interview author garon whited

Interview with Garon Whited

Hi there wottareaders! here is my interview with Garon Whited, he’s the author of the Nightlord series (a must read for LITRPG fans), author of the Luna, Dragonhunters, and over twenty short stories. Let’s get to know him better:

😀 The Man

What can you tell us about you? 

Nothing.  I’m an enigma.  I’m a single, white guy, lives alone, keeps mostly to himself, owns a chainsaw and a basement.  Nothing to see here.  These are not the droids you’re looking for.

Aside from that, I’m a stereotype.  I literally didn’t notice the quarantine until I left the house to go grocery shopping.  I’m up at any hour because I’m awake and have stories to write.  I’m really not that interesting.  It’s the inside of my head where I keep all the good stuff.

Where are you from? Has your country influenced your stories somehow? 

I’m from the United States.  Yes, I’d say my country has influenced my stories.  When they take place on Earth, they are most commonly placed in the USA because it’s more familiar.  It’s easier for me to shape a story in a cultural the geographic pattern with which I am already familiar.

Writers are such for different reasons, which was your thing that made you decide you wanted to become a professional writer?

I started as a reader.  Then I started noticing some of the absolute garbage that makes it to bookstores.  This?  This got published?   Traditionally published, I mean.  With an agent and editor and a publishing house?

Nope, I wasn’t going to let that go.  So I started writing just because the low quality of some published books irritated me.

One book, one movie, one song, and one videogame? 

First off: One book?  That’s not fair.  But if I have to pick one, I’ll take Children of the Lens, by E.E. Smith.

One song?  “Under Pressure.”

Videogame?  Does online chess count?

Pineapple pizza, Yes or no?

No.  I do not care for food that is trying to eat me while eat it.

If you had to define yourself just using one sentence of your novels, which one would be?

If I knew what I was doing, would I be here?

✍️ The writer

I’d like to know about your first steps, the very first day you decided to become a professional writer, what made you do it?

Spite and hatred.  I sat down to read a latest “best-selling” novel and thought to myself, “This is crap.  I could eat a pen and produce a better story than this tomorrow morning!”

I skipped eating the pen and decided to just write one.

Do you have any rituals for writing? Any kind of habit or goal to achieve every day?

Nope.  I wake up when I’m done sleeping, make the grueling commute to work—ten, twelve steps, something like that—plunk down in the chair, and get going.  I take a few breaks for food, drink, laundry, and so on.  Eventually, I’m tired, so I go to bed.  The process repeats.

Do you take real people you know and put them in your stories? 

Only if I’m planning to kill them off in a particularly bloody and unpleasant fashion.  It’s therapeutic and keeps me out of prison.

What advice would you give new writers on how to delve into creative fiction? 

Don’t sweat the first draft.  You’re telling yourself the story in the first draft.  No one will ever see it but you.  You’ll hate it.  You’re supposed to hate it.  But until you tell yourself the story, you don’t know what the story is about, not really.  So write a lousy first draft and hate it.  You can then use it as a perfect example of what you did wrong so you can write the story you tell to others!

Which would you say was your best and your worst moments as a writer? 

Best moment?  Finishing a really good scene.

Worst moment?  Waking up and wondering if any of this crap is worth reading.

Let’s talk about procrastination, what is the most absurd thing you’ve been doing when you should be writing?

I’m lousy at procrastinating.  But I’m in a bit of a rush, so I’ll get to this question later…

📚 The Books

Here you have some books by Garon Whited in case you want to start reading his amazing stories:

The Nightlord series is a LitRPG that centers on Eric, a vampire, but this is not the usual take on a vampire story, it has also a lot of high fantasy elements, but this is not the usual fantasy story either, how would you define your series?

“I couldn’t decide on a genre, so I went with all of them.”

Seriously, how do you limit a story to a single genre?  It feels artificial and forced, sometimes, at least to me.  If your story has a romantic element, does that make it a romance?  If it takes place on a starship, does that make it science fiction?  If your starship crashes on a fantasy world with magic and dragons and so forth, is it still science fiction, or is it now a fantasy?  What about the romance plot?  Is it still a romance?

Eric goes where Eric goes, does what he does, and if that’s in some genre or another, hooray!  It’s not like Eric is going to notice he’s not sticking to his “supposed” genre, now is he?

Book seven of the Nightlord series was released in late 2020, what kind of adventures will Eric be living in this installment?

Let’s see… being a vampire wizard from another universe, he’s got some issues with being a good father to his adopted daughter, especially since she was abandoned as an infant for being “soulless.”  (The locals have this superstition about copper-colored eyes…)

So, teenage daughter issues.  People who want to burn them as witches.  The Sherriff, a local preacher, a Mysterious Figure who is using psychic powers to manipulate people, a world full of political intrigue (which he’s been avoiding while he raises the daughter), a quasi-divine Altar Ego (spelling deliberate!) who needs his help in getting ready for a major miraculous display, a small war…

I know there’s more, but I don’t have my notes in front of me.

Will there be more volumes in this series? 

There better be.  My fans will hunt me down if I leave things there!

There is a review of Dragonhunters that says the following: “If you could combine the movie Topper with a good solid RPG group, you might get something like this”, do you think it’s a good definition? Also, will there be a sequel of this book?

Sadly, I haven’t seen “Topper.”  I’ve been busy writing.  But I can see most of “Dragonhunters” as a D&D game.  I wrote it while thinking about some of my D&D groups and I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out.

Yes, there should be a sequel, or a series.  I know there’s more to that story, but it’s waiting while “Nightlord” gets out of the way.  I’m writing as fast as I can!

What are you writing right now?

A couple of things.  Eric’s adopted daughter, Phoebe, will have a couple of side-novels to explain what she’s been doing while Eric is off studying angels in his Evil Overlord Lair.  It won’t be vital to the “Nightlord” story, but it will be useful for anyone who is wondering, “Who did that?  Why did that happen?  What’s the motivation of that character for this?”

I’m also working on Book 8 of the Nightlord series.  I’m not sure I can kill him off in book eight, but I figure I’ll have him by book nine.  I started the series with the idea it would be a trilogy, but he’s just so darn hard to kill!  I’ll get him yet, though!


Thanks to author Garon Whited for answering my questions! hope you all wottareaders enjoyed this interview, if so, you can take a look at this interview with D.J. MacHale, author of the Pendragon series.

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