I recently got the chance to sit down with the author, K.D. Edwards. We talked about the ferocity of fandom, learning the spectrums of the LGBTQ community, where his previous book fell short, and his reaction to the success he's had with his debut novel. Oh, there's also a part where he wrote two chapters on a battleship.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Edwards’ work, he is the author of The Tarot Sequence, an urban fantasy series that imagines a modern day Atlantis off the coast of Massachusetts, governed by powerful courts based on the traditional Tarot deck. Rune St. John, last child of the fallen Sun Throne, is backed into a fight of high court magic and political appetites in a desperate bid to protect his ward, Max, from a forced marital alliance with the Hanged Man. Rune’s resistance will take him to the island’s dankest corners, including a Red Light district made up of moored ghost ships, the residence of Lady Death, and the floor of the ruling convocation where a gathering of arcana will change Rune’s life forever. His book, The Hanged Man, is the follow-up to his debut novel, The Last Sun. Edwards lives and writes in North Carolina, but has spent time in Massachusetts, Maine, Colorado, New Hampshire, Montana, and Washington.
You can purchase The Hanged Man on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Books-a-Million, and IndieBound.
Annaelise: First off, congratulations on publishing The Hanged Man, which is the follow up to your debut novel. So, what new challenges has writing a sequel presented you?
K.D.: It’s kinda funny. You think you would know, like you would have an idea of what the challenges would be, and then it turns out to be completely 180 opposite from what you expect. I mean, I always knew where I wanted it to go with this series, I have nine books planned. From the very beginning, before I even sold the first novel, I knew what happens from beginning to end. Everything’s plotted out, the second novel was fairly well outlined before the first one was even written, so I thought the biggest challenge would be overcoming the Sophomore Slump because, even though I want to do nine novels, they are three trilogies, which means this is, essentially, the middle book of the first trilogy. And a lot of middle books, I mean not only is it your sophomore book but it’s the middle of a trilogy and sometimes that can come across as just a bit of a bridge, or a placeholder, until you get to the climax of your trilogy.
FINDING MY OWN AUDIENCE ON TWITTER THAT WASN’T CONSTANTLY ALL THE DOOM AND GLOOM, BUT SOMETHING POSITIVE AND SUPPORTIVE, TURNED OUT TO BE PROBABLY ONE OF THE BIGGEST JOURNEYS.
I was really worried about that, so I thought that would be my biggest challenge, but I think what I didn’t realize, more than anything else, is what was going on in the country, too, would influence my writing. Cause it’s been a, I mean, you gotta admit the last few years have been really bizarre. I certainly have no desire to get into politics or to talk about it but it really did influence my writing, my ability to sit down and just kind of open up creatively everyday. And that was all going on right when I had just started writing The Hanged Man.
So, at the end of the day it turned out that the actual process of writing Hanged Man wasn’t that difficult and it really flowed as it’s own story, which is something I’m really proud of, but getting through just, you know, trying to find my own routine within what was going on in the rest of the world and finding my own audience on Twitter that wasn’t constantly all the doom and gloom, but something positive and supportive, turned out to be probably one of the biggest journeys I was on in the past year and a half.
YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE AN AUDIENCE BUT WHAT YOU DON’T REALLY EXPECT, NECESSARILY, ARE PEOPLE THAT COME CLOSE TO BEING FANS AND FRIENDS.
Annaelise: That’s awesome, and speaking of your reading, that’s something I wanted to touch on. You’ve had a very great reception online from your readers, especially when it comes to fanart. Like I looked at your website and I just saw all of this fanart of all different characters in your book and, you know, we’re living in an age where you can hear your audience better than ever, so what does it mean to you, as a writer, to be able to hear from the people directly that are reading your work?
K.D.: You know, I really love that question because it hasn’t been asked of me before and what’s happening right now is just absolutely insane. There are two websites, people who I’ve kind of become friends with over Twitter, actually really good friends by now, because they asked us if they could deal with the promotion for Hanged Man. Like, basically, a fan-based promotion. You know, a reader-based promotion, where they handled everything and the last three weeks, I mean, you saw the artwork on the website, but everything else that’s happened, leading up to Hanged Man, I mean, there are like challenges going on. There are four different Courts and they’re competing for points and people have done quilts and artwork and comic page panels. They baked cookie recipes inspired by the characters. Drink recipes. I literally…All of this creative stuff is going around based off of something I wrote. It’s mind boggling. And I never, especially when I was writing Hanged Man, towards the end, knowing that, I don’t know how to put this other than that I feel like I’ve shared something.
That was one of the things I just never expected. You would expect that you would get readers when you do something and that you’re going to have an audience but what you don’t really expect, necessarily, are people that come close to being fans and friends, in some cases, because they reach out to you and they engage. Not only that, I’ve lost track of the amount of times people have said that they’ve read my story and it inspired them to go to the art store and buy a canvas when they hadn’t painted in years. And then they made something based off of something I wrote and that’s so overwhelming and humbling, I don’t even know how to put that into context.
I also know that, uh, I’ve just finished writing something for another website, it’s a romance website. And I’ve never had to write something for a romance website before and I talked about, that’s probably one of the scariest things now that I’ve connected with the fans is, one of the things they really care about is the romance aspect and who is with who and the level of intimacy, even if it’s not romance. The relationship between the characters and there are some people who want one thing to happen and there are some people who want something entirely different to happen and then there’s a whole group that wants, like, both to happen at once and trying to figure out what I’m going to do with that. I think I decided recently that the one story element, which I haven’t planned out for the nine novels, is how to deal with that aspect of it. But the rest of it is nothing but encouragement of what I get from readers. I mean, just nothing but encouragement. I have absolutely had the best readers of this world.
Annaelise: I guess that’s something that I haven’t really thought about is the, when you’re online and with access to the Internet, people have become more intense in their fandom-ness and just how intensely people get into it. Is that what you were expecting at all?
THEY KNEW IT WOULD AFFECT THEM IF THERE WASN’T A HAPPILY EVER AFTER. I MEAN TALK ABOUT RESPONSIBILITY.
K.D.: No, no. I’ll even give you an example of something that just blew me away. It’s also, sort of, it’s sort like a sense of responsibility, too. Like, especially, you know I have a lot of young readers. I set about writing something which would appeal to a younger audience and I wanted it to be something that I wished I had had when I was younger and I think I’ve kind of hit a vein in that respect. But I had this one young reader in Asia reach out to me and they said that it’s not easy for them to get books like this and that their aunt had sent it. They hadn’t read the book themselves but their friend had and told them all about it and then this reader proceeded to, well at the time they weren’t a reader, had proceeded to tell me all the high points of the book even though the reader had not read the book. And the reason that the reader had no read the book is because they were terrified that I was going to break the heart of one of the characters in a relationship in the book. They were scared to read it because they didn’t want to set themselves up for being upset, because what they had heard so far meant enough to them that they knew it would affect them if there wasn’t a happily ever after. I mean talk about responsibility in a case like that. Let alone having someone reach out to you from a foreign country saying it’s not easy to get books like this and to know that I can fill a niche like that is…it’s humbling and it’s something that I take really, really seriously.
It’s definitely inspired my own education on the different spectrums of intimacy. It seems the younger people are more comfortable, I don’t want to call it labels because I think what we are talking about nowadays has been around forever but now we just have a framework around it, but when you talk about things like demisexuality and asexuality, all those things have always existed but now they’re just discussed more freely and a lot of young readers, they really closely identity with these things and that’s been my journey that I’ve been on more than anything else with these readers who reach out to me and want to see their reflection in a story and realizing, in some cases, that I’ve already sort of planned that with these characters without even realizing it.
Annaelise: When it comes to the audience of the LGBTQ community, that’s a very big part of your readership for a very obvious reason, is the fact that, you know, your characters are predominantly within the LGBTQ spectrum. Do you feel that that’s sort of why people cling to it or what else is it about your book that draws people in?
K.D.: Well, I think that’s a huge part of it and that’s what I set out to do. I guess the genre that you would call it is speculative fiction or urban fantasy, I call it modern fantasy sometimes, but over the last, I don’t know, twenty years or so, it’s become really big. Urban fantasy is a huge buzzword now and it’s a very saturated genre but there are all these greats like Laurell Hamilton and Charlaine Harris and Ilona Andrews, who I absolutely adore. Anne Bishop writes some really edgy stuff and Patricia Briggs. And they do all these amazing novels but I’ve always wanted to take these stories I love but to do them from my voice, from a gay male voice. And have characters in the background who just happen to be gay without it being a gay novel because when I was growing up, a lot of the fiction you had, if there were gay characters, that was the focus of the story. It was a gay science-fiction. It was a gay mystery. That was a predominant element, not just sort of an intrinsic piece of the background and so that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to do something where the story came first and just happened to be populated with gay male characters and that is my journey.
LOOKING BACK I REALIZE HOW MUCH I LET DOWN THAT PART OF THE READERSHIP AND THAT IS A HUGE COURSE CORRECTION I DO IN HANGED MAN. I REALLY LISTENED.
It’s been my journey with all that I do not just this series. But I think that even beyond that, one of the things that I realized, I mean here I’m expecting someone’s gonna hand me a trophy because I wrote an urban fantasy with gay male characters and then they’re like, “yeah but you did an awful job representing women, like genuinely horrible,” like every female character I had in the first book had some sort of serious flaw or was a hidden villain. And looking back I realize how much I let down that part of the readership and that is a huge course correction I do in Hanged Man. I really listened.
A lot of writers will tell you they don’t read reviews. I read every single one of them and especially the reviews where people say they love the novel “but, dot dot dot". I paid really close attention to that and so it’s great that I wrote [The Last Sun] with a lot of gay characters but I hope to see some more lesbians and like one of the characters is asexual and one is growing more into identifying as demisexual. I have a lot of strong female characters coming in and certainly people of color, I’m hoping to show a lot more diversity with that as well.
Annaelise: I think that it’s really great that you’re able to go out and take in that criticism, so to speak, and be able to transform that into something to make yourself better. I think that’s something that not a whole lot of people can do. But another thing that you hit was the worldbuilding within your novels, which, I’ve read this one, The Hanged Man, and the worldbuilding that you do is honestly just amazing and it’s something that you’re often praised on, from what I was looking at, so can you tell us a little bit about your process when it comes to creating the universe?
K.D.: Yeah and thank you by the way. Those were really kind words. I love worldbuilding. I think back when I read, so I mentioned Anne Bishop and Ilona Andrews. They are two authors who taught me that you can take a risk with writing. If you have strong characters, and maybe you have grounded it in something interesting and compelling about the relationship with the characters that’s going to be the core of your story, something so approachable that anyone will understand, if you do that you can kind of take a chance on the worldbuilding.
IT’S THE CREAM OF THE CROP OF TWENTY OR THIRTY YEARS.
Ilona Andrews, in particular the Kate Daniels novels, I mean you get thrown right into this world and you have no idea what’s going on because all the characters are living in that world so they don’t go around explaining what that world is. So you gotta pick up pieces and figure out how this world’s got broken on your own and I think I’ve always wanted to do that. I love crazy worldbuilding. I love things that are surreal. I love taking things that are real in our world but adding an edge to it that makes it something unique and mysterious or a little bit darker.
When I started doing this, the first thing I created were the characters and the second thing I created was a two-page prologue, which never got published but it will show up on Hanged Man, that explains the fabric of this world. And then after that I just kinda dive into it but I think, for me, the strength of the worldbuilding [is because] I’m a planner. I mean, obviously if I have planned out nine novels. I have hundreds of thousands of words written down in an Excel file and when anything that occurs to me, not matter where I am, I jot it down. Worldbuilding is never just sitting in front of the computer and saying “what am I gonna do now?” Generally there’s often years of notes behind that I’ve been taking for my entire life that I’ve been waiting for moment to find a good home for. It’s not just the cream of the crop of the last year of brainstorming. It’s the cream of the crop of twenty or thirty years.
Annaelise: When it comes to planning and brainstorming, what sort of technology, other than, you said, Excel, do you use?
K.D.: Oh, you ask really good questions. Like, just so people know, this isn’t planned but this is literally like if you could softball me a question it would be this because I actually invest in startup technology about voice-to-text recognition.
There’s this thing called the Senstone that I looked into for a while where it’s a medallion on your chest and you press the button and you speak a note and it sends it wirelessly via Bluetooth to your phone. Because everything I do, when you’re doing it on the run or driving or waiting in line, you can’t always pull out a computer and take a note, so I am very aware of technology and how to organize my notes and how to keep it separated by different novels so that it’s not a mess of a bin of ideas but whenever I have a note it goes somewhere sensible so I’ll be able to access it later. And lately voice-to-text technology is something I’ve really been looking into.
I just got my first set of AirPods, Apple AirPods, that I’m excited about that because I hear that it has some transcription technology, so ask me about that in a couple weeks.
WIKIPEDIA WE’RE GONNA LOOK BACK ON SOME DAY AND REALIZE THAT WAS AN EVOLUTION RIGHT THERE. THE IMMEDIATE ACCESS TO SHARED KNOWLEDGE IS PRETTY INCREDIBLE.
Annaelise: You bring up something really big. I mean with our cellphones we have access to a miniature computer nowadays that we didn’t have ten, twelve, fifteen years ago. What do you think that that’s done for the writing community?
K.D.: It’s funny, I think you’ll still find a lot of writers who will write longhand with an 8-by-11, yellow, striped piece of paper but for me the biggest thing that technology does even on the phone, other than doing the transcription, is just the ability to do research. Part of my worldbuilding, I think, comes off well because I do a ton of research before I actually write.
The city of New Atlantis in my novel is comprised of abandoned human buildings across the world, so I do a fair amount of research on abandoned human ruins and imagine them brought over to the island and then rehabilitated. I researched the mythologies of monsters before I put them in. Cellphones and Wikipedia - I mean, Wikipedia we’re gonna look back on some day and realize that was an evolution right there. The immediate access to shared knowledge is pretty incredible. But I think definitely that between research and transcription, I mean, there are a lot of things.
There are a lot of tools you can use now as writers like Scrivener, that people speak highly of, but for me Excel is pretty much the most technological I can get when it comes to organizing all my notes so that I can sort them by either novel name or series name and then the research is huge.
Annaelise: What about your workspace? That’s usually a pretty integral part of the creative process, so what does your creative space look like?
K.D.: Oh not nearly as well as it should. I mean that’s probably the one thing that I wish I could do better. I’m always working, whether it’s brainstorming or research but I wish I could sit in front of a computer and write a little bit faster. And right now, the place I write, there’s a coffee shop in town and pretty much there’s one spot that I always sit in and almost the entire second novel got written there, with the exception of one sequence set on a battleship, and I actually wrote those two chapters on a battleship. I don’t mind noise around me, like at a coffee shop.I can’t have anyone sit at the table with me but if I have energy around me, even the better. People watching? Even better.
Annaelise: Well, how did you manage to, uh, get onto a battleship for that?
LIKE I LITERALLY BROUGHT MY COMPUTER WITH ME AND FOLLOWED THEIR PATH THROUGH THE SHIP ON THIS ADVENTURE.
K.D.: There’s one in North Carolina. The Battleship North Carolina. I essentially created a fictional ship that’s the sister of that ship and it’s a really important part of The Hanged Man. They turned it into a museum and I used to go and visit it just because it’s just this…I don’t know how to describe it. It doesn’t necessarily make you feel good when you’re on it because you know what it was used for but it’s awe-inspiring because it’s huge. The guns are like five-stories tall. I mean like, you can think of what it must have been like when the ship pulled into your harbor. And I kinda tied it into this ghost story I wanted to tell in novel number two. If you’re on the Battleship North Carolina, you can literally follow the progress of Rune and Bran through the ship, like I literally brought my computer with me and followed their path through the ship on this adventure, this ghost story. It meant a lot doing that.
Annaelise: Now, you did mention Andrews and Bishop. Were there any other specific authors or any series that you looked to for inspiration during the creation stages of The Tarot Sequence?
K.D.: Yeah, there are definitely echoes of other series. Charlie Huston wrote a vampire series called the Joe Pitt series that is set in New York City and that has some really surreal, underground worldbuilding and he also does something kinda brilliant, and that I more or less adopted, the technique of separating exposition and dialogue. So you can have a scene where you can just focus on the action of the scene and the dialogue of the scene but all the exposition that goes into explaining what’s going on is set apart in its own little section and it’s really condensed so that, if it’s done well, it’s interesting and it doesn’t slow down the momentum of the story. That was a huge influence for me and […] Julie Czerneda, she’s a sci-fi writer, nothing like mine because she’s hardcore sci-fi in outerspace and I’m based on Earth, but she focuses on the concept of found family and that is massively inspirational to me as well. The whole of my series is based around found family.
Annaelise: When it comes to the theme of found family, why do you think that’s so important to you?
K.D.: [pauses] I…I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that’s what works. I don’t think I ever necessarily planned that in any of my writing. It’s probably one of the first stories where that’s instrumental to it but it just works and I created like…we were talking about immediate feedback from people who are reading. That was really critical with Last Sun because I wrote some of these characters who were supposed to be really sideline characters.
There’s this one character called Quinn who, more or less only has three or four scenes. That’s all people have read about him, realistically three or four scenes, but he’s mentioned in the story enough and it works so well that he becomes found family to the two main characters and when you talk about readers doing artwork or talking about my characters, he gets talked about all the time. And because of that, I mean, it’s like I was experiencing this found family as well so that it inspired me to add these characters to the core and now they’re really the heart of the second story in the best way possible like just…I like sitting down and actually engaging with these characters again.
Annaelise: Now, with these sideline characters, that is something I did notice there was a common theme, in how much people get attached to these ancillary characters. Has that ever made you wonder why it is that they [the audience] are so strongly attached to these particular characters?
K.D.: I will say that I do try to put a lot of work into anyone I put on page, even if it’s someone who only shares a single scene. I really try to give them something that stands apart, so that it’s not forgettable. I don’t want anything just average, I want on every page at least one detail that jumps off and hits the reader in the face.
A lot of how I accomplish that is through the characters, so I think sometimes that’s what resonates and a lot of these side characters I also put in the first novel, they’re misfits. They don’t have place. They’re like ostracized. They’ve never been the type of people to get invited to a birthday part or barbecues or bowling parties, so they became naturally found family in the story cause the main character, Rune, he’s not just rebuilding the Sun Throne, but essentially the Misfit Throne.
So, all of that just kind of conspired to naturally bring all of these elements together and to make these characters a little bit more pronounced than maybe I intended originally, in the best way possible.
Annaelise: Do you feel that the fact that a lot of these characters are misfits, that it has something to do with why people are able to relate to your work so much?
K.D.: Oh I absolutely think so. I really do. [laughs] And I’m okay with that. I will be the King of Misfits, I’m perfectly happy with that name.
I’M NOT ON STEP ONE HUNDRED BUT I’M NOT ON STEP ONE, EITHER.
Annaelise: Yeah, I think it does say something about the fact that, especially within the LGBTQ community that there are so many people that do identify with misfit characters because, in a way, that’s kind of how a lot of society sees us, you know? But moving away from that, now that the sequel to The Last Sun is published, what comes next? Are you going to be working on the third book, or is there something else in store?
K.D.: Both, actually. Well, I guess kinda three things. One is I definitely am working on Tarot three, that is a reality. That’s gonna happen. I’m hard at work on that at the moment. I want to continue to do free novellas between every novel, so I have to work on the next novella between novel two and novel three. I also have a series I want to write, a young adult series that I have been planning for years now, and I think that I’m gonna start writing that in the spring.
Beyond that, I mean there are a hundred steps in this process and the chances of this happening…I’m not on step one hundred but I’m not on step one, either. But I do have a Hollywood agent and I have a development company that I’ve been talking with about turning The Last Sun into a TV series.
Like I said, the finish line is always so far out on stuff like that but even going through this step of the process and, you know, going from the point where you hear someone’s interested and then you actually get a name and then you talk with this developer and then maybe there’s a screenwriter attached and maybe they start working on a pitch and they start to talk about what the entire season would look like. It’s kind of crazy. It’s doesn’t feel real sometimes but so far the people I’ve worked with have just been wonderful and if they can do anything with this, God bless them. I hope they can because you think of a stereotype of Hollywood sometimes like agents tell you exactly what you want to hear but there’s nothing sincere but I’ve got nothing but sincerity from the people I’ve been working with.
Annaelise: I mean I definitely think that there’s a niche for it, you know, for a TV series of that type. A fantasy, the urban fantasy, as well as people just wanting any sort of LGBTQ representation within television. And as far as the novellas are concerned, are they on your website?
K.D.: So, I’ve only done one and I haven’t finished it. I still have the last chapter of the novella to finish but I promised it by Sunday. Five chapters are out and they are on a Google Drive that anyone can download from and Twitter is basically my main social media outlet, I don’t really do anything else at this point but I’ll post that on Twitter and I’ll pin it to the top of my page. [Editor’s note: this interview was done a month ago]
K.D. Edwards (he/him) is the author of The Last Sun, book one of the Tarot Sequence. He lives and writes in North Carolina, but has spent time in Massachusetts, Maine, Colorado, New Hampshire, Montana, and Washington State. (Common theme until NC: Snow. So, so much snow.) Mercifully short careers in food service, interactive television, corporate banking, retail management, and bariatric furniture have led to a much less short career in higher education, currently for the University of North Carolina System.
You can purchase The Hanged Man on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Books-a-Million, and IndieBound.