Hello and welcome to this Track of Words Author Interview, where today I’m delighted to welcome Bradley P. Beaulieu to the site to talk about his brand new fantasy novel The Dragons of Deepwood Fen (out on the 4th January from Head of Zeus). I’ve featured one of Bradley’s books on the site before (Absynthe, written under his alternative guise as Brendan P. Bellecourt) but where that was retrofuturistic science fiction this time we’re very much in the fantasy setting – dragons and all! If you like a good dragon story (and what fantasy fan doesn’t?) then this is going to be right up your street; so read on, and let’s get straight into the interview.
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Track of Words: To start things off, could you tell us a bit about The Dragons of Deepwood Fen and what readers can expect from it?
Bradley P. Beaulieu: The Dragons of Deepwood Fen is the opening book in my new epic fantasy. While the book is epic and the cast fairly large, the main protagonists are Lorelei Aurelius and Rylan Holbrooke.
Lorelei is an extremely sharp and intuitive inquisitor in service to the empire. She’s also agoraphobic, which presents some interesting problems for her along the way. Rylan, meanwhile, is the bastard son of the Imperator, the leader of a vassal state known as the Holt. He’s also a thief out to right the scales of injustice in the Holt. Lorelei’s dogged determination and Rylan’s sneaky ways meet in spectacular fashion when they both try to unlock the mystery of why Aarik Bloodhaven, the leader of a group of freedom fighters known as the Red Knives, decides to meet with the Hissing Man, the ruthless head of a religious cult known as the Chosen. The Knives and the Chosen have always been sworn enemies, so why are they suddenly making nice?
The answer, Lorelei and Rylan soon learn, may have dire consequences. As Lorelei digs deeper, Rylan becomes the focus of her investigation, but even as their game of cat and mouse begins in earnest, both see that Lorelei’s home city of Ancris is under threat, and that what they do next will have massive implications on the empire, the Holt, and the world.
In the end, Dragons is a story about the hidden costs of power, both to those who seek it and those it’s used against. I felt like Rylan, a thief from the Holt who led a privileged life, and Lorelei, a smart young woman in a place of power, were the perfect characters to explore those facets of the story. I can’t wait for you to meet them.
The UK cover for The Dragons of Deepwood Fen
ToW: What can you tell us about the world in which this story is set – whether that’s geography, politics, magic, etc.?
BPB: I’ll tell you a little bit about the dragons first. In the world, there are two types of dragons: radiants and umbrals. While radiants gain unique powers from the bright sun, umbrals are nocturnal and gain their powers from the dark sun. While neither type is inherently good or evil, the empire, hoping to win a war against the Kin and gain control of the vast forest known as the Holt, declared their own radiant dragons to be righteous servants of Alra and the umbral dragons used by their enemy wicked pawns of the trickster god. It led to no end of misery. Umbral dragons were hunted, nearly to extinction, and those who bonded with them were killed.
Something that grew from this that I didn’t really expect was that, because of the empire’s unrelenting propaganda, dragons and their basic types became a sort of shorthand for the haves and have nots, the righteous and the wicked, the mighty and the powerless. It was a neat twist that I played on quite a bit as the story progressed.
A wrinkle in this concept is that the Empire controls dragons through the use of special stones called crops and fetters in a process known as binding, while the Red Knives embrace an ancient custom of bonding with dragons. It was another differentiator between dragonkind and those who used them, and led to a lot of interesting interplay between Rylan, Lorelei, and their dragons.
ToW: I read in another interview that you like to do a lot of world building before you really dig into character and plot. With that in mind, could you talk a bit about where this world came from, what sort of things you drew upon as you were piecing it together, and what that process of world building is like for you?
BPB: That’s right. I tend to take quite a few years from the initial conception of world and story to the actual writing process. In this case, I knew I wanted to write something dragon-centric. I also had this notion of a massive redwood style forest in which the forest itself remembers the things that happen within it. A third element was the notion of an ancient war of the gods having long-lasting effects, and that it can be extremely dangerous to forget the lessons of the past.
I expanded from there, exploring what kind of characters there might be, what nations existed a millennium after the war of the gods played out, who had power, who didn’t, and what all that might lead to.
Unlike my previous series, The Song of the Shattered Sands, which grew top-down from a gifted swordswoman named Çeda, this series used a very bottom-up approach. I developed the world a ton before I had a good grasp of the characters who were going to tell the story. It was really interesting to see the characters grow from that rich soil. My favorites, as you may already have guessed, ended up being Lorelei (because of her quirky and dogged nature) and Rylan (our loveable thief).
The US cover of Twelve Kings of Sharakhai (called just Twelve Kings in the UK) – book 1 of The Song of the Shattered Sands
ToW: Following on from that – once you were really into the world building, at what point did you think “great, I know what direction I want to take this story in”? And was there something in particular that gave you that story seed, or a combination of factors?
BPB: The story really started to come alive when I realized that Rylan would be after something in Lorelei’s home city of Ancris, and that Lorelei, an inquisitor in service to the empire, would eventually be set on his trail because of it. So much flowed from that concept.
First of all, Rylan had to make his way to Ancris, he had to be after something, and that something had to relate to the larger plot. The something ended up being the mystery of Aarik and the Hissing Man and why in the great wide world these two supposed enemies would decide to meet.
Second, but just as important, I needed Lorelei to meet Rylan early, and I needed her to like him, so that (by the time she starts to suspect him of wrongdoing) she would have conflicting motivations. And while I needed her to eventually be on Rylan’s trail, I also needed her to have a greater concern about the looming threat to Ancris.
It was quite fun hinting that these two characters might meet, then eventually getting them together and seeing what fireworks came of it.
ToW: Like a lot of fantasy readers I love a good dragon story, and in particular how so many authors have tackled dragons in their own different ways. Was there anything you had in mind that you particularly wanted to explore with your interpretation of fantasy dragons?
BPB: I love dragon stories as well, and, somewhat ironically, that love is why I avoided writing a book about dragons for so long. There are so…many…books about dragons that it felt daunting to tackle one of my own. I didn’t want the dragons to feel derivative, outlandsish, or (worst of all) ho-hum.
Being a child of the 80s and playing tons of Dungeons & Dragons when I was young, I had this embedded notion of dragon types with various powers, dragons that were good or evil, and so on. I did echo that a bit in this book, but I detested the notion that dragons (or people, for that matter) are inherently good or evil. Instead, I wanted man to use them in such a way that they would be labeled as good or evil. I mentioned above that the empire labeled umbral dragons as evil. The reason was sheer practicality. Umbrals are famously resistant to the crops and fetters they used to control their radiant dragons, and if the empire couldn’t control them, they wanted them gone.
I also rather like the idea that dragons have special scales, known as lucertae, that grant powers to those who know how to use them. It’s a fun twist on magic, a way for people who have no magical ability to use the powers of the dragons, whether it’s to manipulate shadow, summon lightning, or control fire.
The US cover for The Dragons of Deepwood Fen, which takes an interestingly different approach!
ToW: What have you enjoyed the most (so far) about writing your version of a dragon story?
BPB: It was a ton of fun creating the world and the magic system, but that’s all homework, really. The truly fun part is inventing and writing about the actual dragons – what they’re like, their personalities, how they interact with other dragons, the main characters, and so on. Bothymus, for example, was raised in the mountains. He’s a very proud dragon and can fly in the open. Vedron, on the other hand, is quite lonely (having been hunted by the empire from birth) and has become quite playful because of it. It was really a joy to write their first meeting and see how Bothymus’s pride played against Vedron’s playfulness.
ToW: For readers familiar with your previous work, are there going to be recognisable themes, ideas, stylistic approaches etc. on display here? Or has this been an opportunity to try anything different?
BPB: My stories often delve into what death means, both for the dead themselves and for those they leave behind. I’m never trying to explore that theme, but it often shows up. I also like toying with the idea of what it means to live in a world where gods are real and capricious and often vengeful. One more theme that often crops up in my writing is the notion that history can be (and often is) rewritten by the victors. It’s a particularly dangerous thing when there are lessons to be learned, and that’s something I explored a lot in several of my works, including Dragons.
In terms of something new, my last heroine, Çeda, was a hard and extremely capable woman. I wanted my new heroes to be softer and still capable, just in different ways. Lorelei, for example, is a very gifted inquisitor who suffers from agoraphobia. She’s quirky and socially inept, which was fun and even endearing to write. Rylan, meanwhile, is a dragon singer and a thief. Lying comes easily to him. He had no choice, really. It’s in his job description.
ToW: This is labelled as The Book of the Holt: Part One – can you tell us anything about the series as a whole, in terms of its size and scope, or the sorts of things you’re hoping to have achieved once it’s all wrapped up?
BPB: The Book of the Holt is an actual book in the series. It contains visions recorded by Rygmora, the dead mother to three of the main characters. That she recorded those visions in the first place was what led to her death, but the book lived on and has had a great influence on things as the story opens.
Its influence doesn’t end there, though. The characters grow eager to know more about Rygmora and how she was able to coax visions from the citadel trees. Lorelei, in particular, is fascinated by it. It will become a gateway to learning the truth about the past, but they’d better hurry, because war is on the horizon.
The series is currently projected as four books, but we’ll see how it goes.
The UK cover of Twelve Kings
ToW: If a reader loves The Dragons of Deepwood Fen, where would you recommend they go next in your back catalogue?
BPB: I’d recommend Twelve Kings in Sharakhai, Book 1 of The Song of the Shattered Sands. Though set in a vast desert instead of a great forest, the series is similar in style and scope. If you like Dragons, you’ll probably enjoy Twelve Kings, too.
ToW: What can you tell us about what’s next for you, now that this is (almost) out? Is it straight on with book two, or are you juggling multiple series?
BPB: I’m halfway through drafting book two at this point, but I’ve written a novella set in the same world and have an idea for a few more. It’s something I enjoy quite a bit, writing smaller stories in the world to explore things I couldn’t in the main tale. I’ll have more news about the first of them in the coming months, so follow me on my socials!
ToW: Finally, if you could be (or, alternatively, be a companion of) a dragon, what kind of dragon would you choose and why?
BPB: I’m going to go with a viridian dragon. They’re not going to win many one-on-one battles with other dragons (they’re one of the smaller dragon breeds), but they spit acid, can easily hide in the forest, and are resistant to magic. The biggest reason I’d choose them, though, is that I already “rode” one while writing Rylan’s chapters, and they’re probably the closest to my heart.
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Bradley P. Beaulieu fell in love with fantasy from the moment he began reading The Hobbit in third grade. While Bradley earned a degree in computer science and engineering and worked in the information technology field for years, he could never quite shake his desire to explore other worlds. He began writing his first fantasy novel in college. It was a book he later trunked, but it was a start, a thing that proved how much he enjoyed the creation of stories. It made him want to write more. He went on to write The Lays of Anuskaya series as well as The Song of Shattered Sands series.
He has published work in the Realms of Fantasy Magazine, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, Writers of the Future 20, and several anthologies. He has won the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Award and earned a Gemmell Morningstar Award nomination.
Learn more about Bradley by visiting his website, quillings.com, or following him on Twitter at @bbeaulieu.
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Thanks so much to Bradley for taking the time to write such great answers here, and to Head of Zeus for organising this interview. I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I did – I’m really looking forward to reading The Dragons of Deepwood Fen now, it sounds brilliant!
See also: my review of Absynthe by Brendan P. Bellecourt
The Dragons of Deepwood Fen is out on the 4th January from Head of Zeus – check out the links below to order your copy:
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