Featured Interview With Langdon Franz
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I am a Navy brat and have lived everywhere from Maine to South Carolina to Washington State. After working for an Associates of Science, I joined the Navy for six years and operated a nuclear reactor on a submarine. When I finished my time in the navy in 2013 I worked at another power plant before eventually going back to school and earning my Bachelor’s in Nuclear Energy Technology. Eventually I realized I hated nuclear energy and went back to school for my MA in English and Creative Writing which I completed in 2022. I spent the first ten years of my life in Maine and the most previous ten years of in Raleigh, NC where I live with my wife and two daughters. I currently have an Australian Shepherd, Diesel, a Husky, Nala, and two cats, Yanni and Lilah. All four of them were rescues.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I discovered Goosebump in 1995 when I was ten years old and those carried me until I was thirteen where I shifted into reading exclusively fantasy novels. These included series like The Wheel of Time, Malazan Book of the Fallen, The Coldfire Trilogy, The Serpentwar Saga and The Riftwar Legacy to name a few. Around that time I dabbled in writing my own stories. They weren’t good. But it did grow my desire to one day be an author which, twenty-five years later, has become reality.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
Brandon Sanderson and Will Wight have encompassed the majority of my reading over the last decade. I rarely read anything other than fantasy. But if it’s not fantasy, it’s cosmic horror. Sanderson was a HUGE influence in my writing. Everything from the 3rd person limited point-of-view of only a few characters, to his unique magic systems and overarching story stretching across his Cosmere. Over the last few years, I have fallen in love with. H.P. Lovecraft and his Cthulhu Mythos which have ignited a desire to write cosmic horror sometime in the future.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
Heirs of the Promise took me three years to write. The first two years, I worked on it throughout my MA in English and Creative Writing. My thesist for the program was Part 1 of Heirs of the Promise. It took me one more year to finish up Part 2 and 3. It follows the protagonist, Kilal, who is the Immortal Arbiter. Arbiters are a group of enhanced humans who have the power to carve runes into their wrists to gain different abilities based on the combination of runes. The world is flat and split into three parts with only one part, The Sunlight Domain, inhabited by humans. An enormous Veil of black energy seperates the The Sunlight Domain from the Ashen Lands, a nightmarish hellscape home to the Ash Fallen, the enemy of humanity. The story picks up after Kilal and his daughter, Lilliana, were trapped in the Ashen Lands for ten years. During those ten years, Kilal lost Lilliana and fears her to be dead. After Kilal returns to the Sunlight Domain, abandoning his search for Lilliana, he must warn his land of an impending invasion of Ash Fallen which will wipe humanity from the face of their flat earth. But upon returning, he quickly realizes he no longer knows his land. A mysterious group calling themselves the Heirs of the Promise have settled into the Sunlight Domain, killed many of Kilal’s friends and corrupted the vast majority of the remaining Arbiters. Kilal finds himself faced with the task of recruiting warriors to head back into the Ashen Lands and kill the rising leader of the Ash Fallen, while trying to continue the search for his daughter and put an end to the Heirs of the Promise. It’s a fast paced novel which will be told over four books, The Immortal Arbiter Saga.
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Langdon Franz’s Website