Andrew Q. Gordon

Anthony Dobransky stopped by the Land of Make Believe for a chat on writing craft and to celebrate his new release, The Demon in Business Class. Welcome, Anthony!

Interview

AQG: When did you know you wanted to write, and when did you discover that you were good at it?

AD: I first said it aloud to other people when I was 15, but I could already see my connection to it around age 11 or 12. Not that I was some literary event! I wrote dark, angsty stuff, of course, what you expect from a teen who reads a lot of dark fantasy. Just, I did it well enough to keep doing it, a good feedback loop. My friends, my teachers and my mother were very encouraging. I even wrote about being a writer in a college application essay. Since I got accepted into that college, I guess it worked!

AQG: Do you ever base your characters on real people? If so, what are the pitfalls you’ve run into doing so?

AD: I’ve used my friends in mental casting, in minor characters, more for their look or style — as if I was making an indie movie with them. One secondary character in The Demon in Business Class who is based on a real person is Walt, who is based on me! Or really, what I might have become in another life, if I never took writing as seriously as I did.

I don’t know about pitfalls, exactly, but I was conscious that Walt, however he began, had to grow his own way in the novel. He does things I would never do. If you’re going to base a character on a real person, be true to the character. Let them go their own way. Let them surprise you.

AQG: Have you ever taken a trip to research a story? Tell me about it.

AD: Three places I went specifically for The Demon in Business Class were Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Aberdeen, Scotland. Pittsburgh and Detroit were meant as research trips. I knocked around them for three days each, walking and riding buses in Pittsburgh, walking and driving Detroit. I visited city planning offices, talked with locals about how the cities had changed during what would have been my character’s time there. Mostly it was aimless, just to see and learn.

Once Scotch whisky became a thing for Gabriel, I wanted a locale in Scotland. As it happened, I had plans to go to Prague for a wedding, so I added a week in Scotland to the return trip. A woman I met in an Edinburgh pub told me about the hotel in Craigellachie, with its amazing bar of thousands of whiskies, so I rented a car and drove there. I stayed in Aberdeen, where, like my characters, I was disappointed with the hotel I picked. Together those created kind of an arc.

AQG: What is your writing Kryptonite?

AD: Brand names. Can’t stand them. If a writer tosses in brand names as a shorthand to convey wealth, glamour, expertise, anything really — in Ray-Ban glasses, looking at a gold Rolex watch, pushing Manolo Blahniks hard on the pedal of a Corvette Stingray —  I just shut down. I’m like that character in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition who has allergic reactions to the Michelin Man. I can forgive it if it’s done with a point, like the yuppie totems in American Psycho. Using brand names to say something the writer doesn’t actually say… it leaves a bad taste.

AQG: If you could tell your younger writing self anything, what would it be?

AD: People are not going to help you or take you seriously until you reach a certain level of success, or at least completion. You need to do it for yourself and for your vision. Expect indifference or contempt, even from those closest to you. Sorry! I’d like to believe they mean well, all those people who are negative about your dreams, and maybe they think they do mean well. But, to hell with them, expect nothing from them, they are messing with you, they are psychic farts in your elevator.

Seek out other writers, seek out readers of what you want to write, even if it’s not an exact match, even if it seems a huge effort. They are your only colleagues. Everyone else will class you as a wannabe until you actually are what you want to be. Now, get back to work.

AQG: What are you working on now, and when can we expect it?

I’m finishing up my new novel, The White Lake. It’s an Earth-based science-fiction, set in a future Budapest destroyed in a war, where the toxic waste has become its own very valuable industry. As I mentioned, it came in a dream, and it’s become a wild tale of Old World decadence, artificial intelligence, and sports media — like a cross between The Grand Budapest Hotel and Rollerball. Look for it next year!

She can speak all languages. He can smell evil intent.

They’re enemies. They crave each other.

With secret magic, international settings, a conspiracy plot, and star-crossed lovers, The Demon in Business Class is a stylish modern fantasy spanning continents and genres.

A shady executive hires Zarabeth Battrie to help start the next global war, giving her a demon that speaks all languages. But other people know more about her job than she does…

A resolute investigator recruits Gabriel Archer to use his emerging psychic powers, for a visionary leader who turns others from evil. As his senses develop, his doubts grow…

When the two meet by chance in Scotland, passion becomes fragile love, until the demon’s betrayal drives Gabriel away. Before Zarabeth’s revenge destroys the visionary’s plan, Gabriel must stop her — for both to survive, neither can win.

Fans of Jeff VanderMeer, David Mitchell and Michel Faber will love this cross-genre novel with crisp literary style. The Demon in Business Class is an international story of fantasy, intrigue, and love, on the uneasy ground where the human meets the divine.

YOUR NEXT READ IS NOW BOARDING

“If William Gibson wrote paranormal …. weaves the dark worlds of the occult and big business into an intoxicating tale.” – D. J. Butler, author of Witchy Eye

“Creative spark? Anthony Dobranski ignites a creative bonfire …A masterwork of invention.” – Mary Kay Zuravleff, author of Man Alive!

“A swank cocktail of international intrigue, steeped in the supernatural, mixed with literary flair …. so sleek it flies off the page.” – Zach Powers, author of First Cosmic Velocity

Warnings: FOR ADULTS! Drugs, fistfights, vigorous sex, murder, an orgy (witnessed), a cult, and a (told not shown) history of child sexual abuse.

Giveaway

Anthony is giving away a $25 Amazon gift card with this tour. Enter via Rafflecopter:

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Excerpt

Chapter 1 – Washington, DC

In the fake-oak-paneled conference room, Zarabeth Battrie found a dozen others standing. All looked wilted and worn, with bunched shirts and bowing ankles. The plastic tables were gone, the plastic chairs stacked in the corner. More people arrived but no one unstacked the chairs. A herd instinct, Zarabeth decided, to keep a clear path for fleeing.

A natty beige man in a crisp blue plaid suit came in, pushing a low gray plastic cart with stacks of documents. If the standing people surprised him, he didn’t show it. With practiced ease he lowered the room’s screen, plugged in his powerstrip. Someone passed the documents around but no one spoke. In the silence, Zarabeth felt anxieties around her, about money, status, children, groping her like fevered predictable hands. Too intimate, these people’s worries in her skin when she didn’t know their names, or want to. She shook them off, pushed through to the front so as not to stare at men’s backs all meeting.

Projector light bleached the natty man while he talked through slides of sunsets and bullet points, with the real news a seeming afterthought. Her office and two others were merging with Optimized Deployments, in Boston. A great move. Efficiency for all. The animated org-chart realigned over and over, three squares gone and Optimized’s no bigger. Reorganized like a stomach does food.

People asked tired questions, their hot worry now clammy hope. The natty man smiled no matter what he said. Yes, redundancies. Jobs would move, details to work out. All would be well and better.

He left to spread his joy. The room lights rose.

Zarabeth’s boss, Aleksei Medev, slouched in the corner like someone had whacked his head with lumber. His unshaven olive skin hung gray and limp. With all eyes on him, he straightened.

“A very challenging time,” he said. “We’re sending reports to justify — to guide the transition. Client work is secondary.”

Zarabeth was in no hurry to fill out Aleksei’s useless reports. Nothing she had done in the last two months justified keeping her employed, she knew that. She went out the broken fire exit to a stand of pine trees behind the parking lot. She lit a cigarette, paced in the shade.

Once, Zarabeth Battrie had traveled the country as an Inspiration Manager, connecting the best people at Straightforward Consulting to an in-house knowledge network. She had good instincts which managers to flatter, which to cow, which to sneak past. It surprised her how much she understood when she finally got her quarry to talk their special arcana, over morning jogs, lobster lunches, steak dinners, midnight hookahs with shots of tequila. Later, on airplanes, she’d think of those and other conversations, watching the pieces fit together in this strange unity and balloon, her world growing with a drug-like jolt. To let her do that, week in week out — taking off, landing, on the move, on her feet — had been the greatest praise.

On Valentine’s Day, it had evaporated without explanation. Zarabeth had been reassigned to Reston, in the Virginia suburbs, to do public-relations grunt-work for industry trade groups. Aleksei Medev, still shiny then, had put his feet on her new desk and spun a great tale, core knowledge toward a turnkey marketing solution, select team deep study. At least she got an office with a door.

Zarabeth had visited Boston twice in her old job. Optimized had smart people and kept them by being greedy. They would suck the money from her division like marrow from bone. Everyone fired, no matter how they danced.

Doubt ate through her like some parasite come to lay its eggs. She pinched the cigarette’s cherry to burn it off with pain. Six years at this firm would not end this week.

#

Zarabeth sublet a furnished apartment in Foggy Bottom, facing west and the Potomac River. She had chosen it for the balcony view and the location near the highway, but she didn’t like the place much. The heavy dark furniture and metallic abstract art looked good at night, but menacing in morning shadow and grim in afternoon sun. Some days Zarabeth fantasized trashing it, taking a sledgehammer to the whole gloomy aquarium. This was a good day for that.

But Missy Devereaux was there, watching TV, in new red hair, her dirty bare feet on the coffee table.

“Hey, sugar,” Missy said, in her perky Kentucky accent. “Want some wine?”

“Get your bow legs off my table,” Zarabeth said. “When did you go ginger?”

“Do you love it?” Missy muted the sound. “I love it. Gramma hates it. Do you love it?”

A year ago, Missy Devereaux had been a Straightforward legislative liaison, frost-blonde hair and pricey suits, working her congressman daddy’s contact list. Now on the ground floor of Missy’s Georgetown mansion, her grandmother died slowly of bone cancer. Missy came to Zarabeth’s place as a retreat, a chance to smoke without blowing up the oxygen tanks. In return Missy watered the plants and filled the wine rack. It was a good arrangement, most days.

“It’s great.” Zarabeth went to her bedroom. She wiped off her makeup, washed her face with cold water. Her copper skin looked flushed. Small zits on her forehead. Twenty-seven, and she still broke out. She turned from the mirror so as not to smash it.

Missy came with a glass of white. “Three hours ’til the nurse leaves. You want dinner?”

Zarabeth shook with fury. “I so don’t deserve this.”

“I know, sugar-pea. I know.”

“The fuck you know, witch?”

Missy’s eyes flashed, from blue to bright green. Like the unlocking of a cage.

Zarabeth backed down. She checked herself by punching her palm repeatedly. “Fuck me! Fucking fuck.”

“You just relax,” Missy said. Maybe to herself too. Her eyes blue again, at least. She pulled a joint from behind her ear. “Drink and smoke. I’m ordering food. Lamb kebab with fries, right?” She closed the door.

Author Bio

Anthony Dobranski is a native of Washington DC. He studied English Literature at Yale and made his first career working internationally for AOL. His first novel is the cross-genre modern fantasy The Demon in Business Class. He also created Business Class Tarot, a modern Tarot deck inspired by his novel. He is a member of SFWA, and serves on the board of The Inner Loop, a Washington DC live-reading series. He lives in Washington now with his family. He loves to ski.