I love to read books that transport the reader into another world, just off the edge of this one.
BOUND opens with Alex cage fighting in the underground scene, using his slightly supernatural skills to see what an opponent will do before he moves. But his magic draws him into a world he never knew existed – a world he wishes he'd never found.
You can watch an interview with Alan below, or read the full transcription underneath. You can find BOUND on Amazon in ebook and print here.
Transcription of interview with Alan Baxter
Joanna: Hi, everyone, I’m thriller author, J.F. Penn, and today I’m here with Alan Baxter. Hi, Al!
Alan: Hi, how are you?
Joanna: I’m good. So, just as a little introduction, Alan is a best-selling and award-nominated author of dark urban fantasy novels and short stories. His latest book is “Bound,” in the Alex Caine series, which is fantastic, and we’ll be talking a bit about that today.
So, Alan, tell us a bit more about your writing journey. How did you get into being a writer?
Alan: It’s one of those questions, isn’t it! The short answer is, I’ve always been a writer, I just didn’t realize it. When I was about seven or eight years old, in school, we were sent home on a Friday, and we had to write a story for the Monday. When we came back on the Monday, most of my friends, or most of the class, had written one or two paragraphs, and I’d written about seven or eight pages about this guy who goes back in time and gets chased by dinosaurs and all sorts of stuff. And once the teacher had confirmed that it was my work, that my parents hadn’t written it or something like that, she got me to stand in front of the class and read it. People were coming up to me afterwards, my friends, classmates, going, “Oh, yeah, that was a really great story,” and that was my first realization of the power of storytelling.
And like I said, I was seven or eight years old at that point, but I didn’t really realize and take it seriously until I was in my 20s. I did a lot of role-playing games in my teens, and I used to prefer being the Games Master rather than the player, because I would get to write the campaigns and learn to tell stories that way.
Joanna: You’re not in your 20s anymore, Al! How did you get from there to now?
Alan: How can you tell! Well, the two things that I’ve always pursued are writing and martial arts, since I was a kid. And in the early, mid-90s, I got to the point where I’d quit school, and I’d got a really crappy job that was basically just 9 to 5, but it paid my training fees, which meant that my job didn’t occupy too much time, or my brain: I could go and train, I could afford my training fees. And that’s what I did for a long time. Then I started feeling like I was in a rut, and I was like, “I’ve got to shake this up a bit,” because I hated my job, that 9 to 5 bit was hell all the time.
About the same time, a friend and I decided to go and visit a mate in Australia, to help break things up, and at the same time, that friend of mine was like, “Oh, I really want to go travelling and see the world, but I don’t know if I want to go on my own,” and so she and I decided we would go together. And suddenly, one night, over a few beers, we had this whole round-the-world trip planned.
While I was on that trip and thinking about things and seeing the world and everything, I made a few decisions about what I wanted to do, and one of those decisions was, “I need to pursue writing rather than as a hobby: actually do it seriously and see if I can get published and see if I can actually be good at it.”
So that’s when I made the decision to do it, and also on that trip, I met my wife. I ended up moving to Australia, and then in the process of all that, living in Sydney and working, before I actually became an Australian citizen, I started working on “RealmShift,” which was my first published novel. So yeah, that was the big transition period, walking the earth like Caine in Kung Fu [03:37 unclear], deciding to make life changes!
Joanna: I know what you mean. I left London for Australia in the year 2000. Was that a similar time?
Alan: I moved to Sydney permanently in 1999. I was first traveling in 96, I think, so a similar time.
Joanna: It’s funny, isn’t it, these traveling times often help us make life changes, that’s awesome. But let’s talk a bit about the fighting side, the martial arts side, because Alex Caine, in your latest trilogy, is a fighter.
Tell us a bit more about your own fighting experience and how much of that comes through in the books.
Alan: Well, like I said, I’ve been a martial artist forever. I was teaching before I left the UK, and then after traveling, I joined a new school when I came to Australia, and basically started again with that school and trained up again, and then started teaching with them. It’s just something that’s always been part of my life, and it’s a lifestyle. For some people, it’s a hobby, and that’s enough, once or twice a week, and they get what they get from it, but for a lot of people, it becomes a lifestyle, and it kind of informs everything that you do.
That’s very much the case with me. I used to fight a lot in competition before I left the UK, and fighting since then. I’ve long since retired from fighting – I never had a professional fight career; everything I did was at amateur level. When I decided to ease back on the fighting was about the same time as the whole big MMA and UFC mixed martial arts cage-fighting thing was really starting to take off. So I kind of missed that: my fighting was more on the open mat and in the ring, rather than the cage.
I wrote a book with Alex Caine as the protagonist, partly because all the stuff I’d written before featured a lot of fighting, and it featured a lot of people who knew martial arts and stuff: everybody told me I wrote great fight scenes, and it’s like, “Well, I’ve fought my whole life, I know fighting; that’s why I write it well.” I started running workshops for writers about how to write good fight scenes, and then when it came to time to start working on a new series, I decided I should write a character who is actually a fighter. Not a character who’s something else and can fight, but someone who is first and foremost a fighter, and that’s where this story starts.
So, in terms of the character of Alex Caine, a lot of what drives him, and a lot of his philosophy and everything, is very much like my own: you know, the lifetime martial artist. In terms of his character, certainly what happens to him, and also in terms of how he responds to things, that’s the fictional element. He’s not an autobiographical character in that respect, but I was able to use a lot of my experience of living the philosophy of the martial arts, to make Alex the same in how he lives the philosophy of the martial arts, and that’s what he draws on throughout the books to get him through this horrible situation he gets into.
So, yes, I finally got to pull the threads of my life together!
Joanna: I love the books because of that. I think there is a reality, and of course there are great fight scenes, but there’s a much more human aspect, I think: you bring the thinking—the thinking man’s fight scene, perhaps, behind that.
Alan: And through the course of the books, Alex is always thinking back to his teacher, his sifu, which is the Chinese equivalent of a sensei, and the lessons that he was taught, and throughout the book, he keeps making these connections, where lessons about fighting are actually equally applicable to life and to any other kind of struggle.
He’s always drawing on this experience, all his experience fighting in the cage actually helps him deal with all this stuff outside of the cage. I explore that a lot, in all my writing, but specifically in these books, because that crossover, for me, is very true, and it’s true for anybody really: the more you do these things, the more you realize that lessons tend to be trans-dimensional in the way you can apply them.
Joanna: Just briefly, on the girl power, because I have to bring that in: your wife is also a martial artist, isn’t she, and you have plenty of female fighters in the book as well.
Alan: That’s right. I run an academy now, on the South Coast of New South Wales, where I live, and that’s our business, that’s our day job, running the Kung Fu Academy, and my wife’s my Assistant Instructor. She teaches the kids and juniors classes and helps out with the adult classes, and she kicks absolute butt! And it’s very important. It bothers me when people say, “You have strong female characters,” and I understand where it comes from; I understand the need for it, as well. But I just tend to write strong characters, and I make sure that women are well represented in my books. But there’s some weak and useless guys in the books as well.
Joanna: There’s a particularly good one I liked, one of the evil and useless horrible guys with a hard woman next to him!
Alan: Exactly. So, that’s important to me. I don’t set out to write strong, kick-ass women, but I set out to write strong characters, and I make sure women are well-represented in my writing, and so hopefully then that comes across. Not all the women are good and nice and strong; some of them are pretty messed up as well. But that’s the nature of the books; you get all kinds of people.
Joanna: Indeed! Now, you mentioned a bit about the philosophy there, and the feelings of fighting. I wondered: these two threads run through your life.
What do the martial arts and your writing have in common? They seem so different.
Alan: No, no. They’re parallel. I am actually writing a book on it: for years, I’ve been jotting things down and making notes, and one day I’m going to write a book which will essentially be a guide to the creative life based on the martial life. Just to draw a really simple analogy, if you want to be good at writing, or painting, or music, then you have to work really hard, you have to practice a lot, you have to learn your craft, and that’s exactly the same for fighting. You need the discipline to do it: if you want to be good at sport and you want to get onto an Olympic team, you have kids who are in their teens, but they get up and go to the gym for two hours before school, then they do their homework and they train in the evening, and it takes that dedication to get good. It’s the same with writing, and it’s the same if you want to be an artist.
To bring my wife into it again, she runs the Academy with me, but she’s also a painter. And that’s the same thing: she’s dedicated this focus to getting really good at her craft, and it takes a lot of time, a lot of effort and a lot of sacrifice to do it. So those parallels between becoming a good martial artist and living the martial life is the same as becoming a good writer—or a good farmer, or a good policeman or whatever it is that you put your soul into. If you’ve got that passion for it, then you need to apply yourself that way. So, yes, one of these days I’ll write the book!
Joanna: I’d be interested in that: it sounds fascinating. Get on with that when you have a moment!
Alan: Sure! I’ll add it to the list. When I’ve got enough notes, I’ll start the book!
Joanna: I think that sounds great. So, the books also have this supernatural, urban fantasy edge, as do some of your other books I’ve read—“RealmShift” and “MageSign,” which again are awesome.
Why are you drawn to write the supernatural side?
Alan: I think I write the supernatural and a lot of darkness and horror—a lot of what I do tends to go toward dark fantasy and edging into horror—because I think there’s a certain honesty to it. If you’re going to dive into a rabbit-hole, I want to go all the way to the end, and go right down, where it keeps getting darker and darker; keep going until you get to the end, because I don’t want to cop out on things. And so, if you’re going to have people that are in difficult situations with big threats, then if you take out the natural rules, the threats can get bigger, so you have supernatural rules that give you this fantastic scope for story-telling.
And, of course, anything in a story is an analogy for something else, and so when you’re testing characters, you can test them up to a point with human adversaries, and then you can test them even further with non-human adversaries. In many ways, the more supernatural or the more unnatural you make a story, the more you can draw out the human in your characters, because that’s the difference. The more difference you show, the more you can highlight the human aspect of your protagonist—or your antagonist or whatever.
And apart from anything else, it’s just enormous fun for story-telling to be able to play with monsters and magic and stuff like that. So you get to have this really exciting and thrilling and different and other-worldly escapism, but you also get to have that far greater reflection of human character as well, I think. And I love mythology, so I love to play with that and bend it.
Joanna: I seem to remember there’s a pretty cool supernatural / fight scene under the Coliseum, between Alex and a creature.
Can you tell us a bit about the supernatural aspects of the story?
Alan: It’s always a bit difficult without giving too much away, but, fundamentally, what I wanted to do when I started deciding about the Alex Caine series, is take the character himself who was a career martial artist who has this little edge that. He doesn’t actually realize initially he’s magical, and turns out to be, and that grows throughout the story. I also wanted to play around with existing tropes, and so in the first book, it’s sort of loosely based on the classic quest, where you have someone who gets taken out of their comfortable life and they end up going on this journey, and they have to find the thing or do the thing against adversaries. And then I mixed that with the thriller aspect of other people who also want the thing, so there’s a race to get to it, and all those kind of elements. Those were the sort of things I wanted to play up, but I wanted to do it all with that dark, supernatural horror edge to it, because I love to genre mash, so I can’t just write a horror story, I have to write a horror thriller dark fantasy mystery kind of thing.
I just really enjoy mashing that stuff up, and I get to draw so much story out of it. And it’s a lot more fun: I want people just flicking pages. The best compliment I can get is, ‘Oh, I couldn’t put it down’: it’s the best compliment. Of course, I like it when people compliment my actual writing ability or the ideas or whatever, but if someone says, ‘Oh god, I couldn’t put it down,’ that’s the best for me, because it means that they looked past all those other elements and were just totally sucked in by a story; that they just wanted to know what happened next. That’s what I’m always going for.
Joanna: They definitely have that! What are the themes that you keep coming back to in your writing, across all your books—and you have a lot of short stories, 60 published short stories, is that right?
Alan: Sixty-something now, I think, yes, that’s right.
Joanna: You have a lot of different stories going on in your world.
So, what are the themes that keep coming up? What obsesses you?
Alan: It’s interesting, isn’t it, because a lot of the time, you don’t actually notice that stuff yourself. I don’t always love reading reviews, but one of the things I do enjoy often about reading reviews is reading what people get from stories and what they think of a story. They say, “Oh, the author was clearly doing this, that and the other,” and I’m reading it: “Really? What, I didn’t actually know I was doing that, but thanks for telling me.” Because stories belong to readers. As soon as you put this stuff out, it’s not yours anymore. And so you get a lot of that kind of feedback.
Especially over a career of as many short stories as I’ve written, and half a dozen novels and other things, I’m starting to realize that a lot of what I deal with, probably more than anything else, is consequence. A lot of the time, people develop stories and things happen, but I always want to look at little bit further: what are the consequences of that happening? And it’s usually not very good. So often people are playing with things they shouldn’t, or pushing things a bit too far, or messing with things they should leave well enough alone, and the I explore the subsequent consequences of that. And then that bleeds over into a lot of other aspects like revenge and following that through. Seeing how that can turn against people, and that revenge isn’t necessarily the answer, and so on.
Again, I think a lot of it comes back to that martial philosophy. Within the martial arts, there’s this concept of Mo Duk or Wu De in Mandarin, which is, at it’s core, leading a martial life. And that means not only being able to fight, but being able not to fight, everything that goes along with the philosophy of that. And I think that underlying a lot of my stories is an exploration of that sort of theme: when to walk away, when to stand up and fight; what are the consequences of either of those actions?
Joanna: Has that theme stemmed from any particular incident in your life?
For example, my brother is also a martial artist, and that pretty much stemmed from being bullied at school and being the ginger, wimpy kid: that’s kind of what started his journey. So, have these themes, of consequences, for example, come from your life—and can you share with the audience?!
Alan: I feel like I should lie on a couch now! Yes, definitely, to some degree, a large part of why I took up martial arts was because I was the geeky, nerdy, wimpy kid and I got bullied a lot, and a lot of the darkness and sort of consequence and brutality of what I write comes from the fact that I’ve seen a lot of that in my life. My brother died when I was young, and obviously when he was young, and those are the scars that create the person you are; you are, basically, just the sum of your experience.
And so I draw on a lot of that sort of stuff. My brother died because he had a disability, so I’ve grown up with all different kinds of bullying, examples of amazing empathy and care, and examples of absolutely horrible lack of empathy. So I guess I tend to draw on those things in stories, because that’s my lived experience. That’s why writers tend to improve through their career, because they live more and have more experience, and then, if they’re not careful, they end up just writing stories about writers, because they’ve been writers for 30 years and not done anything else, so they’ve got no other experience to draw on anymore. So it’s really important to do other things than be a writer. I’m never not going to run a martial arts academy, even if I could afford not to, because, apart from the fact that it’s passing on my legacy which is part of why I did it, it also gets me out and I interact with people, and you have life outside of writing.
So it’s a constant process of drawing. You remember yourself—I’m sure you’ve been told—people don’t altogether trust you once they know you’re a writer, because they assume you’re sitting there looking at them for stories. Anything you say to me could go in a book, so just be careful what you say!
Joanna: That’s absolutely true! We talked about travel a bit at the beginning, and how that kind of started your move Down Under, and you write a lot about places around the world, and the Alex Caine books have Iceland and the UK and Italy.
So, how have your travels impacted your writing, and are there any particular places that you love?
Alan: Ah, so many. I think the two most important things you can do as a young person, and the two most important things parents can do for children, are one, to teach them how to read and to instill in them a love of reading, because that is the best journeying there is. There’s a lifetime, a journey in every single book they read, and they learn about life and about people and about all those sorts of things. And the other thing is to travel, and encourage them to travel, and show them the world.
I think everybody should, at some point before they’re 20 years old, find themselves somewhere where they’re the different one. Like, for you and I, it would be being the only white face in a crowd. For a lot of people, obviously their entire lived experience is to be the only something in a crowd, and those people tend to have enormous empathy, because they’re always in a struggle, but a lot of people have this privilege of being surrounded by comfort, and I think it’s really important to not be. You know, you don’t have to be a different color, but to be the only person in a big crowd who doesn’t speak the language and to find yourself standing there, not knowing what’s going on; or to be standing in a street looking at street signs you just can’t decipher, because they’re Cyrillic or they’re Asian, or whatever.
That experience is really powerful, and it’s very informing. It’s very important when it comes to developing empathy and to developing a broader experience of humanity, rather than just your experience of humans or your family or whatever. And so I always try to explore that with books as well. It’s important. I don’t just want to write stories about heterosexual white guys in a white society, so—like I said about making sure women are represented in my books, I always try to make sure that race is represented, sexuality is represented, and whatever, because in my life, that’s what I see. I spend an enormous amount of time in the Chinese community, because I live and teach Chinese kung fu. I live in a very multicultural country, even though nowadays I live down in the country, it’s a lot more white where I am now, but working for 10 years in Sydney, it’s very much a multicultural place. So I want my characters to have that world experience and go to different places, and I want readers, through reading my stories, to go on those journeys.
So, like you said, even in just the first book, in “Bound,” Alex starts in Sydney, he goes to London, he goes to Canada, then ends up in Italy, and then to Iceland. It’s important for me to give readers those experiences as well as I can.
As you said, the scene with the Coliseum, ended up being really good and fit the book perfectly: it actually wasn’t going to be that when I first started writing the book. But in the process of writing it, I went back to the UK to my cousin’s wedding, and then on the way home again, we stopped for a few days in Rome. I just had to include it in a book. I went to the Coliseum, and it was like, “Holy crap, that has to be here: these scenes have to be in Rome.” So I ended up taking a thousand photos, walking around, and thinking, “You’ve got to be in the Coliseum.”
Joanna: I’m glad you say that. I personally find one of the perks of being a writer is travelling for research—that’s one of the things we do. Also, I’m glad you mentioned the children thing. I know you have a son. My mum took us to Africa when I was eight, and so I went to school in Malawi when I was eight, and as you say, when you’re that age, you don’t even think it’s anything other than normal!
Alan: Exactly, and you take that through your life with you. You take that mix of culture as being completely normal through your life. You’re not suddenly exposed to different cultures in your 20s or something, when you’ve already formed such fixed ideas about what the world is, because that’s not what the world is.
Joanna: It’s true. It does sometimes result in what my husband calls “itchy foot syndrome”!
Alan: Yes, it’s a problem!
Joanna: It’s a problem when you have a young child like you do!
Alan: When you’re a poor writer, you run your own business and you have a young child, and all you want to do is walk the earth: yes, it’s a problem!
Joanna: But that’s why your characters do: that’s why you’re writing these walking people! I wanted to ask you a couple more questions before we wind up, if that’s alright.
Alan: Sure.
Joanna: First of all, we mentioned the short fiction. And short stories are quite different to novels. Each one is a story in itself, as such, and very different.
What do you love about writing short work, and how does that differ from your novels?
Alan: At a fundamental level, a short story of 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 words has to be the same as a novel of 80,000, 90,000 or 100,000 words, to a degree. It has to have a beginning, a middle and an end. It has to have a point. You have to have characters who encounter conflict, and there’s some resolution to that conflict, whether it be good, bad or ambiguous. So, short stories and novels, in those terms, have to be the same. You can write almost vignette-style short stories, but that’s more an exercise in writing than in actual story-telling, and really, I’m about story-telling. I want to tell whole stories.
I’ve always loved short stories. I remember when I was a kid, reading the short stories of Roald Dahl – they got televised in Britain as “Tales of the Unexpected” – and stuff like that as well—they were amazing.
Joanna: “The Leg of Lamb”: that’s my favorite! Do you remember that?
Alan: I do! My favorite was the one about the tress, when he made the device that could hear the plants screaming, he could hear the roses being cut and all that. Those things, I read those before I saw that show, and they blew me away. And the Conan stories, and H.P. Lovecraft and all those sorts of things. I just loved the form of short story.
It’s a difficult skill. I messed around with short stories, but then I moved to novels, and I’d written “RealmShift” and “MageSign” before I went back to short fiction and decided to take it really seriously. Kind of through a lot of trial and error, and help from people who were writers who I knew, I kind of taught myself the craft. It has actually improved my novel-writing as well, because it really teaches you a brevity and a control of language, and the idea of story and sub-plot.
I just love the exercise of exploring themes. With 60-something short stories now, I’ve got to explore so many more ideas than I would have if I only wrote novels, because if any of those given short story ideas, if I drew them out to novel size—because any of them could be, to some degree, you could develop the stories, build up the characters and everything else—I get to explore all those different themes and those different places and different characters and whatever else, and different genres, because I’ve written historically and ghost stories and science fiction and mystery and crime and all that sort of stuff in my short fiction as well.
Yes, it’s basically just another excuse for great exploration in story-telling!
Joanna: Which is fantastic. Also, I wanted to ask you about the gaming side, because you said, when you were young, you would do the role-playing and I know you’re still a gamer. What I love about gaming is—literary purists might argue that writers shouldn’t be gaming, and that people who read serious stuff should not game—but what we find is, it’s story, right?
Mostly, people are gaming because they want to be actually in a story, which is cool. Tell us about your thoughts on gaming.
Alan: Some of the best story-telling in the world at the moment is happening in games. You have epic stories, like the Mass Effect games, or the Halo games; you have just heart-wrenching stories like The Last of Us, that happened recently; you have just hilarious, clever story-telling, like with Portal. As you say, you get to be a part of the story; you don’t get on with the narrative just by turning a page, but you have to interact, you have to solve mysteries or solve puzzles or whatever, and then with role-play and video games, as well, you make dialogue choices that can affect the outcome of the story, which means that you can go back and play that game again and get told a different story, the same characters, the same set-up and everything else, but a different result.
As soon as anybody says, “Oh, but serious story-telling”— I'm not interested. Because story is powerful: story started with people sitting around a fire, a) entertaining each other, and b) learning and passing on knowledge and passing on important stuff through stories that had to be remembered and told again. And so as far as I’m concerned, there is no medium that has the grip on story-telling. Books, novels, tend to be the deepest form, inasmuch as you can get the most information and you can get the most insight into characters, because through reading you get internal monologue and all that. But you can have stories in short stories, or in games, or in anything else, that are equally powerful.
Comic books and movies are massive influences on me, partly because I love the visual medium involved, but also because some of the best stories are told that way. I was massively influenced in my mid to late teens by Garth Ennis’ “Hellblazer” comic books and Neil Gaiman’s “Sandman” cycle and “The Watchmen” by Alan Moore, people like that. Those kind of writers really influenced me in terms of writing and story-telling. And that was comic books, and there are people who would say, “Oh, comic books, that’s not serious, that’s not real story-telling,” and there are some amazing, and adult, and deep, and heart-breaking stories told in comics, just the same as games, just the same as movies. And of course there’s a lot of pulp out there as well, but that applies to books, as well as movies, as well as games, as well as comics.
Joanna: So, you don’t see a competition between gaming and books; you see them just serving different needs. For people like yourself, who is both a gamer, a reader and a writer, you don’t see any issue with these.
Alan: There is some competition, inasmuch as if we want young people to grow up and love books as much as we do, we have to show them what there is to be experienced from reading a book, because it’s much easier to sit with an iPad or to sit with an Xbox and play a video game and interact that way. Especially in this day and age, kids are digital natives: they grow up with gaming, and computer gaming is used in the classroom now. GBL—Game-Based Learning—is a massive factor. I’ve actually written for the New South Wales Department of Education and worked on a video game purely to teach teachers how to use video games in their classrooms with students. My job in that was to bring narrative to the game, to make sure the teachers didn’t get bored, and so they had a narrative, an emotional connection to continue playing.
This stuff is just an omelet now: you can’t unscramble it. But what’s important—I don’t see it as being in competition as such, because they said television was going to kill this, and radio was going to kill that: nothing does. What you do is you just make room for this thing as well, and that thing as well, same as we always do as people. If you take someone from the days before radio, and they saw what we had now, their brains would melt, that we consume media in the telly and the radio and the books and video games and all this stuff: they wouldn’t be able to handle it. They hopefully would adapt without literally brain-melting, but the leaps that we make don’t happen instantly: they’re just this constant slow process of integration.
So, I don’t see it as competition, but I do think it’s very important that we make sure kids understand that to go and sit quietly and read a book and have that totally immersed experience is important, as well as playing a video game or watching a movie or anything else.
Joanna: Fantastic. Well, we’ve had a really great, wide-ranging conversation today!
So where can they find the Alex Caine books, and all your other works, online.
Alan: The Caine series is available everywhere in e-book now, so wherever you shop for e-books, go there. There has been a little bit of a problem with amazon.com, so if you do have any problem finding any of my stuff, you can just go to warriorscribe.com – that’s my website—and anywhere you see a book cover, click on it, and it’ll take you to a page that will tell you all about the book, and it will have links to where you can pick it up and all that sort of stuff. Or just find me @alanbaxter on Twitter, and just go, “Oi, I need this,” and I’ll happily point you in the right direction.
Joanna: Fantastic. Thanks so much for your time, Alan, that was great!
Alan: No worries: thanks very much for having me.