A couple of weeks ago I checked my inbox and found an email from Dan offering a pdf of Triumff. Once I calmed down and stopped running round the room telling the cats that Dan had emailed me (I may have been a bit excited) I emailed back to say say i'd already downloaded it from Angry Robot, was a couple of days from reviewing it and while I had him....
So here we are, he was an absolute joy to talk to and is awesomely busy. I am plotting to grab him for a face to face when he's next in the area but in the mean time enjoy.
HR - "For people who aren't familiar with your previous work can you give us a bit of a potted history of your writing career so far?"I've been a freelance writer for over twenty years, much of which time has been spent writing comics. I've written just about everything you can think of, comic wise, from very young things like Ghostbusters and Wallace and Gromit to grown up stuff like the Punisher and The Authority. I still do write comics: I'm a regular contributor to 2000AD (on strips that I've created for them like Kingdom and Sinister Dexter) and in the US, I'm currently exclusive to Marvel, working on their 'cosmic' books like Nova, Guardians of the Galaxy and War of Kings.
I love comics, but I also wanted to write novels too, and just over a decade ago, Black Library (the publishing wing of Games Workshop), asked me if I'd like to write some novels based in their universes. Thirty six odd novels later (most for BL, but there's also a Doctor Who, a Torchwood and a Primeval in there too), I've had huge success with the Gaunt's Ghost series (the latest book, Blood Pact, is out right now), The Inquisitor trilogies (Eisenhorn and Ravenor), The Horus Heresy cycle and lots of other Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 projects.
HR - Blimey, you are busy... so comics, novels in pre set universes and now Triumff, not to mention all the different styles and age ranges. You are obviously pretty adaptable, but what are the particular challenges and pleasures of moving between medium, genre, age group and working with so many different sets of requirements? And was working on Triumff different again?I've always enjoyed moving from one thing to another, as it seems to keep my imagination quite fresh. If I stay on one thing for too long, I feel like I'm getting bogged down. So Care Bears can come as light relief from the Punisher, for example, although it has been known to be the other way around. Hopping between genres and licenses etc notwithstanding, it's also a real pleasure to immerse yourself in a world or universe. Some suit better than others, and the Warhammer 40K galaxy (where most things are on fire and everyone's got a headache) seems to offer me continuing inspiration and imaginative elbow room. "Triumff" though, "Triumff" is a very singular thing. I may be borrowing, magpie like, from all sorts of historic and quasi-historic sources in order to build up a world that feels recognisable, but the bottom line is I control the horizontal and I control the vertical. I don't have to ring anybody up and ask them for their permission to do anything. I don't have to consult a style guide to check that I'm not trampling the intellectual property. There's something enormously liberating and exciting about that, and I've really enjoyed the opportunities it's given me. But, as someone once say, "With great power comes great responsibility". In Triumff's world I may be God, and I may enjoy all the perks and benefits of being a patriarchal monotheistic deity, but I have the greater than usual responsibility of making sure that my world is consistent and obeys its own laws. Which sometimes means you have to be strong enough to self-police out an idea that simply doesn't fit, even if it is lovely.
HR - so were you more personally invested in Triumff than your other books? Was the editing process harder because there were no pre established rules?I was more personally invested in as much as it was my project and personal ... but I wouldn't want to suggest that I don't get extremely personally invested with my other work. That's the only way to do a decent job. Triumff was something I really wanted to write, and get right, and I was the chief arbiter of it's 'right-ness' (golly, words really ARE my power), so this time the buck was stopping with me. No pressure, then.
HR - So how long have you been wanting to write Triumff and how did you end up
doing it in the end? I've been writing freelance for over twenty years, and the first decade of that was pretty much exclusively comics. I wanted to write other things, novels especially (I fitted in the odd kid's book), but comics is what I did, what I loved (and still do), and when you're working in one form it tends to breed more work in that place rather take you off at a tangent. ANYWAY... Right back then, writing comics for living, I decided to see if I could sustain a longer piece of writing, you know, just to see if I could, and wrote a novel in what might be laughingly refered to as my spare time. I finished it, and I was happy with it, but it was just an exercise and I never sold or (or intend to sell it). Having written one, I wrote another... again, just for me and just for fun. This was Triumff (in an original, crude form). Triumff as an idea had been in my had since I'd started working at Marvel, and I'd even taken some faltering steps towards turning it into a comic. When that didn't go anywhere, I wrote it as a novel, just for me and, again, made virtually no effort to sell it or expand my published output beyond comics. After that, through the nineties, I started, experimentally (and in some cases, finished) at least half a dozen more novels... once again, just for me, just as experiments, just something in my free time. I suppose some of them might yet see the light of day now Triumff has broken open the crypt.
In the later ninetie s, I started working for Games Workshop/Black Library, who hired me as a comic writer to begin with. They offered me the opportunity to write novels, which I seized (some one was actually going to commission me to write long fiction!) and didn't really look back. I've written over thirty novels for them alone in the noughties, and I love doing them, and I deeply appreciate the opportunities BL has afforded me (to write for a living, to develop my skills, to find an audience). When Angry Robot asked me to write for them, I thought it was a chance to get out of my head some of the things that had been lurking there which had never found an outlet in Black Library work, for IP reasons. Triumff, as the oldest, the most sedimentary, was the first. I dug out the old manuscript and used it as a springboard to produce the published novel. It was a joyful, cathartic experience, allowing me to take a bunch of ideas that had been buzzing in my head for too long and deliver them with an ability that had benefited from experience. It is both very old and very new.
HR - That almost sounds as thought there is quite a stash of Dan Abnett novel's tucked away somewhere waiting to be polished and published? Is that the case and either way what's next for you?One or two, but frankly I've had even better ideas since then. Next for me: A Horus heresy novel for BL Prospero Burns, which I'm writing furoiously now, followed by my second book for AR, which is a piece of extremely hard combat SF called Embedded. Then the next Gaunt. Plus tons of comics, of course.
HR - I'm still reeling from just how busy you are. But moving away from your own writing for a moment. Are there any books or authors you find yourself recommending over again to people? Also, what is a good place for people to start with the Black Library? Those shelves can be pretty unnerving if you don't know the worlds already.I am constantly recommending Kelly Link's work, which I love. When I
read genre fiction, it tends to be people like Charlie Stross, Iain M
Banks, Greg Bear and Ted Chiang, or old favourites like Jack Vance,
John Wyndham, Ray Bradbury, Frank Herbert, Lovecraft, Burroughs,...
but I spend the majority of my reading time on non-genre or
non-fiction, mainly for a change of pace and a different flavour. In
the last few weeks I've read a Harlan Coban, a George Pelecanos (The
Night Gardener, great!), a Hilary Mantell (Beyond Black, hugely
recommended) and a book on the history of grimoires (like you do). I
find reading is like fuel. I need to put words in to get words out.
The Black Library's back catalogue can be daunting. I know the editors
usually recommend my first Gaunt's Ghosts book (First and Only) to
newbies as an easy jump-on point, but I think you can get into things
very nicely with Graham McNeill's fab Ultramarine series, which is
great written space marine action all the way, and brings you into the
core of the Warhammer 40K Universe and the mainstay of its IP.
HR - Black Library is the publishing arm of a larger, very absorbing world of table top gaming, are you a gamer and if so do you prefer the traditional or the future versions? Do you think being a Warhammer gamer or not affects your view of the universe?I was a keen RPGer (espe
cially D&D, Call of Cthulhu and Traveller) in the 80's
and 90's and very aware of GW's stuff as it developed. I've also played all the
various Warhammer/Warhammer 40K variants one way or another, to make sure I
understand them. My local GW store in maidstone will always set up a
demonstration game if I need to find out how something plays. I don't have time
to play any of them on a regular basis, because if I did, I'd never get any work
done, but from a creative standpoint, understanding the game is absolutely
vital. For the record, I prefer Warhammer 40K, because it's the more original of
the two in its setting and background.
HR - I'm assuming then that spare time is a rare and precious commodity so what do you do with it when you find some?I read a lot and I watch an awful lot of movies. I cook (every one in our house - me and my wife and the kids - takes a turn cooking). I visit galleries and museums. I'm learning to ballroom dance (it's a long story).
HR - Ballroom dancing? We have plenty of time if you want to share?My wife did ballroom dancing as a kid, her father too (not together, obviously, because of the height difference). When the whole Strictly thing happened on TV, my youngest daughter was quite inspired and started taking classes. She's great at it, loves it, and is now part of a formation team that competes at Blackpool and elsewhere. Anyway, every time we watched Strictly, my wife would comment on how much she used to enjoy dancing, and how good I might be if only I gave it a try, but never did anything about it. So my daughter booked us lessons without asking us, to force us to do something about it rather than just talking about it every week! It turned out I had some ability and, a year or more later, we're still (voluntarily) having lessons.
HR - Ok, one last suitably frivolous question to round things off (I could happily go on for another week but I am still planning on a face to face sometime soon). Since you have written for a number of comics, who is your all time favourite comic book character and why?My all time favourite character is probably more than one character! I've always loved Iron Man, because he is one of the more technologically credible, least fanciful mainstream characters. And I love the high cosmic fun of characters like Adam Warlock, characters that I'm getting to write now, but adored when I was a kid and I was reading Jim Starlin's superb stories.
HR - Thanks again for your time Dan it's been a huge pleasure and I look forward to doing this over a beer sometime.Thanks Adele, it's been great fun talking to you.
