Cover to Cover #455: M D Lachlan

Discussion continues on including world events in fiction, following up on the questions Brad Beaulieu answered last episode. Mike S suggests focusing more on the emotion of the characters rather than the technology and action sequences to make connections with the readers.

Interview: This week, Mike and Mike chat with MD Lachlan about the first book in his new series from Pyr Books, Wolfsangel. What happens when you take a werewolf story and combine it with Norse mythology and legends? This series is one look at how that could have happened.

M.D. also talks about his background and experiences with gaming and his thoughts on magic and science, and the limitations of Hollywood magic.

The second book, Fenrir, is due out in October 2011.

Link: Pyr Books

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Michael R. Mennenga: And welcome back to more Dragon Page “Cover to Cover”! I’m Michael R. Mennenga…

Michael Stackpole: and I’m Michael Stackpole.

And joining us on the phone we have M. D. Lachlan. His new book is Wolf’s Angel. It’s out from Pyr. Hey, thanks so much for joining us today. Welcome to the show.

M.D. Lachlan: Thanks a lot. Thanks for having me.

MRM: No problem. So tell us about this book, what are what’s going on there? Kind of our stock throwout standard question, but we need to start someplace.

MD: Sure. Well, it’s historical fantasy, it’s based in the Viking era, and it’s very much rooted in Norse mythology, and it’s my interpretation of the werewolf myth, seen through the the eyes of basically an ancient Scandinavian kind of folklore how the werewolf was perceived in those days with a little bit of modern interpretation thrown in on top.

MRM: Gotcha, gotcha.

MS: Very cool. What got you thinking about this is? Did you find that your house was on some, you know, like Viking fortress, or…

MD: How did you know that?

MS: Yeah, I just know a lot of these things, it’s truly scary! (laughing)

MD: No, none of those things. Very strangely, I have a career as a mainstream fiction writer as well. And I sat down to write a modern comedy and started writing about a werewolf, which was odd, but as it seems to be an interesting idea, I kept going. I think it came on the back of, I wrote a book a few years ago called The Elfish Gene, which is about my experiences playing there, Dungeons & Dragons is a kid. And I think it’s kind of rekindled the sort of flame inside me and it suddenly just came out one day and I literally sat down at the keyboard, wrote this chapter without thinking about it and thought “it looks pretty cool” and I’m like keep going.

So I did and that’s how the whole thing had its genesis.

MRM: Wow, and the geek in me wants to ask how big of a geek you are. Do you still have your character sheets and what’s your highest level and what is it? (laughing)

MD: My highest level… I existed in the very early days of D&D in the UK anyway, which was about 1977 I started. And so my highest level is probably about a million trillion. I would guess because I used to play when I was about 13. And I just used, let’s be honest, I used to make the characters up. (laughing)

MRM: There you go! (laughing)

MD: My highest level is stupidly high. I’ve only gotten to gaming later, seeing how things could be enjoyable playing a second level character as well as someone who could crush worlds without actually thinking
about it too much.

MRM: Absolutely. We could dive into a D&D discussion…

MS: Just building out of that, ’cause a lot of our listeners are people who want to write or are prospective writers. and I think a lot of them also sort of come out or I think everybody nowadays has had exposure to gaming and role-playing games.

MRM: Oh yeah.

MS: So have you found, or what would you say… could you identify any of the influences that that gaming background had, especially when you’re going ahead and writing this book?

MD: It’s a bit… weirdly, the kind of magic in Wolfsangel is probably born out of kind of frustration with the D&D system really, because D&D magic, pretty much how I played it anyway, was what you might call six-gun magic really based on, you know, early early sort of fantasy novels where you know you have your spel, you discharge it and that’s it, and you don’t get to do it again for another day.

Well, I was much more interested in doing and I tried to get this into the game but it didn’t really work I was trying to get kind of real world ideas of magic into into the the game, that’s kind of ritual magic — and I can never say this word — acetic magic?

MRM: Mm-hmm.

MD: That’s kinda sounds like magic with vinegar, doesn’t it?

So, I was trying to get that into a game, but as I pointed out in The Elifish Gene, drawing your [truck] circle and calling up the sort of dukes of Hell while a minotaur is charging you, he’s probably, you know, it did [ ??? ] takes three weeks, so it’s not really all that applicable. Also with ritual magic, if people kind of do summon up these kind of weird things, or whatever, then they tend to be a little powerful for the kind of two goblins that are around the corner. So the whole thing didn’t really fit into that.

So really, I wanted to do something that showed a side of magic that reflected a little bit of frustration with what you can do with gaming.

MRM: It’s fascinating to me because as much as there are those authors out there that won’t have nothing to do with gaming or talk about gaming. They’re still using a lot of the tropes that were developed and built out of gaming, especially the way that turn-based attack and turn-based character driven storyline… you know where came from! This is where it came from it came from, this type of of gaming and our a lot of our magic that is that is built and people understand and use on a daily basis. This is where it was developed, It’s where it came from.

MD: Absolutely, and you know I wouldn’t deny at all that gaming’s had an absolutely enormous influence on me. The only thing I can say is whatever the influence is, I don’t know what it is as a writer, but I’m sure it has!

But I’ve kind of, I’ve set out to do something that’s unique to the novel, because nowadays you’ve got TV, you’ve got gaming, you’ve got PC games… I’m old enough to think of paper-based games as real gaming. But so you’ve got all these things. And when you come to a novel, you want to do something that… I want to do something that I’m going to say, “Okay, CGI this!” because you ain’t gonna be able to. (laughs)

Which is probably self-destructive to the book being picked up as a film or whatever. But I wanted to do something that someone could not get by a film, that the guys who did Avatar are not gonna have to be able to recreate… and this is all sort of messy, emotional, almost a side of magic that turns into sort of almost mental illness and things like that, which is very close to the way that, I mean… I have to put the caveat here: I don’t particularly believe in magic. I believe people can convince themselves to have certain things and I believe certain effects of possible. But I don’t. I believe in science and all the rest of it. I do not believe in magic.

But what I was trying to get into my work was the real world idea of magic, the idea that people have had, everyone from the Inca’s, with their sort of pain and murder rituals to the Native American Indians. I was very influenced by a film called “A Man Called Horse”… I don’t know if you ever remember that. And through to yogis to Christian hermits going out into the wilderness. Everybody like that who tried to perform this, it’s a magic of kind of denial and a magic of, where you’re basically shoving yourself towards the edge of madness. And that’s the magic that’s in Wolfsangel.

MS: Isn’t it really… I think, that the advantage of the novel over the film, or any sort of graphic storytelling, is that you have the chance to get into a character deep enough to be able to deal with those messy issues. Because some of those things… you may have the best actor in the world, but you know a glance, a three-second close-up, is not going to convey the depth of someone’s tortured soul.

MD: No, and it’s also not going to convey when someone’s spent time since a child freezing, starving, pushing themselves to the edge of sanity in order to kind of break down the barriers between reality and imagination, and to be able to shove that into the real world as a magical effect. And that would be very difficult to do. I have to say though, if anyone from Hollywood’s listening, I’m sure we could overcome the problem. It’s a great story too, kids!

(all laughing)

MRM: Absolutely. (laughing) You know, the one thing that film is just so difficult… it has such a difficult time with is the internal monologue. To do it and not have it come off cheesy, you can do it so much better in writing and in novel.

MD: – Well, absolutely. And when people try, I mean, the best adaptations of books with internal monologues tend to be ones where they ditch the internal monologue! (laughs)

MS:Yeah, that’s right, right. (laughs)

MRM: Absolutely right. (laughs)

MD: So, you know, it’s not the voice over. Yeah, the voice over has its place, I think. I think it’s not a… it’s not a “never say never” technique, but it can be a technique that just listens to, just ends up being talked to by a boring uncool kind of thing.

MRM: Right. And, and, and, you know, it’s got to be done very sparingly. It works in small doses, but to have the entire film of that would just, just yeah you’d be ready leave after 10 minutes.

MD: Have you seen a lot of British B-movies? I bet you have, that’s exactly what they’re like.

MRM: I have. I watch a lot of British TV, and yeah absolutely.

MD: The modern one, the kind of football hooligan films and things like that. You’ve always got this idiot monologue over the top and you just think, you know you could have conveyed the fact that he’s an unpleasant thug just by having him hit someone!

(all laughing)

MS: Oh, but they want you to know that it goes deep inside, as opposed to just be on the surface.

Yeah, now as a as a mainstream author… in compare and contrast working on a mainstream novel with this, and especially toward the… was there ever a point that you were you were working on something in Wolfsangel and you went, “oh, wait a minute, I can’t do that”, And then just stopped and…

MD: Well, jokes, really. I’ve been a comedy writer most of my career. And really, the world of Wolfsangel is one of this kind of overarching feeling of a grim fate descending on people. It’s people struggling to be human against this kind of terrible barren landscape blah blah blah blah. And you just can’t, you just take the jokes out basically. That’s the top and bottom of it. I can’t, I can never stop myself writing them, but I just, I just take them out.

And that’s, that’s the difference because all I’ve ever done in all my other stuff. And in fact, probably too much, even for comedy, is I’ve, when I’ve written comedy novels, I’m a 4 jokes a page man. I go on the Friends idea, which, you know, people could put this down if they don’t get a laugh in the next five lines. So I got on that idea, which probably is not a perfect idea for writing and perhaps with my latest stuff I’ve matured past that. But yeah, that’s the main thing, getting rid of the jokes.

Although in the second — it’s not exactly a sequel — the second part of the series of Wolfsangel, which is called Fenrir, some of the Vikings have humour, amongst themselves, but that’s the character’s humour.
It’s not me as the author making jokes of any sort.

MS: Were there times in trying to create an unrelentingly grim world…

MD: I wasn’t trying to! (laughing)

MS: Okay. (laughing)

MD:I never tried to do anything. I don’t think it is unrelentingly grim. It is grim, but I would say that, I would describe it as “relentingly grim.”

MRM / MS: Okay. – It doesn’t matter. – It doesn’t matter. (laughs)

MD: If it doesn’t, then again with film, and books as well, I mean, I think we’ve all done Thomas Hardy at school, haven’t we? “Oh, please give us a smile!” You know…

MS: I mean, I know in any of the novels that I do, you know, there are those points where, yeah, it’s, the characters are in really, really deep trouble. Someone has got to say something. You know, okay, because otherwise, otherwise they would just kill themselves!

MRM: (laughing) Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

MD: I do have, again, in Wolfsangel, there’s a kind of, it’s not exactly a comic counterpoint, but he’s a character called [Bargay], who is the sort of, he’s the Viking chieftain’s bodyguard, who’s detailed to look after the one of the main characters when he’s a boy. And he’s a vaguely sort of comic figure, and sort of a warm figure and things like that.

And again, the characters themselves, I’ve got no problem with the characters themselves being light or interesting or certainly got no problem with them being interesting. But it’s just what I decided to do myself was not… I mean, if you read a lot of modern fantasy, so it really could stuff, you know, Joe Abercrombie, people like that, he will, as the author, put jokes in. And I’ve all that’s out of my system with comedy writing. I’ve done that and I still like doing it. But I don’t feel the urge to do it in fantasy. So, again, there’s no criticism of Joe at all, because I think his books are great. But it’s just the way that I like mine. I don’t feel the need to do that.

MS: Interesting.

MRM: Very, very cool. Very, very cool.

Actually were running out of time here. Holy cow, that went quick! Well, tell us what you’re working on, before we take off.

MD:I’m working on the third book of the Wolfsangel series, which I haven’t got a title for now. The first two books… first book’s set broadly in Norway, second book set in France in the Ninth Century, and the third book moves down to where the Vikings themselves moved down to, which is Byzantium, Constantinople when they became the Varangian Guard of the Byzantine Emperors. And so the third book is is set in the city of Byzantium, which is a big change for me because everything else has been big natural landscapes and storms and all the rest of it. And now my characters are in city, which is much smaller theatre of action and it takes a lot of getting your head around, to be honest.

MS: But what a city!

MRM: Wow.

MD: Well yeah, exactly. If you’re going to be in a city… Miklagard, as the Vikings called it, which means I think it literally means “the world’s city”. And there’s theories that say that the Viking idea of Asgard, which is the home of the gods, is based on their contact with Constantinople. And certainly, later, the people who wrote the Viking myths, who were Christians, Christian monks, because the Vikings and non-Nature society, tried to say that Odin came from Turkey. They actually say that he’s a sorcerer who came from Turkey.

But there again, the Christians had their own agenda, which may be turning other people’s gods into heroes really, which is a way of undermining them. But that’s what, certainly what Snorri Sturluson — so I’m kind of a terrible of names. I’m terrible with my own name.

(laughter)

MD: So I am, I cannot even pronounce my name.

So yeah, this is what Snorri said in the Prose Edda, he claimed that Odin came from the east.

MS: Wow. very cool.

MRM: Wow. Well, I tell you what has been absolutely awesome talking to you today and hopefully you can come join us again sometime.

MD: I’d love to.

MRM: Absolutely fantastic. M. D. Lochlan, Wolfsangel is the book. It’s on Pyr, it’s out now, go find it to take a look. Thank you so much for again for joining us today.

MD: Thanks so much.

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