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Interview with David B. Coe - Page 3

© Debbie Ledesma

DL: I like the use of the hawks and owls in your books. Where did you come up with the idea to use birds for your mages?

DC: My brothers, both of whom are a good deal older than I am, got me interested in birdwatching when I was just a kid -- six or seven years old. And I've been a birder ever since, some thirty-plus years now. Throughout that time, I've always been drawn to birds of prey -- owls, hawks, eagles. Mostly, I guess because they're just so cool. There's an elegance to them, and a native intelligence, that I've always found very attractive. When I started developing a magic system for my first series, it seemed natural to include these birds in it in some way.

DL: You have a new series called Winds of the Forelands. Tell me a little about the new series and how does is differ from the LonTobyn Chronicle?

DC: Winds of the Forelands is my new four-book fantasy project, and I'm very excited about it. It tells the story of a young noble who is falsely accused of a murder and thus denied his rightful place in the ascension of kings. In trying to prove his own innocence and reclaim his birthright, he discovers a plot to destroy not only his own kingdom, but the neighboring ones as well. The four books revolve around his effort to establish his innocence and his fight against the conspiracy.

I'm having a tremendous amount of fun with this series right now, for a number of reasons. It's straight fantasy, without any of the science fiction crossover elements found in my first series, but it's actually a far more complex story set, I feel, in a far more deeply realized world. Each of the kingdoms I deal with (and there are seven of them in all) has its own unique political traditions and conflicts, so as the scene shifts from kingdom to kingdom throughout the books, the reader finds her/himself in a new place with different rules and different concerns. Also, the magic system is different. Rather than the magic coming from birds of prey as it did in the first series, this magic system is racially based. Either you're Qirsi (the sorcerer race) or you're Eandi (a race very much like us). And so magic becomes linked inextricably with the racial tensions and conflicts that lie at the root of the conspiracy. Finally, the characters in this series are more challenging, both for me as a writer and for my readers. In my first series, there were many characters who could be labeled either "good" or "evil" without too much trouble. The characters in Winds of the Forelands tend to be in that grey area. Good people are forced by circumstance or tragedy to do bad things, and "bad" characters have admirable qualities. It makes for an interesting story.

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