This is one of the worlds I’ve spent numerous years crafting. I love worldbuilding and I wanted to create an intricate world where many different types of stories could reside. As a kid, I loved Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis’ Dragonlance universe, I loved the Forgotten Realms universe. Each time I read a new book set in those worlds, I knew I wanted to write something like that. I wanted a versatile world where the adventures that take place there could range from dark to lighthearted, from epic high fantasy to adrenaline-pumping sword and sorcery.

I think there’s a part of human nature that instinctively fears what they don’t know or understand. For me that aversion to “the other” is what draws me to horror because I’ve always identified more with the other, the monster, the incomprehensible. Often, I feel like an outsider even in my own sense of self, and so writing is a way for me to get closer to my thoughts and feelings. And then a big part of the appeal of horror is that first it introduces the other, the unknown, and then it entices you to come closer.

I started boxing recently and am finding myself drawn to these parallels between combat sports and horror. Both ask for a wild and possibly counterintuitive sort of consent: I give you permission to scare the hell out of me, or I give you permission to hit me in the face. Everyone signs a waiver in Primal Slap class.

Despite not actually caring about sports outside of weightlifting, I’m a big fan of sports novels. Walter Tevis has a couple of amazing ones such as The Queen’s Gambit and The Hustler. Dostoevsky’s The Gambler is also a great novel about gambling. I think the common thread between these stories is a uniquely accessible window that fiction provides into the mind of the gamer or the sportsperson—we get to see what really makes them tick. I wanted to apply this to horror.