The Reddit AMA8/27/2015 Stizzed
George R.R. Martin's success with A Song of Ice and Fire has seemed to swing the mainstream fantasy market towards grittier, darker, and more realistic fantasy in the past ten years. What (or who) do you see as possibly carving out the next big thing in fantasy ten years from now? S. A. Hunt Albert Einstein once said, “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones,” and I think something similar is going to happen in mainstream fantasy. I don't know who it's going to be specifically, but whoever they are, they're going to be swinging a self-made stick. I'm seeing some amazing work come from the indie and self-publishing quarters, as well as the international market,and if their kind of quality keeps sneaking up on the American book-buying public I think we're going to finally see a sea-change in what customers look for and expect as they realize there are left-field authors out there that can blow triple-A traditionally-published blockbusters out of the water. I'm already seeing evidence of this catalyst taking place. Nearly every day I see someone on social media talk about how they're almost exclusively buying from independent authors because of the price and quality. In just the last couple of years I've seen a bumper crop of vendors looking to help boost the quality of indie material--cover artists, freelance editors, roving bands of slavering beta readers. I think it's going to blow up in a way we haven't seen since the days of finding a rack of dime novels in your village mercantile. As for tone, I can't say with any truth that we're going to get away from grimdark for good, but I'm seeing a lot of people get tired of wanton character-killing and veer into more upbeat work, as well as books set in hybridized genres outside the Euro-medieval (such as "flintlock fantasy" and Afro-steampunk). Croemato Happy Birthday! Thank you for joining us here in /r/books. Which author(s) had the greatest impact on you growing up, and on your decision to become an author yourself? S. A. Hunt Thank you, Croemato! I think the biggest author in my young life had to be King. I blew through The Dark Tower in high school, and it (and The Stand) had a huge bearing on my feel for tone and scope. Second to that are probably Dean Koontz and J.R.R. Tolkien. For some reason I got on a huge Koontz kick when I graduated and moved out, and I spent a lot of time chilling in my tiny new apartment reading through Koontz's golden years by the light of my stove hood lamp, munching Cheez-Its. I think part of me wants to bring that kind of cozy, immersive, midnight-oil experience to other people. I like keeping people up. King inspires me because he was just a Jim Bob Nobody from the sticks when he started, too. I live out in the middle of nowhere. And I think, if he can come roaring out of the Maine wilderness and wow everybody the way he did, what the fuck is stopping me? ashearmstrong Happy birthday, brother! Let's see, I know you had a lot of fun writing Malus, and you might've said this on twitter already but I can't remember. Which scene or scenes was the most fun to write? Also, why do you love butts so much? So many naked combat butts. S. A. Hunt I think the funnest scene to write in Malus was the vineyard fight. Robin vs. the giant hog-monster, it was like transcribing a video game battle taking place in my head. I could just see the firelight glistening on the monster's skin. DUDE, I don't even know why my characters keep ending up naked. Both genders. I've had a naked mech pilot, a naked choke fight in the back of a van, naked alien ninja stealth. I think it's because they always end up in situations where clothes aren't easily accessible without having to craft them out of deer-hides and shit. Sawyer wandered around the wilderness for ages before he got his hands on a pair of two-hundred-year-old trousers, and even those fell apart before he could go anywhere in them. ashearmstrong So many butts. S. A. Hunt I like big butts, and I cannot lie. callmebliss Yes hello I am here for butts. :D PM_ME_UR_FETISHES I've been trying to get back into reading for a long time, but I haven't found any fantasy series that really caught my attention. I think I may have just found that series! ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ Edit: I forgot to ask a question due to my excitement! Whats your favorite beer? S. A. Hunt I actually haven't found a beer I like! I think my tongue is broken. I've been trying to find a good coffee stout or something with coconuts for a long time. I really want to find a beer that suits me and doesn't taste like it was run through a dirty engine block. I had high hopes for Dragon's Milk, but it was a no-go too. I'd like to try some of the stuff Kona Brewing Co. has out. There was one coffee beer that was featured on a recent episode of Beer and Board Games, but now I can't find it. I want to try that one. Usually I opt for a Black Russian if I can't find a good beer. SuperMiniComputer What is the best western across all mediums? S. A. Hunt For books, I think it's a tossup between Stephen King's The Dark Tower or Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. I wish I could say my own Outlaw King, but I dare not step on the toes of the greats. Movies? Definitely the Sergio Leone catalog. I consider the Man with No Name movies to be the epitome of gunslinger filmmaking. John Wayne has a special place in my heart, but for sheer style you can't beat the tag team of Leone and Morricone. In TV shows, there's been so much coming out lately that I haven't had the chance to watch them all. I've heard good things about Hell on Wheels and want to check that one out, but I have to tell you that I think The Walking Deaddeserves more kudos than its gotten for what it's done, which is convince America to watch the hell out of a western again. I do consider TWD a western dressed up in zombie pants. gjamesgang First, HAPPY BIRTHDAY, and many happy returns! (it stinks that I will Always be [significantly] older than you). In your works, you paint so many creative characters and places... a) where would YOU like to spend a week if you could for real? b) where would you send your least favorite presidential candidate as their penance? S. A. Hunt
gjamesgang well played; I'll race you to the front of the waffle line! EggDung Not gonna lie, after reading TWitTT I've been mentally sending all of my enemies to the Thirsty Tower. Everyone from childhood bullies to asshats cutting me off in traffic. S. A. Hunt This is the absolute best. lonewolfandpub Hey dude! Happy birthday, and glad you got yourself an AMA here. On my second read-through of Malus right now, fantastic doesn't do it justice. I mean, we're definitely talking five out of five murdercorns. I really love the relationship between Robin and Kenway; it was supportive, heartwarming, a little snarky, and very well done. What inspired you as you were weaving their little subplot? S. A. Hunt To be honest, I don't know. For a lot of it I put myself in the mindset of Robin, of a small-framed woman that's been by herself for a long time, and I tried to imagine myself in her shoes, and tried to visualize how she would feel about Kenway, and how she would feel around him. I began to feel like she could appreciate his large, steady, Baloo-like stature and nature. It helps that I've had social anxiety for a long time and I know what it's like to feel small and alone, and crave some kind of combination of human contact and the safety of having something to cling to like a buoy. To me, as I sat here in Robin's skin, it felt like coming home. When I write, I try as hard as I can to put the reader in the POV character's shoes. Through most of the first book of Outlaw King, the main character Ross has no utter idea what the hell is going on, and half the characters are talking in a language that he can't understand. I purposefully didn't translate what they were saying because I wanted the reader to feel as weird and out-of-place as Ross did. lonewolfandpub Very cool. I definitely got the Baloo-like vibes off him, but I loved how you flipped it around later as we uncovered another layer of their relationship, and how that steady zen-nature was more of a detachment from his situation. That added some really great depth and complexity to it. I also loved the lack of translation in Outlaw King. It's so hard to resist the urge to give the protag the understanding of everything, but I loved the out-of-sorts feeling that it created. Side Q: Beardcare. Any tips? S. A. Hunt I'm not gonna lie, after so many years of being forced to stay clean-shaven in the Army, this is my first real beard in 34 years! Until this year, I've never had a full beard. I do try to keep it free of food, though! I grew up in my mom's barber shop, so I know how gross it is to have to deal with a man that's got a foody beard. JazzLaforge Hey! I love your outlaw king books and am glad that you are doing this AMA today!!! My question is, what is your comfort read? You know, that book that you find yourself always going back to, that book that you have re-read to many times to count. Thanks! S. A. Hunt I love that you love the books! :D I gave it to my brother last year, but I'd have to say that for a long time my comfort read was the non-fiction adventurelogue Ian Baker's The Heart of the World: A Journey to the Last Secret Place. When I was in the Army, I dabbled quite deeply in Buddhism, so this book really resonated with what I'd learned and was written in a very refreshing, revelatory, open style that I found reassuring and invigorating. It's about a National Geographic explorer that went rogue and headed into the Himalayas despite being menaced by the Chinese Army, looking for the entrance to Shangri-La. It's full of cool anecdotes about running around with mystic sherpas in the woods. It's great. wintermuteTA Have you ever read any novels by Gene Wolfe, and have you written (or considered writing) a story with an unreliable narrator? (p.s., Happy Birthday!) S. A. Hunt I actually haven't gotten into Gene Wolfe yet, but I've been meaning to as my friend and fellow author Christopher Ruz has said a lot of good things about his work. As for unreliable narrators... I'd like to tell you that Ross from Outlaw King qualifies, but he's more of a fourth-wall-chiseler. There's a lot of metaphorical chipping-away at the barrier between fiction itself and the audience, especially in the first book. But his father Ed, who wrote the novels that the characters end up sucked into, will turn out to be unreliable when the heroes discover that he was lying about some key facts in order to jazz them up for the novels or hide certain secrets from his wife back on Earth. In the beginning of Outlaw King 4, one of the POV characters is going to be faced with one of his lies up close and personal. joakes83 Who is your favorite monster/villain in Malus and why? What was the inspiration? S. A. Hunt Probably the resurrected Mesopotamian death-goddess Ereshkigal, who was inspired by fetus in fetu and teratomas (I ain't linkin' that shit). The thought of having a tumor with a face inside you that's actually the reborn body of a being that's been driven insane by a millenia of agony and judgement? Sweet Jesus! Cross that with a slimy newborn calf lying on the floor wrapped in an amniotic balloon, and you've got yourself a nightmare. steelwynd First off, happy birthday man! I know that your works (especially TOK) are strongly influenced by the mighty Stephen King, more specifically the Dark Tower. Mr. King has spoken about his "other room" where he draws a lot of ideas. Do you have any sort of mechanic like this, either created consciously or unconsciously, when you write? P.S. Keep writing them, I'll keep reading them. S. A. Hunt I think me and King have a very similar approach to generating ideas and implementing them. We'll both be hit by an idea out of the blue while we're daydreaming that gradually germinates into something larger. I saw an interview of his once that spoke about how he was inspired to write The Mist by a vision he had of a pterodactyl flying through a supermarket. All it takes is for that first striking image to present itself and then it becomes a "what if" that flowers through incubation and weeding into an entire story. For the Outlaw King, I think my striking image came (though I didn't know it at the time) when I was riding through Afghanistan in the back of an uparmored SUV. I saw these barren landscapes and this culture that was so different to my own and I thought it so much resembled the familiar-yet-not-America world in Sergio Leone's movies. I wanted to use my writing to express the feeling I had when I saw that hard and dirty lovechild of Leone and Middle Eastern culture. JuniperJunebug Hey! Happy birthday. I managed to make it (sitting in a waiting room outside where they are doing my mom's surgery...and the weird thing is I can hear everything they are saying lol...so far everything sounds good). So my question is, what do you feel defines something as more horror than dark fantasy? Thanks! Have a great AMA. S. A. Hunt Thank you! Hmm. That's a hard one. Horror itself, as a top-level genre, I consider an ultimately greater and more inclusive category than the subgenre of dark fantasy. Which is to say, you can be horror without being dark fantasy, but it's hard to be dark fantasy without being horror too. I think a strong thread of horror is what makes "dark fantasy" dark, or at least lends itself the most. To that end, I think real, official, gut-churning, compelling horror takes its bonafides from being more "grounded" and realistic than pure second-world fantasy--it's easier to be scared of something that's staring you in the face as opposed to a menace confined to another world or dimension. It helps for that danger to be more feasible because the reader or viewer can empathize better. That's probably why I always found Michael Myers and (early-series) Jason Voorhees scarier than Freddy Krueger--Freddy exists almost wholly in your dreams, but Myers and Voorhees can get you while you're sitting in your car at a stop light or while you're mowing the lawn. M and V are just hillbillies in masks. There could be a masked hillbilly in your closet right now, and you wouldn't know it until you opened the door to grab a jacket and he stuck a carving knife in your eye. That's why I try to paint my otherworldly creatures in as realistic a light as I can get them, because I want them to feel as real as something that can reach you in your house. I hope everything turns out okay with your mom! Let me know how it goes! JuniperJunebug Thanks for the great answer...made me want to check my closet...and not... Mom's doing good. Out and in recovery. :) S. A. Hunt Huzzah! 🎂 Musical_life Happy birthday! I still need to start a game with you on Steam. What's your favorite song(s) to start the day off and why? S. A. Hunt Thank you! Halestorm's "Slave to the Grind". I leave the volume turned down for the introduction, and then when it ramps into the main part, I crank it up. Gets my blood up every time. starbreakerauthor Is that a cover of the Skid Row song ? S. A. Hunt Yes it is! Kissinxkatie How long has the idea of Destin been around in your mind? Like, was it a vague idea as a child that developed, or did it come later on in life like a Bolt out of the Blue? S. A. Hunt It might have been a mixture of both. I've always been fascinated by desert landscapes, growing up in the deep woods of Georgia, and my first attempt at a story in high school was a sci-fantasy that took place in a desert where a little band of characters was trying to escape from a prison-town buried in a giant underground cylinder like a missile silo. In retrospect it was highly inspired by Final Fantasy 7. In the early 2000's I cooked up a hard-scifi story about a man that crashlanded on a desert planet with his John Cleese AI hologram assistant and woke up from hypersleep with amnesia. I think I've always been trying to do something in a desert, but it wasn't until Afghanistan that I truly understood what a desert really was. Kelketek Hey, S.A.! Happy birthday! I remember reading that you were deployed to Afghanistan. How did your experience there affect the design of the world of Destin? I've not read Malus Domestica yet, but has it played a role there at all? S. A. Hunt Thank you! Destin's geographical and cultural feel were highly inspired by Afghanistan. Several scenes in Whirlwind were informed by situations and locations that I'd experienced myself in Camp Arena, most notably the market scene where the gang first arrives in Salt Point, and the massage parlor in Maplenesse. I also saw a camel spider there, which was where the Wind Emperors in Law of the Wolf came from. Almost all of the Afghanistan influence in Malus Domestica is down to the character Kenway Griffin, a one-legged veteran that's trapped by tragedy and loss in the book's town of Blackfield. He lost a friend and fellow soldier to suicide after coming home from deployment, and he decided to put down roots where his friend lived because he felt like leaving town was abandoning him. Kelketek How much blood has kissed the blade of your Stabby Award? S. A. Hunt Too much, and yet still not enough. Kissinxkatie What was the hardest character for you to write in the Outlaw Series? Was there a certain character that you just struggled with? Also, which came the most natural and easiest to write? S. A. Hunt I guess the hardest character to write has been Sardis. Being the main character's twin brother, it's hard to maintain that similarity and still have him be alien to the reader. I feel like I've failed somewhat; he doesn't feel like a "brother" to me. But I suppose that makes sense, as the two of them had never met before the events of the story and they grew up in vastly different cultures. The easiest might be Tem Lucas. I've spent a lot of time around shit-head hillbillies in my life, and it was easy to mentally assemble him into a living, breathing human. Tem Lucas is all the shifty white-trash lemme-borrow-a-cigarette fuckers I've ever known wrapped up in a facsimile of Otis from Devil's Rejects. starbreakerauthor Happy birthday! Like I said on Twitter, I started reading Malus Domestica today. However, my question concerns The Outlaw King. Does your multiverse have any influence from Heinlein's World as Myth hypothesis? Also, I noticed the allusions to Greek myth and Zoroastrian belief. Are there any other similar allusions, and did you add them purposefully? Or did they just leak in? S. A. Hunt A lot of them just wandered in and took a seat (mainly the Sileni and the towers of darkness in the Void-Between-The-Worlds), but Ink the Mariner and the House of Water were very purposefully engineered. He's actually the Sumerian god Enki, whose alternate name EA means "house of water". He's where the symbol of Capricorn comes from, which is why he calls himself the Goatfish. World as Myth: indirectly, maybe? I hadn't read anything about the WAM hypothesis before writing the first book, but there's definitely an element of reality-as-narrative in the Outlaw King series and always has been, from the fourth-wall-bending climax of Whirlwind and Ross's "scrybing" ability to the way the Mad Gunslinger Seymour's mind is "dimensionally unmoored" and floats untethered between contemporary parallel-world versions of himself like some kind of horrifying recursive Quantum Leap. He's become a master of improvisation after having lived and died through so many of his own alternate selves. It's why he seems to be convinced he owns a dog in Ten Thousand Devils when he quite obviously doesn't--we're only seeing one facet of his dimensional totality. InstantFennec When comparing yourself to other authors, do you count the dead and dying in the drill thing in Outlaw King in your bodycount? (still working on book 3, so I don't even know if the drill thing is real) S. A. Hunt They actually address the drill-towers in book 3. Sardis reveals their true nature to Noreen and Clayton, and a Silen shows Ross what happens when the bones reach the bottom. You'll find out when you get there, but I feel like I can tell you that the people shackled to the walls aren't actually dead. So I guess I can't include them in my authorial bodycount! Kelketek You've written several novels by this point-- my suspicion is you're a writer because if you weren't one, you would explode. If you weren't a writer, what would you be? S. A. Hunt I probably would have re-enlisted when my ETS date came up, and gone back overseas. I wouldn't mind doing private security for an individual. But between you and me, I really want to do something that involves boats. Maybe I would join the Coast Guard or give tours somewhere. CJBrightley Other than Stephen King, what author would you most want to blurb one of your books, and what you would want him/her to say? Question 2: Didn't Stephen King blurb your Outlaw King series? Or give it a thumbs up or something? Why is this not in your Amazon description? Dude, you haz cred. Use it! Question 3: What are you working on next? S. A. Hunt
Kelketek Many of the features and scenes in your novels take inspiration from actual experiences you've had. Do you feel that, in order to keep finding inspiration, you need to keep having new experiences? How do you look for new experiences to have, and what do you think of your most recent exploits will turn up in your writing soon? S. A. Hunt I'm not sure if I need to, but it would definitely help. To be honest, I don't intentionally search for relevant experiences; I just try to be game for any new thing that comes my way, which is how I got into kayaking, tried keto, went into the California mountains and pretended to be Taliban, leapt with both feet into gay culture for a while last year. I think I'm gonna use my kayaking adventures and my '95 trip to Alaska in Malus Domestica 3, because it's gonna take place in a summer camp on a lake. Cannibalfetus Do you have any special activities or rituals you do before or during writing to keep 'in the flow' of things? S. A. Hunt I always start the day with a cup of coffee, and watch a few funny YouTube videos to relax myself. I heard somewhere that doing that can make you more creative. If I run out of videos before work, I'll listen to some good music relevant to what I'm writing to get me into the mood of the book. I listened to a hell of a lot of Halestorm while I was writing Malus Domestica. When Writing Time starts, I set my router's parental controls to kick me offline for several hours so I won't be distracted by the internet when I'm trying to work. If I have a good book I've been reading recently, or an author whose style I don't mind absorbing, I'll take a few breaks throughout the day to read some of it. I read a lot of A Song of Ice and Fire while I was writing Law of the Wolf. chasercosplays happy birthday!!! there's lots of great questions (and answers) here, I hope you're having fun with this~ so here's mine: what is the best or coolest birthday/Christmas present you've ever received? S. A. Hunt Probably Stephen King tweeting back to me about borrowing Maturin the Turtle last Christmas. Outside of holidays, I'd have to say you folks are the best thing that's ever happened to me so far and the best gift. You, Katie, Lucas, Sarah, Devo, all the Outlaws, I love you guys. chasercosplays ngl you and your books are one of the greatest things to happen to me in the last handful of years... <3 we definitely love you too! mrpajamasharkman D'awwww. I love feeling loved. You're much loved back, buddy. :) Wo3lf What is your writing process? Do you start with a rough idea and just write, or do you plan and create an outline first. Do you have any odd ritual when writing? Thanks for doing this AMA. S. A. Hunt Normally I just wing it, hiking from plot-point to plot-point with no compass. I know where I want to go and just keep my eyes on my destination. Here lately I've been trying to outline more, and it's a rough ride. I outlined 2/3 of Malus Domestica and the entirety of Malus 2. I think it could be argued that the book measurably improved once I stepped down from the outline and started pantsing, but that might be because I was working against ruzkin's deadline and just throwing work at the page. With Malus 2 and its completed outline it feels like I'm writing the same book twice, so I've been doing a lot of improvising where I can to keep myself surprised. I'm trying to go back to pantsing more with Outlaw 4. I can't think of any outstandingly weird rituals. Sometimes I light incense, but that's mainly just to run the smell out from eating in here so much. I know it helps to be uncomfortable for some reason, or to vary my location from time to time, which is why I'll sit at the island in the kitchen and write, or bike out to the park and sit in the pavilion, or even drag a chair out in the yard. Often I'll listen to coffee shop ambience. Wo3lf Awesome, thanks! Fictblogsw Hey, happy birthday. My question to you is probably one of the most annoying any author has to answer (as it's usually a tough one to explain), but here goes: Where do you find inspiration for your stories, characters, and themes? And do you see yourself as a "brandable" author, or more a generalist who writes what tickles their fancy? By the way, love your work! S. A. Hunt Thank you! I actually travel the country interrogating authors to extract their book ideas, and then I murder them and dump their bodies in the ocean. Wait no, that's Dexter. My ideas mostly just come at me from the world around me. Like I told that other dude, Stephen King got the idea for The Mist from a vision he had of a pterodactyl flying through a supermarket. Most of my ideas hit me like that, triggered by some random thing, usually in the bathroom or while driving down the road. The themes in my work generally just sort of rise out of the narrative, like a shipwreck floating to the surface. A lot of times I won't even notice what's going on until I start thinking about things in earlier writing, such as the coincidence between Noreen's origins and her penchant for stealing stuff. As for my characters, they tend to coalesce from actors I like and people I know, often an amalgamation of the two. A lot of times I'll put down the first strokes of a character on page 30 and I'll look up from page 348 and realize that Robin Martine has evolved into Lzzy Hale from Halestorm (which is pretty much how she looks in my head). I can't tell you with any concrete certainty if I'm "brandable". Maybe a combination of both. I've definitely been trying to build a brand as the latter, as a creative individualist, and it seems to be working well enough even if there's not enough capital to push it as far as it should be reaching. The material I produce has something for pretty much everybody, even though I'm producing what I personally want to read--which is one of my main codes as a writer: "Write what you want to read", and someone will enjoy it as much as you do. paulthegerman Happy Birthday! I'm brand-new to your books, so my line if inquiry will be a blend of your time in the Service and as a Writer.
S. A. Hunt
Kissinxkatie You have a mansion and 7 rooms to rent. You can rent them to anyone alive or dead (like, as if they were alive, not zombies lol) who are your new roomies? S. A. Hunt My girlfriend Jessica, Stephen King, Nikola Tesla, Bruce Campbell, you, Chaser, Lucas. I NEED MORE ROOMS Thetravelingboy What made you want to write in the first place? S. A. Hunt It's sort of like having a bird caged in your head. It flaps around like a maniac until you let it out, and then everything's cool for a while until the bird reappears in there and you need to let it out again. The words and ideas are always fighting to be let out, and it's the most horrible thing to feel them withering inside you if you don't use them. I've been making stories for as long as I can remember. They used to be Sonic the Hedgehog comic books when I was a kid, and then it progressed to a fledgling fantasy novel in high school and bits and spates of a horror novel throughout the early 2000s. It wasn't until Afghanistan that I realized that if I was going to write that book, it needed to be now, because looking death in the face is not the point where you want to regret not doing that thing you always wanted to do. I still didn't chase that immediately when I got home; I still looked for civilian day-job work, still trying to live life "legit" and build a family like all the other good little boys and girls. I eventually found a job making carpet in a scuzzy little carpet factory here in town, but someone started a rumor I had PTSD from my time overseas and they let me go. Unable to find anybody else willing to hire a vet, I was down and out, so I decided, you know what? fuck it, it's Go Time, and started writing the first Outlaw book. emJK3ll3y Did you start writing while serving in the army or after? What made you pick up the pen? S. A. Hunt I started scribbling an outline while I was in Basic Training, longhand in a notebook since we couldn't have electronics. That might have actually been the first scratchings of Outlaw King, because it involved two gunslingers and took place on a train. But I didn't start writing in earnest until I got home and had trouble finding work. I don't want to cheat you by not answering or look like a derp by cutting and pasting, so I'll link to what I told thetravelingboy about coming back to writing. mrpajamasharkman Alright, what is your snack of choice when you just want something to munch on? I'll fight for Rice Krispy Treats, and I love me some Cheez-its. S. A. Hunt Cheez-Its or ranch-flavored rice crisps. Sweet? M&Ms, dried-fruit trail mix, or dry cereal. emJK3ll3y Happy birthday, man! Wondering what are the biggest mistakes you see new authors making and what advice would you give them? S. A. Hunt Thank you!
emJK3ll3y because like Louis CK said, when someone criticizes your book, they're shitting in your heart. You need a shit-proof heart. Love this! Thanks, man. CreativityTheorist Hey, Sam. To hell with birthdays. Forevermore shalt thou hold sacred the 26th day of August in remembrance of this auspicious appearance. Happy AMA day! For my question: what's your favorite piece of world building you've done that fans don't seem to have picked up on yet? S. A. Hunt To hell with birthdays! I'M IMMORTAL! 34 forever! Probably the binding of Isaac twist in the 1983 flashback at the end of Ten Thousand Devils. mrpajamasharkman Could you see any inspiration coming from the Mad Max series in future writing? Since I got into it I can't not want to abuse the inspiration it threw at me. S. A. Hunt Yes, there are huge swaths of Fury Road inspiration in Malus Domestica 2. Robin flees across the Texas desert with a biker-gang leader's abused wife, and the gang is turned into werewolves by their leader's motorcycle, which is haunted by Ereshkigal. It's sort of like Christine + Fury Road + Dog Soldiers. What they don't know is that Robin bought a grenade launcher when she got to Texas and she's got it hidden in her Winnebago. mrpajamasharkman Holy shit I am so excited for that!!!!! RhetorForPresident So isn't the Rhetor just the best? And by the Wolf, when you coming to San Antonio? (Bee tee dubs, this is Hubs) S. A. Hunt As soon as I can, man. If I can sell enough books to pay my way, I'd like to go to San Japan or that other convention (I can't remember what it was). RhetorForPresident Righteous. It'd be a pleasure for you to be here! Oh and I thought of another! When am I gonna be able to get my hands on the full Fiddle and the Fire series?:P I'm super engrossed in 10KD and loving the excerpts S. A. Hunt As soon as I can get them written! I'm looking forward to writing them. I want to try to do some Choose Your Own Adventure books set in Destin, too. mgallowglas Happy birthday man. If you could have one artist do a cover for you, who would it be? S. A. Hunt Thanks, man, oh Christ almighty I want Carlos Quevedo to do it, without a doubt. I'd do unspeakable things for one of Quevedo's pieces. KathleenRovner Happy Birthday!!! What are you reading right now? S. A. Hunt Thank you! I actually just finished my first read of Stephen King's Rose Madder. It's now one of my favorite King books next to Dark Tower. MikeOfThePalace Happy birthday, Sam! I love the Outlaw King, as you well know, and Malus Domestica is steadily climbing to the top of Mt. Readmore. I'm really looking forward to it! My questions:
S. A. Hunt
StabbyJane How does it feel to win the Stabby? S. A. Hunt It felt pretty good. It's nice to have that physical representation of non-suckitude up there on the wall to look at when I have a crisis of confidence. It's now my most prized possession of all time. If the house was burning down, I'd get the Stabby, then my wallet, then scoop all the paperwork out of my shitpile drawer and run. Imaninja2 Hi Mr. Hunt! You are one of the great authors who hang out around r/fantasy. Just wanted to thank you for the interaction with some of your readers! Here are some fun softball questions for you:
S. A. Hunt
thelonelypubman Hello Mr. Hunt, As you know, I am a huge fan of The Outlaw King Series, and I wanted to know did writing the books hapoen organically or did you outline the whole thing? And as far as horror writers are concerned you are right up there with some of the finest! What works from the genre are your favourites? Finally, please buy these books. They are absolutely incredible and can sit proudly next to King's Dark Tower. Congrats on the AMA, man. Keep on doing your stuff! EDIT: Happy Birthday!! S. A. Hunt Hi Mr. Pubman. :) They've been pretty much completely organic, with rudimentary plot goals floating around in my head. I've got some outlines put down for Outlaw 4, but I think once they've propelled me far enough down the runway I'm going nose-up and pulling my landing gear up.
EDIT: Thank you! thelonelypubman Thanks for the answers! I just wanted to add that a certain scene in a small kitchen in Whirlwind is one of the most emotionally affecting I have ever read. That comes from your brilliant character work. I rate that scene up there with Sol and Rachel Weintraub's story from Hyperion. VSKemanis Hi Sam, Happy birthday! Your covers are awesome. I know from personal experience. Question: for someone like me who gets nightmares from reading really scary stuff, which book of yours is the least scariest? S. A. Hunt Hmm... to be honest, I'm not sure. I guess I would say the Outlaw books, though they've got some minor horror elements too. Probably Law of the Wolf, because the scary stuff in that one is just spiders and robots.
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