For the longest time, it seemed that characters in epic fantasy were either entirely good or entirely bad, with no room whatsoever for ambiguity. Well, it was fantasy, after all. In the real world, of course, very few of us are one or the other. For those of us paradoxically craving more reality in our fantasy, craving more ambiguity, the arrival of authors like Glen Cook, George R. R. Martin, Steven Erikson, Joe Abercrombie, and Tad Williams et al has been glorious.  Now we have characters to whose contradictory moods and motives we can relate!

It’s been said that there are three types of dramatic conflict: Man vs. Man, Man vs. the Environment, and Man vs. Self.  A really good yarn will have all three. An example of Man vs. Man would be the old western shoot out, the samurai battle, or the jousting tournament. A character struggling against an avalanche, a blizzard or a wildfire would be Man vs. the Environment. To me, the most interesting struggle has always been Man vs. Self. From Oedipus to Hamlet, and from Sydney Carton to Tyrion Lannister, Man vs. Self gives us all a scenario we can easily recognize and with which we can all empathize.

I hope and believe you’ll find every kind of struggle and conflict in Immortal Treachery, and I’d love to chat about your questions or observations.

Discovering Vykers' origins, I hope, will be part of the fun of the Immortal Treachery series, but where does the idea of Vykers come from?

When I was a kid, we had something called reading, an activity we loved to engage in when the weather was bad, there was nothing on our (mere) five channels of TV, or, you know, just because. I read a lot. When I ran out of my stuff, I read whatever my dad had just finished. And so, by age eleven or twelve, I'd read all of Robert E. Howard's Conan series. Shortly thereafter, I encountered Odysseus, Beowulf, the Man with No Name, and Yojimbo.  I grew up in a time of Bruce Lee and Muhammad Ali.  Every summer, my folks dragged me to see Seattle Opera's Ring Cycle, where I watched Siegfried battling the evil dwarf, Mime, and the monstrous dragon, Fafnir. At the same time, we made a regular pilgrimage to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where I was equally enthralled by the Bard's heroes and villains. Finally, as a child of the seventies, I was really into comic books and favored the more flawed characters like Batman or Iron Man over superheroes like Superman.

It's fair to say, then, that Vykers is a reflection of all of these influences, equal parts Dirty Harry, Achilles and the Hulk. The point is, he takes no shit from anyone.