to seek out more of his work. If it's as good as this I'll definitely have another favourite.
As for who I'm reading at the moment, just yesterday I finished bingeing on Marianne de Pierres' "Parrish Plessis" trilogy, a racy Australian cyberpunk series. I really admire the way she combines a high-speed narrative with so much depth and detail in her plot and worldbuilding. It's so seamless it's easy to miss until you stop and look around you and realise what an excellent fit each detail is with every other one. Must have taken a hell of a lot of work.
Now I'm about to start John Birmingham's 'Axis of Time' trilogy, which I've had for ages and am well overdue to make proper inroads into.
12. Any practical advice for aspiring BL writers?
Practical advice is, well, be practical. Be realistic. Be aware of what your role is going to be. You're not going to have the whole canon handed over to you to remake as you please. Keep your fannish side and your professional side separate: your BL career is not going to be about how many points you have painted up or at what age you played your first game or what your tournament ranking is, it's about the work. Always about the work.
Oh, and be aware, if you weren't already, that you're putting your writing up into a franchise with a great deal of often volatile fan-politics. For every person who very vocally doesn't like your writing, there's going to be at least one other who rips into you for reasons that have nothing at all to do with anything you've ever set down on a page. It's just one of those things.
13. Do you have an agent? If so, how does that work and how important is it to you?
No agent yet. I may well try to acquire one at some point but I can't tell you much about agents at the moment.
14. When you become Evil Overlord for the day, what rule would you impose on the genre or publishing in general?
I'd take my starry-eyed, rainbows-and-lollipops ideals and enforce them with an iron fist. No more of this stupid, cannibalistic infighting between different genres' writers and fans, for a start. There's plenty of legitimate and fascinating discussion to be had about genres and writing concepts, how they differ and interact, but why do so many of the discussions I've followed degenerate into self-serving squabbling over "my genre roolz, your genre sux"? I'm no fan of the casual (and unsupportable) dismissiveness toward speculative genres in the mainstream writing scene, the kind of thing you keep reading about in Ansible, but seeing adherents of fantasy or SF then apply that attitude toward one another is just depressing.
And I'd stamp out the scam editors and agents, too. Luckily I've never been burnt by one, nor do I know anyone who has, but their activities just offend me.
Thanks to Matt for providing such frank and interesting answers.
- Martin Belderson
