Brought to you by OBS reviewer Sammy.
- Be sure to read our review for Fabrick (The Fabrick Weavers, Book #1) by Andrew Post here at OBS.
Sammy: First and foremost when will the second book come out?
Andrew Post: Unfortunately, I’m sorry to say it’s going to be a little bit of a wait. I have a few other projects lined up (like The Siren House which is in the Medallion Press TREEbook line) but I’m making time to work on the Fabrick sequel. And I can assure you it’s going to be huge and hopefully well worth the wait. The gang will all be there. Clyde, Nevele, Rohm, Flam, Greenspire, Nigel, everybody!
Sammy: Your characters were all fabulous. Which one was the first to manifest in your imagination?
Andrew Post: Clyde and Nevele both came about at roughly the same time. Originally those two characters were going to be in two drastically different graphic novels I had planned. But as time went by and I couldn’t quite get their stories to work, combining them (and having them set on a different planet) made it cohere. It was one of the rare times in which I looked at a story that was giving me trouble and making it even more strange was the fix.
Sammy: Which character was the most difficult to write about?
Andrew Post: By far, Vidurkis Mallencroix. He’s a cruel man who’s pushed forward into doing (and justifying doing) terrible things by an insane dogma and an inky crevasse where a conscience should be.
It was the first time I had written anything that was from the perspective of the antagonist. And it was a challenge. Making his motivations not only sound like they were the right thing to do, but having it be believable he believed them meant having to sort of believe them myself, as the storyteller. Inventing the Mechanized Goddess religion was fun, but having to be a part-time subscriber to it while writing Vidurkis’s segments was tough. It be a nasty doctrine indeed.
Sammy: How long did it take to write this amazing story?
Andrew Post: It’s difficult to gauge exactly because I dreamt up Clyde and Nevele long before the rest of the story came together. But when all the other parts started to fit, with Flam and the Odium and everything else–as well as the enormous amount of world-building Fabrick needed–I got the first draft down in about three months. But by then I knew (roughly) how the story was to go because I’d been tinkering with it for years beforehand, so it was pretty much just translating it from the scribblings in my mental notepad into a Word document. So to answer your question as imprecisely as possible, somewhere between eight years and three months, haha.
Sammy: When writing this story, did you have all the different threads in your head or did they come along as you were writing? The threads were easy to follow and came together perfectly, no confusion, no getting lost. I truly admired that.
Andrew Post: Thank you! That’s good to hear! I’d like to be able say that it was all fully planned from the start, organized and outlined to a T with an enormous chart on my office wall detailing every plot beat with color-coded Post-It notes, but . . . I can’t. I don’t outline most projects and I only tend to know what’s going to happen next concretely about an hour before I write it. The different story threads in Fabrick was something I knew I wanted to do from the start, playing into the theme of things being woven together, etc., but mostly the times to cut away and when to rejoin storylines came about naturally. I never had to stall any character to let the meeting with another fit together better, I never had to force a character to be somewhere they wouldn’t normally be. It was one of the few times I didn’t really have to wrestle with the plot too much. Hardly at all, actually.
Sammy: When did you first realize that you were a writer?
Andrew Post: Very early on. I was the kid that when the teacher said we were going to make our own picture books, requested twice as much paper and double the allotted time so I could finish detailing the frustration-plagued chronicles of Pirate in his woeful attempts in capturing the mischievous Mr. Shark.
Later on, I’d fill up notebooks with zombie apocalypse stories that I’d give to my friends to take home and read. Next morning, I’d be pacing when outside the school waiting for them to show up to give me their critique. I began to really get a kick out of being able to thrill someone with just words alone, sharpening up what my friends said was scary and learning how to hone a story. It was even more rewarding when they said I’d made them laugh, or alternatively, when they’d march up to me the following day and shove the notebook back at me enraged for having been subjected to such a merciless cliffhanger.
I’d always wanted to tell stories, and I always have really enjoyed the sit-down-and-doing-it aspect of the work of writing itself, but when I was actually being read by my friends …” (and sometimes friends of friends if they passed the story on to others which both delighted and terrified me) and I was told that they liked what I’d done, it became an addiction of sorts. One that I don’t think I’ll ever want to kick.
Sammy: What author or book were you inspired by growing up?
Andrew Post: Well, when I was younger the YA scene wasn’t like how it is now so I was reading a lot of stuff that was probably a little over my head. Made that jump from R.L. Stein to Anne Rice with nothing really in between. But, I struggled, and I spent a lot of time with the Dictionary, but it was well worth it. To this day I claim Anne Rice as an enormous inspiration for me. She (still) has the ability to take something mystical and scary and give it both humanity, weight, and heart with so much texture.
I also spent every summer there for a stretch with a Dean Koontz or two and I read a lot of Arthur C. Clarke and Robert A. Heinlein. Especially Heinlein. I really believe Heinlein’s Red Planet should be part of the curriculum in middle school, not just for boys either. That novel made me want to be a writer more than any other. First time I discovered that sense of wonder that’s found in only a select few science fiction novels. Man, I’ll tell you one thing: I could die a happy man if I knew that Fabrick provided that even with just one reader.
Thank you to author Andrew Post for an amazing and interesting interview!
