I was lucky to get an interview with Benjamin Reeves the creator & co-editor of Ballads of the Distant Reaches.
You’ve recently launched Ballads of the Distant Reaches, a digital anthology of fantasy short stories. Why should I subscribe to it?
Ballads of the Distant Reaches is a digital anthology of fantasy short stories, all set in the rich and varied universe of the Distant Reaches.
“We publish a new free story every two weeks on DistantReaches.com”
Please, tell us a bit about yourself.
I am a writer, screenwriter and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, New York. A few years ago, I completed an MFA in screenwriting at the Brooklyn College Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema, where I met Ballads of the Distant Reaches Co-creator and Co-editor Robert Frankel, who now lives in Los Angeles. We launched this project in July 2022, and I began development on it about a year prior, with Robert joining in December 2021. This is my website.
Tell me more about the Ballads of the Distant Reaches.
We spent months building the world — the Amal Empire — and it’s a pretty special place. There’s magic, old gods, Uncanny Beings, and a lot of history and lore to explore. And every story is illustrated by Eisner Award-winning artist Shay Plummer, so the art is really cool as well.
The story revolves around the Conclave of Bards, a gathering of all of the greatest storytellers in the land, who compete for a binding boon from the Wielder of the Diamond Scepter, the Emperor himself. Structurally, we tell stories within stories, so this gives our team of writers — who are all incredible, by the way — a lot of creative latitude. So, within this fantasy world, there’s horror, romance, drama, comedy, grim tales, etcetera.
We publish a new free story every two weeks on DistantReaches.com, and we’ve got lots of exclusive content for subscribers in the pipeline. Right now you can subscribe for free using your email address, and you’ll receive every story and lore update directly in your inbox. Over the next year, we’ll be developing novellas, podcasts and other longer-form and serialized stories as well.
We publish a new free story every two weeks on DistantReaches.com
Writers who are interested in joining us. Write to editors@distantreaches.com
What got you into writing? And how long have you been doing it?
I wrote my first article when I was 12. It was about an osprey, which I saw a poacher try to kill. A local bird rescue rehabilitated it, and one of the editors at the Kingsville Record newspaper gave me a shot! I started working as a professional journalist in college, then was freelance in Latin America and became an editor at a major finance magazine. In recent years, I’ve been working more on books, screenplays — including several sci-fi and fantasy scripts which have done well at festivals — and directing and producing films and documentaries.
Why did you choose to write fantasy? And why pick this particular fantasy subgenre?
I’ve always loved fantasy, and the roots of fantasy. I studied classics — Ancient Greek and Latin — and the mythological way of storytelling, working on our subconscious in ways that are intuitive but not necessarily easy to explain, has stuck with me. For this project, Robert and I wanted to create a new fantasy world that did away with many of the trappings of high fantasy that come ultimately from Tolkien. The Distant Reaches is intended to feel distinctly New World — or at least not Anglo-European Medieval — and we’ve imagined a tension between technology and magic. So, there’s rudimentary steam power and black powder in this world, even as the facility of magic has made much technological progress irrelevant.
The other thing I should add is that coming from the world of magazine journalism — which is a very collaborative process — and more recently screenwriting, which is often very collaborative as well, I felt it was important that this be a project that could contain the unique points of view, aesthetics and passions of a lot of writers. Fantasy is great at being many things to many people, because the writer is literally creating the world where the story plays out. We provide grist for the mill in terms of a world, mythology, history and simple prompts that are very open to interpretation. Then it’s up to the writer to take us on a journey. So far, the writers seem to be having a lot of fun with this, and we’ve had some great surprises.
Which other author has had the biggest influence on your writing?
Lately, I’ve been really into Joe Abercrombie. The First Law trilogy was really refreshing to read. I also recently read Ann Leckie’s The Raven Tower which was exceptional — a true work of literature.
What’s the best thing about being a writer?
Getting to explore. With non-fiction, this means literally exploring the world we live in. With fiction, especially genre, this means exploring a world that only exists in the imagination. More concretely, I get to share an office with my dog, who I call my business manager and head of security.
What’s the hardest thing about being a writer?
There are two things, and they’re related. I’m a full-time writer. The toughest thing about it can be the solitude. I don’t mean this in a literal sense: There’s always interviewing that needs to be done and clients, editors and agents to talk to. Lots of people. But there is a constant pressure to produce work, and at the end of the day, you’re on your own with that. There’s no one else who is going to step in and finish something if you’re just not feeling it.
As a corollary, the pressure to produce things that people need right now can become a drag on finishing longer-term projects that can take months or years to develop. It’s a constant balancing act to keep everything moving forward and developing the way it needs to. Working in film is exactly the same, so I get this double. I feel like this is a very hum-drum answer, and what audiences really want to read about are starving poets living in rain-swept garrets. Sometimes I wish it was more like that!
Do you have any tips or an author app, tool, or resource that you can really recommend we try?
Two things. One: Fantasy writers should really check out Inkarnate.com. It’s a fantastic tool for creating fantasy maps, and it can be a good way to just play with ideas. Two: Listen to the Script Notes podcast. It’s hosted by John August and Craig Mazin, two of the best screenwriters working today, and a lot of what they talk about crosses formats and genres.
And now it's time to yank out your Palantir! Let’s talk about the future. What new projects are you working on?
Ballads of the Distant Reaches still has a lot of growing to do. We’re publishing new stories every two weeks, and we’ve got premium content launching soon, including lore, serialized stories, novellas and (hopefully!) narrative podcasts. I’m also working on a non-fiction book — about a Cold War spy — and several film projects. Keep an eye out for Sleepers, a short film I recently wrote, directed and produced.
Do you expect new technologies to come along soon that will have a huge impact on self-publishing? For instance, when will we see a decent novel written by an AI author?
AI makes sense for certain fairly wrote or technical sorts of writing. There’s no reason why an AI can’t recap a basketball game, although I’ll go out on a limb and say it might struggle to explain the physicality of an athletic activity. I don’t see AI having a future in narrative fiction or longer-form non-fiction. I recently read a short “screenplay” written by an AI. It was stupid. Technically it made sense and was grammatically correct, but it was boring and irrelevant. It didn’t understand people or emotions like love or fear. Even if we have an AI that experiences those emotions itself, it’s a big leap to say that it will be able to communicate how those feel to a human being who possesses a physical body and all of the feelings that come along with that.
Storytelling is ultimately about human beings, emotions, and our internal struggles. There’s a saying in screenwriting which is “externalizing the internal.” This means surfacing that which the character or the audience cannot see yet and making it physical and visible. I could see AI successfully approximating what Nietzsche called the Apollonian, but it will utterly fail when it comes to the Dionysian.
Less philosophically, however, technology is enormously helpful to writers. Our project, for instance, launched on the Substack platform. Instead of worrying about printing and distribution, or building a website, we’ve been able to focus really intensely on storytelling and worldbuilding, with the knowledge that we could go straight to our audience, for free, and still be able to use build-in tools like paywalls and analytics to grow.
Do you have any dreams you’d like to share?
I would love to see Ballads of the Distant Reaches take off with readers. The writers, artists and editors involved in this are already creating some exceptional work. I’d love to have this become a world that people remember and get excited about. Right now, this means we need subscribers to keep it going!
Anything else you would like to say before we close?
One, thank you so much for this opportunity to share our project with the world. Two, I think we’re at a really exciting time for writers. A creative form which used to be limited to books and magazines is free in an entirely new way. We’re telling stories with illustrations, audio, video and social media. Literally, there are snippets of stories on our social media channels that don’t appear anywhere else. This means writers and readers can explore worlds in a million different ways. We’d love to hear from our readers — and any writers who are interested in joining us. Just write to editors@distantreaches.com.
Thank you for doing the interview. I wish you the very best of luck, and I hope you get a lot of subscribers and even more writers who’ll share exciting and new fantasy stories with us.
