Interview & Giveaway – R.S. Belcher, Author of NIGHTWISE

I’m so excited to have Rod Belcher joining me today, especially since I recently read and LOVED his latest urban fantasy, Nightwise, out now from Tor Books. (You can read my review here.) Tor is kindly giving away one finished copy of Nightwise to a  U.S./Canadian reader of this blog, so check out the giveaway at the end of this post!

Welcome to Books, Bones & Buffy, Rod!

Thanks for having me back, Tammy. It’s great to talk to you again.

What sort of story can readers expect when they pick up Nightwise?

Nightwise is my take on the detective stories I grew up loving so much.  Stuff like The Travis McGee series by John D. McDonald, and the works of Chandler and Hammett.  It’s a Noir Urban Fantasy.  I hope readers will experience something new and surprising in my take on the classic tropes of the Urban Fantasy and the Detective genres.

Your main character, Laytham Ballard, isn’t the most loveable guy on the planet. He’s obnoxious, crude and has done some very bad stuff. And yet, I grew to love him. What was your inspiration for his character?

Hahahaha! Um…well, there’s some of me in Laytham, to be honest, but just a tiny bit.  Some of Nightwise is autobiographical, in a very weird way.  I patterned some of Laytham’s personality from various criminals, hustlers, addicts, one-percent bikers, cops, and a bounty hunter I’ve met over the years.  Some people do the right things for very wrong reasons and not every bad boy has a heart of gold.  Laytham’s heart is more like fool’s gold. He’s an asshole, he makes mistakes, he uses people and he lies, especially to himself.  I wanted him to be human, and from the amount of equal parts love and hate I’m hearing for him as a character, I think I did a pretty good job.

I set out to create a character with the trappings of, but who wasn’t, your stereotypical Urban Fantasy hero—you know, rough and troubled but deep down a good guy.  That all comes from Chandler’s notion of the Private Eye as a slumming angel.  It’s been done, a lot, and I wanted something familiar to that trope but with my own mark on it.

Laytham is damaged, and very often wrong. He’s traded away parts of his soul, he had his joy cut out of him and he did it for the one person in this world that gave him joy.  He’s a hot, drunk, chain-smoking mess, but I hope readers can see past the damage and experience the person past the bullshit and the swagger. I wanted him to be real, warts and all. I hope people will see him grow and change as the series goes on, but just like real life, most of us don’t really change all that much, even when we want to.  The world tends to change us.

“A heart of fool’s gold” – I love that! Nightwise is full of cool little details that I found I just had to Google! For example, the urban myth about white lighters, Laytham’s obsession with a soda called Cheerwine, and lots more. How much of adding these details was research, and how much was stuff you already knew about?

I’m glad you enjoyed all that stuff.  I’d say it’s about 60 percent material I already knew, to about 40 percent research just for the book.  I’m always researching—it’s kind of my fetish. I love discovering weird little factoids, dark alleys in history, and urban myths.  It’s almost as much fun to me as the writing.

I was so excited when I got to the part about Jimmie and the Brotherhood of the Wheel, knowing that Brotherhood of the Wheel is your next book. Did you decide to spin-off the story after you finished writing Nightwise, or did you introduce Jimmie knowing you had already written the book?

Jimmie Aussapile, the truck driver, was actually a minor character in my very first novel back in 1998. The novel, called Crusader’s Blues, hasn’t been published.  Jimmie was pretty much the same character he is in Nightwise and The Brotherhood of the Wheel—he’s part of a secret society that protects the roads of America from supernatural horrors and urban myths.

So Jimmie came first. My agent, Lucienne Diver, read about him when she read the manuscript for Nightwise.  She loved the character and the idea of the Brotherhood. We pitched the idea to Tor and they were kind enough to buy the series.  I’m excited to see how Brotherhood of the Wheel is received.  It’s a very different Urban Fantasy voice than the one I write with in Nightwise. I hope people enjoy it.

I loved how varied all the characters are in Nightwise. If you could be any character in the book, who would you pick, and why?

A lot of the main characters in Nightwise are based loosely on real people I know.  I have to say I feel my strongest kinship to Ballard, since some of me is in him, but I wouldn’t want to be him.  Out of the purely fictitious characters I think Ichi is pretty cool, in a bad-ass, John Woo kinda way.

So what’s next for you? Did I read somewhere that Nightwise is the beginning of a series? And can we expect more Golgotha books?

Yes, Nightwise is the first in an Urban Fantasy series. I am hopeful enough folks will enjoy it to keep it going.  My agent has pitched a sequel to it already, that I’m waiting to hear back about.

I am very eager to keep going with the Golgotha series. We’ve pitched a third book in the series and two books that are set in the Golgotha universe that each focus on one of the main characters from Six-Gun Tarot and Shotgun Arcana.  First up is Maude Stapleton and then John Highfather. If the spin-off books are well-received, I’d love to give other characters, Like Mutt and Harry Pratt, a solo book as well.  Right now, we’re waiting to get the green light from Tor on what they’d like to move ahead on.

When you’re not writing, what do you like to do with your time?

I’m the father of two really great kids. My son, Jon, just started college and my daughter, Emily, is beginning high school. I’m really proud of both of them, and they are my primary focus in life.  I enjoy reading a lot, and I’m a big-time table-top RPG player—I run games of D&D and Pathfinder and Champions currently.  I also enjoy working out, and hiking. I’ve had an odd hankering to try to take up boxing again, which at my age, should be pretty comical.

Please tell us three things about yourself that can’t be found on the internet.

Cherry Coke is my favorite soda, Casablanca is my favorite movie of all time, and I can play “You are my Sunshine,” on the harmonica.

Awesome, thank you Rod!

About the author: 

R.S. BELCHER is the author of two acclaimed “weird westerns,” The Six-Gun Tarot and The Shotgun Arcana. Nightwise is his first contemporary fantasy novel. He lives in Salem, Virginia.

Find Rod: Twitter | Goodreads

And now for your chance to win a copy of Nightwise, please leave a comment below. Giveaway is open to U.S. and Canadian residents only. On September 21, I will randomly select one commenter! Good luck:-)