An hour-long conversation with Kevin Hearne, author of the Seven Kennings trilogy, The Tales of Pell (with co-author Delilah S. Dawson) and the New York Times-bestselling series The Iron Druid Chronicles.

Website:www.kevinhearne.com

Twitter:@KevinHearne

Instagram:@KevinHearne

Facebook:@authorkevin

Kevin Hearne’s Amazon Page

The Introduction

Kevin Hearne is the author of the Seven Kennings trilogy, The Tales of Pell (with co-author Delilah S. Dawson) and the New York Times-bestselling series The Iron Druid Chronicles. In his own words, “he loves doggies and trees and art of all kinds and is astounded at how much college costs now.”

The (Lightly Edited) Transcript

Welcome to The Worldshapers, Kevin.

Hey thanks so much for having me, Edward.

Now, we met at Can-Con last year in Ottawa. That was your first time at that convention, I think?

Yeah, it was.

Yeah, it’s a great one, and we were on a panel together about writing series, which I felt kind of overmatched on because my longest series was five…a YA series with five books, 60,000 words each, and The Iron Druid is…more than that.

Yeah. It’s up to nine novels and then there’s a collection of short stories and a bunch of novellas, things like that.

Well, I wanted to tell you how I came across the Iron Druid books first. I was at a World Fantasy Convention in…I guess it was in Washington, DC, that year. And, of course, they have a book bag as…people who haven’t been to them, you get this great bag of books that they give you at World Fantasy, and even if you don’t like the books, you’ve got a great bag. And one of the books in there was the first book in the Iron Druid Chronicles and it was actually my publisher, Betsy Wollheim at DAW—co-publisher with Sheila Gilbert at DAW—who made a point of showing me your book and saying, “You should read this,” because I think she was one of the publishers in the mix when it was being shopped around, and she’d wanted it but of course it went with…Ace, right?

Del Rey.

Del Rey. Oh, sorry!

No worries!

It’s because I hadn’t looked at my notes…I looked at them at the wrong moment there. So, yeah, it was actually another publisher that pointed out the Iron Druidbooks to me and then I read them all. So, I’m well prepared for this.

Well, thank you.

Now, we’ll talk specifically about the creative process, your creative process, and the writing of those books specifically a little later on, but I always like to take my guests back into the mists of time and find out how they got started…well, first of all,