All about the book Roast Wyvern
Who is Ian Thomas Healy?
lan Thomas Healy is a prolific writer who dabbles in many different speculative genres. His superhero novel Deep Six: A Just Cause Novel was a Top 100 Semi-finalist in the 2008 Amazon.com Breakthrough Novel Award. He’s a seven-time participant and winner of National Novel Writing Month where he’s tackled such diverse subjects as sentient alien farts, competitive forklift racing, a religion-powered rabbit-themed superhero, cyberpunk mercenaries, cowboy elves, and an unlikely combination of vampires with minor league hockey.
He is also the creator of the Writing Better Action Through Cinematic Techniques workshop, which helps writers to improve their action scenes. His goal is to become as integral to the genre of superhero fiction as William Gibson was to cyberpunk and Anne Rice was to urban fantasy.
What is Roast Wyvern about?
Chef Muffin is no adventurer, but she’s going to have to figure out how to become one. She’s got to prepare a fantastic dish for a royal wedding, using ingredients she’s never heard of, that she’ll have to travel the breadth of the world to find. If she fails, she loses her livelihood, but if she succeeds…like every true fantasy adventurer…fame and fortune await. And, if she’s lucky, she might even find true love into the bargain.
Interview
What was your inspiration for Roast Wyvern?
I already had this fantasy world from my previous book Horde, and I
wanted to go back to that well with a funny fantasy. I’m also a foodie
and was inspired to have a nontraditional adventurer–in this case a
chef–and a nontraditional quest, for ingredients instead of treasure.
What drew you to writing?
I’ve wanted to write as long as I can remember. I made my very first
book with my dad’s red-ink stamp pad, using thumbprints and drawing on
them to make little characters. It was called “The Happy Days Gang Goes
to the Disco” and I still have scanned pictures of it somewhere in my
Dropbox.
How did you choose which character to centre the story around?
It was easy. I loved the idea of a chef whose nickname was Muffin and it
just rolled on from there.
What was your process for writing Roast Wyvern?
The entire book took me about a year to write, with some breaks in the
middle where I worked on a couple of Just Cause Universe books (my
superhero series). I had a finished copy a year ago and spent a year
querying it, because as it is a standalone tale, I thought I might have
a better shot at moving it to a traditional publisher. I had three full
requests from agents and one from a publisher. They all eventually
passed on it, and I decided at that point to go ahead and publish it
myself via my Local Hero Press imprint. I’m not sorry I did–Nate
Dickson made me a beautiful cover and the book is already out and on
sale (traditional pub would have taken another year or two).
What is your approach to world and character building?
For Roast Wyvern, the world is mostly a typical western-style fantasy
world, loaded with cliches like forests laden with bandits, cities with
great libraries, and underground dwarven kingdoms. But it’s also kind of
wacky, too, with naked druids, elves who don’t believe in bathing, and
scribes who have to interrupt your library activities by spouting
advertisements. Character building comes from my TTRPG background. These
are characters most people will recognize from their gaming groups.
How would you describe Roast Wyvern?
It’s a cozy fantasy romance, with young adult characters and a big dose
of found family. It’s surprisingly low action compared to most of my
books. If I had to narrow it down to a single word, the most appropriate
and accurate would be “sweet.”
Did you have a favourite moment in the book to write?
It’s tough to pick just one. The library in Vallallen. The Dwarves’
Macawea highway. But in the end, I think it has to be Madame Gruyere’s
magic shop and Muffin’s friend Wally acquiring a very…peculiar weapon.
What was your favourite book growing up?
I’m still growing up. I think it will always be Wild Cards III: Jokers
Wild. That’s the first of the Wild Cards series I read, and it blew my
mind that there could be superheroes in prose like that. The DNA of Wild
Cards is in the Just Cause Universe, along with my lifelong love of DC
Comics.
Do you have a favourite genre to read?
I prefer to read various genres of science fiction. Space Opera,
Military SF, Cyberpunk, Steampunk, Hopepunk. Pretty much most forms of
-punk. Maybe what I write could be termed “superpunk.” Yeah, let’s go
with that.
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