Forgive the repeat question here, but why did you want to become a writer?

    In a nutshell, I figured out when I was 12 that you needed to have some way to make money in life and so started to look for a way. I was lazy and thought writers were rich people who got to sit around all day writing stuff. So I decided that I should be a writer.

    It's been my goal ever since.

So no prior family background or urgings or anything like that to become a writer?

   

    Nope.

    Just wanted to “get rich quick”. [Of] Course I soon learned that it wasn't the quickest way to get rich and it wasn't that lucrative either in the beginning. Just a long, hard push to hone a craft and follow a dream. Had I known how long it would take me before I would see my first novel in print I might not have even started down the path in the first place.

    Course I had such a strong dislike for the standard 9 to 5 lifestyle that I would have found something similar in nature I'm sure to replace it [the dream of being a writer]. I'm stubborn if anything else.

Was there anything else you wanted to do besides/in addition to being a writer?

    Truth be told, I had plans to go to college on something of a “make your own major” program in which I was going to get into film (namely special effects), writing and art.

Things didn't go that way then?

   

    I pulled a “Bill Gates” in college, just getting a hair's breath away from my AA degree. I didn't see the point in college anymore- it just seemed so much like wasted money and I didn't want to waste my parents and my own money on something I didn't think was for me.

    College is great for folks that need it, doctors, lawyers, etc, but I knew what I wanted to do and realized that I wasn't getting there through college, in many ways it was holding me back, so I left.

Do you ever regret that?

   

    My mother does (laughing). Maybe one day I'll go back and get that AA degree, but I've found that you don't really have to have a college degree to succeed in life if you got a dream and are willing to work for it. Now that's not to say “drop out of school kids” just to say that for me, it wasn't fitting with where I felt I wanted to go. It is to say, however, that the old adage, “it's not what you know but who” is a very true statement which I've seen repeated again and again in my life thus far.

So you left college and then did what?

    Oddly enough I'd been working a variety of jobs related to what I wanted to do- be a writer. From sixth grade on, whenever someone asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up I'd say, “I want to be a writer.”

    I followed this up with action though, not just words. From sixth grade on I wrote my own stories and read heavily. I researched and dissected many things to learn how to be a better writer. I didn't have a lot of writer friends to help read my work and give me feedback, my own family was helpful to a degree, but they didn't often want to sit down and help edit or give feedback on what I wrote.

    When they did do so, it was that unhelpful “it was good,” commentary that all writers hate to get and all loved ones feel safest in giving when they don't know what to say. I don't blame them, though, I didn't really have that great of stuff back than anyway- it was really rough and raw.

    Part of that action [to following up my dream to be a writer] was also working in places where I could learn more about the business of writing and publication. My resume resembles my hodgepodge ethnic background, but I learned a lot from working in bookstores, being a merchandiser for book companies, interning at a comic book company, working in a high end retail gallery, warehouse and all the other odds and ends jobs I've done and forgotten about over the years.

    These places were valuable in getting me an inside scoop on the nature of the book business and helped me get some contacts which I got to use later on for my book signing in December of last year [2004].

So you worked at odd jobs and wrote. Anything else you did during this time period?

    I wish I could make it sound more glamourous or something but that is pretty much what happened during that time till now. Of course, I also submitted things all the time. I started submitting things back when I was in the sixth grade even.

    Stephen King was one of my early book idols and I heard he got started young and then I read about Robert E. Howard and some others selling things at young ages and... well I didn't really know any better not to really and so submitted like crazy.

    [It was] More odds and ends and writing. Really I was still sticking with writing but not in the tradition sense. I had given up for a short while after I self-published a novel and had a bad experience with an agent. Through it all I just keep thinking and tooling and researching a lot about Tralodren. For some reason I felt this would be a really fun thing to write about.

    I did some more odd short story concepts but really for the most part got more into art and college and trying to find my way in the world like a lot of people do in that age group.

    Later, I started my own company which was going to be a publisher of comics, RPGs and novels. Thankfully that folded early on as the concept was a good one but the implantation of the system, or lack thereof was poor at best. I learned a lot, though, and made a lot of connections and gained a lot of insights which also helped me learn more about and gain greater respect for the publishing business.

    After that I floated around for a while until I saw the open call ad for R&R Endeavors I thought it would be a fun trial as I was finding myself up against a wall that said this was my last chance at getting published short of finding another agent and going from there which was something I wasn't too keen on doing again.

So you weren't joking when you said you're kind of a Bohemian then.

    No.

    Must be in the blood. (Laughs).

    I wouldn't recommend it for anyone else but for me it seemed to be work and fits me pretty well.

What did you end up submitting early on in your career?

    Terrible things really. Short stories that had some supernatural elemental to them, a lot of devil and vampire tales if I recall... My friend and I even ended up getting something of a comic book series up and running in 1989 after we both saw the first Batman movie.

    We actually went pretty far with it too, mapping out a whole set of story arcs and writing about twelve issues before we ran into a wall looking for an artist (we did find one, however, he decided to stop being an artist before we did the first book) and the pile of rejection letters that soon found their way to my door.

You submitted a comic series at twelve years old?

   

    We weren't twelve. We started the comic when we were twelve but my friend moved out of state and I ended up doing the rest of it myself and then sending it off when I as probably about 14, if I can recall correctly...

    But like I said, we didn't know any better and I figured “what have I got to lose”. When you're young you think you know it all and that your stories are perfect. Some were okay, looking back now, but a lot of them needed to be cleaned up and I needed to learn how write in comic script format which makes a big difference as well, but I did it.

What was the comic called?

   

    “Gator”.

    He was suppose to be this sort of Batman hero who moved around the city and did some hard core vigilantism. [He] Had a theme of an alligator which was sort of fun to play around with. [We] had a great rogues gallery too which, in my opinion, I haven't yet seen beat yet by the stuff out there today.

So your comic never saw print but at least one short story did, according to your bio. What was that about?

   

    The story was called “The Gift.” I don't recall how I got wind of how to submit it, maybe my English teacher, but in any event, I submitted it and it got published in one of those teen papers that are circulated and made just for high schools.

    It was a fun time and I learned a lot because of it. It didn't pay anything but at least I could say I was a “published author”.

    It felt good.

Readers to this site can look at some other interviews and essays with you about how the book signings and promotion and publication of your first novel went so we're not going to rehash that in this interview. Instead, let's look to the future. First off, what is the future of your work?

    That's a big question. You mean the future of my work regarding...

Regarding the Tralodren stuff for starters.

    Well, the world is still there and the trilogy has been written along with some other collections I'm working on finishing up too. I'm still looking for publication with the work but it's a slow going process. I am about 99.9% sure, however, that the series is going to be signed up by the end of the year with a publisher. (editors note: Aspirations Media signed on for all Tralodren material Chad had at the time of this interview).

    The comic work I'm working on getting out there is another story. It's different than prose in that you need an artist and so forth to get it done and up until now I haven't had much success finding one, but I keep looking and working nonetheless.

    I have a graphic novel and a thirty-six issue series written and am finishing up the background for a new open-ended ongoing series I'm going to be working on as well. I've recently been planning out some more background for another Tralodren related comic project so that keeps me busy too.

    As to other projects, I do have more books that are in various states of planning. These are probably best described as non-fiction even though they have fictionalized components to them... It's kinda hard to explain.

Sounds like you've been keeping busy then.

 

    Yeah.

    So if any publisher is reading this if you'd sign me up you'd get a whole lot of goodies to put in your distribution channels.

Did you want to promote any of your work?

   

    Not at this time. I find it best to keep some things secretive for a while. I don't want to spill the beans on what I'm doing too much until it's ready to come out. Things change in the process from preproduction to production and I don't want to put out any false hype.

    I can say though that the thirty-six issue comic series is not a fantasy based story, more a near future post Apocalyptic tale and the other open ended comic series is just an amazing blend of fantasy, scifi and a little modern day stuff as well.

You've been mentioning of late as well that you've involved with a new publishing venture. Are you willing to share any information about that?

    What I can say for right now is that I'm working with a few other people in the beginning stages of creating a publication company. It's not an overnight deal and has and will take some time as it is put together and established, but ultimately it will be a publisher of comics, and novels and graphic novels.

    It's been a dream of mine to get something like this going and I'm happy to finally have a chance to see it get rolling with some great people I know and trust. It sure beats what I tried to set up on my own before that's for sure.

So let's switch gears here a little. Let's talk about “Seer's Quest” and "The Divine Gambit Trilogy” in general. It's unique on some levels but also familiar as well. Was that your intent?

    Yes and no.

    When you're writing fantasy, I've discovered, you can't escape some cliches since they're so ingrained not only into the genre but our culture (global and regional) as well.

    On one hand I really wanted to get away from as many stereotypes and formalized cliches as I could. However, you just can't get away from them all. I really tried to get away from as many RPG and Tolkien references and feel as I could from Tralodren too. I didn't want to write stories with such a heavily influence and so instead delved back into the mythological sources for a lot of these concepts and built up from there with my own twists and turns. I wasn't able to get the full feel of the series until the second novel as the first still has some Tolkienesque and RPG trappings but, I feel, still has a unique enough voice to help distinguish it from the others on the shelf.

So where did the concept for the elves come from? They are certainly not that Tolkienesque and not tied that strongly to mythology.

   

    Right. I made a choice early on, following Robert E. Howard's example, to base everything on a small kernel of truth and reality so readers have an easier time of identifying with it. Pure fantasy is great but I never liked or was able to get into tales where the hero's name was fifteen consonants long and everything was way too complicated to pronounce from nations to even common animals. That turned me off and made it hard for me to understand and follow the story.

    So I took the idea to have the nations and races of the world be based upon a certain aspect of historical truth which I could mold and bend a bit into my own designs. The elves were based upon the Byzantine and Roman Empires with heavy Celtic and Aztec/Inca/Mayan influences for the other branches of the race. This isn't to say that they ARE those ancient cultures but they share some similar characteristics with them which I think just about any reader can easily latch onto and imagine pretty easily as they read along.

    I also wanted elves that weren't these peaceful hippy-like characters. When you were dealing with a race that lived longer than what we can imagine, it seemed very logical to me that an empire of some type was all but certain. Given their historical roots it wasn't that hard then to make them more warlike and aggressive, more real, at least in my eyes, as to how they better fit into the world.

You seemed to have answered the next question then about how you choose the main characters names. You wanted to keep them as easy to pronounce as possible too right?

    Yep.

    I also wanted to have them match up with a cultural feel as best I could for their respected races. Again, I wanted to get the feeling of history without being historical.

So the entire Trilogy has been written now. What can you share about it, if anything?

   

    First off, as the first trilogy I've written I can say I have a healthy respect for the process. Writing what probably will work out to be a over a thousand page story was something that I didn't totally grasp when going into it. Having finished it, I really can't believe that I wrote the whole thing myself, in fact I'm convinced I didn't (laughs).

    I find myself rereading some segments and wondering to myself, “How did I do that” or “When did I write that?” It's very interesting and humbling at the same time.

    Another thing that I noticed, after I took a step back from the whole series and read it again, was how strong of a story it really was. Granted I'm never going to be able to see it as the first time reader, since I wrote the thing and know all the “deleted scenes” and such, but I could really get a sense that this was a decent story line and again- was put into a weird feeling of just how [all] those keystrokes worked their way into this...

    I guess I can share one small sneak peak, as it were. The series grows progressively larger in scope with each novel so that the whole tale blossoms into this entirely different and really, I think, amazing scenario right before your eyes.

So how big is Tralodren in terms of future works that could come out of it?

    It's huge.

    The trilogy was meant just to be a starting point- a benchmark for things to come. There is a lot of rich, meaningful stuff that can be pulled out of it for quite a long time.

    I'm already planning on a few more series following The Divine Gambit Trilogy. Of course I have to get the first three published. That's an important step.

Getting back to the previous vein of historical “flavor” to your work on Tralodren, was there a historical approach as to how you established the world itself as far as history and land masses go?

    Sort of.

    When it came to land masses, I went for an earth-like setting in terms of day/light cycle and surroundings (one moon, and sun, etc). The continents were just, really, haphazardly laid out a long time ago and developed over the years into a working, believable model.

    I've had the distinct advantage of getting to grow with the work for many years before it ever came into the public light so I know of a lot of little details and have a strong background of the history in my head as well from which to work.

    Speaking of history, I never was a big fan of these long drawn out endless spans of time you find in a lot of fantasy epics. I wanted something a bit more contemporary and “real” to the time frame in Tralodren. Using common sense alone can show you what can happen in just a hundred or even a thousand years on this planet. Now when you add in longer lived races and the former advances being the starting point for the next generation, I had a problem with going into 100,000 year spans of time.

But you have unrecorded and recorded time, according to the history on chadcorrie.com, so does that mean that unrecorded time isn't so long a time span either than?

    It's measured, just not by anyone but me. You can't have all the secrets, you know. I think a story looses some of it's magic if the reader knows everything, it's just not as fun and doesn't allow for creative speculation. The recorded time is definitely shorter than what most fantasy epics would have their readers believe.

The gods and mythology of Tralodren seem very well thought out and detailed as well. Following that familiar vs original concept you explained earlier, how did you come to develop this rich part of Tralodren? This website has a small snippet of the Tralodroen Pantheon, but there's a lot more to them, isn't there?

    Whenever I create a new world (and I've done that several times now) I always start with the two pillars upon which I build everything else: history and religion. With these two pillars in place the rest of the world can be established as they provide all the real resonance and background for the setting.

    I was really happy how the Pantheon turned out as it seemed very believable to me the more I worked with it. By keeping it simple and somewhat historical I also added some American flavor to the concept as well- just enough to take it a step or two away from the European themes that dominate much of fantasy religion and mythology today.

    Here too I wanted to diverge from the more common trend found in a lot of fantasy tales, inspired by RPGs and the like, where they have hundreds of gods. Tralodren has sixteen total, which is more than a enough- and believe me, I tried to widdle it down to less but the gods that were chosen were necessary. Following classic opposition or duality that is common in many mythologies many of the gods are opposite the other in some way shape or form either directly: Asora and Asorlok or indirectly: Ganatar and Rheminas.

    I also have that whole “Olympian Family” dynamic going on which readers will get to see played out in part towards the later end of The Divine Gambit Trilogy.

    Thanks for allowing this chat, but we have to cut it off now or risk making a book of our own. Hopefully this interview has been an informative and entertaining experience for you. Thanks again to Mr. Corrie for taking the time to answer some questions.

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