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Nuts & Bolts: Tom Lloyd

March 13, 2009 Here's a blast from the past! A Book a Week is on hold for the next few weeks, since I have a pile of manuscripts to read for the Amazon contest that PW helps with every year, but I have a few old Nuts & Bolts interviews hanging around, and I thought I'd blow the dust off this one for you. The interviewee is Tom Lloyd, whose most recent book is The Twilight Herald. I asked him about The Stormcaller, the first book in his Twilight Reign series.

Genreville: Where did the idea for the book come from, and what attracted you to that idea?

Tom Lloyd: The idea evolved over several years. I'd had the first scene stuck in my head for a while, a dream originally, so it was the natural start for the book, but I didn't actually have a plot to begin with. When I started writing I just started sketching out ideas for the world and how I'd like it to be populated. I've always loved the quarrelsome gods of Norse mythology and decided that I wanted more involvement from gods than most books I'd read. That led me to white-eyes as their champions, as unsubtle and quarrelsome as they are, and from there I let the ideals play off each other until something formed for me to write about. The only rule I wanted to keep to was that at the end you wouldn't see the weakling hero find the strength from somewhere to defeat the bad guy despite having just had his tail handed to him.

GV: What challenges did you face when writing, pitching, and promoting it?

TL: All sorts! First of all, I had to learn to write - Stormcaller was my first book and I learned to write while rewriting it again and again. That took a few years in itself and once it was in a condition where an agent was willing to take it on, I then discovered that in the U.K. it's a good year when three home-grown fantasy authors are given a debut chance.  On the promotion front, the difficultly is just getting noticed. It's pretty dark in parts and has a twist on the standard, but at heart it's an epic fantasy and it takes a while for people to pay attention to it at all. It helped that I was published as a trio with Scott Lynch and Joe Abercrombie, albeit as the most traditional of the three and always likely to receive the most flak, and that (along with the Gollancz name which U.K. readers trust) got me enough attention for people to give me a try and that's the main part of the battle. Persuading U.S. publishers to take any British author is very tough, but I was lucky that Lou Anders at Pyr was looking for my sort of epic fantasy as I was looking for a U.S. publisher!

GV: How did it inspire or discourage you? How is that experience affecting your current and future projects?

TL: The only discouragement has come from realising how long it takes to write a book, I am pretty lazy at heart! When compared to doing something I love and getting strangers email me to say how much they've enjoyed it, that's nothing however. What I've got from that is the confidence to push a little further in the subsequent two books and trust what I'm doing - even if that sometimes mean trusting that there's a good reason why I'm including details that seem at the time unimportant! Being on the 'scene' even in the small way that I am and hanging out with other writers has also given me a far better idea of what else is being written and what others want to achieve. That helps me focus on the directions I want to go in, whether it's steering clear of an idea someone else is going to do first or thinking more about how I'd do something differently. I rarely watch a TV show or movie these days without wondering how I'd structure the scenes instead, now that writing has me in its grip. I'm a lost cause!

Posted by Rose Fox on March 13, 2009 | Comments (1)