Darkfell

In recent months, I had the privilege of making encountering Matt Posner throughTwitter, and I have to say I’m glad that I did. His School of the Ages series gives us a fresh, and beautifully written look into a different take on magic and fantasy fiction, and I believe he’s bound to become on of the true masters of the genre. As if that were not enough, this brilliant writer has of late been working a project for a great cause: Kindle All-Stars 2: Carnival of Cryptids, a charity anthology, with all proceeds going to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Be sure to download your copy, and keep up with him at the School of the Ages website!

Follow him on Twitter: @SchooloftheAges

Visit his Amazon page HERE.

1. First things first. Who are you, where are you from, and do you still ring people’s doorbells and run away? (just kidding on that last bit, unless of course that was you).

I’m Matt Posner, a teacher from New York. I’m originally from Miami, Florida, but now firmly settled living in Queens and working in Brooklyn. When I was younger, I followed the dream of being a novelist like all the authors I read in the 1980s, such as Piers Anthony, Fred Saberhagen, Alan Dean Foster, David Eddings, Stephen R. Donaldson. Life intervened, as it does, and I wound up in a union teaching job in NYC, where I will remain till I am old or a millionaire. I don’t ring people’s doorbells and run away, but only because I can’t run that fast.

2. How would you describe your work to someone who hasn’t yet read it?

I write in any genre I feel like. Most of my work lately has been for young people, which is an obvious fit because that way I can write books like the ones I loved as a kid. The School of the Ages series is about a magic school in NYC, but it’s multicultural and has good world-traveling elements too. I’m a little burned-out on dark lords and such, so I am writing a series which essentially overlays magic upon real-life situations and real-life feelings. I have also co-written Teen Guide to Sex and Relationships, in which Jess C. Scott and I try to share our knowledge and ideas to help young people with the most challenging questions they face in managing their romantic and physical relationships.

3. If you were on a major talk show to promote your work, what would you want the show’s theme to be?

I think a major talk show appearance should focus on Teen Guide, which brings together a wide range of questions into a single volume, questions that a lot of adults aren’t willing to tackle these days without pushing particular agendas.

4. Every writer has a story behind how they started out. What’s yours?

I was born with the instinct for narrative. Even my play with toys was cinematic. My toys were consistent characters who had ongoing adventures. I’m talking about when I was six and seven and eight. I read voraciously, sometimes two to three books a day on days off from school, and absorbed the lessons of literature through aggressive osmosis. It pretty much comes naturally to me now. When I started doing it, I already knew how to do it and it was just refinement and maturity I needed.

5. How did the idea for School of the Ages come into being?

I was working in a yeshiva high school and I saw that the job was going to end and I thought, “I need to write something commercial.” I had been kicking around an idea for a novel with a wizard and a few apprentices embedded somewhere in the world doing missions that involved interacting with cryptids (sasquatch, Nessie) that would turn out to be nature spirits not living animals. But I had learned so much about the odd culture of Mishnaic Judaism that I wanted to use it in my next book, so I made my wizard and apprentices into a school that was half Orthodox or Chasidic Jews and half non-religious. This is why the first book, The Ghost in the Crystal, has a lot of material from obscure Jewish texts. The shocking event at the end was still fresh in my mind when I was writing it; some object to it, but at least one person has been positively moved. I still cry myself when I read that part. The book took seven years to finish, so it wasn’t that quick cash opportunity I was hoping for, but at least it’s out there now, and I can see ahead to the time the series is finished and I can start something else.

Once I had my roster of characters established, I moved forward to seek other unusual ideas to make adventures for my young magicians. Book two, Level Three’s Dream features themes of learning disability and Alice in Wonderland. Book three, The War Against Love, is full of kick-ass battles among magicians (adult and student) elementals, and monsters, with a strong romantic plot and a lot of European travels. Book four, which I will publish this summer, is all about India, modern and ancient. Book five uses Islamic themes and mythology.

6. Every writer’s got their own creative process. Some are orderly and even OCD, others can be very chaotic. How does yours work out?

I’m chaotic. I write in notebooks which are widely scattered, and my second draft consists of typing up the notebook. I have in the past written multiple novels in the series at once, although as I have only two books left, that is less the case now and I am mostly on book four with only the occasionally dipping of the narrative toe into book five. As a younger writer, I used to get stuck at a particular point and not write till I broke the block. I decided at a certain point that I would rather just work on whatever part I have creative flow to work on and assemble the fragments later. Usually I can fix the seams fairly easily when typing up. I recently started using Scrivener, which suits this style of writing because it lets me keep the incomplete parts compartmentalized till I have finished them.

7. The dialogue in your work, in Ghost in the Crystal, for example, is very sharp and authentic. Can you give us some detail as to how you developed your ear for how people speak, and how your writing grew in this area since you started?

Thanks for the compliment, Sam. Back at you – as I’ve said before, your characters in the Darkfell stories speak what Lin Carter called “the authentic elfland accent.” Where does my ear for dialogue come from? I can only speculate. I know my mother read books aloud to me when I was a toddler, so that probably helped with character voice. I also think a lot of this skill comes from watching well-written TV comedies in the 1970’s and 1980’s, such as All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and Barney Miller. Most of my comedic dialogue comes from Lewis Carroll, Woody Allen, and Monty Python. So in summary, it’s all osmosis.

Me, Interrupting: I just KNEW Monty Python had to be in there!

8. I have to admit, I love beginnings (I have quite a few written myself for books I may not even write). Is there a particular beginning to one of your books that you’re especially proud or fond of?

I like the opening of book 3, The War Against Love, in which I aspired to a more intense lyricism than my usual narrative voice, by having Simon reflect, after the fact, upon the sadness of the story he was about to tell and talk about the nature of the universe.

Book 4 is not published yet, but I am doing this again, with an opening modeled on the opening of Huckleberry Finn, which points toward a series of picaresque (not picturesque) adventures Simon has during the story.

9. What would you say is the most important thing you’ve learned about writing over the years?

I’ve mostly stopped kicking myself about not being an all-rounder in fictional technique, and now I am content to exploit my strengths fully (dialogue, character development, plotting) and accept that I cannot match some writers’ strength in other areas (descriptive writing, elaborate focus upon observational minutiae). Not that I’m bad at anything, you understand. It’s just that some parts of technique come naturally and others take intense focus and concentration to achieve, and, well, fuck it.

10. Is there a genre you haven’t yet tried but would like to try in the future? If so, why?

I would like to try many genres. I’ve made plans to collaborate on a mystery with Jess C. Scott, but we’re both too busy with other projects, so we haven’t started it yet. I think mystery and thriller have large audiences into which I would like to tap.

I will certainly write more nonfiction also.

11. What got you writing your first novel?

I was in seventh grade in a gifted class and had to come up with a long-term project. So I decided to write a “novel.” That means that I made a commitment to be a writer when I was twelve: fairly early, I guess. The resulting project was only 80 pages and was too much like Star Wars for its own good, but it was enough to proven that I had chosen the right path for myself. Since it exists only in a typescript I don’t have at hand, I can’t share any with you, but when I find it, I’ll get it scanned/OCR’d as an interesting artifact.

12. What are you working on now, and where do you see your writing going in the next ten years?

Right now I am working on the promotional launch for Kindle All-Stars 2: Carnival of Cryptids. This is a charity anthology, with all proceeds going to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. It’s the brainchild of bestselling novelist Bernard Schaffer, and features seven stories about mysterious animals, all by working pros. My particular story is about an underground TV cooking show in which the flesh of the animals is cooked, and each chef eliminated gets attacked by knife-wielding children. It’s violent, gross, and also snarky and funny in ways I can’t be in School of the Ages.

Besides this, I am working on School of the Ages 4: Simon Myth. Very hard book to write. I am seeking such an epic scope as far as plot and characters that I have been feeling overwhelmed by the magnitude and left it alone a lot. But now I write at least a few lines per day, and that does add up. By summer it should be ready.

13. Of the whole process of writing a novel, what is your favorite part? Your least favorite?

My favorite part of writing a novel occurs when I write a scene of either emotion or action that I find moving and exciting. The feeling of being “in the zone” makes me high while in process and then pleasingly drained afterwards. My least favorite part is formatting, because MS Word is the most awful tool for formatting that can be humanly imagined. Ever try to remove tabs? Can’t do it. The software is designed so that they persist and there is no way to clear them, ever, ever, ever, even by using those tools that purport to be able to do so. And when you convert Word with tabs to another format, the tabs unpredictably change. Sometimes they indent extra, sometimes they vanish. I just don’t understand why the software is written so poorly.

14. In writing, it’s often said ‘show, don’t tell.’ Some would say that there is a place for telling, for a narrative voice distinct from the characters in the story. What’s your take?

I came out of the academic fiction departments of two southern state universities, Florida State (Go Noles) and Alabama-Tuscaloosa (Roll Tide) both of which firmly indoctrinated me in ‘show, don’t tell.’ It’s all very Hemingwayesque. But you know what? Hemingway may have been a great writer, but we don’t all have to write like him. His own contemporaries of equal statue, Faulkner and Fitzgerald, certainly did not. And Raymond Carver, who is intermediary between big H and us, and who carried the banner of ‘show, don’t tell’ to my generation, was not really that kind of writer at all: it was his editor at New Yorker, Gordon Lish, who cut his prose to be so reticent and tight. Telling, and lyricism in general, may be back in vogue. Cormac McCarthy, whose writing style is staggeringly mighty, is like the honey badger where this maxim is concerned: he doesn’t give a shit. Salman Rushdie? All subjective voice. Jhumpa Lahiri? Pages and pages of telling not showing, brilliant and moving storytelling. (She’s also luminously beautiful, by the way.) And so on and so on.

Me, interrupting again: I’m digging the Honey Badger, but now picturing one hammering a way at a typewriter and chomping a cigar.

A young writer reading this had better damn well master the ‘show, don’t tell’ style, which is fundamental to success in both genre and literary writing; however, if you have it firmly under your belt, feel free to try out telling also.

15. For many writers, there have been some events, incidents, and life milestones which have been critical to how we develop in our craft. Tell us, if you will, about one such incident in your life.

When I did my tour of duty in Viet Nam, I… (cough cough) Okay, that war ended when I was a toddler. The loss of my parents was… (cough cough) No, they’re both still living and teaching music lessons in Durham, NC. Wait, wait. When I made my first million, I had to sacrifice my… (cough, cough) No, still middle class.

Seems like, notwithstanding personal traumas and learning experiences with no broader dramatic implication, I just read a lot and wrote a lot. I have my Gladwellian 10,000 hours, and that’s the explanation. If only I had 10,000 hours in book marketing also!

Me, once again: Wow, 10,000 hours already? People are usually in their 50s by the time they hit 10,000 hours.

16. Where do your characters come from? Are they in part based on real people in any way, or are they more the children of your mind?

I always say that all my characters are me, including the villains. A person may inspire me by giving me a particular feeling, but the resulting character is not a pastiche of the person. Rather, the character reflects my feelings about that person.

This may translate oddly when one looks at a particularly horrendous character. For example, I have a vicious creep in The War Against Love — a snooty French Nazi. He calls himself “The Connoisseur” and uses expressions like “you dirty Jew.” Those things, clearly, are not my personality. I chose Nazis as the villains in the book specifically because it is so easy to celebrate when they are killed. But I think it would be freeing to act superior and condescending, as The Connoisseur does, just as a way to release frustration at the way people disappoint you in life. I can’t do it, because I’m a moral and empathetic person, but I can certainly imagine doing it, and that’s good enough.

17. You’re from New York, Queens in particular, and the life of your city comes through in your work. Tell us something we might not know about New York that found its way into your fiction.

Queens Hospital Center, located at 164^th street between Union Turnpike and the Grand Central Parkway, is as active and busy as any hospital in Manhattan. I used to live across the street from there and to compete with nurses and orderlies for parking near my apartment. At the time, you could walk on a ramp between buildings of the hospital to get to the bus stops on 164^th. That walk gave me an eerie feeling early in the morning.

18. What are you reading right now?

I read The New Yorker magazine as my primary source of intellectual content across genres. Besides that, I mainly read indie authors who I actually know. It happens that I have J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy on my desk as well, although I had to take a break after the first fifty pages, and when I returned to the book, I had forgotten who the characters were. Very dense book. Well-written, but dense. So I have to start over.

19. Is there any advice you’d give to other writers?

Don’t expect to make a living at it. Very few people do anymore. The majority of us indies use our books as supplemental income. You need a job that pays what you need to live well, and you need the heart and guts to keep working and publishing for no reward and not much recognition.

Publishers do not have your best interests at heart. They will screw you, either on purpose for their profit, or because they don’t give a flying purple fart about anyone but their star authors, or because they are poor and get in over their heads, or because they are bumblers.

Literary agents only care about big hit books. They don’t care about the midlist because their percentage of such books doesn’t give them life-sustaining income. If your book isn’t a celebrity blockbuster, they will resist signing you, using some bullshit code language like “I really have to believe in something before I can sell it.” Agents who offer to sign unknown authors should be checked out thoroughly to make sure they are really honest and legitimate and have a track record. In other words, don’t trust an agent who would take you as a client.

20. Is there anything specific you’d want to say to your readers?

First, I’m happy to hear from readers. I have many public venues where you can talk to me, and I tend to respond, and I’m thankful to those who have a good word about my writing.

Second, if you like one of my books, please review it on Amazon or wherever you bought it, or in your blog, or anywhere people will see your review. Indies like me, with no advertising budget, have to rely on word of mouth to find their readers.

Third, please consider buying the upcoming anthology Kindle All-Stars 2: Carnival of Cryptids, as described above. All the money goes to charity, and you will enjoy what you read, which makes you a winner all around. It should be for sale by the end of the month.