Their Village, Their Fortress, follows a soldier who defies orders and sets out on a journey to alert his home village and surrounding communities of a threat headed their way from a new weapon that causes mass destruction. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

There are two reasons behind how I set up this story. One is that it’s a standalone add-on to a wider series of seven books, in a world I have already built. Once I decided what kind of story I intended to write, I found where it might fit in existing continuity so that I wouldn’t have to create another new fantasy world; I don’t feel like broad-strokes world-building as much as I once did.

Conveniently, the seventh book in that series established a highland village where I had decided the villagers would tend to have Ukrainian names. I gave up on inventing names years ago, though some examples survive in earlier works. Since then, I have tried to mindfully borrow real names while considering what they mean and attempting a vague cultural consistency within a land. For example: Derek, from previous works, was from a land where most others around had Polish names, but empires tend to include many cultures for both benign and nefarious reasons, and people do move around, so you would encounter names from other cultures of Eastern Europe.

All the context the reader would need from this book gets mentioned in Their Village, Their Fortress: their old duke from a century ago, brave Galyna who went to confront him, people who fled from an aggressive imperial army to the safety of a land that welcomed them.

As for why I felt like writing a love letter to the power of community, where villagers with such names and traditional styles of dress stand together against a brutal imperialistic hierarchy… I have always used my work as a proxy to consider current events, but I have never been more direct.

What were some of the emotional and moral guidelines you followed when developing your characters?

The number one thing is balance. Even when I have a clear agenda, no named character is meant to be a caricature. The woman who believes her purpose is to interrogate every idea is valuable to the community for doing so, even if she makes enemies by taking things too far. The man with an uncanny knack for quick learning lives through severe struggles with the compassionate understanding of others; he does not just “have powers” that make him useful in the moment, he is a person with a complicated life to handle. You are meant to view the catalyst character as rather obnoxious at times, but he doesn’t ignore his missteps and at least he tries to do better.

The invading soldiers, as per my other works, are not evil inhuman creatures; they face the consequences of their participation just as they would the consequences of refusing orders, but they are people, possessing moral agency, private opinions, and responsibility for their actions. Even the character intended to be the least likable, the battalion leader, a cultist bureaucrat, believes thoroughly that his invasion is meant to improve the lives of those he intends to conquer–but his rigidly hierarchical worldview holds no space for contrary opinions, and he believes so much in this imaginary new world he would build for them that he would burn down the one they know and love. He is utterly steeped in beliefs that make him the hero of his own story and the villain of mine.

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?

Community is the first thing, the heroism and value of the everyday. To handle that appropriately, I needed to flip my usual approach. So many of my prior books tell the stories of powerful people, with drama encompassing an entire continent. The action most often revolved around dukes, crown princesses, warlords, and generals. Sure, I would give perspectives and consequences, I would show you people having to abandon their homes because war is not neat or tidy and the battlefield you will read about is often someone’s ruined community space. The stories were driven by single personalities who would alter or preserve the course of their world, but only with the help of countless people who struggled, few of whom ever got named compared to their number.

For this book, I narrowed the scope. My initial idea, which I didn’t stick by, was to have the entire story happen within the bounds of Nimmlisok village–for most of these characters, that’s their world. While power brokers wage devastating wars from an impersonal bird’s eye view, I give you the story of everyday people coping with these grand maneuvers, trying to survive and preserve what matters to them. People who don’t need their world to be remade in anyone’s image, resisting the brutal power that punches down at them. This time, the power brokers from the other stories are almost entirely absent–a couple are named, while one of them says a few consequential things in the prologue. Their stories have already been told in other books.

Is this the first book in the series? If so, when is the next book coming out, and what can your fans expect in the next story?

This book is meant to stand alone as a read, though it exists as the eighth work in a single continuity.

My original plan for this series was six books: a trilogy followed by a prequel trilogy. Since the end of the first trilogy, I have tried to make everything that followed independently readable because I know how daunting it is to dive into a long fantasy series. I also think my writing has improved since the first trilogy, and I would rather lead with better material: why not jump in at Prince Ewald the Brave, or The Fate of Lenn, and read anything else at your leisure?

The seventh book, The Redemption of Jarek, was not really in this plan, but it was a contingency. The story was hinted at by existing works. I knew where it fit with the others in case I wished to keep writing, or if fans demanded more. One day, I asked myself why I should wait. If I knew what the story should be, perhaps I should write that before I forgot or before life had me otherwise occupied.

This eighth book was not even a contingency plan. I had no rough draft or even notes about it, yet somewhere between June and July, I unexpectedly had a book. Once I had it, I did not hesitate to produce it. How do I know I will ever have another idea, and such ideal circumstances to write it?

That’s how it is from now on. I can’t reasonably guarantee any more books when the eighth one was a surprise to begin with. I encourage readers to seek out and appreciate the eight that are on the market.

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