It gives me great honor to be able to interview my friend and fellow author Thomas Kane. He is a kind and inspirng person, who has just completed the enticing "Mara of the League" series, a truly incredible read comprised of four books.
Please introduce yourself. Tell us a little about your background.
I grew up in the woods of Maine with bears for neighbors. As a teenager, I wrote articles and supplements for Shadowrun, GURPS, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and other role-playing games which were popular in the 80s and early 90s. I started a PhD in international relations in California and accepted an invitation to finish my studies in England with a well-known scholar named Colin Gray.
Fun things that happened along the way included taking part in a Royal Navy wargame and observing simulated battles (with real tanks) at the US Army’s National Training Center. I got a job at Britain’s University of Hull and taught there for eighteen years. Living in the UK made it easy to travel around Europe. Eventually, I moved back to Maine and started using using what I’d seen and learned in my academic career as material for writing fantasy fiction.
What inspired you to become an author?
When I was eleven, my teacher read the Lord of the Rings aloud in class. He did the black riders’ screams. From that point on, I loved fantasy and wanted to write it. However, in point of fact, I think I wanted to be an author long before that. I can’t say that I wanted to be an author all my life, because I know that when I was a toddler I told my parents I wanted to be a farmer and a truck driver, but the idea goes back a long way for me.
What genres do you enjoy reading? Do you have a favorite book?
I read pretty much everything. The Lord of the Rings has had a huge influence on me, but recently I’ve been especially inspired by Ursula K LeGuin’s Earthsea series, especially The Tombs of Atuan and Tehanu. I also admire Arthur Koestler’s novel about the Soviet Union, Darkness at Noon..
You have recently finished your “Mara of the League” series. Tell us a bit about that story.
When a smart eleven-year-old named Mara Bennet tries to save her aunt from witch-hunters, she starts asking questions that grown-ups find dangerous. She keeps on asking questions as a teenager at boarding school, when her best friend disappears. Her quest to find her friend draws her into political intrigues involving the most powerful people in her world. By her forties, she is living a solitary life working an office job by day and secretly running her country’s off-the-books spy service by night. Mara uncovers an enemy plot, but to save her country from invasion she must convince her ruler to take advice he does not want to hear.
The series follows Mara’s adventures throughout thirty-six years of her life. It explores the way her ideas, relationships and perspectives develop over that time.
Book One: The Witches of Crannock Dale amazon.com/dp/B07XWXP1X2
Book Two: The Rebels of Caer City amazon.com/dp/B085XTW5CM
Book Three: The Hideous Garden amazon.com/dp/B08M239BXF
Book Four: The Rending of the World amazon.com/dp/B08LK7SHP5
What was the process like?
When a story starts coming together, I can practically hear lines and paragraphs of it in my head. If I’m alone, I may even recite them aloud. By the time I’m ready to write, I usually know the main things that are going to happen. .However, I’m often fuzzy about how I am going to get from one point to another, and working out the transition scenes is often the hardest part of writing for me.
What inspired you to create Mara?
I trace the story back to when I was small,and my mother told me the story of Cassandra. As I grew older and got interested in writing, I became curious about Cassandra as a character,and about what it was about her that allowed her to foresee dangers that others could not. When i studied the build-up to World War Two in graduate school, my ideas crystallized, and I came up with the idea for a story about an introspective and occasionally fierce woman who picks up on trends that people in power would rather not see.
Did you know from the start that you wanted the story to be four books, or did that develop over time?
When I started the first draft of Mara of the League, I thought it would need to be a stand-alone novel. One reason was that that was the late 1990s, when indie publishing barely existed. I thought a single book would be easier to pitch to agents. Also, I had internalized writing advice saying that you needed to begin stories in media res (i.e. with the action already in progress), so I thought I should start close to the end of the story, with Mara as an adult..
However, I quickly realized that to tell the story I wanted to tell in a single book, I was going to need a lot of flashbacks to Mara’s childhood and adolescence. A beta reader told me that once he started reading the flashbacks, he wanted to keep on reading about Mara as a little girl. That intrigued me, since I wanted to write the story of Mara as a little girl too.
Then, due to changes in my workplace and personal life, I had to put writing fiction aside. When I returned to it twenty years later, indie publishing had become viable and I felt I had more freedom to tell the story my own way. What was more, I read that series were actually more marketable than stand-alones. So, I wrote Mara of the League as four books covering forty-seven years of the main character’s life, which was really the story I had wanted to tell all along.
As an indie author, what sort of challenges did you face when it came to editing your first book, and then deciding how to publish and market it? Did you try traditional publishing first?
I’ve published eight non-fiction books traditionally, along with nineteen book-length gaming supplements. When I returned to writing novels, I settled on indie publishing as a way to retain more control over the process. The main challenge at first is finding professional support for things like art and editing. I found an excellent artist early on, and now have an excellent editor as well. Some indies format their own work, but I outsource that, and I cannot recommend Suzanne Minae (reachable on Facebook and Fiverr) strongly enough..
As for marketing, I publish a monthly newsletter, which features original articles on topics ranging from science to adventures I’ve had drinking coffee. I recommend Silver Dagger Blog Tours and Bryan Cohen’s free course on Amazon advertising. I’ve connected with a lot of great people (including readers) in Twitter’s writing community, and I maintain a website. Soon, I plan to start making promotional videos, but I need to get a haircut first!
Do you have any plans for future books?
I’m excited to announce that I’m working with awesome narrator S.M.McCoy (reachable on Twitter) to release Book One of the Mara of the League series as an audiobook.
The People vs.Abigail Bennet, a legal thriller set in the same fantasy world as my Mara books.Seventy-eight-year-old lawyer Abigail Bennet comes out of retirement to defend a teenage girl accused of murder. I plan to release People vs. Abigail in autumn 2022.
In 2023, I plan to publish Sleep of Reason, a story about a servant in a wizards’ academy who makes a discovery that could change magic.
Then I plan to write an organized-crime-themed sequel to Mara of the League.. An espionage-themed Mara of the League prequel is in the works as well. Beyond that I’m planning a near-future thriller about an intelligence contractor on the run in Britain during the opening battles of a third world war and a twenty-first century fantasy in which a fae queen assumes command of US nuclear forces.
Where can readers find you?
Newsletter: www.thomasmkane.com.
Website: also www.thomasmkane.com
Facebook: @thomasmkaneauthor
Twitter: @thomasmkane11
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