The Rainshadow Orphans: Naomi Ishiguro and Anime Inspired Fantasy

Hello and welcome to MythMakers. MythMakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for fantasy. My name is Julia Golding and today I'm doing one of my favourite things which is talking to a fellow author and we've got now the Ishi Guru with us who is just releasing the fantastic The Rain Shadow Orphans for those of you who are watching this, I'm holding up the beautiful British edition of this book and so welcome to MythMakers and Ermi. Hi thanks so much for having me it's great to be here. Hi everyone thanks for listening and watching if you're watching. It's super exciting when you get to that point where your book is just arrived through the post and you're looking at this little, well very big in your case, your firstborn as it is. I was wondering what the child would have thought knowing what the grown-up near me is facing now and were you that kind of girl who loved books and roamed through libraries or did you come to it late? I definitely grew up loving books and stories and yeah in all forms actually I was thinking about I was very much like a Disney kid as well I loved animation and like all sorts of visual storytelling as well so this book is very influenced by anime specifically but also I just wrote it like I wanted it to feel sort of animated as if it was sort of hand-drawn maybe so yeah I think I think I was I was sort of always captivated and specifically by fantasy as well I've always been a huge reader of fantasy so yeah I think I don't know child I haven't changed very much so I think probably the child in the adult's love of having this similar a similar response which is just I'm very excited and I'm I'm feel very lucky and I'm excited to share it with readers yeah and for those of you who like books as you know they actually physical thing of books it's a it's a lovely addition to hold and read yeah but the the American one came in the in the post the other day which I think is it's just so beautiful they've got these beautiful spread edges and stunning endpapers as well which is sort of wonderful cat going down the endpapers so I think actually get the American addition guys if you if you've got access to it because it's beautiful so which was the first book that you can remember having read to you or reading yourself that really lit up your imagination can you watch your entry entry drug to this you know obsession with literature books that are really captivated me as a child well when I was thinking I had a bit of a think about this and actually I did I think the first the very first thing from when I was about like two was was actually watching things rather than reading things it was again animation I loved I loved fairy tales relate to me like Aladdin and things like that sort of it became visually I think animation is like sort of real magic in the real magic in the real world and so many of those stories kind of really are just about imagination and infinite possibility like the magic carpet in Aladdin the sort of that whole sequence or the under the sea sequence in the little mermaid so I think it was honestly it kind of stories stories like that that just were very transporting because I was obviously too young to read myself I remember having these lamps in my bedroom that had like a light bulb in the middle and then like a paper thing that would spin around because of the heat of the lamp and it would project images on the on the walls and one of them was sort of out of space things and one of them was under the sea things which I think fits well with the Aladdin magic carpet obsession and the little mermaid being under the sea obsession and as with books so like I think I read like a lot and had a lot read to me like you know just the usual kind of like standard 90s British childhood but I think possibly like Terry Pratchett was the the thing that really got me kind of obsessed with like the possibilities of what you can do with fiction I loved Mort as a child's the one that's death is the sort of actual character walking around doing things speaking and I think the idea that you know it was the first time I've heard the words anthropomorphic personification and think I was about eight or something and just the first child yes but the idea that you could you could take this kind of abstract idea that we are afraid of a lot of the time and turn it into something that maybe wasn't so fearful or that yeah was was part of this kind of very humane kind of humanist kind of vision that the Discworld presents I think was extremely compelling to me at the time yeah so you've you've had various jobs involved with or tasks involved with literature I have noticed that you were a bookseller for a bit and you've done various creative writing further degrees yeah so when when people pick up rain shadow orphans which is the first in the series what are they going to be entering into here yeah so it is almost that it's very anime inspired as inspired by sort of Japanese shown an anime it's yeah an anime inspired adventure story sort of epic fantasy urban fantasy and it's very much there's a sort of heist a slight sort of undercover spy sort of story a bit of a revenge plot and it's really about marginalized young people standing up for their place in society and resisting kind of injustice and corruption in all of their forms but I've tried to make it like there is a political edge obviously there's a lot of fantasy does have but it's also I've tried to make it very hopeful because I feel like that is political in itself it's it's like what's what's what's the point in just handing people despair we have enough of that in the world and yeah it's fun I wanted to be fun for readers I've spent some time as a as a high school teacher and yeah if anything if that told me anything is that your lessons and your the things you create to share with people they have to be fun so there's a funny cat and martial arts battles there's dragons of course there's a cool magic system hopefully and lots of like entertaining snacks and lots of like found family and solidarity so that's that's what you that's what you can expect yeah so your rangehead of orphans live on a island a large island which has the geography is quite important to the plot because the southern side of the island is where the dispossessed the the stateless individuals the undocumented workers in that parlance live whereas you've got an emperor who's a female emperor to start with and the court and the privileged people who've got through the hoops to be citizens live in a sort of more privileged area and then there's a kind of no man's land area in between were you thinking of any particular model of a place when you came up with that there was like a real world society or did it kind of just organically grow as you began to explore the world around your characters it very much started with theme so I've always been interested in questions of physical space and my personal was actually called common ground which is very on the nose and very literal but is how we need more common ground literally and physically so space and the politics of space is something I've always been very curious about so I think that's sort of where the kind of very like socially structured geography of the island came into the world building but it is I was interested in this idea we see in so many of our societies of of a society which is built on the labor and the efforts of those that it vilifies and that is often sort of undocumented workers and people who the sort of I guess like majority class have decided for whatever reason kind of don't belong so this idea of like space belonging and the role but sort of different different kind of social groups play play within society and the injustice of a lot of that was something I very much kind of wanted to write about not from a kind of here's my polemic like I'm telling you what to think but just kind of like raising questions about it and just exploring the dynamics of that kind of society I didn't want to look at it's not a straight allegory for anywhere in the world particularly because it was it was a specific kind of power dynamic that I wanted to examine rather to just sort of say like oh this is Gaza or this is like the jungle in Calais or like you know like yeah a lot of these kind of marginalized spaces did to kind of play into my head while I was writing it but it is fundamentally like it's a fun fancy novel so I didn't want to get like two into making it literally a straight kind of like for like of something that was like a very live political situation and I think that's not really I mean it can be fiction's role but I'm more interested in looking at like the underlying dynamics and forces and and the things that sort of societal and emotional consequences of those of those things really yeah yeah I mean we often talk about C.S. Lewis and Tolkien on this podcast and one of the things which I've always found really helpful that they talked about which is not an allegory but an applicable applicable something that's applicable to the world so that you you as a reader and what I think the quote is allegory lies in the power of the author whereas applicability lies in the power of the reader yeah so as someone's reading it they may think oh this reminds me of something happening in America where someone else is saying oh this reminds me of what's happening in Australia um so you apply it to your own sort of context yeah I love that and so much of fantasy is sort of giving to the reader like giving agency to the reader like you're making magic systems and then you're sort of handing them over and saying like you make up your own stories you imagine in this world like this world as yours now that's intrinsic to the genre so I love that that it's it's finding some kind of universal or like kind of deeper truth about human societies um that isn't just like that I'm not imposing on it it's just uh that's what I'm aiming for anyway I'm not sure to maybe achieve that but yeah you're sort of aiming for this kind of a different level of truth I guess that you can hand over to people and say like interpret this in like see like see where this kind of fits your context and sort of read it as you like um so was the journey to writing this at a smooth plain sailing all the way or did you have many stops and starts was it actually quite a tough right um I don't feel that anything is ever plain sailing and writing with that that's a trap that question yeah with uh listers who if you if you write you'll know that it never is um but uh yeah so I published a couple of books in the pandemic uh and it's just the experience of that was uh you know I mean there were many many many many worse things that happened to people in the pandemic I'm definitely not complaining uh but it was it was just very discombobulating and I think just sort of being exposed to the industry for the first time was quite stressful so I wanted to carry on writing but I actually sort of decided I wasn't going to be like a career writer um and trained as a secondary school teacher and was working so a high school teacher so I was working with teenagers um for for a couple years after my first book um and that was my agent was you know he kept he kept me on and he was like you could try writing a different kind of book like what have you wrote about teaching what have you wrote non-fiction and then he sort of said what have you wrote for for young people like what have you wrote with your students in mind like with a different audience and I was like yeah okay um but then I actually thought like yeah what what if I what if I did sort of do because it's not a children like it's not a YA it's been published as adult but it is it's with the sort of and I was you know I was teaching like up to like 18 year olds so um but yeah it's sort of with with with my students in mind was kind of how it sort of first came into being um and yeah I think once I once I decided to write it it was actually quite not easy um but it came quite quickly and um I just found myself like very excited by the whole process and I had a great time writing it and it just sort of like everything kind of seemed to come together in the world uh sort of made made sense um and I just had like a fan because we're fantasy you can you can source ideas from all sorts of different places and people and it's it's just such a fun process um so it was actually kind of wonderful once I'd started but I think that that sort of sense of what what what am I going to write um took a while but I think that's sort of very common with writers because once you sort of write a novel you've sort of said everything you have to say and you pour like years of thinking into it and then you have to sort of spend some time sort of living and and gathering more uh thoughts and observations about the world yeah so the world building um I'm correct me if I'm wrong but I was seeing it as having a sort of Japanese basis for the culture and um but it's not Japan it's not our own world I mean obviously once you realize there are three moons um you know you're somewhere else which sort of frees you up from any sort of attempt to connect it um so what kind of world builder are you are you the sort who has loads of notebooks where you're um you know already creating a world and then you go ahead with the story or do you create the bit of the world that fits that bit of the narrative um I think it's it's a it's a difficult one because I love world building just for fun um I think it's just a wonderful like it's it's it's a great activity um it stuck there can't you and it's something quite different from from writing a novel I think and create a sort of perfect fun world and then you think oh it's not really in service to the story and the characters and the themes I really want to explore because like writing a novel is really about theme um so I think yeah for I mean for me like I did say that the the sort of land and the the sort of politics of the land was very much that came from the themes but um yeah there's a whole kind of solar magic system that's kind of roughly based on I guess sort of ideas of like a numerous energy flows through the world or kind of Chi um and there are kind of creatures called sun spirits um who like I've invented but are sort of based on um just ideas that like slightly of sort of Japanese yokai um and like uh the animism in the shinto tradition of sort of kami being these sort of spirits um these gods that are sort of a physically present in places um yeah uh I think with the world building uh with with this book there was bits that were sort of there um and they were the ones that were in service to the the theme and and the character the characters um and then I sort of wrote the draft sort of getting the story uh and then I had sort of three friends who ended up sort of helping a lot uh three kind of beta readers I guess um one of them was just a sort of amazing literary novelist who read a draft and was sort of questioning some of the politics of it sort of being like okay so how does this island's economy really really function you've said that it kind of runs on these uh the labor of these like undocumented migrants who are in this sort of like almost refugee camp but like how does that actually work like what like and what is the role of this gang the lucky crows that you have like what are the actual kind of mechanics of injustice here like let's draw that out a bit more um uh yeah and and sort of look to sort of uh the the history of the island and and that kind of thing with me um and that sort of solidified that um I have a friend who's a professional theoretical physicist which is always handy yeah great to have one of those on speed dial so like I asked him about the magic system and just being like so does this is this logical like does this make sense in terms of like some kind of physics um and sometimes they also be yes and sometimes like no not quite but what if you did this um and that's just that was really fun just to throw around ideas and to get ideas for like future books of like just kind of things that could happen that may never like we did a lot of just kind of co world building that may never actually end up in the books but uh was really fun as an activity so that did make me think it's quite dangerous you can just well build infinitely um and yeah I have a friend who has an MST in Japanese studies from Oxford which despite me being half Japanese I'm definitely definitely definitely don't have that um so she read through the book and just kind of gave me more advice on the cultural aspects um because it does borrow quite a lot from uh Japanese sort of culture and tradition so um she was sort of my cultural advisor so I think with fantasy it's great because you get to draw on the expertise of the people around you and uh yeah my previous books felt very much like me on my own like this is just me whereas this has felt like I've written it but it feels very much like a kind of team effort of me going around and sourcing like interesting people and having interesting conversations and there's definitely like more like research uh experiential research that has gone has gone into building this world definitely yeah I've got a friend who is a primary care doctor in the developing world you know so he goes into the the kind of places that you know Yemen and Somalia and yeah places that you wouldn't go on holiday at the moment um but he's very helpful because if I say um what happens if you get bitten by a cobra what happens if what happens if you get hit by a sword you know what really happens as opposed to like fantasy you know film violence yeah um what's what kind of infections might you have after you know sort of and unfortunately he knows um because of the nature of where he works so he often gets a dedication and a thanks but I wanted to point out or just raise with you that your your dragons are eastern ones um so tell us a little bit about your dragons because anyone who loves dragons if he hang on in the book because they come yeah you've got to have dragons I think that was one of the things I was like if I'm writing a fancy novel like I have the has to be dragons yeah um yeah it's like you know naturally um yeah it was very important to me they're eastern dragons um I yeah I love western I mean I I was one of those people who did old English at university uh and just loved all the you know like grew up reading Tolkien um like you know the dragon and bear wolf and the all the idea of the kind of worms and uh like smug and like I very much kind of like grew up in in that tradition but it was also very much aware that there was a kind of very different kind of idea of what a dragon was uh that was was an eastern dragon and that they I didn't see growing up anyway so many of them in fantasy fiction um because it was always these kind of big winged kind of I don't know how to like creatures um and yeah I just wanted because it's a kind of eastern archipelago um and that's sort of the the world I like the idea of dragons that sort of have have control over the weather I love the story of the dragon pearl um the idea of dragons being a sociative water um and because there's the magic systems all about kind of elemental flows of energy like the kind of weather and and that kind of thing seem to work very well um within the context of the story but I think some of it's just kind of like representation like when you work with young people and it just sort of made me reflect on like there weren't that many kind of eastern skewed fantasy worlds um like for me when I was growing up so I just kind of wanted to make one and there's plenty now there's loads but um yeah no it's probably probably will still feel fresh to a reader and and anyone who's perhaps you know filled up they've been glutted on western soul dragons it'll be lovely refreshment to find another series of legends and traditions informing your characters so um you have I noticed if I think I've got this right you've got um five main points of view you've got Toshiko who we start with who's the younger of three siblings her brother Yun Jun who um is a very good cook and sort of caring for the family figure and you've got Mai Mai Mai got Mai sorry um who's the eldest or the elder sister who's the sort of computer whiz who prefers to stay at home she's that kind of person and then you've got Haru who is the young son of the emperor only child and then you've got Theo who is an outsider who seems to have come from what we would normally think of as a western background in he's got a fair hair and blue eyes and you know so he's the outsider in this this world so um who walked into your imagination first I think the sisters Toshiko and Mai um I imagine because I was teaching a girl's grammar school um I think this idea of I mean these that my characters aren't quite teenage as Toshiko's 17 and Mai's 21 um but it was sort of the idea of these two sisters essentially who um have the kind of bicker and the very different Toshiko is very like she goes out and like has that she knows martial arts and she'll you know fight the bad guys and go on the heists and have the adventures and Mai is very much an introvert um and yeah she has a different school set completely and she's very sarcastic um and say that home with a very grumpy cat mochi um so yeah I think it was I I just kind of loved the idea of their kind of sister bond and um like what they kind of learned from each other and how they complete each other I guess um and I just loved the idea of these two sisters in this kind of almost like a cyberpunk world um that I just I just had the aesthetic of it I was like yeah it's a sister story uh and then it actually kind of built out from there I think I liked the idea of writing a trio um I'm not quite sure why but it just sort of made made sense um having the three three siblings uh and often I I didn't really do this consciously but it must have been an unconscious thing I think often in anime you do get uh it's almost like a trope having five main characters um uh like like a gang of five um so I think maybe that was sort of how it went just like it felt naturally right to me um Mai isn't such a point of view character she only has one section from her point of view so it every does her thinking oh god that's something it's gonna jump around a lot and the um sort of difficult to read um it to shiko is a main our main point of view so it's often like the the perspective of alternate to another character and then go back to the shiko and then another character and go so you are kind of grounded in this one sort of central POV character that carries you through um but I liked the idea of yeah um also like it's very much a story about the importance of like a collectivist view um it sort of kicks against individualism I suppose um and I think there are so many like amazing fantasy stories about like the chosen one and the individual like succeeding and going off and self-actualizing and that's that's one thing and I love a lot of these stories but I I think one of the main things I like to look at in my writing is the importance of society and the kind of things we owe to each other um and a more collectivist kind of sense of how we kind of move forward as people um so I think having this kind of ensemble rather than just a kind of one main character was important to me for that reason as well did you find yourself having a favorite um well to shiko is like your main she's sort of the anchor so I really enjoyed writing her as well because she's a very like active character um she is very impulsive she doesn't always make the most sensible decisions so she dives headfirst into things that often quite reactively just being like oh like I'm angry I need to go out and do something and then it will create some kind of disaster but then she has to sort of deal with it so that was quite exciting as a writer to have someone who is sort of always wanting to take action and go out and do things um rather than necessarily like do the sensible thing that like we might actually doing real life um and I think because she's young like it felt true to the kids I was working with as well who often would just kind of do things first and then consider the white of it later um so I loved her but I also I liked writing Haru a lot um the young prince he's a very sweet character and I think a lot of it is the most pure and hard isn't he yeah and actually a lot of the emotional heart of the book comes from him and he had sort of found family relationship with um this woman who's sort of effectively like his nanny good-k and I think writing writing his like his emotional story was something that I think felt like it added a kind of slightly deeper layer to the book yeah so I would say that I found May the hardest to like but I suspect that's on purpose because you need to have you know the fact that you do sort of like her but she is the hardest to love because she is prickly that's that's the way she works um so were you thinking about that of actually having a bit of a grist in the middle otherwise if you have lots of characters all kind of sweet you know you need you need the one who is the awkward squad one don't you really oh definitely and like you don't want characters who are all just kind of uncomplicatedly blandly lovely more than a bit of like realness to them um actually a lot is interesting you say like a lot of people have told me may as their favourite actually one that gets mentioned the most often as being a favourite amongst like people who read it so that is I think people write to her differently maybe she's just the strongest flavour um it should be an age thing because I like I maybe it's kind of like maternally I I liked Haru because he was sweet whereas I imagine if May was my daughter I'd be having putting my hair out I mean Haru is he he's quite uh I don't know he's he's quite like missing quite a lot that would worry me I mean again his decision making isn't because he at the beginning he's so sheltered everything sort of again so he isn't sort of the wisest um he can be a bit of a least can at least he's not just sweet but um actually june is really sweet what do you mean yeah I mean you know as a grownup you could see that Haru could be like him growing up so um yeah june is just lovely he just cooks pancakes for everyone in his just he cares he's the caring role um yeah May came about though because I I was teaching these grammar school girls and um they were like really cool like they were really like I just thought they were like like really awesome uh but they were also like massive like nerds in the sense of like what when like when I was at school people would be like oh you do robotics like you do computer programming like oh such a nerd um but they were also they were just like really kind of like effortlessly cool um and I felt like we don't see and a lot of them you know they might not have been into computers but they'd be into reading or like they were just very like academic uh and quite quite introverted but still like that that wasn't seen as like an uncool thing and I just sort of wanted some a character that was who was cool like a teenager or like um a slightly like a young person but who also was um who like solved problems with her interlegs and was like it preferred to stay at home with her thoughts and um her computers and uh yeah that was that was sort of where that where that came from but also she's quite a traumatized character um yeah no I think that's more like what I was picking up on is that she yeah she keeps people at a distance she even has these long acrylic nails that almost like cat sits around her shoulders that will kind of like claw anyone who gets too close so I think that's where her prickliness is sort of uh meant like she she has to sort of protect herself like she's quite spiky um and she's actually quite fearful of the outside world as well so I'm really able to the the plot of the piece without giving away you know any of the twists or turns uh I would say um it's the first of a trilogy but don't worry guys don't hang back from reading it because you do actually land it in a place which has a sense of a very satisfying completion of this part of the adventure with the the threads going on for what would then develop in the rest of the world so you don't leave it on that cliff edge which is so frustrating where yeah you don't know what's going to happen um so you mentioned ready that it deals with some real world uh issues of undocumented workers but also there's an element of about the AI sort of robot artificial intelligence um approach that is coming at us so when you're writing your plot are you finding your plots in the real world um like reading the newspaper and thinking oh yes I think this is best looked at in the laboratory of a fantasy world or is it something i mean how does your plot plotting happen if you can it's hard to analyse this sometimes because you might just do it but um i'm sometimes aware when i'm writing stories that i've got some kind of an overarching theme which i've seen in the real world like i wrote a book at the time of the banking crisis in 2008 where i thought what would happen if the banking system collapsed in a fantasy world um that's where i started i thought it was really interesting yeah in this context because i hadn't read a book about the collapse of the banking system in a fantasy world because it's not very sexy subject but the outworkings of it are so how do you go about finding your plots uh amazing premise um yeah i must have been quite fun to research as well um it's quite organic i'm very much someone who uh if i know what's going to happen i get bored and the the all the life kind of goes out of the project and i kind of even if i force myself to sit down and write a thousand words a day whatever it just doesn't doesn't seem like it doesn't work i just end up having to throw the whole thing away so i yeah i it's very discovery based i think uh it's more like i could kind of go out into the world and experience lots of things that i find interesting that i assemble kind of quite instinctually like i knew i was interested in young people and educational inequality and like the relationship between education and society um and yeah various things sort of happened in in my life as as well that it's just sort of personal things that kind of feed into it and then you sort of sit down you're like i need to write about all of these thoughts in my head um and then i just kind of honestly just sort of started doing that um so it comes yeah comes from sort of theme and area again uh but then the plot really comes out in the rewriting for me i'm someone who rewrites and rewrites and rewrites and rewrites like yeah i know some people will just kind of like they will they'll be pay pay a huge amount of attention to each sentence and then once the sentence is kind of locked in it more or less stays where it is like no like i think i don't know i think we were on uh i can't even remember draft 10 was the one i submitted to the publisher but then i rewrote it about 12 times subsequently and then we went through multiple drafts uh after sort of including the copy edit i think we went through seven of those so there were probably about like 35 drafts maybe i think i think discovery writers often do that don't they i mean i i'm i'm very my technique depending what i've been asked to do by the publisher because occasionally you'll say you'll get someone saying can you please submit a synopsis um yeah i hate that yeah but i will do it if i think there's a a contract at the end of it um so that puts a bit of discipline on me in advance but actually what i enjoy most when i'm writing is just to see what happens yeah and but it does mean that you have to make sense of it at the end and thank goodness for world processors i know i do think about this like when people have had to handwrite like what did they do like obviously they managed it but just the number of notebooks and they're like i have to have scissors and glue and and also it's uh what you do is um it because uh talking funnily enough was a discovery writer is that you end up with masses of posthumously published versions of your book by your son yeah and tons and tons of kind of world versions where it's like trotter rather than strider and all sorts of other things going on and um yeah no fascinating and i think it took a very long time i i think her is isn't lord of the rings was meant to be a sort of sequel to the hobbit they just got like death yeah well it you can tell can't you it starts as a kid's book and then by the time they it's more less when they first meet the black rider suddenly hang on a minute we're in much darker territory here off we go yeah yeah amazing i was i've been um my my daughters um future husband is marrying into a family who all loved lord of the rings so he's valiantly reading his way through it at the first time and um i spoke to him in the weekend i said have you got he's just finished but you know fellowship and i said it changes doesn't it he said oh yeah i'm much i'm enjoying it much more now because he'd never got past that sort of joeville you know party thing at the beginning which was like the hobbit so i don't think we're allowed to do that anymore because we got word processes and we can true like the sort of people are a bit strict so with their expectations because yeah you do that a bit like well why don't you just go back through the word document yeah yeah yeah so you're thinking about sort of plot and structuring and you've mentioned that you do think of it as a sort of a anime type film you studio giblies one i sort of think of when i think of japan um are you aware of using more like screenwriting structuring rules as you're writing as a result you know the classic sort of three-act structure your book is in um how many sections is it five you think it's five yeah it's i'm writing in the next one at the moment yeah it's five which is it's usually for three or five acts isn't it for screenplay um all is lost you know that stuff are you aware of that or is it just something which because you watch so much Disney and anime films that you fall into as a story telling instinct was the book is actually the dedication i mean it's it's all about teaching so it's for for all my old teachers and for the students i taught but it's written really in memory of my drama teacher away a few years ago and yeah he only taught me for two years but he had a sort of disproportionate influence as you know those as some kind of exceptional talented brilliant people do especially teachers when you're kind of learning everything for the first time um they hit a disproportionate influence on my kind of creative and intellectual development um so i still kind of use everything that he taught me kind of every day really um and we did a lot of Shakespeare like a lot of Shakespeare five acts sorry five is five acts a hundred percent so i think i think i think i think of everything in five acts structure still um because i sort of embodied you know you do a level third studies and i think i was in ten plays in my level year um all with this sort of kind of guy that just new Shakespeare inside out and lived and breathed it so it does the five acts structure comes from comes from that and i think uh like probably some of the scene setting and cuts and stuff probably do slightly organically come probably still from from those plays and also from the way we were using them we had a quite um just a really weird unconventional hamlet that was really brilliant called hamlet house of horror that he devised but we we all kind of worked on together there was a kind of a German expressionist version of hamlet where we were kind of all on stage all the time and it was it it was a musical there was tomweights music in it um and that had quite filmic cuts uh and the way that the story moved um we kind of edited it to be like that so i think that had a sort of because you have sort of inside the creative process if you're devising in like a theater context and i think that's that's partly where that that kind of came from um i was also yeah just aware of writing for an audience i think because i had these books before my like previous novels quite sort of social realist uh kind of longer form just more traditional kind of chapters and um i just remember like seeing like my yearnines and stuff like trying to read it and like not always i like just finding it a bit of a sort of harder harder thing to connect to and i was just like i want to give them something that they'll have a great time with and it's not an effort um you know that they like write something like that's like a gift to them i'm saying that this is like it's a teenage book it's sort of it's not really it's for all ages but um no i think perhaps what you're talking about is a a readership which actually thinks primarily in visual yeah visual medium first before they think about literary medium because that's one if someone said to me what's known his style i'll say well it's um the cut to so particularly at the end or not at four should we say thinking at four when the pace of the action is building up and you've got sort of a number of conflicts or battle scenes or major decisions being made you do the um he reaches for the coffee pot come to what's happening over there and then and then you come back to Theo with the coffee pot so it's the and that immediately is a it's not so much a book thing it's more of a film thing and those books do do that too but it triggers a visual version of that and i would say that was the style that came out of this book for me um it was interesting that you're saying it's very different from your earlier books um do you find would you say that you're quite a you have like a ventriloquist style in that you can become the writer for that kind of story and then change it if if someone said please write me a i know um a who done it thriller with an unreliable narrator and you would go yes i'll do that and i'll go over there and do that are you quite happy to shift that's an interesting question i find it i really struggle to write under contract which is a bad if you're trying to form like a career as a writer that is sustainable because as you say like a contract is important um but yeah i find it very difficult to write anything to order to be honest um and it's something i do really really struggle with um not sort of just like it's not on principle it's just when i sit down and i know that there's a contract and i have to do it everything comes out sort of awful um which is is tough um but um i think the voice does yeah i do sort of think of the voice for the project i think my earlier work was um because i wrote it all in my 20s it was much more just kind of like how it came out like i was finding my voice i guess um we're still looking credibly young to me so are you are you now in your 30s and is that cool yeah um still still young useful yeah kind of um yeah so i think yeah but i did i it's very much sort of i was see like what kind of tradition is this project within so like my novel i was reading like it was more socially realist again themes about sort of injustice and landownership and finding common ground um between different social groups and how like solidarity and and connection between sort of marginalized communities is actually a way to sort of safe society um and sort of moving from it's a similar theme it's like moving from an individualistic kind of framework of seeing things to something that's maybe more collectivist so it's the same kind of agenda but it was very much like i was reading a lot of um i see like i read like a lot James Kelman uh and like i did i was really like urban Welsh so this idea of like it's not in the vernacular but i wanted to write like how well i guess it is but it's like south of England vernacular which is sort of he is that even but like but like yeah i was sort of like i wanted to write something that was how people spoke um and it was very much kind of that felt real in that sense uh yeah so that it was i was sort of trying to write a book that in that kind of looking at how to do those things whereas with this um yeah i think the voice again it came from my students i think um yeah yeah that was what you've just said makes me want to ask you about whether or not you've experienced any prejudice going from a more literary frame of you know novel to working within a genre of fantasy i mean notice people treat you differently uh reviewed by different different different kinds of people or do you think we've got over ourselves well it's all very fresh um so the book isn't out yet it's out on the 26th in the UK the US and other places in the japan uh the 26th of may may yeah just to face with people listening to this it's probably out already if you're listening to this folks yeah so i don't know how people are going to receive it i don't know how they're responding um but i i used to work for an independent bookseller and we didn't um shell things in genres it was the the whole idea was just kind of fiction general so obviously there'd be like the history would have its own genre or we'd have its own genre but like within fiction there wasn't like crime science fiction fantasy whatever like it was just everything was fiction and i think that had a very like formative um impact on how i how i saw things so i've been and i've always read that way as well like i grew up reading a lot yeah i wish that we didn't hung up about it because i started writing for kids and for many years i get people saying to me oh so you're writing for kids do you think you're ever right for adults or when you're going to start writing for adults as though i needed to kind of um row up you know you're thinking hang on it's not like proper enough or something yeah and i've written for adults since but i mean you didn't know me because it was all parts of the market are doing their own thing and then add their own you know respect um when that was just valuable i just think that all that all stories it's all literature like um the incredible she's connected with Oxford actually Catherine Rundle i don't know if you know her i know her yeah yeah she's wonderful so rooftop as the explorer the impossible creatures series um but yeah there was books i think yeah like i've i used to teach adults for a bit i gave sections of rooftop as to adults and they connected with it like they were just like what is this fantastic book um and i i just think it's it's all kind of marketing and well she also wrote the critically acclaimed biography of John Dunn done yeah you know she's she's an extraordinary person and she's all souls which is a fantasy location if ever there was one yeah those books are setting written in an essay which i haven't actually read yet because i do read children's books so very arrogant it was like i don't need to read this but it is i think it's called a why you should read children's books even though you are so old and wise and i do you pretty much agree with the sentiment um yeah and i i think you can see between her John Dunn biography and her children's books there's a you can really see the correspondence i think that's almost like a study in why like children's books are like because she talks about done done like how how joyous it is that like you can start reading a sentence or a line and it's the words and the meaning kind of just like twist out of your hands into something completely unexpected and new and startling and that is exactly what she does in all of her children's writing like every sentence like starts one way and like ends up for something kind of delightfully unexpected and that is that that's something children love because it's it's fun you laugh there's a sense of wonder and sort of surprise um but that's also what this Renaissance poet did and sort of how she writes about him so i think there's you know like everything's much more connected with writing than um yeah then there's certain people would have us believe so moving away from the more serious questions i had one silly question for you which is you might be able to explain to me what is it about snacks i i i noticed this in the that kpop demon hunter thing where there's a lot of scenes at the beginning with them scoffing away at various noodle types snacks and things um and you i noticed i was reading through this there's quite a snacks were really important whether or not people were at sister snacks is there something that's passed me by or is there something from a japanese perspective i mean kpop demon hunters is Korean isn't it but um what's going on you don't really i never really analyze that to be honest i just think snacks are very important i think i mean for me it's a certain i i think there's a nice i feel like there's i have an impulse to include sort of a sense of coziness and a sense of sort of comfort and um kind of joyousness in in in the book um in the story even if it does look at some sort of quite tough themes and there are that it's like tools and things like that i think it was it was important for me to sort of bring that sense of home and hope partly because i wanted to sort of show what they were fighting for and also just the wonder of these kids that had like built their this like functional cozy family home for themselves despite not really having like a parent figure um and that's like a trope that's sort of with all this time in in children's rights sold us the 19th century anyway um and yeah so i think for me the snacks sort of came from that because like even when things are really sort of tough and they're going off on some like big revenge plot to like face down this gang so that murdered they're adopted aren't like you got to have your bag of rice crackers like you got to have snacks well one of them takes a job in the kitchen they say you'll be okay you're near the snacks you know uh exactly and and i think that just that kind of like it brings a sense of lightness and sort of that there is there is kind of humanness and joy and that they are kind of human bodies in a space even if it is an adventure and it also aligns the characters with the readers or the watchers the viewers because often as you are reading or watching you are eating snacks so i feel like it's sort of like that it sort of creates a sense of companionship and sort of humanizing yeah and it sort of emphasizes still sort of kids uh yeah no that yeah that's definitely that's definitely true yeah okay so we've we've galloped around the world of the rain shadow opens do you have a title for the next book that you want to tell us uh no i do have a working title but it will i always do the title last i'm not very good at titles so yeah the working title something to aim for and then you change it to something that sounds good at the end this once out this month and are you planning to bring the next one out to what point a year's time at the moment we're talking twenty twenty seven yeah but um it's still being written so we will see how we go yeah yeah but if you're intending it to be within yeah fairly short time frame yeah but like we said like it does it's very important to me that trilogy is actually like each book stands alone each book finishes um because i think i sort of cop out if you don't finish the story because then then you're just cheating because it's hard to finish your story satisfyingly so yeah it very much is like it makes sense as a book on its own um and that was for like all my favorite trilogy do that so yeah no definitely so to end i want to ask you a question just to make your imagination fly away um and i always ask my guess where in all the fantasy worlds not their own one but all the others they've been delightfully exposed to over their lives the best place for for something that i've picked up in their work and one of my favorite moments in your book is when Haru gets a dragon ride and um so we're imagining that we're on an eastern style dragon where would you like to ride your dragon which fantasy world would you like to see from dragon back oh um it doesn't have to already have dragons you you're just you know you can go there just have a look at it on your dragon um i mean the first thing that comes to mind is maybe like earth sea earth to the calico oh good good good choice yeah magical archipelago there are dragons but not so much eastern dragons but yeah i think i think that would be a wonderful one um to explore but um i think yeah with with where the eastern dragons come from as well like there's a lot of kind of like chinese folklore and mythology and sort of i looks a lot of japanese kind of yokai stories as well so um sort of within within the the sort of those sort of stories as well i think could be just to be able to step inside um some of these sort of traditions and uh sort of interact with the dragons within them i think would be would be very um very cool also i'm obsessed with um avatar the last airbender i don't know right you'll watch uh no no that um amazing series um so i would you know any any excuse to to sort of saw over the avatar worlds um would be um extremely welcome yeah so i found myself thinking about all those fantasy maps that i've enjoyed looking at um uh so i mean the obvious thing is i would be great to see fly over the map of middle air which we also do know from the films and from the books and um naniya lessso but left there is a real way but still it's it's a map that we all can think of so i think for me if i was going to pick one it would be um the the the voyage of the dawn treader so the stuff that isn't on a map just to see that um see all the bit like you and the ocean of the green islands it's just to sort of get how it all fits together and seeing it from a dragon would be great fun yeah and there's sort of essentially uncharted lately undiscovered yeah pop it again uh yeah move that it actually might be more appealing than sort of covering a map that we already have um yeah yes go off the edge yeah exactly thank you so much for being with us and i wish you all the best for your book launch and look forward to reading whatever the next one is going to be thank you very much thank you so much for having me and 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