Exclusive Interview: “Storm Furies” Author Wen Spencer

 

Not everything fits into a neat little package. Take the story Wen Spencer wanted to tell in her urban fantasy novel Harbinger, which was the sixth book of The Elfhome Series. Despite her best efforts, the story she was trying to tell in Harbinger couldn’t physically fit into one book, so she split off the second half, which has just been released as Storm Furies (hardcover, Kindle).

In the following email interview, Spencer talks about what inspired and influenced Storm Furies, as well as how the split came about, and how she originally wanted to call this second book Harbinger Book Two.

We previously did a deep dive on The Elfhome Series when the previous book, Harbinger, came out, so let’s just dive in: What is Storm Furies about, and when does it take place in relation to Harbinger?

Storm Furies is about the full out battle for Pittsburgh between the oni, the elves, the tengu, and the human militia. It was originally supposed to be the second half of Harbinger, but I had hit deadline on Harbinger, gone past it, and already had enough words for a book and half without starting the plotline that Storm Furies contains. I decided to end Harbinger with the massive oni spell going off that was designed to render the elves helpless. Storm Furies follows the aftermath with the allied forces on the ropes. Thus, it starts mere seconds after Harbinger ends.

You kind of just answered this, but where did you get the idea for Storm Furies?

I was thinking of calling it Harbinger Book Two, but the cover and the Amazon listing of Harbinger was already up, and said nothing of “book one,” and it was far too late to change the cover. I was a little worried as I worked on Storm Furies that there would be a book three. I managed to bring it to a happy resolution (although there’s lots of dangling bits that the fans will probably want tied up in later works.)

And is there a reason why you made the invaders be oni, as opposed to tanuki or kappa or some other kind of mythical Japanese creature?

It’s just how my brain works. I had read a bunch of borderland stories and for some reason, they all just used one kitsune in their stories with nothing else of Japanese mythology. I knew that I was going to use tengu as a race that was stuck in the middle. Oni, to me, was a natural invading force. As I went through the stories, though, I decided that the oni themselves were the victim of the elves that once ruled Elfhome, the Skin Clan.

Harbinger and the other books in The Elfhome Series were urban fantasy stories. Is it safe to assume Storm Furies is as well? Because it sounds like it might be a bit more action-oriented than the previous books.

I don’t like writing fight scenes because if I put one in, I insist that’s its cool and exciting with intelligent novel ways of the good guys winning. This makes them very hard to write. Storm Furies is mostly fight scenes. I kept crying to friends “why did I do this to myself?” Almost every character is faced with impossible odds — and there’s nine different point of views, so there’s a lot of fighting.

That said, I wanted every character to have moments where they grow and change. All said, it’s a fun ride for the reader and really made me stretch as a writer.

Storm Furies is obviously not your first published book. Are there any writers or stories that had a big influence on Storm Furies but not on anything else you’ve written, and especially not Harbinger or the other books in the Elfhome saga?

Since it’s the book in a series, it shares many of the same influences as the other Elfhome books. I fell in love with the genre with Emma Bull’s War For The Oaks and even more so with Finder. I wanted more but the books were few and far between. I decided that I would just write more myself. After I wrote Tinker, an editor had asked for a short story based in the same world, and I wrote Wyvern. I realized then that there were so many different stories to tell and started to add more point of views in the novels and short stories. It was all kind of organic growth — characters leaping forward and saying “I too have a story to tell.” I really enjoyed the freedom that I gave myself in Project Elfhome, an anthology of shorts about different people in the world. I was disappointed, however, that the overall narrative was choppy. It was due to the nature of the beast since it was an anthology, but I wanted a smoother plot, so I decided to use all the characters introduced in the anthology as viewpoint characters in Harbinger. It meant that Storm Furies has an epic feel — which is good for a massive war story — but it’s kind of bulging in the seams to hold everything I put into it.

How about non-literary influences; was Storm Furies influenced by any movies, TV shows, or games?

I’m a huge anime and manga fan. I’ve been one since the mid-’80s, when I started going to sci-fi conventions. (I grew up watching Kimba and Speed Racer but didn’t realize that they were made in Japan since I lived in a little farming town north of Pittsburgh.) I even lived in Japan for a few months as a test run for living there. (We decided that while it was easy to do tourist stuff without a fluent grasp of Japanese, living there was really beyond my ability to deal with a foreign language.) While how the elves cast spells is all my invention, the visuals come from anime.

As we’ve been discussing, Storm Furies is the latest book in The Elfhome Series. The seventh, to be exact. And as you said in the interview we did about Harbinger, this is an ongoing series. Does that mean someone could start by reading Storm Furies, or do they need to go back to the first book, Tinker?

The first five books were written where someone could pick up one and understand what was going on — especially Wood Sprites (the twin’s book set on Earth) and Project Elfhome (the anthology of short stories and novellas). I tried in Harbinger to make it approachable to a new reader but unfortunately Storm Furies really needs the other books read first to understand what’s going on since its basically the wrap up of many storylines stretched across the earlier books.

So, is there anything else people need to know about Storm Furies?

Storm Furies isn’t the end of the world. I put up a novelette on my Patreon page for members called When They Were Young [https://www.patreon.com/wenspencer] which covers how Team Tinker got started and how Tinker first saved Windwolf’s life.

I’m also working on Jane’s wedding which will be a novella or novel — I haven’t figured out which yet.

Finally, if someone enjoys the Storm Furies, and they’ve read the rest of The Elfhome Series, what urban fantasy series of someone else’s would you suggest they read next?

I’d highly recommend Emma Bull’s two stand-alone books War For The Oaks and Finder.

I also have the urban fantasy The Black Wolves Of Boston, which is about (as you could guess from the title) werewolves in Boston. I’m working on a sequel to that, Black Ties And Tails, which I hope to be out next summer.

Also, my novel Eight Million Gods is about a writer living in Japan who gets caught up in a war of the gods.