Evan Winter tells us about The Fires of Vengeance, his new fantasy book

The next chapter of The Burning, Evan Winter’s epic fantasy saga, is almost upon us. We speak with the author about the highly anticipated sequel, The Fires of Vengeance.

Evan Winter’s debut novel, The Rage of Dragons, was one of my favorite fantasy novels of 2019. Rage tells the story of a young man named Tau, whose life is twisted off course when he loses his father and his place in the brutal, caste-based society where he lives. Tau undertakes a quest for vengeance, all set against the backdrop of an African-inspired fantasy world replete with dragons, demons, magic-wielding priestesses, clashing armies and political machinations. It had just about everything a fan of dark fantasy could desire.

The follow-up, The Fires of Vengeance, is one of the most highly anticipated fantasy releases of the fall, and with good reason: The Rage of Dragons was excellent, and it left off just as the story was reaching new heights of tension and intrigue.

Recently, we got the chance to sit down with Winter and ask him some questions about The Fires of Vengeance, his writing process, and the swords he’d want guarding his back. Very minor spoilers for the series below!

DANIEL DEVITA: Thanks for joining us, Evan! In case readers aren’t familiar with your books, can you talk a little bit about the origin of The Burning? How far back do you and Tau go, and how did this story come to be?

EVAN WINTER: Hey, Winter Is Coming, thanks very much for having me. It’s an honor to be speaking with you, and, in terms of Tau, we go back to the top of 2017. That’s the year we were formally introduced, and, to be honest, before that I was exploring several other options that I thought might be the right story for me to try and tell. But, meeting Tau changed that.

There was something frightening yet irresistible about him. Here was a brutally wronged young man, slated by society for poverty, disdain, and an early death, but then he finds a life-altering crucible promising incredible power. Once I knew that, I couldn’t look away because I needed to know what someone who has been systematically denied power and equal humanity might do when they realize that they can claw back everything that was kept from them.

Before you were a writer, one of the many hats you wore was director and cinematographer. Has that skillset been beneficial to you in your writing?

I definitely think that directing and shooting affect the way I write. Working in film taught me to break down a narrative and to think about it in discrete pieces. It taught me to value making each and every single piece work maximally.

As a director/cinematographer, I also came to deeply value the pre-work that went into a good shot list. After the first two dozen projects, I could see that the more effort I put into my shot list, the better the finished product. So, I adopted a similar approach for The Rage of Dragons and I outlined the book extensively.

The outline made me comfortable with the story I was trying to tell, it helped me see where I was likely to fall down in the telling of it, and it was a source of support and comfort when I was in the middle of a draft that didn’t seem like it was going as well as I wanted it to go.

I love outlining, I think it is possibly the most important part of my personal process, and I learned to both do it and value it from having worked in film.

Image courtesy of Orbit Books

The Rage of Dragons had an incredible run up to publishing, first as a self-published book that gained a huge following on the r/fantasy forum on Reddit, and then with its highly acclaimed print run from Orbit books. How has the publishing cycle on The Fires of Vengeance been different? The same?

As we’re speaking, The Fires of Vengeance is still two weeks away from launch. I bring it up because I can tell you that writing Fires was harder than writing Rage, but I have no idea what actual publication will bring. Writing Fires was harder for many reasons. It’s a sequel to a book that found more readers than I would have ever imagined possible and that comes with some pressure to deliver an experience worthy of the time the readers will spend with the story.

With Rage, that wasn’t the case. There was no pressure. I mean, I wanted Rage to be the best book that I could make it, but no one knew about it, no one was waiting for it, and there were zero expectations.

Book 2 feels quite different. I began Fires under contract, there was a team both emotionally and financially invested in the work, and, of course, there were readers waiting to see where we were going next. Then, on top of all of that, there were non-book related things.

A huge one was that we lost our family cat as I was writing Fires. She’d been with us for a decade, she’d sat with me at my writing desk when I drafted Rage and then again for most of Fires. Losing her was hard, and, still, that wasn’t the hardest thing.

As I was writing Fires, my father passed away, and going through that pain and loss was the most difficult thing I’ve had to do in all my life. I wasn’t anywhere near normal for an entire year after his passing and that alone was enough to make the experience of writing these two books vastly different. I wrote Rage just for me, while hoping that a few other people might care. I also wrote Fires for me, but it was now also for so many other people too, and one of those people is my father. The Fires of Vengeance is dedicated to him.

One of the first things to leap off the page in your books is the world-building — it’s so unique compared to many of the other adult fantasy books out there currently. Can you talk about what went into this African-inspired setting, and how you shaped it into the world of the Omehi?

Thank you for the kind words. I think that I approached the African-inspired setting in a way that felt the most natural to me and in a way that meant most of my research was inward looking. The world of the story is based upon my sensory memory of Zambia as a child growing up there. I tried to understand the essence of what I felt and absorbed from the land and then I tried to pour it out onto the page.

I took this approach because, though I’ve always read and loved fantasy, I hadn’t come across many books that existed in worlds that reflected the one in which I had existed for so long. I wanted to see the world I knew in a fantasy because there was so much beauty, energy, and life all around me at all times when I was growing up, and I couldn’t picture much that was more fantastical than that.

You can’t talk about your books without mentioning the absolutely killer action scenes. Duels, epic battles, fights against demons, dragons, and everything in between — The Rage of Dragons and The Fires of Vengeance has them all. What’s your process like when it comes to writing all these different action scenes?

Again, thank you! Hmm… I think that there are two important things for me in action scenes. The first is that I must keep in mind all that’s at stake. I need that to be clear because the stakes are the point. They are the justification for the violence.

Then, the second thing I must do is make the language rush and flow. My intent with these sections is to write the action as I see it and then to go over and over and over them until the words disappear. The scene is not done until I can read it without faltering. I must tumble through it without effort while also being drawn to each subsequent moment, beat, and blow. By the end, I must be breathless. It should feel like I’ve run a heart-pounding race, and, to make that work, the words need to disappear because letting them have the presence they often want will make the scene stumble when it should soar.

Image courtesy of Orbit Books

Was there any one scene that you were really looking forward to writing in The Fires of Vengeance? (Avoiding spoilers, of course)

I’ve been waiting to write the battle of the two queens for years now. Before I’d written the first word of this series, I’d already seen most of it in my head.

The magic in the world you’ve created in The Burning has strong ties to a place called Isihogo, an underworld filled with demons of a million different deadly varieties. Can you talk a little about the origins for this concept, and all the terrifying demons you’ve created?

All power has a cost. I really believe that, and I think our world shows that to be true. Now, some costs are easily paid, even if the price is high, because a cost is relative to the person being asked to pay it. It’s relative to their resources, worldview, personality, ethics, morality, everything. Well, I had troubling questions about the cost of power, and Isihogo, its Goddesses, Gods, and demons; they’re one form of answer.

Aside from all the action scenes, deeply fleshed out characters, and amazing world-building, one other aspect of both The Rage of Dragons and The Fires of Vengeance that really stands out is your knack for creating believable, slow-burn romances that you can’t help but root for. Are there any fictional romances that inspired you, or that you tried to learn from when you approached writing them yourself?

You made me smile because I wish I was a fraction as talented at expressing what I want to express in terms of love as the myriad of blindingly brilliant romance authors that make falling in love look dangerous, wonderful, and perfectly necessary. I sit in awe and admiration of their abilities to present the emotions, needs, and wants that so many of us have to love and be loved as convincingly, insightfully, and refreshingly as they do time and time again. It’s with good reason that romance has the most readers and is the backbone of all publishing.

Also, I’m fascinated by love and it’s always been interesting to me how much more comfortable I am with violence and its depiction than I am with love and its depiction. I’d like to think I know this much, if it ever comes down to it, love and not violence will save humanity, and since writing is the best way that I have to examine and explore the human condition, love will always play some part in my writing.

The Burning has a strict caste system. As I read The Fires of Vengeance, I was struck repeatedly by how many powerful lines you had written that, while totally relevant in-story to the Omehi and their societal struggles, also managed to toe the line between timeliness and timelessness for our own world. What has it been like to go through the production cycle on this book with everything that’s going on in the world right now?

To answer this, let me just say that I’m writing Book 3 right now, and it feels like I’m being deluged by a firehose of information that I’m trying to synthesize and render down to some essential elements that hold true to me. I want very much to write truth — not objectively but as I can best currently see and understand it — and it’s important to me to work as hard as I can to see the things I’m conceiving of as truth as clearly as possible because what I see today may not be what I see tomorrow, and that’s okay, so long as I’m careful enough in my explication of what I see today to make it hold some kind of value that can at least survive first contact with the broader understanding that often comes with more experience and more time for thought. Ugh, let me try and say that another way: writing this kind of series right now, with all its undertones, feels like I’m surfing a tsunami on a piece of driftwood.

When you first announced you were releasing The Rage of Dragons with Orbit Books, it was as part of a four-book deal. But as Tolkien said, sometimes the tale grows in the telling. Do you still think you’ll be finishing The Burning in four books? And if so, how does it feel to be nearing the halfway point in the series?

Hah! Great question, and sometimes I do feel the story trying to grow beyond the constraints of its intended structure. However, I’m a hardcore structuralist and the story was always intended to be told in four parts. So, though it would be possible to go beyond four, I’m determined to maintain the balance I found and loved in my initial four-part outline.

Finishing on a lighter note…if you were going to battle, and could recruit three fictional characters to fight alongside you in your scale, who would you choose?

I like your style! And, to make it extra ‘theme-ly + time-ly,’ I’ll only pick folks introduced to us within the last 10 years who *also* use swords as their primary weapons.

Here we go:

1. Yerin Arelius from Will Wight’s Cradle Series;

2. Takashi Matsuda from M.L. Wang’s The Sword of Kaigen; and

3. Vaelin Al Sorna from Anthony Ryan’s Blood Song.

The Fires of Vengeance hits shelves this Tuesday, November 10th.

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