1.- Could you introduce yourself to Jamreads’ readers?
Hello, I’m Devin Madson, a fantasy and romance author from Australia. I live in the middle of nowhere with only kangaroos for neighbours, I work obsessively, and contrary to the requirements of my profession, have no cats and don’t drink coffee. But I will murder for green tea.

2.- How did you start writing?
I am one of those authors with the boring story of having written all my life and always having wanted to be an author. I still have the first book I wrote when I was 6 or 7 years old, a depressing story about a small Christmas tree whose mother gets cut down and taken away and the other trees laugh at him when he cries. Apparently, I’ve always had a thing for torturing characters… Always writing turned into writing epic fantasy series in my late teens after reading The Belgariad by David Eddings and now here I am!

3.- Your writing career starts with The Vengeance Trilogy, whose prequel novella, In Shadows We Fall, won the Aurealis Award. How did this idea appear? What inspired you to create that world? Which book would you say was the most difficult?
I wrote the very first draft of what became The Vengeance Trilogy way back in 2007. The version I self-published starting in 2013 had changed a lot from that, but the original idea came from an annoyance at how simplistically the concept of empaths is often treated in media. Empaths are usually shown as being able to feel emotions in an almost detached way, occasionally with strange feelings of their own, while I felt that the experience would actually be overwhelming. And so, I set out to write about empaths. This was also the first time I wrote about the soul-based magic system I’d long been developing and went on to use again in the sequel series, The Reborn Empire. It was a lot of fun writing what was essentially three generations of a family, with the novella, In Shadows We Fall, focussing on Hana’s mother, and The Reborn Empire on her daughter.
The hardest book of that series to write was the third, The Grave at Storm’s End, because my life was totally upended after book two. I had moved country twice, gotten divorced, had two small children to solo parent and a new life to put together, which made finishing the series an emotional struggle. I struggled to write the last book of the next series too because I got very sick between book three and four, so perhaps I’m actually just cursed.

4.- Why did you initially choose to self-publish your works?
Impatience and control, mostly. I’m very bad at waiting for things and the process to become traditionally published was long and complicated. It also involved a lot of pitching to agents, which felt like job applications and gave me anxiety, quite aside from the feeling (incorrect as it was) that I lived in entirely the wrong country to have any sort of real career. All that being the case, I decided to self-publish, which allowed me to choose my own art, editors, release dates etc and felt like a real, viable option to someone in my situation in a way that traditionally publishing, opaque as it is, never had.

5.- Your second series, The Reborn Empire, could be called the one that discovered you in the world. How it was the experience of the SPFBO 2018, where your novel, We Ride the Storm, reached finals? Could you tell us more about the process of getting picked for traditional publication?
That SPFBO year was very different from my first (SPFBO3) in which I was cut in the first round. I’d released We Ride the Storm a month or so beforehand and it had a little buzz happening through reddit’s r/fantasy board, which meant oddly going in with a strange sense that people expected it to do well and it was a threat, to the point where I actually had another author tell me privately that they needed to take me down. That meant that from the beginning it was far more stressful than it ought to have been. It was a lot of fun, too, though, and it was nice after getting cut in the first round the first time to reach the finals the second time.
Although in the end, it was rather overshadowed when Nivia Evans from Orbit contacted me quite early on. I thought it was a prank to begin with, because I had never hoped in even my wildest dreams of being contacted out of the blue by a traditional publisher. It almost didn’t happen though, because it was a follow-up email, checking in because I hadn’t responded to the first—an email I never got! I didn’t have an agent, was planning on soon bringing out book two in the series, and suddenly I was in talks with a traditional publisher. It took a while, because everything in trad-land is slow until it's not, but in the end they offered for seven books—the whole of The Reborn Empire as well as the prequel set, The Vengeance Trilogy. I’d been having trouble financing self-publishing and the money (though it wasn’t an enormous deal, just lots of books) was life changing to my struggling family, so I accepted. I couldn’t talk about it for ages, but it did mean that before SPFBO finished up that year, it was all signed and sealed.

6.- How was the process of writing the rest of the books of The Reborn Empire after your success with We Ride The Storm?
I was already writing the second book before the first came out and started getting interest, which is probably good because it meant I was able to keep to my plans rather than being swayed by other people’s thoughts, as I was still reading reviews at that point.
Once Orbit bought the series, I had to stop working on the later books and go back and do fresh edits on the first ones and a lot of rewriting of The Vengeance Trilogy—2019 and 2020 were full of endless edits and I think I barely moved from the keyboard while getting all five books done (the three Vengeance books as well as We Ride the Storm and We Lie With Death). All that work did mean that by the time I came to write We Cry for Blood (book 3), Nivia and I had built up an excellent rapport. That third book was the easiest and most joyful part of the whole experience, while We Dream of Gods (book 4) was AWFUL. I got PMDD in between the two, making that final book a huge struggle that took ages and I hated every moment of it. I am proud of the outcome now, but it was Not Fun At All at the time.

7.- Would you say your fiction is influenced by your Australian origin? In affirmative case, how?
I think the sorts of things people write are always somewhat influenced by their lived experience. In my case, beyond a tendency to make worlds that get colder when you go south and hotter when you go north, I think the biggest influence being Australian has on my writing is a tendency to write about people who are insiders and yet different. It’s something I’ve always felt about being Australian, that while we are part of the anglophone world, we’re also very far away and very different and function on a totally different time zone. Especially when the majority of the publishing industry is in the US and the UK, I’m often left with the feeling of belonging enough and yet never enough at the same time, and I’ve noticed it has somewhat influenced the sorts of characters and worlds I create.

8.- In August, your next book, Between Dragons and Their Wrath, will be published, starting a new series. How would you pitch it? How did the idea of this series evolved from its inception?
When I started thinking about a new series, I wanted to do something very different to my previous series, and something with interesting worldbuilding, but the way I tend to begin thinking about new projects is through its characters, relationships and themes. I wanted to explore the concept of family, of responsibility to the people one feels they belong to, wanted to think about capitalism and colonialism, but also different ways of seeing the same ideas. But I also wanted to write about queer people just existing and making bad decisions because no characters should have to be perfect.
So all in all I would pitch Between Dragons and Their Wrath as a book with deep themes underpinning messy queer relationships, political machinations, smut, creepy plant magic, snarky humour, glass-scaled dragons and desperation.

9.- Related to the last question, why do you think dragons are such a popular creature in fantasy?
I think dragons are, and always have been, a very popular part of fantasy literature because there is just something inherently cool about flying creatures you can ride and who spit fire. They fill a space for people who loved dinosaurs as kids, and there is such a cultural variety in dragons that a lot can be done with them. Historically, they seem to be something of a shared myth in many parts of the world, while more recently I think the sheer weight of amazing stories containing dragons helps to make their popularity self-perpetuating at this point.

10.- Recently, it was announced that you will be published a new book, The Gentleman and His Vowsmith, under the penname Rebecca Ide. Could you explain more about the reasons for choosing this new penname instead of sticking to Devin Madson?
It was a combination of reader expectations and contract stuff. While I have always written with a strong focus on characters and relationships, We Ride the Storm gave the Devin Madson name a grimdark patina that seemed unlikely to translate well into queer romance murder mysteries with regards to reader expectations. Also with contracts, Orbit have first option on Devin Madson books, and having a different pen name for the romance fantasy means less complication around Saga and Tor now having first option on Rebecca Ide books. I actually didn’t even consider having them be the same, but this might be because, for personal reasons, I want work that isn’t connected to the Devin Madson pen name.

11.- How would you say it is different writing this new book from the more classical oriented fantasy that is part of your bibliography?
The biggest difference is that my fantasy books are all part of a series, which is a totally different way of thinking about stories compared to these new books being standalones. The Gentleman and His Vowsmith is also a fantastical, gothic, murder mystery romance, so it required a complex, romance and mystery focussed plot structure unlike anything I’ve done with my standard fantasy novels. And it also only has a single third-person POV unlike my fantasy novels, which have three or four first-person POVs. All that being the case, I suppose I should say it’s very different to write, but although I have to switch a few things in my brain depending on what I’m working on, I actually find the whole process very much the same—get into the characters and let the words fly.

12.- At this point, do you feel nervous about these new releases?
Surprisingly, I haven’t felt nervous about new releases for a while now. I think between the fact that I don’t read my reviews and that in traditional publishing you finish working on a book around eight months before it comes out, I’ve always moved on to something else well before a book releases. I thought maybe Between Dragons and Their Wrath being a new series might bring the nerves back, but I think I’m also just too tired and overworked for nerves these days. I shall have to wait and see whether The Gentleman and His Vowsmith, being a whole new pen name, brings it back or not.

13.- What can we expect from Devin Madson in the future?
This is a big question, because I have SO MANY projects sitting on so many back burners that I must have a whole slew of stoves hidden away somewhere. As with The Gentleman and His Vowsmith, they aren’t all ‘Devin Madson’ projects, but of those that are… some continue stories I’ve already started or exist in worlds I’ve already written in, while others are whole new adventures. I’ve recently been thinking a lot about what it is that I love about my favourite stories and thinking about writing something that draws on them all, but it’s very much still at the throwing ideas around stage.