Hi and welcome to the Storyteller!
First of all, thank you for all the love for my Matthew Perry tribute. It took a lot from me to write it, and it means so much that it touched and resonated with as many as it did. If you missed out on reading it, you can catch up here—
I’m writing today’s (lengthy—so settle in) issue from a Mumbai that is showing the tiniest of signs of cooling down enough for it to feel like “winter” (the city’s version of it, anyway). And who doesn’t love cosy reading when that happens?
So, today, I have for you the author whose work first introduced, and immediately sucked me in, to the world of cosy fantasy last year. If you’ve been reading this newsletter since its restart, or you follow me on instagram, you’ll be familiar with the name Legends & Lattes. This “low stakes high fantasy” novel made my top five reads of 2022 list, and you can read about the why here.
Bookshops & Bonedust: high fantasy, first loves, second-hand books
Book 2 is actually Book 1, or 0 if you take L&L to be the start of it all, a prequel about our Viv at the start of her mercenary career.
Publisher’s blurb
Viv's career with the notorious mercenary company Rackam's Ravens isn't going as planned.
Wounded during the hunt for a powerful necromancer, she's packed off against her will to recuperate in the sleepy beach town of Murk—so far from the action that she worries she'll never be able to return to it.
What's a thwarted soldier of fortune to do?
Spending her hours at a beleaguered bookshop in the company of its foul-mouthed proprietor is the last thing Viv would have predicted, but it may be both exactly what she needs and the seed of changes she couldn't possibly imagine.
Still, adventure isn't all that far away. A suspicious traveler in gray, a gnome with a chip on her shoulder, a summer fling, and an improbable number of skeletons prove Murk to be more eventful than Viv could have ever expected.
I was lucky to read this in the summer thanks to Travis, but it was even better when I read it again this past week, because #moodreading. It was interesting to see Viv this young and hot-blooded, with a lot of growing up to do but with glimpses, of kindness and sensitivity, that showed the orc she’d become by the time she moved to Thune all those years later. This was also her queer awakening origin story that would eventually lead her to Tandri (there’s a delightful epilogue in this book connecting the two timelines).
As with L&L, B&B features found family (albeit some temporary, others more permanent), a cosy but sleepy seaside town, lots of baking (courtesy a talented local dwarf who owns a bakery), and instead of coffee, there are books. Lots and lots of books, and a second-hand bookshop run by the immediately endearing, creatively foul-mouthed ratkin Fern and her sidekick gryphet, Potroast.
In addition to this, there are other wonderfully fleshed-out side characters such as an orc carpenter who discovers a love of poetry, a serious-minded homunculus named Satchel, a high-elf doctor, and a character who also makes an appearance or two in L&L that I won’t spoil for readers (it was great to read about how they became friends with Viv, despite a rocky start).
It’s been more than a year since I read L&L so perhaps I’m mistaken but I felt that this second novel added an extra level of complexity in its character building which worked for the narrative tone it adopted. No sophomore trap here, dear readers—though, once you read Travis’ interview below, you’ll see just how long it took him to get there. We get themes of figuring out life purposes, no matter how “late” you think it is; we get realisations of living in the moment, of some people being in our lives just for a season but teaching us how to inhabit that space of time and enjoy it to its fullest; about right times, right places, wrong people, and all of it leading us to where and who we need to be for the three to seamlessly converge.
There are higher stakes, more tension, and more adventuring in this story than in the author’s debut: enter necromancers and all the weird, eerie stuff that sort of magic involves. And running parallel to that, as well as the cosy elements which are absolutely present and equally delightful, is a wholly unexpected narrative thread that has my entire heart. Viv must learn to navigate a considerable leg injury and the patience and waiting and “at rest” this involves—and stories become one of her refuges, much to her own surprise and initial reluctance. The books she reads, recommended by an observant and intuitive Fern, help her to grow, consider unexpected perspectives, and work through some existential questions posed by the lack of mobility suddenly thrust upon her for a few months. And Viv isn’t the only one in Murk whose life shifts in this manner thanks to the bookseller.
Through Fern who loves nothing more than to match a reader with exactly what they might not even have realised they need, B&B introduces the healing magic of books and reading, its power of community; on readers old and new and even those who never imagined that a reader was waiting inside their hearts. Beyond everything else it deal with, Bookshops & Bonedust is a heartfelt love letter to all aspects of this special kinship of words.
Which brings me, rather elegantly, to…
A chat with Travis Baldree
“I’d love to tell you a story,” is the first thing you’ll see on Travis’ About/Contact page. Author, narrator, storyteller—Travis lives with his family in Washington State, and I’m so excited to welcome him to the Storyteller today!
Anu: Welcome to the Storyteller, Travis! To start off, how did you get into/decide on game development as a career path? I'm sure the Storyteller readers would also love to know how you became a narrator; and most recently, a writer (and even there, you went from a self-published author with a highly acclaimed debut who is now traditionally published by Tor)!
Travis: Thanks for having me. I've always loved computers, and programming ever since I typed in programs from a magazine on my Commodore 64. Game development combines a lot of careers into one: engineering, mathematics, art, writing, music, acting. I did it successfully for decades, and started narrating on the side as a hobby—until I eventually discovered that I liked the hobby more. I'd also always wanted to write, and there are a load of half-baked novels in my wake. Legends & Lattes was the first that I actually completed for National Novel Writing Month in 2021. I had no real expectations that it would develop into anything more though, or that anybody would read it at all. Nobody is more surprised than me!
Anu: That’s so awesome! How has your work as a game developer and narrator impacted how you view storytelling, and how has it transferred onto the page for you?
Travis: There are some pretty amazing writing benefits that occur as a natural result of reading thousands of other people's books aloud. The first is that it makes your internal voice much, much stronger—you can hear how things would sound aloud without having to speak them. As anyone who has edited their work by reading it aloud to themselves might imagine, that's incredibly powerful. The second benefit is that reading a variety of work clarifies your own personal writing style. Everything that you personally like (or dislike) is shown in sharp relief. I can confidently say that anything I wrote prior to narrating didn't have that clarity of intent.
Anu: What was the inspiration behind Legends & Lattes? And, what drew you to low-stakes cosy fantasy? Or more in general, what draws you, motivates you to write, narrate, or develop the stories that you do?
Travis: Initially the book began as a bit of a joke. As a narrator, I am constantly cast for high-stakes adventures with twenty-something male protagonists fighting some world-ending threat. I offhandedly mentioned that what I REALLY wanted to read was a Hallmark movie set in the Forgotten Realms. I like all sorts of genres, and fantasy romance and cozy mysteries are great. They make you feel good: chicken soup books. So when the time came for NaNoWriMo, that was what I decided to write.
Anu: How did you go about building the world in the book; did it come first or did the characters? As a writer, are you more of a planner, a “go with the flow” or somewhere in between?
Travis: I had the characters and concept first. I wrote the tagline, then the blurb, then the outline, then the book. I always wanted to be a pantser, but it turns out I'm not—articulating the book in brief solves all sorts of problems for me and helps me find my way to the end. Then when the time comes to write, I can just do the hard work of getting to the end of each chapter, rather than wrestling with thornier issues.
Anu: What do you want readers to take away from your stories? Do you have a sort of writing manifesto mapped out?
Travis: I only want to leave them a little better than they were beforehand. I want to write about human concerns and the little aches and revelations we all experience.
Anu: Is there any advice you wish you’d gotten when you first started out? Or just any advice for aspiring authors from your own experience, something that’s really helped you in your writing and publishing journey so far?
Travis: The first would be to keep things simple. Simple doesn't mean shallow, and it doesn't mean bad. Simple things can be very powerful, and it makes for an achievable first book that you can hold in your mind. The next would be to find the human heart of the story before worrying about the plot. I've discovered that I have to look back through my life and find moments that made me ache with indecision—points where my life could have branched in a profound way. I think a lot of us reach these same branches, and that they're a powerful core for a story. But honestly? My sample size is small. The right advice for you may be very different!
Anu: What's your favourite writing/creative and your favourite non-writing part of the publishing process?
Travis: I like having already written a book, in the past tense! The actual writing is work for me. It's not unrewarding, but it's also real work. As far as non-writing, I love commissioning artwork and doing art direction.
Anu: Bookshops & Bonedust is a prequel set in the same world as L&L and with the same lead character, Viv the orc. How, if at all, was the experience of writing this different than the first? (First a coffee shop, now a bookstore—what more do us bookworms need?!)
Travis: It was considerably more difficult. Bookshops & Bonedust was not the book I set out to write; in fact, it's the fourth restart. I had initially planned on an entirely different book that I was very excited to write, and had an outline for, but I didn't REALLY find the heart of it. Another complication was the feelings I was untangling while working on it. I couldn't tell if my profound sense of dread was a worry about not living up to the expectations of readers of the first, or whether there was something legitimately wrong with the story, and it took about 50,000 words of trashed manuscript before I figured it out and untangled those.
Bonus questions
Anu: What's in the works going forward? (If you're allowed to, and want to, share, of course.)
Travis: I'm definitely planning more books! But can't really say much about them yet—they're still in my mental mulch pile. There are also some other projects involving the existing books that I can't say anything about just yet, but I'm very excited about them.
Anu: And can you share a recommendation or two (audiobooks and/or books) for the readers of this newsletter?
Travis: I love The Library at Mount Char and recommend it to everyone who will listen to me, and I also love T. Kingfisher's work—Nettle & Bone and Thornhedge are both fabulous.
Thank you so much for taking the time out to answer my questions, Travis!
You can find him at his website | instagram | twitter, which includes buy links for both Legends & Lattes and Bookshops & Bonedust.
Before I wrap this up today, I wanted to quickly shoutout Summer Melody which completed two years on November 20 and Pomegranate Summer which completed one on November 24.
If you've been waiting (very patiently) for a physical copy of the former to become available to buy via Amazon India, I'm afraid I don't have better news, BUT it's now available to read via Kindle for the first time in India, at the link below 💙💛
https://www.amazon.in/Summer-Melody-Anushree-Nande-ebook/dp/B0CNPLF894
There's not much that I can write or say about the novelette that I haven't already, so I'll leave you with some of the words of others about this story that was a decade in the making—and yes, I still can't believe the first one in the list myself 😅🙏🏽✨️
For a Pomegranate Summer excerpt and more insight into how the collection came into being, you can revisit my issue from earlier in the year—
As always, please feel free send in recommendations—books, movie, TV shows, authors to interview, ideas of what you’d like me to write on, rants/ramblings/excited monologues, GIFs and memes (especially them) and more. Just drop me a line and turn this into a conversation, even if just to say hi and let me know what you thought of the latest issue 😊 Or share this with someone you think might enjoy it.
Take care and I’ll see you on December 10 for the year’s penultimate issue!
Anu
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