Tag: The Conjuring of Zoth-Avarex: The Self-Proclaimed Greatest Dragon in the Multiverse

A Few Quick Questions with…K.R.R. Lockhaven

Earlier today, I posted my thoughts about K.R.R. Lockhaven’s novel, The Conjuring of Zoth-Avarex: The Self-Proclaimed Greatest Dragon in the Multiverse, a book I strongly recommend. The author was gracious enough to spend some time responding to some Qs that I posed, I hope you enjoy his As as much as I did.


I typically ask about what led someone to being a writer, but you talked about a little in your recent guest post here. So instead—what led to you being a firefighter? Other than giving you more of an income than novelist will likely provide, how does it affect your writing? Is Jake you putting yourself in the novel?
That’s a tough question, since my memory is patchy at best. But I think the seed of the idea was planted when I read The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut. There’s a line in that book; “I can think of no more stirring symbol of man’s humanity to man than a fire engine.” Reading that awakened something in me, and eventually led to me try to become a firefighter. It was probably a little of that, and a little of wanting a job that was considered “cool,” because I felt/feel very uncool.

Jake, a firefighter character from my book, is actually modeled after one of my coworkers who is this big, fun-loving guy who is nice to everyone and loves to pull pranks. I am much closer in personality to the main character, Harris, who is meeker and much more unsure of himself.

All authors have more ideas running around in their head than they can possibly develop—what was it about this idea that made you commit to it?
The fire department I work for is at a nuclear site in eastern Washington State. It’s a place that suffers from…bureaucracy issues. As a writer, I have long wanted to satirize the entire site in some way, but I could never find an angle I liked. Early on in my writing “career” I wasn’t writing fantasy, but I always felt a pull to start writing it. Then one day it just hit me—what if, instead of being a nuclear site that once made atomic bombs, there was a magical site, hidden away by the government, that tried to conjure a dragon? I was immediately taken with the notion, and the ideas really started flowing. There was no turning back from that point.

There’s a tricky element to the tone—keeping it fun and funny while maintaining the threat represented by Zoth-Avarex intact. Did that come naturally, was that something you had to work on over multiple drafts to make sure it worked?
Tone is a very tricky thing! I have to admit that it wasn’t something I thought of when writing the first draft, but I have learned a lot about it since then. My brother was the first to point out to me some of the initial inconsistencies with the tone. I went back through everything with that in mind, and tweaked it to what it is now. I think the fact that Silvia, the woman the dragon captures, is made to feel as comfortable as a prisoner can feel (like “a guest without leaving privileges”), helps to give it enough immediacy to be compelling (hopefully), but not a life-or-death, this-isn’t-fun-anymore, feel.

It’s hard to pick just one or two things to focus on to ask about that don’t involve spoiling the whole book…but I want to talk about Eddie for a minute. Where did that character come from? How do you keep yourself from letting a character as fun as that from taking over the novel?
I’m glad you liked him! He was loosely based on an old curmudgeon of a firefighter I worked with early in my career. Sometimes I feel like an imposter when I get credit for dreaming up a character like that, when I really had an inspirational embarrassment of riches at my job. He is a larger-than-life kind of guy who I was lucky enough to get to hang out with for a while.

I love a novel with comic footnotes. Can you talk a little about the choice to use that technique—in general, and how you decide when to use a footnote to deliver the joke rather than keeping it in the text?
I love footnotes, too! I recently read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke, and I thought the footnotes really expanded on the world of the book.

I wish I could explain the decisions, but it was mostly done by feel. I thought footnotes could be used to expand the world of the Site, too, and to get a into Zoth-Avarex’s history and psyche. In the end, I deleted a ton of footnotes. Many just weren’t funny, and having too many of them distracted from the story too much. Some of my favorite parts of the book are in the footnotes, though. Like the thing with the rise and fall of an entire civilization that went on for almost two pages. That was fun to write.

What was the biggest surprise about the writing of The Conjuring of Zoth-Avarex itself? Either, “I can’t believe X is so easy!” or “If I had known Y was going to be so hard, I’d have skipped this and watched more TV.”
The biggest surprise I found when writing the book is that I could actually write comedy. I wasn’t sure if I had it in me, to tell the truth. Among my group of friends, I’m probably the least funny of the bunch, but on the page, I have to admit that I have at least some comic ability. I was very hesitant to admit that, though. I mean, I made myself laugh with my goofball shit, but I didn’t know how others would receive it. It has taken a lot of positive feedback and some good reviews to convince me that maybe I don’t completely suck.

Let’s play “Online Bookstore Algorithm” (a game I made up for these Q&As). What are 3-5 books whose readers may like The Conjuring of Zoth-Avarex?
Another tough one! I know every author thinks their book is so unique, but I do have a hard time coming up with comparable titles. I am no Terry Pratchett, or Douglas Adams, but I do think that people who enjoyed The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or anything by Pratchett might get a kick out of my book. Also anyone who grew up reading Tolkien, or just fantasy in general, and would like to see the genre lovingly skewered. One recent, semi-comparable title is The Part About the Dragon Was (Mostly) True by Sean Gibson.

What’s next for K.R.R. Lockhaven, author?
I was lucky enough to recently sign a three book deal with Shadow Spark Publishing, and they are going to publish my humorous hopepunk nautical fantasy trilogy. Book one, tentatively titled Marauders, Daughters, and Dragons, is slated to come out in the summer of 2022. The series will take place on another world, but will still be within the Zoth-Avarex multiverse (wink wink). My writing has made a slight shift toward the more heartfelt and serious, but there is still a lot of foul-mouthed fun, like a shit-talking bird companion, a reanimated skeleton with confidence issues, and a group of failed pirates who just want to sing and have adventures.

Thanks for your time—and thanks for The Conjuring of Zoth-Avarex, I had a blast with it and I hope you have plenty of success with it.
Thank you very much! I’m so glad you enjoyed my book. This interview was really fun! The questions were tough, and unique, and you really made me think. I loved it.


The Conjuring of Zoth-Avarex: The Self-Proclaimed Greatest Dragon in the Multiverse by K.R.R. Lockhaven: So Preoccupied with Whether They Could, They Didn’t Stop to Think If They Should…

The Conjuring of Zoth-Avarex

The Conjuring of Zoth-Avarex:
The Self-Proclaimed Greatest
Dragon in the Multiverse

by K.R.R. Lockhaven

Kindle Edition, 306 pg.
BookBaby, 2021

Read: October 23-25, 2021
Grab a copy from your local indie bookstore!

“We’ve had years and years of preparations to ensure everything will run smooth. We have learned from the mistakes of the past and will use that knowledge to make better mistakes in the future. Er. . . to avoid those mistakes altogether.”

What’s The Conjuring of Zoth-Avarex About?

Harris Reed is fresh out of magical training school and arrives at the Site to begin his career as a conjurer—he couldn’t be more excited about it. He’d grown up on fantasy literature and movies, and in college finds out that so much of what he’d dreamed about is actually true. Not only that, he can be part of the incredibly secret world.

What he discovers is a corporate culture that basically mimics that which is in the mundane world (Harris would use the adjective “Muggle,” he’s that kind of nerd). Petty rivalries, careerists focused on climbing the ladder, budget issues, inter-department squabbles, and a devotion to bureaucracy over the well-being of the employees—or common sense.

Harris and his fellow graduates have been brought to the Site to add some last-minute power to a long-term project set to launch on their second day of work, which sounds exciting to them all.

What they don’t know is that the project is summoning a dragon into this world from another universe. To you and I, this might sound as dumb as John Hammond’s plan for a park full of dinosaurs, but the managers of the Site (and the U. S. Military, which expects to be the eventual recipient of said dragon) don’t see it that way. It turns out that, in comparison, Hammond looks like a safety-conscious genius—it takes less than one sentence for the dragon to show that the humans have no control over him. He kills one staff member, snatches a woman that Harris knew from school, and flies off.

Zoth-Avarex takes Silvia to the top of the Space Needle and makes it his base. He brought Silvia along because he needs a princess in addition to his treasure. There’s no threat implied to her (as long as she doesn’t try to escape)—he basically wants to keep her safe and pamper her. It doesn’t keep this from being a horrible experience for her, but it sure could be much worse.

On their first day, Harris has befriended (or tried to) Siliva, her fiancé, and her sister. The three of them quickly realize that Management and the military are going to be of little use in getting Silvia back, and decide to take matters into their own hands in the tradition of fantasy protagonists everywhere. They get support and a little guidance from Silvia and Harris’s direct supervisor, as well as a long-term employee who’s got his heart set on retirement.

Eddie

One of the first people that Harris meets on campus is a conjurer just days away from retirement. He’s named Eddie, but might as well be named Dr. Perry Cox. Eddie’s a legend on the Site for some heroics back in the ’70s but is now an iconoclastic grump. The kind of guy every office has one or two of—they’ve been around forever and understand the way things work in ways that management doesn’t. They also don’t care about anything anymore and aren’t afraid to show it. He gives the new hires a hard time but actually gives good advice and assistance.

I personally love to get to know those figures and try to learn as much as I can from them (and have likely taken on that role a time or two), maybe that’s why Eddie resonated with me so much. He was hands-down my favorite character—he’s one of those supporting characters that could overshadow the protagonists if used too much, but Lockhaven doesn’t let that happen. Which is probably good, too much of him could’ve hurt the novel.

Footnotes

I am a sucker for a good (generally comedic) use of footnotes in novels—it’s not something I see often, but when I do, there’s a high correlation between their presence and a novel I enjoy.* Lockhaven nails the practice—they give him an added vehicle for jokes and help add to the reader’s understanding of the world and some characters. He also includes one note that’s so long could be a Steinbeck-ian intercalary chapter. It takes a certain audacity to try that, and it paid off.

* See Lisa Lutz, Thomas Lennon, Josh Bazell.

Satire

The book is primarily a fantasy adventure, but throughout—sometimes more pronounced than others—it’s also a workplace satire. As such it’s a winner—even if the fantasy storylines and broader comic bits didn’t work, I’d be pretty positive about this book for the workplace satire alone.

Like Harris, Lockhaven is pretty clearly someone who has drunk deeply from Fantasy fiction. At once he celebrates tropes, themes, and ideas from all sorts of Fantasy—and pokes fun at them. If he just ridiculed them (as several tropes and themes deserve), it’d likely come across as mean-spirited and wouldn’t be that entertaining. If all he did was unleash his favorite tropes to use in telling his story, it’s be unoriginal and clichéd. Mixing avoids the pitfalls and makes for an entertaining read.

So, what did I think about The Conjuring of Zoth-Avarex?

“Well, Bill, I know the answer to life is simply to live with love. Well, actually it’s forty- two, but you humans can’t comprehend that.” The dragon paused wistfully. “I know the best things in life are free. But the birds and bees can have all of that. I need gold! Gold! And to hang here with my beautiful maiden. That’s all I want in this crazy mixed-up world.”

It’s de rigueur when talking about a humorous work of Fantasy or SF to invoke Pratchett, Adams, and Asprin, and it’s de rigueur when I talk about that kind of fiction that I go out of my way to not do that. It’s easy this time because I find them completely inapplicable. On the other hand, TCoZA:TSPGDitM brought to mind: John Scalzi (I’m thinking Agent to the Stars and The Android’s Dream), Scott Meyer (Magic 2.0 series), Joe Zieja (Epic Failure Trilogy), and Eoin Colfer (Highfire). You put those works in a blender and pulse for 30 seconds and you’re going to get something akin to this book.

* Actually, does anyone Asprin anymore? I probably need to update my references.

This would be an easy book for me to go on too long about—I’d love to spend a few paragraphs on Zoth-Avarex alone. But it’s best experienced rather than being told about.

Most of the Independently published Humorous/Light Fantasy that I’ve come across hasn’t worked for me—at least not as much as I wanted it to. Either on the humor front or the story front. But Lockhaven nailed it, I’m happy to say. I laughed—audibly and hard—a couple of times, I chuckled and grinned a lot. I thought the relationships between the characters worked well, and I enjoyed the characters you’re supposed to enjoy and was annoyed by the ones that are supposed to bother you. This is largely one of those novels whose journey is more important than the destination—but I enjoyed the way Lockhaven wrapped things up, too.

In short, I had a lot of fun with this and expect that you will, too. Give this one a try.


4 Stars

This post contains an affiliate link. If you purchase from it, I will get a small commission at no additional cost to you. As always, opinions are my own.

The Friday 56 for 10/22/21: The Conjuring of Zoth-Avarex: The Self-Proclaimed Greatest Dragon in the Multiverse by K.R.R. Lockhaven

The Friday 56This is a weekly bloghop hosted by Freda’s Voice.

RULES:
The Friday 56 Grab a book, any book.
The Friday 56 Turn to Page 56 or 56% on your ereader. If you have to improvise, that is okay.
The Friday 56 Find a snippet, short and sweet.
The Friday 56 Post it

from Page 56 of:
The Conjuring of Zoth-Avarex

The Conjuring of Zoth-Avarex: The Self-Proclaimed Greatest Dragon in the Multiverse by K.R.R. Lockhaven

Marian moved the group along. “She’s a talker,” she whispered to them as they snuck away.

At the next cubicle over, they found a man in his late thirties peeking over the wall.

“This is Dan,” Marian said.

“You guys haven’t seen a green-headed duck around here, have you?” Dan’s eyes darted around the room.

“No.”

“Dan is afraid that a duck is somewhere out there watching him.” Marian made the statement as if it was an everyday, normal thing.

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén