Bradley P. Beaulieu Talks About Finally Exploring the Desert in Twelve Kings in Sharakhai

This September is one of the strongest months for new sci-fi and fantasy in recent memory, and one of the best books coming this month is Bradley P. Beaulieu’s Twelve Kings in Sharakhai. We were swept away by his magical desert world of warriors, mages, kings and spies jockeying for power and pursuing revenge.
We were so enthralled by it, in fact, that we wanted to know more, and Brad happily took the time to answer a few questions about the writing, how he has changed as his career has matured, and where the book fits into today’s epic fantasy market. A lightly edited transcript of that interview, conducted via email, follows.
Twelve Kings in Sharakhai is the start of your second epic fantasy series. What was your entry point into the genre?

No doubt about it, I really do love fantasy, and I’ve come to embrace epic fantasy in particular. My gateway book was The Hobbit, which I read in third grade. I moved quickly to The Lord of the Rings and really never looked back. Since then I’ve dabbled in thrillers, mysteries, [and] horror, but science fiction and especially fantasy became my mainstays.
I bounced around a bit in my teens, reading authors like Piers Anthony, Margaret Weis, and Tracy Hickman (I’ll give you one guess which series that was), Robert Asprin, Fred Saberhagen, Roger Zelazny, and others. And I enjoyed all of them. But when I came across a few with a darker, more serious tone—Stephen Donaldson, C.S. Friedman, Tad Williams, and later Robin Hobb and George Martin—I was really struck by how immersed I became, partially for the scope of those worlds, but more so because those authors made fantasy feel more real to me. [They] probably played the biggest role in forming the sort of writer I wanted to be. Worlds that had a big canvas but with characters that felt very real.

Guy Gavriel Kay is a writer I greatly admire. I love his ability to create prose that borders on poetry while telling such rich, complex stories. His stories are the closest I’ve come to consuming a painting in written form. I love Tim Powers as well—the attention to detail he gives the story, pulling seemingly unrelated elements (often of our own history) and drawing them into a fascinating, cohesive tale by story’s end. Glen Cook’s Black Company series was my first exposure to “gritty” writing.
When did you start writing yourself?
My first serious attempt at writing fiction was in college. I started a really derivative high fantasy story in a notebook (which I still have!) that I later abandoned. I was going for a degree in computer science and engineering, and at the time, writing wasn’t a serious focus. But if I’m being honest, the more important reason was that I really didn’t have a clue what I was doing.
I tried again in my early thirties, and this time I became a lot more serious about it. I wrote (and finished!) my first trunk novel. I wrote a few more. Also trunk novels. I started attending writing conventions and learning the ropes of publishing. And then I started to go to writing conferences and attending workshops. It’s been a fun ride. I really do love the world of publishing, warts and all, and it’s been intensely interesting to see the contract side of things, how agents and editors and publicists work. I like seeing how the sausage is made.
How do you think you have grown as a writer since you published your first series?

I think all writers are trying to improve our craft as we write. When I was writing The Lays of Anuskaya, I was very concerned about lulls in the action. I felt the readers’ eyes over my shoulder, and whenever there was a pause, I felt like it couldn’t be allowed. I’ve since realized that while it’s important to stay focused on the plot, there is a need to show the characters outside of it as well, to let the reader sit down in the world a bit. I think it gives the reader the sense that these characters are real, that this place is real. It gives a sense that the times of tension and strife mean something. I’ve also shifted slightly away from the “everything is gray” mode of writing that permeates a lot of epic fantasy and grimdark fiction. That’s not to say that I’ve gone for absolute goods and evils, a la Tolkien, but I do think that the notions of good and evil are useful, even important, to a lot of readers.
Can you tell us about your journey to publication?
I had a pretty “traditional” road to publication. I tried breaking directly into novels early on, but after attending some seminars on writing, I decided to tackle short stories to perfect my craft a bit. So I wrote a bunch of short stories. I wrote a novel or two. I went to conventions, conferences, workshops. I traded a million crits on the Online Writing Workshop. I made slow, steady progress. I made my first sale to a “for the love” (aka non-paying) market called Deep Magic back in 2004. My next sale was a win in The Writers of the Future. It was also my first pro sale.

In the years that followed, I learned who was who in the publishing world and started making slow, steady sales. My “big break” was when I approached Jeremy Lassen of Night Shade Books at the World Fantasy Convention back in 2009. They were looking to expand in to epic fantasy, and I just so happened to have a new novel in that vein. I got the offer for The Winds of Khalakovo. I didn’t even have an agent at the time (I scrambled and eventually, and very fortunately, landed with Russell Galen of the Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary Agency.
There are many, many stories about the path to publication, but for people like me, a writer who didn’t come to writing early, I think it’s a natural progression. The toughest part, frankly, is simply sticking with it. Perseverance is by far the biggest key to becoming a successful, selling writer. That and a dogged determination to study the craft and to make yourself a better writer.
I’ve mentioned a few signposts along the way, but one that has been particularly gratifying is having people like Glen Cook, Celia Friedman, and with this book, Robin Hobb, read and enjoy my work. That’s been mind boggling for me. It still is when I stop to think about it.
One of Twelve Kings’ most striking features is the richly evocative desert setting. What were your inspirations?

I’d long wanted to scratch the itch to write a desert story. I can attribute this partly to liking  One Thousand and One Nights, particularly the milieu. In fact, as my last series progresses, you can see more and more of the Persian-influenced Aramahn coming into the picture, culminating in long stretches of desert scenes in the final book.
So the desert was something I really wanted to explore, and I knew I wanted to steep the history of the city in a nomadic, Bedouin-like culture, but I’d probably give the most credit to the Thieves’ World anthologies, created by Robert Lynn Aspirin, for [inspiring] the setting. I loved the city of Sanctuary when I read [them] in high school. I loved that it was the “armpit of the empire,” that it was a meeting point of old and new, that there were pantheons of gods vying for power. I loved the vastness of Sanctuary, and the hidden wonders it contained. The feel of that is what I wanted to explore with Sharakhai. [It] is in some ways a mere city state, but in effect, it controls trade throughout a massive desert bordered by four powerful kingdoms, and has amassed incredible wealth and power, [but not] without making enemies along the way. The twelve immortal kings of Sharakhai are hated by many. And the roots of the story are buried deeply in that hatred.
My favorite aspect of the book is your strong heroine, Çeda. I think readers will absolutely love her. How did you envision her character, and how did you come to decide to focus your novel on her story, at a time when many much of the conversation around genre writing concerns issues of gender and representation?
I hope people do love her. I certainly grew to love her in the writing. These days I spend a lot of time on world-building before getting too specific about characters, so that when I get to culture and eventually character, all the work that went into the world can advise me on who the characters are. By the time I was formulating Çeda’s character, I already knew about the desert world, the twelve kings, the role that Sharakhai played in local politics as a hub of commerce. I knew to a degree that there were wandering desert tribes and that the people of Sharakhai came from and often identified with them. And it’s in that place—the strife between an older way of life and a newer one—that Çeda and her mother, Ahya, really began taking shape. I wanted the story to be about the loss of heritage, the desire to regain it. I wanted it to be about family and what losing that might mean to a young girl. And I think for the most part I succeeded. Whether or not people think it’s a good story, I think the core of Twelve Kings in Sharakhai is very much about cultural identity.
As for why I ended up with a strong female character, I wouldn’t point to the ongoing conversation about it (which are both necessary and great for the genre as a whole). I grew up in a somewhat female-dominated household. [My dad] played, and still plays, a big part in my life, but he was the breadwinner, and so I saw my mother and twin sisters more. My mom was very caring and patient (perhaps more than I had a right to expect). My sisters and I fought quite a bit, but we loved each other a lot too. It wasn’t a conscious thing on my part, [but] I know that they played a role in the formation of Çeda’s character, and her mother’s.
That said, if Twelve Kings in Sharakhai adds to the ongoing conversation, I’m thrilled. I hope it can show that “strong female characters” doesn’t simply mean taking typical fantasy or sci-fi placeholders and replacing “he” with “she” and calling it a day. My biggest hope for Çeda has always been that she will be seen as an individual, first and foremost, one who finds herself in a tough situation that calls for heroic action.
Your characters are colored in shades of grey and riddled with imperfections, which seems in line with the “realist” trend of the last decade. Would you consider yourself a sort of genre deconstructionist?
I don’t have a deconstructionist bone in my body. It takes a smarter and more well-read person than I to do that. More importantly, though, I have no interest in it. It leads to agenda writing, and that’s something I’m completely uninterested in. (I say this recognizing we all have hidden agendas, but that’s beside the point, and would take a small essay to explore.)

I fall into the Tim Powers’ camp of writing, in which I’m not trying to say anything. I’m simply trying to explore a story that gives me juice. I like characters that are fighting from within the prisons of their own world, their upbringing, their societal mores, because it’s extremely interesting to me to see what happens when they step outside of those walls to see what they’re willing to fight for, and what others are willing to fight for. George Martin had a huge effect on me in this respect, giving us stories in which reader perceptions and loyalties can change with the flip of a POV.
I used to be a very plot-driven writer, to the detriment of my writing. I’ve worked hard over the years to change that, and to learn a lot more about the characters so that they can guide me and make the stories more character-driven.
It also seems like you are interested in exploring the intersections of myth, legend, and history and how they underpin power through this series of books. How did you get interested in exploring this theme through epic fantasy?
One of my favorite analogies for Tolkien’s works is that The Hobbit is fairy tale, The Lord of the Rings is legend, and The Silmarillion is myth. I like the notion that there are different prisms through which we can view the world. I find it very interesting how history changes over time. Our modern perceptions skew the way we look at the past, and as more time passes, more and more layers of story are added to the history, until you end up with archeological strata, each layer adding its contemporary baggage, that distorts or occludes or sometimes completely conceals the truth. It’s a very human thing we do as we write our collected histories, and that was something I wanted to play with in the history of the kings, the city of Sharakhai, the desert tribes, and even the gods of the desert.
What excites you about the current epic fantasy market?

I do like the general trend (the Hugos notwithstanding) that we’re seeing of being more inclusive in science fiction and fantasy. I think it’s leading to some wonderful fiction like Anne Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, N. K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, John Scalzi’s Locked In, Kameron Hurley’s The Mirror Empire, and more. Epic fantasy, high fantasy, and heroic fantasy are probably going to be slower to shift, but we’re already seeing changes there too. Bravo, says I. More, interesting fiction is always welcome.
Twelve Kings in Sharakhai is available September 1.