How did you find the transition from short story to novel writing? 

I wouldn't consider it a transition because I still write short stories. In fact, short stories came after I learned how to write fiction. As they say, writing long is easy ... it's shortening it up where things get difficult. I started writing short fiction about five years ago to get better at long fiction. I also felt there was more of a market there for a writer starting out and I was right. It forced me to learn how to keep things tight and moving, but also get used to the business side of it - submitting, get rejected, refining, submitting, more rejection, etc. until I finally sold something. Once you sell once, it helps with your confidence to suffer through the inevitable rejections that continue to come.

Your narratives combine humour and darkness – was this a conscious decision, or did it develop over time? 

Conscious but natural. I think it's a Canadian thing to naturally inject humour alongside the darkness. We live in a country where the air is actively trying to kill you six months of the year. If you don't find that funny after a while, what are you doing? It made sense to me to combine humour alongside savagery in Wolf at the Door because otherwise it's just awful. The story is about a family Thanksgiving where everyone has issues with one another and then werewolves show up for the murderin' - I mean, if you take that too seriously, who's going to read it? I think it has to be darkly funny to dilute the awfulness of it and make it palatable to the average reader.

What was the inspiration for The Dungeoneers and the Treasure of Roan?

 I've wanted to write a sword and sorcery novel since I was a kid. It was a dream but I never had a story to tell. A little over half a decade ago I was on a writing retreat in the mountains mid-winter and had an image pop into my head of a thief running up a mountainside and disappearing into a cave. But before he disappears he looks over his shoulder to determine whether anyone followed him. It just stuck in my mind. I wanted to know who he was, where he was, where he was going and why. The Dungeoneers were born out of that.

Will the novel be a stand-a-lone, or can you foresee a sequel?

 I've already written and published a short story in the same world - "The Warrior's Task" - which can be found in my anthology It Came From the Trees and Other Violent Aberrations. You won't know that it's linked but it is. I'm working on a follow up short story to that one now and I've also written the first chapter of the next Dungeoneers novel. We're going to learn more about Wren, Rena and Terry the Barbarian this time around. And there'll be goblins.

How long did it take you to write the novel? 

Two months, once I finally figured out what the heck I was doing. I played with it for a couple years before I figured out the direction. Then I used a #NaNoWriMo November as an excuse to get 50,000 words out. The following month I did the second 50,000 and she was done.

Were there any writing pitfalls you did not expect while writing your fantasy novel? 

Lots. It was challenging to keep the timeline straight. I went over and over it, especially through the editing process. The book is told through two points of view and each point of view has flashbacks. The flashbacks ratchet back and forth between the characters, tracing their relationship and move forward in time until you're pretty well caught up to where the novel starts. There are also trinkets/treasures that pop back and forth in the flashbacks that I had to account for. I thought it was a simple structure when I started, but it got a lot more complicated the deeper I got.

Has your journalistic style and format aided your fictional writing? If so how? 

Absolutely. Journalism taught me the power of simple, short sentence structure and how to get your audience to read something beyond the first few lines. You see it reflected in the simplicity of the language I use. It's on purpose. The language is just a vehicle to get you into the escape that is the story/place I've created, so I try to keep it as simple, engaging and to-the-point as possible. There's no better teacher for writing than journalism.

Fictional and factional writing is very different, how do you separate the two mentally?

I don't write factional, typically, though I may have elements of that in my horror work set in B.C. For that, I'm true to the place, geographies, histories, etc. That's fairly simple. In a novel like The Dungeoneers and the Treasure of Roan I didn't need to worry about it because, frankly, none of it is real. It's a bloody fairy tale, hahaha. That said, I used the geography and climate of Northern B.C. as my baseline for worldbuilding and it helped immensely, so one could argue there's a spine of fact that underwrites the whole thing. 

Are you working on another book? Can you tell us something about that project?

 I am. I'm in the final year of my MA in literature and my thesis is a cosmic horror novel set in present day British Columbia. It's fair to argue it's gothic-cosmic. The story follows a silver spoons young businessman trying to escape the family empire in Toronto who decides to buy a derelict saw and pulp mill complex in a ghost town on the rugged West Coast. Then he starts logging. Then he wakes something up. Madness ensures. Hijinx, murder, death. All that fun stuff - sign up for my newsletter if you're interested in following along.

What is your writing process – early mornings or late nights, panster or planner? 

Any and all, wherever I can squeeze it in. I'm not particular about time of day or place, but ensuring I just keep doing it even if it's not very good, or I don't think it's very good. And I'm definitely a pantser until I get 2/3rds into a story and need to figure out how to pull it together.

Bio:

Joel McKay is an award-winning author, journalist and executive from Northern British Columbia. His fiction includes the horror comedy novella Wolf at the Door, the anthology It Came From the Trees and Other Violent Aberrations and a host of short stories published in various anthologies and online.

Where can readers find you and your books? 

Visit joelmckay.ca and sign up for my newsletter. Follow me on X @joelcmckay or INstagram author_joel_mckay or buy my stuff on Amazon worldwide.

Joel's other books:

To request additional review copies or an interview with Joel McKay, please contact Mickey Mikkelson at Creative Edge Publicity: mickey.creativeedge@gmail.com / 403.464.6925. We look forward to the coverage!