Book Tour Q&A: Credible Threats by Daniel Meyer
- Fiction Fans
- Sep 3, 2023
- 18 min read
Today we're taking part in the book tour organized by Escapist Book Company for Credible Threats by Daniel Meyer! Continue reading for the book blurb and a Q&A with the author.
About the book
Sam Adams, sixteen-year-old wizard, has zero interest in saving the world—but staying out of the line of fire isn’t an option for wizards.
When a new designer drug hits the streets, giving ordinary humans magical powers and leaving a trail of bodies in its wake, it threatens to turn his city of Williamsport’s long-simmering conflict between the haves and the have-nots into a full-scale war.
The only one with the skills to protect the city, Sam finds himself thrust into a conspiracy far darker and more dangerous than he ever imagined, with tentacles stretching into the criminal underworld and the wealthy elite—and into the spirit world. Fighting for his life, surrounded by enemies, Sam has to dig deeper than ever before to keep Williamsport from going up in flames.
But even magic has its limits.
On to the interview...!
Thank you so much for joining us for this Q&A! We’ll start off with one of our standard podcast opening questions–tell us something great that’s happened recently.
I made an important breakthrough on my revisions for Sam Adams book two. There were a couple problems that had had me stuck for months, then something clicked and I fixed them in two days. Finally getting over that hump finally put the end of revisions in sight.
What are you currently reading or what’s up next on your TBR? What made you pick up this book?
Current read: Light Bringer by Pierce Brown. I’m down to the home stretch and I’m shuddering in terror at seeing how it ends. Red Rising is one of my favorite series of all time and a big influence on my writing. Up next, I’m going to read something VERY niche, which is a history of Ireland’s O’Sullivan clan; the magic of DNA suggests I’m descended from them, so I’ll learn more about their wacky misadventures. And then it’s Sharpe’s Regiment by Bernard Cornwell.
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what inspired you to start writing?
Well, I’m thirty-two years old, and I live in Missouri. Thanks to quarantine, I finally realized my lifelong dream of growing long hair and shaving irregularly. I love history and rock music and binge-watching TV. And reading, obviously. I used to be a substitute teacher and work in radio, and spent about twenty-seven years in college trying to figure out what I should major in. (Just last night I dreamed I went back to finish my bachelor’s, and I was so relieved when I woke up, safe in bed and far away from school.) I’m impatiently waiting for fall to arrive, because it has the best weather and it gives me an excuse to unleash my scarf collection.
I’ve had ideas for fictional tales swirling around in my head since forever. It took me a long time to realize I could bring them to life, however; I sort of brushed that off and spent quite a while pursuing more straightforward careers. I took it for granted that I’d never try to write for real, though I don’t know why. I suppose what changed was when I started reading more; I’ve always been a prolific reader, but in my early twenties, I started going out of my way to find more books I’d like. (Motivated in part by finding something new to read after I finished A Song of Ice and Fire.) All that extra reading fired up my creativity until the temptation just became too much to resist. And somehow, I pulled it off.
How do you spend your free time when you’re not reading or writing? Do you have any hobbies or interests that you can talk to us about?
My concept of free time is sort of flip-flopped. Once upon a time, when I had a regular day job, writing is what I would do in my free time, when I got home from work. When I got laid off during the Covidpocalypse, I had a lot more free time, which meant getting a lot more writing done. On some level, I supposed the responsible thing to do was look for another steady gig, but I couldn’t resist devoting all that extra time to what I always considered my real career. So, basically, my free time became my job. Nowadays, my main focus is writing, and I put a lot of pressure on myself to keep after it, to give my career a boost. I also do a little freelance ad-writing thingy, so I don’t have to rely only on book sales for a living. (Yikes.) So yeah, my idea of free time is definitely skewed.
Like I said earlier, I love binge-watching one of the umpteen shows I’m working my way through: Babylon 5, Dollhouse, Frasier, Dark Angel, and plenty more. That’s probably my favorite way to unwind. And I love studying history. Lately I’ve been absorbed by the research of a French historian named Christian Settipani, which has occasionally stolen my focus from this interview. I do a little research on my family history, which I don’t have a lot of patience for, so it usually consists of emailing people who actually know what they’re talking about. I’m also learning High Valyrian. Rytsas, se kirimvose, nuha raqiros. (Hello, and thank you, my friend.) Oh, and I love medieval weapons, but as this is an expensive hobby, I spend more time resisting the temptation to collect medieval weapons rather than actually collecting them.
Who are your favorite current writers and who are your greatest influences?
The ones that jump out immediately would be Pierce Brown, Jim Butcher, George R.R. Martin, and Bernard Cornwell. I think they’ve all influenced everything I write, in one way or another. One off the beaten path influence I should mention is Robert Young Pelton, an adventure journalist whose writing I discovered as a kid; he writes about some of the most brutal conflicts on earth, and it’s utterly hilarious. His offbeat way of looking at things made a big impact on my own writerly ‘voice.’
If you could collaborate with any one author, who would it be and why?
Interesting; I’ve never really thought about this.
Off the top of my head: Bernard Cornwell. I’ve always wanted to see him take on a fantasy or science fiction novel, and I bet we could come up with something really cool if we put our heads together. I’m not sure how good I would be at coauthoring, though. I still hardly know what I’m doing.
What is one thing that you love about the current state of SFF and what is one thing that you wish you saw more of?
I think my favorite thing is something pretty mundane: there’s just so much of it! More genres and subgenres than you can shake a stick at, and new authors always appearing. There are so many options. On a related note, I love that self-publishing, at least in the SFF world, has hit the big time. If you look at, say, Will Wight, Ryan Cahill, etc., you’d be hard-pressed to say they’d be any better off if they’d gone the trad route. Even debuts, like Eleventh Cycle by Kian N. Ardalan or The Crew by Sadir S. Samir, have made a big splash in the fantasy scene.
One thing I wish we saw more of is stories influenced by history. Now, I’m sure everyone will think that’s a very silly answer, because pretty much all fantasy stories are influenced by history. However, I think there’s still a ton of cultures, eras, incidents, and so on that have yet to be mined for inspiration. Even with a traditional medieval Europe inspired story, there’s a lot of fertile ground; with stuff like the conflicts between the Irish and Normans, the Scottish Wars of Independence, the wars between Italian City states, Moorish Spain, and so on.
That’s not even getting into what you could do with some other eras; I want to see some writer do for the Hittite Empire what GRRM did for the Wars of the Roses, for instance.
(Someday I may end up having to try some of this myself.)
What is one book you want to shout about to the world? What about it makes you love it so much?
This would be a great time to shout out a scrappy up and comer, but the first thing that came to mind was something very different: The Adventures and Exploits of Brigadier Gerard by Arthur Conan Doyle. I’m not sure why it’s not more well known; overshadowed by Sherlock Holmes, I guess. Recommended if you like The Three Musketeers, or you’d enjoy a more comedic version of the Richard Sharpe series, from the point of view of the other side. It’s got swordfights, spooky castles, frantic midnight rides with the fate of France hanging in the balance, all kinds of good stuff. And Gerard is one of my favorite heroes I’ve read about in quite a while; he’s utterly convinced he’s the most valuable soldier in Napolean’s army, and as one reads about his adventures, it starts to look like he may be right. I really wish Doyle had written a lot more with him.
What are your favorite types of stories? Of characters?
I like stories with lots of action and cool worldbuilding, stories that can really pull you in and get a reaction out of you. (Of course, that’s a very subjective thing, and even I’m usually not sure what makes me like one book and dislike another.) I also really like stories with a funny or otherwise memorable narrative voice, which won’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s read Credible Threats. The Red Queen’s War trilogy by Mark Lawrence is a good example of that, or the Gerard stories I just mentioned, along with The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, which has a far more dramatic and emotional narrative voice than those others, but is no less engrossing.
The characters I like are the loveable rogues, the wild men, the unlikely heroes, the loose cannons and deadpan snarkers. The rulebreakers, who don’t grouse about law and duty and instead toss a chaos grenade into the system, characters like Darrow or Uhtred. The characters who are constantly outnumbered and outgunned and beaten-up, fighting impossible odds. I gravitate more towards characters like John McClane, Riggs and Murtaugh, Indiana Jones, and so on, the ones who careen from one disaster to the next, as opposed to the ones who are capable and in control of a situation.
That’s something I dealt with in Rising Shadows, Sam Adams book two; after book one, he’s stronger now, more experienced, so I had to make sure he doesn’t do TOO good a job of rising to the occasion, and still gets in over his head.
How much do you plan when you write? What’s your writing process like?
I plan a lot but it’s not enough. When I start a new book, I realize how little material I actually have and have to come up with a lot more on the fly. It can be very frustrating.
I try to knock out a thousand words a day. If I’m really in the zone, I can surpass that, but I figure even if I fall short, I can still put up a solid amount. I’d like to get faster. The hard part is the revisions, when I have to figure out what to rewrite and what to leave the same, what I should add and what I should subtract, and so on…
Is this your first book? If so, what lessons have you learned from writing it? If not, what lessons did you learn from writing earlier books that you brought into this one?
Yep, Credible Threats is my first book. Well, that’s not strictly true. I wrote first drafts of four different novels before publishing Credible Threats, along with a couple short stories I never felt strongly about. Credible Threats, however, is the only one that I kept returning to and refining until it was fit for public consumption.
For one, I learned how to work from an editor’s revisions, which was immensely valuable. On a related note, I learned that the problems that bedevil your manuscript are fixable, if you just keep after it, and that if there’s a particular part that’s given you trouble since the beginning, you can just snip it out and lose nothing. And I got a sense for what you should fix before you even send it to your editor, which saves time and energy later.
What do you think characterizes your writing style?
Hmmm… I’m going to say some wry humor (because I’ve found I’m incapable of taking things 100% seriously, no matter how heavy the story is), lots of action, and a fast pace (probably because of my short attention span). I suspect no matter what I write, those elements will be more or less constants. Basically, I’m just trying to write the books I’d like to read.
How much of yourself do you write into your stories?
I’m not sure exactly. I’ve definitely tried to avoid Sam becoming a self-insert type character, which is easy for people to assume you’re going for when you’re writing in the first person. To be fair, Sam’s narrative voice bears a certain resemblance to what I was writing in college, when I was writing reports; we both had a tendency to make wry observations and have trouble taking the subject matter too seriously, occasionally wandering away on tangents.
Beyond that, there are certainly various real-life things that have found their way into my writing. I’m sure that’s how it with all writers. For instance, I used to drive home from work and see a bunch of fancy houses on a series of hills, which inspired the neighborhood in Credible Threats called The Bluffs. There’s a throwaway line where Sam mentions being a fan of Liverpool FC, which is my favorite soccer team.
And Sam’s reticence to discuss his emotions comes about partly due to my own uneasiness writing emotional scenes.
And there’s certainly more that I’ve forgotten about. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see how much of myself ends up in future books…
What comes first to you when you’re writing, the world, the characters, or the storyline?
It depends, I guess. A lot of the time it’s just a basic premise; at least, it was with Sam Adams, when I thought someone should write a story about a wizard in high school. With other ideas, though, it’s been the world or the characters, or a ‘what if?’ type scenario. And oftentimes, I cannibalize other, more minor ideas into stories I feel more strongly about. In general, I like coming up with cool, high-concept ideas.
They say to never judge a book by its cover, but a cover is still a marketing tool that helps sell books. Can you tell us about the idea behind the cover of your book?
Haha. It took me AGES to come up with the idea. Artwork isn’t in my wheelhouse at all. After a very frustrating search for ideas, I finally landed on a scene in the book when Sam discovers a tarot card, the death card, as a clue. I decided to go with that just because I didn’t have any other ideas, and thanks to my cover artist, Luke Tarzian, it exceeded my expectations and turned out amazing. Basically, the front cover is supposed to be the death card that he finds.
Can you give us an elevator pitch for your book?
Oh dear. I’ll try.
If you want it at the most basic, I’d call it The Dresden Files in a high school.
If you want something a little less basic, I’d say it mixes the high school urban fantasy of Buffy the Vampire Slayer with the rip-roaring action and wisecracking humor of Die Hard, with a little of the noirish vibe of Veronica Mars.
Describe your book in 3 adjectives.
Fast-paced, funny, and action-packed. (I got ya with the compound words!)
How different is the final version of this book from the first draft?
Very. I didn’t have a clear idea at first of where I wanted the story to go, so Sam had different powers with a different backstory. (He could summon spirits, demons, and other supernatural creatures, and he was the first summoner to appear in over a hundred years, signaling that Ominous Magical Things were about to happen.) This proved to be cool on paper, but not so much in practice; the MC’s sole power amounting to an ability to hold conversations with other entities really hamstrung the story, so I had to give him regular magical powers as well, and ultimately dropped the summoning angle. There was also a very different villain, plot, opening scene, climax, etc., and some characters had slightly different arcs or hadn’t appeared yet. And it proved to be way too short: I had every intention of writing a full-length novel, but I’d never tried to do that before, and was flummoxed to end up with a thirty-thousand word novella instead.
With the second draft, I changed things up, again with a different villain, who I ended up repurposing for book two, and a different storyline. There was some good stuff, but it still wasn’t quite right. And it was still too short. I did keep the opening scene, in which Sam attempts to banish a poltergeist, and a few other scenes.
On the third draft, I finally cracked the story, more or less because I threw caution to the wind. I had second-guessed my original, basic concept of Sam being a wizard, and made things needlessly complicated, but I realized my favorite iteration of Sam was also the best one. That’s when characters got fleshed out or made their first appearances, when I came up with Sam’s tragic backstory with Abby (which drastically deepened and improved his character and the book in general), and with the concept of Hex. It required many rewrites, but that’s when it became a (very rough and basic) version of the story you see today.
As a result of all those rewrites, I did lose a few things I liked over the years: there was a funny priest, a ghostly Viking, some great lines, an action scene on a football field and another in the sewer tunnels, with Sam worrying about Williamsport’s urban legends regarding alligators. But it turned out for the best.
One thing that stayed the same in every draft was the middle section: without spoilers, it starts with Sam heading to an upscale neighborhood to get some answers, and ends with him recuperating after a brutal battle. That was incredibly helpful, and it came from Jim Butcher’s advice to write, basically, a climax in the middle of the book, to get past what he called the “great swampy middle.” And there were other ideas I’d had since the very beginning, like Elise and her murky motives, the city’s polarization between rich and poor, etc., that I kept.
Can you tell us a little bit about your characters? What are your favorite kinds of characters to write?
Well, the main character is Sam Adams, a teenage wizard, with all that implies. I think that combination really lends itself to storytelling because it’s such a unique perspective. He’s not bearded and dispensing wisdom, like a stereotypical wizard, he’s a fighter and a troublemaker and he doesn’t have all the answers. He has to scramble. (One of my favorite tiny bits of worldbuilding pertains to his age, when he reflects on the fact that real wizards aren’t white-haired and wrinkly, because they usually don’t live very long.) I like thinking about how his teenage perspective affects his wizardly perspective, and vice versa, and how he finds the balance between his magic and his humanity. That’s something that he’s going to deal with throughout the series. He has to ask himself if he’s going to end his days in a demon battle, or if there might be something more. He’s becoming increasingly ambivalent about magic, on the one hand embracing it and being defined by it, and on the other, realizing how much chaos it’s bringing into his life.
He suffered a devastating loss prior to the beginning of the story, and he refuses to cope with it. While he doesn’t often put things into explicitly moral terms, his history with loss is ultimately what motivates him to get involved in the dark plots afoot in Williamsport. And that makes him vulnerable. He flings himself into these dangerous situations partly because, on some level, he has this sense that the worst-case scenario has already happened. It makes him a little reckless about his safety.
And he’s funny, which is very enjoyable to write. I’m not so good at serious characters. Pre Credible Threats, he was the classic class clown, but when we meet him, his sense of humor is increasingly becoming a coping mechanism. (And sometimes, he just likes to see how much nonsense he can get away with.)
Some characters, like his family and his friend Jason, are sort of meant to humanize Sam, and provide a human perspective amongst all the supernatural chaos, while hopefully getting compelling character development in their own right. Then there’s Elise, a vampire assassin who pretty much wrote herself and who I had a ball with. She’s involved with some shady characters and has an agenda that’s completely mysterious. She’ll pop in and out of the series to turn Sam’s life upside down from time to time.
There’s also Eressen al’Barra, who came about as a result of my desire to come up with my own supernatural species, as opposed to using an existing one. He was originally intended to be openly villainous, but the more I thought about his character, the more I came up with ideas that I liked better, so his character will go in a very different direction than what was first intended. He’s up to something as well, and it’s another one of the threads out there in the supernatural realm hinting that there’s something bigger going on here. You’ll want to keep an eye on him. No spoilers, but he’s going to play a key role in the ‘mytharc’ of the series.
I’m particularly fond of Alexandra Tyler; she was meant to be a minor character, but more than any other, really took on a life of her own. Coming from a background both privileged and troubled, she has some very complicated secrets that start coming to light when circumstances throw her and Sam together. Unlike some of the other characters, her motives are very straightforward: the danger unleashed in Williamsport has struck her close to home, threatening her brother, and she’s determined to protect him. People are typically dismissive of her, but the crisis reveals her core of strength. She’ll be a pivotal character going forward, and her story will take some very unexpected twists.
And last but not least, there’s Catrick Swayze, Sam’s Familiar, a seven-hundred-year-old talking cat. It’s his job to teach Sam about magic and the supernatural world, and offer all sorts of dubious opinions. He originated partly as a reaction to the news that in Netflix’s then-new Sabrina series, their Salem wouldn’t talk. (“Then I’ll have a cat who will,” I vowed, shaking my fist at the sky.) In a way, I have him to thank for the whole series; early on, I was feeling very insecure about my nascent urban fantasy story, but I found I really wanted to write the scenes with him and Sam playing off one another, and that pushed me to get started. I got his name from the label on a cat’s food bowl I randomly saw on TV one time.
As for my favorite characters to write, well, they’re the antiheroes and rogues I talked about above.
If you could choose one worldbuilding detail (a place, ability, or creature, for example) from your book to exist in the real world, what would it be and why?
Well, the obvious answer is the talking cats, but that sounds like a recipe for trouble.
I know you said one detail, but I can’t decide between two.
One is obvious: Sam’s ability to magically move things with his mind, which is self-explanatory in its awesomeness.
The other is a lot less obvious, and that’s Sam’s home city of Williamsport. It’s a bit strange, since it’s a place that Sam justifiably considers pretty unpleasant. However, it’s so old, with so much history and so many nooks and crannies with their own stories, that I think it would be a fascinating place to wander around in and explore, and see some of the places Sam sees.
In your opinion, what kind of reader would like this book?
Somebody who’s looking for a book that grabs your attention and doesn’t let it go, somebody who really likes slam-bang action and off-kilter humor. And people, like me, who are first-person fans.
What would you like readers to take away from this book?
I just hope they have a blast with it and love following Sam Adams on his misadventures. I hope it’s something that sticks out in their minds and makes them want to keep going through the whole series. I hope it’s something that people don’t find to just be ‘okay,’ but something that really jumps out in their minds.
Do you have a favorite quote from your book that you can share with us? What about this quote in particular makes it your favorite?
This is a tough call, and I had to chew over this a long time. I don’t know that I can pick a specific favorite, but I can tell you one I really like: “In Williamsport, there’s no such thing as neutral ground, but Jake’s is as close as it comes.”
This may seem like an odd choice; there are many lines in the book a lot flashier than that one. But that one has always tickled my fancy: for one, I think it’s a great opening line for a chapter and it really sets the mood. For another, I like the scene it transitions into, in which Sam is on his way to get some information, and is making his way through a sketchy neighborhood, passing graffiti on the walls, as the sun’s going down. I really like the imagery there. I always thought of that whole sequence as my ‘noir’ chapter, as it features Sam, our sarcastic, frequently beaten-up hero, meeting with a gorgeous heiress with a troubled past to take a case that will get him in way, way over his head. I liked to listen to the soundtracks from Chinatown and Body Heat when I was writing that chapter, to get into the right frame of mind. Like I said, it’s by no means the most dramatic part of the book, yet it was one of my favorite parts to write.
Is there anything you can tell us about any current projects you’re working on?
Certainly! I’m currently working on my revisions for Sam Adams book two, entitled Rising Shadows. Hopefully by the time this interview goes live, they’ll be close to done. My tentative plan is to follow that up with Sam Adams book three (working title: Mysterious Ways) before taking a break from Sam to write the first book of an epic fantasy trilogy called The Voice in the Mist. After that, things get murky, but I’d like to alternate between writing that and continuing with the Sam Adams series. And then move on to some new stuff, if I can nail down the right idea.
Thank you so much for taking the time to answer a few questions for us! Do you have any parting thoughts or comments you’d like to leave for our readers?
You’re very welcome, thank you for having me. I’d just like to say thanks to everyone who read Credible Threats (and read this rambling interview), participated in this book tour, or otherwise helped me out along the way. I’ve been really gratified by all the support I’ve gotten after publishing Credible Threats, and I’m looking forward to showing everyone what I have in store next.
And finally, where can you be found on the internet if our readers want to hear more from you?
I’m on Twitter @dmeyerauthor and my official website is www.danielmeyerauthor.com. Feel free to sign up for my newsletter for occasional updates.
