I was lucky to get an interview with Tom Mock, the author of The Long Nights, and one of this year’s #SPFBO8 semifinalists.
Please, tell us a bit about yourself…
Thanks so much for the opportunity of this interview, Rune. It’s great to be able to meet more people in the community. I’m a SFF novelist from North Carolina living in the Chapel Hill / Raleigh with my girlfriend, our beloved rescue dog Marlo, and a kitten we’re currently fostering from my parent’s small horse farm from out in the county. I’m 34, I got an English degree from East Carolina University, a Masters from NC State, and when I am not fixing barn roofs or arena lights (a precarious endeavor) at the farm, I’m doing my best to have a go at being an author. My hobbies, curtailed by the pandemic as they are these days, are listening to audiobooks and the Exploring Middle Earth podcast while I walk the dog, and playing D&D online with my friends.
“There’s something about the escapism that captivates me. There are no bounds on your imagination in the genre. The most surprising, wonderful things can happen in a fantasy story, so long as you follow your own rules.”
What was the first thought that popped into your mind when you found out you had made it to the semifinals?
“Oh wow. Oh no. That’s amazing.” I was thrilled, incredulous, and desperate to see what the reviewers thought, pouring over their reviews line by line. I started writing because I wanted to create that experience of disappearing into a story for other people. That anyone read my debut novel and thought highly enough of it to mark it a semi-finalist in this blog-off must mean I’ve made headway towards that goal. I spent 13 years on and off working on the novel, or learning how to write it, at least, and it’s very gratifying to find that my sense of the book’s quality is not totally without merit.
Why did you decide to take part in the SPFBO?
This is my first time participating in the blog-off. I published my debut in 2019, but didn’t learn about SPFBO until last year when I finally tried to start learning more about the indie community (just figuring out where and how to start was difficult). I was attracted to the idea of a community event instead of the traditional open and shut competition where judges disappear with their pile of books for months until one day you see the anti-climactic results posted on a website or a brief email of congratulations or condolences. I’d like to thank Mark Lawrence again for starting SPFBO. I think this is the best possible version of an art contest anyone could hope for. Every book, whether it’s selected for advancement or not, gets its due.
Why should we buy your SPFBO8 book?
A young telepath working with a group of occult “specialists” searches the memories of a killer vampire to find his victims before they wake to feed, but risks losing himself along the way.
The appeal of the book for me, in its conceit, was writing a story that begins where the traditional urban fantasy monster of the week narrative ends, with the lurking vampire responsible for the spate of gruesome murders stalked, caught, and brought down. One of the themes of The Long Nights is trauma and how darkness spreads, and vampirism seemed like the perfect vehicle for those ideas as Joe tries to navigate the boundary between his night work and the rest of his so-called life in this 90s era, character driven, dark psychological fantasy that weighs in at just under 300 pages.
What got you into writing? And how long have you been doing it?
I picked up R.A. Salvatore’s The Dark Elf trilogy. It and all the adventures of Drizzt that followed took me away in a way no book had to that point. At some point, daydreaming my way through the boring long hours of school, I thought maybe I could do what Salvatore did and, by working at it long enough, add structure to my daydreams, give them weight, and make them real. I sat down in my room and opened a laptop in maybe 2003 and worked for three hours, largely plagiarizing the opening to a forgotten realms novel – never mind which. Some orcs attacked a caravan at night in the rain. It took an enormous amount of painful concentration, fumbling around stupefied with only a blunt sense story, but at the end of those few hours I had maybe two-hundred single spaced words. It was little more than a moment that I had written, but I had written it. There it was, almost alive. The time I’d spent felt meaningful. I kept at it, and that’s how I got here, jeez, almost 20 years later, but don’t read too much into the time. I can’t say much for the scribblings of my 15 year old self, and I’ve always been a slow learner.
Why did you choose to write fantasy? And why pick this particular fantasy subgenre?
There’s something about the escapism that captivates me. There are no bounds on your imagination in the genre. The most surprising, wonderful things can happen in a fantasy story, so long as you follow your own rules. I’ve long loved the sense of adventure in so many of the books I’ve read, even before I started reading the forgotten realms novels. Noirish urban fantasy was a bit of an accident, to tell the truth. I was so attracted to the aesthetic of Batman: The Animated Series when I was younger, as well as the strange, dark 90s anime I would catch on TV late at night. It all went into the caldron of story in my head along with movies like Blade Runner, Leon the Professional, and Dark City, and when I sat down to write, Joe Kellerman, struggling artist and telepath, walked onto the page and met Adrian Lange, the dead vampire with a bloody, fractured mind.
Sound like a fascinating story!
Which other author has had the biggest influence on your writing?
I think, for The Long Nights, my answer is Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos series (especially the first 3) and his standalone novel Agyar (epistolary vampire urban fantasy). Both are first person narratives, and Taltos, while it is secondary world fantasy, follows a fantasy assassin who is also a small-time mob boss operating in the great city of the Empire. If you’ve had any interest in the Gentleman Bastard books, go out and get Brust right away. What struck me most was the protagonist-narrator’s voice—his personality and incredibly human shortcomings—and the strained, less-than-communicative relationships he forms with his many allies along the course of the stories. Brust’s characters all feel so real, there’s no hand-waving, questionable motivation nonsense. The stories are fast, fun, cram packed with excellent dialogue, and the way Brust blends Vlad Taltos’s personal life and his occupation pulled me into the world and wouldn’t let me go. Agyar makes use of a very similar voice, but the modern setting and slowly unfolding story told from the vampire’s point of view made for an enthralling read. I finished Agyar, and a few months later started what became The Long Nights. I wanted to do in it much of what Brust did well, though my story ended up being less playful, and the character’s circumstances more emotionally fraught. Maybe that says something about me. Is there a psychiatrist in the house?
What’s the best thing about being a writer?
Dreaming awake, the slow dissolving into another world, and the sublime sense of accomplishment as a story comes along, never really knowing just what’s next.
Very precisely put!
What’s the hardest thing about being a writer?
Whatever goes wrong, it’s nobodies’ fault but mine.
How do I get into the semifinals? Just kidding! Or not? Do you perhaps have a tip, scrap of wisdom, or perhaps an author app, tool, or resource that you can really recommend we try?
I feel very fortunate to have been chosen as a semi-finalist by Before We Go Blog. Books have to find the right readers, and I’m glad The Long Nights connected with some of them. The book became what it is through a lot of revision, rethinking, and rewriting. But as I said, I was learning how to write a novel. I am still learning how to write a novel. I am still learning to notice when a story I’m reading is sweeping me off my feet, and trying to figure out how it did it.
The Long Nights only got to be what it is because I eventually got over the disastrous notion that I had some special creative instinct and whatever I wrote would be good, even if I couldn’t explain it. I had to write a synopsis (the bane of all writers) when I was querying the book. It was uncomfortably revealing because it showed me how much I had faked in the book and how many otherwise good ideas I hadn’t done much with. Even with all my revisions, I was in as much of a rush to get done with the novel as anyone. I cut corners, got distracted with things that weren’t the developing action of the story to make myself feel like I was making progress, hung on to darlings from my first draft that simply didn’t serve the story, you name it. In the end, I had to admit to myself that I hadn’t done what I thought I’d done. I’d paid a lot of attention to prose, but I needed to focus more on story. It was a blow, but the writing was on the wall. The agents weren’t wrong, my story was.
From there, though, everything got easier. I had work to do, but because I’d been vague in my thinking about my story before it was overcomplicated. The character motivations were all in a tangle because I’d decided whatever they did was right because that’s how I wrote them. Because I couldn’t make up my mind about story details, I’d try to write around them, and then it was like I was skating on thin ice avoiding the things I didn’t know. So I stopped and I thought the story through beat by beat and took the time to make up my mind when I came to these patches of thin ice or characters doing something that didn’t quite fit. That’s hard to do, but as I did it, I started gaining momentum and the story started to make more sense. Perhaps the starkest evidence of how muddled my thinking was is that Joe’s search to find the missing victims of the vampire before they woke as newly turned vampires aching with death and crazed with hunger didn’t become the clear and present danger of the novel until much later. It was really that bad, but I’m not ashamed to say it. Writing is thinking, and sometimes we just don’t think as clearly as we think we do. We can see it pretty quicky in other people’s work because we aren’t attached to any of their ideas. I started trying to treat my work as indifferently as a stranger’s, practicing changing things just to see if different ideas worked better, and it just made everything lighter.
Once I committed to sitting with the creative discomfort of figuring out what I should do, I discovered I was more creative that I thought I could be. I made lists of what I could do instead of what I had done, and when I hit on an interesting idea, I’d follow it as far as it could go, and before I knew it, I’d solved my problem. And the best thing was I discovered I never ran out of ideas. Often I needed a walk and a good night’s sleep, but there was no need to hold back, no need to cut an story idea short for fear of going too far off course.
That brings me to another big leap forward for me. I decided to write parts of The Long Nights I had avoided because I didn’t think I could pull them off. These became my favorite parts of the novel and are what make it work at all. The mental library, the vampire’s memories, the prologue, the entire climax of the novel, and more. They only happened because I decided there was nothing wrong with trying and failing. But it turned out writing something exciting and unexpected made for great fun, and, as daunting as it was, I liked sitting down to work on it better than what I’d done before. It was like starting fresh. I was daydreaming again, and I wasn’t putting up roadblocks on my imagination because I thought the idea would be hard to write, or it would take too long and I wanted to be done by December.
Having a trusted reader (it only takes one, and often one is better than two) can help you see your writing for what it is. You have to encourage them to be brutally honest, though. It’s also great to practice interrogation other people’s work, good, bad, or indifferent. The worst book you’ve ever read can sometimes be a greater teaching tool than the best one because, though you may cringe to admit it, it may resemble your own work in at least some of its faults.
Thank you for a very comprehensive and interesting answer.
What new projects are you working on?
I’ve had a tough year emotionally. I planned to finish two novels I started before the pandemic, but that hasn’t worked out so well. It’s alright though. I’ll get there. One, still in a drawer, is a final rewrite (famous last words) of a prequal to The Long Nights. This will be the novel that properly begins the Joe Kellerman series, chronologically speaking. It is my second novel and, as Steven Brust said, “You will never do anything harder than write your first novel, except maybe write your second.” There have been growing pains.
I’m very excited by my third novel, which I hope to finish over NaNoWriMo, because it is a foray into a new genre for me as an author. Working Title: Treasure Dragons is a fantasy adventure coming of age novel like Naomi Novak’s Temeraire meets Treasure Island, but with skyfarers in sailing airships. The tone is lighter than The Long Nights, and though there is not a great deal of out-and-out magic, there’s no shortage of wonder. It’s been a lot of fun to work on and I hope it will be just as much fun to read when I’m done. I look forward to sharing it eventually.
Anything else you would like to say before we close?
The Before We Go Blog and many authors have called my semi-finalist novel “criminally under-reviewed.” I appreciate that they’ve encouraged readers give The Long Nights a look. I’d like to recommend Jay Requard, another author whose work deserves more attention. His novella The Curse of Shallow Bay (part of the Salt Songs series) was one of my favorite reads of the last year. A fun, muscular sword and sorcery with the aging father of a family of raiding corsairs at its turbulent center, it’s like something straight out of Weird Tales with a hint of a Star Trek command drama. You’ll see what I mean.
If you’re in the US and you haven’t already, go vote, get your shots, wear your mask, and try to give yourself a break at the end of the day.
Good advice and best of luck with The Long Nights and your next books! A big thank you for doing the interview, Tom.
