You may have noticed if you hang out with the same crowd of Super Cool Independent Writer People that I do: D. Emery Bunn’s book Darkness Concealed released earlier this week.

Because I am lazy and didn’t get to it in time a skilled marketer, I suggested to Emery that we do an interview but schedule it for Friday— today, in other words– so that folk would see it heading into the weekend and maybe he’d get a little bump.  Totally has nothing to do with me not getting my shit together before launch day. Nothing at all.

Anyway, I wrote some stupid questions and fired them off his way and he actually put up with my nonsense.  Check out the interview, and check out the book:

1) Forget the book for a minute; tell me about yourself.

But…but…the book! Okay, fine, I’ll talk about me. Engineer by day; writer, reader, and gamer by night. I never found the beach interesting enough for long walks on it, and I positively love a crescent moon.

Is that enough? No?

Cruel taskmaster…more specifically I do both tabletop and video games, depending on the night. I’m a hardcore Twitter addict, and still wonder how I thought it was pointless for years before starting on this writing thing.

2) Now tell me about Darkness Concealed.  Who’s the target audience?  What other writers or books would you compare it to?

In a sentence, Darkness Concealed is about a recurring apocalypse no one can explain, and the quest of four strangers to try to explain it at their own peril. It’s dark fantasy, with liberal doses of mystery and horror everywhere. Oh, and a ton of humor. I’m not morbidly depressing, only slightly saddening.

I’ve got several target audiences. People who…
…are tired of stock fantasy tropes used in stock ways with very few twists to mix it up.
…want to try to solve an intricate mystery where most of the answers are hidden.
…want a detailed exploration of philosophical themes and subtext without having them browbeaten.
…love engaging characters with vastly different personalities.
…desire to have an uncertain conclusion instead of a foregone one.

3) Does your book pass the Bechdel test?

It passes it with straight A’s, 100%, and flawless victory. I have two female characters in the story, and at no point do they talk about a man in a romantic way. At best, they have their gripes with the two males accompanying them.

4) Give me your single favorite sentence from Darkness Concealed.

A single one? You sure you didn’t mean “top three” or “quick hit list”? I swear, you’re a sadist. I’d have to say it’s the very opening line:

“Mommy, what’s going on?”

In so many ways, those words encapsulate the entire plot and theme of not just this story, but the trilogy in sum.

5) Describe your process for writing the book a bit.  How long did it take you?  How long did the idea for the book percolate in your head before you finally had everything on the page?

I’m going to answer this backward…ish. The land of Telthan came into my mind in December 2008 as the result of wanting to apply to a worldbuilding play by post D&D campaign. I was taking a shower (ha!), thinking about what it should be, and one sentence came to me: “It’s a peaceful, idyllic pastureland…except the one day where nearly everyone dies.” Thus was born the Darkening and the land it afflicts.

The campaign failed. Too much overhead for the DM and the players. I took the setting wholesale and started my own campaign to explore it, and go over the full arc that was in my mind. Two attempts at my own campaign failed, because the arc was too particular, too limiting to the players. This was even after I’d written up a full campaign arc outline while at Basic Military Training, pouring my pent-up creativity straight into the pages. In a lot of ways, I consider the outline some of my most creative work.

Problem is…I lost the outline while moving to my first base in July 2010. I thought I’d left it at my hotel room the night before making it there. I wrote the first, second, and third drafts based purely on the memory of that outline. Then a month or so ago I was sifting through some old files and out it falls. It’s sitting over there on my desk, so unlike what I’ve written onto the page, but the same general idea.

Back to the present…

Honestly, writing this book is a study in me being a procrastinating fool who doesn’t realize what he has in his hands. I wrote the first draft mostly during NaNoWriMo 2012, wrote another 23k in the two months following…then abandoned it because I’d written myself into a corner.

I didn’t touch it again until NaNo 2013, ending up stumbling around for the first couple of days trying to remember my plot thread. You see, I threw out the first draft as an unsalvageable mess. This has since turned into a trend with my other work.

Anyways, NaNo 2013. I wrote…a lot. The entire second draft, weighing in at 103,259 words, got completed that month. Me getting stuck in Dallas-Fort Worth airport due to a nasty winter storm certainly helped (15k from those 48 hours alone). But I finished it…and I loved what I’d written. Sure, it had faults, but I had finished a novel all the way through. (Point of context, I’ve won NaNo 3 times…and only finished the resultant novel once)

And if I can write a novel, gosh-darnit I can revise the thing into publishable shape. I sent the draft off to a few beta readers, who came back with some good things to go and fix. Which I did…slowly. Procrastination and a ton of other responsibilities are nasty conspirators, and while it took me about a month (January) to finish the first part and another three weeks (February-March) for the third, parts 2 and 4 were on hold until the middle of May. Whereupon I knocked them out in six weeks.

I sent the finished third draft at the beginning of July to far more beta readers than the second had seen…and got the right comments back. The kind that say “fix these minor issues, polish the grammar, and publish”. None of them actually said that, but what they commented on signaled that.

6) If the book had a soundtrack, which bands would be featured?

Blind Guardian, Hammerfall, DragonForce, and tons of orchestral in the vein of Hans Zimmer and John Williams. Honestly, put Blind Guardian’s Sacred Worlds (Warning: extremely epic, and must be played loud) on in the background whenever Gerald is featured.

7) If you die halfway through writing the third book in the Darkness trilogy, which author would you pick to finish your work?  Don’t say Brandon Sanderson.

At this point in time, I’ll be happy with finishing the second book. I don’t have any author in mind for that sort of thing.

8) How long would it take Grond to beat up your main character?

And here I thought Grond was the more pragmatic of the two. Why beat up a bunch of random people he doesn’t know who haven’t wronged him? Anyways, I consider all of my characters main, so…

Caleb: One punch and he’s down. Bonus points for getting him to mumble “I must have done something wrong.”
Alexandra: They’d fight each other to a stalemate, realize that it’s pointless, and shake hands before parting ways.
Ivan: Would take a punch, then jump back and demand an explanation “for the unexpected and undeserved intrusion upon my personal space. And this nasty bruise.” Would promptly evade every other punch until he got so tired that he’d fall unconscious all on his own.
Liz: No punch would land. He’d throw one, and she’d skip out of the bar without a second thought about fighting fair.

9)  Assuming I love it, how long do you think it’ll be until the sequel comes out?  Any other projects in the pipeline that we should know about?

Assuming you love it? I thought that was a foregone conclusion. 😉

Tentative plan on Darkness Revealed is next summer. We’ll see how it goes.

For October, I’m going to get back to the second draft of my cyberpunk novella Nikolay. It’s all about a guy who just wants to not be normal…in a world where normal is enforced by law.

10) I pre-ordered it like four days before it came out.  Shower me with affection!

Only four days? Real fans would’ve preordered it one week out, when I pushed the final copy to retailers! Here, have a token of my gratitude instead of a shower of it.

Thanks for putting up with me, at least for a little while. Oh, and if people are wanting to know where to harass me:

– Blog (includes free PDF of Darkness Concealed): www.DEmeryBunn.com
– Twitter: @DEmeryBunn
– EMail: emery (at) DEmeryBunn.com

Oh, and the book is on Amazon , Google and Kobo. Go get it!