Fire Priest (Pawn of the Gods, Book 1) by Stephen Murdoch
Publisher: (Dec 12, 2018)
Category: YA Fantasy. Epic Fantasy. Gateway Fantasy. Alternate Reality, Sword & Sorcery
Tour dates: Mar-May, 2019
ISBN: 978-1916488311
Available in Print and ebook, 304 pages
Description Fire Priest (Pawn of the Gods, Book 1) by Stephen Murdoch
Seventeen-year-old Jack Kulinski is the best mixed martial arts fighter of his generation. So why does fighting scare him so much? In the ring, the sound of swarming bees mysteriously fills his head, and it takes all of his effort to not flee in panic. But when his best friend disappears, and Jack, alone, discovers that he’s been magicked to a terrible land ruled by a murderous god and his violent people, he needs to learn how to face his fears and to fight better than he ever has before.
Praise Fire Priest (Pawn of the Gods, Book 1) by Stephen Murdoch
“I found myself really into the book and finished it in two days. I was rooting for Jack and Denny throughout the book, I liked the talking rabbit and I really liked Zolin, the soldier, and his buddies. I hated the Fire Priest and Priestess and found myself reading at the dinner table, hoping Jack would destroy them.
I think the world that Stephen created is complex and interesting; I like the references to Mesoamerican culture, history, and names. At first I felt like there were a lot of characters to keep track of, but part way in realized I had them all set in my head and it was all coming together. I’m interested to see what happens in Book 2 of the series.”-Helen, Goodreads
Interview With Stephen Murdock
TR: Please tell us something about the ‘The Fire Priest’ that is not in the summary. (About the book, character you particularly enjoyed writing etc.)
SM: I wanted the book to be fun, action-packed escapism; the kind of book I would have liked when I was pre-teen to mid-teens. But it turns out that fun books don’t help us escape unless the characters and their world are real to the author. Jack and his friend Denny, the protagonists in The Fire Priest, are very real to me. I found that the story and their predicament allowed me to gently explore, or at least flag, issues of how young males view loyalty, self-confidence, fear, anger, and even surprising things like their looks. I like to think I didn’t hit these heady issues heavily—this is meant to be an entertaining book—but even page-turners need a soul. I wrote a story in which young men could cry, for themselves and others.
I grew up in Southern California: in fact, in Santa Barbara, where the story starts out. When I was growing up there was a huge emphasis on looks—perhaps there still is—and teenage boys unfairly looked for female perfection. In The Fire Priest, I slightly turned this on its head by making Denny physically beautiful, and making him obsessed and self-defined by this. Taking that away from him—as happens in the story—doesn’t necessarily make him more thoughtful, at least not yet, but it did allow me to hold a theme up to the light.
What I enjoyed about the writing process, once the terrible first draft was done, was realizing that these issues come out naturally for an author. The Fire Priest is not my first book, but it is my first novel. Things happen far more subconsciously when we write fiction than non-fiction.
TR: Tell us about your cover. Did you design it yourself?
SM: I can barely draw a stick figure, so I definitely didn’t design the cover myself. No, the cover was done by a Canadian by the name of Jeff Brown (http://jeffbrowngraphics.com/). Jeff lives in Mexico and most often works for science fiction and fantasy authors. I think he does great work. In fact, he’s got a sped-up version of his screen as he worked on my cover. It’s completely fascinating to watch how he puts it together. A minute or so in you see that he takes an image of a naked figure, representing Jack, puts him in a rather terrifying landscape, and then actually picks out clothing for him. It’s bizarre. You can see it here: https://youtu.be/rF5K0kv_04c
Despite being clueless about design (I can leave a room and have no idea what furniture was in it or the color of the walls) cover art really mattered to me as a kid. Like so many others, I particularly liked Michael Whelan’s work on Michael Moorcock’s Elric series. I could space out on those covers for a long time: they conveyed action, a sense of disturbing place, and entire worlds. They made me want to go there, as long as I didn’t actually have wield a sword or suffer privations of any kind.
TR: How long did it take you to complete?
SM: I worked on The Fire Priest off and on for a very long time. Years. Part of the issue was that I was completely clueless how to write a novel so it took me a while to figure out. Another part was that I wasn’t writing full time; like most writers I do other things to make money. But equally importantly was that when I began working on The Fire Priest I realized that I had a fatal flaw as a writer: I was impatient. I wanted to get product out the door as quickly as I could to see how “the world” (my agent, a publishing house, readers, whomever!) would respond. After too many rejections I realized that this was a disastrous approach. Never send half-baked writing out hoping that people will see through the problems to what the work will eventually be. That results in a lot of rejections, feeling badly, thoughts of giving up, etc., and that doesn’t help. So with The Fire Priest I slowed down and concentrated on enjoying the process. As a result, I wrote and sat on the book over a long period of time. And when I thought I was properly done I thought that writing the second book in the series would help the first one. If an author improves after working hard on a first book, surely that writer is even better after writing two. I hope I was right; certainly The Fire Priest has changed over time. And if you read it and don’t like it, imagine how bad it would have been had I rushed it!
TR: What is your favorite scene in ‘The Fire Priest’? Why?
SM: My favorite scene comes toward the end when Jack, the main character, has an insight about his father. I find it moving, which is almost embarrassing because it’s quite corny. But what’s not to like about love and positive change?
TR: Which actor/actress would you like to see playing the lead character from ‘The Fire Priest’?
SM: I don’t know my actors too well. It would have to be somebody pretty badass to play Jack; he’s physically an extreme anomaly. He’s big, six feet two, fast, strong and flexible. He’s a fighter with a soul, although he’s certainly not sophisticated or worldly. He’s quite clueless, actually. Who’s the Jean-Claude Van Damme of the younger generation today? I think we’d have to comb the young mixed martial arts competitors to see who wants to become an actor. That and give them a really shaggy blond wig.
TR: How completely do you develop your characters before beginning to write?
SM: I write one page each about my characters and think about them for a while. But then I don’t look at that page again for a long while. I find that I need a starting point, but then they develop more as I write; they grow and change. After a while I go back to the page to refine and correct it. At some point in the process it feels right and I know what the characters would do in each scene. Knowing how one’s characters would behave helps the creative process and construction of tension. Well-defined characters who have different goals leads to conflict, misunderstandings, and errors, which is the stuff of fiction.
TR: Where do you get the names for your characters?
SM: My two main characters come from California, so that was pretty straightforward. They’re a couple of working class kids requiring two fairly straightforward names. My novel is a fantasy, so common names for other characters don’t work when the two boys are abducted and taken to the world of Tal’alli. The story is infused by a sort of hijacked Aztec mythology, so I looked for Mezo-American names, and even Native American names, that I could riff on. For example, some people might recognize the Aztec god Tezcatlipoca in Lord Tezca, the main god of Tal’alli. However, they’re not one and the same at all. I read Aztec myths simply as an inspirational starting point. As a result, I think Lord Tezca is probably more intimidating and rapacious than Tezcatlipoca, which is saying something—Lord Tezca is only a creator in the sense that he wants to dominate.
TR: Describe the room you are sitting in as though it was a scene in one of your books.
SM: The Rector John Bobbe was a small man in a very large bedroom. The arched ceiling was 20 feet high with thick blades and beams of oak to hold it in place. Everywhere he looked there was strong, local oak. Even his interior walls were close studded, composed of expensive oak timbers lined up vertically for no purpose other than that they looked good; he might have been a man of the cloth, but his church was a powerful one that didn’t mind spending on a wealthy parish’s priest. In this area, Dutch wool merchants and producers that had settled here provided a boon to the local economy.
One’s own private bedroom was still rare in late Medieval England, so Rector Bobbe was special, indeed. From it, he could peer down into his great hall through a spy hole. He liked to make sure that his servants weren’t napping in the middle of the day; that they were taking care of his guests and visitors, as was right for a man of his position. Given his remote setting, Bobbe got more visitors than you’d expect. Partly it was because his was a rare place to rest and eat on long, sparsely populated country roads where there were more sheep than people (he could see them out his oriel window in the long sweep of fields down to his sandstone church). It was also that travelers knew he could afford to feed them decently, and that his hall had a large and warm fire at all times of day and night. Rector Bobbe had a reputation for generosity and he was popular with his parishioners, who had supported him now for decades (Bobbe could also, rather pleasingly, see the often-full tithe barn along the road toward the church). And while there was fighting to the north, this area of Kent remained fairly peaceful, aside from the usual highwaymen, but everyone expected them.
There was more to the visits, however, than just the promise of trade and generous tranquility. John Bobbe himself was titillating; he was famously, or perhaps even infamously, small at a time when the English didn’t tolerate differences and disabilities very well. Rector Bobbe was a dwarf, at a time when a baby’s differences were often blamed on the mother, and frequently even her sexual mores. Nor was it particularly safe to have a disability. There was a game at fairs during Bobbe’s time where blind people were given weighty sticks and put in an enclosure with a valuable pig. Go ahead and kill the pig, the organizers would say, and you can keep the meat. How endlessly funny it was to watch blind people damage each other. Tiny had its place in fun, as well. Before Bobbe’s time, Eleanor of Provence, queen to King Henry III, sent for a young man from the Isle of Wight who was just three feet tall; he accompanied her around the land for people to gaze upon in wonder.
But John Bobbe was different. Despite his physical differences he was wealthy, locally powerful, and he commanded respect; he led his people for a remarkable 38 years, one of his church’s longest serving rectors in an 800-year history.
My desk is where Rector Bobbe’s old oriel window used to be (a subsequent Georgian rector ill-advisedly removed it). But I can still see sheep and John Bobbe’s little parish church. It’s a good spot in which to write fantasy novels.
TR: What was the first major news story you remember as a child?
SM: I remember learning from my mother that “our president is bombing little countries far away.” This was in the early 1970s when it was revealed that the Nixon Administration had a secret bombing campaign in Cambodia and Laos. I later became a human rights lawyer in eastern Cambodia along the old Ho Chi Minh Trail. The judges and court staff I worked with had survived the American bombing, which made me feel awkward, indeed, at times.
TR: What are you currently working on? Is there another book in your future?
SM: I’m back tightening up the second book in the Pawns of the Gods books with the working title The Priest Slayer. I’m very excited about. I do think writers improve after writing their first novel, and I think it shows in the manuscript. The pacing is better and the world richer.
About Stephen Murdoch
Stephen Murdoch is a writer and investor who lives in England with his wife and three daughters. He is the author of the non-fiction book IQ: A Smart History of a Failed Idea (Wiley, 2007). He has written for various publications, including Newsweek, The Washington Post, and PRI’s Marketplace. The Fire Priest is his first work of fiction. Murdoch is the chairman of two healthcare providers in the UK that provide cutting edge digital and bricks-and-mortar solutions to the mental health sector.
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