Please introduce yourself and tell us about your background as a writer.
I’m Harry; I grew up in North Yorkshire and now live in London. Although I’ve written in one form or another since I was a child, it’s only this year that I’ve started to consistently finish and publish short stories.

My day job is in film, and I realised last year that my creative outlet had become tied up with what I did to pay the bills. I needed to rekindle my joy in writing, and so I turned back to weird fiction and sword-&-sorcery – the stuff I’d loved writing as a child, and which had perhaps been squeezed out by adult life. A year on, and I’ve sold seven stories and discovered a thriving, supportive community (a particular shoutout here to the endlessly encouraging, creative bunch centred around the terrific magazine Whetstone).

What are the most prominent influences on your writing? How do you incorporate those influences without being derivative?
I’ve always read pretty widely, and not just within the genres I like writing. I think that’s a valuable way to keep things fresh – steal from a wide variety of sources and the result might end up unique. It also helps to develop your own taste, which is ultimately what you have to trust when deciding whether a draft or a sentence passes muster.

As for specific influences, I’m not a great judge of what shows up in my own work but I’m certainly influenced by the usual suspects, Howard and Leiber in particular. So I’ll focus on a few that may be more personal to me.

Brian Jacques’ Redwall series never left my shelves as a kid. My dad’s moth-eared collection of Biggles paperbacks sparked an early taste for pulpy adventure. As a young teenager, I went through bucketloads of Terry Pratchett and Bernard Cornwell, and tried to imitate both (though not at the same time – in retrospect, that might have been more interesting). I think those traces remain. Then at 16 or so, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road amazed and terrified me, and everything I wrote for a while thereafter was striving for the terse unpunctuated poetry of his prose. Little of it, it goes without saying, was any good.

Discovering the Old English corpus at university was a big influence; it engaged me in a new way with the roots of my language, and I still have clumsy, handwritten translations of The Wanderer and chunks of Beowulf in a drawer somewhere. The short stories and poems of George Mackay Brown were also transformative – deeply charged with history, religion and place, without losing a sense of human scale or dignity. I doubt much of that influence shows up in my adventure stories, but I’m certain they changed me as a writer.

I haven’t even begun to talk about film and music, and if I do we’ll be here all day. But I will mention that one of my earliest memories is watching The Adventures of Robin Hood as a small child, and I suspect that last duel between Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone has a lot to answer for in the subsequent development of my tastes. The bit with the shadows on the wall!

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?
I’ve not been doing this long enough to have a good answer! So far I’ve focused on getting stories out there, and hopefully laying the ground for more consistent marketing when I have a bigger body of work to promote.

That said, I’m gradually coming to realise how important reviews and ratings are for standing out in the Amazon ecosystem. I’m trying to get better at leaving reviews for work I like, and encouraging readers to do likewise (so if you liked Samhain Sorceries, take this as a hint…)

How much do your audience’s expectations factor in to what you write? Does this ever cause you to hold back from experimenting?
I try to write well-crafted adventure stories, which hopefully have something a little distinctive about them – whether that’s the characters or some twist in the plot or setting. I don’t think I can yet claim to have an audience in my own right, but my stories mostly seem to have been well-received by readers and editors, which I guess means my work is in line with their expectations.

My concern is often more introspective. I really enjoy working with the conventions of my genres, but when does a trope become a cliché or stereotype? Am I sometimes lazily recycling my influences? And on the flipside, is my more formally ambitious work just chasing lofty ideas at the expense of an engaging story? I suspect every writer has these kinds of internal dialogues; hopefully someday I can balance them with more external feedback!

That said, a joy of the genre is its variety. That’s one of the most compelling legacies of Howard’s original stories – his world encompasses swashbuckling adventures, sweeping military campaigns, weird horror, and even elements of sci-fi, with a tone running from wry humour to nihilistic horror. And there’s a century-long wider tradition which only gets broader, whether it’s purist or revisionist or somewhere inbetween. That’s a lot of room to experiment before you run out of road.

Have you had any new stories published recently? Are you currently working on any?
Earlier this year I had stories in Whetstone and Rakehell magazines, and the fourth Swords and Sorceries anthology. More recently, “The Barrow King’s Bride” appeared in Samhain Sorceries, and “The Horn of Tur” kicks off the new Feast of Fools anthology from Innsmouth Gold. Both are swashbucklers, one taking place in 18th century Yorkshire and the other in a distant fantasy world.

On the horizon is “The Foulness in the Depths,” a weird tale with a little Clark Asthon Smith about it, which is due to appear in Aphotic Realm sometime in early 2023. I’ll also have a story called “Hawks Over Aeolis” in Broadswords and Blasters’ new anthology. The title is swiped from REH, but the story is a planetary romance about an Edwardian aviatrix battling airborne pirates on Mars. I’ve described it as a lovechild of John Carter and Biggles, and I hope it lives up to that line…

As for works in progress, I’ve probably got a dozen stories in various stages of completion. I can’t seem to make a dent in that pile before I get excited about a new idea and start another one! A resolution for next year is to get more of them finished...

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.)
David C Smith’s Sometime Lofty Towers really impressed me – fast-paced and brutal, but with an elegiac focus on the consequences of a life of violence, as if Conan were starring in a latter-day Clint Eastwood film. It’s great to read something that’s unashamedly a sword and sorcery yarn (albeit with something of the Western about it), but which has a real interest in the internal lives of its characters.

An older book I loved is Mary Renault’s The King Must Die and its sequel. Set in a Greece somewhere between myth and pre-history, it nails the incredibly challenging task of making the distant past seem like a different planet, full of characters whose instincts are often completely alien, and yet utterly compelling. Her ambitious, iconoclastic Theseus is a wonderfully rich character.

As a bonus answer, since it falls between your old and new dates and I’ve just finished reading it, I’ll mention Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road – a bittersweet buddy comedy about a pair of wandering Jewish mercenaries in the 10th century Caucasus. Huge fun and brilliantly written; I’m very envious of his perfectly crafted, seemingly effortless prose.

Any final words?
Thanks for having me! It’s fun to delve into this stuff. And thanks for all that DMR Books do to promote sword-and-sorcery in all its forms, especially some lesser-known and appreciated authors.