Book Tour Q&A: Wild Court by Matthew Samuels
- Fiction Fans
- Jun 18, 2023
- 8 min read
Today we're taking part in the book tour organized by Escapist Book Company for Wild Court by Matthew Samuels!! Continue reading for the book blurb and a Q&A with the author.
About the book
A secret organisation is losing the battle to maintain the empathy levels that sustain our planet’s barriers against the nightmare worlds.
Meanwhile, a young aristocrat safeguards a terrible secret, sponsoring an archaeology graduate obsessed with biblical artefacts. An all-knowing orphan worshiped by a cult joins a textbook exemplar of toxic masculinity and an introverted librarian. Together with a retired demon hunter, they’ll face the apocalypse.
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.
Hi there! Thanks for having me along, I’m really happy to be here. It probably goes without saying that I’m absolutely thrilled to be launching my new book, Wild Court; it’s been a long road to get here, and I’m very chuffed with how it’s all turned out.
What are you currently reading or what’s up next on your TBR? What made you pick up this book?
I’m reading Cage of Souls by Adrian Tchaikovsky – I read the Shadows of the Apt series a few years ago and really loved it, as well as his novella, Elder Race, which is just fantastic. I’d recently picked up Doors of Eden in a phone-box library, and I’ve got City of Last Chances next up, so it’s a Tchaikovsky triple bill! His imagination is superb, and I really admire his plotting – as well as the gorgeous front covers.
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what inspired you to start writing?
I’ve pretty much always written. When I was little, I wrote stories about my friends and the fantastic adventures we’d have together, riffing on things I’d seen on TV, other books I’d read, or dreams I’d had. Then I started writing stubs of stories, developing characters but usually losing interest because I was still a teenager and there were a few other things to do. Later on, I decided to actually plan a full book, which I finished in 2014, queried and became a bit discouraged when it didn’t go anywhere. Eventually, self-publishing became an option, but I decided to park the first book and work on a sci-fi hopepunk piece that became Parasites, the first book in the Navigator saga. I had a lot of very kind support from the book community on Twitter, and have since released the second book in the series, Dusk, as well as urban fantasy titles Small Places and now Wild Court.
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?
I’m a big gamer, and mostly play story-driven stuff and games like the Dark Souls / Elden Ring / Hollow Knight, although I also love more wonder-driven, relaxed titles like Abzu and Dear Esther. My guilty pleasure is Terraria though, and Steam tells me that I have over a thousand hours logged on it so far.
I enjoy walking and running, the occasional whisky, spending time with my partner and my cat. I like films, music and ballet, but my tastes aren’t very sophisticated – I love the Fast and Furious franchise and John Wick.
Who are your favorite current writers and who are your greatest influences?
Where to start? I was brought up on Anne McCaffrey and Arthur C Clarke, later finding the likes of Iain M Banks, Julian May, Jacqueline Carey, Charles de Lint, David Gemmell, Steph Swainston, Clive Barker, Carrol Berg and Jasper Fforde. That said, I’ll read almost anything – I absolutely consumed Sally Rooney’s Normal People far too long after it was released.
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?
Despite being a big John Wick, Jay Kristoff, Clive Barker fan, I do love that we’re starting to see books emerge that aren’t as dependent on conflict-as-entertainment. I think Jasper Fforde’s recent book, The Constant Rabbit, had some very pertinent things to say about humanity, and obviously Becky Chambers is doing some incredible things. I also really enjoyed reading Legends and Lattes last year.
What is one book you want to shout about to the world? What about it makes you love it so much?
Against a Dark Background, by Iain M Banks. For me, it’s just a superb example of a tired hero past her prime doing her best, with style. Banks’ worldbuilding is just superb, his characters brilliant, and the pacing is spot on. Love love love.
How much do you plan when you write? What’s your writing process like?
They kind of grow, but I do plan. I’ll often start with a concept, or something I want to show, and start building things around it. Then when I’ve got a rough concept in my head that I like, I’ll scribble down a load of notes until I’ve got an unwieldy notebook or overly large word document. I try to wrangle it into chapter outlines, and look at the overall flow and pacing of it before actually starting to write. I find it much easier to write a chapter if I know the essential premise of it, but do usually elaborate and improvise as I write. I do sometimes edit chapters after I’ve written them, but more often I’ll just write the whole book and then repeatedly re-read it – first onscreen, then on kindle with a laptop next to me for editing. If I could outsource one part of the process, it’d be the editing; I’m not a detail person at all, and really don’t enjoy it. I’d read Small Places six times before I realised that I’d not spotted the part where I’d left a heading as ‘Chapter Ninteen’!
What do you think characterizes your writing style?
That’s a hard one to answer yourself, but I very much agree with Brandon Sanderson that a reader’s enjoyment of a magic (etc) system is often directly proportional to their understanding of it. Limitations are incredibly important to both sci-fi and fantasy, and that’s something that really spoiled some of the later Star Wars films for me – if you can just conjure up a fleet of Star Destroyers from nowhere at any time, what’s the point? At the risk of offending another huge swathe of fans, that was also my problem with (written) Tolkien in some places – I found it really hard to follow some of the action scenes in Return of the King. As such, I’ve tried to embody a kind of wonder and magic in my work, but also to make it comprehensible; a reader might not need to understand the exact ins and outs of how dilithium crystals work (for example), but if you fill your books with systems that just don’t make any sense, are inconsistent and poorly explained, then it’s not going to be a good read. We can suspend our disbelief, but there’s a kind of logic that I don’t think we can suspend, and if you break that, it’s game over.
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?
For some reason, the covers of my sci-fi books tend to be landscapes, whereas my fantasy titles are much simpler and more abstract. I played around with a more sophisticated concept for Wild Court, but it didn’t quite work, so I settled for something straightforward. In the book, there’s a military order – the First Extraordinary – trying to preserve the supernatural boundaries that keep the earth separate from the nightmare realms. This supernatural boundary is called the noosphere, and it can also be channeled to contain or disperse non-corporeal creatures from other worlds. It’s a long process to attune yourself to the noosphere so that you can do this channeling, but the First Extraordinary have found that by using a kind of silver ink, embedded into the skin, it’s much easier. The cover for Wild Court is a pair of these tattoos.
Can you give us an elevator pitch for your book?
Wild Court is a fantastical look at the impact of declining empathy on our society. It’s about found family, crap, crude jokes, an orphan with a terrible secret worshiped by her own cult. It’s about a librarian, an archaeologist and a textbook example of toxic masculinity all desperately trying to understand and stop a plot to unleash the apocalypse on our world.
How different is the final version of this book from the first draft?
That’s a tough question, because there was a long pause mid-draft. In 2019, I was about 40k words into Wild Court, struggling with very poor mental health, and despite a very lovely holiday in Aberdeen, just couldn’t summon the energy to keep writing Matt’s chapters. Matt’s an extremely high-energy character, and required a lot of ‘bounce’ to get right – when you’re consistently feeling crap for months at a time, it’s almost impossible to keep up the pace. So I stopped, looked after myself, and turned back to other works as and when I felt like it.
Somehow, during the pandemic, I was inspired to continue, and eventually finished the book. There was a bit of rejiggling after beta reader feedback; Alice’s introduction was initially the second chapter after Ben’s introduction, but it slowed everything down – it was over 5k words before you got to any real action! I also trimmed out a few more exotic uses of the noosphere, because it just didn’t make sense. But generally, in terms of flow, it’s fairly similar to my initial vision.
Can you tell us a little bit about your characters? What are your favorite kinds of characters to write?
They’re all so different! We’ve got Ben and Matt, who shouldn’t be friends but are – Ben is a quiet, introverted librarian who likes fantasy books, where Matt is a crude, sweary bloke who drinks and smokes too much. Alice is an incredibly smart archaeologist who struggles with people, and is obsessed with unravelling a biblical mystery, and her sponsor, Hugo, is a paranoid billionaire who lives in a prepper’s fantasy mansion. Then we’ve got Chloe, a strange orphan worshiped by a cult, and Lincoln, a retired demon hunter called back into service.
They were quite tough to write, but especially Matt. He’s got a big, loud personality which is very different to my own, although we do share some humour! Ben’s more straightforward, and although Chloe only gets a few bits here and there, I quite enjoyed her quiet, orderly consideration of things.
Is there anything you can tell us about any current projects you’re working on?
I’m about 10k words into the third book in the Navigator series that started with Parasites and continued with Dusk. I’d like to rewrite the first book I ever wrote at some stage, and have about 9k words of notes here and there, but also have a high-fantasy concept buzzing around in my head, which is a take on heaven vs hell and humans in the middle. I’d like to finish the Navigator series, if only to say I’ve finished a series!
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?
Thanks for having me on, it’s been a lot of fun!
And finally, where can you be found on the internet if our readers want to hear more from you?
You can find my website at theabditory.co.uk, and I’m on Twitter at many_writings or Instagram at many.writings
Where to buy the book:
Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0BYB931R6/
