SPFBO 9 Author Interview- Seann Barbour

What inspired you to write your SPFBO entry? Is there a particular story, personal experience, or idea that sparked this book?

The Ghosts in the Flames was specifically inspired by my asking one question, but it’s a question that it’s kind of a spoiler to reveal. So instead, I’ll talk a bit about everything else that went into it.

We all know the story of the dragon that demands a princess’ sacrifice. Usually she gets saved by some brave knight. It’s the classic Saint George story. The thing is, in these stories, the princess is just a plot device. She’s not actually important. The dragon could have demanded a really nice painting and the story would play out the same way; with the gallant hero slaying the beast and retrieving the prize. Over the years we’ve had revisions to this tale. We’ve had reimaginings that address this issue or try to put a new spin on things. We’ve had the princess saving herself, or the hero being a charlatan, or even the princess falling in love with the dragon.

But what about the people who gave the princess to the dragon? What about the king who weighed the consequences and decided that it would be best to let the dragon have his daughter? Wouldn’t the princess feel resentment for her father? What if there was no knight coming to save her, and no allies she could turn to, and all the princess had were her feelings: her anger, her despair, her yearning to have something meaningful in her life before the inevitable end? What is the emotional journey of someone who is to be a sacrifice?

That is the story I set out to tell in The Ghosts in the Flames. I wanted it to have a somewhat classical feel to from the beginning, so for stylistic inspiration I looked toward old Gothic novels, chivalric romances, and fairy tales. That last one was key: the story didn’t really take shape until I decided to embrace fairy tale logic and trappings.

How would you describe your writing process? How did it evolve during the creation of this book?

This wasn’t my first novel, and I mostly just approached writing it the same way I’d approached my other novels before then. There were a few false starts when I started writing and ended up abandoning the project before I finally settled down to write what would eventually become the finished version.

Honestly, my process is pretty simple: I write a rough draft, start to finish. Usually I’ll write the first chapter or two to get a feel for what I’m doing before I jot down a quick outline to use as a guidepost for the rest of the story. Once that draft is done, I set it aside on one computer monitor and use it as a guide to write another draft on my main monitor. I can be pretty impatient and fast with my writing, so this revised draft usually ends up adding a lot more detail and ends up longer than the first. After that it’s a matter of editing, polishing, and trimming out anything superfluous or redundant.

What challenges did you face during the writing or publishing process, and how did you overcome them?

Finding the time and motivation to write can be the biggest challenge, I think. I work full-time, so some days I get home and I’m just too tired to do anything other than crawl into bed and put on random YouTube videos.

I find that deadlines help. Participating in National Novel Writing Month is a great way to find motivation, because then it becomes a matter of personal pride to reach certain word counts by certain dates. Setting hard deadlines for myself when it comes to finishing different stages of a project is theoretically helpful, but it’s hard to enforce deadlines when they’re self-inflicted and self-maintained.

Who are your biggest literary influences and how have they impacted your writing style?

It depends entirely on what I’m going for. I write in a variety of genres and styles, and I usually aim for a voice that I feel benefits whatever story I’m trying to tell. The Ghosts in the Flames is a dark fairy tale, so I looked to Grimm fairy tales, and classic romances like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Gothic works like The Castle of Otranto or The Monk for inspiration.

But other works can be completely different. My novel Jamie Christmas is a goofy satire, and I spent the writing process trying to channel Terry Pratchett (it’s also an early work of mine, so my inexperienced self likely failed on that front). Both my novel Mad Scientist Love Story and my LitRPG series ScaleGuard are inspired by anime and light novels, though different genres of each, and so those served as major influences. Dead Drops and Dragons is an urban fantasy, so I looked at books like The Dresden Files or Mercy Thompson for inspiration, though as I was writing I quickly realized that I was also drawing a lot from horror novels like the works of Stephen King. I decided to just lean into that.

How do you approach world-building in your fantasy novel? What elements do you think are essential for a compelling fantasy setting?

Worldbuilding is all about balance.

So on the one hand, the world should exist to serve the story. I don’t sit down and build the world unless I have a story I want to tell in it. I find that trying to build the world first and then fit a story into it is too limiting.

On the other hand, the world also needs to exist beyond the story. It needs to feel like a real thing, with history and complexity and things happening outside the main characters’ bubbles.

It must serve the story, but it must also exist far beyond its scope.

To that end, there are a few tricks a writer can employ. The easiest, but also the easiest to screw up, is to have a character make a reference to something that’s not explained. As long as all the worldbuilding details that are actually relevant to the story, characters, and themes are explained in the story proper, then extraneous details need only be referenced. There is of course a risk of putting too many details in this category so that the world feels incoherent to the reader, but it also stops writers from grinding the story to a halt to explain something utterly irrelevant.

A good example of that is the Necromancer from The Hobbit. In the book, the Necromancer is mentioned by Gandalf, and mostly serves to get him out of the story for a few chapters, and that’s it. He’s a plot device, and if you’re really curious you can check the appendices, but he’s not relevant to the story being told beyond that. In the film adaptation, they add a whole subplot to explain how the Necromancer was actually Sauron, and it contributes absolutely nothing to the story of Bilbo and the dwarves, but does add massive structural problems to the narrative that didn’t exist in the book.

Another thing to keep in mind is that different people are going to believe different things. In history, all we have is what’s written down, and all stories are biased in their telling. The same should be true in fantasy. It’s so much more interesting when there’s no universal accepted truth about historical events, but there are multiple versions of the truth put forth by different people or institutions. Whenever I explain a detail of my world, I always try to consider who is presenting this information, and in what ways this character might be biased in how they perceive and present the current subject.

If you could give a piece of advice to the main character in your book at the start of their journey, what would it be?

Well, if I gave her good advice, and she followed it, then the story wouldn’t happen, would it?

As a self-published author, how do you navigate marketing and promoting your work?

Badly.

What made you decide to participate in the SPFBO competition? How do you think this experience will benefit you as an author?

It seemed like fun! I chose The Ghosts in the Flames for my first entry because I personally think it’s my best book. As my answer to the previous question hinted, I’m also very bad at marketing, so my hope is that this will get more eyes on the book as well.

If you were to win SPFBO, what impact do you think this would have on your writing career?

Wow, wouldn’t that be something? To be honest, I’d probably keep on as I am, only with maybe a bit more confidence.

What's next for you after SPFBO? Are there any upcoming projects you can share with us?

Currently, I’m working on my first full-length horror novel (I’ve written horror short stories before, but this is my first longform work in the genre). It’s called The Last Day, and it’s a time loop story about a man who must relive the end of the world over and over again. It’s inspired both by a nightmare I had once and by the works of Clive Barker and Stephen Graham Jones.

Beyond that, I’m also working on sequels to both The Ghosts in the Flames and Dead Drops and Dragons. And of course I intend to continue working on my ScaleGuard until it concludes with it’s tenth book (the sixth one was actually just released a few days ago as of this writing).

I’m always writing something, and I don’t think that’s going to change any time soon.