I was lucky to get an interview with Jack Batchen, the author of The Outside, one of this year’s #SPFBO9 entries.

Please, tell us a bit about yourself…
I live in Canberra, Australia, with my wife Amanda and our two-year-old daughter Ingrid (who happens to be the funniest human alive). Apart from writing, I work as a pastor at a local church. I love playing and listening to post-rock and ambient music, and have an irrational attachment to Southampton Football Club.

Why should I buy your SPFBO9 entry?
I try to write what I'd like to read, which are fresh stories brimming with a sense of wonder and discovery, wrapped around a relatable human core. More specifically, The Outside is about loneliness, old friends, and finding purpose after your dreams have crumbled... as well as what life would be like if humanity was restricted to isolated pockets of inhabitable land and daddy-long-legs spiders were sentient and as big as a truck.

What got you into writing? And how long have you been doing it?
The short answer is... reading, which probably isn't a surprise. About twelve years ago I started chatting with some friends about what we do if we ever wrote a big epic fantasy thing: the things we liked about what we read, things we'd try to do differently. Then the three of us -- much to our own surprise -- wrote one together. It was terrible, like truly bad, but we learned a lot, and it ignited in me a passion for writing.

Have you participated in the SPFBO before and where did you hear about the competition?
This is the first time I've participated in the SPFBO. I first heard about it a few years ago through the r/fantasy subreddit and subsequently read -- and was blown away by -- The Sword of Kaigen, which won the competition in 2019. Since then, it's always been on my mind to enter if I ever had a self-published book of my own.

Why did you choose to write fantasy?
As I said above, I try to write what I would want to read, and a sense of wonder is something I'm always looking for in a story. Tolkien's essay On Fairy Stories talks about three things he argues fantasy does better than any other genre: to help us see our own world more clearly, to look above and beyond our day-to-day to something bigger, and the eucatastrophe: the sudden joyous turn from disaster to triumph. These are all things I resonate with, and what to strive towards in my own writing.

Which other author has had the biggest influence on your writing?
Honestly, probably Brandon Sanderson. His lectures and work on the earlier seasons of the Writings Excuses podcast were fantastically helpful when I was starting to learn to write. Though I should add he's not my sole inluence!

If you were to win the SPFBO, what impact do you think this would have on your writing career?
It would be huge. I'm somewhat allergic to self-promotion and social media, making me an awul marketer. The signal boost from winning would do far, far more than I could ever achieve on my own. The competition looks great, though, so I'm not expecting to get all that far!

What challenges did you face during the writing or publishing process, and how did you overcome them?
For me, the challenge has always been fitting writing time in around all the other demands in life. I also got very close to scoring a traditional publishing deal for The Outside, only to fall at the last hurdle, something that was simultaneously encouraging and greatly discouraging.

Do you have any tips or an author app, tool, or resource that you can really recommend we try?
I love Scrivener as a software tool for writing novels, however I've recently been trying out Dabble as an alternative with better cloud functionality.

And now it's time to yank out your Palantir! Let’s talk about the future. What new projects are you working on?
I've got two in the works! I'm aiming to release my next novel, Divine Artistry, later this year. It's about a painter who only wants to paint stumbling around the wilderness, trying to save his home town. It's not a sequel to The Outside, as you could probably guess, but there are some sneaky little connections. At the same time, I'm about 60% of the way through the actual sequel to The Outside, something I never thought I'd write.

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?
While these apps might have the potential to make the writing process easier, one of the biggest challenges as an independent author is getting your book to stand out over the thousands and thousands of others out there. These apps are only going to increase that "signal-to-noise" ration, and I think that's ultimately going to make things harder.

Do you have any dreams you’d like to share?
I'd love to be able to keep writing and releasing my books in the future. Perhaps one day, I'd love to have the time to compose and record a soundtrack for something like The Outside.

Anything else you would like to say before we close?
Thanks so much for having me! I've never done an interview like this before, and it's been a great experience.

That was some interesting answers. I wish you the very best in the SPFBO. I hope a lot of readers discover your writing. Thanks for doing the interview!