For all that is good and holy in the world, what possessed you to become an author?
I was told there would be no math.
Are you a plotter or a pantser?
Being a pantser technically requires pants, which is a level of organization to which I can only aspire.
If you were a taco or a pizza, what kind of taco or pizza would you be?
I would be the sort of pizza that you eat in the dead of night under a moonless sky as you prepare yourself body and soul to assail the infernal tower in a last desperate attempt to save the dragon in distress.
How many books did you write before you published/sold your first?
I wrote eleven books before I sold an Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors.
If you had to start your career over again from scratch, what would you do differently?
I would write An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors first.
What is the best advice you have for aspiring and pre-published authors?
Write what you want to read and let the market fall where it may. There is no one right way to publication and the path that works for one person won’t necessarily work for anyone else, so you must have perseverance even when you are long since out of patience.
Curtis Craddock was born in the wrong century and quite possibly on the wrong planet. He should have been born in a world where gallant heroes regularly vanquish dire and despicable foes, where friendship, romance, wit, and courage are the foundations of culture and civilization, and where adventure beckons from every shadow.
Instead, he was born on Earth and lives in a world bounded by bureaucracy, hemmed in by cynicism, and governed by the dull necessity of earning a wage. An exile in this world, he is a biographer of friends he’s never met, a chronicler of events that never happened, and a cartographer of places that never were.
Given that the mundane world supplies a dearth of oddly progressive kingdoms to be saved, he spends his time saving cats, dogs, and the occasional bird of prey. By day, he teaches Computer Information Systems classes to offenders at a correctional facility. By night, he puts on his writer’s cap, the broad-brimmed one with a feather, and, into the prison walls of reality, etches defiant words of legend.
His debut novel, An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors, was released by Tor in August 2017.
Excellent! And I, too, appreciate no math. 🙂