Author Interview with Michael Joseph Tharnish Roby

Below is an author interview with New Pulp Tales author, Michael Joseph Tharnish Roby (AKA MJTR)!

 

What inspired your recent story, Sins of the Son? 

I wanted to move in on the end of the saga of Deacon Struct as Sabine’s overarching villain. The
guy’s been around since Sabine’s earliest days as a mercenary pulling various strings

in the background, but The Fairy God Blunder and Sins of the Son both gave him a role much closer to the action. Sabine is literally working for Struct this time around, and while she doesn’t trust him, his promise of something worse than him happening if she doesn’t forces her hand.

For a while I was stuck on exactly what this assignment was going to look like. The gag that
Struct’s son is, “Not religious, just spiritual” was with me for a while, and when that started sounding like a very “college student” kind of thing to say, the idea that Sabine is infiltrating the fantasy kingdom equivalent of a college frat party slowly started coming into focus. Sabine’s fought idiots with too much power before, but Silfde revels in his buffoonery more than any of the villains before him, which I thought would give us a fun something different before his father finally takes center stage as the big bad.

Here’s a fun fact for this episode: I think the gag of, “Mistaking an adventuring party for a party
where you drink with your friends” has been with me for about 20+ years. The first RPG I ever played was the original Paper Mario on the Nintendo 64. At the beginning of the game, Mario is attending a party Peach is throwing, and throughout the game as you meet the allies who travel with you, the game always says they, “joined the party.” I never heard that term before, I always assumed Mario was just giving them invitations to celebrate after you rescued Peach as a thank you for their assistance. Feels good to finally pay that off in a story.

 

Who are some Pulp Writers you enjoy?

I just got into doing some of the old Robert E. Howard Conan stories earlier this year and I can’t help but wonder what they must have felt like at the time. Eldritch monsters were just coming back* into writing, and the idea of this stone age strong man fighting malevolent old gods of destruction must have felt like nothing readers of the time had ever experienced.

In a somewhat more modern example (though still mostly before my time), the writings of Gary K. Wolf are genuinely, wonderfully unhinged wherever you can find a short story collection carrying them. And of course, his magnum opus Who Censored Roger Rabbit? is a hilarious homage to pulp detective stories that pulls off moments of genuine mystery, a couple insane twists, and occasional bouts of genuine pathos. As the inspiration, however loose, for one of my favorite movies, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, it’s also suitably hilarious.

*Here’s another fun fact- Did you know, etymologically speaking, Eldritch is just a modern corruption of Elvish? Which, in its earliest, least specific form, just means, “From another world.” Indeed, Cthulhu and Legolas are cut from the same cloth. Go figure.

 

Is there any guidance you’d give to someone looking to write Pulp?

When possible, always go bigger. Make the situation more dangerous, make the joke more ridiculous, make the writing more over the top. Pulp lends itself to writing in extremes. In almost every case one of my lovely editors with New Pulp Tales expresses confusion at a joke, I try to make the punchline bigger and more absurd.

If you want to write a story with some more grounded situations, you will eventually reach the point where bigger isn’t necessarily better but trust your editor to tell you when that is. If you build up to it properly, you’d be shocked how big of a hand canon you can get your audience to believe your hero is about to blow someone away with.

 

Do you have any recent work you’d like to spotlight? 

At the end of the year, the next anthology to feature me, Fairy Tales, Folklore, and Fables Reimagined will be dropping. It includes my short story, “The Girl Who Grew Up,” which features an adult Wendy Darling forced to reckon with her friendship with a decidedly more sinister, cryptid-like Peter Pan.

Additionally, my first true genre oddball comes out next spring in the Prom Perfect anthology from Wild Ink Publishing, which features my short, “A Charming Night on the Flipside.” It is a high school romance story set in a world inhabited by both humans and monsters. The tale features mortal football quarterback Carter as he takes his tentacles, snake-headed girlfriend Skylar to her prom, and has to contend with the fact that in a world of great beasts and beautiful magical creatures, maybe he doesn’t know what his beloved sees in him.

And, of course, Sabine’s final showdown with Struct is coming soon. I promise not to take two years between entries this time!

 

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