Book Tour Q&A: The Many Shades of Midnight by C.M. Debell
- Fiction Fans
- May 28, 2023
- 6 min read
Today we're taking part in the book tour organized by Escapist Book Company for The Many Shades of Midnight by C.M. Debell! Continue reading for the book blurb and a Q&A with the author.
About the book
Isyr. Stronger, brighter, more beautiful than other metals. Once the most desirable thing in Ellasia, now it is priceless, the pure Isyrium needed to produce it mined to exhaustion. What’s left is controlled by the powerful mining syndicates, and such is the demand for their Isyrium that even kings do their bidding. Yet just as the beauty of Isyr hides a deadly secret, so too do the syndicates.
A terrifying enemy is spreading a plague across the land, a sickness that kills or transforms everything it touches. Unable to contain the outbreaks, the King of Lankara begs the aid of the disgraced former Duke of Agrathon, Alyas-Raine Sera, a man who has spent years fighting syndicate expansion and whose resentment over his exile makes him an unpredictable, dangerous ally in the power struggle between the rulers of Ellasia and the mining companies.
Attached to the envoy to recall the duke, the apprentice surgeon Brivar finds his skills and loyalty tested as his service to his new patron uncovers secrets about Isyr and the plague that link it to the mining of Isyrium – and threaten the life of the man it is his duty to protect.
In their own separate ways, Alyas and Brivar must take on the might of the syndicates and confront the greed, murder, betrayal and impossible choices of a crisis that has been decades in the making – and the price of their failure could be everyone and everything.
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.
After years of talking about it, we finally moved out of London last year to a little town in Somerset, and I love it. My son adores his new school, I love having green fields on my doorstep, and my husband is closer to a surf beach, so we’re all happy.
What are you currently reading or what’s up next on your TBR? What made you pick up this book?
Legacy of Brick and Bone by Krystal Matar. I finally got around to reading Legacy of the Brightwash in March after it sat on my kindle for about a year, and I adored every minute of it. I started reading the sequel the day it came out and I have been trying to make it last as long as possible because I don’t want it to end. After that, I’m not sure. I’ve been eyeing Sordaneon (LL Stephens) for a while, and I have Seeds of War (João F. Silva) and The Sword Defiant (Gareth Hanrahan) winking at me on my kindle, so probably one of those.
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?
We’re a beach-loving family, rain or shine (mostly rain, because this is the UK), and whenever we can, that’s where we’ll be. I love looking for shells and I can spend hours doing nothing but wandering with my head down, seeing what I can find. I’ve solved a lot of plot issues that way – just walking and thinking.
Who are your favorite current writers and who are your greatest influences?
There are loads of authors I love, and I would say I am influenced by all of them. But my absolute favourites are Janny Wurts, Guy Gavriel Kay, Miles/Christian Cameron, Bernard Cornwell, Lois McMaster Bujold, Sherwood Smith, Neil Gaiman. And lots who are no longer with us – Terry Pratchett, Dorothy Dunnett, Edith Pargeter, Ursula Le Guin, Patricia McKillip…
What is one book you want to shout about to the world? What about it makes you love it so much?
Not one book but six – the Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnett, starting with The Game of Kings. It’s historical fiction set in sixteenth century Europe, with possibly the most fascinating, infuriating and compelling protagonist I’ve ever read. They’re gorgeously written, the history is magnificent, and Lymond will break your heart. Like any book, they’re definitely not for everyone, but since discovering them, I’ve also discovered that many of my favourite authors are also Lymond fans.
How much do you plan when you write? What’s your writing process like?
I’m not really a planner. I don’t have the patience to plan out a whole story or the discipline to stick to it. I tend to start by throwing a load of problems at my characters and then work out how they’re going to solve them. That said, I usually know where I’m going to end up. I don’t write chronologically, so I often have the last few scenes written quite early on and bounce around in the story as I go.
Writing The Many Shades of Midnight was a bit different. I had spent four years thinking about the early scenes, so when I finally sat down to write it, I knew exactly how it started but absolutely no idea where it was going. And I threw such massive problems at the characters that I spent a couple of weeks panicking about how I could possibly solve them. When I finally worked it out, I wrote the whole of the ending and then everything else just fell into place.
What comes first to you when you’re writing, the world, the characters, or the storyline?
The characters. For me, it always starts with the characters. The story and the world I generally just make up as I go along.
Can you tell us a little bit about your characters? What are your favorite kinds of characters to write?
When I read, I need to care deeply about the characters. They don’t have to be a particular type or have a particular trait, but they need to feel so real that I live the story with them.
Those are also the characters I aspire to write, but I don’t plan characters any more than I plan story. If anything, I find out about my characters at the same time as the reader. The only time I get into trouble writing characters is when I think too hard about what they should be like or try to make them do something they don’t want to do. So, for the most part, I just let them get on with it.
How different is the final version of this book from the first draft?
Not very different, because I rewrite, edit, rewrite and edit as I go, over and over. And at the end of each day’s writing session, I copy the whole lot onto my kindle and read and edit it again, so by the time I get to the end, the book is already pretty much how I want it. However, although the first and final drafts are not very different, each way in which they are different made the final book so much better, and that’s down to my amazing editor Sarah Chorn, whose comments, changes, and reactions helped me find the problems that, as the author, it is so hard to see in your own work. Her input was invaluable, and I can’t recommend her enough.
What would you like readers to take away from this book?
To remember the day the blue star-violet flowered.
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?
“We should have some more tea.” It’s from perhaps my favourite scene in the book, a tiny interlude in the middle of a crisis when two characters have nothing to do but wait. And because I’m English, and a cup of tea in a crisis makes everything better.
Is there anything you can tell us about any current projects you’re working on?
I’m currently having fun writing some short stories about the characters from The Many Shades of Midnight because I’m so fond of them. I’m not sure if I’ll ever do anything with these stories, but I’m enjoying writing them. I’ve also started another book in the same world set around a hundred years before this one, and that’s moving forward in the background.
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?
Thank you to everyone who organised and participated in this tour – you’re all wonderful. And to those thinking of giving my book a go, I hope you love it, but if you don’t, there’s plenty more books out there!
And finally, where can you be found on the internet if our readers want to hear more from you?
I have a website at andeira.net though I don’t do as much with it as I should, and I am sporadically on Twitter - @lottedebell
