What’s the difference between this story and the original one?
It’s the same story, but I spend more time on fewer story arcs, with fewer characters. The original novel read sort of like an alt history novel with many perspectives. This one is more along the lines of a traditional fantasy novel. The length is relatively the same.
I also made the book PG-13. I don’t mind writing erotic scenes, but I found the book’s appeal was reaching well outside the Furry subculture and into an audience that liked fantasy novels. Hitting them with an erotic furry scene five chapters in was leaving a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouthes.
Since I decided to write this more in the form of a fantasy novel, I read some of the more iconic fantasy novels while re-writing this, hoping it would both help and influence my writing style, which I’m sure that it has. ‘Out of The Ruins’ is a lot better than its predecessor.
Why do you have to write German soldiers?
My answer to that is ‘why not.’ Maybe it’s because their stories are the ones never told. Maybe because it’s what readers are really more interested in. It’s difficult to methodically explain inspiration, and frankly, an author shouldn’t have to. This is definitely an area of interest of mine, and one of my objectives is to take characters, some real-life and some literary, out of the same old setting, with the same old stigmas, and into a new place.
I heard this was “Nazi literature.”
Fiction 101: The perspective of the character is not that of the author. This is novel from the perspective of the characters. Yes, many were ‘national socialists.’ There’s no avoiding that and airbrushing it from the story would be denying reality.
The mark of any good author is to get in the mind of the people who’s story he is writing. Harry Turtledove, one of my favorite authors, did something similar in his alt-history novels, with one of his characters being an analogue of a Confederate Adolf Hitler. Did that make Turtledove an ‘evil nazi racist?’
There’s Confederate Flags on this book. Does that mean Turtledove is some evil racist who wants to enslave black people? Anyone in their right mind would say ‘no.’
Why furries? Are you a furry?
I consider myself a furry, but it’s more of an artistic interest in the anthropomorphic than anything. The furry “fandom” (I hate that word) has turned itself away from the universal appeal that draws the general public to it, and has instead decided to draw inward and become a social crutch for various types of rejects.
But that doesn’t have to mean that anything and everything ‘furry’ has to be like that. ‘Furry’ is just a tool, a genre, and a style; not a way of life. Or, at least, it shouldn’t be.
I also found that the furry thing fits eerily well with these character, in a Germanic ‘Brothers Grimm’ sort of way. Humanizing animals has been a dear piece of German culture for a long time. The confluence of these two feels definitively German and pre-Christian.
What can we expect next?
I fully expect this book to come out in paperback form at the very least. I do have a sequel written up, but it definitely needs some work. Also, I am strongly leaning to making an audiobook form of this, as well as, hopefully, a visual novel.