As an author nothing beats having a free-wheeling ramble through your work past and present with someone who appreciates it. So it was a real pleasure to have a chat with Luise Loges of Part-Time Heroes who was kind enough to interview me recently (Google will translate for you).
In this free-ranging interview we talk about Mon Dieu Cthulhu, the mysterious Mister Seraph, the blurred lines between fiction and RPGs, game design and writing, what’s next for me, and the challenges of writing about worlds poised between real history and cosmic horror.
Here’s a short excerpt to whet your appetite, but go and explore the full article and feel to message me on Facebook, Instagram or BluSky if you’d like any further questions (I’ve pretty much ditched X.com).
You can also mail Jollybigpublishing AT gmail DOT com if you’d like to speak directly!
Part-time heroes: Is that the reason your hero, Gaston Dubois is a French hussar? An enemy of the British in his time?
Houlihan: During Napoleon’s time, France was the driving force in Europe; all eyes were on France because it was so militarily successful.
As a writer, you have to evolve from time to time and try out new characters. If you always write the same thing, it can get very boring after a while. So part of the appeal was trying to think like a Frenchman living in that era.
Playing with the French language also has a humorous component for me: my French is pretty bad, so I constantly have Gaston making mistakes, mangling his English, which I hope come across as funny. Dubois is actually quite controversial. Some people really dislike the character and his way of speaking. They see him as a caricature of a Frenchman, but that’s not how he’s meant to be.
It’s also nice to have a French narrator because it allows for humorous critiques of Great Britain, or at least I hope so. It gives me the opportunity to poke fun at certain things I currently dislike about my homeland.