Chris Well of DIY Author talks to author Nat Russo about Necromancer Awakening, book one of the Mukhtaar Chronicles trilogy. This dark fantasy action book, which quickly became an Amazon best-seller, is about redemption and the exploitations that can occur when there are abuses of religious authority. Chris and Nat cover the book and the writing process, but also delve into tools Nat uses to enhance his learning and further pour into his writing craft.
Q&A WITH DARK FANTASY AUTHOR NAT RUSSO
There were some difficult moments, as I was going through and trying to remember in detail a lot of the experiences that I had.
Where the novel came from
Amazon #1 fantasy bestseller Necromancer Awakening by Nat Russo
The inspiration for Necromancer Awakening came from the author’s experiences when he was in seminary to become a priest. His exposure to abuses of religious authority impacted him and shaped his thinking and shaped his writing. Nat thought he had adopted a severely negative opinion of religion until he started writing his books where he worked through his devastation which eventually came out in story form.
Nat knew he wanted to be a writer while in his teens. An avid reader of fantasy fiction, he dabbled in it for 25 years–until a few years ago, when he started his blog and decided to get serious about his writing craft.
What he learned about himself through writing his fiction
Writing has given Nat deep introspection of himself and especially the writing of Necromancer Awakening. It dredges up the paradox of his past experiences in two separate seminaries. First, with a religious order called the Legionaries of Christ where the impact was negative, then followed by a period in a seminary run by Benedictine monks where his training stemmed from religiously positive influence. The two sides of the book, the good and the bad, the positive and the negative converge into the storyline as though their parts come from the positives and negatives from each of the seminaries.
His writing tools
Turning attention to Nat’s favorite tools as a writer, he enthusiastically shares his affinity for gadgets and all things electronic. A software engineer by trade, he loves technology. He talks about the equipment he uses, both in his writing and when he’s inclined to play computer games. He uses an iPad now but intends to by a Kindle PaperWhite.
One of his preferred apps is Scribner for writing, tracking, planning, and storyboarding his books. It has become an indispensable tool to him. Nat says he uses it to store research information, which he then uses just like a local Wikipedia and digs out information while he’s writing.
For quick notes, Nat uses a phone app to capture his thoughts when he’s not near his computer.
Another app he’s sold on is IFTTT, which he uses to send ideas and observations to himself. Basically this app is a service that sits out on the web and listens. You give it permission to access various services like Google Docs, email, Facebook, Pinterest, etc. When he sends a note to himself, the service detects a pre-defined event, and based on the specifications of the event, the note is uploaded to the right place, for example, a note is uploaded to a document in Google Docs all based on the set parameter.
Where he writes
Nat also talked about his writing space: Nat’s laptop goes with him to the living room where he can be with his family. This is quite a change for him–starting out, he needed complete isolation and silence. Now, he has trained himself to write in any environment, even those that are noisy.
With the demands of his day job, carving out sufficient time to write his next book is a challenge. He’s also a published author now, which means he’s writing another book while balancing the marketing and business planning for his existing book and those yet to come.
Roadblocks and mental blocks have been reality for Nat. At one point he expected to start writing and allow the characters and plots to evolve. Upon reading the book Plot and Structure by James Scott Bell, he discovered the necessity of planning and plotting upfront, before starting to write. Planning the plot, storyboarding, is the technique he uses now to resolve the roadblocks of his earlier experience.
Nat’s writing practice begins with an outline; he knows how his story will end before he begins to write. He also knows the major plots and where the pieces will fit. He goes with the natural flow of the story, but is aware that he might need to steer things in the right direction if he starts to get off his aim.
When it is time to revise and edit, he sets aside the manuscript for six weeks. This step is critical as it helps him to gain objectivity. Without this resting period, he loses his ability to adequately edit his own text. Nat has a checklist that he uses initially, more along the lines of assuring he’s using words correctly. His focus then becomes targeted in specific areas such as characterization, then another edit session to check for theme and symbolism. When he has made his multiple passes through the book he enlists the help of beta readers. Once he can think of no more reasons to make changes, he’s ready to think about publishing.
To promote his work, Nat began building his author platform even before his book was published. Nat admits doing this robs the author of writing time, and some authors feel it’s a mistake to do that–but once his platform was established, the pre-work was done and it has served him well. Nat believes that he spent more time before publishing which set the stage for building a following of people even before his book was published.
Nat also shares the best piece of advice he’d ever been given: You don’t have to be born a writer, you can become one.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN IN THIS PODCAST
The origins of his best-selling novel Necromancer Awakening
the authors who influenced him
how he writes
and his favorite tools as an author
Live Links to Learn More
Nat Russo’s website http://erindorpress.com
Facebook https://facebook.com/natrussoauthor
Twitter @natrusso
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TRANSCRIPT FOR DIY AUTHOR EPISODE 19
PART 1: DARK FANTASY, HORROR FICTION, AND RELIGION
Chris: When you published the dark fantasy Necromancer Awakening, it was an Amazon bestseller right out of the gate!
Nat: It’s done so much better than I had ever expected.
Chris: Tell us about Necromancer Awakening.
Nat: It’s really a book about redemption. At its core, it’s about what can happen when there are extreme abuses of religious authority on a global scale.
Chris: When you say “dark” fantasy, does that mean that the point of view is dark? Or that it has content you would not normally find in a fantasy book?
Nat: It definitely has some dark content—to the point that you’ll also find Necromancer on some of the horror bestseller list as well. The undead are very much a part of the story. There are some elements of horror, there are some elements of gore.
I tend to not shy away from depictions of violence—I wouldn’t consider it gratuitous, but that’s a judgment for the reader to make. You’re not going to find your typical fantasy races like dwarfs, and elves and ogres, and that kind of thing.
Chris: What inspired you to write this book?
Nat: About 25 years ago, I was a seminarian. I’m Catholic, and I was studying to be a priest at the time when I was about 19 years old. I was in a seminary for a few years—and, unfortunately, I was exposed to a lot of abuses of religious authority.
I’m not an anti-religious person by any stretch to the imagination. I still consider myself Catholic. But those experiences really shaped who I am, and they shaped my writing as well. Some of those experiences took many years for me to kind of fully digest internally. Eventually they came out in story form in Necromancer Awakening.
Chris: What did you learn about yourself from writing this book?
Nat: The interesting thing was that, before I digested a lot of this in the form of writing a story, I thought I had a far more negative opinion about my religion than I actually do have. What I found writing my book, I kept going back to a type of balance where you have in my book, you’ll have two characters who are both authority figures in the world’s religion in Erindor, the world in which this takes place. I use one to demonstrate the negative sides of things, and I use the other to demonstrate the good side of things.
Going into the story, I wasn’t expecting to portray that kind of balance. It just kind of happened. It wasn’t really a conscious decision, it kind of came out.
When I noticed it on subsequent drafts, I went back and highlighted it a little bit more because I liked the balance idea. That was a bit of a learning experience for me.
Chris: How was this a novel only you could have written?
Nat: It very much stems from my training in the seminary. I was actually in two different seminaries. One with a religious order called the Legionaries of Christ. I speak about them in some detail of my blog; they’re an interesting group of people. They’ve been in a lot of trouble with the church. A lot of stuff that they do, and recently come to light and that’s being dealt with.
I was fortunate enough after leaving that seminary to enter a seminary that was run by the Benedictine monks. Through that experience, I was fortunate to be exposed to men that I consider to be extraordinarily holy. And I think that’s where a lot of my balance comes from. A lot of the training and philosophy and the mysticism that I learned from the Benedictine monks really play into my story. I don’t think I could have written the Necromancer Awakening that’s out there today without that training.
Chris: Since the book has kind of these two sides, how much is that the two seminaries are represented here?
Nat: Strangely enough, I had never considered that until you just asked me that question. On reflection, I think that’s very much going on. I drew a lot of my negative experiences from my first period of time in the seminary, and all of my positive experiences from the second stay.
I think you’re onto something there. I think it’s definitely related.
Chris: That is what I always say about writing, it’s cheaper than therapy.
Nat: So true.
Chris: What was the hardest thing about writing Necromancer Awakening?
Nat: There were a lot of experiences that I had kind of tucked away. My instinct dealing with a lot of problems is not to deal with them. You know, pretend they don’t exist and hope for the best.
When I was writing Necromancer Awakening, that was no longer possible. I had to pop the cork on some of those things, and just finally come to grips with them, to shine a light on them and see what they meant and how I could portray them in a story format. There were some difficult moments, as I was going through and trying to remember in detail a lot of the experiences that I had.
Chris: In terms of what you’re writing now: Are you following up this story, or are you doing things that are completely different now?
Nat: I’m definitely following up. Necromancer Awakening is the first book of a trilogy, and I’m in the process of storyboarding book two right now, which is titled Necromancer Falling.
In the meantime, I also have a couple of shorter works of fiction I’m developing that are set in the Necromancer universe however. The intent is that readers who haven’t been exposed in Necromancer Awakening will not have to have read that in order to enjoy the short stories.
Chris: When did you first know that you wanted to be a writer?
Nat: I began writing when I was a teenager. It was just something that I was curious about. Around the age of 12, I became an avid reader, particularly in fantasy. I decided to just try my hand at it, and share some stories with teachers and friends.
But I never actually took it seriously until about five or six years ago. That’s when I really decided, “Okay, I really want to do this, but I don’t know what I don’t know yet.” I decided to just throw myself into learning as much about the craft as I possibly could. Part of that involved starting the blog. A lot of the articles that I write on the craft of writing are actually reminders to myself, so that I can go back and revisit what I had learned, when I’m tackling certain problems and make sure that I don’t make some of the same mistakes again.
I’ve been writing for the better part of 25 years, but it wasn’t until about 5 or 6 years ago that I actually took it seriously and said, “I’m going to do this. I’m going to write a book, and I’m going to publish it.”
PART 2: THE AUTHORS WHO INFLUENCED HIM
Chris: What were the books or authors that you read as a kid?
Nat: I think the very first fantasy book that I read was Magician by Raymond Feist. I began reading that book, and I just fell in love with it. I wound up just going through the entire series—The Riftwar Saga—and I was just hooked on books at that point in time. Raymond Feist is a huge influence on me.
At the time I was also reading Douglas Adams. I remember reading Robert Lynn Asprin. Frederik Pohl was another one—I read Gateway cover-to-cover in a single day. I think that was the first time I had ever done that with the book.
Those are some of the names. I was consuming so many books that I have left out dozens, if not hundreds.
Chris: Who are the authors that you read now?
Nat: At the moment on my Kindle app, I’m reading the very first Dresden by Jim Butcher. My friends have been telling me for years that I need to read the Dresden book. I finally decided to just start that. I have to say that I love it. I’m having a grand old time with that.
I’ve also been reading Brandon Sanderson, and Patrick Rothfuss as well. Those are some of the more current fantasy authors that I’ve been reading.
PART 3: THE WRITING TOOLS HE USES
Chris: Let’s turn our attention to the tools that you use for writing. First of all what are your favorite computers, e-readers, devices, and gadgets?
Nat: I’m a techie. I’m a software engineer by trade. I’ve been in the high-tech related industry for more than 20 years now. I love gadgets. I love any device you can hand me. If it’s electronic, I want to play with it.
As far as computers go, I haven’t yet taken the step out into the Mac world, I intend to do that at some point in time. I’d like to have an interesting balance of devices. Right now I’m pretty much using PCs. I have an MSI laptop—it’s actually a gaming laptop that I use for my writing that I just acquired a few months ago. Great laptop.
As far as e-readers go—believe it or not, I haven’t actually bought a Kindle yet. I intend to do that in the next month or two. Right now, I’ve been using the Kindle app for my iPad and iPhone.
Chris: That’s fair.
Nat: I do intend to buy a Kindle Paper White though. A colleague of mine has one of those. I had an opportunity to play with that for a while and it just looks fantastic. I’d love to get my hands on one of those. I’m going to have to do that.
Chris: What are your favorite apps and software and those kinds of tools for writing?
Nat: I am a huge proponent of Scrivener. I’ve been using Scrivener now for almost two years. It’s the type of software that the only way I can describe it is it’s a game changer. It was a game changer for me. It was one of those things where you get a hold of it and you start, after you finally get accustomed to it, you start asking yourself, “How did I ever do this without this tool?” That’s kind of what Scrivener became for me. I absolutely love that or for just general purpose writing, tracking. I use it for planning, story boarding. I use it for the actual writing.
I also use it to store “canonical” versions of my universe for lack of better word. I’ll use it as almost like a local Wikipedia type of thing where I can very quickly dig out certain information about a culture that I wrote in book one, but I don’t retain all of the details so I want to go back and reference them to make sure I get everything right. Scrivener works very well for that as well.
As far as apps are concerned on my mobile devices, I keep it pretty simple with the apps. I use the Notes app pretty much to jot down random notes as they come to me, as ideas come to me while I’m walking or exercising or something, I’ll use the Notes app.
I also use a service called If This Then That—I think it’s IFTT. That’s an interesting web service where you can connect various services that you subscribe to. The way I use it is I can send myself an email and if it has a particular token in the subject of the email, the If This Then That service will take a hold of it and it will append it to a document that I keep in Google Drive. That’s a quick way of sending ideas to myself. I have the comfort level to know that I’m not going to lose that. That’s been a great help.
Chris: Wait—it doesn’t upload a separate article to Google Drive, it adds it to an existing article?
Nat: That’s correct. It basically connects two or more end points. The end points are defined as whatever services you currently subscribe to. It could be anything from email to Facebook to Pinterest to a host of other things including any smart home apps that you might have. Basically, all it does is it sits out there on the web and it listens. You give it permission to access your various services, and it basically just sits out there and listens for an event. You define these events through their web interface in a very intuitive user-friendly manner.
What it does for me is it monitors my Gmail accounts. When it detects that I sent myself an email with a very specific word in the subject, it will basically take the text of that message and append to a document that already exist in Google Docs for me.
Chris: I love that.
Nat: It’s awesome. I can change the token. I can use that token that I mentioned in the subject to categorize the documents so I can have multiple documents in Google Drive and the token that If This Then That detects, will determine which document it gets appended to.
PART 4: HOW HE WRITES
Chris: What does your writing space look like?
Nat: Early on, I had just basically set up my laptop at my kitchen table. My home office has pretty much been taken over by my son. All of his computer stuff is in there. He’s a musician as well so all of his instruments are in there.
Lately, I just sit on my couch with my laptop. I have this laptop board, it’s almost like a cooling surface, and I just sit on my couch with the laptop. The thing that I like about it is that it doesn’t isolate me from my family. My family can be in here watching television or doing whatever they’re going to do, and I’m still part of the action. I’m sitting there writing, but I’m still very accessible and aware of what’s going on around me.
Now, I should say that was very difficult at first. I started off as a type of writer who needed absolute silence in order to be successful. Since then, I’ve trained myself to be able to write in noisy environments, so I can just write wherever I am, wherever I have to be.
Chris: What part of being an author do you find the most difficult?
Nat: The most difficult thing for me is just finding the time to actually write. That’s tricky for me because I don’t yet earn any substantial amount of money from my writing. I still have a day job; there are a lot of expectations about a certain number of hours that you’re going to work every week and that kind of thing. It’s a project-driven job, so there are periods of time where for two and three months, we’re in crunch mode working 60- and 80-hour weeks.
And now that I actually have a published book, a lot of my free time is actually spent in business planning and marketing as well. It’s still a learning process to me. I’m still trying to find that balance between running my writing business and actually writing. That’s proven to be a challenge so far.
Chris: What problem with writing was your greatest roadblock and how did you overcome it?
Nat: I think the biggest roadblock that I had was I was under a misconception of basically how to write, if that makes any sense. In the beginning, I was basically thinking that I needed to just down at the keyboard with very little planning and just have at it. Just start writing and see where the story took me. Inevitably, I would get to a point where I just didn’t know where to go from there. I just didn’t have a plan. No matter how much rewriting I did, I never quite closed the circle. I never got to the end of the story.
I think I came to realize that I needed an outline to write my stories. I didn’t notice until I read a book by James Scott Bell, Plot and Structure. I was just kind of grasping for straws, seeing what it was I might be missing, and that happened to be the magic piece. I realized that all the time, I didn’t really have a plot. I was just allowing these plots to evolve as they went on. They kind of meandered and went nowhere. For me, I discovered that I need to plot some of this stuff upfront.
That was the biggest roadblock, was just coming in terms with the fact that, for me, I was doing it incorrectly. For many other people, that works for them. That was just a technique that did not work for me. I had to learn to embrace a new technique.
Chris: What are your writing habits? It sounds like you were a make-it-up-as-you-go writer and now you’re becoming an outline writer.
Nat: That’s correct. The interesting thing is that I’m kind of a hybrid. All those years that I spent in being a “pantser”–writing by the seat of my pants—actually plays into my current writing style. At present, I absolutely have to know how my story is going to end. Beyond that, I need to know what some of the major plot pieces are. They kind of act as a navigation device for me as I’m writing. I always have something to steer towards regardless of what part of the story that I’m in.
But when it comes to the actual prose, when I sit down and I begin writing the story, it is actually done in an exploratory kind of way. I do kind of just go with the flow, but I have this safety net of knowing what I’m aiming for, so I can always steer things in the right direction. That seems to work very well for me.
Chris: Once you have a manuscript, what is your editing process like?
Nat: I approach my editing in the same way that I approach my software engineering. It’s very methodical. Every revision that I make is done for a very specific purpose.
I have a series of checklists that I use initially. On the day that I finish my first draft, the very first thing that I do is I set it down and I try to forget about it for about six weeks, and I move on to other work. I found that I absolutely have to do this in order to gain the necessary objectivity that I need and the distance from the work to actually revise it. Otherwise, I’m still in this mode where I think every word that I wrote is sacrosanct and that I can’t change it. I have to get that distance from it first.
About six weeks later, I have a couple of checklists that I use for basic tidying up, like making sure that I’m not using certain words or phrases incorrectly. I have certain pet words and phrases that I tend to misuse, and I know this about myself. I have a list of them, and I go back in revision and I look specifically for those to make sure that they’re okay.
Once I get through the checklist type of stuff, I then go on a series of revisions that are very targeted. I’ll take one pass for characterization, I’ll take another pass for theme and symbolism, and so on, until I get to the end of those targeted revisions.
Once I’m at that point, then I actually share it with beta readers and I take feedback from them. That’s getting close to the last step, so to speak.
I try not to make revision unless I have a specific reason that I can articulate for making it. When I get to the point where I no longer have a reason for making changes, that’s when I know I’m at the point where I’m done and I can move on towards publishing.
Chris: What is the best thing you’ve done to promote your work?
Nat: I think the single largest contributing factor to any success that I’ve had so far was actually the work that I did prior to publishing. That was two or three years that I spent building a writer’s platform. It’s kind of a controversial subject. A lot of folks out there say it’s a waste of time. I definitely see what they’re getting at. If you’re building a platform, if that time is spent at the expense of your writing time, then it is not being well spent and you should reevaluate what you’re doing. There’s no doubt about that.
On the other hand, having that platform allows you to reach a lot of people in a very short period of time. That’s what you need to drive your initial book sales, to get onto those bestseller lists. The more time that you can spend upfront before you publish, building a following of people, the better off you’ll be when you actually publish your book.
Chris: What was the process of designing the story world of Necromancer Awakening?
Nat: There are some key contributors that I mentioned in the acknowledgements, a couple of coworkers. One coworker in particular, he’s also an avid fantasy fan. He’s also a tabletop RPG player, which I am as well. He and I would have in-depth conversations about magic in the context of my story world and that was very helpful when I was wrestling with what I should include in my own magic system and what should I leave out. That was very helpful.
But in terms of the overall story, the actual storyboarding was a very solitary process for me. I just did that pretty much by myself. At the time I was using PowerPoint for my storyboards, I would make a slide for each scene and that would act as kind of a virtual note card. That was very much a solitary exercise for me.
Chris: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
Nat: The advice that changed everything for me was in that book I mentioned from James Scott Bell, Plot and Structure. There is something that he refers to as the “Big Lie” that he says is being perpetrated on potential writers, the notion that you’re either born a writer or you’ll never be a writer. He goes into painstaking detail to prove that writing is actually a learned craft.
There are certain things that we’re definitely born with. Some of us definitely have more talent than others do. There’s no denying that whatsoever. That’s a wonderful gift to have.
We’re all kind of born with some degree of imagination—it’s really a question of do we nurture that imagination or do we suppress it somehow just by virtue of how we’re brought up, or our environment or what have you.
But the single best advice that I got from him was that this is something that can be learned and can be improved on. It’s true. Unless you have a substantial amount of talent, you may not ever be what you would be quote “great writer,” but you can certainly be a good, successful writer. Those two things aren’t necessarily the same.
That was a very interesting thing for me. It took away the fear that I would never be great. For me, at the time, it was very black and white—I would either be a “great writer,” or I wouldn’t be a writer at all. James Scott Bell kind of taught me that, no, there’s a kind of grey area in the middle that you really kind of have to pass through. Until you start trying to pass through it, you’ll never really achieve your full potential.
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