I call myself a writer – and have for a long time. It all started when I had, however temporarily, run out of stories I wanted to read. So I penned everything from a Western that went nowhere to a couple of contemporary novels that will never see the light of day. And then I discovered Fantasy. Not the elves-and-fairies-and-unicorns kind, though. I wanted my Fantasy gritty and tough. Fantasy Noir. With fallible characters. With broken characters. With ambiguous characters. With characters who don’t talk like a paladin out of a medieval storybook but like real people with a keen sense of the absurd and a penchant for foul language. So if you’re easily offended by irreverence, or triggered by graphic language and violence, let this be your warning.
Despite the fact that I tend to maim and torture my characters with wild abandon, just to see how they deal with it, I’m a wimp. A boring introvert with an interest in languages, Japanese swords, the martial arts, and a few more obscure niche pursuits. In other words, I’m not at all like my characters… well, maybe just a little. You know how it goes. You end up sprinkling little pieces of yourself all over the characters in your books and leave the curious reader guessing which ones are autobiographic and which ones are entirely made up. Or borrowed from people you either admire or detest, in which case writing them into a story can be, respectively, a great way of paying homage or an even greater way to get even.
If I had to name one trait that defines me, it’s curiosity. I want to know how things work. And I want to know what makes people tick – myself and others. I love exploring new countries, new environments, new foods, and new experiences. Fortunately, all of that curiosity dovetails nicely with my writing, and when you call it “research”, it even sounds respectable. I filter everything – from my daily life in a large city to traveling in Tibet, from being an eternal dabbler in the martial arts to cooking meals that would give some people pause – through the lens of my characters, who, not entirely surprisingly, tend to be a diverse and opinionated bunch.
Some of them also know what it’s like to be at home in two cultures, but not really belonging to either. Guess what? I’ve been living half my life in a country different from the one I was born in. Different continent, too. And different languages. Which, as a translator by trade, is something that keeps me busy on a daily basis.