Dragon Soul Press had the opportunity to interview Daividh Eideard Mitchell, an author featured in Apocalypse, At The End, Dragons and Heroes, and To Hunt and To Hold.

1. Introduce yourself.
   • Daividh Eideard Mitchell. If you’re wondering why my name is spelled this way, it’s to
     avoid confusion with the guy who wrote Cloud Atlas. And if you’re wondering why I didn’t
     use the moniker “D. E. Mitchell” instead, it’s to avoid confusion with the lady who wrote
     Warrior: The Morgantown Songbirds. I’m a New England based speculative fiction writer,
     with a focus on Historical Fantasy. My writing has been featured in To Hunt and To Hold,
     Dragons & Heroes, and the forthcoming volumes Apocalypse and At The End.
2. What prompted you to begin writing?
   • Since I was old enough to speak, I was always preoccupied with play, storytelling, and
     created worlds, and I was far more interested in living creatures, prehistoric animals, and
     imagined monsters than in things like sports, cars, or current events. When I wrote my
     first story at the age of eight, I was transcribing what I had already been doing for years,
     just in a different medium.
     
     I was always writing, but I initially thought of it as a hobby rather than a serious craft to
     develop or a vocation to pursue. This all changed when I found myself in a college
     writing workshop taught by none other Jerald Walker, who himself is a product of the
     Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Let’s just say that this kind of class opened my eyes in a way
     nothing else ever had. Tears were shed in his classes on more than one occasion.
     Walker had no patience for the students who were just there for an easy grade, and he
     took offense to the stories that students obviously put little time or effort into. But if he
     complemented your work, you knew he wasn’t lying.
3. Do you have a favorite story or poem you’ve written? What’s it about?
   • I think my favorite story at the moment is “The Hanged Man of Elendorf”, which was
     featured in To Hunt and To Hold. This story is set in 1823 in a fictional Prussian village
     called Elendorf, which corresponds the real-life location of Krudenberg. It explores the
     Nachzehrer, which is a variant of the vampire found in German folklore that more
     resembles a ghoul or a zombie than the sort of vampires we might associate with the
     Romantic or Gothic movements. Unlike classic vampires, it’s always a former suicide,
     and its condition is not transmittable through a bite. To me, this seemed like a poignant
     metaphor for the harm suicide inflicts far beyond its instigation.
     
     The village of Elendorf is beset by a dangerous French cult which feuds with an
     unpopular local Rittmeister. A dark curse has caused the Rittmeister’s son, who has
     recently committed suicide, to return from death as Nachzehrer. The desperate local
     constable enlists the aid of a pair of seasoned travelers who themselves are former
     military men, the Catholic priest Father John Harcus and his perennial companion
     Feargus Sinclair. In the course of their investigation, they encounter the Nachzehrer,
     who claims to be on their side. Can they trust him, and if so, at what cost? That’s at the
     heart of the story.
     
     Father Harcus and Feargus Sinclair are also prominent characters in my novel. I
     suppose you could describe Harcus as a cross between Father Brown and Solomon
     Kane, or what Dirty Harry would be like if he changed career paths and become a priest.
     To me, his friendship with Feargus somewhat resembles the dynamic between Fafhrd
     and the Gray Mouser, but set in early 19 th century Europe. I always had it in mind that
     they had many adventures before the events of my novel, and I don’t think we’ve seen
     the last of them.
4. How many projects do you have planned over the next few years? Tell us about one.
   • Quite a few! As far as my next story is concerned, I’d rather keep that a surprise. All I
     can say is that I intend to keep writing, and hopefully for more DSP anthologies. I also
     hope to expand my online presence with readings and short video essays on YouTube.
5. What is your writing process like?
   • I am definitely a plotter as opposed to a pantser. Of course, no writer is 100% in either
     camp. Inspiration will absolutely come during and not just before, especially the more
     you’ve progressed. And you’ll always have a different impression of your characters and
     the story after you’ve written it. But in my case, I’ve found that I can’t churn out a story if I
     don’t have a good idea of where it’s going from the start. Writer’s Block is almost always
     the result of an idea that’s insufficiently developed or outlined ahead of time.
     
     So the outline comes first, because although I am generally more interested in character
     and theme, I want to make sure the story at least makes sense and can be broken down
     into manageable chunks. In my opinion, endings are more important than beginnings,
     because they often recontextualize everything that took place before. I find few things
     more disappointing in the media I consume than a desperate wrap-up to a story or series
     that clearly wasn’t thought-out ahead of time, so I try to avoid that in my own fiction.
     
     I might even keep additional files on hand with biographical information on the
     characters, or dates and timelines when relevant. This is material that may or may not
     be referred to in the story, and is often subject to change. I also spend a lot of time trying
     to pin down the voice of every character, so I often write dialogue separately from the
     main body of prose before integrating it into the rest of the story. I never write characters
     to serve as mouthpieces for my beliefs or opinions, nor do I write them to represent the
     groups they belong to or the creeds they profess. I think it’s important that they represent
     themselves first. That said, I do need to identify at least one point of connection with
     every character I write, so there’s a little bit me expressed in each of them.
     
     When trying to set writing goals for the day, I have found it far more helpful to think in
     terms of story goals rather than goals based on word count or hours spent. A finished
     scene, chapter, or a dialogue is a good day.
6. Where do you draw inspiration from?
   • Like so many other Fantasy writers of my generation, D&D was like crack cocaine for my
     imagination for many years. But like any Dungeon Master with serious writing ambitions,
     the game eventually became a hindrance for my imagination more than vehicle. As
     Robert E. Howard scholar Mark Finn explained in his blog, D&D is ultimately a pastiche
     of Fantasy literature, like Howard, Tolkien, Leiber, Vance, Moorcock, Dunsany, and
     many others.
     
     Which is not to say that there’s anything wrong with D&D or secondary world
     medievalism—hey, I love this stuff too—but it seems to me that the Fantasy genre has
     studied Tolkien’s setting more than his thinking, and that a lot of Fantasy appears to be a
     response to this response, or pastiche of pastiche.
     
     Rather than thinking consciously about subverting the current trend of Fantasy tropes, or
     drawing back in irony, I try to ignore all of the existing baggage and look to the sources
     that inspired the things I first came to know through D&D, and then to the sources that
     inspired these sources, and then to the body of myth and real-world histories that
     inspired those. What I invariably find at the bedrock of Fantasy is a clarity and vision that
     only makes sense in the milieu that gave it birth. The setting informs the theme. Think of
     what Robert Eggers said when discussing his movie The VVich, about how in order to
     make a witch scary, you have to go back to 1630. Or about what Guillermo del Toro said
     about Pan’s Labyrinth—that a fairy tale about obedience changes meaning when set in
     Francoist Spain.
     
     You always have free reign in developing a secondary fantasy world, but anything that is
     or isn’t present will feel completely arbitrary unless you put in the work to make it seem
     natural and inevitable. The upside to writing Historical Fantasy is that this world-building
     is already done for you and the relevant body of myth already exists. You just have to
     give it tone and shape. And paradoxically, you’re freed up to focus more on things like
     character, plot, and narrative. The downside to writing Historical Fantasy, of course, is
     the insane amount of research that has to be done to keep everything grounded.
     
     And there’s always my personal angle. For “The Hanged Man of Elendorf”, I was never
     keen on the notion of sexy vampires and intentionally wrote a disgusting one instead. I
     think it’s the least glamorous portrayal of vampirism in the entire volume! As Prussia
     created the conditions for Imperial Germany and eventually Nazism, I wrote with the
     awareness that this absolutely would have been the sort of environment that
     emphasized machismo, and that this would give us another depressing clue about
     Hansi’s suicide. And while I don’t want to get political, I think this story has something to
     say about the destructive endgame of toxic masculinity, especially as it plays out with
     Rittmeister Albrecht.
     
     For “The Feast of the Holy Dragon”, I wanted to write a story that was rooted in the
     actual middle ages, and didn’t view this era with modern condescension. Yet when
     researching dragon lore, I also had to acknowledge that Western culture has almost
     never viewed reptiles sympathetically in myth or legend. Dragons are far too charismatic
     for modern readers as well, and don’t seem to inspire the same kind of fear and loathing
     they did in the pre-modern world.
     
     My better half and I have also kept reptiles for many years now. If there’s anything I’ve
     learned in this department, it’s that lizards are quirky little creatures that are every bit as
     goofy and idiosyncratic as dogs and cats. Even alligators and crocodiles look adorable to
     me, because I can recognize the body language of my pets in them. I just can’t take
     seriously the thought of any kind of reptile as a straight-up metaphor for greed, evil, or
     sin.
     
     The particular passage from the apocryphal Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, which opens
     the story, intrigued me for years. The dragons in this passage were treated like any other
     creature in the animal kingdom, for once, no more or less worthy. So herein was an
     angle for me to write an unambiguously good dragon in a story with an unambiguously
     Christian ethos—in a sense, redeeming the dragon in Western culture. Our two bearded
     dragons inspired the personality of the dragon in the story, and the final battle scene
     tapped into those feelings I had as a small child when I watched Ray Harryhausen
     movies on TV and found myself rooting for the monsters.
7. Who is your favorite author / what is your favorite book?
   • For short fiction, Robert E. Howard. For writers of Fantasy, he simply isn’t optional. You
     can pick him apart for his shortcomings, for the limitations imposed by the market he
     wrote to, or for the racist Depression-era pseudoscience that informed his understanding
     of the world, sure. But you’ll learn a lot more from Howard by observing what he gets
     right—especially in regards to pacing, action, storytelling, diction, and economy of
     description. It’s all there, and every sentence he writes brims with intensity and
     conviction. There’s a damn good reason Howard is the second most influential Fantasy
     author aside from Tolkien. In all honesty, I wish I’d read him when I was younger. I think
     these pulp stories are better for encouraging young people to read than Shakespeare
     and Dickens.
     
     My favorite novel is A Canticle For Leibowitz by Walter Miller Jr., which should be read,
     taught, and studied as often as 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451, as it’s just
     as important as those titles for understanding the trajectory of Western civilization. The
     novel is a masterpiece of dark irony and terrifying understatement, as if Flannery
     O’Connor wrote Science Fiction.
8. What is one goal you have for your writing future?
   • To write something that will be read and enjoyed by someone I will never meet, and that
     will hopefully outlive me. And to land an agent interested in my novel, hopefully.
9. What do you hope readers enjoy most from your work?
   • C. S. Lewis said that he wrote the books he should have liked to read, since he couldn’t
     find them anywhere else. I’ve written my own stories for similar reasons. If wouldn’t want
     to read it, I won’t write it. The writing process itself is grueling, work-intensive, and
     requires you to say no to almost everything else in your life—sometimes even your job.
     But if I can read my own story afterwards and enjoy it, then I know I’ve succeeded.
     
     But I don’t assume readers will share my vision. If they even gave me time of day, I’m
     grateful. If they enjoyed my work, I’m happy. I’d rather hear about what it meant for them
     than explain what it meant for me.
10. Where can readers learn more about you?
    • My Facebook author page. An author website and YouTube channel may be forthcoming, and Facebook is where you’ll see the updates.