Posts Tagged ‘Iron Druid’

You interviewed Kevin Hearne

To celebrate the release of the seventh book in the Iron Druid chronicles, SHATTERED (UK | ANZ), we asked you to come up with your best questions for author Kevin Hearne (or Oberon). We had some absolutely fantastic responses, and Kevin has answered a selection of the best below.

Q. How did you get interested in Druids and how have you collected your information of how Atticus understands his magic?

KH: I got interested in Druids because I’m a tree hugger. The modern-day Druids, of course, are revivalists who are basing their ceremonies on nineteenth-century guesswork. The ancient Druids never wrote anything down except for things like property boundaries on stones marked with Ogham. Atticus’s magic system, therefore, is almost entirely my fabrication. His abilities are suggested by legends, however: multiple accounts speak of shape-shifting, divination, and even of teleportation (which I presented as a shifting between planes). There are also accounts of weather manipulation, which Atticus has used in a small way in the first two books. I unified those legendary Druidic abilities under the system of binding.

Q. Which super villain do you think Atticus would have a tough time defeating?

KH: Going to go a bit obscure on you: Cyclone, an old opponent of Spider-Man’s that I always found to be quite scary as a kid. He controls the wind in a hundred-foot radius around his body and can pluck the very air out of your lungs, preventing you from taking another breath. He can also create tornado-force whirlwinds about himself, which he can use defensively (any strike with Fragarach would be deflected) or offensively, lifting Atticus off the ground and cutting him off from the earth. I’m sure there are other super villains who could also succeed but that’s the first one that came to mind.

Q. What is Atticus’ favourite pop culture tshirt?

KH: He has one that says WHAT THE FRAK in really large letters and then, in a much smaller font underneath, “happened in Season 4 of Battlestar Galactica?” Because it was a mess.

Q. How is it that a Druid who has had so much grief from the Fae, came to name his dog after Shakespeare’s King of the Fairies?

KH: Atticus thinks of it as wry jest. He knows very well that the Fae are actually ruled by women – Brighid, the Morrigan, etc. – and Oberon & Titania were merely Shakespeare’s creations.

Q. Does Oberon have an accent when he ‘talks’?

KH: Great question! He has the standard Western American accent – in other words, not anything southern or northeastern – mixed with the slightly manic tone of an excited, hungry, and horny hound. Atticus adopted him when he had been living in America for a while and of course Oberon’s pop culture diet in the States included plenty of American movies and TV.

The Delight of New Voices

SHATTERED (UK | ANZ), the brand new Iron Druid Chronicles novel from Kevin Hearne is released today. Read a guest post below from Kevin about what it was like to write it . . .

When you write a first-person series for a few years you start to hear voices – other voices than your main character, that is. To let those voices tell their own story you have to give them their own chapters, and I began that process in the sixth book of the Iron Druid Chronicles, HUNTED ( UK | AUS). That was the first time Atticus’s former apprentice, Granuaile, had a few chapters to herself. The change from Atticus was lovely as an injection of variety but I quickly realized that the new point of view allowed me to develop both Granuaile and Atticus in ways not previously available.

The experiment worked so well (for me, anyway) that I expanded the practice in SHATTERED. We still get plenty of Atticus and Oberon in the seventh installment of the Iron Druid Chronicles, but Granuaile gets equal time and so does Atticus’s old archdruid, who goes by the modern name of Owen Kennedy. Writing in three very different voices was a delightful challenge for me and I enjoyed exploring their musings on the nature of power and how it should be employed. I also enjoyed making all of them very uncomfortable.

Both Granuaile and Owen have to adjust to a very different life from the one they led before. Granuaile must carefully choose her path now that she’s been bound to the earth and possesses great power, while Owen, brought forward two thousand years into the future, must struggle to adapt to a completely alien culture and level of technology. And Atticus, normally so confident in his abilities, learns that he missed some key facts and the true situation with the gods bears little resemblance to what he thought it was.

Writing from three first-person views—alternating between chapters—also forced me to write in a nonlinear fashion. I discovered that when I tried to write in order it was slow going, because each voice had its own verbal tics and style and switching between them required a mental adjustment. Once I ditched the idea that I had to write from beginning to end, work proceeded much faster. I would write three Owen chapters or four Granuaile chapters and stay in those voices for days, piecing them together in order later. And because of that I managed to finish writing the book in only five months, which for me is quite fast. (And I know that some speedy readers out there will finish the book in a single day and then ask, “When’s the next one?” at which point I will weep and clutch a teddy bear.)

I hope everyone will enjoy getting to know Granuaile and Owen a bit better and appreciate the light they shed on Atticus as well. Many thanks to you all for reading; I do hope to get across the pond someday to meet you.

 

SHATTERED is available now to buy in the UK and Australia.