We’ve had the absolute pleasure of chatting to author Brian Naslund about his latest novel, Sorcery of a Queen, which is the sequel to Blood of An Exile, and it’s a fast-paced adventure perfect for comic readers and fans of heroic fantasy! Brian chats about his new release, writing advice, book recommendations, and more!
Hi, Brian! Tell us a bit about yourself!
Hey there! I’m the author of the adult fantasy series, Dragons of Terra. The first book, Blood of an Exile, came out last August, and the sequel, Sorcery of a Queen, is out August 6 in the UK and August 11 in the US.
When I’m not writing, I’m usually exploring the rivers of Colorado in my kayak or failing at gardening.
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?
I’ve been lucky and privileged to stay safe and healthy so far, but I’ve certainly had to make some adjustments with everything going on.
The main thing for me has been maintaining a pretty rigid structure to my days to avoid a full descent into lethargy and nothingness. I try to exercise a few times a day, and I ration out chores and household tasks so I can fill breaks in the work day with something that feels productive. I never thought I’d be in a position where I get excited to see that a bunch of weeds have grown out of control in the backyard because it’ll give me something to do in the afternoon, but here we are.
That being said, the wheels have occasionally fallen off the bus and I’ve lost entire days to junk food and The Netflix Void. But, generally speaking, I’ve been able to stay pretty even-keeled.
When did you first discover your love for writing?
I didn’t really take a swing at creative writing until my third year of college, but I fell in love with it almost immediately. I remember getting a writing exercise the first day of class where we were supposed to write a story or scene based on a tabloid headline. I picked something like “Man Nearly Drowns in a Stream of His Own Subconscious” and had a blast writing it.
Pretty much from that day on, my favourite way to start the day is sitting down with some coffee and making up a story.
Sorcery of a Queen, the sequel to Blood of An Exile, is out on August 11th! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Dragons. Swords. Mayhem. Mushroom zombies.
So, for those who haven’t read Blood of An Exile, what can they expect? And then what do they have to look forward to in the sequel?
Blood of an Exile is a fast-paced adventure fantasy with a lot action and humour, but also some serious bits, and lots of complicated characters with interesting relationships to each other. And dragons. A lot of dragons.
In Sorcery of a Queen, readers can look forward to the same general tone and vibe, but also an expansion of the world. All of the main characters explore areas of the realm that are both unfamiliar to them, and weren’t really shown in detail in Blood of an Exile.
And—being deliberately vague here—I also dig quite a bit deeper into some of the mysteries surrounding Silas Bershad.
What inspired you to write the Dragons of Terra series?
I started writing what became the first chapter of Blood of an Exile the day after I graduated from college.
At the time, I’d been mostly writing literary short stories for class, but that morning I realized that nobody was going to grade me anymore (or even read my stuff at all unless I forced them to) so I decided to drop the post-modern angst approach and write a story about a hungover guy who needs to go kill a dragon that day.
I didn’t really start writing Blood of an Exile with a purpose until a few years later, but the pages I wrote that day basically stayed intact, and were the jumping off point for the whole series.
Were there any challenges you faced with writing the sequel?
Oh, yes. God, yes. I naively thought the second book would be easier, since I’d kind of gotten used to the process and had a clear picture of both where I was starting and where I wanted to end up.
That was very, very wrong.
The biggest challenge I had was keeping the middle suspenseful and interesting without essentially stealing all the big stuff I had planned for the third book. After writing the first draft, I realized that if I went with this, I’d essentially be forced to re-hash the same stuff in book three.
So, I embarked on the Great Summer of Rewrites, which was pretty stressful. I cried in public on several occasions. But I eventually found a story that felt fresh and fun, and I’m really happy with how it turned out.
Without spoiling too much, is there a favourite moment that you really enjoyed writing in Sorcery of a Queen?
There’s a new POV character who was a blast to write from start to finish. His name is Cabbage, and he’s this morose and earless pirate. I decided to write from his point of view fairly late in the process, but once I started, I think I wrote all of his chapters in a single weekend and they’re some of my favourite pages of the series so far.
Do you have any advice for aspiring fantasy writers?
There’s loads of good stuff from better writers than me, so my first piece of advice would be to take their advice. The podcast Writing Excuses is fantastic, but there’s tons out there.
One thing that I personally found very helpful was to question my world-building and plot early and often. Even though you can pretty much do anything you want in fantasy (provided you follow your own rules) I had a tendency to treat established aspects of my story as immutable, even though they weren’t.
Once I started questioning my decisions, some interesting new pathways opened up for me. Asking myself things like, “What if this character dies on page 3 instead of 303?” or “What if these two magical elements are connected to each other instead of wholly separate?” wound up being quite helpful.
This does lead to heavy rewriting (and crying), but that’s a big part of my process anyway.
Lastly, what are you currently reading and do you have any book recommendations for our readers?
I’m currently reading Shorefall by Robert Jackson Bennett and really enjoying it.
As for book recs, two of my favourite recent reads are We Are the Dead by Mike Shackle and This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. We Are the Dead has a lot of similarities to my own stuff, whereas This Is How You Lose the Time War is totally different from my writing, but also totally fantastic.
