Hi all, I’m pleased to present a brand new interview – with fantasy author Scott Palmer. Scott is writing his Last Ballad series (1 novella and 1 full novel already released with book 2 coming soon) which you can find out more about below.
This interview has made me really enthusiastic about reading Scott’s work and I’m sure you’ll agree his passion and dedication shines through. Enjoy!
Hi Scott and welcome to Spells & Spaceships! I hope you’re doing well?
Hey, Alex, thanks for putting this together! I’m doing fantastic.
Your author website and book covers look really polished and eye-catching. How important are first impressions as a self published author?
Well thank you for that, I appreciate the kind words! I have set up everything about the Last Ballad Series in an attempt to earn the trust of potential readers. Starting a new series by a new author is something that most people don’t do very often, maybe a couple of times a year, even if they are avid readers, so the impression that any person has upon first seeing your author brand is absolutely crucial. I think it’s important to build that trust from the ground up though.
So, by taking the time to make my book the absolute best representation of what I was capable of as an artist and a human, and by pouring my heart and soul into the writing and editing process, I had the confidence that the story of the Last Ballad was worth sharing. That confidence served as the base of my attempt at earning readers’ trust. With that confidence I had firm ground to stand on, so I was able to go into my search for a cover with the mindset that my cover was going to be the gateway to the world I’ve created, it wasn’t going to be an attempt at tricking the reader into buying anything on impulse but simply a window into what the true value was—the story.
I think that as an indie author trying to build a brand and earn the trust of new readers, everything about your brand should be based around the story. That gives your work a kind of blanket theme that people can easily grasp onto, or vice versa, it tells them it’s probably not something they’d like and you avoid bad reviews. By creating that feeling of a window, the reader feels like they know what to expect when they do get to your work, and if your work matches their expectations, (even partially, because any good story should have some aura of unpredictability) or, to put it in other words, if your work matches the readers first impression, then the overall effect is major catharsis and a feeling that every reader longs for. It’s a feeling that keeps us coming back, and I say that as a reader myself—I know what I want as a fantasy lover and I try to deliver that.
by Robert Trotea
Everything starts from the ground up, and your story is the base that everything else stands upon. You could have the best looking website and the most expensive cover, but if your story falls short then none of it mattered anyway.
You say your story started with a map. Can you tell us a little about this map? Why do you think fantasy maps have such a long-standing allure with readers?
About ten years ago I was playing Skyrim and had created elaborate backstories for a few different characters. I wrote them all down and got really creative with it. As I was role playing these backstories in the game I was constantly frustrated at the restrictions that the pre-created world of Skyrim put on my own creativity. I wanted different places for my characters to come from. I wanted different quests and different character arcs for them to experience. It was around then that I saw my little brother playing Minecraft. He was riding a horse through all of the different biomes and my imagination went wild. Suddenly, I saw a way to expand this world I had in mind beyond the mountains of Skyrim.
I was working full time, and playing in a band in the evenings and on weekends. So I had a very limited amount of time to play video games, but the time I did have I started creating a world. First, I drew a small and crappy map. It had a couple of kingdoms, Mal Hallow being the mountainous Celtic inspired kingdom, and Esher being the desert, Dorne/Egypt inspired kingdom. At this time, because the Minecraft map had a big body of water, I added Lovas, the roman-esque kingdom that was beyond the Old Sea. For a couple of years I played on this Minecraft world, building castles and roads and villages and cities, slowly building out a map and naming things and places and making notes of the back stories and lore.
Then 2020 came along and I suddenly had a bit more time. I played a lot of Minecraft in those first few weeks of March and soon found that, even with more time, I was completely unfulfilled and totally restricted by the limits of the game. A friend of mine who writes movies for a living told me that I should ditch the video game and try to write it all down in a story. I didn’t think he was crazy, in fact I thought he was a genius, and I immediately started thinking of how I could do that. I studied my favourite worlds, Middle Earth, and Westeros, and The Circle of The World, and I studied our own world and its history and mythology and I soon had hundreds of pages of notes and thousands of years of history for the world of the Remembered Lands. I went to the dollar store and bought a large bristle board where I drew the first two continents of the Remembered Lands, Ardura, and Edura, and I placed towns and cities in appropriate places based on research of where and how towns and cities were built and developed in our own world. I came up with the economy and how trade would function, I came up with the many different ruling structures and named the many different ruling families, and I made sure to get the distances right so that the geography of the world, and your experience as a reader moving through it, felt as real as possible.
Then I wrote A Memory of Song and lived happily ever after—NOT. Now that I had a fully functioning world, I tried to write in it. I wrote for two years before I wrote the first chapter of A Memory of Song, and those were two years of struggling and learning. The stories I produced were falling short of what I wanted. They felt small and stunted and I was struggling to get the epic feeling that I longed for. So I went back to the drawing board, while still working on completing my second attempt at a novel. I studied the Silmarillion this time, and the World of Ice and Fire. I read Herodotus and Hesiod, Beowulf and the Tain, Morte D’Arthur and the Prose Edda. I studied world mythology deeply and on a level I never had before. Suddenly it all came together and I understood what I was doing wrong.
With much practice at writing and worldbuilding now, and a much deeper understanding of our own world’s history and mythology, I started A Memory of Song, which tells the story of a world in which the elements have died, and our heroes fight on behalf of Nature to save Her. It’s a sprawling epic based in an earth sized world filled with history and lore and abundant with cultures and fantasy creatures of many kinds.
I think maps have such an allure to the fantasy reader because they, much like the cover, are a window into your world. A map tells a story that’s within your story—it tells the reader that they have permission to be somewhere else for a while, it tells them that everything here may not be like it is at home. It says: I’m close, I’m familiar, you can recognize the shape of land masses and you’ve seen rivers and mountains and forests so you’re safe here. It stems off the first question regarding first impressions—a map gives the reader a certain expectation, and this can either be a good or bad thing. When I see a map as a reader I expect that I’ll be following the characters along and we’ll be moving through this map—I’ve been given a map because I will need it. So, as an author, I treat my readers in the same way. I’m saying, here is a map because you may need it on this journey. We’re moving around a lot, names of places are said and the characters know where they are so it’s up to the reader to look at the map if they want to really dive in and gain a deeper understanding of the story and the world it’s taking place in.
If you’re given a map and the story just doesn’t live up to it, or you find that the map doesn’t match the narrative of the story, it can be a very big red flag, and that hard earned trust can be broken easily.
Maps can be one of the most alluring things about your first impression package, and they can serve as an everlasting base to stand upon as you work your way through a long series (imagine the Wheel of Time without a map). A good map becomes an indispensable character, (in the early days of LOTR, they sold more posters of the map of Middle Earth than of any single character besides Gandalf. The world itself had become a character, and one that people wanted to return to.) but if your map isn’t intimately tied to the story itself, and if it doesn’t match the narrative exactly, it could cause a lot of readers to lose trust.
I like what you’ve done with your series titles; the series being The Last Ballad and each novel being a different verse. How many verses are planned?
Thank you! The Last Ballad Series is planned to have Four Verses and three Prequel Novellas. The Novellas will come out in between each verse and expand on certain events vaguely discussed in the main series. The Novella’s are written in a way that you can read the four main books without them, however you will gain major insights and background knowledge that could increase your overall reading experience.
The Second Verse is set for release in June of 2025, and the second novella won’t be far behind coming near the end of 2025. I’ll follow up with the same pattern, releasing the Third Verse, then the third novella, and then finish the series off with the Final Verse.
The three prequel novellas will make the reader privy to three major historical events that have impacted the present world. They will expand on many of the important people and groups which carried on to affect current events.
My hope is to give the effect of the Silmarillion, but to do it in narrative form, and release the story in a way that the first readers of this series will have a chance to experience the entire story instead of just hearing about past events from the mouths of my characters—I will put them right there, like a time machine. It is also a technique often used in myth—to tell stories within stories. The novella’s are stories that exist within the main series that I’ve simply expanded into prose to put you in the head of a person who experienced these stories first hand. My hope is that the overall experience of reading the Last Ballad is a well rounded one. I hope to give you many of the puzzle pieces so when you’re finished you can look back and make sense of everything.
In reviews of your work, your world-building has received high praise. How do you juggle achieving that layered and rich world building while keeping the plot on track?
The idea is that in my first draft I’m focused on getting the plot down. I write the plot in a way that the characters drive the story, so I largely need to be in their heads as I’m writing the first draft to ensure the decisions they make feel true and that the results of those decisions are what is driving everything forward—even the worldbuilding.
So, in writing the first draft in the heads of the characters I’m allowing myself to go down rabbit holes of worldbuilding as they see things and arrive at new places. I’m writing about things they know, and stories they may have heard, songs they like and the stories behind them. I’m giving stories of lore, heroes they look up to, past kings and queens. I’m allowing everything to come naturally as my characters walk through the world and move towards their goals. This gives the reader the feeling of discovery—they are following the plot and these characters and the world is being revealed to them as they progress deeper into the story.
There are also worldbuilding elements that are a part of the plot, and to fit those in I used a layered approach. So I would reveal a small piece of the magic system and then carry on with the plot, then reveal a bit more until the reader was able to grasp what was going on. This has kind of become known as the Malazan method. Where you just throw the reader into a new world without any knowledge and just slowly reveal things as the story unfolds. I think that just adds to that feeling of discovery I mentioned above. It really makes your reading experience feel like an adventure in my opinion, and that is exactly the feeling I wanted people to have as they read this first book.
In depth and well imagined fantasy worlds seem to bring a sort of escapist comfort and excitement to readers. Why do you think fantasy has such a power to do this?
The power comes from the ability to make a person feel like a child again. The feeling of discovery, adventuring into the unknown, magic. The incredible feeling of using your imagination, and living in the wonders it is able to craft with just a little guidance from the author.
When a person reads a book, the world that is crafted in their own minds becomes theirs and no one else’s. It’s a world that is conjured by a combination of the author’s words and the reader’s imagination. Every single reader will have a different outcome, even if some are very similar, but no two combinations will ever be the same. And that, I think, is why fantasy worlds are so comfortable—they literally become the reader’s own world.
By Robert Trotea
There is also a bit of a commitment factor. Diving into a new epic fantasy series isn’t something to take lightly. It will take a lot of your time to get through, and I believe that when a person commits a certain amount of time and energy to a thing, they have a deeper connection. If you’ve taken the time to learn the names of places, people, animals, weapons, gods, etc., and spent the time reading about the history of a place and hearing the stories of the generations of people who have lived there, you are going to feel committed. Then when you sit down to read you really get the feeling of escaping to a familiar place. A place that you’ve taken the time to understand and warm up to—a place where you know the people and they even seem to know you.
If you could read any book or series again completely fresh, which one would you like to experience all over again?
I have said it a hundred times on record already and I’ll say it again now, A Song of Ice and Fire is my absolute favourite piece of literature or entertainment in general. Reading those books changed everything for me. The only thing I regret is how fast I went through them. I wish I had taken my time and basqued in the beauty of the prose and lingered in Winterfell with the family all together for a little longer.
I’ve always been a huge fan of classic literature. I love the language that the authors use. I love reading lines from Steinbeck, or Hemmingway, or Faulkner just to hear the cadence of it. I am completely fascinated by the fact that words can be so beautiful. So when I read A Game of Thrones for the first time and realized that the author was using language on the level of the absolute best authors of all time and doing it with a FANTASY book, I couldn’t believe it. I had read The Rings trilogy and the Hobbit, and Tolkien’s language is, of course, beautiful, but it is aged—it feels old and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it makes for a slower reading experience at times. Which, again, I love, and that had kind of been what I had come to expect from fantasy.
The modern-esque narrative of Game of Thrones (especially Tyrion—I couldn’t believe how modern his language and thoughts were) completely flipped the genre on its head. George crafted a fantasy world and managed to remove nearly all of the magic. There were no elves or trolls, the only dwarf is a human with dwarfism, and the sorcerers and dragons are stories from the past—hypothetical. After dissecting the series for many years now, I can see what George did to achieve this. He took the realism he was going for to the maximum, and placed himself in the heads of people from the middle ages. In those times, these stories which we now call fairy tales, were actually tales of warning. People feared things in the woods and things in the night. They feared the big bad wolf and the undead. They feared withcraft and sorcery and they feared the dragons from King Arthur’s time would rise from the mountains again. The world was mysterious and unknown, and the word we have developed to describe things that are completely unexplainable is magic. George managed to trick us into feeling at home, where magic only appears in fairy tales. He sucks us into this world of violence and political intrigue with the promise of drama, and when we’re least expecting it, he hits us with magic. Real magic. And the reason it hits so hard is exactly because of how little he uses it. As the series nears the end, the magic starts to awaken. I absolutely loved that idea. I loved it so much I used a similar idea of magic sleeping and waking—of magic being a living thing that rises and falls like the sun but on a much longer celestial journey.
I could literally ramble about this series forever, but I would always love to have that experience of both reading and watching the series for the first time again.
What is the plan for you as a writer over the next few years, and is there anything on the horizon we can look forward to?
I have a ton of plans for the future. First things first I will be finishing the Last Ballad Series in entirety before moving on to anything else. So, as I said, you can expect three more full length books of 200k words or more, and two more novellas of around 30-50k words each. Not only that, but as the books come out I will be releasing exclusive signed and numbered editions through the Broken Binding that will feature illustrations not included in the normal print versions. These are kind of like mini special editions, but it gives the readers who like to collect that sort of thing something special to put on their shelf.
By Robert Trotea
My schedule looks something like this:
June 2024 – A Chorus of War: Second Verse of the Last Ballad (Completed at 210k words)
December 2025 – Second Novella (outlined at 40k words)
June 2025 – Third Verse of the Last Ballad (outlined at 290k words)
December 2026 – Third Novella
September 2027 – Final Verse of the Last Ballad
December 2027 – The World of the Last Ballad (Book of Castles, Lore, and More)
I have all of the titles ready, and all of the future covers are planned and in the works! After the Last Ballad series is complete I have three stand alone novels I would love to write in the same world. Similar to what Joe Abercrombie did with his world, I have three stories I would love to tell inspired by my own favourite stories.
After that I would love to create another world and go through the process of that again.
Thankyou to Scott for some really interesting and eye opening answers!
About Scott
Scott Palmer was born in London, Ontario, Canada, where he lives with his wife, daughter, and two cats, and they conjure up magic (love and happiness) daily. His whole life has been a journey of collecting stories and stowing them like a library of experiences.
Growing up in Middle Earth, Kanto, and Hyrule, before moving to darker worlds like Westeros, The Circle of The World, and The Randlands provided a sturdy foundation for Scott’s imagination to grow upon. He travelled to those other worlds and walked, and fought, and bled with the people that lived there. It was somewhere in those pages that he fell in love with the art of storytelling.
Since taking those first steps out of reality, Scott has immersed himself in creating his own world. A place that could transport readers somewhere they could only dream of. A place of magic, and love, forgotten lore, and long history.
Scott started writing seriously in 2020 and now he cannot stop.
Spells and Spaceships 