Richard Harland, author of the Worldshaker books, creates a whole new world of angels and apocalypse!
Ferren and the Angel
by Richard Harland
Publisher : IFWG Publishing International
(November 6, 2023)
An angel falls from the sky and crashes to the ground!
Miriael, the Fourteenth Angel of Observance, has been shot down in the thousand-year war between Heaven and Earth. Damaged and helpless, she prays for extinction.
The young tribesman Ferren finds her lying in the grass. She ought to be an enemy, since his people are on the side of the Earth. But seeing her there, unable to fly, his curiosity outweighs every rule and every warning.
Ferren knows almost nothing about the terrifying world he’s grown up in. Now he’s going to learn the truth about the war, the Humen army camp and what military service really means. His unique friendship with Miriael is about to change the course of history.
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Author Interview
At what point did you decide to be an author and what was your path to publication?
I first thought how great it would be to be a writer when I was about ten. My best friend and I had this area like a junkyard at the back of his house – all sorts of junk, like packing cases, old tin baths, metal drums, carpets, pipes, wire, everything you could think of. We used that junk to build submarines, airplanes, fortresses, tanks – and we built on a big scale, big enough to walk around in the submarine or airplane or whatever. Andy supervised the construction, he was very mechanically minded, but I took the lead when we’d finished building and started making up adventures that could happen to us in the things we’d built. Wave after wave of attackers coming against us in the fortress, some traitor letting them in, a fire, pinned in a single last tower … Or attacked by an enemy submarine, forced to hide under an ice cap, running out of oxygen, surfacing through ice and ripping holes in the hull … We came back after school every day and added to the story, and some of our stories went on for weeks.
Then one time it rained for day after day – did I say I was living in England back then? We couldn’t get out to our junkyard, which was called ‘the Chicken Run’, and we were so bored in the end we decided to write down some of our stories, like pretend books. So that passed the time – but then Andy’s older sister Kitty, who was as bored as we were, started reading some of our stories.
“Hey, these aren’t bad,” she said. “Why don’t you try selling them?”
She had an idea how to do it too. We had to copy our five or six best stories using an old-fashioned duplicator (these were the days before computers!), then we took them to school to sell in the school playground. Only we didn’t exactly ‘sell’ them, because none of our friends had spare money or they didn’t want to part with it. Instead they did swaps for our stories: candies, comix, even some of their school lunches.
I guess that’s when I first learned that being a writer isn’t the easiest route to being a multi-millionaire. But I learned something else too – that there is no better feeling in the world than to have someone read a story you’ve written and say, “Hey, that was great, you got another one?” And then you know that something you imagined inside your head has gone across into someone else’s head. They experienced it too! Absolutely no better feeling – makes your heart beat faster!
That was the moment when I thought how great it would be to become a writer. But, years later, when I applied myself seriously to making the dream come true, that’s when I hit writer’s block. Twenty-five years of it! As I described in my bio … and there were many stupid reasons why I could never finish anything I started, stupid reasons like manic perfectionism, being too proud to listen to advice, trying to produce literary forms of fiction that didn’t come naturally to me, etc etc. But the one thing I did right through all those twenty-five years – I kept on trying, I never gave up!
Describe your writing process. Do you outline, plot and plan, or is your writing more organic?
I don’t think you can just jump into fantasy without planning – you have to create a world in your head before you can move around in it. It must be different with realistic fiction, especially when tending to memoir – then reality has already done the work and laid out the ground ahead of you.
For me personally, I love big, rolling climaxes in the books I read and the books I write. Everything has to build up to a grand, grand finale! But I also believe a good climax has to grow naturally, you can’t force it at the last minute, so you have to plant the seeds for growth very early on.
So, sure, I’m a planner! But letting something grow naturally, it still has the power to surprise me. I know when I have all the elements there to build a big climax, but I never know exactly how it’ll play out.
I think of telling a story like riding on the back of a great beast – say, a dinosaur! You aim to end up at some vaguely glimpsed destination on the horizon, but there’s no way you can just suddenly wrench on a rein and redirect such a huge monster at the last minute. You have to start guiding it the right way from the start. You can’t control it or force it, you have to work with it. In that sense, it’s an organic process – you have to respect where the story wants to go, and if you want to end up with a big, rolling climax (typical of all my novels!), you have to start nudging and guiding – and foreseeing – from the very beginning.
Tell us what you enjoy most about writing fantasy.
For me, there are two best things about being an author. One is when ordinary readers get back to me and ask, Are you going to do a sequel? They want more because they’ve liked what they’d read so much! And there’s just the wonderful feeling that a world which only existed in own imagination has gone across into someone else’s imagination. They’re living it too!
The other best thing is the best part of the writing process, when I’ve set everything up right and the later stages of the story just unfold all on their own. It’s exhilarating, like being on a toboggan and hanging on for the ride. Not a sense of speed because I’m never a fast writer, but a sense of being totally caught up and gliding effortlessly downhill. Sometimes I find myself standing in front of the bathroom mirror wondering whether I’m about to clean my teeth or I’ve already done it!
Do you have any odd (writing) habits?
Well, I write on the bed lying flat on my back, using my iPad!
Maybe my most useful habit is what I call ‘pre-filming.’ After writing through the morning, I do jobs around the house, then sometime in the afternoon I relax into a sort of vague, unfocused sort of state and start picturing the episode I’m going to be writing tomorrow. Like a movie! I think of it as if I’m there, how it’ll look and sound and unfold. But I don’t write it down, it’s just one best version among a hundred other possible versions, and all those other possibilities are still hanging around.
I don’t know if any other writer does that – I suspect not. Me and my weird visual imagination …
Instead of trying to fix it and pin it down, I let sleep do the job for me. That’s the real trick! I go to bed with it all floating about in my head, and the unconscious mind goes to work on it. The mere possibilities get shorn away, and what’s left when I wake up in the morning is the episode as it has to be, the single definite movie! It’s not my imagination any more, it’s as if it really happened, and all I have to do is record it.
To date, what is your favorite (or most difficult) chapter you have ever written?
Hard to remember with earlier books, but I can answer on Ferren and the Angel. My favorite chapter was the chapter where Ferren jumps off the over bridge to escape the Humen and finds himself in a dank and musty forest – then hears the tiny cries and wails of the Morphs. He can’t see them, they aren’t solid but exist invisibly between solid things, but he talks to them and hears their plaintive lament. They’re the souls of the dead who have been shut out of Heaven ever since the start of the war between the armies of Heaven and the armies of Earth. They’re so lost and lonely, living in quiet places where no one will disturb them …That was just one of those chapters which seemed to write itself – and which took off in the telling. In fact, the Morphs ended up being far more crucial than I ever realised. By the end of the Ferren Trilogy, they’ll be the deciding factor in the overall story! I think the most difficult chapter was the one in which Miriael dreams her way back up to Heaven in a visionary dream. I started imagining all sorts of grandeur and magnificence, but somehow that didn’t have the right feeling. The most important quality wasn’t magnificence, I decided, but serenity, a much quieter subjective quality. So that’s where it became personal – what scenes gave me a feeling of serenity? And I discovered that, for me, very simple scenes were the most peaceful and calming. Gardens, fountains, green lawns, birdsong … and that clicked with an image of Heaven that already existed in a painting I’d seen years ago in Belgium, the famous Ghent Altarpiece by a medieval painter, Van Eyck . Funny how things come back to you! Van Eyck’s version of Heaven wasn’t in any way fine or grand, but simple and serene and beautiful like an ideal version of a medieval town with gardens.There’ll be other altitudes and other regions of Heaven to appear in the next two books of the trilogy, so I’ll need to come up with different impressions, including a sense of magnificence for the higher levels. The simplicity of the region Miriael visits goes with the fact that these are familiar, nostalgic scenes from her past. But I want to maintain the sense of serenity for all parts of Heaven now!
Describe the [book/series] in 10 words or less for people who are just learning about it.
The Ferren Trilogy: Only an unlikely friendship between a human and an angel can end a thousand-year war and prevent an invasion of Heaven.
(I gave up counting – I knew I could never do it in 10!)
What do you like to do when you’re not writing?
Going on long walks with our Yogi the Labrador. At least, I think of them as walks – he thinks of them as food foraging expeditions!
About the Author
Richard Harland was born in Yorkshire, England, then migrated to Australia at the age of twenty-one. He was always trying to write, but could never finish the stories he began. Instead he drifted around as a singer, songwriter and poet, then became a university tutor and finally a university lecturer. But after twenty-five years of writer’s block, he finally finished the cult novel, The Vicar of Morbing Vyle, and resigned his lectureship to follow his original dream.
Since then, he’s produced seventeen books of fantasy, SF and horror/supernatural, ranging from Children’s to Young Adult to Adult. Best known internationally for Worldshaker and its sequels, he’s won many awards in France and Australia.
He lives with partner Aileen near Wollongong, south of Sydney, between golden beaches and green escarpment. Walking Yogi the Labrador while listening to music is his favourite relaxation—when he’s not writing like a mad workaholic, catching up on those wasted twenty-five years …
WEBSITES
https://richardharland.au
https://ferren.com.au
Richard Harland Writing Tips
