Indie Author Week - Gelo Fleisher

Today's first Spotlight Author is Gelo Fleisher!

Shadowcursed is his debut fantasy novella.

Bolen is a thief, plying his trade under the spires of an ancient and sprawling city. Worried that he's growing too old, Bolen has lined up a risky job, just to prove that he can still pull one off.

Tonight, he's going to break into a nobleman's vault and help himself to its contents. What he doesn't know is that inside is the key to a secret as old as the city itself.

Kings have killed for it, demons have coveted it, priests have prayed for it, and in a few moments it will be in his hands. And when it is, the adventure of his life will begin.

Shadowcursed is available for purchase on AMAZON!

Welcome Gelo! Gelo is an author and game developer. He lives in the East Coast, with his wife and daughter. Can you tell us your main inspiration behind this novel?

The main inspiration behind ‘Shadowcursed’ came when I replayed a series of computer games that were first released back in the 1990’s called “Thief”. Those games included a series of hand-painted cut scenes to book-end each game level and I was really struck by their somber beauty. I got inspired to try and recreate the tone and feel of those images in a story. ‘Shadowcursed’ was the result.

Was self-publishing your first choice? What was the most nerve wracking part of the process?

Yes, because ‘Shadowcursed’ is a novella self-publishing was my first choice. At the moment there isn’t a “traditional” market for novellas, since publishers don’t really buy them and fiction magazines don’t often accept larger pieces from beginning authors. One of the nice things about the e-book revolution is that it allows smaller forms (like novellas and short story collections) to have a much wider audience.

Weirdly enough, the most nerve wracking part of the publishing process was making sure that everything uploaded properly to Amazon. I thought I’d give it a test run and tried uploading a draft version to Amazon, when to my horror I accidentally published the draft! It took Amazon two days to finally take the wrong version offline and I was sweating bullets the whole time.

As a self-published author, did you choose to edit your novel yourself? What was the biggest change you made to the story and/or characters?

While I handled the e-book formatting process myself (with help from Guido Henkel’s excellent formatting guide), I hired a professional editor to go over the manuscript first. I was actually pleasantly surprised though: while I had to make a whole ton of smaller changes and fixes, the editor didn’t find any significant story or character adjustments that needed to be made, so the book got through the editing process pretty much intact.

Do you have any unusual writing habits that aide your process and/or character development?

I think for any author the most daunting thing is the blank page, so what I tend to do when I’m stuck about what to do next in a scene is to just write something, anything down, even if it’s terrible. Once I have something down on the page, I can usually turn it into a base for writing something better. Editing is always easier than creating from scratch.

Is there one passage or scene from your novel that you are most fond of?

Because I had a specific goal for the mood I wanted to create in the reader’s head, I was pretty happy with this bit of description. It was one of the first things I wrote where I felt I nailed the feel I was going for:

"He lay motionless, enjoying the quiet peacefulness of the newborn night. The heat of the day was gone, replaced by a coolness that played against his skin, whisking away the sweat that had accumulated during his sleep. He’d been dreaming, but couldn’t remember what about. Bolen had been hungry in the dream, he remembered that. Maybe it had been a memory from his childhood, running around the wharfs with the other street rats. He’d been hungry enough then."

Definitely a great piece of description! Thank you for sharing this excerpt with us. I am looking forward to reading Shadowcursed!