Talisgate follows two pre-teen friends in 1976 who, while exploring a dilapidated house, discover a magical talisman that takes them on an adventure to multiple worlds. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

First, there’s a little bit of me in Troy Cooper. Like me, he’s eleven years old in 1976. Like me, he’s obsessed with books. I wasn’t born in Florida, but my family moved to the story’s setting when I was fourteen. The neighborhood Troy and Molly live in is very closely modeled after Whitfield Estates, a neighborhood I lived in that kind of straddles the line between Sarasota and Bradenton. There was a rundown house in that neighborhood that was a little like the Muldoon house in Talisgate. My imagination just kind of expounded on that to create the world and situations in which Troy and Molly find themselves.

Then, there’s Molly. When I was a preschooler, my best friend was a little girl living two doors down named Kim. We were inseparable. We kind of grew apart during my school years, but I drew a good bit of Molly from Kim. The story itself is a bit of a nod to The Magician’s Nephew, the first story in the Narnia series by C. S. Lewis. It’s not exactly that story, but I was fascinated by Lewis’s description of kids traveling between worlds. It kind of stuck.

What was your approach to writing the interactions between characters?

To me, characters drive everything. Everything. Characters do stuff, say stuff, and believe stuff because of who they are. You can’t have a believable plot without characters staying true to themselves. You can’t have definitions of who characters are without consistent adherence to every part of their being. I sometimes use what I call “mini-stories” that build on this sort of thing. For example, in Talisgate, Troy tells the story of setting a kid’s shoestring on fire at school. In doing so, he not only tells you something about himself, but he also tells a lot about his mother and their relationship. I do a good bit of that. Once I have that kind of foundation established, interactions come naturally. I especially like the tension between Troy and Sojourner throughout Talisgate. Sojourner repeatedly exasperates Troy with his misuse of common sayings and exasperates him further by his reaction (or lack of reaction) to Troy’s exasperation. All of that is important to Troy’s arc. As my main protagonist and narrator, Troy’s journey from how he perceives himself and his relationship to others around him at the beginning of the book to where he is with those concepts at the story’s close is paramount to reader engagement and satisfaction.

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

My stories are all very distinctly human, regardless of genre. Human relationships are key to good reading, at least for me. The friendship between Troy and Molly is deliberately non-romantic. Part of the reason I made them so young was to emphasize that. Troy says repeatedly that Molly is not his girlfriend, and the reader is never taken down that path, but they are very close friends. I also wanted to stress how we have never learned all there is to learn, even about the people who are closest to us. Troy begins this story with a lot to learn about both Molly and himself. I worked very hard to make sure his eyes opened slowly to make his growth believable. See my comments about characters above. Troy changes, but he’s still undeniably Troy.

This whole self-discovery theme is critical to the story. Some of the things Sojourner reveals about the nature of the (fictional, of course) universe come across as unbelievable in Troy’s mind, but Sojourner is patient and persistent with his explanations. One of my favorite lines from Sojourner in the book is, “Just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean it isn’t true.” That’s something I think everyone needs to keep in mind every time we encounter a person, a culture, or anything else we don’t immediately understand.

I love Molly McPherson. There’s a deep undercurrent of the human need to belong running through the story with Molly. I don’t want to introduce any spoilers, but Molly has a lot happen to her that questions her place in her family and the universe at large. Her own self-discovery path is rooted in this concept. I’m really happy with how it played out. I think Molly is one of my best characters ever. I hope my readers like her as much as I do.

The book has some hypothetical theology going on, but it’s not a “religious” story. There are elements of the Judeo-Christian faith present, but they are not presented as doctrine. The concept of the human soul is there, and the eternal battle between good and evil is central, but I added a lot of speculation regarding the structure of the universe that won’t be found in any religious text. It’s all fantasy when it gets to that part.

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 is the first book in a planned trilogy. It could go beyond that, but I have two more books roughly thought out, and I have begun writing on Book Two already. I’m hoping to have it done by the middle of the year. The next book will stand on the foundation built by the first. I won’t have to spend a lot of time building Troy and Molly’s world, so I can dive right into the adventure. In the second book, readers will be taken to new worlds where they will meet some new characters, including a colleague of Sojourner and some new and particularly nasty crashers.

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