In which an author discusses his amazing work
Chris Tullbane is the creator of the fantastically fun Many Travails of John Smith urban fantasy series as well as the post-apocalyptic, superhero mash up Murder of Crows. While Damian’s story arc is complete, the universe he occupies is very much alive and well. This month, we’re celebrating the 4th book of John Smith’s world – The Italian Screw Job.
You can purchase books by Mr. Tullbane on Amazon Here or from his website here
First, a bit about Chris
I read in your profile that you were a software engineer, I take that to mean propeller head programmer. Can you tell us a bit about that and how working in code may have impacted your writing?
While I was a competent enough programmer, I was never one of those brilliant people who could sit down and genius their way through anything. I was productive and I wrote clean, maintainable code (more so as I gained experience, of course), but I think my strength lay less in the nuts and bolts of programming than in the communication, analysis, and organization that defined the approaches I would take. And unsurprisingly, those are all aspects that translate to writing.
To me, both fields are often about problem solving and iterating on a proposed solution until it works. And in both pursuits, you can sometimes find yourself in a pseudo-flow state, where connections and solutions appear like they’ve been wished into existence. I do prefer the creativity and flexibility of fiction though, and if I never again have to worry about scalability of massive database queries, I will be able to die a happy man.
How and why did you make the decision to jump from 0’s and 1’s to urban fantasy and superheroes?
I have a degree in writing, so it was more that programming decided to intrude on my plans for a few decades … mainly because I graduated, was already married, and needed to make a living. I’d done some volunteer work on a gaming MUD (the text-based predecessor to MMORPGs) and parlayed that into a QA role at my first company, that then led first to web design and then full-stack programming over the course of the next few years.
As for swapping back to writing… well, San Diego has long had a very small tech community, especially in the early 2010s when everyone was moving their businesses to Austin. I ended up getting laid off in 2013 with an eight-month severance package, and after spending several months of that time hiking around the city with my co-workers and friends, I decided it would be fun to write a book. To that point, I’d never written anything beyond poetry and the occasional very short story, but for some reason, writing a novel suddenly seemed appealing.
I didn’t have a plot or an outline… just the idea that my MC would be named John Smith, that it would be an urban fantasy, and that there would be some sort of mistaken identity (owing to his generic name) that pulled him into the supernatural world he didn’t know existed. Two months later, Investigation, Mediation, Vindication was done… and while it was unpolished, awkward, poorly paced, and overly wordy, people who read it really enjoyed it. And positive feedback is by far the best motivation to keep writing!
Instead of editing that book like I should have, I wrote the series’ second book, Blood is Thicker Than Lots of Stuff, the following month. Then, my severance package ran out and I went back to work and spent several years writing two more sequels in my limited free time, as well as dramatically overhauling what I had already written. I eventually hit a point where I wanted to try something different, and that’s what led to See These Bones.
If I hadn’t been laid off, I don’t know if any of that would have ever happened. Sometimes, things just work out.
You frequently refer to your wife as your “angel wife” I assume that she’s just willing to put up with you and not that she’s dead – “it’s ok Timmy, mommy is an angel now”. Does she actively contribute to your writing (think Ilona Andrews) or is she mostly inspirational?
My angel-wife is very much alive and kicking all sorts of ass, thank goodness! In fact, I thank her in the dedication of every book I write. For me, the actual writing process is very much a solitary thing: I sit down and bang on the keyboard and maybe something halfway decent emerges. I do send her chapters to read as soon as I’ve written them, and I can tell from her facial expressions if I’m on the right track or not. Near-instant feedback is incredibly helpful.
So, her role is really as my first alpha reader (I have two, with the other getting 100-page chunks instead of individual chapters), my cheerleader, my sounding board, and my motivation. She also does a ton of behind-the-scenes work for Ghost Falls Press, while I focus on the writing, editing, design, and marketing of my books.
I’ve found writing to be a very personal thing and I identify with the solitary aspect. Did you struggle with any anxiety when sharing with friends, family or others early on? Did you have any thoughts on using a pen name?
I was definitely a bit worried about what people would think, but started with my angel-wife, then my brother, and only then started sharing with some of my friends (not all of whom liked it). By the time it came to actually releasing any of the books, so many people had read one or more of my stories that I didn’t even think about using a pen name. That said, if I ever wrote erotica (I won’t, but if I did), I would definitely have to use a pen name, just for the sake of my parents!
You’re in Vegas now, do you have a favorite casino or game to play?
Strangely, I don’t gamble. Or maybe that’s a good thing? I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the idea of setting my money on fire. That said, we still go to the casinos a lot, mostly because the dining options on the Strip are amazing. I think our two favorite casinos in that regard are currently Caesar’s (Amalfi, Hell’s Kitchen, etc.) and the Wynn (Mizumi), but our goal is to continue to try new restaurants as regularly as we can. I really do love living in Las Vegas!
If I was going to gamble, I think it would be on sports, particularly the NBA, as I could at least fool myself into thinking I had some knowledge in that area. But it’s already enough of a bummer when my Pelicans or Warriors lose without also having money on the line!
Let’s talk about Damian and the Post-Break World
I think many of your fans may have come across the world of Damian Banach first. How did you come up with the idea of superhero fiction set in a post-apocalyptic world?
I started with the basic question of what would happen if people were spontaneously granted superpowers around the world… if everything that happened came through the pure random chance of a dream instead of some sort of intelligent design. Damian has a more cynical perspective than I do, but I think we both agree that the result would be chaos. Maybe in some timelines, the good people among that first crop of Powers would outnumber the bad (and also possess the right abilities to keep the peace), but in my world, that clearly wasn’t the case. And to be honest, I do think the criminal elements or selfish individuals would be quicker to take advantage… less worried about what the change meant for the world and more focused on what it could get them.
So, to me, Dr. Nowhere’s dream was always going to be the sort of event that shattered existing laws, nations, and bonds. I was less interested in the collapse itself (although I touch on it a little bit in the novelette, The Stars That Sing) than the societies that would try to pick up the pieces (for good or ill) decades later. As much as I appreciate hope-punk, something less idealistic and grittier felt better suited for this story.
Damian is a unique character and a unique take on the concept of being a necromancer. Can you share a bit about how you landed on that? Was Damian always a Crow or did this start out as something else and evolve?
In a classic example of do as I say, not as I do, I once again wrote the opening chapter of See These Bones before I had any idea about the book’s plot, characters, or themes. In fact, I wasn’t really planning on writing a new book at all. Basically, I just wanted a break from the John Smith books, had a dram of whisky one night, and banged out two pages of expletive-filled prose, most of which made it into the final book. Sally Cemetery, Gravedigger, King Rex… even Damian growing up in an orphanage in Bakersfield (and why) all came out of that initial night of spontaneous writing. While necromancy isn’t something you typically see in superhero fiction, it really fit the tone of what was already shaping up to be a bleak world. I wanted a wide range of powers including some that were considered less socially acceptable than others. The idea of Crows all going crazy (“Everyone knows what happens to Crows: they go mad and they go bad”) added to the tension and potential drama and ended up forming one of the main themes and conflicts of the series.
The next morning, my angel-wife really liked what I had written, so I then had to figure out how to turn those few pages into an actual book. It was a few months before I sat down to continue the story, and even then, much of the plot changed/developed as I was writing it. A lot of the twists in that series happened organically, as I recognized the potential for previously unplanned connections during the drafting process. The fact that it all came together as well as it did was a minor miracle, honestly!
My two series’ main characters, John and Damian, both originated as responses to the fiction I was reading at the time, which tended to lean heavily into power fantasies. I don’t mind a good power fantasy, but they can get stale after a while, and it’s hard to maintain the tension of a book when the reader knows the MC goes into every situation with both overwhelming strength and plot armor. John was my take on an MC who had no power whatsoever… whose main gift was his ability to make friends with powerful people. Damian was a different take on that idea… what if my protagonist did have power, but that power was fated to destroy him? The inner tension of someone who wants to do good in spite of his own supposed destiny was definitely something that appealed to me, even before you throw in more external pressures like public opinion or the conspiracies that began long before he was even born.
You seem to have a way of magically making side characters we want to know more about. Her Majesty, Ishmae, Alexa and Dominion all seem like they would have amazing stories to share. What can you tell us about future plans? Have you thought about collaborating with anyone to get stories told you might not have time for while you focus on your core works?
To be honest, side characters are my favorite part of every book I write. As much as Damian and Silt are the emotional throughline of the entire trilogy, Sally Cemetery, Alexa, Her Majesty (aka the Queen of Smiles), and the Weaver are probably my favorite characters. Even with more minor characters that show up for a scene and are never seen again, I really enjoy the process of trying to infuse them with personality and story through only a few passages or lines of dialog in the book. It’s basically the literary equivalent of thumbnail sketches. Every person is the main character in their own story, so even if they are a peripheral character in mine, I want them to have lives and opinions, distinct personalities, loves, and traumas. If I do my job right, those characters will feel like three-dimensional people, and readers will want to know more.
The advantage of having a cast as big as this series does is that there’s no shortage of characters I can dig into. I’ve had requests for novelettes about everyone from Orca to Ishmae to Sally Cemetery to Alan Jackson and even one request for more about Samara and CJ, who didn’t even show up in the main series. I have very tentative plans for shorter stories about Ishmae (several years after See These Bones), Vibe and Paladin (doing their internships with the Defenders and Matthew’s dad), and Orca, and there’s backstory for Alexa, Bard, and Bard’s wife that is begging for more detail. As ideas come to me, I just add them to the pile. When/if I ever get to those stories is the big question.
I do have a stand-alone, full-length ‘Her Majesty’ novel tentatively planned for a fall release this year. It will take place after One Tin Soldier, so she’ll be dealing with the events of that book, while getting pulled into a battle of her own against the warlord known as the Crimson Queen. Two queens enter, one queen leaves. I guess we’ll see who that ends up being!
I’ve only collaborated once in my writing life, and that was on a play back in high school. The play wasn’t very good, but the experience itself was fun. The problem for me is that my writing process (wherein everything is in my head, and I make connections and new plot threads as I write) is not at all conducive to collaboration. And if someone did write something officially in my world, I feel certain I’d accidentally tromp all over it in one of my own stories. Control is a very hard thing to give up.
Having said that, if anyone out there ever wants to write fan fiction set in my universe, have at it! My angel-wife loves fan fiction and has been dying to find something set in the post-Break world.
From the onset of Murder of Crows, you begin introducing intriguing characters such as Grannypocalypse, the Weaver and Sally Cemetery. We’ve met many of them, Legion even got a place in a novella. Any chance we get up close and personal with the others? Are there more coming?
Actually, that reminds me: that pile of ideas also includes a novelette with Grannypocalypse, called Tea with Grannypocalypse. Like many of my favorite characters from the series, Granny started as just a name I found entertaining and then slowly evolved into a full character. I have a special place in my heart for characters with very different, often alien, perspectives and Grannypocalypse seems like she would have a lot to say to the reporter who dared make the trek to her porch, in the middle of miles of irradiated wasteland.
I also plan to write a (free) short story detailing Damian’s final battle against Tezcatlipoca, as I know that’s something a lot of people wanted to see. I didn’t feel there was enough there for a full book—with the series being from Damian’s POV, and Damian being the only person who can cross into what used to be Mexico without becoming Tezcatlipoca’s puppet, it would be nothing but a succession of battle scenes—but the final showdown seems like it could be fun.
As always, I will be introducing new characters as we go, and hopefully they will each resonate in their own way. We’ve only seen a small corner of the world, and as the setting expands, we’ll encounter other great and terrible Powers. If you can’t be weird and creative in a world broken by superpowers, then when can you?
Eventually, I’ll gather all the post-Break novelettes and short stories together and publish them in an anthology called Stories from a Post-Break World, so that print readers will finally have access.
Will the next story arc be concurrent with events we’ve seen or are we jumping in time to another period of the post-break world?
The untitled Her Majesty stand-alone will be set after One Tin Soldier. The next post-Break trilogy (yes, there will be another trilogy!) features a new cast and occurs a few years later. That trilogy will be set back in the Free States, in a San Diego that is coming to grips with the idea that the bogeyman to their south has been replaced by someone who might be just as bad. Because the original trilogy’s cast will have graduated by that point to become Capes, they will be presences on vid and in the news; little bits of story happening in the background. It should allow me to offer some closure to existing readers without irritating new readers who start with the second trilogy instead of The Murder of Crows.
As far as the novelettes and short stories go, the setting and time period will always vary. The Storm in Her Smile took place before See These Bones. The Stars That Sing takes place sometime after One Tin Soldier. The Paladin and Vibe story will occur concurrently with Damian’s trip across the Badlands, while Tea with Grannypocalypse could honestly happen at any time at all, given that she appears to be effectively immortal.
I feel like there is ample space in this world to explore, but I also don’t want to retread existing ground or shrink the scope of the setting the way prequels sometimes do. In general, I’ll be pushing forward chronologically instead of going backwards.
And now for the star of the show… Mr. Smith wasn’t it?
Since John has a book coming out soon, we should probably pivot to his world.
Sure! John knew he’d gotten dressed up today for a reason.
John’s world is 180-degrees from Damian. I believe you intended to be a lighter tone and you’ve labeled it as “comedic urban fantasy”. Once again, you’ve mashed things up and given us a new niche. How does this keep happening?
These days, comedic urban fantasy has become more of an established subgenre, but in 2013, when I wrote IMV, I really did think I was breaking new ground. With that series in particular, the vibe started with the character’s name. What author picks the most common, least original name in existence for their main character? It seemed ludicrous from the beginning, so I just kind of leaned into it. John is a lot sillier than I am (my angel-wife says I am closer to Anastasia), but I really enjoyed the idea of an MC who was the antithesis of the genre’s usual haunted protagonist with a tragic backstory.
The real trick has been maintaining that humor and somewhat lighthearted feel even as the series deals with a lot of blood and some increasingly weighty subjects. For me, the guiding principle is that, while John doesn’t take himself too seriously, his flippancy doesn’t extend to his job, his friends, or the tragic stakes of some of the situations he finds himself in. He is, at heart, a good person who tries to do what’s right… but he’s also ridiculous, easygoing, tremendously lazy, and just trying to get through the day. John serves as the verbal punching bag throughout much of the series, but every now and then, someone looks at all that he’s accomplished, and gives him his rightful due. And then he complains about a distinct lack of spaghetti and everyone shakes their head and moves on.
I think I’ve seen you state that Italian Screw Job (Preorder now, its due out March 15, 2022) was actually the first book you wrote and that you’ve iterated on it countless times. It’s also the longest book you’re written, correct? How did that turn into 3 “prequels” before you got to this story?
Actually, Investigation, Mediation, Vindication was the first book I wrote, way back in 2013. I did write all four John Smith books first though! Then, after finishing See These Bones, I decided to release it first instead; I love both series, but Damian’s story felt more ambitious and like it would hit harder as a debut. I’ve been editing and releasing the John books in the two years since, interspersed with the other two books in the Murder of Crows trilogy.
The Italian Screwjob is definitely the longest book I’ve written. I wrote its first three hundred pages from scratch a total of… four times, I think? Add in at least two times where I Frankensteined existing pieces together in another attempt to fix whatever it was I could sense was wrong with the story, and I wrote well over two thousand pages to end up with 600 or so that I was happy with. Thankfully, the editing process has gone very smoothly over the past few months, so I guess that extra work paid off. It’s my favorite of the series to date, even given the absence of everyone’s favorite character, Bill.
Once again, you’ve given us a fully realized world with tons of amazing side characters we are aching to hear more about. Other than Bill, who we’ll talk about in a minute, do you hear much demand for stories centered on any of the vampires, weres or goblins?
While there are readers who definitely prefer this series, I haven’t seen quite as much conversation around it in general. Still, Bill is a phenomenon, and I’ve had people tell me how much they love Juliette (or even how much they hated her at first and now love her). I’ve also had a handful of questions/comments about Valentina, but I think that (much like Sally Cemetery from the other series) her origin story will remain hinted at rather than fully detailed.
Most people seem content with the John-centric storylines. I think that may be because the story has to this point been constrained to San Diego and San Diego is a comparatively small fish in the supernatural pond. We don’t get much in the way of references to distant but legendary characters like we did in See These Bones, and John and the reader have both been very insulated from that larger world.
That changes significantly in this and later books, as John inadvertently plays a role in ushering San Diego onto the greater stage. Sometimes, the old Smith luck is anything but a good thing.
Speaking of Bill (please, you had to know this was coming)… How did Bill happen? He’s one of the coolest characters I’ve come across IN ANY BOOK (inside joke if you’ve read the other books, you get it).
I wish I knew! My writing process is largely a succession of creative accidents, some that work and others that don’t. Investigation, Mediation, Vindication was initially supposed to be all about subverting urban fantasy tropes, so I knew when John went to his fateful mediation at Gordon Biersch, Lord Beel-Kasan needed to be something contrary to expectation. Lucia and her House represented (in some ways) tyrannical order, so it made sense that Bill would be chaos, but as I sat down to write that chapter, I thought… what if John and Bill actually hit it off? And what if John goes in expecting… well, whatever you’d expect from Lord Beel-Kasan, Demigod of Nightmares, Terror, and Vindication… and instead gets a cross between Gumby and a seven-foot-tall asparagus who insists (in a southern baritone, no less) that John call him Bill?
The idea made me laugh, and that was all I needed to go with it. (Incidentally, the note that is left on the vampires house in excrement was something I went back and added after I had a grasp on who Bill was… Yours in Love, Lord Beel-Kasan just felt like the perfectly Bill thing to say after a deeply threatening note!)
I didn’t expect the character to take off the way he has, but I do love Bill and all his contradictions… the silliness and childlike innocence in a being who gives nightmares and rules a dimension where people literally burn as human candelabras… the tenderness he shows to his human ward (who I invented on the spot in that chapter when I needed John and Lucia to be met at the door of Gordon Biersch) and the way his mood can shift on a dime to something genuinely terrifying. He’s a tough character to write, especially when trying to write from his POV like I did in The Good, the Bad, and the Asparagus, but throw in a few words in all-caps and maybe the mention of ice cream and/or burning and everything comes right back.
He and his ward, Jee Sun, also have a much, much bigger back story that we’ll get to in book 6. I hope I’ll have improved sufficiently as a writer to do it justice.
We got post-break novellas. When do we get short stories in the John Smith world?
I had plans… I really did! Each book is separated from the next by anywhere from six months to a year, and I frequently make reference to things that happened in those gaps. My original thought was to turn those references into stories. And then… it just didn’t happen.
I did sneak in the aforementioned Bill short, The Good, the Bad, and the Asparagus, as extra story content at the end of Blood is Thicker Than Lots of Stuff, although I’m not sure all of that book’s readers even knew it was there. A good friend and fellow author suggested I write a Bill-focused Christmas short next. I’ve even had a Juliette short story in mind for a while, but it’s mostly just sitting in my brain, waiting to be written.
There is a Zorana plotline that may prove too unwieldy for book five and which could conceivably be a short story instead. That said, it would likely be from John’s POV, and I’m not sure there’s a huge appetite for Zorana stories. Which is a pity because she and Lucia are two of my favorite horrible people.
How did you come up with the idea to tie the names of the goblin tribes to local sports franchises?
This was another thing that was completely spontaneous. I was looking for an easy way to differentiate my creations from more traditional goblins and the idea of taking the tribalism we see in sports fandom to an extreme where it served as the actual identity of goblin tribes seemed compelling. Especially when sports teams in any given city go through cycles where one team is good and the others are not. I liked the idea of that potentially playing out as real-life power dynamics. Of course, it also meant the poor Clippers tribe–who don’t even have a team anymore after Sterling moved the franchise to Los Angeles—were stuck at the bottom.
The Chargers also leaving San Diego was unexpected, and has yet to occur in the 2015 world of The Italian Screwjob, but it will absolutely have ramifications. Who would have expected the Padres, of all teams, to reign supreme?
Are you going to recognize the Chargers leaving? How will the goblins swallow that pill?
Well, given that a war just broke out between the Clippers and Superchargers after the Superchargers were decimated by this failed coup, I think any bets that they’ll survive all the way to the football team’s departure are still highly questionable.
Let’s talk a bit about writing as a profession
You jumped into writing feet first it seems. Amazingly, you’ve got 500+ reviews on One Tin Soldier with a 4.5-star average, John Smith books seem to be gathering momentum. Do you have some lessons learned to share? Things you’d do different if you could or double down on?
First of all, while I am very proud of my books and grateful that they’ve had such a positive reception, I think there’s an element of luck involved in even small successes like mine. You do what you can to position your book for success—a well-edited manuscript, a solid cover, an appealing blurb, and (hopefully) some positive reviews right out of the gate—but actually attracting readers in sufficient numbers to keep the momentum going even for a short while seems to often depend on factors out of our control as authors. As I say in my author note at the end of every book, indie books live or die on word of mouth.
As far as writing is concerned, I think a lot of the oft-repeated advice is apt. Even if your first draft is good (they’re not all complete disasters), it will benefit heavily from time, perspective, and editing. Less is more is almost obnoxiously overstated, but it starts to make sense when you see prose that laces in only the pertinent details and lets the reader’s mind conjure the rest. To all the usual advice you can find on social media, I’d add: write what you want to write. Don’t get so caught up in what you are supposed to do or not do. Writing rules started out as writing guidelines and then somewhere along the way, were repeated so regularly that they somehow became laws. The truth is those rules aren’t always valid or necessary. Understand why they exist (the problems they are intended to address) and then feel free to break them.
On the business front, I always recommend to new authors that, unless you are strongly anti-Amazon, you should enroll your debut novel in Kindle Select. The digital format of the book becomes exclusive to Amazon and becomes essentially free-to-read for Kindle Unlimited subscribers (while still paying out per-page royalties). As a new author, readers don’t know who you are, so making the barrier to entry as low as possible is a great way to build your brand with readers. I know that my books being available on Kindle Unlimited is a big reason so many readers took a chance on my work. Even two years later, KU reads still represent anywhere from 60-80% of my monthly royalties.
There is also a truism in writing circles that sequels sell, and that has proven out in my experience. It’s hard to generate traction with a single book, marketing is less profitable (without more books in the series, that one ad-click you’re being charged for doesn’t have the potential multiplier of the reader continuing on to other books in the series), and some readers won’t even start a series until they know that it has been finished. I call it PTGRRMS (Post-Traumatic George R. R. Martin Syndrome). Also, with the sheer volume of books available out there, discoverability is a real problem. A new release is one way to get eyes back on your books. For example, I’ve had numerous readers only find the John Smith series with the second or even third book’s release.
As far as what I would do differently? Honestly, I would have made a beeline for self-publishing immediately, instead of spending years learning random factoids about various literary agents so that I could drop those factoids into my query letters in an attempt to differentiate my email from the hundreds or thousands of queries they receive every week. Then again, because I was querying, I kept writing books without releasing them, and my writing improved dramatically in the process; those few years of spinning my wheels may have ironically been the reason my debut was successful.
You are extremely active on social media. Do you see any sales spikes from days when you’re more active?
Not really! Amazon makes any sort of detailed tracking difficult, and I do know that my activity on social media has earned me the occasional sale (from people who told me on social media that they bought my book), but there’s a lot of self-marketing on Twitter and I think people tend to tune that stuff out. I have seen bumps when other people post about my series, particularly on sites like Reddit. For me, social media is less about marketing and more about accessibility. I like that anyone who has read one of my books can just look me up and start chatting.
I’ve gotten a lot of support from other authors on social media, and I do my best to pay that forward by supporting and discussing their work. We all have to stick together!
Do you have an intent to hit fan shows? Since you’re not doing that, should we expect 4 extra books and a Kickstarter?
I struggle with anxiety, to the point that even talking on the phone is something that I might panic about for days ahead of time. That said, it’s something I’m working on, so book shows and signings aren’t completely out of the question in the distant future. As for crowdfunding, I’ve thought about doing a Kickstarter, but I’m worried that Mr. Sanderson will be hurt when I break his recent (and still growing) record, so I might hold off on that just a bit. Kindness is, after all, its own reward. (Seriously… $25+ million with 23 days still to go? That man is his own small nation at this point! It’s incredible!)
We’re slowly building up a web store online, with signed copies available at the Ghost Falls Press website, and merchandise stuck somewhere in the planning stages. It turns out that artists who will perfectly capture an idea, grant commercial rights to their piece, and do it for a reasonable cost are hard to find!
