Interviews

June 2018 - Interview with InkSorcery

 Hullo everyone, elveloy here with inksorcery author of "The Tendrils of Fate," @Adultfiction' s Book of the Month for June.

Elveloy: Thank you for coming in today. To begin with, I see that you are actually two people, Narcisse Navarre and Marzio Ombra. Can you tell me how that came about?

Marzio: In the 'real' world, Narcisse and I are best friends. We met over ten years ago during a game of Dungeons and Dragons and hit it off right away. We share a love of roleplaying, writing, and creativity (not to omit gardening). When I was younger, I wrote short stories and dabbled in poetry. Once I got married, I let writing fall by the wayside. All credit goes to Narcisse for rekindling that old flame. We had been roleplaying some characters in World of Warcraft. We created some detailed backstories and histories for the characters. While fun, it was also frustrating because, in many ways, we were limited by the game's sandbox.

Narcisse suggested that we would be better off writing our own stories set in our own worlds. She was right. We quit gaming and started writing our first novel. We had no idea what we were in for! Three years later, we had hundreds of pages and no cohesive book. Writing a book is hard, writing with a coauthor doubles everything, both good and bad.

Elveloy: I can imagine!

Narcisse: For about four years Marzio and I toiled on a series of books called The Soulbinder's Covenant which follows characters who make cameos in The Tendrils of Fate, but the project never came together. At the time, it didn't occur to us to try to shift the timeline of the story or approach it from a different angle. In those early days, we lacked experience and wisdom. We felt like five-year-olds with survival kits in the middle of the woods. We had all the tools to make fire, but no idea how to strike a spark. Our word counts were painfully low and we spent a lot of time staring blankly at the screen.

Luckily, in the summer of 2012, I wound up in Turks and Caicos. I'm Cuban, and the Caribbean has a way of unknotting the kinks left behind by the harried pace of New York City life. I arrived in Providenciales on a sunny day and made our way to a quiet resort facing the ocean. For about four days I didn't touch electronic devices. My routine included beach, beach and more beach. My husband and I took walks and snorkeled our days away. It was blissful.

One night, after waking from a lucid dream, a story began to gnaw at the back of my mind. It was abstract at first, a series of moonlit rooftops stretching as far as the eye could see. Darkness. Shadows. An assassin. But what was he doing? What was he after?

I got up, grabbed my laptop, and began to write. By the time 4 AM rolled around I had 3000 words and the beginning of what would become The Tendrils of Fate. During the next five days, the story grew and grew. I sent Marzio my updates through email every night. He was excited that I was writing again and it wasn't long before he got involved in the process. When I returned from vacation, Marzio and I went to our usual spot to brainstorm––the Russian bathhouse. Apropos, considering this new story was influenced by water. In the hot tub, we began talking about the plot. As fate would have it, that's where our villains were born!

Marzio: It took us a while to find our groove and our voice. There were tears, shouting, and a lot of frustration. If our friendship weren't as strong as it is, the stress of collaborating would have killed it dead. After several years of head banging (no, not the heavy metal kind), writing did get easier. The years we had spent working on The Soulbinder's Covenant, weren't a wasted. At the end of that process we had an enormous grimoire of world building information. Cities, nations, religions, languages, you name it!