[Today we sit down with fantasy/sword and sorcery and romantasy author M. Daniel McDowell, who also publishes under the name Jay Wolf. Here, McDowell discusses their new book, Beneath the Shattered Gods; their advice for other self-published authors; and their forthcoming projects.]

Forests Haunted by Holiness: You recently published Beneath the Shattered Gods. First, congratulations! Second, how did you go about releasing it? Selecting the cover, editing, distribution, et cetera? What advice can you offer other authors hoping to publish their own book?

M. Daniel McDowell: Thank you! Beneath the Shattered Gods is my first novella-length publication, and the first I’ve overtly written as a romance (that conforms to the social contract of romances!) It is a sword-and-sorcery romance so there is also admittedly a non-zero quantity of monster guts. This was an interesting case as the cover originally came to me through a social writing game; the base art is a stock illustration from Tithi Luadthong, and I have handled all parts of the writing, editing, and layout process myself, with some amount of input from my best friend and right-hand Valerie Valdes. (My secret is that I am a freelance publishing professional in layout and design, so I can make it look like a team effort.)

For authors new to self-publishing, my first and best advice is to try it out with something low-stakes so that if it doesn’t turn out perfect you won’t beat yourself up over it. Beneath the Shattered Gods was the third published of my books, and I used a lot of the lessons I learned from the first two, as well as from my anthology Beating Hearts & Battle-Axes. 

My other recommendation is to publish the ebook before you mess around with print — I often release my print books months after my ebooks because there’s always something that needs fixed. I have also found that every time I have a new “thing” to advertise it gives all the editions of my other books a little boost, so introducing print after the ebook has been out for a while gives me some fresh “news” about that title. 

FHBH: The book is set in the wake of a divine apocalypse. Why did you use that as the setting? What does such a setting allow you to explore in terms of character development that a different setting might not?

MDM: The interesting thing about this cover is that because it was originally for a social writing game, the cover and title were set up for me and gave me something to work from. In this case, the red on the ground and the intense, distant, crumbling statue in this artwork suggested to me a place of some profound dereliction, and so did the title it was given.

FHBH: Nathei Ketre and Kaesh Daloran make up the odd couple at the heart of Beneath the Shattered Gods. But they both have flaws and secrets. How and why is Nathei questioning his faith? And how does that influence/intersect with Kaesh’s secrets?

MDM:  I am not a highly spiritual person, but I love questions of faith and doubt, and in this cover image, in addition to this derelict world I saw the figure who later became my main character. Natheì — a character I gave both of these issues — is definitely the lens of the story. As the last priest remaining in a time of plague, his faith is pretty thin and his doubts omnipresent, and not solely because his world is falling apart — his mentor has been murdered. When he meets Kaésh, he discovers a connection to his mentor’s murderer that makes his new compatriot fascinating in more than one way. Kaésh, on the other hand, wants nothing more than to distance himself from all of this. The tension between all of these things is tightly wired.

FHBH: Where can readers find Beneath the Shattered Gods, and your other books?

MDM: For the moment, the easiest place to find this and my other books is via Amazon; for those who prefer not to shop there, some of my ebooks (including Beneath the Shattered Gods) are also available on the Itch.io platform, and I am working to make my whole catalog available there, but it will take some time.

FHBH: What other projects are you working on?

MDM: I always have a lot of pots boiling at any given time, but hot on the heels of the paperback release of Beneath the Shattered Gods is the paperback release of my novella By Thieves-Light, which is a very different kind of gay sword & sorcery adventure tale. The one-line pitch for that story is “What if Fritz Leiber’s “Ill-Met in Lankhmar” was a gay meet-cute instead” and it more or less goes off to the races from there — two rival scoundrels with one mission and close stakes, getting interested in each other whilst confronting unknowable horrors from the depths, that sort of thing.

Past that, I’ve set my intentions to wrap up the third book in the Song of the Scourgelands sequence, though the timeline for that is fuzzy. It’s been a big “release the thing” year here so I expect at some point the Beast of the Fallow Field will come for me and demand of me some rest, somewhere in the middle of all that. I suspect it will catch me unless I run very, very fast.

[M. Daniel McDowell is the author of several books, including the gay sword & sorcery romance novella Beneath the Shattered Gods, and editor of the romantic sword & sorcery anthology Beating Hearts & Battle-Axes as Jay Wolf. Find out more at mdmcd.com.]