I was lucky to get an interview with Daniel Maidman, the author of The Exile of Zanzibar, one of this year’s #SPFBO9 entries.

Please, tell us a bit about yourself…
Like most Americans, I am secretly a Canadian. I split time between New York City and a small town upstate. My primary career is as an artist! My gallery is in Manhattan and my work is in a number of museums, as well as the drawings department of the Library of Congress. Digital copies of my art and writing are being archived on the Moon as part of the Lunar Codex project. I didn’t tell too many people I was working on a fantasy novel until it was done.

Why should I buy your SPFBO9 entry?
It’s about a bronze-age society confronting the arrival of a woman from their own far future. In her struggle to get home, she really kicks over the apple cart. She interferes in their wars, their religion, and their politics. She makes dear friends and deadly enemies. The events of the book range from the grittiest filth of battle and death to the sundrenched upper reaches where the human approaches the divine.

I illustrated the print editions – 14 pictures in the paperback and 18 in the hardback. I love those illustrations and I think readers will really enjoy them. That’s a snippet of one in the banner image above.

What got you into writing? And how long have you been doing it?
I have always written and drawn, but in a way I became an author and an artist simultaneously. I spent many years trying to make movies. But I get better at things slowly, and the economics of film favor getting up to speed almost instantly. In 2003, I had a revelation that film wasn’t going to work out. I had a breakdown that lasted some months, and when I came out of it the unified impulse to make a moving narrative image had fractured into the twin impulses to make still images and verbal narratives. By 2005 I had started the first draft of “The Exile of Zanzibar” and by 2009 I was exhibiting my paintings in New York.

Have you participated in the SPFBO before and where did you hear about the competition?
This is my first. People keep asking where I heard about it, and for the life of me, I cannot remember. I was tracking the entry date for six or seven months before SPFBO9 opened up, but I haven’t the faintest idea how I knew to do that.

Why did you choose to write fantasy?
I didn’t! “The Exile of Zanzibar” is the first of seven volumes. The entire story presented itself to me in a single sleepless night in 2005. I had the profound relief of realizing I would never face writer’s block again. When it came time to figure out what it was, I realized that even though my main reading genre was science fiction, my life’s work was to be epic fantasy.

Which other author has had the biggest influence on your writing?
So many have. Before I understood anything about writing a novel, I wrote in iambic pentameter because Shakespeare did, and I used a crazy number of micro-narrative similes because Homer does. Apart from catastrophic technical influences like those, I was strongly influenced by Dostoyevsky, Camus, Proust, Neal Stephenson, China Miéville, Cao Xueqin, Frank Herbert, Olaf Stapledon… I don’t know where to stop. I’m passionate about the books I love.

But my background is also in art and film, so maybe add some painters: Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Peter Paul Rubens, Diego Velázquez – and some directors: Terry Gilliam, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Andrei Tarkovsky, Krzysztof Kieślowski…

If you were to win the SPFBO, what impact do you think this would have on your writing career?
I guess it would be like having the good fortune to hit a really long ladder in Snakes and Ladders. It’s already brought so much notice to the book which I could not have gotten or known how to get on my own, and everyone I’ve encountered has been lovely. I’m grateful for participating at all.

What challenges did you face during the writing or publishing process, and how did you overcome them?
I didn’t know how to write prose when I started this book. I know you’re supposed to write a few bad books out of your system, but I loved the idea for this one so much that I couldn’t let it go. So I wrote eight substantially distinct drafts. Each draft represented a leap forward. There was a stall of about a decade in the middle while I worked through the problem of the narrator’s voice. I spent that entire time writing art criticism for The Huffington Post and others. Learning how to communicate with a readership got me past the narrator hurdle. Then I only had character, narrative, scene transitions, momentum, and suspense to figure out.

I also got rejected by 116 agents. That was pretty depressing.

Do you have any tips or an author app, tool, or resource that you can really recommend we try?
I would recommend Brandon Sanderson’s BYU course on writing. It’s archived on Youtube and is head and shoulders the most cogent and practical guide to writing I have ever encountered. If you listen to it and that’s not enough, the first several seasons of Sanderson’s podcast Writing Excuses unpack many of the same topics in much greater detail.

And now it's time to yank out your Palantir! Let’s talk about the future. What new projects are you working on?
I’m working on volume 2 of “Railroad to Zanzibar”! I can’t afford to spend 18 years writing each of them. 

Apps that are based on artificial intelligence (AI), such as ChatGTP and Midjourney, along with apps aimed specifically at authors, have caused quite a stir. Do you expect these new technologies will make your life as a self-published author easier or harder, and do you expect that they’ll mean you’ll earn more or less?
I don’t expect to interact with them in any substantial way. As a receiver of art, I find what they do categorically uninteresting. For art to have meaning, it has to emerge from consciousness. AI isn’t conscious, so its products are irrelevant to me. I expect that my readership will primarily consist of people seeking that same communion with human beings, so they too will not be attracted to AI products.

Do you have any dreams you’d like to share?
My wife asked me the specific point on this book when I felt like I’d accomplished something. I couldn’t give an answer before I went through the very long process of getting it ready for publication and then publishing it. You’d think it would be when I held the first hard copy, but it turned out, in hindsight, it was when I finished writing it. I got my dream.

I want to be able to keep writing and for my books to find their readership. That’s most important. But sure, I’d love to sell a million copies. I’d love for Zanzibar to support me as I’ve supported it. I’d love for HBO, oops, sorry, “Max,” to produce quite an expensive series, with which I could have blissfully little to do. I’d love for my ideas about human harmony, the nature of time, and our place in the universe to seep out into the general culture a bit. I’d love for the fantastical images scattered throughout the book to enter the common storehouse of the human imagination.

Anything else you would like to say before we close?
Yes – thank you. It is such a pleasure to be able to answer these questions.

Also, I figure a lot of the readers are other SPFBO entrants, and I’d like to say your books look amazing, and I wish I were a faster reader and could read them all. I’m glad to share a contest with you.

They do indeed!

I wish you the very best in the SPFBO. I hope a lot of readers discover your writing. Thanks for doing the interview.