Introducing BOOKBURNERS! Interview with Author Brian Francis Slattery

I was very excited to be invited to help promote Serial Box, a new publisher that brings the excitement of episodic television to the page! I’ve already read the first two episodes of their first story, Bookburners, and I can already tell it’s going to be a fun ride. Here’s more about the series:

Magic is real…and some books have teeth.

This September, new publisher Serial Box is bursting onto the scene and bringing the TV model of media production and delivery to the book world with Bookburners, an urban fantasy adventure following a black-ops anti-magic squad backed by the Vatican. Wandering from police procedural to New Weird and dabbling in most genres in between, Bookburners will keep you hungry for more, week after week.

Written by a team of authors including Margaret Dunlap (Eureka), Mur Lafferty (The Shambling Guide to New York City) and Brian Francis Slattery (Lost Everything), the group is led by rising genre star Max Gladstone (Three Parts Dead and the Craft Sequence).

While the series officially launches on September 16^th with the release of Episode 2, we have the first episode up for all to enjoy on SerialBox.com.

I’m thrilled to have one of the Bookburners‘ writers here today to tell us more about Serial Box and Bookburners, so please welcome Brian Francis Slattery to the blog!

Welcome to Books, Bones & Buffy, Brian! Can you start by telling us a little bit about the concept behind Bookburners and what kind of story readers can expect?

Thanks so much for having me! I’ve always been terrible at the elevator pitch, but here goes.

Bookburners is about a cop named Sal Brooks who, after her brother falls under the spell of a demon, joins a secret society that goes around the world collecting magical artifacts and locking them away before the magic can be released. Sal just wants to find a way to save her brother. The society believes it’s saving the world. But is it? Multiple forces, human and otherwise, are aligning that make the society’s work—and Sal’s mission—more complicated and dangerous than she thought.

That’s the overall idea, without giving too much away. The early episodes have a lively monster-of-the-week/get-to-know-the-characters thing going. But there’s an overall story arc that, in time, takes over, catching all the characters, and really, pretty much everything in the previous episodes, in its grip.

How many episodes there will be for Bookburners? Have all the episodes been written as we speak, or are you and your fellow writers still working on them?

There are sixteen episodes and, at this point, they’ve all been written. We’re in the final stages of editing the final four episodes—which, as you can imagine, involved a lot of coordination among the four writers to make sure that everything worked smoothly. In the early episodes, it felt more like a game of catch among us. The final four episodes—really, the final six—are more like a relay race.

You are working with writers Max Gladstone, Mur Lafferty and Margaret Dunlap on this series. What’s it like working together?

A blast. After writing four books on my own, it has been a real thrill to collaborate with other people, especially on something of this size. I’d never met Max, Mur, or Margaret before the initial long weekend we spent together to hash out the worldbuilding and the general arc of the story, and it was super-fun pretty much from the word go. The four of us work really well together; we’ve served as one another’s closest allies and toughest editors, and we’ve pushed each other to write our best. Certainly in my case I’ve written things I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to write without them, for which I’m really grateful.

Like a TV series, each episode appears to have a contained story that is resolved at the end, and yet there are overarching elements that will continue throughout the series. Is one of you the “mastermind” behind the overall storyline, or do you all collaborate on each episode?

The initial spark of the overall idea was, I believe, Max’s. But even early on, before our first meeting, we passed around the barest skeleton of an outline for the story and characters that we gradually fleshed out, and during the meeting the couple pages we had ballooned into many, many pages as we all threw in our ideas and tweaked the ideas of others. At the end of our weekend meeting, we had the arc of the story in place and assignments for individual episodes detailing exactly what plot points of the larger story needed to be hit—and looking back on it now, for the most part it’d be very hard to tease apart which ideas were whose.

After that, we each wrote our first episodes ourselves, and met over Google chat to discuss them—both any problems we saw with them and what possibilities each episode opened up for future episodes. That pattern continued with the next four episodes. In the back half of the story, as we started to more explicitly weave the main threads of the plot together, we met before and after writing the individual episodes, to make sure we didn’t make problems for each other. The meetings to talk about the episodes before and after ended up being pretty invaluable, especially in the final stretch of episodes that really do work directly off one another. Coordinating all that was fairly complicated and would have been nearly impossible otherwise.

At the same time, when I look over the episodes now, I also see how each of us managed to shape our episodes according to our own strengths and interests. We made general rules about style and structure to make sure that the transition from one episode to the next wasn’t jarring, but I think we also managed to give ourselves and each other room to play, to have fun with each of the episodes, to take them in directions we didn’t necessarily see coming before we sat down to write—which is a great way of insuring that we all wrote the best we could.

How did you personally become involved with Serial Box?

I knew Julian Yap, who is the mastermind behind Serial Box, for a few years through my editor at Tor, Liz Gorinsky. Julian called me at one point to talk about the idea behind Serial Box, and as I recall, I pretty much signed myself up on the spot.

I loved the lighthearted feeling of your episode, Everywhere But Here. Even though the members of Team Three have a very serious job to do, the banter and dialog among them is refreshingly upbeat, especially in a genre where “dark” is so prevalent. Does that tone continue throughout the rest of the series, or are things going to get more serious?

Things get more serious in the sense that the stakes rise with each episode. But I think it was important for all of us to never lose sight of the dynamic we created for our characters right at the beginning. I love it when characters banter and bicker; it is really fun to write dialogue like that. And we definitely had a sense of not wanting to lose the general sense of fun. Sure, the characters are engaged in dangerous work. But they’re also pretty good at their jobs and they know it. So they’re not the types to run flailing and screaming when they encounter, oh, I don’t know, some sort of spider god accidentally summoned to Bali because someone rubbed the wrong amulet and said the wrong thing. It’s their job to take care of the problem and they face it the best they can. And usually that involves a little humor.

So far, Bookburners is reminding me a little of the TV show Warehouse 13, which also had a very humorous yet action-packed feel to it. Because Bookburners is similar to episodic television, have you taken any inspiration from TV shows?

Absolutely! In the past ten or even fifteen years I haven’t had nearly the time to watch all the shows I’d like to, which is particularly frustrating since we’re really living through a golden age of television. But when I sat down to write my particular episodes, the two shows I was constantly drawing inspiration from/afraid I was ripping off were—you guessed it—Buffy, and also The X-Files. I realize that dates me considerably, but those were two shows I watched religiously while they were on, and they happened to be on while I was still in the embryonic stages of learning how to write something decent. So they were hugely influential. And, of course, both of them play with the same sort of elements that Bookburners does, in taking a cast of characters that have a lot of humor at the heart of their relationships and putting them in difficult, scary situations. Both shows, at their best, provided ample examples for me of how to do it right.

(Please note that I heartily approve these influences:-))

Where will readers be able to find/purchase the Bookburners episodes, and how often will they be released?

The easiest way to get at them is to visit SerialBox.com, which has them available in the electronic format of your choice—including audio. There is a handy app, for iOS users, or you can also find it on Tunes, Amazon, Kobo, Google Play, and B&N. New episodes come out every week, just like TV. Which means, of course, that people who want to binge can just wait until the end and then get them all at once. Any which way people get the episodes, I hope they enjoy reading them as much as we did writing them and putting them together.

Thanks so much, Brian!

About Bookburners

Magic is real, and hungry—trapped in ancient texts and artifacts, only a few who discover it survive to fight back. Detective Sal Brooks is a survivor. Abruptly thrust into the battle between nefarious forces trying to unleash this power onto the world and those trying to stop them, she joins a Vatican-backed black-ops anti-magic squad: Team Three of the Societas Librorum Occultorum. Together they stand between humanity and magical apocalypse. Some call them Bookburners. They don’t like the label.

Chapter 1: Badge, Book, and Candle

NYPD Detective Sal Brooks is no rookie—but even the most hardened cop would think twice when they see their brother open a book and become…well…something entirely not their brother. When her attempts to solve the case cross paths with a mysterious team led by a priest, she starts to realize that the world is far more than what is seems, and, just maybe, magic is real—and hungry.

Thus begins the 16-part serial, Bookburners, presented by Serial Box. From a team of writers, this collaborative effort will unfold an epic urban fantasy narrative across an entire season in weekly installments.

Follow along as Sal learns the life changing lesson: some books have teeth.

The Team Behind Bookburners:

Max Gladstone
Max Gladstone has been thrown from a horse in Mongolia, drank almond milk with monks on Wudang Shan, and wrecked a bicycle in Angkor Wat. Max is also the author of the Craft Sequence of books about undead gods and skeletal law wizards—Full Fathom Five, Three Parts Dead, Two Serpents Rise, and Last First Snow. Max fools everyone by actually writing novels in the coffee shops of Davis Square in Somerville, MA. His dreams are much nicer than you’d expect. He tweets as @maxgladstone.

Margaret Dunlap
Before joining the Bookburners, Margaret Dunlap wrote for Eureka (SyFy) as well as ABC Family’s cult-hit The Middleman. Most recently, she was a writer and co-executive producer of the Emmy-winning transmedia series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, and co-created its sequel Welcome to Sanditon. Her short fiction has previously appeared in Shimmer Magazine. Margaret lives in Los Angeles where she taunts the rest of the team with local weather reports and waits for the earthquake that will finally turn Burbank into oceanfront property. She tweets as @spyscribe.

Mur Lafferty
Mur Lafferty is the author of The Shambling Guides series from Orbit, including The Shambling Guide to New York City and Ghost Train to New Orleans. She has been a podcaster for over 10 years, running award-winning shows such as I Should Be Writing and novellas published via podcast. She has written for RPGs, video games, and short animation. She lives in Durham, NC where she attends Durham Bulls baseball games and regularly pets two dogs. Her family regrets her Dragon Age addiction and wishes for her to get help. She tweets as @mightymur.

Brian Francis Slattery
Brian Francis Slattery is the author of Spaceman Blues, Liberation, Lost Everything, and The Family Hightower. Lost Everything won the Philip K. Dick Award in 2012. He’s the arts and culture editor for the New Haven Independent, an editor for the New Haven Review, and a freelance editor for a few not-so-secret public policy think tanks. He also plays music constantly with a few different groups in a bunch of different genres. He has settled with his family just outside of New Haven and admits that elevation above sea level was one of the factors he took into account. For one week out of every year, he enjoys living completely without electricity.

What are you waiting for? You can check out the first episode, Badge, Book, and Candle for free here! And stop back here Thursday for my review!