Continuing the epic tale begun in the multi-award-winning City of Lies – a thrilling story of subterfuge and treachery and wild and ancient magic… We had the pleasure of chatting with author Sam Hawke about her new sequel Hollow Empire, representation, book recommendations, and much more!
Hi, Sam! Tell us a bit about yourself!
Hey guys, thanks for having me! I’m a fantasy author from Canberra, Australia. I’m a lawyer by day, jujitsu instructor by night, parent to two little ninjas and keeper of two geriatric hounds. Basically being a fantasy author is very consistent with my lifelong status as a nerd who likes to stay home a lot.
With the current state of the world, what are you doing to cope with the changes we’ve had to make with our day-to-day?
Lucky two of my favourite way of coping with stress—stress-baking and stress-eating—are a naturally compatible pair, so I think the answer is: very slowly swelling to twice my original size?
To be fair, we’ve had a much easier run here than in a lot of the rest of the world, and particularly in my city where we locked down early and never got community transmission of the virus. I’m conscious that I am extremely lucky in that my husband and I could both do our jobs remotely from home, and I live very close to my sister who has kids roughly the same age as mine so we were able to form a bubble and switch the kids’ homeschooling between our houses each day. So I was really playing on easy mode compared to a lot of the world. Because both my jobs really just involve sitting at the computer, covid hasn’t changed my routine enormously except for, you know, the overhanging existential dread for the whole world, which definitely makes being relaxed and creative something of a challenge.
When did you first discover your love for writing?
I honestly can’t remember a time where it wasn’t something I did. Definitely by the time I was about 6 I had figured out that writing books was an actual thing people could do, and so I used to make mock ‘books’ by stapling together lots of sheets of paper and then going through coming up with extremely Enid Blyton influenced chapter names (‘A rude shock for Susie’; ‘What happened over the hedge’; Jimmy learns a lesson’ etc) and maybe a sentence or two of each. (Only a sentence or two because while I liked telling stories a lot my follow through was pretty poor and clearly I was already quite lazy, haha).
I also used to spend hours narrating games to myself where, like the complete weirdo that I was/am, I would describe what was happening with, like, speech tags and stuff. I’d be crawling around under the table muttering overdramatic stuff like: “Panting, she made her way down the tunnel. And then she saw something… something that turned her skin cold. ‘Oh, no,’ she said.” Etc. I have a distinct memory of my older brother, watching/listening to this madness, telling me I should probably be a writer since I narrated my own games like a novel. (My oldest son now does this as well so clearly my weirdness has a genetic aspect).
I was properly attempting to write book-length things before the end of primary school, definitely, and I attempted my first epic fantasy when I was about 12 or 13, I think.
Hollow Empire is the sequel to City of Lies and it releases on December 1st 2020! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Ooooh, that’s tough. “Things go pear-shaped again”?
For those who haven’t ready City of Lies, what can they expect?
City is my love letter to my two favourite types of story – epic fantasy and closed room mysteries. It’s a story about a brother and sister, Jovan and Kalina, whose secret family duty is protecting the Chancellor and his heirs from poison and other hidden threats. When their uncle (the current poison tester) and the Chancellor are murdered with a previously unknown poison and a mysterious army lays siege to the capital, the siblings are on a clock to find the murderer and unravel the plot before the new Chancellor is murdered or the city falls.
That’s sort of the plot but at its core it’s a story about sibling bonds, friendship, the tensions between dominant and non-dominant cultures, and how we reckon with mistakes of the past. In some ways it’s not a very normal fantasy because it’s pretty low magic, it’s structured like a mystery rather than an epic, and the main two characters aren’t necessarily the usual fantasy archetypes. Don’t come looking for snarky bad-ass assassins, quests, wisecracking old wizards, or upholding the patriarchy or monarchy, but if you like slow burn tension/mystery and optimism (with characters who are decent humans trying to do their best in bad circumstances), it might be your jam.
And for those that have, what’s to come in Hollow Empire?
Trying to do this without spoilers is tricky, so I’m just going to say if you haven’t read City of Lies, skip this question!
Hollow Empire is set a few years after the events of City and the country (and the characters) are still reckoning with the fallout. At the beginning of the story Silasta is hosting a massive spring festival (think something like the Olympics and Carnival combined), and the city is swelling with visitors from the surrounding countries. Jovan is convinced an assassin is stalking the Chancellor, while Kalina is using her diplomatic skills with the visiting dignitaries to try to find which of the neighbouring countries is working against them. They uncover another conspiracy which now threatens not just Silasta and the Chancellor but also their own family, and must contend with assassins, witches and a criminal network if they’re to save the city once again.
Basically you can expect more mysteries, more politics, new characters and an expansion of the world that we saw in City, and new kinds of magic – oh, and plenty more trouble for Jov and Kalina to get into. Also it’s gay.
Your series features a diverse cast! How do you approach representation within your books and ensuring you portray them correctly?
I think that fantasy as a genre is getting a lot better at portraying a diversity of characters and cultures in secondary worlds, but yeah, obviously it’s something that needs to be treated with care. I’m very conscious that I’m a white cis woman from a privileged first world country and there are a lot of stories that aren’t mine to tell. But I absolutely didn’t want to default to ‘white able bodied cishet characters in a pseudo medieval European world have adventures’, either. Because it’s boring and it doesn’t reflect the real world, let alone the worlds I can imagine.
One area that I particularly wanted to make active choices about inclusivity with was in disability and mental health, because these are such commonplace things in our own society – in Australia it’s estimated something like one in five people experience a mental or behavioural condition, and I think among adults it’s something like 50% have some kind of chronic condition – it’s a huge deal, you definitely know a lot of people who struggle with this. But you really don’t see a lot of it in fantasy fiction. I mean, you see some grizzled old warriors with a limp or some aching joints and the occasional dramatic scar (usually not the kind that stops you being hot though, especially if you’re a woman), and you sometimes see PTSD portrayed with varying degrees of success, but you don’t see a lot of ADHD, or bipolar, or depression or anxiety even though these are not uncommon conditions.
OCD gets a fair bit of representation in popular culture but by and large it’s terrible representation that doesn’t reflect what the condition is like for most people. It’s often portrayed as something like a superpower that makes you a genius with bad social skills, or just like a set of surface-deep quirks (oh, she washes her hands a lot!), and it sure doesn’t help that it’s commonplace to hear people call themselves ‘OCD’ because they like to keep their desk tidy or whatever. What I was hoping to do with Jovan was tackle some of the anxiety and frustration and fear, the intrusive thoughts, that make this a really difficult condition, without that detracting from his strengths.
With Kalina, I wanted to represent some of what it’s like to have an ‘invisible’ condition which interferes with your daily life but which other people struggle to understand or even believe in. It’s a challenge for her to dole out her energy reserves in a crisis, or to deal with the kind of casual dismissal of other people who think that if they can’t see a problem it’s non-existent or exaggerated. But again, that doesn’t make her less capable or less heroic, it just means that she has different challenges on how to get there than maybe your usual fantasy hero.
Basically, I just pretty strongly believe that people with disabilities also deserve to be the heroes in stories, and the stories don’t have to be about the disability or about finding a magical cure or even wanting a magical cure. They’re just things that are part of being human and which therefore have a place in fiction as well.
As for how to portray it correctly – and bearing in mind there’s no single monolith experience, and everyone experiences their disabilities in their own unique way — the key to writing this kind of thing well in fiction is, I think, just being good at listening. Listening to the actual people who have experience in the area, understanding what they identify as the challenges, getting a sense of what helps and hinders, what microaggressions they’re subjected to, so that what you write can hopefully resonate with them. One of the best things about my experience since publishing City is hearing from readers who really connected to Jov or Kalina and saw themselves reflected in those characters, especially when they’ve not seen that aspect of their lives represented much in their favourite genre.
Worldbuilding can sometimes be a hit or a miss, but readers adore the intricate world you have created. What’s your process like?
I’m very much the type of writer who builds the world to tell the story I want and explores it as I go rather than the type who already has the world fully fleshed out and only then populates it with characters and makes up a story. I still don’t have a real map of the world, even though I love maps! I tend to start with a few core ideas and then slowly build the world and backstory out from those rather than the other way round.
So to give you an example, I had the idea of writing about a poison taster, a ‘proofer’ and I wanted it to be not a disposable position like a canary in a coal mine, but something that was an actual skill or art, something you could train in. I then had to sit down and think what kind of society would both need poison tasters for protection and not want to advertise that fact? Why might that position have developed historically? What kind of social rules and norms would make a family devote themselves to this incredibly dangerous job? And I kind of built the culture and society around those strange tensions: a place with an ostensible disdain for violence and uncivility, but where it is culturally acceptable to use poisons to deal with your political and personal enemies, a place where putting yourself in danger without public recognition is still a source of deep personal honour and satisfaction.
I also always saw the story as being about this little triad: the siblings whose family had that job, and Tain, who they were sworn to protect but also who they had grown up with almost as close as siblings. All three came to me pretty well formed as they are, as if I’d just looked in on a little window of their lives. So I had a strong sense of them as people, and about their bond, and the underlying tensions between them. And I wanted to tell a story that centred those relationships, so again, I asked myself what kind of society might value sibling and friendship bonds so highly? The obvious answer was one in which romantic relationships were de-prioritised, which led me to imagine an entirely different social and familial social structure without any concept of marriage. And then that choice led me to explore what an absence of marriage in an economic, social and political sense would do to gender relations and norms, inheritance, sexual practices, etc. And so on!
What challenges did you face while writing the sequel and how did you overcome them?
Oh, boy, look, sequels are tough, anyone will tell you they’re tough. There’s all the usual stuff – you have unlimited time to plan and work on your first book and then a much shorter time to do the second, you have reader expectations (you’re not supposed to read reviews but that’s the kind of sensible advice that smart, wise people follow and, to quote one of my favourite characters in SFF, I have never been wise), and your desire not to disappoint them, etc. You wonder if you can actually do it again or if it was a once-off thing.
In my case I think there were two main challenges besides those standard ones. First, I sold the Poison War books on a 2 book deal but with the knowledge that if a fantasy series is doing well then readers tend to like more in the same series so I might have to turn it into 3. Of course the main problem is that you don’t know how your first books is going until you’ve already written or substantially written the second book. Effectively it’s Schrödinger’s Book 2: simultaneously the end of the series and the middle of a trilogy. That’s not the easiest thing to plot out satisfactorily, I have to tell you.
Second, I had to write this book twice and so it took me something like half a million words to get this single book out there (if you were wondering, this is why there was a 2 year instead of 1 year gap between books, sorry!). My first draft was 300,000 words long and then I cut it down by a third (ie editing out the equivalent of one entire book by a normal sane person). And then my editor didn’t like it and I had to throw out the other 200,000. (No, not kidding about that last point, I wish I was). So, you know. For future reference, I don’t recommend this as an ideal way to draft your second or, indeed, any book, haha.
How did I overcome it? I suppose just by doing what writers always have to do: keep going, keep the words ticking over, drink a lot, moan to your friends and then keep going again.
What’s the best and the worst writing advice you have received?
I don’t know that I personally have received bad advice so much as things that don’t necessarily work for me. I suppose a couple of bits of advice that I’ve found particularly unhelpful are the kind of absolute ‘rules’ variety. Things like you must write every day (I definitely don’t). Don’t use adverbs (you can pull them from my cold dead grip). The word ‘was’ means the sentence is passive (it doesn’t) and passive is bad (it’s not necessarily). You have to know people in the industry to break in (you definitely don’t; I got my agent through the slush pile, same as the majority of people still do). You need to start with short stories before you write novels (they’re totally different forms and you can be good at one but not the other). That sort of thing.
The best advice I have gotten came from an industry veteran and one of my favourite writers, and I have to constantly remind myself of it: it’s that ultimately your success or otherwise in the industry is influenced for the most part by factors that are out of your hands. Things like luck, timing, the marketing dollars behind you have a bigger role to play than you’d probably like, and all we writers can do is write the best work we can, be a good person and professional in our dealings with others, and try not to tie our self-esteem too closely to our career. It sounds a bit depressing but I think it’s healthy to focus on the stuff we can control.
What’s next for you?
I’m currently working on an entirely new project, the working title of which is Hadestown meets Les Mis But With Ghosts (I’m very good at titles, as you can see), which is part rescue-a-loved-one-from-hell, part uprising-of-the-downtrodden, and part bad-creepy-ghosts-eat-your-soul. I’m having a lot of fun with it.
Lastly, are you currently reading anything and do you have any book recommendations for our readers?
ALWAYS, my friends, always.
One of the best bits about being an author is sidling up to author pals and begging them for early copies of their stuff, and most of my reading this year has reflected that – so my apologies for recommending mostly things that aren’t out yet. But you can pre-order, pre-orders are great, they’re a gift to your future self and it’s 2020, our future selves definitely need presents.
Right now I’m reading The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri which is great, like everything she writes, and also extremely tapped into my particular body horror trigger points so I’m expecting nightmares, haha. I recently read the Councillor by EJ Beaton, an intricate and elegant political fantasy, A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske, a magical historical that is part mystery, part romance, very gay and very fun, She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan, a slightly-magical very genderbent sort-of retelling of the rise of the Ming Dynasty (did you like being kicked in the heart by Baru Cormorant? Have I got a recommendation for you!). Then next up is Marina Lostetter’s upcoming The Helm of Midnight (serial killer thriller in a fantasy world, yes please).
OK these are all a bit unfair because none of them are available for you to buy right now, so I should say some that are out as well – a couple of sequels that came out this month you should definitely get into if you’re not already – the Fires of Vengeance by Evan Winter and the Call of the Bone Ships by RJ Barker continue their excellent series, and the Stone Knife by Anna Stephens which is the start of an awesome new trilogy and is out the same day as Hollow Empire. Like everyone else with a beating heart I bloody loved The Once and Future Witches by Alix Harrow. I haven’t yet read but am highly looking forward to the Bone Shard Daughter by Andrea Stewart and Unconquerable Sun by Kate Elliott, both of which you can get right now as well.
