Author Interview: The Siege of Burning Grass and The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed
- Fiction Fans
- Mar 13, 2024
- 37 min read
Episode 131
Release Date: March 13, 2024
Your hosts are joined by Premee Mohamed to talk about her novella The Butcher of the Forest and her novel The Siege of Burning Grass. They discuss moral ambiguity, relatable antagonists, and the horrors of war. They also bring up how much they want to give Alefret a hug, even if it wouldn't actually solve any of his problems.
Find more from Premee:
Thanks to the following musicians for the use of their songs:
- Amarià for the use of “Sérénade à Notre Dame de Paris” - Josh Woodward for the use of “Electric Sunrise”
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
Episode Transcript*
*this transcript is AI generated, please excuse the mess.
Lilly: 0:04
Hello and welcome to Fiction Fans, a podcast where we read books and other words, too. I'm Lily.
Sara: 0:09
And I'm Sarah, and I am so thrilled that today we are welcoming Premie Mohammed onto the podcast to talk about The Butcher of the Forest and The Siege of Burning Grass. Welcome.
Premee: 0:19
Hi, thanks so much for having me on.
Lilly: 0:22
Well, before we begin talking about your work, which I personally have been waiting to do since we read The Apple Tree Throne two years ago. So,
Sara: 0:33
I mean, you are kind of like a dream guest.
Lilly: 0:37
first, what's something great that happened recently? Sarah, would you kick us off?
Sara: 0:41
Yes, so my good thing is going to start with a very bad thing. One of my parents pugs had a very serious pug emergency over the weekend, which was very not good, very terrible, very stressful, but he's okay! And he, he came home on Sunday, we didn't think that he was going to for a while, but he did, and it was such a relief, and so yes, that starts with a very bad thing, but like, that makes the, the high even higher.
Lilly: 1:07
I feel like that's very appropriate for the tone of some of the books we're going to be discussing today. Okay. Preamy, how about you? Anything great happen recently?
Premee: 1:18
oh my god. So I just had yesterday the launch party for The Butcher of the Forest, which came out February 27th, and I kind of like combined that involuntarily with the Siege of Burning Grass launch party because that's coming out in like a week, but it didn't get its own launch party, so I was like, I'm just gonna roll it. into this one, even though it's not mentioned on the poster. So, that was really nice! It was super, super cold. It was minus 25 Celsius, which I I apologize, I don't know what that is in freedom degrees, but
Lilly: 1:53
Fuckin cold. Yeah.
Premee: 1:55
Yeah! Um, like, I would not have gone if I could not have avoided it. But, uh, we had a packed room, we almost sold out of books, it was really nice. And then some friends took me for a beverage afterwards. I was supposed to do a reading, and I kind of got up to the podium and kind of stood there for a second like, Oh, they didn't give me a copy of my book to do the reading with. Luckily, I had brought a copy in my bag for just such an occasion, so minor crisis averted. But I thought it was funny that the bookstore wouldn't like, have my book ready for me, for me to read from.
Sara: 2:31
would kind of expect that they would have an author reading copy.
Premee: 2:35
I actually did expect it, but I, yeah, they did not.
Sara: 2:39
Lily, what about you?
Lilly: 2:42
Did I exist before this moment? Presumably. Um. I think my good thing is that I got an inordinate amount of housework done last weekend, which was not, like, enjoyable, but it was good to do, and now it means this week I don't have to do that much and still exist in a fairly clean house. So, like, win win.
Sara: 3:07
Indeed.
Lilly: 3:09
Very low key nice thing, but
Sara: 3:11
Hey, it doesn't have to be fancy.
Lilly: 3:13
it doesn't. What is everyone drinking tonight?
Sara: 3:18
I wanted to open a bottle of bubbly, failed miserably at opening my bottle of bubbly, and so opened a bottle of cider instead.
Lilly: 3:27
Tragedy.
Sara: 3:29
Yes.
Premee: 3:30
I'm just drinking tea because it is a Wednesday night, and because I had numerous adult beverages yesterday. So I thought maybe I would take it a little bit easy on my liver, maybe two nights in a row, because I'm not getting any younger. So I'm just drinking tea.
Sara: 3:46
What kind of tea?
Premee: 3:47
Decaffeinated PG tips.
Lilly: 3:49
Ah, lovely. And sometimes you just, like, need a warm beverage. Especially when it's fucking cold.
Premee: 3:55
Falcon gold, which is the scientific term for how cold it is right now.
Lilly: 4:00
It is, yeah. I am drinking white wine, which is out of a box. And I have discovered recently that if there's an adjective in front of the wine name on the box, that means it's going to be way too sweet. Not for me. I like sweet wine. But like, this was called crisp white. And I was like, okay, sure, great, fine. Nope, apparently that means it's very, very sweet white wine. And previously we ran into this with chillable red, which also apparently means it's very, very sweet. Although I don't think crisp nor chillable works. Should imply that on their own. So, live and learn.
Premee: 4:40
I like your glass too.
Lilly: 4:42
Ah, yes, it's very good.
Premee: 4:45
Like, as a cat owner, I just
Lilly: 4:50
Yes, my mother in law got us these. Silently judging you. To which I argue, there's nothing silent about it. The cats scream all the time.
Premee: 4:58
Yep, yep. Sometimes they are very vocal and they're judging. And then you pause for a second and ask yourself, like, maybe they're not judging. Maybe they're trying to communicate something else. They are not. They are trying to communicate their judgment.
Lilly: 5:13
Yes. Complain that the bird feeders are empty and so they have no birds to look at.
Premee: 5:18
Yeah, Bird TV got turned off. Well, I'm sorry. I can't make the birds show up. There is seed out there. There's a cat like pressing on the window like, turn it back on. Dude, I'm in a meeting.
Lilly: 5:34
They always know the worst time to try to get your attention, too.
Premee: 5:37
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I was actually, this is not really relevant to fiction or anything, but so in my, my new position as the writer in residence at the Edmonton Public Library, a lot of what I do is I meet with writers and we talk about their work and I give feedback and you know, we talk about next steps and stuff. And I was having a virtual meeting with a woman who was talking about her personal essay that was just, you know, it was very, very vulnerable. It was about her childhood and she was starting to like tear up and cry. And then here's, The cat who steps out of his bed, shakes himself off, you know, like cats do, and just go ROAR directly into the mic, and I'm like You may have just ruined this woman's life and or writing career. He does not care.
Lilly: 6:23
Or he gave it his blessing. Mm
Premee: 6:27
I don't know. Yeah, perfect timing. Perfect timing. Perfect timing. Perfect timing.
Lilly: 6:32
Read anything good lately? The classic question.
Sara: 6:35
Uh, besides podcast books, which we are going to discuss at length and which were excellent, I did start reading the Good Time Girls of the Alaska Yukon Gold Rush, I believe that's the title, by Lael Morgan, which is kind of a cop out because that's our next podcast book, but I started reading it, yeah.
Lilly: 6:53
but sure.
Sara: 6:55
It's not this episode podcast reading, but I'm enjoying that, and I'm also re reading Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey for a book club with some other friends. That's okay, you don't have to re read it.
Lilly: 7:12
Thank god. Primi, how about you?
Premee: 7:15
Uh, I've never read that one. I just finished a reread myself. I just reread The Raven Tower by Anne Leckie, which I love. And the last, I guess, really super good new book that I finished was The Two Doctors Gorski by Isaac Thelman. Which is a dark academia, and like, in my mental boxes of categorization, I wasn't sure whether to put it in science fiction or fantasy, but definitely horror, let's say. Let's, let's file it under horror. It was very good.
Lilly: 7:44
Horror often has, like, the best gray area between sci fi and fantasy.
Premee: 7:49
Seconding.
Lilly: 7:51
I have read nothing other than what we're about to discuss, so let's get into it. So, speaking of genre, you walked right into our first question.
Premee: 8:01
Oh!
Lilly: 8:02
be psychic. I feel like everyone in the world has different definitions for different, you know, genres and subgenres and things. So, would you start by telling our listeners what genres you would consider these stories?
Premee: 8:16
Okay, I would consider The Butcher of the Forest fantasy. Possibly dark fantasy? I don't know. Like, if we're saying fantasy with horror elements, then okay, dark fantasy. But I would say strictly fantasy. And then The Siege of Burning Grass, oh. See, I don't know, I'm never thinking about genre when I write. I just hand stuff in, and then I just, you know, the implied body of the email says something like, genre is now your problem, to my editor. You know, The Siege of Burning Grass, I guess I would call that a military fantasy. Or sci fi.
Lilly: 8:53
I was gonna say, uh, Sarah and I had a whole conversation about how, what genre we considered this, like, started out fantasy and like, slowly got sci fi as we learned more about the world.
Sara: 9:05
Yeah,
Premee: 9:05
so, okay, military sci fantasy.
Lilly: 9:08
Yeah.
Sara: 9:09
it's, it's very, very kind of like blurred boundaries in terms of genre.
Premee: 9:13
yeah, I think, I think the genres you're touching there. I think it's, people have told me it makes them think of the fifth season, which is like, sci fantasy in a lot of respects as well, because some things eventually through the three books get explained as science, and some things stay basically as magic. So if we can call that sci fantasy, then I think we're in pretty okay territory here.
Sara: 9:40
Speaking of, like, science a little bit. You have a background as a scientist. Do you find that that background affects the way that you go about your storytelling?
Premee: 9:50
Yeah, it, you know, it kind of varies from story to story. I think as, as you would expect, because each story is going to call for different things from an author, but a lot of where it kind of comes from is not so much the content, like the science in the story, but the process of researching where you just take like the 5, 000 papers or whatever and then try to boil them down to not necessarily their essence, but to what you want. To be useful from the papers. So if that's finding connections between unrelated fields or looking for gaps in knowledge or, um, Looking at long term studies and seeing how the trends are moving. I think that process is, like, identical with scientific research and scientific, you know, knowledge development, as it is for writing fiction. Because that's what I'm doing, is I'm reading 5, 000 things, and then eventually, you get a novel out of it. So they're, they're very similar to me, yeah.
Sara: 10:51
Actually, I think, I think that ties in perfectly with another question that I had, which is, at the end of The Siege of Burning Grass, you list a number of books that you read in preparation for writing this novel. And it sounds like that's kind of your normal Like the normal way you go about writing, right? Like, can you talk a little bit about that and like how, if at all, it differs from, from your normal process?
Premee: 11:16
Yeah, it's funny because Siege, I think, is probably the first book where I actually tried to make a note of what I had been reading. What it doesn't make clear there is that I have been reading books along that line, books from the same period of history, books on the same subject, since like 2010 or 2009 or something like that. So it's the same, I finally realized, with every other book that I write, is when I am writing, the seed of the idea may have been quite recent, like, you know, two weeks ago or whatever. But the knowledge that Is going to go into it, or one of the avenues of interest that's going to help me research the rest of the book. If I haven't been doing that for years already, probably started decades ago. Just lists of things I am interested in are just filed away up here somewhere. And it wasn't until five or six years ago that I actually started tracking what I was reading. Before that I would just read, and so I didn't know everything that went in there. But I thought, you know, in this case, since I have the list, let me go back through those lists for the past several years, and fish out the ones that I thought were the most impactful. And so, when it came time to actually write the book, I think I picked up five or six more books to read, to kind of fill in the that hadn't been filled in previously, but I was surprised a little bit by how little I had to do that. Like, how few holes kind of remained, and how few questions I had left where I was like, okay, I would like to fictionalize something, and I don't know how we've done that in the past, for me to turn that into something that is happening in this fictional world, so let me go look something up. There wasn't a ton of that, so I think this book has kind of been a long time as opposed to The Butcher of the Forest, which I just completely made up.
Lilly: 13:05
So, these two books are being released in, around the same time. But I know, you know, writing processes aren't always consistent. Were they also written around the same time, or how did that go?
Premee: 13:16
No, and this is funny too, because as you've probably heard from a lot of other guests, authors are not the boss of the release schedule unless they're self publishing. So I have five books out this year. I did not realize that there were going to be five books out this year. It's more a case of like, You're sitting there last year at some point, maybe, you know, at a patio having mimosa and then you get an email telling you the release date for a book and you go, Oh, that's nice. And then you get another email telling you a release date for a book and you go, Oh, word. And then you get another email telling you the release date for a book and you're like, I would like another mimosa, please. Um, so yeah, Siege was written in, Early, was finished and handed in in early 2022, like the spring of 2022. And, uh, Butcher was finished, I don't know, like early 2023, somewhere around there. And, yeah, very, very different writing process for both of them. And I guess partly, too, that's related to length, as you would expect. Like, Butcher is just a novella, it's It's like 35, 000 words or something, and The Siege of Burning Grass is a novel. But Butcher was also kind of like a passion project. I just, you know, I had the idea, and I was so excited about writing it, I took about three weekends to finish it. And I told the story last night too. And then I sent it to my agent and was like, hey bud, uh. What's up? Um, and he kind of wrote back like, oh my god, where did this come from? You're not supposed to be working on this. You're supposed to be working on something else. You're on deadline. But Jonathan Strayhan, the editor, had actually responded to a tweet of mine talking about the novella that I wanted to write, where I had described it as Escape from L. A. meets Edmund Spencer's The Fairy Queen. And he wrote back to say something like, oh, you know, that sounds cool. I would like to read that if you write it. I was like, what? Maybe I will write it then. So then I did write it, and then I had to send it to my agent, and I had to screen cap the tweet. So that he didn't think that I was just on magic mushrooms or something, and you know, I pasted it in there, and I was like, okay, so You know, maybe he was joking about this, but, you know, before we send it to anybody else, can we send it to Jonathan? And he was like, can you give me a minute to read it first? I don't know where this came from. So that's how that one came into the world. Whereas Siege was, you know, we, we signed the contract and like, early 2020 or the end of 2019. So I knew that one was coming for quite a while, so I had a lot more time to, you know, plan and, and structure and, and build it into the shape that I wanted, which, you know, I didn't want it to be like a, an extremely fast paced, like, military thriller, exactly. I wanted it to be like, You know, a character study and a spy story and a war story. And that was, I think, a little trickier for me because actually it would have been an easier and quicker novel to write probably if I had just said, okay, let's just put some heroes in this, let's not make it complicated and just let's send them out to do a job or something.
Sara: 16:26
I mean, but it's, it's so complicated and so good. I mean, it's good because it's so complicated and there's no, there's so much ambiguity there. It's, I mean, it was chef's kiss.
Premee: 16:39
I love ambiguity. Thank you.
Sara: 16:41
So for all that you say that 2024 is kind of an outlier and that you have five books coming out. I do believe that you. just posted a graphic where you said you had 13 stories come out in 2023. So,
Premee: 16:54
Yeah, I'm not sure how that happened either.
Sara: 16:56
yeah, you're, I would, I would say that you're quite prolific. It's not, it's not just dates being set by other people.
Premee: 17:03
Yeah, well, and actually it still is though, because I think probably eleven of those, ten or eleven of those were solicits. So, you know, you get the email from the editor and they're like, Hey, what's up my buddy? And you're like, Oh my God, somebody dropped out of our anthology. Can you give us a story? I'm like, can you give me a small amount of money? Because then you can have a story. But that's what most of those, those stories were. And some of them, of course, you know, the usual caveat were written in, you know, the year before and then just got published last year. So it wasn't that I was also writing a short story every five minutes either. Yeah. It's all this optical illusion of scheduling. It's like you wait at the bus stop forever and your bus never comes and then as you decide to start walking home like five of them come at once.
Sara: 17:48
Yep, I, I have been there.
Lilly: 17:51
The setting in The Siege of Burning Grass feels very close to the real world. I'm trying very hard to not use the word fantastical so no one gets mad at me for saying that it's fantasy.
Premee: 18:04
It kind of is.
Lilly: 18:05
It felt very familiar. Whereas the setting of The of The Butcher of the Forest felt more like a, more like a story, right? More like a fairy tale. And not even with the, the magic forest necessarily, but just the description of the, I don't know if you'd be considered the main antagonist, but the tyrant at the beginning. And I just thought it was very interesting reading these two back to back and having these two very different sort of settings. And for two very different stories still, but uh, yeah, that just struck me.
Premee: 18:36
Yeah, it's um, I think I was chatting to somebody about this the other day, too. Particularly at the novella length, you know, obviously because of the limitation of word count, there's only so much world building you can do. So, as with Butcher, you have to be very, you know, I hate to use the word efficient. You have to be very efficient with your world building. But sometimes what that looks like is like Martha Wells, Murderbot, where it's narrating something, and it says something like, you know, The space station was triangular, and was larger than the last one I had been on. And then that's it. You know, you don't get any more description or anything. So, yeah. I kind of, in some respects, did the same thing for Butcher, which is, I need the reader to kind of carry some of the weight of the story. I'll just set it up to be familiar enough that people who are, you know, versed, you know, Or, or who like, sort of like the Grimm style fairy tales, can bring kind of their own backpack full of worldbuilding to the story. And then I don't have to put that in there because they already have it, kind of. Whereas in a novel, especially one like Siege, where the setting is so so important to everything that the characters do where it constrains their every move where it affects their decisions where it's obviously affected the war and and decisions made by the government and the military and you know everybody's background and their culture and where they've lived and you know people's values and attitudes. I thought Thank god this is a novel, because now I can, now I can build this world with the constraints that I kind of need it to have. So in, in The Butcher of the Forest, if people have, you know, their own ideas, or wrong ideas, or whatever, about this fairytale setting. I don't care, because the parts of the world building that affect the plot are in there and they're solid. Whereas in Siege, it is kind of a case where I don't want people to bring too much of that backpack full of preconceptions to this particular world. You know, I don't want them to be like, one of my friends was saying, you know, this didn't have to be a speculative fiction novel if you had just, you know, Taken out all the fantasy stuff and like the, you know, the Pteranodons and stuff, and, you know, and set it in the Balkans and changed everybody's names. That could have won the Man Booker Prize. And I was like, I don't want to win the Man Booker Prize. I don't want to write about a real place and a real time and a real war and real people. I want it to be speculative. And that means you have to do the work in the world building.
Lilly: 21:06
Is this a safe space? Can I give a really, really embarrassing confession? For a little while at the beginning of The Siege of Burning Grass, I did in fact think that they were all animal people because of one throwaway dialogue line. Someone was calling the enemy, ah, they're all animals. And for some reason my mind was like, that is 100 percent true. And they are all animals. Ha!
Premee: 21:32
Okay, well, I'm glad the rest of the book fixed that. I
Lilly: 21:34
It did, I, I figured it
Premee: 21:36
use, you know, historical language of, of many thousands of years of people saying that the enemy is an animal and trying to dehumanize them.
Lilly: 21:44
Yeah, no, I was like, oh no, that was, that was figurative. All right. I was like, oh no, what have I done? I did go back. I reread a little bit because I was like, this is uh, this was wrong and I need to fix it.
Sara: 21:59
I will say something that struck me reading both of these stories back to back is that they both have main characters that really strive to empathize with their antagonists. I mean, obviously we have Alifret who is really, really trying to empathize with Qudor, not always successfully, but, and then we have Varys who is really trying to empathize with the children of the tyrant who I mean, the tyrant is obviously a very terrible person. He's the tyrant.
Premee: 22:34
Yeah, that kind of came, I guess, and people have been commenting that, which is great, that's what I was trying to do, but I think that kind of comes out of what we were talking about earlier, which is this, this ambiguity, and of not being super wild about stories where things are really presented in kind of a black and white way. I guess my other thing is, like, for the past couple of years, maybe? I keep starting. To read books that have been recommended very highly, say, or, you know, that are selling lots of copies, or that got a lot of media attention, or whatever. And, you know, you get to like page 15, and you kind of realize, this is going to be one of those black and white stories. And if I'm not a big fan of reading those, you know, I'm not going to be a big fan of writing those, either. So, the application of empathy to the enemy is something that I want to make the reader feel a little bit uncomfortable with. Like, You know, we should know who the antagonist is in a story, but antagonist and, like, enemy or nemesis or villain are not actually synonymous. The antagonist is just the person at cross purposes to what the protagonist is doing. Um, and You know, a lot of the time, they probably want the same thing. They're just going about it two different ways, and one way may be, you know, more harmful, or more misjudged, or just unexpected compared to the other. But, in the stories, I hope people can see that even in a more like, caricature like fairy tale story like the Butcher of the Forest. These are intended to kind of represent real people and real ideas and antagonists that are very much the center of their own stories and think they're doing the right thing.
Sara: 24:21
And I would say that you definitely get that feeling with absolutely Qudor and with the tyrant as well. We see, since it's a novella, we see a lot less of him, but you do get that sense that he's the main character in his story. We're just not reading his story.
Premee: 24:37
Which is good, I think, because that would be a much, like, messier, bloodier story. But yeah, the other thing I keep thinking of for that one there is just like, It's the way both books kind of look at power, and how when you boil down what power is, it is the ability to cause people to do your will, whether or not they want to. Like, that doesn't, that doesn't matter. So, it's not that the tyrant is afraid of the forest or anything like that, or that he thinks it'll end badly, or that he doesn't want his kids back. It's that he would never go in to get them alone, because that's not what people with power do. They just make other people do what they want them to do. They never get their own hands dirty. They never do the work. And, you know, when you look at our world, you see that too. People who have real power aren't the ones doing what needs to be done, whether that's good or bad. So I kind of wanted to make that really clear too, that Varys is simply a tool that he's going to use, and he's going to throw it away after, you know, after he's done the thing he wanted to have done.
Lilly: 25:38
Switching gears a little bit to The Siege of Burning Grass, Alifret, the main character, is constantly dealing with people who associate his appearance with his intelligence. Or just, you know, his personality in general. And we read another book recently that also was like, very clearly trying to push back against, what did Gabriella Huston say, the beauty bias?
Premee: 26:03
Mm.
Sara: 26:04
Yeah, beauty bias. Yeah.
Lilly: 26:06
And I just felt So bad for him every time he got into a new situation. And this, I mean, we are so close with this character through this whole book and how, like, thoughtful and sweet he is, and then everyone just assuming he's some lumbering monster. Yeah, if you wanted me to feel very bad for him, you did that correctly.
Premee: 26:28
Yay! No, I wanted, he was the one, yeah, that I really wanted people to feel and see the world. Um, really from his perspective, obviously as, you know, as we were just kind of saying it would be a very different book if it had been told from the point of view of Kudur, the fanatic, you know, he would obviously have a very different view of how this war is going and where he wished he could be and how many people he probably wished he could be killing or whatever. But yeah, Alifrit was always right from the start. The way he is kind of conflicting with the story world, which I think is so important in, you know, in any book, but particularly speculative fiction, is you've built a world, you've made up this whole world, you've created all the, the little, you know, peculiarities of this world, and then you have to build a character who is going to just, like, have friction with it in some way, that they're going to break the world or the world is going to break them in some way. And, you know, About Alifret, it's a time of war, and you've got this big, huge, shambling guy who should be, as they keep telling him, a weapon. You know, he should be dangerous, he should be violent. They can't conceive of somebody who's not. Who's big, who isn't going to use that size for evil, basically. Because I happen to think war is evil, and there's never any excuse for it. And instead, he plays completely against type. Like, not only is he not in the army, killing people, he's actually a pacifist. And that's the thing he's going to try to cling to, you know, at the expense of his health, at the expense of his life. And this, I guess, also is where some of the science came in, but just the awful way in my undergraduate degree that a lot of my professors, like my human genetics professors, would talk about, you know, genetic disabilities or genetic changes. Like mutations, things like trisomy 21 and stuff, and they would always try to hammer into us, like, you know, Oh, if you've got a change in, you know, appearance, you've probably got a change in intelligence. These people will be developmentally delayed for the rest of their lives. You may as well write them off as soon as you see their chromosomes. And it was just this kind of like, this kind of disability essentialism whereby they expected us to look at pictures of babies or children in our textbooks and immediately say, you know, They're substandard. They're never going to be real adults. They're never going to be real people. And, you know, that's part of what Alaphret is dealing with. You know, the idea that if you look different from the average person, you must also think differently from them. And maybe because you're body is deformed or unusual in some way. Your brain's probably deformed or unusual in some way. He does play that to his advantage a couple of times, you know, with the old ladies, but I don't think that's a spoiler. But I just wanted it to be part of his personality, something he's been dealing with his entire life. You know, people looking at him and being like, I'm going to write you off immediately. I don't know you, I don't know your background, I don't know that you are literally a school teacher in your village. I'm just going to write you off. And so, that's built who he is, his treatment by others, his treatment by his parents. It's a very different book if he is a big violent guy that just does go off to war because he thinks he should be doing it.
Lilly: 29:55
I think there's also something, circling back to what you said earlier about power, people assume he would be violent because he is physically powerful, so why wouldn't he exploit
Premee: 30:06
wouldn't he? Yeah. And they can't think of why he wouldn't because they're like, if I was like that, then I,
Lilly: 30:12
Mm hmm.
Premee: 30:13
so they just, they just extrapolate that to everybody. Or they think, you know, if I was like that, then I, particularly if my country needed me. So they assume that part too. Like that's the second part of that. And again, they assume that wrong as well.
Lilly: 30:29
I loved Alaphret.
Premee: 30:30
I, I love Delafrit. Someone last night actually asked me, you know, how I, how I developed characters, blah blah blah, and if I had a favorite character, and I said I had a tie now, because my first favorite is still Johnny Chambers, the absolute, like, shit goblin child from my first debut trilogy, who, Saves the world for various reasons, not which of least is the fact that it's her fault that the world needs saving. Because she just, she's like James Bond. Fundamentally she doesn't change. Like, she causes some huge disaster and then just like bounces up and dusts herself off and is like, Right, I will just make a machine to fix this. And we're all like, Don't! Stop! And then I said, she was tied now with, with Alifret the pacifist from the siege of Burning Grass. Because He's, he's very complicated and I just love him.
Lilly: 31:22
Well, we can talk a little bit more about the particulars of how much we love him in the spoilers section, but before we get there, Sarah, who should read this book?
Sara: 31:31
I think you mean both books. These books, yes.
Lilly: 31:34
I'm a little obsessed with The Siege of Burning Grass, I'm sorry.
Sara: 31:39
You should read The Butcher of the Forest if you like dark fairy tales, and you should read The Siege of Burning Grass if you like a lot of moral ambiguity, and, and like, messy stories. I mean that in a good way, to be clear, but like, it's not cut and dry, it's not black and white, there's ambiguity all over the place.
Lilly: 32:01
Mm, you should also read The Siege of Burning Grass if war makes you upset and you want to just like kind of sit with that upsetness for a little while. The remainder of this episode contains spoilers. Continuing my obsession with The Siege of Burning Grass. At one point in this novel, the main characters are talking to Bunny, who is a very privileged, an aristocrat, who is helping the resistance. And he's talking about how he's going to write a book about the war, and when he does, he's going to make it glorious and heroic, because people will emulate what they read. This book, however, highlights the sad and gross parts about war. So I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that you disagree with Bunny.
Premee: 33:02
Yes, and if somebody wants to like, pay me to write a novelette or something from Bunny's point of view, like the early part of the book, I will totally do that. But yeah, it's, it's just, I keep thinking, you know, you can't write a pro war novel. You just cannot, because there is nothing good or noble. Or even dignified, or reasonable, or rational, or beneficial about sending lots of people to murder lots of other people. There just cannot be. And I saw something on social media yesterday, the day before, that just made my eyes bleed. And I guess it was a quote from Francois Truffaut, I think, that said something like, every war film glorifies war. And there was a back half of the quotation that I don't remember seeing, because I was seeing pink by that point. But, you know, you can't glorify war. The, the history books that try to kind of look at it from like the 50, 000 foot view. And they're like, well, the general took this division of soldiers, and then they attacked this division of soldiers from the rival general, and this general won. And that tells you nothing about how many young men died horribly in fear, in agony, screaming. On the field, or who were captured, or tortured, or starved, or sent on a death march, or imprisoned, or, or, or whatever. You know, there's just no way to make it sound good. There's no way to make it sound good. And yet, Bunny's attitude is very, very much that of the people who are sending these young men out to die. The attitude of people in power. The attitude of people with money. Who think that whatever outcome they have, they want from the war, it's very, very reasonable to pay the price of people they don't know. So to them, war is glorious, because look at what our country has gained, and the price doesn't matter. So that would be the kind of book that Bunny would write, and I just, I hate the idea, and I hate every war book that's ever been written that tries to make it look defensible.
Lilly: 35:08
And the price is pretty negligible when someone else is paying it.
Premee: 35:14
It's never gonna be bunny or people like bunny or people from his family, like, never.
Sara: 35:20
I think something that interested me, though, is that, like, Alifret and the Pact members who have sworn this pact of non violence, who, who have decided that they are not going to participate in this war machine, they still have to grapple with the limits of that, and like the edges of that, you know, they have to confront the question of whether it's a or not their commitment to non violence helps or harms in every situation. Like, I'm, I'm thinking of specifically the scene where Alifret and Qudor come upon the scouts, or the scouts come upon them,
Premee: 36:01
Mm
Sara: 36:01
Qudor slaughters them, basically, and Alifret sits by and kind of lets it happen.
Premee: 36:08
Yeah, and I think you see too that he thinks about that later too, like, you know, this was an opportunity to do this and this and this and this and this and And I think that's a, that's something that fiction should be looking at, because we kind of, I don't know, I don't want to, I don't want to generalize, but I said, you know, we as kind of a modern society have almost gotten like stuck in that kind of thinking, like, because we cannot perfectly predict what our actions will cause, we better do nothing. Kind of. So you end up in this kind of analysis paralysis for almost every major issue, and that's kind of why we're in this, like, poly crisis. And, you know, Alfred sits by not just because of his ideals, but also because he is kind of afraid, like, what if I did something and made it worse? What if I did something and I helped the wrong people? What if I was wrong about the wrong people? What if I, you know, there's too many what ifs, and you only have a few seconds to decide, it's, and the scene is over very quickly, too, because Qudor's not a very nice guy. And, you know, it's, it's like watching,
Sara: 37:14
Understatement.
Premee: 37:15
it's like watching a car crash, is, you know, what, what should I do? I would like to sit and think about this for a couple of weeks. But I can't, because the crash is happening. And you know, some of that was some of the reading that I was doing, like I was talking about, to fill in those gaps. And some of those gaps were after I had decided specifically to make Alaphret not just a pacifist, but also part of a pacifist group. So then you can go and read about the pacifists and how they interacted with various resistance groups, particularly in World War II. And you do see things like people who are like, I am freezing to death. I, I may actually die, but I noticed that there's a soldier's uniform coat over there, and I'm not even going to put that on, you know, to keep myself warm so that I won't freeze. I would rather die. And then you read later about these people that did die, and you're like, you probably should have put on the coat. Um, but you know, I just. Whether or not any of the anecdotes are true, there are a lot of them. And for each individual person to decide where they're going to draw the line, depending on their own tolerance limits, and their own fears, and their past traumas, and, and their particular circumstances, and who else they have depending on them. It's just this incredibly complicated calculus where you feel like at any point, if you make an error in your calculation, everything's going to be so much worse instead of so much better. because the easy way makes it seem like it'll be better, but something could go wrong. So you see that again and again and again in these people's descriptions and in the memoirs and, you know, are we doing the right thing? And Alifred sits there like, oh, you know, shit, did I do the right thing? Maybe I did not. Maybe I did. Maybe I did not. Maybe I should have done like a secret third thing.
Sara: 39:05
And then you contrast that with someone like Merlin who I, is, is much more, well, we don't, we don't get into his head the way we do with Alifred, but like, he has different delineations between what he can and cannot do. I mean,
Premee: 39:19
Yeah.
Sara: 39:19
Or what he should and should not do. Like he, he, at the, at the end, he, he decides, yeah, I think Qudor, not a great guy. I, I think he should be gone. And was probably right about that. Not successful, but
Premee: 39:33
He probably was. Yeah, yeah, I think that's, that's kind of the change. And I actually really loved, I loved Merlin. The story would have been a lot longer if I had gotten more into his head and into his decision processes. But yeah, it was kind of like, that's kind of the point where Merlin decides to kind of go from what the resistance has been doing, which is kind of like ready, aim, fire. And just to go to kind of like, Fire, do something, do any action, and then correct your aim later when you see what the results of your action have been. And that's really kind of not how his group has been working so far. So for him to take that step, triggered by Qudur showing up, you know, that's huge for him. So it's, uh, it's a good thing they're kind of like at this point in the war rather than earlier. Which again, because spoilers section, you know, this is very near the end of the book where they actually do manage to end the war.
Lilly: 40:26
I very cruelly now want just like an entire internal monologue of Alifret trying to solve the trolley problem. Yeah.
Premee: 40:46
a huge giant monster whose head is full of like stories and folklore and myth, but he's also kind of a walking library. It's, you know, it's mentioned a few times. He reads a lot, so this is not going to be a short story for him. This is going to be, this is going to be him going through every possible permutation of the trolley problem and still not solving it.
Lilly: 41:07
So, Alifret is sent on this mission. to theoretically end the war by one of the armies in this book. Yeah, not many air quotes. And Qudor is the sort of primary person, his, his minder on this mission. And we find out that they're actually from neighboring towns with very similar cultural backgrounds. And I was hoping you could talk a little bit about how you used that to complicate their dynamic in the story.
Premee: 41:37
Oh, God. Thank you so much, too, because initially, uh, they weren't. They just happened to look vaguely similar. And one of the higher ups says something like, well, you know, Tukadur, who's like the brains behind the outfit. Some brain. You know, if you can use that to your advantage, you should. But then I did kind of think, like, wow, wouldn't it be so complicated? if they were far more alike than they were different. If they're extremely different, if they're coming from extremely different places of that kind of culture, and background, and ethnicity, and area, possibly they spend the entire, and it's also kind of a road trip novel, possibly they spend the entire road trip butting heads about that, and never coming to an understanding about it. It's actually worse if they start out from a very similar point, because then both of them get to ask themselves, as they do in the text, How did you turn out this way? Why did you turn out this way? What was so different? Like, where was the division point that you You know, became this and that you became this and the similar cultural and informational touch points that they have are an opportunity for them to connect and work better together. And it's really that sort of second layer of their personalities, their beliefs, their principles that put them on the far side of ever being able to. to do that. So they have decided that they can't possibly get along, even though in theory they probably could. So that was just kind of the the building of the antagonism between them, is that they, you know, at some level they're both thinking, we really could be friends. Like, realistically, if this wasn't a war and if we weren't on this stupid mission, you know, we would probably get along. We have a lot in common. But instead, because of this, we veered off on two such separate paths that it's probably going to cost one of us our lives. Like, how did this happen? The whole book is a, how did this happen?
Lilly: 43:41
heh. Speaking of complicated characters, in The Butcher of the Forest, I was shocked when the tyrant was kind of a chill dude for a half second at the end there.
Premee: 43:56
Half a second! Yeah, I wasn't sure what to do with that scene at first. I just, I went with my instincts, which of course as a writer is all you can do, but then kind of later coming back I thought, okay, okay, okay, maybe this is his one split second of mercy, but not weakness, exactly. I think he's affected very much by Varys's story. And, you know, and again, he's kind of a one dimensional guy in the book, he's just the evil king in a fairy tale. I think he's affected by it in a way he didn't expect, and I think he doesn't like being surprised. And I think, partly, that's what it is. It's like, it's almost like an animal being startled and dropping something. So I think Varys also is aware that it isn't really mercy, it just is something that looks very much like it, and she should probably, you know, count her lucky stars, because what if it never happens again? But it also leaves the door open like a crack to say, what if it does happen again? What if this is the beginning of a change to someone who has, you know, Killed her family. Killed her parents. Killed almost everyone she knows in the war. Conquered her valley. Is trying to assimilate and arrest everybody that isn't, you know, playing by the rules. What if this is the beginning of a loosening of that? So I think it gives them both kind of a moment of, of hope and of mercy. And, you know, I don't know at the end who's sending the food either for her family. Is that the Tyrants? I don't know. Is it someone else at the castle? I don't know. It could be anybody. It might be him. Or one of his servants. Or the kid's mother. Or somebody. I don't know. But maybe if it is him, it's because that door is open a crack.
Sara: 45:39
Speaking of, of not knowing the specifics of who is doing something, were there any scenes in either book, both books, that surprised you?
Premee: 45:49
Hmm. Yeah, I think the, so the Butcher of the Forest was just kind of one long surprise. Because I just did such a loose outline for it. It was like, I think literally like five or six sentences. Of things that I wanted to write, and I just gave it such a light polish, but I think even at the end, I was wavering on what I wanted to happen with Varys and the children trying to get out of the forest at the last minute. Because, you know, the, the ancient god of the forest who kind of shows up and is like, Hey, guess what? I literally told you not to come back here. The fuck are you doing back here? You know, who shows up and is mad, and, and, you know, feels like he's being robbed, and feels like he's been tricked, and that he's been cheated, and everybody in the forest is like, narking on Varys, being like, oh my god, guess what she did? Yeah, probably in that exact voice. He offers, uh, You know, and again, we're on the spoiler part of things. He offers a trade, and Varys doesn't want to take it, and she offers herself. And I thought, you know what, that probably would be a good ending. Let's push the kids out through the gateway. Let's save the kids, and let Varys stay. And then that's kind of the end of the story. And I changed my mind at the last minute. And again, just going off the writerly instinct that that wasn't what I wanted to happen. That this was another thing where she was trying her best and, again, failed because it's a book about power. And it's a book about how people remove what little power you may have. It's a book about You know, a protagonist who wants to be on the hero's journey and be an active protagonist and ends up at every turn having that snatched away from her and being reminded, you know, you're poor. You're nothing. You're, you're meaningless. I have more power than you. I'm going to do what I want. You're going to have to act within my constraints and just the sensation that this is what marginalized and colonized people have been suffering under for thousands of years under various colonizers, she hasn't escaped that. It's still happening, and she still is not the one in charge. So that's why that ending felt right to me, is she gets to live. She gets to live with the survivor's guilt.
Lilly: 48:08
What a prize. That would have been, like, too neat of a bow, too, right? Like,
Premee: 48:13
I think so.
Lilly: 48:15
the story's so complex, if it had ended up so cleanly, it would have felt strange.
Premee: 48:19
Yeah, and it that would have been the more Fairy tale ending though, like to have that neat, that neatness of the ending. But again, it's not, it's not a real fairy tale. People have been telling me, you know, this is a fairy tale retelling and I'm like, well, which one? And then they can't answer that because it isn't. I'm like, no, it's not a real, it's not from a fairy tale. It's just got fairy tale vibes. And then the cover, I think helped with that. So,
Sara: 48:44
Yeah, I mean,
Premee: 48:45
love the cover. Yeah.
Sara: 48:46
the cover for both of these books are just absolutely gorgeous. You tend to have really good covers in
Premee: 48:52
I've been very lucky so far. Yeah.
Sara: 48:55
But I would agree with you that it, it has fairytale vibes. It feels like a fairytale, but it's, I mean, it's quite clearly not
Premee: 49:02
Yeah.
Sara: 49:03
one, you know,
Premee: 49:04
Mm hmm. It's not a specific one. Yeah.
Sara: 49:07
What would you like readers to take away from both books?
Premee: 49:10
Oh, we're asking the tough questions now.
Lilly: 49:14
Kid gloves are coming off.
Premee: 49:16
Kid gloves are coming off. I think, I think I want the engaged reader to come out from both books thinking about emotional ambiguity and their own instincts. And the idea that we're always told to trust our gut, but what if our gut is leading us wrong because of historical trauma, or, you know, being raised under circumstances that made us mistrust our gut? Both books, I think, I tried to focus really hard on character, not at the expense of plot or whatever, but really hard on characters making decisions that not only are hard, but that they don't want to make. And I hope the reader is feeling the same way as they read. I hope they're deeply emotionally steeped in these unwanted decisions. Like tea. Like a tea bag.
Lilly: 50:11
Alifred a hug.
Premee: 50:14
I also want to hug Alfred. Heh heh heh
Lilly: 50:19
Thank you so much for joining us. This has been a fantastic conversation. We loved the chance to get to talk to you. Before we let you go, are there any current projects you'd like to talk about?
Sara: 50:29
You mentioned you have lots and lots of books coming out this year.
Premee: 50:34
Oh boy! So, yeah, we've got the two that we've discussed here. We have the sequel to my 2021 novella, The Annual Migration of Clouds, coming out in June, which some people are excited about recently because they didn't know that there were going to be sequels. I also did not know until my publisher emailed me and was like, can we have some? So that one's called We Speak Through the Mountain. And that's coming out in June. And then at some point during the year, I also have a weird, post apocalyptic, wild western, wild hunt story coming out from Absinthe Books called The Rider, The Ride, The Rich Man's Wife, which is edited by Maria Regan. And I also have a mini collection coming out from Psychopomp Press. So that's a new novella called One Message Remains, and a reprint of The General's Turn, which was in the Deadlands, and two new novellas. So I'm pretty excited for that one, and I'm afraid I don't know release dates for those two that I just mentioned, but I am supposed to be doing edits for One Message Remains, like, right now, so, hopefully soon.
Lilly: 51:37
So we'll wrap this up quick so you can get back to that.
Premee: 51:41
Oh boy, edits. No, thank you guys so much, this was such a great conversation, and thank you for inviting
Sara: 51:47
Yeah, this was, I mean, like we said, we absolutely love your work. Dream Guest. Yeah, I, I will say, obviously you sent us arcs for this, but you are an auto buy author for me. Everything that I've read that you've written has just been like, fantastic.
Premee: 52:01
you.
Sara: 52:02
Before you leave, can you tell our listeners where you can be found on the internet so they too can follow you, learn more about release dates as you know them, read your stuff.
Premee: 52:11
Yeah, I, um, I try to keep my website updated ish. So that's www. pramimuhammad. com And I'm less on Twitter, but I'm there as Pramisaurus And more on Blue Sky these days, which is now open to everybody, so you don't need an invite. And if you just search my name, I'm on there under my profile. website. So that's, that's my handle now. And I'm also occasionally on Instagram, same handle as Twitter, but blue sky is the best place to find me lurking around these days.
Sara: 52:41
Awesome.
Lilly: 52:42
The great exodus from Twitter is slow and
Premee: 52:45
The great exodus from Twitter. Oh, I should also shout out. So my cat has a blue sky account. He's not really like grammatically correct, but I think that's okay for cats so people can go follow him too.
Sara: 53:01
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Fiction Fans.
Lilly: 53:05
Come disagree with us. We are on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok at FictionFansPod. You can also email us at FictionFansPod at gmail. com.
Sara: 53:16
If you enjoyed the episode, please rate and review on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and follow us wherever your podcasts live.
Lilly: 53:24
We also have a Patreon, where you can support us and find our show notes and a lot of other nonsense.
Sara: 53:31
Thanks again for listening, and may your villains always be defeated. Bye!
