Today, Feathered Quill reviewer Katie Specht is talking with Richard Harland, author of Ferren and the Invaders of Heaven, Book 3 in The Ferren Trilogy.

FQ: Tell our readers a little about yourself. Your background, your interests, and how this led to writing a book?

HARLAND: I was born in England and grew up in the farming countryside of Suffolk. I dreamed of being a writer from age twelve, but a few years later I won a national prize for a short story - which turned out a total disaster! I had a natural instinct for telling exciting, imaginative stories, but I won the prize with an oh-so-clever literary story. So I thought I ought to be writing literary fiction, and when I tried - writer’s block!

For twenty-five years, I started and abandoned endless stories and novels. I still have a wardrobe full of unfinished mess! Even when I went back to imaginative storytelling, it was too late. The habit of writer’s block had its grip on me.

Meanwhile, I migrated to Australia at the age of twenty-one. I never intended to stay, but fell in love with the sunshine, beaches and easygoing lifestyle. I drifted around for years as a singer, songwriter, poet, and fringe academic, then finally became a university lecturer. And really enjoyed lecturing! But I never gave up the struggle to complete a novel.

At last I did! When The Vicar of Morbing Vyle, came out in Australia, it gained a cult following and led to a contract with a bigger publisher. I glimpsed the chance of writing full-time and resigned my tenured lectureship. I had to follow my original dream!

Since then, I’ve had nineteen books of speculative fiction published. My biggest international success has been with my YA steampunk fantasy, Worldshaker and its sequels. I’ve won the Prix Tam Tam du Livre Jeunesse in France for Worldshaker, six Aurealis Awards in Australia, and now I’m starting to win awards for the Ferren books in the US - the Reader Views Teen Fiction Silver Award and the Moonbeam YA: Fantasy/SciFi Silver Award.

I live south of Sydney with partner Aileen and Yogi the labrador. We’re not far from the biggest steelworks in the Southern Hemisphere, but we’re even closer to a string of golden beaches with an escarpment like a green cliff for a backdrop. Living the dream!

FQ: Tell us a little about your book – a brief synopsis and what makes your book unique.

HARLAND: Ferren and the Invaders of Heaven is set in a post-apocalyptic world -but a literal apocalypse! The background is drawn from angelology, the fascinating Judeo-Christian-Islamic lore about angels, fallen angels, Heaven and Hell, as preserved in the Apocrypha, Gnostic writings and the Kabala. This is not a religious book, though, and has no religious message to push.

A thousand years in the future, the continents of our planet have been reduced to ruined wastelands by an endless war between Heaven and Earth. The war began ten years on from our present time, when human medical scientists pushed over the boundary between life and death, resuscitated a human brain, discovered the reality of a Heavenly afterlife and ended up fighting against the angels. In Ferren’s present, Earth’s military forces are composed of artificially created Humen, while the original human beings have been reduced to small, fearful, isolated tribes.

Now the Humen launch their ultimate invasion of Heaven. They have the means to climb right up into Heaven’s First Altitude, they have secret weapons, and most of all, they have a new leader. The angel Asmodai has turned against his own kind, and wields not only his knowledge of Heaven’s secrets but special powers he’s developed himself.

The angels have no answers … but Ferren has been building an alliance of tribes to stand against the Humen. He’s been aided by Miriael, an angel who was shot down and miraculously survived on the Earth. She’s also acquired human feelings and once fell in love with their new arch-enemy, Asmodai.

Ferren and the Invaders of Heaven contains shocks and betrayals, a desperate pursuit, close encounters with the highest archangels, an amazing journey up to Heaven, and the wonders and terrors of terra-celestial warfare. When Ferren and his followers join the fighting on Heaven’s First Altitude, this battle will decide the outcome of the thousand-year war. And there are still more twists and turns to come …

FQ: Please give our readers a little insight into your writing process. Do you set aside a certain time each day to write, only write when the desire to write surfaces, etc?

HARLAND: I start writing every day straight after breakfast and keep writing until about half past one – late lunch time. I used to think my best ideas came at the end of the day, and maybe they still do, but morning’s the best time for motivation, which I need for turning ideas into words on a page. At half past one I stop, even if I’m in the middle of an exciting episode – because then I have something I’m eager and ready to get back to next day. I’ve learned to be very strict with myself, ever since regular writing habits helped me to beat my writers’ block.

In the afternoon, I do what I call ‘pre-filming’. I’ve never heard of any other writer doing it, so perhaps it only works for me and my very visual imagination. But I mull over the episode I’m going to be writing tomorrow, I see it in my mind’s eye, how it unfolds, how it looks and sounds, I live through it like a character in the scene. Then – and here’s the trick – I sleep on it overnight. I really believe in that phrase ‘sleep on it’! I think the unconscious mind goes to work, firming up ideas and making them solid. Because, next morning, it’s no longer possible scenes, it’s the one definite episode of story – and as real as if it really happened. All I have to do is record it!

Then there are all the other times of day when ideas for scenes later on in the story pop into my head. People ask, where do your ideas come from, but mostly there’s no answer, ideas just appear, no rhyme or reason. But maybe it helps if you have a sense of your story, world and characters always at the back of your mind – like a space held open for ideas to jump into. I don’t know, I don’t think too much about it – I don’t want to think too much about it. That’s one part of the writing process that’s always come easily and naturally to me!

FQ: What was the hardest part of writing your book? That first chapter, the last paragraph, or something else?

HARLAND: Ferren and the Invaders of Heaven is a YA retro-future fantasy. But it also has elements of science fiction - as in the backstory about the beginning of the terra -celestial war between - elements of steampunk - as in the old-new technology used by the Humen of this retro-future - and elements of horror. Definitely not fantasy in the standard sense of fantasy! The supernatural here is based on religious angelogy, magical in spirit but not ordinary magic.

I think fantasy ought to be challenging, always opening up new kinds of world for the imagination. I’ve never wanted to write fantasy that simply uses the standard medieval/Celtic tropes  (though I don’t mind reading it).

The book is YA because the main characters are in that age group, but I’m sure it’s not limited to YA readers. That’s the beauty of fantasy: it really can work for anyone! I originally started the Ferren Trilogy as adult fantasy, even though the main characters were always in the YA age group. But parts of it weren’t working well, so I re-imagined it as YA in order to help myself rethink the overall story. I didn’t pull any punches in the rethink, though!

FQ: If you were to teach a class on the art of writing, what is the one item you would be sure to share with your students and how would you inspire them to get started?

HARLAND: I can answer this because I’ve done it - in workshops with writing groups, in schools, etc. I think the supreme challenge of fantasy is to imagine a world that’s way, way different to anything in our real lives - and then convince the reader to experience it just as if it were real life. Every bit as solid, filled-out and vivid! For all writers, it’s essential to get the reader living along with the characters as if standing in their shoes; for fantasy writers, it’s harder to do, so all the more crucial to succeed in doing it!

I set up a possible scene that none has ever has or could experience for real, and say to aspiring writers: imagine yourself there! What would you see, hear, smell, think, feel? What would it actually be like? I’ve sometimes used the example of Ferren coming upon the angel Miriael lying shot down and damaged in the grass - this awe-inspiring, fear-inspiring kind of being only ever seen as a distant light in the sky … but now the light of her aura is dying. She’s in pain - yet she’s an enemy - yet she’s very, very beautiful. It’s amazing the impressions that people can come up with - it doesn’t matter if they match what I created, just so long as they’re detailed and personal and persuasive.

A big part of the skill lies in drawing on morsels of what you have experienced in real life, but projecting and expanding them to live up to something much, much bigger. Another, more testing example: put yourself in Miriael’s shoes (sandals?!) - how would it feel to be reduced to this damaged state, losing your light and unable to fly - and then sense the approach of an Earth-dwelling creature, dirty, unkempt, sweaty, physical? That requires an almost metaphysical leap of the imagination, but everyone has it, although it’s often buried under the weight of real life.

The younger the group I’m talking to, often, the better they are at letting loose their imaginations.

FQ: Is this the first book, the second, etc. in the series and how many books do you anticipate writing in this series?

HARLAND: Ferren and the Invaders of Heaven is Book 3 in the Ferren trilogy. When I originally wrote Book 1, it was a standalone, and I wasn’t prepared when my publisher wanted it turned into a trilogy. I managed to come up with the ideas for a trilogy, but was never fully satisfied with the result - I didn’t have time to flesh out those ideas the way they deserved to be fleshed out.

That was the original Heaven and Earth trilogy published twenty years ago and sold only in Australia. By and by, the books went out of print, which should have been the end of the story. But those books had fans - really devoted fans, and they wouldn’t let Ferren and his world go! They harassed publishers for a reprint, and twenty years later, they won through! IFWG Publishing proposed a reprint of the trilogy, I countered with a proposal for a total rewrite - and now here it is!

For me, the new Ferren trilogy is the story as it always should have been. Instead of a great first volume followed by a falling away, now every volume builds upon the one before. The stakes get higher and higher, the story gets bigger and bigger! When I finished typing out Ferren and the Invaders of Heaven, I felt the ultimate satisfaction: the potential that had always been there was now fully realized! I’d brought it to birth at last!

FQ: Where did the idea for your story come from?

HARLAND: The inspiration for the trilogy was a single generative spark – it came out of a dream. Seriously! I dreamed I was under a blanket, then peeked out and saw uncanny, moving lights in the night sky and heard weird, ominous sounds. Suddenly I knew – the way you can know things in dreams as though someone had told you – that this was the great war going on between the armies of Heaven and the armies of Earth.

I was still watching when one of the lights came hurtling down out of the sky straight at me. That was the moment I woke up, but I was still in the drowsy, half-conscious state when you come out of a dream too fast. I thought to myself, ‘That must've been an angel shot down and crashing to Earth. And she must've landed very close by. Perhaps she’s dead or injured.’

I thought more about it as I came fully awake. One thing I thought was, ‘I’ve been gifted the start of a novel.’ And so I had! It took me decades to fill out the background behind that first scene, decades of research and story-planning, many, many drafts and versions. But through every draft and version, one thing was always the same: the opening scene. With the young tribesman Ferren in my place, the first ten pages of Ferren and the Angel have never varied. Ferren sees Miriael shot down and fall to the Earth; next morning, he goes to investigate.

The third book, Ferren and the Invaders of Heaven, grew very naturally out of the two before. All the elements were in place for building up to a tremendous Humen invasion of Heaven – yet so many elements hadn’t been planned for that purpose at all. The Morphs, the angel Asmodai and Miriael falling in love with him, the past world history including the Weather Wars and the fallen angels allowed back up into Heaven – I’d never guessed at the role those elements would play. Yet it was if they were just there waiting to play it! It’s a great feeling when the story takes over with a life of its own!

FQ: The “bad guy/gal” in your book … was he/she fun to create and how difficult was it to write those scenes where he/she plays a central role?

HARLAND: The angel Asmodai is the ultimate ‘bad guy’ in the Ferren trilogy, and bad with a special sort of evil. It was fun creating him, but he made me shiver too. In fact, I don’t know how much I created him - he seemed to grow and develop into a kind of monstrosity I’d never expected.

His monstrosity is all internal; outwardly, he’s very beautiful, with a solemn sadness on top of the natural beauty of all angels. He’s also compassionate and sympathetic towards Miriael - at least, he can assume those qualities very, very convincingly. But underneath …

He was once a follower of Satan, but now views Satan as clumsy and unsophisticated. His version of pride is more inward, and he’d never reveal it. He’s also unusually clever and original for an angel, despising the traditionalist thinking of Heaven and developing powers never previously contemplated.

Did I mention that he’s been allowed to return to Heaven along with other ‘Luciferians’? That was a belief of some of the early Church fathers such as St Jerome, that the followers of Satan would eventually repent and be allowed to return.

Asmodai’s special monstrosity comes from the general condition of angels in Heaven. They touch spirit to spirit and exist in a state of total community, and partake in a communal kind of love, all for all. They can’t experience the human kind of love of one person for another.

Miriael, who is no longer purely spiritual, can experience the human kind of love, and she falls in love with Asmodai. Asmodai observes it in her and encourages it for his own ends. But he also enjoys being fallen in love with! It tickles his vanity, to have someone feeling this peculiarly close, personal love for him, which he - still a purely spiritual being - can never feel in return.

Isn’t that monstrous? It seems to me the pinnacle of cold-hearted egotism. Asmodai does many terrible things in the story, but the way he uses someone else’s feelings for his own gratification is what chills me the most.

FQ: Tell us about the fans favorite character. Were you surprised at the response to this character? Why do you think readers respond to this character?

HARLAND: Some fans have told me that Zonda’s their favorite character - others dislike and condemn her! She’s that sort of personality, you either love her or hate her. I’m not sure how I’d react to her in real life, but I love her in Ferren’s world. She’s pushy and forward, utterly self-confident, and what she wants she goes for. I don’t know - she’s just so much herself, just totally Zonda through and through! Ballsy and irrepressible! She always bounces back, and although she bumps thoughtlessly and bruisingly against other people, she really doesn’t have a mean bone in her body.

In Ferren and the Invaders of Heaven, she’s decided that what she wants is Ferren - and that creates a triangle with Kiet. I’m not telling how it works out, but you can bet Zonda will bounce up some way or other!

FQ: What was the most difficult scene to write and why?

HARLAND: I think the most difficult chapter was when Miriael goes up through the Altitudes of Heaven in a visionary dream. She’s had such dreams before, where she’s really, presently there as a spiritual consciousness, while her body remains below on the Earth, so I could handle the paradoxes of that. But to create a sequence of different Heavenly scenes, all beautiful and tremendous, while making them so vivid that the reader can actually see them! My imagination works very much with visual effects and sound effects, but I don’t think it’s ever had to work so hard as on that chapter.

I started Miriael off on the Third Altitude, which is where manna is produced according to traditional angelology. I pictured light falling from above like a faint mist, settling and crystallising as manna on the branches of manna-bushes; then the silhouetted figures of angels in the light, carrying baskets and gathering manna. I can’t properly describe it now, but I think I did in Chapter 12. Simple and peaceful … but more and more magnificent as she rises up through the Fourth Altitude, home of the Heavenly Byzantium, then the Fifth Altitude where a vast wall of a thousand angels sing in unison. There’s a thunder of organ music behind the choir, and I hope I created a visual equivalent.

Finally – in Chapter 13 – she ascends into the Hall of the Council, where the boughs of the Tree of Life arch to form a roof and the fluttering Blessed Souls form the leaves. There stand the great archangels in all their radiance …

I don’t know if it was more or less difficult for the fact that Miriael is experiencing emotions of her own at the same time: a desperation to communicate with angels who can’t see her, a sense of loss over the glorious realm she’s left behind, a sort of awestruck dread at venturing into levels of Heaven where she’s never been allowed before.

To learn more about Ferren and the Invaders of Heaven, Book 3 in The Ferren Trilogy, please visit the author's website at: richardharland.au