Interview with fantasy author e rathke

Fantasy author e rathke is here to chat about Glossolalia.

During his virtual book tour, e will be giving away a $50 Amazon or Barnes and Noble (winner’s choice) gift card to a lucky randomly drawn winner. To be entered for a chance to win, use the form below. To increase your chances of winning, feel free to visit his other tour stops and enter there, too!

Bio:
e rathke writes about books and games at radicaledward.substack.com. A finalist for the 2022 Baen Fantasy Adventure Award, he is the author of Glossolalia and several other forthcoming novellas. His short fiction can be found at Mysterion Online, Shoreline of Infinity, and Luminescent Machinations.

Welcome, e. Please tell us about your current release.
Glossolalia is a Takashi Miike by way of Ursula K Le Guin. The novel gets weird and wild, but it is always grounded in its characters and their relationships. It’s the story of an isolated village at the edge of the world who take in an orphan. Once this orphan comes to town, well, that’s when life gets weird.

Through telling stories that challenge their view of the world, he seems to be unraveling their society. And then his adopted father begins dancing. Simply dancing. He doesn’t stop until he dies. By then, even more people are dancing.

What inspired you to write this book?
This novel grew out of several things smashing together in my head. I’d been looking at pictures of Greenland because I wanted to see the glaciers before they melt completely. While planning a way to physically go see them, I started imagining a very different version of reality and constructed a people to inhabit this place that looked just like Greenland.

I’d just written a long, daily meditation on the Tao Te Ching. With the Tao so deeply on my mind, I constructed this society based on Taoist ideas about leadership and conflict. Then, because these had to be real people and not mouthpieces of ideology, everything began to twist and become more complicated.

Add to that my fascination with the Voynich Manuscript and the dancing plagues in medieval Europe and Takashi Miike’s Visitor Q, everything fell into this novel. Sloshing around and fermenting until I poured it out on the page as Glossolalia.

 

Excerpt from Glossolalia:
IV

The truth of that summer is often hard for us to swallow, even all these years later. There was a profound feeling of powerlessness mixed with an exciting sensation of change bubbling up inside all of us. While the violence of the Uummanuq tried to hold us down, smother us, bury us, the words and visions of Ineluki invigorated us.

Most agree, now, that the reason Ineluki became such a central figure in our town was because of the weakness of Aukul as chief. His obsession with Umaal, butchery, and the Uummanuq. But we’ve been unfair to Aukul for so long, and with no one to defend him, his legacy continues to be smeared and tarnished. It’s always easier to point a finger than it is to ask for forgiveness.

We all allowed it. Any one of us could have turned him away that first day, or any day that followed. Especially after all the lunatic things he told us about his gods and his people.

This is where the oppressive powerlessness came in to lead us down a path of complacency. The Uummanuq mutilated our friends and family. The mountain girls returned, and though no one admitted it then, only to sing a song no one understood. We didn’t understand the context or the purpose or the words, and so our silent, absent leaders arrived only to reveal themselves opaque and incomprehensible.

And then there was Ineluki. His beauty and otherworldly glow. His green eye and his black. His white hair and his certainty. His empty book and the way he invaded all our dreams. The way his words swept through our town. His words of different ways of living, new ways of thinking.

 

What exciting story are you working on next?
Currently writing a cyberpunk novel live in google docs (follow along here!) that’ll be released on December 1^st. It’s called Howl and it’s a very unusual take on cyberpunk, but it’s the only way I could think to come at it.

I’ve always loved the idea of cyberpunk but rarely fallen in love with a work of cyberpunk, so I thought I’d take my own crack at it. In the cyberpunk spirit, I just dove straight in without any planning or plotting and then allowed whoever wanted to watch me bring this thing to life in real time. That’s actually been a lot of fun. Seeing people pop in and out of the document while I’m writing it.

Along with that, keep an eye out for my collaborative projects coming out under the names KE Wolfe and Coyote Black. KE Wolfe is working on a Star Trek inspired serial that will be released quarterly in 2023. Coyote Black is more a collective than an author, but you should see a few weird and wild novels come out under that name next year.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?
I don’t know that I consider myself a writer, even still. There’s something vaguely embarrassing, I think, about telling people that you’re a writer. It’s an identity I shy away from, I suppose, because writing, to me, is just about the most fun you can have while spending hours alone and talking to no one.

I love it!

But I also don’t like to tell people that I’ve spent thousands of hours of my life sitting alone in empty rooms typing up conversations between imaginary people in imaginary worlds. I mean, maybe I’m the only one who finds this sort of thing embarrassing. But it’s just not something I talk about with most people if I can avoid it.

But to answer what the question is actually asking: I wrote my first three novels in 2010. That’s about as good a place as any to put something official on it. I wrote before that, but the novels are when I began to take this quite a bit more seriously.

Do you write full-time? If so, what’s your work day like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?
Writing full time would be the dream, but, sadly, I have a very uninteresting job that I won’t bore anyone here with. How I find time to write—that’s always the real question.

For example, my wife and two kids both came down with the flu this week. Now, as I mentioned up above, I’m trying to get a novel out by December 1^st that I haven’t finished writing yet, so this puts me way behind. But that’s part of the fun, yeah?

Before I was married, when I was living alone in South Korea, I’d spend all day writing. On the weekend, it wasn’t out of the ordinary for me to write 10 or 12 hours a day. I once wrote 20,000 words over a 24-hour period this way. Of course, once you get in a serious relationship with another person who doesn’t really want you to disappear for days at a time to write your silly stories, you have to adjust. Relearn how to write by becoming jealous with your time or flexible with it. I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words after my wife goes to sleep. I’ve written more during slow times at work or during lunch. And sometimes my wife is just an understanding person and lets me hole myself up away for hours in the evening.

But then you have a kid and now you need to relearn how to write again, because nothing about your day becomes predictable. Can you write during their nap? Yeah, sure, but is this going to be a three-hour nap or a fifteen-minute nap? Are they going to wake up at 3am with a fever? Are you going to take them to the ER at 1pm because they’ve been screaming all day and you don’t know what to do because no one gives a tutorial on what to do when your child is sick?

So finding time here and there to write is always the real struggle. You get good at it, though. You learn to quit being so precious about process or ritual. There’s no time to wait for the muse to come calling: you just put your kid down for a nap so you hop on your keyboard and write as much as you can as fast as you can before they wake up and need your undivided attention.

What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
I’m sure I have one though I don’t know what it is. I do have a habit of piling images atop one another in sequence. I like the rhythm of language and so I’m often trying to capture that. It’s not really the way I talk in real life, but I find that my real life speech sometimes comes to mimic a character I’m writing that has a very distinct way of speaking.

But, yeah, I’m not sure I have a quirk that I recognize. I’m sure someone who’s read a lot of my stuff could tell me exactly what idiosyncratic and potentially embarrassing writing quirks I have, but I’m just not sure what they would be.

Maybe my obsession with dust, with wolves.

As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I have never dreamt of working. Even as a child, I did not have a dream job or anything like that. But from a pretty early age, I realized that this, here, is what I liked doing. I loved reading and still read compulsively, and I thought that that would be pretty all right. Telling stories for other children to read sounded about as good as life could get.

So I suppose being a writer has always been what I wanted to be.

Anything additional you want to share with the readers?
Whether my fiction is something you connect with or not, I also write personal essays at radicaledward.substack.com that may work much better for your taste. I publish one to three essays per week on a wide variety of topics. My Table of Contents over there is incomplete but gives you a taste of what kind of thing I write.

Thanks for reading and I hope you check out Glossolalia.

Links:
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