Author Interview with K.S. Villoso – Wikathon 2022

What is your pastry and beverage combination of choice?

SHEALEA: Hi, Kay! It’s very lovely to have you back on this blog again, especially for Wikathon 2022. Definitely been a while since I last interviewed you, so let’s start with a few warmup questions: Let’s imagine that we’re doing this interview in a beautiful café. What pastry and beverage combination would you order from the menu?

K.S. VILLOSO: Probably a chocolate mousse, a brownie, or a slice of red velvet cake with a dark roast double-double… which is Canadian slang for a plain coffee with two creams and two sugars. I love the combination of chocolate with ridiculously dark coffee. (Related, one of my favourite types of beer is milk stout with strong coffee notes.)

Are there any media that you’ve been avidly consuming lately? Can you share a few titles with us?

K.S. VILLOSO: I’ve been on a last frontier sort of kick lately. The most recent show I really enjoyed was Klondike starring Richard Madden (the actor for Robb Stark), which is a mini-series depicting life in the Yukon Territory during the Gold Rush. It’s detailed and grim and brutal and probably boring to most people, and I loved the heck out of it.

To add to that, I’ve been playing Red Dead Redemption 2, albeit a bit too much according to my husband, who recognizes how tempted I am to say goodbye to society and go muck around in the wilderness with dogs and horses…

Why have you decided to re-publish your fantasy books?

SHEALEA: After a busy year following the traditional release of Chronicles of the Bitch Queen (wherein the installments were published months apart from each other), you are now re-publishing your other fantasy books. What made you decide to take on such a huge endeavor?

K.S. VILLOSO: I’ve always really wanted people to experience the story as it was meant to be — which is not just a snapshot of the events in the Bitch Queen series, but to see the progression of the background plot and the growth of the characters over years. It’s always been the draw of epic fantasy for me. To write about a woman first as a girl, and then see her learn and make mistakes and then become a force to be reckoned with… remains fascinating to me.

There’s been a trend in epic fantasy in trad these days that prioritize fast-paced action, and it shows in a lot of the books acquired… the classic-style epic fantasy that starts with a protagonist as a child and spans multiple books and multiple plot arcs have been mostly relegated to the realm of self-publishing.

So it’s a natural decision for me to go back to the earlier books and give them the same treatment that my traditional publisher gave Chronicles of the Bitch Queen, which includes fresh new covers and pretty formatting, so that fans of the trad series would have more story to consume if they so desire.

Having experience in both traditional and self-publishing, what factors do you consider in choosing which route to take for your projects?

K.S. VILLOSO: The trad process is slow, and my agent knows she is better positioned to sell books that follow typical narrative structures, so we do a lot of edits for those manuscripts with that in mind. I generally hand over shiny, new series ideas to my agent — anything involving new characters, a completely separate plotline with a nice ‘hook,’ and so on.

Anything that is a continuation of my existing series (such as Blackwood Marauders, which is an ‘open’ series of standalones… e.g. there is no set plan, I just write the books when inspiration strikes me) is generally self-pub immediately. So are book ideas that are a bit more straightforward: books that [are] just about fast-paced action, adventuring, or expanding an existing world.

Of course, as a bit of a contradiction to all of that, books that are also too weird, experimental, or don’t fit into any existing mold with strange structures to boot are probably better for self-publishing. I have a few of those baking away in the background.

It goes without saying, as well, that any books I am unable to sell to traditional publishing will automatically jump on my self-pub schedule.

What is it about Agos-agan that inspires you to continue revisiting it?

SHEALEA: One fascinating aspect of your republished books is that they’re all set in the same vibrant world of Agos-agan. What is it about Agos-agan that inspires you to continue revisiting it?

K.S. VILLOSO: It’s the first world I ever made, and it’s comforting to return to it. Probably because I’m not too hung up on “rules” or trying to make it more than it is. It’s just a playground with the equipment for me to explore certain issues that are important to me as a Filipino living in the diaspora. The magic system is also ridiculously simple while allowing me to expand it to suit the plotline—in the end, it reflects the emotional depth of the characters in my stories, because it’s all about our connections to each other.

SHEALEA: Relatedly, does writing multiple stories anchored to the same fantasy setting come with unique challenges? And how do you navigate them?

K.S. VILLOSO: The hard part is remembering who did what at which point in time! It helps that I always approach each series as a potential gateway to the world, so I spent some time establishing new ground rules that give every series a unique flavour.

Each of them have different sub-genres (Bitch Queen is high fantasy epic action, Blackwood Marauders is low fantasy sword-and-sorcery), which adjusts the framing of the plot. And because each one of them is either first person or deep, deep third POV, the narrative is “limited” by what the character knows. I very rarely declare something as correct in the narrative. Instead, I allow minor mistakes to happen, because nobody knows 100% about everything correctly all the time…inaccuracies just make it all the more realistic to me, and it’s all about what each character interprets for that story.

Without spoiling, what are some things that readers can look forward to in these books?

K.S. VILLOSO: Maximum family drama. I’m talking Filipino soap opera levels. I can’t write books and not insert tsismis fodder into the mix.

Can you tell us more about your experiences in collaborating with Filipino creatives?

SHEALEA: The new book covers are so gorgeous, by the way! I understand that you worked alongside Filipino illustrators to come up with them. That’s really cool. Can you tell us more about your experiences in collaborating with Filipino creatives?

K.S. VILLOSO: I loved it. I love coming up to someone whose work I really admired, giving them the freedom to interpret my world in their own way, and seeing the result. I love seeing all the differences, but also all the similarities — like the Lapu-lapu style headscarf! I don’t believe I ever told anyone to draw that in, but it’s shown up multiple times during the draft process. Without a doubt, it’s my favourite part of the whole process.

Can you tell us more about your upcoming project and the Kickstarter to support it?

SHEALEA: In our recent talks, you mentioned that you’re currently working on a new book launch. (Seriously, your hustle game remains unparalleled.) Can you tell us more about your upcoming project and the Kickstarter to support it?

K.S. VILLOSO: The new project is yet another “gateway” to the series and connecting plotlines of the world. Chronologically, it’s smack dab between the Agartes/Legacy of the Lost Mage series and Chronicles of the Bitch Queen, and for fans of both, you’re going to find out more about how the cast of the previous novel affected the events in the latter (particularly all those magic bits in the final book, The Dragon of Jin-Sayeng).

But the most important thing is that this is the about the journey of a magical school dropout. It’s about a woman who grew up in a colonial empire she wanted nothing to do with, except now it needs her. Maybe. If Chronicles of the Bitch Queen is a thinly veiled depiction of the homeland and its problems without the touch of colonization, this new series is about the diaspora. How do the challenges of the homeland and the challenges of living in this other world, which has hurt the homeland in many ways, connect?

The major characters are all people you normally don’t see represented in a magical school setting. There’s a transracial adoptee, the girl who couldn’t be a student and lived in the servants’ quarters instead, the war refugee… people from the outside, looking in. I wanted to show how an empire is truly run—by the cooks, the housekeepers, the groundskeepers, the servants, the workers—many of whom are immigrants or children of immigrants. And then I wanted to get these people to shake the foundations of this grand, terrible empire, and break it from within.

You can learn more about Outlaw Mage at my Kickstarter page.