Ian Richard Gill Interview Published on: 06, Jun 2022

I grew up in Oakville, Ontario, Canada until I was 14, then we sold our house and moved to an apartment in Etobicoke (west-end Toronto), big change. Lived there for my high school years, and moved out on my own in 1976. My childhood was different from most, as I was born with a hole in my heart, which was life threatening. After two major surgeries (3 years old & 7 years old) I was on the mend, but still not able to keep up with the other kids, so I kept to myself a lot, read science fiction and science fact, both of which fascinated me. Eventually I became strong (in my 20’s) but remained susceptible to asthma attacks, so had to be careful.

Nothing unusual or memorable enough to remember, although I’m sure that I did.

My family has been aware that I write, and that I wanted to write a novel for a very long time, as I had been attempting to do so since my early teens. When I finally did finish my first novel, Distant Kingdoms: The Drodenar Project, Folly of the Gods (first book of a trilogy) I think that they were surprised at my ability. In particular, my older brother and two of my sisters served as alpha readers, and were quite supportive.

Actually, I have written since I was a teenager, but never with the drive to finish a project. When I was 57 (2014), I envisioned this book, and began writing, but like before it was a start and stop kind of process. Then the pandemic hit in March 2020. It gave me the time I needed to focus, and so I hunkered down and wrote the rest of the book. After my brother Steve agreed to read it, and came back with positive feedback I became determined to publish it. My sisters, Heather and Kathy also read the manuscript at that point, and encouraged me to finish the project, so I have written two subsequent volumes, Book 2, Wars and Rumors, and Book 3, Age of Askelwrought. These volumes are waiting to be published, once Book 1 starts producing significant sales.

I was sitting around the dining room table with my sons, Jason, and Krystofer in early 2014, and the topic came up of a story that had occurred to me in a dream the night before. The dream was about a race of beings, neither male nor female, but both, created in a University Research Facility in the distant future,… but where? We brainstormed a bit, and I chose a fictitious planet in orbit around the binary star Sirius. Then it became necessary to envision these beings, so sketches were quickly made, according to what I thought they should look like. I wanted them to have very specific attributes, including arms that carried a double forearm, and so we discussed what kind of musculature would be required to support this system. We thought that an extra large upper arm and shoulder was required to accommodate the extra muscles needed to operate the additional limb. Other details were fleshed in as I set about writing the story. I began to create the world Drodenar, on which these Androgenari lived, including a planetary history, topography, and political systems and religions that made up their cultural environment. Once these things were established I began to create my Andro characters. Only then did I begin to write my Human characters, and develop their own realities, including their civilization, its economy, politics, and so on.

Rochester, like all of my characters, is a composite of many components, not based entirely on any person I have ever known. He is the first-born identical twin, along with his brother Maximillian, of a mother, Anna Gloria Henderson, who is a fiercely independent business woman, Owner, and CEO of Trans-Galaxy Shipping Lines. In essence, the characters of both Max and Roche, as they are also known, are largely determined by their relationships with their mother. Max, the dutiful son, followed Anna’s directions and studied hard and long to become a noted scientific authority in multiple fields, while Roche, preferring a more Bohemian lifestyle decided to follow The Arts, which placed him into direct conflict with Anna’s wishes. She disowned him, and cast him adrift to avoid embarrassment. Understandably, the futures of both men develop divergently from that point forward.

I have been a science geek my whole life, so it came as no surprise to me that I had a decent knowledge base to start with. That being said, I researched certain facts, such as the distances of other star systems from our own, including the star names, online. I wanted the scope and distribution of the Earth Empire to be reasonable, and not spread out too far into regions that we could not have reached by the dates I intended to use, as we were limited by our inability to travel faster than light. I chose to avoid the whole warp speed thing, and stick with established reality. In my Empire, sub-lightspeed colony ships were sent out to the nearest stars, including those that were only a small number of lightyears from Earth, the journey taking mere decades. It was then that receiver technology could be established on those worlds for matter transference technology. Subsequently, additional equipment and personnel could travel at the speed of light, a journey of only 4.2 years to Alpha Centauri, for example.

Buy gold. Seriously, it was $50.00 an ounce when I was a teenager.

This is a great question. Initially, I did write a brief outline, but it was only bare bones and only took me so far into the storyline. What I found, was that my characters, once they had been established, wrote the story for me, so to speak, by their interactions with one another. As they moved the plotline forward, their characters developed, and as they changed so did the trajectory of my writing. It was their development that contributed to several plot twists along the way, and due to this those twists were not really seen until they happened, surprising even me at times.

So many things have happened to Max, so I will pick one. As a young Archeologist, Max makes a discovery on the ancient world, Defynas that wins him tremendous notoriety across the Empire. Unfortunately for Max, too much of a good thing can take a toll, and over several decades of a whirlwind of travel and speaking tours, celebrity wears thin, leaving him exhausted mentally and physically. In response, he falls off the scientific touring wagon and spends a decade in relative anonymity aboard one of Anna’s ships. Perhaps my books will propel me into the limelight one day, and I will do my best to accommodate that if it happens, but I don’t have Anna Henderson at my bad pushing me, the way Max does.

The titles of my books have tended to come to me on their own, before I begin to write. Strangely, however, when I am writing chapters, the opposite is true. Generally speaking, I don’t know the title of a chapter until very near to, or at the end of writing it. Only then is the real theme of the chapter obvious to me, and therein do I find the title.

I have author friends on social media, including Facebook, Instagram and most recently, Twitter. Some of them have read and even reviewed my first book, and provided me with insights and critiques which have been helpful. On Twitter, I am involved in a writer’s forum, where there is a lively and ongoing discussion of writing topics, as well as a fair number of philosophical questions that stimulate thought. Often, writers engage in writer’s-lifts that encourage us to share our projects, websites, and reviews, to develop exposure.

It really varies for me, as I will sit down and write whenever something occurs to me and must be put down, but I tend to do most of my writing during the morning, after breakfast, until the urge subsides.

Of course, I am working on the two subsequent books of the series, Wars and Rumors, and Age of Askelwrought. The Drodenar Project is, after all, an epic, that follows the Androgenari and their Human creators over millennia, though adventures, and through wars, to a conclusion that contains so many more possibilities.

I have only been with AllAuthor for a few months now, but so far they have done everything that they said they would do. This has not been my experience with other platforms I have tried, some of which did part of what they promised, some things decently, others poorly or not at all. Yes, I would recommend AllAuthor to other authors that I know.