I was lucky to get an interview with Casey Hollingshead, the author of The Witch Hunter, and one of this year’s #SPFBO8 semifinalists.

Please, tell us a bit about yourself…
I grew up in the middle of nowhere Texas. I studied business and biology at university before doing a hard swerve and changing to international relations with a focus on the Levant. Took 3ish years of Arabic. Practically lived in library halls as I wrote paper after paper. Long story short, became disillusioned and declined to continue down the path I had originally envisioned. Still graduated, but like many in that time I went right into a terrible job market and worked a litany of strange jobs and an assemblage of boring ones. Somewhere around there I returned to fiction writing! That’s the important bit, I just needed to set the stage, heh.

What was the first thought that popped into your mind when you found out you had made it to the semifinals?
I can’t recall but knowing myself it was probably something understated like “Sweet” or “Alright!” I think in a subjectively judged competition you do need to regulate expectations and be outcome independent. That said, it’s nice that someone saw fit to advance my story and I’m happy to have been given the opportunity. The craziest part of SPFBO is that it exists at all!

Why did you initially decide to take part in the SPFBO?
I’ve been in and around the self-pub community dating back to 2010ish when there was a gold rush of sorts on digital storefronts. SPFBO came up a little while later so it’s definitely been on the radar. It’s an amazing idea, truly, and this is my first foray into it.

Aside from your SPFBO8 book getting the stamp of approval by being in the semifinals, why should I buy it?
Well. The story follows a witch hunter in a brutish, resource-scarce low fantasy world. Lots of killer mercenaries, conniving nobles, menacing monsters, and more! Oof. I am absolutely terrible at selling. I suggest reading the blurb and first two chapters. I’ve been told that the intro is quite intense so if you can read those first two chapters and survive, you’re in the right place.

Also, what little data I have shows people often zip right through. For being 485 pages, it appears to be a breezy read and I think that’s a selling point of its own these days? Hey us self-published authors gotta flail about and try everything, I say bring “fast pacing” onto the elevator!

I thought you sold it pretty well, it definitely sounds interesting.

Casey, you mentioned that you’ve been at this for a long time. Exactly how long have you been writing? And what got you into writing?
TL;DR: Starship Troopers and Lovecraft – about age 9 or 10. I’ve been writing ever since.

Using a liberal definition of it, I’ve been writing for 25ish years now, maybe? I was a voracious reader as a kiddo and very obsessed with history in particular. For example, in the 3rd grade my school library had this huge book set on the American Civil War and I read every volume. Not only read them… but enjoyed doing it. Just an absolute maniac back then. About that time, I also started reading fiction novels and picked up Starship Troopers because it was in the news due to the upcoming Verhoeven movie. I was way too young for Heinlein’s book and a lot of the concepts flew over my head, but I was still all about that action. Now, there’s a part in the book where Rico falls into a nest of bugs and Heinlein described his suit crashing through their crunchy insect limbs as if he were falling through the branches of a tree, and the imagery of that really stuck with me and I just remember being wowed by how effective it was. There’s a pretty big step up from simplistic children’s books to purely text novels when it comes to engaging your imagination and Heinlein kinda plugged me into an all-new mainframe right there and then.

With creative circuits buzzing, I soon after read a Lovecraft short story called “The Beast in the Cave” while sitting in a mall bookstore. This was back in the day when little kids would just roam malls totally unwatched, randomly spooking middle-aged women from the center of clothes racks, inflicting mayhem in the food courts, or trying to sneak behind those sticky beads at the video stores. I never did those things and if anyone asks, I was reading Lovecraft. But it’s an important development for me because “The Beast in the Cave” is what actually spurred me to write my own fiction. I distinctly remember later that week sitting down in the school library for about 30minutes at a chunky computer and just outright mimicking Lovecraft’s style. After that, I was hooked. Been a flurry of writing ever since. I hate pinning it to a date because it sounds a bit exaggerated in that suburban way. You know how that chatter goes, a conversation seen through the bottom of a wine glass: my kid started ballet when they were six, yeah well my kid was hitting hole in ones at age four, yeah well MY kid was kicking piano keys from the womb! But if I had to put down a number, I think I was about 9 or 10 when I started writing fiction.

Whatever the case, that is quite early. You mentioned sci-fi, horror, and civil war stuff, so why did you choose to write fantasy? And why this particular fantasy subgenre?
This is a tricky question for me because I don’t read a whole lot of fantasy. I think the genre as a whole somehow slipped by me when I became obsessed with horrors and westerns instead, although often times my favorite books in those genres are very fantasy adjacent. But the question got me thinking, and I took a quick audit of my most recent reads and they are:

Berlin - Anthony Beevor

Mysterium Coniunctionis & Synchronicity – Carl Jung

Nondual Perspectives on Quantum Physics – Tomaj Javidtash

Moral Man and Immoral Society – Reinhold Niebuhr

All the Pretty Horses & The Road – Cormac McCarthy

As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner

The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

The Tracker – Tom Brown, Jr.

The Redundancy of Courage – Timothy Mo

So I guess the actual answer is super nerdy: I really enjoy fantasy in other mediums, particularly games and movies. Ultima Underworld, Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, Dragon Age, the works. Love them all. I even painted a Minsc figurine. You name any of the famous fantasy books and I’ll likely tell you I haven’t read them, but I’ve played the games/seen the movies. I hate to admit it so publicly but I’m basically an uncultured philistine when it comes to fantasy.

Which other author has had the biggest influence on your writing?
Many non-fiction authors have been very influential, but I’ll just stick with fiction writers: Lovecraft, King, Matheson, Barker, in no particular order. With Lovecraft, I was such a dedicated reader of his that I used to take the time to papermache over his book covers just so I could read them in class. Those covers were immensely grisly and I didn’t want my peers to think me a weirdo, for being a weirdo in middle school was akin to being a chomo in a jail cell: you’re just not going to have a good time. King – characterization master. Everyone should read King if only to understand how powerful good characters can be in carrying stories. Matheson is simply one of the most talented writers ever and I think a lot of people miss on this because he writes in spec fiction. Barker is a devildog in the trenches of horror and he's the best at what he does.

No particular book comes out as most influential. I suppose “Catcher in the Rye” is my favorite book and one of a very few I’ve read more than 2+ times. Yeah, I’m in that “camp” on the Catcher, though I totally understand why it doesn’t take for a lot of people.

What’s the best thing about being a writer?
Ironically, it makes reading better. This realization happened just a few years ago. I went to this little writing meet up in Dallas, and this guy brought a story and in it this character escapes from a jail. Pretty basic stuff, except the writer had to describe a lot of things that were out of sight and sometimes out of hearing, too, as his character was sorta sleuthing about in the dark and trying to avoid guards. As senses dipped in and out of use, things were both implied yet tangible, the way in which a murderer’s creeping shadow is functionally harmless yet rightfully terrifying all the same. The writer did a very good job with it. But to me, the story was enhanced because I knew that on the technical side of it, the actual writing side, that trying to convey a scene like that can be very difficult.

I have a greater appreciation for good writing because I am familiar with the ways in which it is completed, if that makes sense? It sounds extremely elitist and I promise I don’t mean to come off that way. I think most people who work in any particular ‘field’ understand this, though. And I mean any field, from programming to lumberjacking to anything creative. When you’re intimate with the process you gain a new perspective of the ‘greats’ who dwell in that field. Personally, I’m a big fan of westerns and gothic stories, so if I read something like, say, Light in August and I come across one of Faulkner’s 500ft home runs, I have the given sense of awe, but then I also have this pang of dread that on a technical level this man exists on another plane altogether and I can do nothing but look up at it – and that kinda makes those reads all the better. Now, if I read a strong enough passage, I say something like “you mother****er” and fling the book across the room and step outside and stare out into nothing. Kidding, kidding. Also, apologies if this explanation was too long or a bit much on the fart-sniffing.

What’s the hardest thing about being a writer?
Editting.

Might you be willing to share a tip, a scrap of wisdom, or perhaps an app, tool, or resource that you can really recommend to authors?
TL;DR: you have to do what works for you. Finding out what works for you requires trying and bumbling, but eventually you’ll get it. No specific advice can be all that sage because both the start and end of the process is different for everyone. I’ll tell you a little about my own processes here, but it’s mostly to satiate any curiosity, I guess, and not to be taken too literally as ‘advice’:

I don’t do much fancy stuff on the technical side of things. I am a begrudging lifelong user of MSWord. Don’t recommend it, but it is what I use. The actual writing process for me is very easy, but the editing less so. Because 90% of my effort is put into rewriting and editing, I try to maintain some semblance of a system tailored to just that – and that system is a horror and I don’t recommend it, either. I use an editing “system” of [ brackets ] wherein notes and edits can be easily ctrl+f’d and found, but in no way are organized outside of keeping tabs within my own headspace. I’m sure there are actual tools that do this for writers in a non-psychotic manner, but you must understand I am terrified of change. After my book is dorked up with brackets and notes and all that, I do rewrites. And I delete – a lot. While editing/rewriting, I keep separate files for dart throwing plots just to keep ideas freshly churning. These files rarely get reopened.

Somewhat scholarly, I maintain a “living” document of sentences, idioms, words, ideas, names, etc. I’ve always sorta done this, but rarely kept it organized. It was only after seeing Eminem of all people show that he kept shoeboxes filled with notes and rhymes that it kinda clicked for me. (Talented lyricists are themselves top tier writers, so their methods are worth looking into, certainly moreso than mine heh.) My “shoebox” is currently over 14,000 words now and is an invaluable asset; I always have it open while writing and/or reading.

When I read, I take notes. Pretty liberal with penning observations at the edges of pages and all that. I’m a dog-earing monster, too. No apologies, no survivors. I will dog ear a 1913 original edition of translated Omar Khayyam poetry if I damn well please. (Just kidding, it’s next to the fine china.) But to be serious I do find this helpful. I mostly do it with non-fiction of course, but it can be good to have little things to return to and re-read without necessitating a dig through the entire book. I still usually forget them, of course. If a note is worthy enough, it gets a place in the “shoebox” where it can also be forgotten but forgotten differently.

What new projects are you working on?
Battle Brothers Book 2. The draft was already finished when Book 1 came out, but I have no publisher or editor or anything like that, so I have to manually do all these things myself. I try to be meticulous so the editing process tends to be much, much longer than the writing one. The word file itself is currently at 145,000 words. Those editing [ brackets ] I mentioned? Sitting at 239. So… I have a ways to go, but we’ll get there.

Anything else you would like to say before we close?
An artist and I released a short comic book earlier this year and I really enjoyed the process and would like to revisit it. If you want to take a gander at that one, please be my guest. At a chippy 15ish pages, it is a sensitive condolence on behalf of the 485-page book heh.

Also, the artwork is great and its artist quite the talent.

Congratulations on the semi-finalist spot and best of luck in the competition, Casey.
Thanks for doing the interview!