Say hello to our SFF Indie Author of the Month, Jonathan Weiss. From stop motion experiments involving questionable amounts of clay, to discovering the magic of the written word as a teen, Jonathan’s storytelling evolution has been anything but boring. These days, he’s powered by the support of his wife and three feathery muses (a.k.a. budgies), and spends crafts stories full-time. When he’s not busy wordsmithing, you’ll find him nose-deep in a book, avoiding eye contact with his ever-growing pile of unpainted Warhammer 40K minis, or trying to defy physics by cramming a feast onto his comically undersized BBQ grill.
1. To begin with, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself – where were you born? Raised? Schooled?
What a big question! And a scary one! “Hey what’s your entire past?” is terrifying in it’s eldritch size and scope! Well, I’ll stop beating around the bush and answer it properly.
I was born in Sydney, Australia, and grew up right next to the beach, which was wasted on me because I’ve never been a fan of the ocean. I was a quiet, reserved, head-in-the-clouds kind of kid, but I was always creative. I always tried to make things, little stories in little worlds I’d made up, but I always had trouble expressing it to other people. I loved videogames, especially the kinds where you were cut loose in a world to “figure it out” without much pre-amble or talking. I didn’t do too great at school, but hey, that’s undiagnosed ADHD for ya!
In university, I went for a Bachelor of Journalism, because I wanted to do some kind of job where I got to write, but despite graduating with the degree, I had absolutely zero desire to get into the field. The idea of being a radio host charmed me for a time, because I sure like to talk, but there’s very few places to do that without entirely uprooting one’s life and taking in some VERY low pay for some gruelling work.
I swept up popcorn for a bit at the local cinema while I worked out what to do with myself, then a friend from high-school let me know about a job going at the (now closed) Microsoft Store in Pitt Street. It was as simple as selling computers, and it opened a lot of doors for me in the wider organisation of Microsoft, which I stayed with for about another five years, only leaving a few years ago after getting a bit burnt out on the whole world of tech-sales.
This is about when I decided to take a good, hard run at self-publishing. Through the past few years preceding that, I’d figured out a lot of things about myself, and that reflected in my writing (in that I actually finished a book or two!) So I hunkered down, got to churning out more books, and then here we are!
2. What did you want to be when you were twelve, eighteen and thirty? And why?
Well, I’m thirty at the moment so I’m happy to say that I’m pretty well where I want to be, so I’ll skip that bit!
When I was twelve however, I had ambitions for stop motion animation. The Wallace and Gromit films were the most amazing thing I’d ever seen, and I wanted nothing more than to become an animator. I started making my own stop-motion shorts, but eventually tired out of the whole venture due to the amount of time it chewed up.
“Whadda mean that was only fourteen seconds of video!? It took me a week to do that!” – Jonathan Weiss, Aged 12 (Probably)
I did take another crack at doing a stop motion animation with some of my Warhammer 40k figures when I was in my 20s’, going as far as to use a green screen and add special effects, but I decided it was a fun little side project, not something I would make more of (but it was pretty sick.)
By the time I was eighteen, I was dead set on being a writer, but I hadn’t yet landed on the world that would become the setting of my current books. I was slowly writing and re-working the kind of book you start at sixteen that should never see the light of day for how bad it was. It was a hodgepodge of ill-thought out tropes, unrealistic and fanciful action sequences and very strained strands of plot holding it all together.
I think I kept going with that story until I was about twenty, which is when I finally figured out The Droughtlands.
3. What strongly held belief did you have at eighteen that you do not have now?
I was very sure that I was going to be a famous published author. Certain of it! I was going to get picked up by one of the big publishing houses and rocked into movie deals and all the rest. But now I’m really firm on being, and staying, self-published (unless someone makes me an offer I can’t refuse.)
I really enjoy the control, the autonomy, and the intimacy I get to have with my work when I’m the one calling the shots. I decide on what the cover will look like. Who the editors will be. When to pull the plug on a series and when to keep going. (I’ve heard horror stories from other authors getting the short end of the stick on that last one.)
4. What were three works of art – book or painting or piece of music, etc – you can now say had a great effect on you and influenced your own development as a writer?
Tough question, and I’m going to come out of left field for some of these.
The first would be an Australian film called Mary & Max. It’s a stop-motion feature that tells the story of the pen-pal relationship between a lonely young girl in the outer Melbourne suburbs in 1970s’ Australia, and a lonely man in New York, whose name she pulled out of a phone book.
It’s a film about growing up feeling like there’s very few, if any, people in the world that understand you, and that feeling that you don’t have a place in it, no matter how hard you try to fit in. This is portrayed through Mary’s growing pains as a child, teenager, and then wayward adult, and through Max’s struggles with the constant bustle of New York and his eventual Autism Spectrum diagnosis.
It was a film that really made me feel seen and heard. One that I still go back to and watch almost every year. I identify strongly with both characters’ struggles, and it reminds me why I write things.
Because that’s how I fit in and communicate with the world.
“The best part of writing a book is that someone has to listen to you for the better part of a hundred thousand words before they can interrupt.” – Jonathan Weiss, Aged 30
The second one is going to be a gear shift, and will be just about everything Matthew Reilly has written. I loved the frenetic pace of the action, the constant escalations and the visceral way that guns rattled and punches landed. I ended up writing Molten Flux because I wanted to have a more action-packed story to explore The Droughtlands in, and comparisons as such have been drawn since then.
The last inspiration is a partially retroactive one, and that’s the poem Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley. I only found it when I was part way through writing another of my books, The Hytharo Redux, and it perfectly summed up the theme of the rise and fall of empires and civilisations that I’ve been telling with the world of The Droughtlands. You’ll even find references and foreshadowing through the books based on this poem!
5. Considering the innumerable artistic avenues open to you, why did you choose to write a novel?
“The best part of writing a book is that someone has to listen to you for the better part of a hundred thousand words before they can interrupt.” – Jonathan Weiss, Aged 30
It’s probably the ADHD doing it to me, but I’ve always had a hard time getting out words and facts in the “right” order. My dad always likes to say that I had a habit growing up of starting my stories in the middle.
With writing, I have time to refine, to expand and to jump in deep to the things that interest me. The best part is, no one can stop me! I don’t have to ask a single person for permission, approval or if it makes any sense right up until the end. As you’ve probably gathered from how long my answers are here, I’m not a man of few words. The more the merrier, dammit! Just count yourself lucky that my longest book is only 150,000 words.
6. Please tell us about your novel, Molten Flux.
Molten Flux is the first book in The Flux Catastrophe, a sci-fantasy trilogy set within the world of The Droughtlands that begins with a mutiny aboard a walking fortress of scrap metal, results in a Chernobyl-like disaster, and then heavily invades the territory of science fiction as the series comes to its epic conclusion.
It follows Ryza, the youngest conscript aboard the walking fortress, as he attempts to escape a dark past that would have him executed by his own squad mates, and his one-man-war to stop the mutiny that would blow his cover.
It’s got machine-based magic, gunfights on apocalyptic sands, and did I mention A GIGANTIC WALKING FORTRESS OF SCRAP METAL? What’s not to love?
It actually started as a side-project to The Hytharo Redux, the first in my other series set in the same world. As mentioned above, I wanted something action packed, and that was something the Hytharo series didn’t have the space to explore.
Because I’m self-published, I’ve been able to be a real weirdo about releasing these things, and I’ve actually been alternating which series gets its book written next. With them being set in the same world, I’ve actually been able to hide a whole bunch of easter eggs between them, and the reading order can be just about anything!
7. What do you hope people take away with them after reading your work?
That they want to buy the next book!
HA!
Jokes aside, I’d love them to have indulged themselves in the puzzles in those books. Those greater questions about the world that I’ve intentionally left vague so people can work it out themselves, or discover answers to them in other books.
Most of all, I want them to wonder what will become of the people that we are today. While The Droughtlands is set in an entirely fictional world, it still is an allegory for what I foresee in a long and distant future.
One of the main themes of the world is represented by these ruined and buried skyscrapers that lie deep within the sands. It’s impossible to tell how old they are, who built them and why, or what purpose they could’ve possibly served. They have lost their meanings, and their meanings have been re-interpreted and lost again over the eons since their builders have vanished.
Think of the pyramids of Egypt. It’s only been around five thousand years since they were built, yet they still remain. What will happen to them in another ten thousand years? What will happen to our own skyscrapers?
I’ll leave the rest of the philosophising for the books themselves, should you read them, but the idea is not the tragedy of the apocalypse but the echoes that last long afterwards.
8. Whom do you most admire in the realm of writing and why?
Special shout out to all the good dudes in #thebreakins. They’re a writing collective of new and ambitious self-published authors that I’m lucky enough to be a part of, and it’s really given my a sense of community and comradery as an author. Writing is a lonely life, and in a constantly-online world, it’s hard to make connections through all the noise. We all have our own special talents when it comes to being authors, and sharing what we learn from these things is how we’ve been succeeding together. It just goes to show that there is no competition in the indie publishing world, just friends you’re yet to make.
9. Many artists set themselves very ambitious goals. What are yours?
When I started self-publishing, I thought I was going to be able to release FOUR novels in a year. Nuts, right!? I’ve since toned that down to two (though it might be one this year due to how big this last Flux Catastrophe book will be.) I’d initially based that assumption on being able to perfectly churn out three thousand or more words a day, and an ability to edit twice as fast. It’s been good to scale that back, however, as it has given the books more time to brew.
My ambition now is to finish The First Hytharo series. I’m on the cusp of releasing the last book in The Flux Catastrophe series, so that’s an achievement in itself, but The First Hytharo series will be of five books, and if you ever get to reading them, you’ll see just how complex the damn things get!
But don’t worry, I already know how it ends! I just need to figure out how to get there!
10. What advice do you give aspiring writers?
I’ll spare the writing advice because I feel a bit too removed from what aspiring might mean (gee, that sounded arrogant!) I’ve been writing for about fifteen years now, and it feels like a rhythm and a reflex to me, so my advice on writing will be coming from a frame of what works for me now with the experience and practice I have behind me, and might just sound trite to someone actually starting out. Mainly because my advice for writing as a whole will boil down to “just start punching out words, something will happened eventually!”
I think my best advice is that it’s a LONG game. Releasing your first book isn’t the make-or-break event that it always gets framed out as. If it doesn’t immediately find roaring success, that’s fine. You’ve released it! You can keep working at finding readers for as long as you like. You can keep writing more, releasing more, building up a collection so that when a new fan comes into your world, they’ve got a feast waiting for them. That’s been my strategy in publishing as fast as I have been, because now I look more established to potential readers.
I’d also stress that there are more readers out in the world than you will ever reach through social media. On the business side, I sell the most books at in-person events, conventions and markets.
Meeting people and making solid connections with them is a sure-fire way to get them on-board, and you’ll reach people that you NEVER would’ve been able to reach through the internet. For example, I sell a lot of books to parents looking for something for their teenage kid to read because they go through a book every three days. There’s no possible way for me to seek out and target these people online, but in person there’s nothing but excitement for the books.
The larger advice to take from that is that to reach readers these days, you’ll have to go off the beaten path, but that’s what a good book should do, shouldn’t it?
Molten Flux
As the freshest conscript aboard the walking fortress of Revance, Ryza forges a name for himself in battle. The enemy are the smelters, bandits that trade in reanimated corpses. But for Ryza, the bloodshed represents a path of redemption for an upbringing he's just escaped.
His prowess with a rifle draws the interest of the Locusts, a clandestine faction within Revance's ranks. It turns out that not all aboard the fortress seek to stamp out the plague of molten flux, the mysterious liquid metal that fills the bodies of the dead and makes them walk again.
Some seek to profit.
The reanimated corpses -known as autominds- are used to control enormous contraptions of magnetically enchanted metal, forming the backbone of The Droughtland's factories. The only thing stopping the smelters from expanding their illicit industry is Revance.
The Locusts make Ryza an offer. Either help overthrow Revance to do the smelter's bidding or reveal his father's legacy as the very thing Ryza now fights against.
The former is unthinkable. The latter means death.
Ryza resolves to infiltrate them and expose the mutiny, plunging him back into the murky underworld of the smelters, testing his convictions, and even leading him to the ancient origins of molten flux itself.
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