Featured Interview With Venancio Cadle Gomani Jr.
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I’m a 21 year old Speculative Fiction and Historical Fiction writer who loves to try tones of new things. I was born in a little city called Kitwe here in Zambia though I was mostly raised in different cities in Botswana. When I was around 5 years old my dad moved the rest of the family to Francistown in Botswana because he had just gotten a new job there. So from around the time I was 5 years old till the age of 14 years old we mostly lived there in Botswana moving from one city to another before finally moving back to Lusaka city here in Zambia where I currently live.
I’d love to travel a little more in the early months of 2016 and I’d really love to visit the city of Nanchang, China for a few weeks.
I really love being experimental and explorative with my stories and I personally believe my childhood travels are what influenced my writing style.
I’m currently studying for my bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering at DMI-St. Eugene University.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I started out writing when I was just around 12 years old and at that time I was in my seventh grade.
As a child I was always fascinated by Dr. Sues’ stories and even though I couldn’t really relate so much with stories such as Sherlock Holmes and other more adult reads enough to reciprocate appropriately, to a certain extent I attempted a few cracks at them. I did take a strong liking to novels such as Christopher Paolini’s Eragon, and C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia.
I do recall, however, falling in love with storytelling when we had just moved to Francistown for the first time back in 2000 and I hadn’t made so many friends yet. At that time I could barely write my own name but I loved sketching stories and those were my first attempts at storytelling.
Over the years I began writing picture books as my next attempt at storytelling. I explored so many more avenues of storytelling such as writing music, scripts and plays, making comic books, yet I always went back to writing novels and short stories simply because it gave me more liberty to really just describe in detail the worlds I would create and have my story written as persuasive as I possibly could.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I love Author Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes because Mystery is perhaps my favorite genre to read. I love books by Edgar Allan Poe such as the Raven and The Pit and the Pendulum.
And as for authors who inspire me so much, I side with J. R. R. Tolkien for his Lord of the Rings and perhaps George R. R. Martin for his A Song of Ice and Fire simply because I love how they create whole worlds. Personally I love to create worlds and systems too and create stories within those worlds that I would write about, such as my “Crest of Dreams” world.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
My most recent book is Quantos Rising and it is the first in my Crest of Dreams series.
Crest of Dreams is the story of a world that has been split into four colonies after a Great War in which knowledge, civilizations, and time were lost from the world. After five hundred years of recreation civilization is split into four colonies: those that live on the ground call their colony ‘Damiroo‘; those who live in underwater cities call their colony ‘Retarctica‘; those who live in floating cities that hover above the clouds call their colony ‘Anotreshpore‘; and those who live in space cities following the same orbit as the moon around the earth call their colony ‘Centralis‘.
How I love to write books is that I would first create or recreate a whole world before building stories inside, and what takes the longest in my process is the quality of the detail in the world I create so it shouldn’t come as much a surprise to know that it takes me quite a while to fully have a story ready because of the heavy processes involved. I began working on the Crest of Dreams world in the last few months of 2012 and I’ve been working on the story ever since. And since the story is so exciting and detailed, I would love to tell the story of each of the four Domiciles.
Quantos Rising is simply the first and introductory short novel to the Damiroo Domicile and there will be three more short novels to tell the story of the other three Domiciles (T-16 to tell the short introductory story of Retarctica, The Superimposition to tell the short introductory story of Anotreshpore, and Sons of Time to tell the short introductory story of Centralis). After each of these short introductory stories will come full length novellas of each of the stories of the Domiciles.
The book is available on Amazon at: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01958A4VW and on Kobo Books at: https://store.kobobooks.com/en-us/ebook/quantos-rising.
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Venancio Cadle Gomani Jr.’s Website