Tales of New Stenchford follows a scrappy petty criminal navigating a filthy, dangerous, and absurd fantasy city filled with crooks, nobles, monsters, and chaos. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

I was born and raised in Manhattan in the 1970s and ’80s, and for reasons I don’t fully understand, I was always drawn to the city’s underbelly. I explored deserted subway tunnels, decommissioned ship piers, condemned buildings—anywhere with a “Keep Out” sign.

I met all sorts of marginalized people and discovered elaborate worlds hidden away inside the city. Still, it wasn’t any one thing in particular that I was seeking; it was a feeling, a sense of belonging that coaxed me onto buses and under bridges to commune with something I couldn’t describe but knew felt right.

Alongside all of that, I had a family that introduced me to opera, museums, and fine dining. I experienced the world that lived high above the scrappy streets and had to wrestle with the dissonance. I experienced the city on many levels and brought its richness to New Stenchford.

I think it’s fair to say that when you ask about “navigating a filthy, dangerous, and absurd fantasy city filled with crooks, nobles, monsters, and chaos,” you might be referring to New Stenchford, but you could just as easily be talking about my hometown.

Rizzle is treated as an outcast by many people, yet he seems perfectly at home in the city’s streets. What does his relationship with New Stenchford reveal about his character?

The book had to begin with Rizzle. It had to start with something base and real, not a square-jawed hero with wavy blond hair.

Rizzle is a dirty little scoundrel, but he has a big heart, not unlike Ratso Rizzo from Midnight Cowboy. Rizzle is pragmatic and can bend his morals to fit whatever situation he might find himself in, but he is not a sociopath. He has empathy for his fellow city dwellers, even if sometimes he uses it to con them.

People look down on Rizzle, but he doesn’t need their approval; he has the city. New Stenchford keeps him warm, fed, and protected, even if those things require a bit of thievery and stealth to acquire.

Rizzle can see the rich living high on the hog, but he knows their secrets. He knows who is addicted to what and who is cheating with whose wife. It gives Rizzle a no-nonsense point of view that allows him to see the world clearly.

The novel contains numerous intersecting plots, including political corruption, organized crime, forbidden romance, religious conspiracies, curses, and magical disasters. How did you approach bringing those seemingly unrelated threads together?

Believe it or not, when I sat down to write the book, I had nothing but a cluster of characters and locations. I didn’t have a plot, a theme, or an outline.

I just sat down one afternoon and started writing the book chronologically, moving from one scene to the next without knowing anything about where I was going.

The resulting book is a little scattered, but I don’t think I could have written it any other way. I needed to let the characters and situations dictate what happened next; otherwise, I think it would have felt stale.

It wasn’t until I was more than halfway through the book that I started jotting down notes and making plans. It wasn’t until I reached the last chapter that I knew how the book ended.

If you could spend one day in New Stenchford, where would you go—and what would you do your best to avoid?

The answer to both of these questions is one place: the Last Resort. It is probably the smelliest, most dangerous place in town, but that’s where all the action is. It’s a dirt-floor bar down by the Pue River near the center of town. In a later book, I explain that although the Last Resort has windows, sunlight does not come through them for fear of what it might illuminate.

You don’t know what might happen in that rundown little shack, but that’s what makes it interesting. Yes, it’s possible you might lose a limb or end up with vomit in your hair, but you won’t be bored. The palace will no doubt be a predictable pageant of arrogance and sycophancy, and the inns will be crowded and hot, but in the Last Resort, you might see something truly novel. It might be something you wish you had never seen at all, but it won’t be boring.

Tales of New Stenchford is the first in the New Stenchford Series. There are ten books in the series. A new one will be published approximately every five months.

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