Please introduce yourself and tell us about your background as a writer.
Hi, I'm Dariel Quiogue, a writer and photographer from the Philippines. Writing fantasy and science fiction, particularly sword and sorcery and sword and planet adventures, has been a dream of mine since childhood. I've been told more than once that I have a knack for putting words together, so I guess writing has always been in the cards for me. Before I started publishing fiction I was writing for magazines, mostly on photography.

My tastes in fiction and what I like to write were shaped when I was about 10 or 11 -- in the same year, I got introduced to Star Wars, Edgar Rice Burrough's Barsoom, and Robert E. Howard's Conan, as well as The Odyssey. Before that I was already very much into the Arabian Nights, and Philippine folktales -- my mom was a teacher who'd get books for me from the school library, and my dad liked to collect books, especially the classics. I was an asthmatic bookworm, so I ended up reading Homer and Herodotus really early. That, and lots of National Geographics.

Then two summers in a row we vacationed at this fine old house in Baguio whose owner was an American sci-fi buff, and we had access to his huge library. That included nearly all the ERB stuff, if I remember right, and lots of sci-fi anthologies. I'd beg off from day trips to stay and read instead. I also got really interested in classical biographies in high school -- Alexander, Julius Caesar, Hannibal, and the Roman Emperors -- we had a copy of Plutarch's Lives of the Romans and Gibbon's Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire so I read those.

My fiction is really all about exploring the stuff I'm fascinated with -- history, especially wars and power struggles (influenced by Dune and Clavell's Shogun), Asian history and mythology, and the Silk Roads, both the inland one and the Maritime Silk Road because I'm Southeast Asian.

What are the most prominent influences on your writing? How do you incorporate those influences without being derivative?
The biggest influence of all for me is history. I like taking a big historical picture, looking at its patterns, and drilling down to see how that would affect the lives of my characters, and how they'd respond to the pressures brought about by the tides of history.

In terms of authors and voice, the biggest influences are Robert E. Howard, David Gemmell, Harold Lamb, Leigh Brackett, and Tanith Lee. My pacing is from REH, my taste for tragic or bittersweet endings is from Brackett, and the complexity of my characters, their dark and conflicted natures, is inspired by Gemmell's work. I'm also a highly visual person, so the way I describe things is also influenced by photographs and cinema. I used to watch reruns of samurai dramas on TV a lot, so some of my fight scenes are described with chambara influences.

I'm still worried from time to time that I sound too much like this author or that, so I try to be different by mixing and matching influences and always starting with my own premises for a plot. For that, it's back to history and mythology, particularly Asian.

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?
Oof, that's a big weakness for me. I'm a natural recluse, and really bad at tooting my own horn. Social media's an incomprehensible void as far as I'm concerned. Right now I'm experiencing a boost in sales thanks to getting featured on Oliver Brackenbury's podcast and getting invited to the Whetstone magazine Discord. Before that, I had no idea who to contact or how to go about it. Marketing is something I very much have yet to learn. All I really know is to do my best to get a good product out and hope it's good enough to generate some honest recommendations.

How much do your audience’s expectations factor in to what you write? Does this ever cause you to hold back from experimenting?
Not at all. It helps that sword and sorcery is a pretty well-defined niche, and audience expectations seem to align pretty well with what I personally like. In short, I write what I'll enjoy reading. I'm just lucky to have found an audience that shares my taste.

I'm experimenting on my own with more complex characters and motivations, different tones, things like that. I try to look at what I've done so far and ask what can I try next to be better, to be different.

Like, I noticed that most of my work has been rather dark and cynical in outlook, so I challenged myself to write something lighthearted and comical. The result was my Wali and Khalid series, one story of which has been published in Rakehell Magazine. Khalid's a dashing swashbuckler with a rather thick skull, while Wali is an ex-sorcerer cursed with the form of a monkey, and is an irreverent, amoral lecher.

Have you had any new stories published recently? Are you currently working on any?
Yes, I just had one published in Rakehell, and another in the forthcoming New Edge of Sword and Sorcery magazine. I also just self-published a new story collection, Track of the Snow Leopard.

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 just finished rereading Tanith Lee's Tales From the Flat Earth, I just find her language and gift for storytelling so enthralling. The latest new work I bought and liked was Schuyler Hernstrom's The Eye of Sounnu, I enjoyed the mashup of sword and sorcery and Heavy Metal-esque weird-post-apocalyptic vibe he had going on there. And a friend recently lent me his copy of Scott Oden's Men of Bronze, which I'd long wanted to read. Not sword and sorcery, but a historical right up my alley. Heartily recommend both! And if anyone reading this interview hasn't read Tanith Lee yet, give yourselves a treat and read Flat Earth or the Birthgrave trilogy.

Any final words?
Thanks so much for the interview! I'd like to think we're entering a new age for sword and sorcery and other niche genres, thanks to digital publishing and the Internet. I'd almost given up, but now that I've found what seems to be a growing community of enthusiasts and fellow-writers, I'm really inspired to do more.

Please check out my newest story collection, Track of the Snow Leopard, and watch out for the long-delayed Swords of the Four Winds Volume 2!