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, known as in German, has been released, a full month in Germany before the (and a month and a week before ). As can be seen by the image I nicked off German Amazon, you can ever read the inside of it, assuming you speak German.

At any rate, the german publisher, Piper, have linked an that I did late last year, and I thought, as a little mini celebration of the book finally being out there for the nation that won the World Cup, that I would provide the untranslated interview below. My German, being perhaps the worse German of anyone on the planet, I answered the questions in English, but to give you a confusing sense of whatthefuck, I kept all the titles in German.

Here we go:

Ben, thanks for doing this interview. Can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you’ve become a writer?

Hey, no problems. I’m always happy to talk.

I live in Sydney, Australia, with my partner, the photographer, Nikilyn Nevins. We have a cat and a bunch of books. Because the cat resists all organisation, we organise our bookshelves in strange new orders. Currently, we have our books organised by the date of birth of the author, which has, upon occasion, seen me email an author with a polite but invasive question about their birth.

As for an author, I suppose I became one due to a complete inability to stick around in another job. I was once a projectionist, and for a while I thought about becoming an academic (I have a doctorate), and I fell into teaching here and there for a while. But all of it was just something to do while I wrote. My first love has always been literature, and no matter where I have been personally, that has always been part of me.

I got told a while back by a friend that I’ve done the walk of a writer hard, and it has had its ups and downs, no lie there. I came close to packing it in a few years ago, but I have always been able to find that love, and hold onto it. At the end of the day, no matter what I will say about craft, about research, about art, about anything relating to writing and how to get there, if you don’t have that love, you’re kinda out of luck.

Your novel Verflucht will finally be out in Germany soon. What is it about?

Verflucht is set in a world where the gods have died, and their corpses lie on the ground.

They went to war, thousands of years ago, an act that had terrible repercussions for all the mortal life beneath them. At one point, the sun shattered, and the world was plunged into darkness for a week, which resulted in famine and starvation. At another, a giant god died in the ocean, and its blood turned it black and poisonous.

Yet, after this, mortal life continued, and adapted. The corpses of the gods became part of the landscape, and society entered a post-divine existence, of a sort. There are men and women who believe they will be gods, men and women who had said they were gods, and men and women who fear any return of them.

Mireea, where the bulk of Verflucht is set, is a city built on the Mountains of Ger. They are basically a huge cairn that covers the corpse of Ger, a giant god who controlled the elements. The people living on him built a city out of a gold rush and have become a trading city, one of the most prosperous in the world. However, they are on the cusp of being invaded by the Leerans, a nation who have fallen under the control of old priests, and intend to reshape the world in the eye of the gods, again. The only problem, of course, is that Lady Wagan, the ruler of Mireea, doesn’t want to give up her city. She has hired mercenaries, armed her populace, and told the Captain of the Spine to do whatever is necessary. Once you know him, you’ll realise why that’s a problem for the Leerans.

³Õ±ð°ù´Ú±ô³Ü³¦³ó³Ù’s narrative is split between three characters, creating an ensemble cast. The first, Ayae, is a cartographer’s apprentice. The second is Zaifyr, is a stranger who comes to the city alone, only to find himself drawn into the politics of the war, and the third is Bueralan, is the leader of a group of saboteurs who have been hired to slow down the Leeran Army, if they can.

Verflucht is your first “classic� fantasy novel. After all the other projects you have done, why have you entered the fantasy-genre?

I grew up reading fantasy and, in many ways, its my first and original love. The very first book I ever bought with my own money was Margaret Weis and Tracey Hickman’s Dragon’s of Autumn Twilight. I still have the tattered paperback with me. My oldest friend, who once told a boyfriend that he has known me longer than his partner had been alive (we met in the first grade) bought the second of the series, and for years I only ever had the first and third. Years ago he gave me the second book, and I still have it.

I kind of drifted away from classic fantasy in my early twenties. There was no real reason for it, just one of those things that happened. I discovered other writers, other genres, and a lot of my writing went that way. I was hugely interested in racial representation and experimental writing, for example, and Black Sheep and Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth represent that. Still, it would be wrong to say I didn’t do anything fantasy based. For a long time I tried to get a series of short stories up and running similar to Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series, with characters called Allandros and Balor. I sold about half a dozen, I think, but for all the time I put into it, the rewards were pretty slim. I think maybe half a dozen people read them, really.

But I didn’t write a classic fantasy novel until Verflucht. Before it, I wrote a novel called Beneath the Red Sun, and it is really that novel that gave rise to it, because it was that book that almost saw me quit writing. I had written it before the global financial crisis a few years back, and I had an editor who was interested in it. That editor never read it, and since things weren’t working out with my agent as well as I thought they would, I left, intent on getting a new one. The global financial crisis happened around then, and everything slowed down, but eventually, I found a second editor interested and with an offer � only for that to fall through before a contract was signed. I didn’t have an agent then, but I got one shortly after. When that didn’t work out, she stopped returning my emails and calls, and soon enough, ditched me in a fine, impersonal email, leaving me with nowhere to go, really.

It was a pretty shit time and I was forced to take a step back and try and figure out what I was doing here and what I wanted.

In that time, I went back to a lot of the books I read as a kid, the things I loved, the reason I became a writer. I went searching for this fantasy novel I wrote when I was sixteen, but the drive it was on was long gone, the paper copy long lost. I took a big step back from the online life of being a writer, which was, I thought, becoming a negative place for myself. I just holed up and thought long and hard about what I wanted. During this time, one of my friends got married up in Darwin, and I flew up there for it. Darwin is this small little city with lots of outlying suburbs, and it takes forever to get anywhere, but that’s okay, because the heat is all lazy tropics heat, and one day, while my friend and I were driving round before her marriage, I was day dreaming about immortals fighting, and long, century like feuds, and the books I’d been writing, and I thought, I should make one more go at this.

When I got back to Sydney, I still thought it was a good idea. A fantasy novel that took all the stuff I loved as a kid, and put all the things I loved into it as an adult, and somehow, at the end of it, I had a new agent, a new publishing deal, and here I was, writing fantasy books and as happy as I’d ever been as a writer.

You probably thought that answer was going to be a simple one, yeah?

Do you have a complete outline for the whole series or do you allow the plot and character to evolve during the writing? How does your writing process work?

I know how it ends, to a degree. I know the very final scene in the book, but the faces in that scene change, and alter, occasionally.

I’m not huge on complete outlines. I tend to map a little, and then let everything evolve as it does. Mostly, this is due to the fact that I am a terrible re-writer. After I write an original scene, I will rewrite it like five, six times, before I rewrite the whole novel, and whole scenes again. Nothing really looks like it does when I first start it, though by the end, there’s less and less as everything falls into its outcome. But yeah, I rewrite a lot, and I tend to stop once I cannot stand the sight of it anymore.

On a day to day level, when I’m not teaching, I tend to rewrite, edit the previous days work in the morning, and write new words in the afternoon. If I’m handling about a thousand words of new work each day, I think I’m doing alright.

What’s the fantasy and sf community like in Australia? Is it as big as in Europe or the US? Are you in touch with other fantasy authors?

Australia is pretty small, really. Jonathan Strahan once described it as one phone call wide, one phone call deep, and it hasn’t really changed from that.

As for other authors, a few here and there, but I tend to keep to myself these days. But I’ve known Rjurik Davidson for years, for example.

Any plans for the books as a movie or tv series?

Nah.

I mean, if it happens, all good, but it isn’t really a priority of mine. I don’t really need my books to be turned into a TV series or a movie. If it had been a desire, I would have written them as that.

What is your next project?

Well, currently I am writing the second book of Children, and then the third. After that, well, I kind of hope I am in a position to continue writing more fantasy books. The world I created is huge and its left me with a lot of cool ideas, but we’ll all have to see how this rounds itself out.

I have a few side projects that I keep going, however. My partner and I are working on a book based on Sydney, a novel that mixes photography and prose together, and I have my Dead American project to keep me busy as well. The fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of JFK has seen an influx of assassination books in the house, and it is very tempting � but you know, its not a priority.

Right now, finish this series, and hope people love it. Everything by the day, y’know?

How can readers reach you if they want to get in touch?

I have a blog, a facebook, and a twitter account. Feel free to come by them and say hi. It’ll be all good, as they say.

Thanks very much, Ben, for taking the time.

No problems at all.

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In other news, I know the blog as been a bit quiet, for which I apologise. I have been busy, and when I have not been busy, I have been lazy. However, I have done a bunch of interviews, and pieces, which will be filtering online soon, and in August, my story, ‘Upon the Body� will be printed in The Godless will be released, reviews will be linked (the good, the bad, the whatever), and in general, people will no doubt become sick of me.

Something to look forward to, that.

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is beginning to appear in the world. It isn’t released until August, but photos of ARCs are appearing on twitter (Warren Ellis even has one), samples are appearing for people to read, and there are interviews and even reviews. Well, just one at the moment, but it is review.

It is fairly positive:

“Fifteen thousand years ago, the true gods turned on each other for reasons beyond mortal ken. The outcome of their struggles is a landscape dominated by the corpses of dead and dying divinities. When fire fails to consume shop clerk Ayae, she discovers that she is one of the “cursed,� imbued with power by a divine spark. Her newfound abilities set her apart from the rest of the denizens in her beloved city of Mireea. The cursed are not the only legacies of the gods; as an army mysterious in purpose and savage in method advances on Mireea, determined to recover a treasure the Mireeans have forgotten, Ayae joins steadfast mercenaries and would-be deities in defense of her adopted homeland. Peek (Black Sheep) weaves multiple threads of the plot together with considerable skill. Ayae and the story’s other protagonists—reformed megalomaniac Zaifyr, baron turned professional saboteur Bueralan—are well developed, in contrast to the scenery-chewing monsters they oppose. Although this volume serves mainly to introduce the Children series, readers fond of open-ended epic fantasies set in vivid, and occasionally lurid, worlds will find it right up their alley.�

However, reviews are reviews, and what is better than reviews is excerpts, and ran five days of excerpts last week, revealing the first five chapters of the book. Pretty cool, really, and you can, of course, go a bit of the book yourself (and if you like it, please, share it around for others).

Lastly, I began doing some interviews last week, all in the name of getting word out, and helping promote the book. The first of them was with Stefan Fergus at his blog. You can read it , if you so desire.

If you want an interview, or want to get into touch with me about anything in regards to the Godless (perhaps you want to discuss reformed megalomaniacs), then by all means, drop me an email.

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Today, I return to writing.

Two weeks ago, I finished Leviathan’s Blood, and sent it off to my agent, my editor, and my test readers, and then I went and found a hole, and buried myself in it. The final three months of the book had been fairly intense, and I needed time to sit around and empty my head. Since the deadline for the third book is in a year, however, I can’t sit around for that long, though I’m going to ease back into it slowly, letting myself build up slowly to where I want to be. It’ll be maybe two weeks of half time writing, pecking, planning, and cleaning, before I fall into a decent work pattern, again. Even then, it won’t be like the last three months: you have to pace yourself in this gig, I’ve found. After all, a single book takes over a year to write, especially if you include edits (I added 20k to the Godless during edits, for example).

At the start of this book, however, the first thing I am going to do is get the book printed and bound in some cheap, black plastic shit. Then I reread it, mark it up with various notes, both for edits and for the new book â€� almost every page ofÌýthe Godless is so marked â€� and it sits on my table as a reference alongside the previous one. Every time I need to make reference to something, or remind myself of something, I open it.

It’s not how I would start a new book, obviously, but the third book in a trilogy is a bit different, and it’s all a bit of a new experience. This is one I found quite useful for the second, so I’ll keep it for the third.

My experience of writing books at the moment is very different to my previous experience of writing a novel. It is not just the trilogy aspect, but the deadlines, and the expectations, which are both very reassuring when you’re embarking on a long project. Writing without a deadline imposed by someone else lends itself to doubt � ‘Why am I writing this?� ‘Who will buy this?� ‘I should do something else� � which lends itself to procrastination, and can make the task of writing a book much longer than it should be. It is probably the hardest thing of writing a book without a deadline, the search for that constant desire to keep pushing forward, that constant bit of faith in oneself.

Whereas now, the questions are about balance between work and life, and so on and so forth. All of it important just as important, of course, but just different from the previous experience.

At any rate, it is back to it today, even if, I admit, back to it is really just easing yourself into it, much like as if you were a frog, and someone had just turned the lit the stove on low.

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And, as if I could raise a curtain and reveal it to you, the US cover of the Godless.

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Pretty cool, hey?

The Godless will be released in 99 days, or something close.

I, meanwhile, will be finishing Leviathan’s Blood in the next week and a half. Teaching is done, now, so no students for a few days, and soon, I will be able to get up from the computer and walk away, and people will be able to read it for feedback. As always, I have various thoughts about it, but I need space from it before I decide if they’re good thoughts or not. I suspect by the time I have all the edits back, I will be about a quarter into the third book, maybe further.

It’s a strange time, though, I have to be honest. A second book in the year, another two years mapped out ahead of me. I would never have picked it.

Anyhow, and there is a sweepstake to win some ARCs of it, so long as you’re not in Australia. No love for the distant colony, as always in these things.

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I wrote a Book Notes post for Largehearted Boy which you should read. , and includes a spotify playlist, for all of you who wish to have a spotify playlist.

Follow the link, , and so on and so forth.

(Yes, I know, a short post, but I am pushing through to the end of this book. Almost at the last chapter.)

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Today is the release of Rjurik Davidson’s Unwrapped Sky in the UK.

It’s a excellent novel, one that I think a lot of people will enjoy, and I recommend. In fact, I thought that so much that I actually gave a blurb for it, which may or may not appear on the book (it was mainly a way for me to read it before a lot of others). But I thought it was very cool, so, click click, buy buy.

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The Annadale was a real venue, alongside Parramatta Road, and I saw a lot of bands in there cheaply. My friends lived near it, which is probably what set it immediately apart from other venues in Sydney, but I remember it fondly, regardless. I remember the International Noise Conspiracy gig we went to once where they sold anarchist books and zines after (they must have at all their gigs; they were a pretty good band live, though, even if as a whole the band was no replacement for Refused). I bought some, of course. A lot of the time, we’d leave a gig and cross the road to what was, according to legend, the most regularly held up McDonalds in NSW. Who knows if it was true, but the McDonalds is still there, with a new coat of paint and a new security system, and the Annadale has shut down, sadly. A little bit of it lives in this story, though.

‘theleeharveyoswaldband� was a story I sat down to write without much but the opening line. The title I took from a local band around here, theredsunband, which I think I’d seen a few weeks before. But the band itself had no real impact on the creation of either of the main characters. I was pleased with both, though, enough to let them guide the story. In the end, however, what the story eventually became was a piece that tracked the change in music and how it was delivered to people. I wanted to capture that sense of transition, that moment in history when music felt as if it was being lifted out of the corporate advertisers hands, and transplanted into the power of others. I am not sure you can say that this actually happened � there just seems to be a lot more corporate owners now, but maybe that’s just the cynic in me.

Either way, in the depths of the story is the tragedy of Lee Brown, and he is the heart of it, a musician built out of the model of a thousand other musicians who felt lost in the business of it, and whose personal issues left them inadequate to deal with their fame. There were, I am afraid to say, many examples to draw upon.

The story was originally published in Polyphony Six, edited by Deborah Layne and Jay Lake. It began my friendship with Deb Layne,Ìýan excellent person for whom I have already said many fine things, and could say more. The books that Wheatland Press put out in the mid two thousands were uniformly excellent, books that walked the fractured lines of the genre, and gave voice to some truly unique and excellent writers. A press that does that is always worth your time, and I have been lucky, in my experiences with independent presses, to be involved with people who push the edges â€� from ChiZine Publications, to Twelfth Planet Press, to Wheatland Press â€� with a vision that is unique and demanding. It has been, and will continue to be, ever rewarding to be published in such an environment.

(This is a story note for my collection, , which is available now. The song is part of an illusionary soundtrack that I am putting into each of the posts for amusement, but if you owned the book, you could listen to it in the final moments of the story, if you were so inclined. If you don’t own a copy of and you haven’t read ‘theleeharveyoswaldband�, then you’re only hurting yourself.)

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The concept behind ‘Octavia E. Butler� was a relatively simple one: to build a work of fiction from Octavia Butler’s body of her work, one that works both as an independent narrative about a girl who meets herself from the future and one that works as literary criticism that seeks to explore and celebrate the themes of Butler’s work, such as race, gender, sexuality, history, and identity.

I very much admire Octavia Butler’s work. Parable of the Sower formed an important building block of my evolution as a writer, and it and its sequel, Parable of the Talents, combines with it to make two of my favourite novels. Not all of Butler’s work is equal, however, and the Patternist series is a good example of how it could be quite uneven. While the early novels and final ones are good, the 1978 Survivor, the one novel Butler never allowed to be reprinted, is rightly derided by her. And Fledgling, her final novel, is a strange thing, a vampire novel of uneven prose, and an odd child sexuality that just never really comes together, in any fashion. But yet, novels likeÌýKindred persist with its excellence, and the Xenogenesis Trilogy is universally strong, and features some of her best writing. But it was the overall work of them, the warm but fierce intelligence behind her body of work that I wanted to take and form into a narrative (her collection, Bloodchild, is quite good, but including short stories in ‘Octavia E. Butlerâ€� just proved too difficult). I wanted to make a work of art that would both rejoice in the work that Octavia Butler created and, I hoped, be a good read in its own right while inspiring people to read the work that had meant so much to me. I like to think I succeeded, but that will be for others to decide.

I hope Butler would have appreciated the story in her name, though perhaps she might not have. But I like to think she would have seen the humour in it as well, because ‘Octavia E. Butler�, the novella inspired by the work of an African American woman, is the work of a white Australian male from the working class suburbs of Sydney � and there is, in that, something a touch funny, though it speaks mostly to the reach of her work and to the importance of what she wrote.

It is published in Dead Americans and Other Stories for the first time.

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(This is a story note for my collection, , which is available now. The song is part of an illusionary soundtrack that I am putting into each of the posts for amusement, but if you owned the book, you could listen to it in the final moments of the story, if you were so inclined. If you don’t own a copy of and you haven’t read ‘Octavia E. Butler�, then it’s clear you haven’t clicked that link.)

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It was Orson Welles who first said that Joseph Stalin had put a price on John Wayne’s head. Given the nature of Welles, the story was just that for a long time, but the claim was verified in recently declassified Soviet documents. Yet, even if it had not been true, it still would have been the start of ‘John Wayne�.

The truth is, I’m not a huge Wayne fan. A few movies are interesting, but none of them � not even the Searchers � hold any real importance to me. I am, however, fascinated by him as a figure in society and by how he was able to embody a version of the American male, a role that in his later years he protected by selecting roles that would not diminish his off screen persona. Yet, parts of his personal life felt as if they were in conflict with the personality he fostered, such as his three marriages to Hispanic women, and his fluency in Spanish. The combination of the two worlds always appeared to me to create a very nauanced and fascinating character, and I tried to capture that here, in the story, while also talking about American fear, and the somewhat surreal experience you have, as a foreigner, when you walk into a Walmart and see the amount of weapons you can buy. I don’t think that Amercians realise just how truly weird that is, really.

No one wanted to buy ‘John Wayne� after I wrote it. It was one of those stories, one where everyone says they don’t get it, or it’s too weird, or they give you the polite brush off, and maybe a couple of people tell you flat out that they think it sucks. I had it all, man.

Me, I always thought it was great, so I kept submitting it and it kept wracking up the rejections. It was the kind of thing that makes you want to question a piece, but I was always of the opinion that there was nothing wrong with the story in terms of writing, or structure. You reach a point in your evolution as a writer where you can pick up these things. It is usually not when you finish a piece, but you figure it eventually, maybe after a bounce or two. A lot of the stories early in my career � including my first novel � are pretty flawed things, and I can see the flaws clear as smooth botox skin, but with ‘John Wayne� I always believed that it was a decent piece. I just needed to find the right editor. Someone who thought, like me, that John Wayne entering a Walmart to buy a gun was the best idea ever.

Eventually, I did. Ben Payne and Robert Hoge took over Australia’s longest running magazine, Aurealis, and they bought the piece. I don’t know if one liked it more, or both liked it, but either way, they purchased it.

At any rate, Payne and Hoge were kicked off Aurealis after one issue, and the magazine’s owner, Dirk Strasser, referred to them as ‘the disasterous Queensland experiment� that Aurealis survived, which was a fairly fine endorsement, I thought. ‘John Wayne� was published in the following issue, edited by Stephen Higgins and Stuart Mayne, and the days of me selling stories to Aurealis about American movie stars entering Walmart vanished oh so quickly.

On the other hand, Bill Congreve and Michelle Marquardt republished ‘John Wayne� in their Year’s Best series, so there is always hope.

(This is a story note for my collection, , which is available now. The song is part of an illusionary soundtrack that I am putting into each of the posts for amusement, but if you owned the book, you could listen to it in the final moments of the story, if you were so inclined. If you don’t own a copy of and you haven’t read ‘John Wayne�, then you should follow the links and . After all, who doesn’t love old American movie stars?)

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‘Under the Red Sun� is the first Red Sun story I wrote.

I remember very clearly the moment of inspiration for the story, because I was watching a documentry about 19th century body snatchers with my mother, as you do. My mother, who is very supportive of my writing without having read any � she has never been much of a reader � is nothing like the mother in the story, but I imagine that the mother/son nature of our relationship was part of my sub conscious� cherry picking at that moment as we watched about body snatchers, grave robbing, early medical experiments, and the way the dead were handled. From that moment came six short stories (so far) and a novel.

The latter is somewhat infamous. I am asked about a Red Sun novel every now and then, and yes, there is one. The story of why it isn’t published is long and twisted, but it essentially runs like this: one editor wanted it, but didn’t read it, then a second wanted it, but didn’t buy it; and I had one agent, and then another. There’s more inbetween, but at the end of it, I almost gave up writing. But I did not, and the book I wrote after that -ÌýThe Godless â€� offered me the best opportunity of my career as yet. I also suspect that those who like the Red Sun stories will like the world of the Children, with its dead gods, fractured sun, and ocean discoloured by blood, and I suspect that when all is said and done, people will look at the Red Sun world and its fiction as the dark mirror to the world I created in the Godless, but only time will tell with that.

‘Under the Red Sun� was originally published by Sean Wallace in the print version of Fantasy Magazine. It was the first of the pair of stories he published, but unlike ‘Possession�, I did not get a single date out of it. It’s enough to declare that print is dead. However, I did, a few years later, record a reading of it for Keith Stevenson’s TISF, and if you are so inclined, .

(This is a story note for my collection, , which is available now. The song is part of an illusionary soundtrack that I am putting into each of the posts for amusement, but if you owned the book, you could listen to it in the final moments of the story, if you were so inclined. If you don’t own a copy of and you haven’t read ‘Under the Red Sun�, then you should follow the links and . It’s just like spending time with my mother.)