On November 24, the Friends of the Orange County Public Library will host its first ever Hillsborough Local Author Book Fair! You can read more about the event here. Leading up, we’ll be posting short interviews with some of our author guests. Today we feature James Maxey!
Tell us about your latest work.
Currently I’m working on a fantasy novel called Dragonsgate, but for much of the fall I’ve been focused on bringing my existing novels out as Audiobooks. In the last three months I’ve had Witchbreaker, Cinder, and Nobody Gets the Girl go live on Audible, and Dragonseed and Burn Baby Burn are now in production.
I used to be dismissive of audiobooks, viewing it as somehow less pure than reading a printed book. Then I took a job that had a long commute and started listening to audiobooks as I drove and came to really appreciate how much the music of the language can really emerge when spoken in a way that might pass without notice in a silent reading. As an author, listening to someone else read your novel out loud is a great way to silence the voice in your head and experience your own work from a fresh perspective. Of my fantasy novels, I used to feel like Witchbreaker was my problem child, with an awkward, talky opening scene and an ending that didn’t quite tie up every loose end to my satisfaction. But listening to it as read by Jake Urry, the central story is perhaps one of the most emotionally resonant tales I’ve ever written. Sorrow Stern is the daughter of a judge who hung his own mother for being a witch. Sorrow ran away from home determined to learn witchcraft and seek revenge on her father and the cruel church and king that he served. Sorrow is unable to forgive and forget, and her anger and craving for justice makes her the most driven protagonist I’ve ever written, walking a fine line between heroism and villainy. She’s committed mind, body, and soul to fighting the status quo of the world and utterly isolated because most people she meets can’t and don’t share her passion. Few even waste time considering her words, dismissing her as crazy. I wrote this book years ago, but listening to it I couldn’t help but recognize how much it captures some of the current cultural trends about fighting to change the world in meaningful ways. Of course, in the real world people engage in that fight with tweets and picket signs, and in Sorrow’s magical universe she’s stealing powers from dragons and reducing people to skeletons with her necromancy. The first path is probably more effective in the long term, but the second path makes for exciting reading! And listening! You can pick up the audiobook here!
What one sentence bit of advice about writing do you most wish you’d listened to before launching into your first book?
The worst novel you put on paper is more readable than the best novel you keep in your head.
If we were to tweet one sentence from one of your books, which sentence would you choose?
“I sometimes think that what the world accepts as sanity is merely the capacity to grow numb to outrage.”
Gale Romer to Sorrow Stern in Witchbreaker
For more information about James and his writing, check out his website!
