Paul Batteiger is a prolific author of sword and sorcery short stories, and DMR Books has been fortunate enough to have published two of them. Read on to learn more about the author of “The Glory of Ravens” and “The Howling God”.

Please introduce yourself and tell us about your background as a writer.
I was born in Ohio, I live in Oklahoma, and I have wanted to be a writer since I was 9 years old. I studied writing some in college, but I didn’t find it that useful, and so I am pretty much self-taught.

Some might describe your story "The Glory of Ravens" as grimdark. How would you categorize it? Did you feel it fit in well with the other stories in Warlords, Warlocks & Witches?
Well, I actually wrote that story a long time ago – long before the term “grimdark” had any currency. I would not really classify it as that, it just has a really morally challenged protagonist. I wanted to play with the idea of heroism, and whether one heroic act makes up for a lifetime of being a son of a bitch. I wanted to touch on the irony of a guy who was really an awful person remembered as a hero because of one thing he did. And he did not even do it for selfless reasons, he wanted to do something grand and important, and that it would help anyone else was really immaterial to him. So in his case he was a hero for the lowest kind of motives, and yet he ended up doing something noble. It’s meant to leave you pondering afterward.

As for fitting in, I don’t know if I can answer that. It has an elevated, almost tale-teller kind of voice, which is not a modern kind of voice to use, and it’s at odds with the violence in the story. Sword & Sorcery stories often have elevated diction, but not veering into an actual Tale. The story has a lot more moral and thematic complexity than the usual S&S piece. It’s not a story of barbarism versus civilization, more man versus nature. The dragon was directly inspired by descriptions of volcanic eruptions, particularly those of Mount St. Helens and Pelee. It’s not a usual kind of Sword & Sorcery story.

What are the most prominent influences on your writing? How do you incorporate those influences without being derivative?
I grew up on Tolkien, and I suppose that’s not surprising. As a writer I have been much more influenced by either classic literature or pulp writing, as I have a very pulp imagination, and there’s no denying that. I am a big, big fan of the pulp-era writers, both in the fantasy field and out of it. Lovecraft of course, I’m a huge fan of Robert E. Howard (that picture up there is me in his room where he wrote) and Clark Ashton Smith. Also a fan of more mainstream pulp writers like Hammet. You can learn a lot about pacing and plotting from the pulps.

I think when you have influences you start out derivative no matter what you do. I remember I set out like 20 years ago to try and write like Howard, and I produced some awful stories, but I learned a lot from reading and re-reading him and trying to imitate what he was doing, trying to figure out how those effects I wanted were achieved. I mean, writing is just words in a row – there’s nothing hidden. When I read something I like, I take it apart and try to figure out how it was done, to see how I can use some of the same tools to tell my own stories.

Many authors say marketing is one of their biggest challenges. What tactics have you found to be most effective for getting your name out there?
Oh man, marketing is so hard. It’s a full-time job on top of writing, which is a time-consuming job on its own. The thing I have found works best is trying to establish a presence long before you have something to sell. You have to get on social media and be funny or wise or clever and attract people to follow you, so that then, when you do have something to push, you have goodwill built up before the fact. You have to make sure to keep the signal-to-noise ratio under control, so your Twitter or whatever is not just sell-sell-sell all the time, because then people tune it out. You have to connect with people, and that’s hard to do.

How much do your audience’s expectations factor in to what you write? Does this ever cause you to hold back from experimenting?
I’m not thinking about the audience expectations as much as I am just keeping the kind of story I am telling in mind. Some things are just not right to go in some kinds of story, and so you have to be cognizant of that. If your story is going to be really brutally violent, then you have to telegraph that right off, because if you suddenly start halfway through, then people will be put off and pushed out of the story. Your opening pages, or chapter, or whatever has to tell the reader what kind of story this is going to be – the tense, the voice, the style, the setting, the point of view, the tone – and that tells the reader what to expect. You have to be aware of that and respect it. I mean, it might be fun for the writer to set up a light, funny story and then launch into gory violence at the end, but that’s only going to piss off the reader and eject them from the story. When you set up expectations in a story, then you have to deal with them in some way, shape, or form. You can’t just ignore them, because then you come across as inept.

Have you had any new stories published recently? Are you currently working on any?
I am constantly writing and posting stories on my fiction blog at New Iron Age where I post a new Sword & Sorcery story every other Monday. I have a Patreon to help support my writing, and I have the previous years all collected in ebooks. My current storyline, The Black Flame, is an inversion of the resurrected-evil-sorcerer trope of the classic pulp days, as my resurrected evil sorcerer is the protagonist. You should check it out.

Name one newer and one older book you have read and enjoyed recently. (“Newer” meaning from the past year or so, and “older” meaning written before 1980.)
I don’t read an awful lot of modern fiction. I did recently read Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice and I rather liked that. I also re-read Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros and T.R. Fehrenbach’s This Kind of War. My regular diet of reading mostly consists of military histories, true crime, and other nonfiction stuff.

Any final words?
I have a great deal of affection for “The Glory of Ravens” and I am glad it found a home. I really appreciate your dedication to Sword & Sorcery fiction and I am glad to be a part of DMR Books.