Interviewing Tej Turner

Hellooo!!!

Over the last few months I’ve been really impressed reading the work of Tek Turner starting with their contemporary fantasy duology The Janus Cycle and Dinnusos Rises and now their branching into epic fantasy with the great Bloodsworn. Yes, I’ll soon be talking about the sequel Blood Legacy which is out now!

As a chef, traveller blogger and even someone who has worked in Ecuador helping wildlife get back into the wild; Tej is a fascinating person and I’m lucky to get a few questions answered before they go off to Central America

How would you booktempt The Avatars of Ruin series and the first novel Bloodsworn?

Bloodsworn is a novel that will initially feel very familiar to readers of epic fantasy, as it starts like many of its ilk do – with a group of young protagonists from the backwaters of an imaginary medieval world – but this is a bit of a ruse because shortly after they get the call to adventure the plot takes a grim turn and ventures in a darker direction. It is both fast-paced and gritty whilst still being high fantasy, and it will keep surprising readers at every turn.

What was the appeal of writing epic fantasy for this series?

Epic fantasy has always been my favourite genre. It has dominated my reading ever since my childhood, so to me it was only natural that it is what I would end up writing in my adult life. I could honestly write a thesis as to why I love it so much as a genre, but I guess I will just try to summarise a few of them here: I love how broad and limitless it can be, I love the way that it can be both an escape from mundane life yet also at times powerfully analogous (and more often than not both of these things at the same time), and I also love how, no matter how bad things get, there is usually a sense of hope.

But, as much as I have always loved epic fantasy, some trends that were commonplace during my youth bothered me. It didn’t always sit well how polarised a lot of them were by pitching a wholly benevolent ‘good’ side against an irredeemably evil one. I found it odd that so many of them seemed to have these long-winded romance plots that were way too fancifully chaste to be believable and often took several books to incubate only to finally manifest at the finale to serve as part of a fluffy ‘happy ending’. And it always struck me as strange when only the tertiary characters ever died whilst the protagonists (and most of the secondary characters) seemed to have miraculous auras around them that protected them from any real or lasting harm. Life just isn’t like that.

So, in other words… I wanted to write fantasy that felt a bit more… real.

In all fairness, I have noticed (particularly over the past decade) that many more authors seem to addressing the aforementioned weaknesses, and the trend does seem to be steering away from such tropes now. It is a change that I welcome, and I am happy to be a (very small) part of it.

I also think some of my love for fantasy stems not just from my love of the genre itself but my interest in history and mythology; both of which I have studied in a formal capacity (at college, university, etc) and in my spare time. Anyone who follows me on Instagram has probably noticed that my idea of a good holiday (or even sometimes a day trip) is to go roaming around historic sites such as castles, forts, temples, and megaliths, which all fascinate me.

How does it compare to writing more contemporary fantasy?

Despite my contemporary novels (The Janus Cycle and Dinnusos Rises) being my first to ever be published (and thus what I was initially known for as a writer), they were not the first novels I penned. As with many authors, it took me a while for my writing to reach a place where it was polished enough for my books to be ready to be enjoyed by other people.  

I started writing The Janus Cycle when I was at university; a time I was discovering new kinds of literature that I had never been exposed to before and experimenting as a writer. I think this is why they were a bit more literary in their style. When I am writing epic fantasy, I aim to write in a way so that the reader can get lost within the story, but my contemporary novels were more postmodern so the prose itself was more expressive; often veering into self-referential or abstract.

I did also find – whilst writing my contemporary novels – that I often had to stop to do research because I wanted to make sure that anything I featured from our world was accurate, whereas with epic fantasy the ‘background work’ is usually more to do with world-building than research. Although, like most epic fantasy series, I did often (both consciously and subconsciously) draw upon the history of our world for inspiration when creating the world for The Avatars of Ruin, I just didn’t have to worry as much about accuracy as I did when writing contemporary fiction (unless I needed to find out how a specific kind of medieval technology worked, or something like that).

Your younger characters don’t feel the usual honour focused pure as snow kids and all have their own rivalries, secrets and love lives as well as deal with the end of the world. What led to these choices?

I like ensemble stories. Ones that force characters who wouldn’t typically choose to be in each other’s company to band together because it is do or die and they have no other choice. It is something that the horror genre often does quite well (two examples that come to mind off the top of my head are the 90s film The Faculty and more recently The Walking Dead). I wanted to capture that kind of energy but within an epic fantasy setting (instead of a contemporary one).

As I mentioned earlier, I personally find fantasy books where the ‘heroes’ are too pure and the ‘villains’ too evil not just boring, but unrealistic. Most people are the heroes of their own story, and people’s agendas are more often than not prompted by their circumstances.

Bloodsworn (and the rest of The Avatars of Ruin series) is a bit of a pastiche, and one of the ways it veers from a lot of classical epic fantasy stories out there is that it is darker. My publisher and I did briefly consider using ‘grimdark’ as one of the labels when describing it but refrained in the end. I think it was the right choice because, while it would not have been completely unjustified as a descriptor, Bloodsworn would not have met all the expectations that the fans of that genre hold. It is quite grim at times, but it does still (in a very broad sense) have ‘heroes’ and ‘villains’… it’s just the line is sometimes blurred because none of its ‘heroes’ are purely heroic, and most of its villainous characters have either something sympathetic about them or at least an understandable agenda. I have aimed to make all of the characters in the Avatars of Ruin series (whether on the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ side) morally grey in some way because to me that is what makes them more believable.

One theme that seems to reoccur throughout all of my work (no matter what particular subgenre of ‘fantasy’ each of my novels may fall into) is that I feature protagonists who are young but have endured things that they ideally shouldn’t have by their age, and thus are somewhat older than their years. After Bloodsworn takes its grim turn, most of the main characters are suffering from (what we in our modern world would call) PDST, and they all find different ways to cope (or not cope) with it. This is obviously going to lead to a lot of clashes.

What led to your use of this magic system?

Bloodsworn has two magic systems. One of them – whilst having some unique quirks – is sorcery based and in all honesty fairly standard as far as epic fantasy goes, so I will instead focus on the other one for this question (as it is more interesting and one of the things that make my series stand out from most others in its genre).

To be truthful, it is because I am a big fan of anime and grew up in the 90s. A lot of the stuff back then had themes of transmutation and featured heroes (and villains) that could shapeshift into powerful armoured beings. A lot of the worlds were also filled with all sorts of strange part-humanoid mutants. They were all science fiction, and the explanation as to how these characters gained metamorphic abilities (or how the weird mutant creatures came to be) was usually through scientific experimentation.

I wanted to find a way to plant such things into a medieval fantasy setting, so I created a magic system where people could be ‘experimented’ on through ritual rather than science. This then led to me realising that I could borrow other novums usually exclusive to science fiction – such as contagions caused by humans messing with nature – and it all kind of spiralled from there.

What can you tell us about the next novel in the series?

Well as you (and other people who have read it) know, Bloodsworn is a fast-paced novel, and most of its protagonists had lived quite sheltered lives before it the story began. Once their very sudden (and quite grim) call to adventure happened they hardly had any room to breathe from there because they were constantly fighting for survival. It made for very tense and claustrophobic energy at times.

In Blood Legacy (Book 2 of the Avatars of Ruin), the world becomes much bigger. The protagonists reach their capital city, and that offers them some form of sanctuary, but they soon come to discover it is not quite the bastion of stability they had always believed it to be. Their burdens become less immediate, in some ways, but heavier and far more complex as they discover more about their world and the way it works. They also start to truly realise they are not solely fighting for their own survival anymore but that of the world.

Another thing I shall reveal (without giving too many spoilers) is that Blood Legacy also introduces two new protagonists, both of whom come from Gavendara, so the reader will learn more about them, and perhaps even come to understand their side of the story more.

In some ways, it is going to be more of a traditional epic fantasy novel (with all the added political intrigue), but I have aimed to fill it with as many surprises as the first one.

I’ve also really enjoyed your earlier contemporary duology starting with The Janus Cycle. What was the inspiration for that series?

First of all; thank you! It pleases me to hear people appreciating those books as they don’t seem to get as many readers as my epic fantasy. I think that is partly because they are hard to classify within the typical genres that booksellers use and readers recognise. A lot of the people who do choose to pick them up and read them seem to have much praise, though.

I have already mentioned some of the circumstances surrounding me writing those novels in a previous question, so I will try to not repeat myself too much. I started writing The Janus Cycle whilst I was at university; a time when I was finding myself both as a person and as a writer.

I think there are a lot of reasons why both it and Dinnusos Rises turned out the way they did. I was reading more ‘literary’ fiction back then, and I think that rubbed off on my writing. I was also entering my adult years and this caused me to reflect upon my youth… much of which (without going into too much detail) was unpleasant. I often describe The Janus Cycle as a ‘semi-biographical novel’ because, whilst none of the characters are me, a lot of the things they go through during that story are drawn from actual events from my childhood and teens. Some of it was quite heavy stuff, but I found it easier to address the darker (and often deeply personal) themes by writing them through fictional characters and combining them with elements of fantasy and surrealism. This functioned as a shield in two ways; it softened some of the blows whilst I was processing some of my trauma, but it also meant I could write something deeply personal without revealing too much about myself publicly.

I never planned The Janus Cycle. It was primarily a cathartic exercise for me. I didn’t even realise it was a novel at first as I started by just writing Chapter 4 (‘Red Rivers’) as a short story. But then I wrote another (Chapter 4, ‘Bruises’), followed another, etc. I didn’t write it chronologically. It also didn’t need as much editing as any of the other novels I have had published, and I think that is one of the reasons people have often commented about how emotionally raw it is. It was a huge surprise to me when I finished it and realised that (like a strange mosaic) it came together into a somewhat coherent narrative. I was even more surprised when people wanted to publish it, and others wanted to read it.

What else can we look forward from you in the future and where can we find out more?

Well, one of the things you can look forward to me in the future (besides my novels) is my travel blogging, because that is something else that I do.

When I am not in the UK (working novels and working as a chef) it is usually because I have strapped on a backpack and flown to another part of the world to go on an adventure. I have clocked in two years in Asia and a year in South America so far, and since coming back from my last trip in 2019, I have been saving up for my next.

In 2023, I am going to return to South America to see some of the places I missed last time and then from there venture up into Central America.

My past blogs can be found on this part of my website (click here) where people can also – if they wish – sign up to my mailing list and follow me on my next journey.

Fiction wise, I am currently working on Book 3 of the Avatars of Ruin series, which is going to be called Blood War.

I also have written the first instalment of another fantasy series called Children of the Gloom. It is possibly my most ambitious to date as it takes place on the twilight belt of a world that is tidally locked to its sun (and thus has no day/night cycle). This strange setting has made for a remarkable atmosphere but also required an extraordinary amount of worldbuilding. I have put it aside for now so I can look at it with fresh eyes before I start polishing it up ready for submission. I am very excited about it.

If there was one book that you wish everyone would have a chance to read (not your own) what would it be and why?

I usually use these opportunities to help uplift independent presses and their authors. This is not because I dislike books published by bigger imprints – I read a lot of them too, and many of them are also great – but indies don’t have as many resources behind them to ensure people hear about them, so it is doubly important for us (as readers) to both try to seek them out and shout out about the ones we like. Otherwise, we are all missing out on a lot of gems out there!

But that said… the question you have just asked is a book that I think everyone should read… that is something which I am honestly not quite sure exists in the realm of fiction, as we are all so different (both as readers and writers). Much of it is subjective, as one person’s trash is another’s treasure.

So instead, I am going to say that everyone should read more history because history is important. Not only will it add more nuance to your reading (and writing) if you are into many of the fantasy genres, but history explains how we got to where we are now, and understanding the patterns of how things have happened in the past can help us understand our present and future. I will add a caveat though that as important as history is, it is often flawed because the way it is recorded is always subject to some kind of bias. So, for the specific book, I will instruct everyone to choose one that is written from the perspective of a culture that is not their own. 😉