INTERVIEW: Katy Nicholas: “As the World Falls Down”

RELEASED ON JANUARY 15^th, 2020, just before COVID-19 slammed into our world, Katy Nicholas’s excellent debut novel, As the World Falls Down, about a worldwide pandemic that kills the vast majority of humanity, is one of the best novels I’ve read in the past few years.

Just a few chapters into it, I found myself thinking, where did this author come from? Though I’d never encountered her work before, Katy writes with all the assurance of a longtime professional, and her novel, while vastly different in every way other than theme, is right up there with modern plague classics like David R. Palmer’s Emergence and King’s The Stand. As the World Falls Down also differs in that it’s the first volume in a planned series, Cities in Dust, though it works as a standalone novel. I would argue also that this isn’t just a Science Fiction novel, but a crossover novel which the non-genre reader will also find accessible and enjoyable.

My curiosity thus piqued, I contacted Katy, and the following interview is the result.

DC: Katy, I’m so glad to interview you. As a writer and editor used to reading debut novels and work from new authors, it’s very clear to me that you’ve been writing for at least a decade. As the World Falls Down is absolutely seamless, one of the most refreshing, thoughtful, and best-planned novels I’ve come across in a long time. I abandon a great many books because they’re simply too formulaic or fail to make me care, but your novel surprised and delighted me at every turn. Tell us a little about your development process as a writer.

KN: Believe it or not, before As the World Falls Down, the last thing I wrote was back in 2008.  In high school, I wrote daily. I had no interest in school. I remember writing stories in my economics class. After I left school, I got a job, had a family, and I didn’t really have time to write. So, there was a ten-year gap before I picked it up again. I wrote half a fantasy story about a girl who could bring the dead back to life. Again, life happened, and I didn’t write anything more for another ten years. The first draft of As The World Falls Down was basically me learning to write again, if I’m honest. It was 40,000 words. I then scrapped it and started again. I must’ve written about 200,000 words in four months. Oh to be that focused again. I began writing the sequel straight away, but I scrapped that as well, and started again. I’m currently editing it, so hopefully it’ll be out in 2021.

DC: I can’t imagine what it must have been like to release a book about a worldwide pandemic in January and have one explode in reality the very next month. What was that like for you?

KN: It was very surreal. I mean, I’d spent half of 2018 immersed in this book about a pandemic. Turns out I was right about a few things.

DC: What sparked the idea for As the World Falls Down?

KN: I had a dream. That’s so cliché, isn’t it? I have very strange dreams. In about April of 2018, I dreamed about the scene in the book where Halley finds Nate on the couch in his cabin. I had no idea what the rest of the story was about. I finished the book in September 2018. Then, I edited it, with more re-writes. I began to query agents and publishers, but my queries were dire. Then I sent five pages to The Wild Rose Press, and they requested the first three chapters, then the full MS. I signed with them in March 2019.

DC: Without giving too much away, the novel opens mainstream and slowly reveals a widening paranormal/science-fictional theme. As a writer and editor, I can clearly see the work is very tightly structured and meticulously planned. And yet your story is solidly character-driven and suffers none of the rigid, mechanical feel of intricately plotted novels. Can you tell us a bit about your specific writing process, and how you approached constructing this work?

KN: My process is chaotic. I spend a lot of time talking to myself and wandering around acting out the scenes. Then I scribble down notes. Usually I don’t make a proper chapter plan until I’ve written half the book. I feel like I go into the ring with every story and fight each round until I’ve figured everything out.

DC: Your character work is superb. Halley and Nate, your protagonists, are exceptionally well-drawn and even the novel’s minor characters are round and well-developed. Do characters come to you, as it were, living and breathing with a backstory to tell, or do you put a lot of conscious thought into their development?

KN: It’s more unconscious thought. I can’t even begin to explain how my brain works. I love to read and be so swept up in a story that I can’t stop thinking about it. I’ve not found a book like that in a really long time. I wanted As the World Falls Down to be that book. Even if I was the only person who ever read it. I also think I worked through a lot of my own personal trauma in this book. There’s a piece of me in every character— Halley more than most. None of the characters have the moral high ground either. Well, maybe Halley does. I explore that more in book two. I like moral ambiguity. I like flawed people who make terrible decisions for the right reasons.

DC: Your novel has a very satisfying roundness and texture. Nested mysteries and a sense of growing strangeness shading toward horror are interwoven with gentle notes of domesticity, of love for the pastoral beauty of the English countryside. And the love affair between your protagonists is, like so much else, exquisitely well-handled and developed, something not a great many SF authors manage. Do you read romance and other genres beyond SFF?

KN: I don’t really read romance. I usually read horror or fantasy. It’s the movies and tv shows that I watched in my youth that probably shaped my mind in terms of what makes a good romance. Princess Leia and Han Solo, Buffy and Angel, Robin Hood and Maid Marian. I like the idea of star-crossed lovers, even if it doesn’t end well.

DC: Though your actual writing style is transparent, refreshing, and entirely yours, I’m wondering where your literary roots lie. Are there any authors you feel influenced you, especially in terms of genre or thematic concerns?

KN: In my early twenties I think I read every fantasy author on the shelves of waterstones. I also love Alice Hoffman. She writes stories about ghosts, and magic, and mermaids, but it’s never really about the supernatural, its about the characters and their relationships.  

DC: As the World Falls Down is traditionally published by The Wild Rose Press in New York State. Getting a publishing deal is notoriously hard for new authors today. How did you go about finding your publisher, and had you considered going indie if you weren’t able to?

KN: I queried forty publishers and agents, using query tracker for the most part. I think TWRP were query number 30 or something. I blundered my way into the whole process— no idea what I was doing. I began querying in September/October and got signed in the following March. It was all rather miraculous to be honest.

I definitely considered self-publishing because I refused to let this book die. Some authors shelve their books. I can’t imagine putting your soul into something and then saying ‘oh well, I couldn’t get an agent so I’ll just forget about this novel and write something else.’ The more someone tells me I can’t do something, the more I’ll fight to succeed. 

DC: I know you’re active in the UK SF and comic convention scene. Tell us a little about your involvement and how you came to love the genres.

KN: My first ever sci fi convention was Destination Star Trek London. I only went because Scott Bakula was there. I was an obsessed Quantum Leap fan. I still am. I made friends online in the forums and we met up at the event. Since then, I’ve done many cons and made amazing friends. We try and meet up as often as possible but we’re all missing each other terribly this year. Covid 19 has put a stop to our antics.

DC: Of course, I’m very much looking forward to the next volume in the Cities in Dust series. Do you have a release date yet, or is this still open? And are you working on anything else in the meantime?

KN: The sequel had to be cut in half as it was such a long book. I’m almost done with it. I imagine it will be released in spring 2021.

DC: I know you live in southeast England. Apart from writing, what else do you enjoy doing?

KN: Being a mum and a carer takes up a lot of my time. I live near the beach which is great. I walk a lot. I find inspiration everywhere. I love people watching. I’m slightly obsessed with interior design. Whenever I can, I head down to Cornwall or Dorset.

DC: Katy, thanks so much for spending this time with us. Is there anything else you’d like to add?

KN: Thank you for reading. Thank you for your support.

• You can learn more about Katy at her website: https://www.katynicholasauthor.com/
• Follow Katy on Twitter at @KatyNDarkQueen
• Buy As the World Falls Down  at

1. Amazon US
2. Amazon UK    
3. Amazon CA     
4. Amazon AU

(other countries search by title & author)

 

To read more of my in-depth author interviews, click here

 

“Hands of an Angry God”: My Final Indie Book Recommendation for 2018

I’ve been doing more editing and book production than writing this year, and have been so impressed by the quality of some of the books I’ve worked on that I wanted to bring them to my own readers’ attention.

Douglas Martin’s Hands of an Angry God is the last in this series on exceptional indie novels.

Set in a remote wilderness inn at the start of the American Revolution, Hands of an Angry God is a dark, compelling tale of mystery, suspense, murder and, ultimately, Grace and redemption.

The novel’s protagonist, Dayne, the innkeeper’s eleven-year-old son, does not speak. In the author’s own words, Dayne “withdraws inward in search of voice and a family root, but the cruel death of a brother and repeated emotional failures with his father deepen his isolation. Bitter social and political adversaries trapped by a blizzard snarl the inn with danger and war. A conniving peddler riles all and brings ancient grudge and reckoning.”

Three things make this novel extraordinary, and one I believe you should read.

First, the story is one of the most resonant and visceral I’ve ever read. This is a gut puncher of a book, with fully rounded characters driving the action to its explosive climax in a way that would have made Shakespeare smile.

Second, the author’s depth of knowledge and research of the period renders the story utterly convincing in historical and social detail. And his portrayal of the dangerous wilderness that was upstate New York in 1776 is spellbinding.

Third, Douglas Martin’s writing style is pure prose poetry. His unique use of language, along with the points mentioned above, make this an absolutely unforgettable book.

All that said, this novel is a dark and dense read: if you’re looking for fluffy and happy, it’s probably not for you. But for those who like intense, visceral fiction, and who love to savour unique prose and dialogue that crackles with tension, Hands of an Angry God is a must-read. If, like myself, you enjoy historical fiction as real as it can be, all the better. Here’s a sample:

Dayne rocked back and forth, arms closed tight to his body. The water and woods carried unspoken rhythms, life as it came, yet also unseen spirits, omens and unkind nature. Over recent months ill change crept close along edges of the forest and into his father’s fields. Disturbance, violent upheaval would follow. The arrowhead proved it.

The lonely bird called again and an answer came from dense laurel thickets on the slope across the stream.

Alarmed, Dayne glanced up. His father said Indians sometimes made such sounds and often he ran afraid through fields and forest to escape unseen enemies. He peered uneasy, unsure among barren woods. Only the waterfall, the push of the creek and scratch of windblown leaves on the ground disturbed the quiet.

Dayne placed the arrowhead in his coat pocket. He would hide it in the fields far away from his eyes and thoughts. Cloth and hole covered over he gathered the kitten, turned along the path and crested the upper bank to overlook a narrow knobbed valley.

Scattered crop remnants poked uneven farm fields and a distant road creased wilderness beyond. Forbidding mountains loomed over all, stark and unforgiving, giant bony beasts buried restless and angry in the earth.

You can find the book on Amazon in both eBook and print by clicking here, or on the book’s cover image on this page. I first read it two years ago in draft, and think about it to this day.

That’s probably a wrap for me for the year. As for myself, I’m contemplating starting on a new novel in 2019. Thanks as always for following this blog, and I wish you the happiest of holiday seasons, and all the very best in the coming year.

Dario

 

 

 

The Made in L.A. Anthology is here!

We at Made in L.A. Writers have been working like crazy to put our first anthology together since deciding on it late last year. The anthology is now available in print and releases in digital format on the occasion of the L.A. Times Festival of Books (April 21-22), where we’ll have a booth. If you’re in L.A., we’d love to see you there. My own fiction contribution to the 300+ page volume, a 45-page novella titled Dry Bones, is set right here in the City of Angels, as are all the other stories. I’m very excited about this anthology! Here’s a peek at the cover and the list of fabulous authors. 

cover design by Allison Rose

CONTRIBUTORS:

Amy Sterling Casil
Dario Ciriello
Jude-Marie Green
Andre Hardy
Gabi Lorino
Bonnie Randall
Allison Rose
Cody Sisco

Readers in Los Angeles are thirsty for stories that bring their city to life. This anthology features a diverse range of voices and genres. Like the City of Angels in which these stories were born, nothing is off-limits. Literary or contemporary, noir or ghost story, fabulism or science fiction, each story in this volume will forever change the way you look at this iconic metropolis.

Made in L.A. Writers is a collaborative of Los Angeles-based authors dedicated to nurturing and promoting indie fiction. This 2018 volume is the first of the annual Made in L.A. anthology series. While our styles, themes, and story locales differ, our work is both influenced and illuminated by our hometown and underpinned by the extraordinary, multifaceted, and often surreal culture and life of the City of Angels.

From my colleague Cody Sisco’s introduction to the volume, here’s the scoop on how this anthology series came to be:

“In 2017 four indie authors first came together under the Made in L.A. banner to support each other and share a booth at the Los Angeles Festival of Books. We passed out bookmarks, watched as kids made away with our candy, chatted with a few questionable characters, and found many new fans. We expected all of that.

“What surprised us was how many people approached our booth with a version of the question: Are these books all set in L.A.? Our reluctant though truthful response, “Not really,” didn’t satisfy them and it didn’t satisfy the four of us, who saw a missed opportunity to “give them what they want.”

My own novella, Dry Bones, set in the Altadena foothills of the San Gabriel mountains, revolves around the breakdown of relationships, reality, and even time in the face of L.A.’s haunted past of cults and occultism.

The Made in L.A. anthology is already available in print at Amazon, and will release as an Amazon eBook on Saturday April 21. If you prefer the digital copy, please pre-order it now, since every pre-ordered copy will help us immensely by building momentum and interest on release day. Either click on the book cover image above or follow this link to the book page for either edition.

We had a lot of fun putting this volume together, and I know you’re going to love it. And don’t forget — if you’re in L.A. that weekend, do stop by our booth at the festival and say hello!

 

 

When Ink Runs Red

The unfolding debacle with regard to eBook pricing is both fascinating and, in some ways, bewildering. So for those who’ve not been following the issue, here’s a quick recap:

Ebooks have been around  for well over a decade. Although there were several—and some would say better—eBook readers on the market years before Amazon introduced the Kindle in 2007, the lure of instant eBook downloads via the Kindle’s unique, built-in wifi, added to Amazon’s vast inventory and ultra-prominent brand, quickly made Amazon the main player in the eBook business; even today, with competition from the Barnes and Noble Nook, the Sony Reader, Apple’s iPad, and numerous apps that enable one to read on a smartphone, Amazon still claims some 60% of the eBook market.

The action kicked off last summer with a class action suit filed against Apple and five big publishers, accusing them of eBook price fixing. Back in 2010, Amazon had been selling eBooks at $9.99 in a drive to grab as much market share for the Kindle as possible. With the introduction of the iPad, Apple and the publishers reacted with a covert deal to set their own eBook prices so that no bookseller could undercut Apple (déjà vu of Apple’s policy over individual song pricing, anyone?). As a result, eBook prices jumped overnight. Amazon wasn’t about to give up: in February of this year, Amazon dumped some 5,000 titles from IPG (Independent Publishers Group) because they refused to go along with Amazon’s pricing structure. And yesterday the US Department of Justice opened its own suit, simultaneously announcing that 3 of the 5 big publishing houses had agreed to settle, leaving Penguin and Macmillan to fight alone.

Although one can certainly have some sympathy for the Publishers’ and the bookselling industry’s assertion that once Amazon cements its monopoly this will quickly turn into a Pyrrhic victory for consumers, it’s very, very hard for me to have any sympathy for the book publishing industry as a whole. Not only has it clung for decades to a truly awful business model, but the industry is well-known for its historic lack of transparency over authors’ royalties and for its often onerous contract clauses; like the music industry before it, book publishers have only themselves to blame for their utter failure to adapt to a rapidly-evolving marketplace and new technologies. It’s not as if someone changed the rules overnight: the writing has been on the wall for at least a decade, and the book publishing industry simply sat on its hands and showed the same fatal complacency that the music industry did several years ago.

Like it or not, we live in a Darwinian, capitalist world, and Amazon has achieved dominance by serving the book-reading public with truly phenomenal efficiency; if they’ve sometimes done so by taking a loss on individual book sales to cement their market share, so what? It’s their money, not the taxpayer’s.

From a writer’s point of view, Amazon has also—so far—proved benign: indie authors publishing their own titles electronically get to remain in print indefinitely, have near-complete control over their work, and keep a far, far greater share of the net. Yes, they’re forgoing marketing, cover design, copyediting, and the rest… but given that traditional publishers offer most new authors just about zero marketing help and often appallingly poor covers on which they have no input, this is a debatable loss. Nor do I buy the ‘ocean of dreck’ argument which argues that  publishers have been the industry’s shining Guardians of Quality: although they may have screened out the worst—manuscripts of  third-grade level literacy—the truth is that a large percentage of published works have always been and will continue to be crap, per Sturgeon’s Law.

The nightmare scenario that the book publishing industry and many indie authors warn of is that once Amazon has run the competition out of town and achieved a monopoly, it’ll start jacking up prices and chipping away at author royalties. While the second is a distinct possibility, the first is unlikely. Why? Because (i) the market won’t wear it; and (ii) capitalism abhors a vacuum. Even if all the big five publishers were to fall—and they won’t, because some of them show signs of ‘getting it’ and adapting—other players will appear to compete with Amazon. Who would that be? Why, Apple, Google, and maybe even Mr. Zuckerberg (Facebook Publishing, anyone? Ugh.). All these have the muscle to go head-to-head with Amazon, though it certainly won’t be easy.

The bottom line? No monopoly endures for long, and modern capitalism tends to duopolies at worst; the free market is a Darwinian arena where the blood never dries. And whenever a Goliath appears, there’s always going to be a David to challenge them.

—

See also WIRED magazine, DOJ Announces Terms of Stettlement

On Self-Publishing

As someone who put out his first eBook (the novella anthology, Panverse One) back in 2009, I suppose I’m something of an old-timer in the field. And even in the eight months since I published my own book, Aegean Dream, the eBook revolution has gathered steam. Though there’s still some stigma–rather too much–attached to self-published eBooks, I see cracks starting to appear, as more self-published books break from the shadows onto bestseller lists, or are snapped up by traditional publishers for big money. One day, who knows, self-published authors may even be able to get reviewed in a mainstream venue.

One thing bothers me though: a lot of strong writers who self-publish simply aren’t prepping and polishing their manuscripts well enough. Without agents and editors involved, too many people are simply throwing books out there that are still in draft condition and definitely haven’t been copyedited or proofed, even if they often have decent (but rarely more!) covers. And the fact that they’re offering the reader a novel for $2.99 instead of $12.95 absolutely does NOT excuse them. Shoddily-produced eBooks hurt us all, but most of all they hurt the writer and their future sales.

Yeah, yeah, I know–you can’t afford to hire a cover artist at $75/hr or a copyeditor at a cent a word or so; fair enough. So get together with other (good) writers and swap critiques and copyedits. Proofread for one another. Because the truth is that any writer is way too close to their own work to see its flaws, and certainly utterly unable to proofread for typos etc.

It’s painful to me as a writer to read an otherwise strong book, especially one written by a friend (and I’ve seen a few now) that really should have had AT LEAST one more revision pass and then been proofread. Plot logic holes, changed character names, radical shifts in tone and diction, awkward paragraphs, typos by the score, this is all stuff that will kill you in the market. Yeah, I know that traditional publishers have cut back on copyediting and proofing too, but agents and editors between them still provide a great screening and polishing process for the traditionally published writer. And that’s who you’re competing with if you choose to self-publish. If nothing else, your own sense of professionalism should spur you to take the extra time and effort to ensure that your manuscript is the best it can be and at least as good as anything else out on the market in terms of presentation and polish. And since the royalty earned from a self-published book at $2.99 is roughly equivalent–often more!–than we’d get from a $12.95 book traditionally published, there is simply no excuse other than laziness. As for the cover art, find a graphic designer, even a student,  who wants to beef up their portfolio, and give them cover credits and a mention in the acknowledgments.

In short, behave like a publisher. Only better.