Josh Reynolds Talks Humour, Horror and the Age of Reynolds: Part One

From his early work in the Old World through the End Times and beyond, and onto more recent work on Age of Sigmar, Fabius Bile and even the Horus Heresy, Josh Reynolds has for a long time been one of the most prolific Black Library authors. If you’re a Black Library fan, chances are you’ve read at least a few of Josh’s stories.

I’ve been following Josh’s career for a few years now, mostly through his Black Library work but also with a couple of other publishers, so I was delighted when he agreed to an interview. Rather than focusing in on one specific book or series, I wanted to cover quite a wide range of topics so we bounce from Josh’s early short stories to his most recent work, by way of music (including the soundtrack to Fabius Bile), invasive plants, Cryptids, the question of faith in Warhammer, and Space Wolf ‘knock knock’ jokes.

Covering such a lot of ground means this is, once again, quite a long interview. As I’ve done a few times before I’ve split things out into two posts – this first one looks a little at Josh’s influences, his way of working and the earlier stages of his writing career, before moving on to Age of Sigmar and the Warhammer Old World. You can find part two here, in which Josh talks about his more recent 40k and Horus Heresy work.

Josh remained resolutely self deprecating throughout, but if you’ve read any of his Black Library stories, especially his recent Fabius Bile and Age of Sigmar novels, I’m sure you’ll agree that he’s very much in the ascendant. If you haven’t…well, I hope this interview provides you with suitable inspiration to go out and find some of his work to read and enjoy.

Welcome to the Age of Reynolds!

Track of Words: Let’s start off with a few questions about how you got started – was there anything in your childhood or when you were growing up that set you on the path to being a writer?

Josh Reynolds: Honestly, not really! I became a writer because it seemed a good way to make extra money while I was in college. At the time when I started you had a lot of internet magazines popping up, little fly-by-night operations that paid in PayPal, maybe $25 or $30 per story. They weren’t very discriminating, so I rattled off thirty or forty Lovecraft pastiches in a couple of weeks and made rent for a month! So I kinda thought ‘ok, yeah I can probably do this…’

ToW: Can you remember the first story you had published?

JR: Oh, lordy. I don’t know, actually. I can remember the first one that I admitted to having published! That would be a story called Kudzu, with Pulp and Dagger webzine in 2003. Kudzu is an invasive plant species in the American South which eats everything. If you go online and look up ‘kudzu houses’ you get just some horrifying pictures.

So that’s pretty much what I wrote about – a kudzu house. That was the first one I actually remember people talking about. A lot of my early work was basically ‘oh here’s a Lovecraft story – how can I set that in the South and change it slightly?’

ToW: How did you end up working with Black Library?

JR: Oh, this is going to be another one of those answers that nobody likes! I saw that they had an open submissions policy at the time, and I whipped up a book pitch that afternoon amidst a handful of other pitches for other publishers, and sent it off. They got back to me a couple of weeks later and said ‘hey we really want to accept this but you’ve set it in Estalia and Tilea, and we can’t really do that.’ So I said ‘well I’ll just change all of that, I’ll just flip it to the other coast so that it’s Norsca and Marienburg.’ The editor got back to me and said ‘so you’re just happy to change it?’

So they accepted it, and that was Knight of the Blazing Sun. I sold them that book and then I wrote a couple of short stories in very quick succession for Hammer and Bolter magazine and the Age of Legends anthology. I wrote the book in maybe four or five weeks, and then re-wrote it in three more weeks when I had to cut a character and a bunch of plotlines out that didn’t work, and tighten the book up. And that was pretty much it!

ToW: Did the Erkhart Dubnitz stories stem from that first novel, as well?

JR: Yeah, Dubnitz first appeared in Knight of the Blazing Sun. He was really popular with the editors, more so than Goetz [the main protagonist], because Goetz is kind of a moody, depressing person and Dubnitz was Brian Blessed, basically! So I wrote four or five Dubnitz stories for Hammer and Bolter; there was a plan at one time to actually write enough Dubnitz stories to collect together, but because of the End Times that obviously did not happen…

ToW: Were you a Black Library/Games Workshop fan before you started working with Black Library?

JR: I was a fan in the sense that I had played the games; my games of choice were always Necromunda and Mordheim. Warhammer Fantasy was a game that my dad had taught us to play, but I wasn’t really interested in the ranked combat style, and 40k was just too expensive. My actual first experience playing 40k was playing Rogue Trader, playing the ‘Battle at the Farm’ scenario, and for a long time I thought that was the entire game!

I picked up White Dwarf here and there, mostly to read about Necromunda, and I was a fan of the fiction. I’d read Gaunt’s Ghosts and Ciaphas Cain, Gotrek and Felix obviously. I was a big fan of the Jack Yeovil books, like Drachenfels and Genevieve Undead, but I’d never really thought about writing for them. It just wasn’t something that occurred to me that people did – I wasn’t thinking in terms of books at that point, I was thinking more of short stories. I didn’t honestly know whether I could write a full-length book, all the books I’d written up to that point were fifty or sixty thousand words. Black Library obviously wanted a hundred thousand, which was a bit of a challenge!

ToW: Let’s move onto a little bit about you as an author – how would you describe yourself as an author, or your writing style, to someone unfamiliar with your work?

JR: Tongue in cheek? I’m basically a pulp writer, I tend to write whatever works. I like to include a little bit of everything when I write a story, so that’s a little bit of serious, a little bit of funny. A little bit of horror, a little bit of comedy. I don’t really know if I can describe myself in a bullet point! I’ve never really worked towards being one type of writer or another, I just kind of write whatever is needed…

ToW: ‘Pulp fiction’ can sometimes be seen as a bit of a negative thing – when you describe yourself as a pulp writer, do you take that as a positive term?

JR: Yes and no. I don’t think it’s necessarily a negative term, because pulp writing has existed since the beginning and will exist for as long as there’s pop culture and we need to fill it with books. As long as you need to novelise a movie or write comic books, there’s pulp fiction. It just seems to be the best descriptor of my style, and my work. I’m someone who writes whatever I’m asked to write – it’s not a calling, it’s a case of ‘we need seventy thousand words about this guy shooting a martian and we need somebody to write it’!

ToW: You’ve already mentioned Lovecraft, but could you talk a bit about your early influences?

JR: Sure. My early influences, like a lot of people, included Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. My main influence, though, was an author called Manly Wade Wellman, who was a North Carolina author, a pulp author who came a little after Lovecraft and Howard. He wrote a lot of stories based on folklore from the region, and his stories were always a lot like what I try to do – there’s a little bit of humour, and the characters aren’t the cyphers of Lovecraft or the idealised versions of Howard, they’re just normal people. Maybe they’re a little bit tougher than normal, or they know a little more, but they’re normal people who have normal conversations and do normal things…but occasionally they have to shoot a monster in the face.

I really enjoyed his works, they were very formative for me. Also Dorothy Sayers, the Peter Wimsey books, which were Golden Age of Detective novels. I’m a big detective novel fan…for someone who writes a lot of fantasy and science fiction I actually don’t read a lot of it. I’m trying to read more of it now, but I mostly read detective fiction or nonfiction. Most of my influences were detective authors, so Dorothy Sayers, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Parker, authors like that. They’re where I got most of my stylistic tricks from.

ToW: Have those remained the key influences over time, or have things changed over time?

JR: I honestly keep returning to those. I’ve been trying to read a little more widely of late – the last couple of years I’ve been trying to read things that I wouldn’t have normally read. I’m a big Georgette Heyer fan, for instance. One of my favourite books is Madame Bovary, which is a book in which nothing happens! It’s about a woman being bored and possibly having an affair – it’s not a very interesting book but it’s a good book, because it’s about people doing people things. Authors like Dorothy Parker and Tennessee Williams, as well. So they haven’t so much changed as expanded…

Essentially I’m trying to expand my toolkit a bit, to enjoy what I’m reading a little more and draw from a deeper well than I have been. I feel like I’ve been able to draw from pretty much everything I’ve read of late. You get different things from different books, and see different ways of doing something. Science fiction and fantasy have their own tropes, that you can kind of use as literary shorthand when you’re writing stories. Especially tie-in stories where everyone’s already familiar with the tropes of 40k and Fantasy. Of late I’ve been trying to use a different set of tricks and tropes in some of my work, I’ve been trying to use things I’ve learned from Flaubert and the so-called ‘classic’ authors, just to change things up a bit and make things a little more interesting stylistically. I don’t necessarily know whether it’s worked or not, or if anyone’s noticed!

ToW: Do you think you’ve been fundamentally influenced by where you grew up, in South Carolina?

JR: Oh, yeah for sure. South Carolina is very much a land of stories. Storytelling is an art in the American South, especially in the Carolinas. You have to be good at it, you have to know how to tell a story to get through daily life!

ToW: Your list of published works stretches to the hundreds, including audios and short stories – has it always come naturally to be so prolific, or is it something you’ve had to work on, as a result of being freelance?

JR: A little of both, to begin with. Coming up with story ideas isn’t hard, but sitting down to actually commit them to paper is. You look at my list of short stories and it’s actually two hundred-odd now, but that’s only a third of the short stories I’ve written! The other two thirds didn’t get published…

You have to train yourself on not just how to write but to write the thing that’s going to be published. Coming up with an idea isn’t hard, but figuring out how to polish that idea into something somebody’s willing to pay you money for…that takes a while to figure out.

So it’s about being aware of trends, being aware of what an editor is looking for, and what an editor hates! A lot of magazines and anthologies say ‘read previous issues’. That’s not just a scam to get you to buy stuff – it is, but it’s also basically saying ‘if you want to see what sells to us, read a previous issue and get an idea before you submit the same serial killer story that everybody submits’. You know – ‘I was the serial killer all the time!’ It’s that same story.

I once worked as a slush editor for a couple of different magazines, and I kid you not – every time you’d get like six stories that were basically ‘I was the serial killer all the time’, told in the first person all the same way. Different authors, but everybody writes that same bad story. It’s a bit sad…it’s even sadder when you sit down and read all of those and realise ‘goddamn, I actually wrote that story myself, three years ago!’

ToW: Do you have a particular routine for writing, or a way of making sure you’re in the right headspace?

JR: Mostly I just like to have music available. Not necessarily mood music, just what I would listen to normally on the radio – a lot of R&B, stuff from the 70s. A lot of disco…I listened to a lot of disco while writing Fabius Bile, you would not believe how much Earth, Wind and Fire went into writing Primogenitor! That is the unofficial soundtrack for Fabius Bile…

Mostly I get up and usually try to sit down in the morning, about 8am or 8.30, and I just start writing. I usually aim for between two and three thousand words a day, and however long that takes me to get done…that’s my work day. If I get done a little early I tend to try and start work on something else, a different project – a short story, a blog post, another book, book pitches – just to keep busy. I’m kind of a workaholic so I tend to work twelve, thirteen hours a day.

ToW: You mentioned other projects – do you prefer to focus on one book at a time, or swap between books for different parts of the day…?

JR: It depend on deadlines, really. For instance right now I’m completely focused on the one book I’m working on, because it’s due in about two weeks so I need to get it finished. Generally if the deadline is two or three months off then I’ll juggle projects, just because I’ll be aiming for anthology deadlines, magazine deadlines, and various other projects I’ve committed to. I tend not to like to focus on one thing to the exclusion of everything else, just because it’s really easy to get sick of what I’m working on and start making…not mistakes necessarily, but cutting corners and going the easy route instead of coming up with something interesting for a scene.

ToW: When I spoke to Dan Abnett he talked about working on comics while he’s writing a book so that he gets those regular little hits of satisfaction over the course of a longer project. Do you find that applies, perhaps with short stories, topping up your sense of satisfaction as you’re going?

JR: Yeah, actually that’s a good way of putting it. It does, it keeps you feeling like you’re accomplishing something. With a book it’s really easy to lose sight of ever getting it done, especially with the way I work on a book. I tend to write scenes out of order, so I wake up in the morning and whatever scene or chapter I want to work on, that’s what I work on. I then assemble it as I go, and it’s really easy to get stuck on a scene, circle it and take forever to get it done…when really it’s just a five hundred word scene. Maybe it’s a bit of dialogue between characters but you can’t get it right, and it starts to get frustrating…so having another project completed helps.

For one it helps you break through the block of whatever’s preventing you from writing that scene, generally – to switch gears with your brain. It also makes you feel as though you’re getting something done as opposed to just spinning the wheels.

ToW: It’s not without merit that Age of Sigmar is sometimes jokingly referred to as Age of Reynolds – by my count you’ve got at least an involvement in 10 AoS books so far – out of about 19 in total! How does it feel to have contributed so much to this still relatively new setting?

JR: I don’t really know, I’ve never really thought about it. I like the setting! It’s one of those things…I really enjoy the openness of the setting, so whenever they [Black Library] said ‘hey, do you want to write an Age of Sigmar thing?’ I said ‘yeah, sure!’ Most of those were more due to me being available to work on them and being able to turn them around, because a lot of those were written in the ‘dark period’. During that period, what was prized by the combined editorial staff was someone who could write to the brief very, very quickly.

That was me basically. They would say ‘can you turn around this book in five weeks’ and I would say ‘yep, I can do that.’ That’s how most of that stuff came to be written. It wasn’t necessarily by choice, but rather I wanted to keep getting paid and they needed somebody to do it, so…

ToW: How has it been to write in AoS compared to the Old World? What have been the differences so far?

JR: There have been noticeable differences in tone, but not necessarily so much in how it’s done. Stories are about people, regardless of whether they live in a giant sprawling medieval megapolis or a relatively smaller megapolis like Altdorf. The tone of Age of Sigmar is a lot different from the tone of Warhammer Fantasy, which was very much like 40k where you always had that one minute to midnight feeling. Everything’s kind of heavy, portentous and dark, and there’s kind of a cloud hanging over your hero’s survival. Even if they win, eventually they’re going to lose.

Whereas with Age of Sigmar that tone is not so set. It’s not ‘you’re gonna lose’ it’s ‘you might lose…you’re probably gonna lose, but there’s a chance you might not’. It’s allowed for some stuff to be explored – a lot of the themes I’ve explored in the Stormcast stuff I’ve written would not have been possible in Warhammer Fantasy. The idea of these characters who can essentially walk into Nurgle’s Garden and kick the door in, set things on fire and give middle fingers to the god of plague and death and still walk out…that just wouldn’t have happened.

Now we can actually have characters who can…not necessarily make a difference, but who can attempt to make a difference in a way that characters like Gotrek and Felix really couldn’t. They were never going to stop the End Times, but they would try…and that’s where a lot of the heroism came from. With Age of Sigmar you have the same thing, but on a grander scale and with the potential of winning, which I think lightens the tone slightly.

ToW: What have you tried to achieve with your AoS work so far – what’s been the objective, beyond telling great stories?

JR: Well…one of the things that attracted me to the old Warhammer Fantasy back during the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay days was the nature of the gods and how they interacted with people. The Chaos gods were mostly negative, but they did have positive aspects which could be explored in the people who served them. Khorne is the god of blood and skulls and he does staple babies to his head, but there are also aspects of Khorne that are honourable warriors, who won’t slay the innocent or the weak. There are aspects of Khorne that do very much care where the blood comes from.

There are aspects of Nurgle that are positive, because while he is a horrible god of disease and decay he is also a god that does truly, honestly care about his followers. Slaanesh is perfection, it’s excess, but it’s also the drive to succeed. Tzeentch is hope. It’s conspiracies and plots and schemes and plans, but it’s also hope, that’s one of the things that he represents.

Having that also with gods like Sigmar and Nagash and Alarielle, and being able to explore them in a way that’s deeper than ‘Sigmar is the good god, and humans worship Sigmar and fight Chaos…’ but also explore why humans worship Sigmar. What does he offer them? Do all humans worship the same Sigmar, or is there some difference of opinion in how Sigmar dresses, looks, sounds, and speaks? Nagash is the same – is he just ‘ten foot-tall skeleton pope’? Is ‘ten foot-tall skeleton pope’ the one that turns up when a child dies? Is that who shows up to collect that child’s soul? Does skeleton pope bend down through the door of it’s parents’ hovel to collect this child’s soul…? Or is there a different aspect of Nagash that’s kinder and gentler, despite skeleton pope being a raving lunatic?

It’s another reason I like Age of Sigmar, as we can actually explore the gods both as characters and as symbols, in a way that with Warhammer Fantasy it wasn’t really possible. This is the same kind of thing I tried to do in Knight of the Blazing Sun with Goetz’s need to find his faith – faith is just one of those weird subjects that interests me.

ToW: As a reader it feels like AoS is much more of a blank canvas, in a world-building sense, than the Old World. Has that given you interesting opportunities, or challenges?

JR: Both. The Old World was very defined, and you knew what you were going to have so therefore it was a lot easier to come up with stories because it was so defined and so filled out. You could find a plot hook a lot easier. With Age of Sigmar because it’s so much wider there’s a larger pool of influence and a larger pool of inspiration to draw on, because you can explore the entire world and its cultures, as opposed to neo-Renaissance Germany! At the same time, you also have to control yourself a little bit and try and exert some discipline over your creativity so you can still come up with a story that is hopefully enjoyable for people who enjoyed the neo-Renaissance Germany stories.

There are a lot of people who miss their floofy pants and feather caps, so you want to try and give them the same thing they enjoyed but just explore the potential of the setting a little more, and use that to add some colour and spice to the stories.

ToW: Is that a similar challenge to writing original fiction, in that Age of Sigmar gives you so much freedom?

JR: Pretty much actually, that’s a good way of putting it. There’s a lot more freedom to invent – the through-line is there, the baseline of what you need to have for it to be a Warhammer story is still there, but you have a lot more freedom in how you approach that line. Chaos, for example – we’re kind of getting back to the old days of the Realms of Chaos books, where it’s a little more ambivalent about how it’s viewed, in terms of people who worship it. As opposed to it being very set – you know, ‘here are the models, all of the Norscans are hairy barbarians, and this is how they worship and this is what they do…’ Now we’re getting back into that situation where…yeah, there could be a Khornate cult in a city, but they don’t have to be barbarians. They could be an elite duelling club in a city, that’s something we can do now.

ToW: I saw on your blog that Spear of Shadows looks to be linked to most of your previous stories in one way or another. Has that been planned, or did it just develop that way over time?

JR: With Spear of Shadows specifically, the reason I got to write that was because I pitched it as a travelogue of the Realms. So it would be a book that people could pick up, like City of Secrets [by Nick Horth] that says ‘here are the Realms, here are what people in the Realms look like, what they do, how they worship…here’s their daily life’. You would have heroes from that…I guess ‘normal’, mortal contingent, and the book was okayed because it would add depth to the Realms.

The reason I revisited places that I’d already used was because I’d created a corner of the Realms. It’s easier to write stories about that and layer over it, to deepen the meaning of those places. By reusing the same characters and locations you create a sense of familiarity with them that places like Altdorf and Nuln in Warhammer Fantasy had. By reusing Shu’gohl the Crawling City, or Klaxus, or Excelsis, you’re going to make those places as real as Altdorf, Nuln, and Marienburg were. It took thirty years for those places to become shorthand, basically, for the Warhammer World. What we’re doing now is establishing places that will become shorthand for Age of Sigmar in twenty or thirty years.

ToW: It looks like you’ve got two AoS series running simultaneously now – Hallowed Knights and Eight Lamentations. How are you separating those out, either in terms of your writing approach or what you’re trying to achieve with each one?

JR: Eight Lamentations is essentially going to be a big dumb action movie. There was a period in the 80s when there was a bunch of new fantasy novels out that were all the same fantasy novel [I’m thinking Eddings, Brooks, Williams, Feist etc.] – that’s what Eight Lamentations is. It’s the big dumb fantasy novel of the 80s, it’s the collection of ragtag characters gathered together for a quest to find a magical mcguffin and potentially stop a great evil. With a little bit of Ocean’s Eleven and the Dirty Dozen type of thing thrown in.

The Hallowed Knights series is more about giving personality to the Stormcasts. I hate to use that word, because they always had personality, but in a sense it’s akin to Graham McNeill’s Ultramarines books or James Swallow’s Blood Angels books where it’s taking a group of Stormcasts and showing you how they function, what their daily life is like and how they get involved in the wider setting. With each book I’m going to do something different and focus on different characters within the Hallowed Knights. The first book is very much about the Steel Souls and about tying up some loose ends with the War of Life. The second book is about tying up some other loose ends from the audios, dealing with the Bull-hearts and their expedition to the Realm of Death, and Mannfred.

In the third book…god only knows! I’d love to do something that’s taking place in Azyr, because we haven’t seen much of that yet. We’ve heard about it, and gotten glimpses of it, but we’ve never actually had a story set there. I’d really like to do a Manchurian Candidate-type story with the Hallowed Knights investigating a mystery or a plot in Azyr itself. But we’ll have to see…

ToW: I feel like I have to mention the End Times. You started and finished that series, and killed off the Old World – what’s your overriding, lasting feeling about that? How are you feeling about it?

JR:…[long pause]…I don’t know, really. I had a lot more stories I wanted to tell in Warhammer Fantasy, but at the same time it’s one of those things where somebody was going to have to kill it, so might as well have been me. I’m always a little disappointed by it, because if I’d had another month and another thirty or forty thousand words I could have done some magic, I think. There were so many characters I forgot about and so many little loose ends. We were writing the novels while the game books were coming out, and that was a period where they [Publications, presumably] really weren’t keen on sharing that kind of stuff until it was out.

So there were half a dozen plot lines that got wrapped up before the final book of the End Times that I didn’t know about. Stuff like Tyrion’s squire [Princess Eldyra] who gets turned into a vampire – in the game books she becomes the new Elven goddess of death and wanders off screen. I didn’t know that, I didn’t know that she was gone, so it was like ‘oh she’s a vampire, and we haven’t discussed her yet!’ They finally sent me a PDF of a game book and I thought ‘ohhh…that’s a big mistake. I hope nobody notices that!’ Of course everybody noticed…

***

And on that note, the first part of this interview comes to an end. Huge thanks to Josh for giving up his time to do this interview, and I hope you’ve enjoyed it so far. Check out part two here, in which Josh talks about Fabius Bile, Lukas the Trickster, and his Horus Heresy stories.

If you want to have a look at more of Josh’s writing you can find everything that’s currently available on his author page on the Black Library website or his Amazon author page, and check out his blog here.

You can also find all of the reviews I’ve written for Josh’s work here!

If you’ve got any thoughts, feedback or questions off the back of this interview, please do feel free to let me know – you can get in touch via the comments on here, by emailing me at michael@trackofwords.com or via either Facebook or Twitter.