Writer's World

discussion with dlmackenzie!

Take your seats ladies and gentlemen, because it is now my pleasure to introduce another of Wattpad's finest...one of my favourite writers who you can find here as  dlmackenzie. 

Question 1. For those who do not know can you let everyone know what steampunk is?

Depends upon who you ask, I suppose.  "Steampunk" is now a noun, an adjective, and even a verb, as in "I steampunked my Kindle by hot-gluing brass gears to it."

 For my purposes, "steampunk" is a literary subgenre that re-imagines the Victorian fantasy of (for instance) Jules Verne, with the advantage of hindsight.  Of course, Verne was a true visionary, imagining submarine and subterranean voyages well before science or technology had produced such things in the real world.  On the other hand, steampunk is a sort of "retro-futurism" in which the writer takes one's self and one's readers back to a time before the modern marvels we take for granted, and re-invents the future from a Steam Age perspective.  In my case, I am also gently parodying Victorian fantasy, so I strive to recreate the overblown style of the old masters with humorous—even ludicrous—undertones.

Question 2. Can you tell us about The Magnetron Chronicles and The Last Adventure of Dr. Yngve Hogalum (The Magnetron Chronicles Vol.1)? How did this story come about and what was the inspiration? 

I started writing these stories more than ten years ago after some friends of mine and I decided to collaborate on a writing project.  We had no idea what we were going to write about, but we bandied about the idea of some Steam Age characters, each of which we would "play" as a sort of alter-ego in a freeform role-playing game.  I was skeptical, quite frankly, but I started writing and researching and simply fell in love with the period and the characters.  Our writing group fell apart, but I started publishing my stories as a web serial and developed a small following.  For me, the serial structure jibed pretty nicely with the material, and I found I liked ending each short chapter with a cliffhanger.  The more I wrote, the more story ideas came to me, and eventually I had dozens of situations, characters, and major and minor story arcs going.  Nearly everything I saw or heard inspired some new idea I threw into the hopper for a future subplot or story detail.

Sorry to hear about the group, but I am happy at the same time it delivered you to us! 

Question 3. What is important to you when creating a certain setting and time within a story? 

In a word, authenticity.  I do a lot of research, which is one of the reasons I'm such a slow writer.  I research everything from Steam Age technology to Victorian Era figures of speech, and try to dovetail my stories into actual historical events.  The events themselves are just there to add texture and realism to the story, but often my research leads to new plot twists and other story ideas.  Also, I like to think that some fussy History major will look up some obscure historical reference in my story and be gratified to find it's historically accurate.

Question 4. Who has been your favourite character to write and why? 

That's a tough one, but I would have to say that my favorite character to write has been Dr. Hogalum himself.  In the first volume of the series, "The Last Adventure of Dr. Yngve Hogalum," Hogalum is dead, but our hero Phineas Magnetron decapitates his corpse and reanimates the head with voodoo.  Despite his inauspicious circumstance, Hogalum remains as egotistical, condescending, and overbearing as ever.  In "The Smiljan Breach," a series prequel I just recently completed, Hogalum is still alive, which gave me the opportunity to build out his character a bit more as a supremely self-confident drinker and carouser.  He's something of an anti-hero, in the sense that he does heroic things for un-heroic reasons.  A narcissistic thrill-seeker, he causes a lot of humorous tension but also catalyzes the other characters to great deeds.