I Always Wanted to Be a Fantasy Writer… Peter V. Brett blogs

The Painted Man

Actually, that’s a lie. When I was nine I wanted to be a comic book artist, but that didn’t last long. I was pretty good at looking at things and drawing them, but drawing from imagination? Not so much. It’s not that I couldn’t imagine cool things. I could. I just couldn’t get them to look on paper anything like they looked in my head.

Writing became a way for me to describe all those cool things in my head without my sorry drawing skills screwing them up. After that, all I wanted was to be a writer.

I knew right away it had to be fantasy, meaning my stories needed to have magic and monsters in them. Maybe it’s because the first pictureless book I ever read was The Hobbit. Maybe it’s because the first movie I remember seeing in the theater is Star Wars (which is really more fantasy that science fiction, with the Force as “magic”). Maybe it’s because in fantasy, you get to play God more than in other genres, where you are bound by annoying rules like “reality”. But who knows? Maybe I just liked swords and cover paintings of women in corsets. Whatever the reason, for me, fantasy has always been where it’s at. ‘
I wrote my first novel in High School, and it was just awful. It was about a preppie jock and an alcoholic metalhead who were kidnapped by alien robots and had to learn magic and find a way to get along in order to fight monsters in space.

Yeah, I know. I just wanted to make sure you didn’t think I was being self-effacing when I said it was awful. My friends and family said nice things about it at the time, but let’s be honest, they were just being gracious.

I came to the conclusion then that writing would always just be a hobby for me. Sure, I wanted to be a published author, but come on, who was I kidding? Why me? What did I have to say that was so special other people would pay to read it?

But the writing bug stayed with me. If you truly enjoy something, you don’t need to be paid to do it, and I’ve always believed that if you do something at all, you should try to do it as well as you possibly can. So I wrote. All the time. I played Dungeons and Dragons, and wrote original adventures for the players. I wrote short stories as gifts to friends, and bad poetry about famous mythological figures. And I read. A lot.

After college, I tackled writing another book, a 160,000 word monster that was better than the last one, but still not good enough to satisfy me. So I wrote another book after that, better and longer still, but again, by the time I got to the end, I had learned so much that the beginning seemed flawed. Back to the drawing board.

My next book was The (soon-to-be released from Harper Voyager in Australia!) Painted Man. I’d like to say third time was the charm, but the truth is I gutted and rewrote the book several times, lathing away all the rough edges for years before it reached what I thought was submission quality. And even then, I really didn’t expect anyone to want it. .

But they did. The book has sold in ten markets and nine languages so far, with more in negotiation, and the damn thing’s not even printed yet. .

So now I sit. And I hold my breath. My dream of being a published fantasy author, carried with me for over twenty-five years, is about to come true. Early reviews (almost exclusively from Australians so far, thank you!) have been fantastic and I’m very excited, but the real test, readers who’ve spent their hard-earned money on the book, is yet to come. .

The tension is killing me.

Peter V Brett’s debut fantasy novel, The Painted Man, will be released in Australia in October (having been slightly delayed upon the rolling seas). In the mean time … Visit Peter V Brett’s website.

Find out more about The Painted Man.
… Or read a couple of advance reviews of the book that has the Voyager Cabin Crew buzzing:

Oz Horrorscope
SF Revu