Meet Amanda Downum

Amanda Downum is a southern-born fantasy novelist who lives in Texas and writes about “monsters and fraught relationships. Separately and in combination.”  Her novels are filled with layered descriptions, serpentine plot twists, and well-developed characters racked with very human ambivalence.

The Drowning City, the first book in her Necromancer Chronicles, tells the story of Isyllt Iskaldur, a spy who has “a revolution to foment, a country to throw into chaos, and an emperor to undermine.”  Iskaldur lives in a world “rank with brine and bilge, sewers draining into the sea, but under the port-reek the air smell[s] of spices and the green tang of… forests rising beyond the marshy delta.”  It’s a world where “death smell[s] like roses.”

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What do you enjoy about writing?  What do you not enjoy?

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Amanda Downum: I love inventing people and places, and the endorphin rush I get when ideas fall into place. Writing a sentence that still sounds pretty on the tenth read-through is nice, too, and wearing pajamas to work doesn’t hurt.

Any good fiction can reflect and illuminate, slip ideas and questions into readers’ brains, all wrapped in a crunchy entertaining shell. Spec fic can do that on a cosmic scale. And dragons are awesome.

The frustration and tedium and deadline-induced anxiety dreams are less fun.

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In addition to writing fiction, you make jewelry. How are the two processes similar?  Dissimilar?

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Amanda Downum: They both run the risk of eye strain and RSIs. They also both include boring repetitive work punctuated by moments of inspiration, and the frustration of having ideas that surpass my current abilities. It’s easier for me to finish pieces of jewelry than short stories, though, and writing has never caused me to stab myself with an awl.

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Was the culture of your childhood conducive to reading and writing?  Who influenced/supported you in these pursuits?

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Amanda Downum: Yes. My parents are both readers, and my mother read to me when I was young–Tolkien, Lewis, LeGuin, L’engle. That was all it took to turn me into a permanent spec fic reader. If she’d known it would turn me into a writer, she might have thought twice.

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What inspired you to write The Drowning City?

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Amanda Downum: Many of the characters had been salvaged from old and terrible juvenilia projects, and I’d known for some time that I wanted to write a spy-thriller fantasy. Then Katrina hit New Orleans, and I thought of the title, and the rest came together from there.

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What’re the coolest elements of the forthcoming The Bone Palace?

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Amanda Downum: Spooky catacombs, forensic necromancy, and made-up theatre.

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What’s next for you?

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Amanda Downum: I’m working on Kingdoms of Dust, the third in the Necromancer Chronicles, now. After that I’d like to write something different for a while–probably contemporary/urban fantasy.

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Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher.  He is the staff Interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine and a frequent contributor to Kobold Quarterly.  He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC.   He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006.