So hi Jay, welcome to Waterstones. We are in St. James's Church in Piccadilly which is
very appropriate for The Nevernight Chronicles. How do you feel now it's all over?
It's a little bit sad to say goodbye to it but I think I gave Mia the ending she
deserved. I don't know, readers will decide whether that's the case, but I
feel like I gave her the send-off that was appropriate. So it's sad to say
goodbye but I'm glad I said goodbye the way I did.
Because obviously from the very first page of the very first book we know how Mia's story
is gonna end. Was that the same for you writing it, you knew exactly where
she was gonna end up? Or you knew that thing that happens on the first page, had
to happen to her in some way?
Yeah I mean in theory she could have died at 90 surrounded by
loved ones or making love to the pool boy or something. No I mean I'm a plotter
rather than a pouncer so I had a really rough idea of where the third book was going
to go and how it was going to end but I'm not quite clever enough to plot
three books in advance. I tend to write a little bit by feel so by the
time I got to the third book I had a pretty good idea of where it was going
to go but the ending still surprised me a little bit. That's one of the things I
like about writing the way I do. If the story or the characters surprise me as
the author then they're probably going to surprise the readers as well.
Do did you build the world around Mia or did Mia come first and then you
built the world around her?
Yeah, Mia came first and the world came second. Mia was the product of me witnessing a drunken
argument between two of my lady friends on New Year's Eve. Like friends who are
ladies not 'ladies friends'. And it was about the use of the c-bomb and
whether or not it was offensive and I wisely stayed the hell out of that
argument. But they both raised some really interesting points so I went away
the next day and kind of wrote a scene and that scene ended up being the end of
chapter 5, the discussion between Mia and Trick about the c-bomb and
at the end of that scene I didn't really know who Mia was but I wanted to find
out and so I wrote a book to discover who she was. So everything kind of came out of her.
So on that, the world draws a lot on like Roman structure
with the Senate and the gladiators. So what was your inspiration for creating it?
I mean I'm a huge Roman history nerd. There's like three topics
in the world that I can talk about with authority at a dinner party and one of
them is Roman history. It's not a very useful skill but yeah, I've always loved
Roman history ever since I was a little kid so the idea of those structures came
out of a thought experiment. I kind of asked myself what would happen if Julius
Caesar's rebellion against the Senate failed. And Mia's father is kind of a
pseudo-Caesar in that sense, he's a famous general who tried to overthrow
the Senate and he failed and his family were punished for it. So that's kind of
where her in the political scope of the book started.
And about the writing style. This trilogy is pretty well known for the footnotes. When did
you decide to include that because as you find out in the third book they're
there for a very specific reason. Did you know that from page one?
I had a vague idea but I didn't really know who the narrator was going to be when I
started writing book one. There were three possibilities and
the front-runner at the start of the series ended up not getting the
Guernsey. It turned out to be someone different. The footnotes are
there, they serve two functions. One: they're there for levity, hopefully they make you
laugh, because it's a pretty... otherwise it would be a pretty grim
and dark and morbid tale without them, I think. So they're there to inject a note
of humor or a nervous giggle in a particularly morbid moment. But also I
grew up reading kind of doorstopper epic fantasies like big, thick David Eddings
style books and I'm really into granular world-building, I really like it, but I
understand that some readers don't. So I thought by compartmentalising that
nitty gritty stuff - if you don't like finding out why the sword fighting style
is named what it is or how the coinage of the realm works, don't care, you just
want her to get to the assassin school - you can skip all that stuff
and not really miss anything in terms of the story. But if you're into that
granular level of world building then you can read the footnotes and get a
little more out of it. That was the idea.
In the third book you also go kind of meta, including some of the criticisms which was an interesting choice!
Was that just, I know what I can do when they were discussing the narrator of the book?
Yeah, I mean I like to put fun at myself a little bit as well. I think if you're
taking yourself too seriously then you can sometimes get lost in the woods and
so I try and check myself more than anything else. So that wasn't me
making fun of the critiques, it was more me acknowledging the critiques and yet
trying not to take it all too seriously.
Well now that Mia's story has come to an end can tell us a little bit about your next series?
Yeah so my next epic fantasy series is called Empire of the Vampire. And that's going to be up next year.
It's basically, how do I describe it, it's about a guy named Gabriel de Leon, he's a
fallen paragon of a religious order that hunt vampires and he lives in a world
where the sunlight has essentially failed. So the Sun is still there but
it's not as bright or harsh as it used to be and that means vampires can walk
around during the day. So the book is set 27 years after the first 'day's death',
it's called day's death, and he's kind of telling his life story. How he
reached that point. So he's kind of a broken, bitter, faithless man at the start
of the tale and we go back in time and explore how he got to that point. And
yeah it's a lot of fun to write him. I'm having a lot of fun revisiting vampires.
I was a huge vampire nerd when I grew up and they kind of became something
different over the course of my lifetime. Like I grew up reading Interview with the
Vampire, vampires like Claudia and Lestat. Salem's Lot by Stephen King was
one of my favourite books of all time. And then vampires kind of became romantic
figures, they became different, they became less
monsters. And I'm using this book to explore the idea of the nature of
evil and the way immortality will make any morality a road.
Everything kind of falls apart over time, so that's one of the themes of the book,
that everything falls apart. Yeah, a delightful read for the entire family.
Well we're really looking forward to it at Waterstones especially, so thank you for sitting down with me.
Thanks for having us.