Hi Brandon, thanks for agreeing to do this interview. What made you decide to become a writer and who were your influences?
I decided to become a writer when I was fourteen. Before then I hadn’t been a big reader. A lot of kids, young boys, stop reading about the fourth grade age. It’s apparently a trouble time. I didn’t know that, but I stopped reading about that age. Fourth, fifth, sixth grade not a big reader. Seventh grade, not a big reader.
Eighth grade, I had a really wonderful English teacher who got a fantasy novel into my hands. And before then I just thought books were boring. Someone had tried to give me Tolkien, but Tolkien was just too hard for me. She gave me Barbara Hambly’s Dragonsbane , which I loved. Fell in love with fantasy books, discovered David Eddings, Terry Brooks over the summer. This is before Wheel of Time was even out.
Just fell in love with reading and decided that this is what I wanted to do for a living. Didn’t really look back since then. Started my first book when I was fifteen. It was dreadful. But just kept writing and writing and writing. A lot of my influences were the Wheel of Time books, once they came out. Absolutely loved them. I would often study them, read them, try and see what is Robert Jordan doing here. I remember specifically looking at passages and saying: “Okay, what’s he doing? What’s making this work?”
A lot of my other influences, I’d say, were Melanie Rawn. And Barbara Hambly. And Annie McCaffrey would be some of my big influences. I liked the sort of hybrid fantasy/science fictions. Not the sort where a fantasy world meets a science fiction world, don’t enjoy those as much. What I’m talking about is a fantasy book that treats its magic like a science. I loved, for instance, Melanie Rawn’s magic system. Really worked for me. When I discovered David Farland, his magic system really worked for me. I loved the Runelords magic, those things really sort of jump out and sing to me. And I knew when I got published—if I got published some day—that’s what I wanted to do.
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