Sam Hawke’s second novel Hollow Empire is out now, and picks up the story a couple of years after City of Lies. Following on from the original interview (which you can read here) that covered Hawke’s background, Paul Simpson chatted with her over Zoom from her home in Australia shortly before publication of Hollow Empire at the start/end of a long day!

We did an email interview for the first book, so obviously covered quite a lot of the normal ground-breaking questions. I suppose the easiest thing is to jump in straight onto book 2 and the big catch-all question: What did you find the biggest challenge of writing the second book?

Only one?

OK, what were the challenges, plural?

Writing sequels is always tricky isn’t it? Famously so.

The first challenge was that you have unlimited time to write your first novel, your debut, and I am the type of person who will keep tinkering for as long as you let me. So there were some very long gaps of me overpreparing and procrastinating, sending it out for somebody else to read, deciding on a query letter and those sorts of things. I’m very good at overdoing these sorts of things.

Then of course you hit book 2 and suddenly everything’s got to be done in the space of a much shorter time frame. In my case I had a few extra hiccups, which was to say that I’d written a book originally as a standalone but then when we sold it, it was being sold as two so I had to do an outline [for the second]. I did that but then in the course of the next year, with the editorial process, some fairly significant things changed in City.

In particular the original version that we sold was a no-magic fantasy and obviously it ended up still being relatively low but having magic in the world, which made a very big difference to how book 2 was going to play out. So when it actually came time to look at the outline we’d done for book 2 back in the day, it didn’t really work anymore so we kind of had to do a new one.

The additional challenge was that at the time when I was starting to write the second one, book 1 wasn’t out yet so you didn’t know what the reception was going to be like for it. So basically, you have no idea if this is going to be book 2, the end of a duology, or book 2, the middle book in a trilogy because it depends how the books do as to whether the publishers want more books.

Readers like longer series and publishers like you working in the same established world and characters, so writing a sequel that functions as a functional end of series or as a middle book in the series is probably the biggest challenge that I had in terms of structuring it.

And then in terms of disastrous things that just went wrong, the first book I had very carefully planned out over a number of years and had a long time to write it. The second book, because I had to redo the outline and rethink it, I was more working from a high level plan rather than a detailed one. Which means left to my own devices, I write too much and so I wrote a very long first draft – 300,000 words long – which I then had to cut a third of over the course of one stressful summer.

Unfortunately it still wasn’t working for my editor and we ended up having to delay the book and starting from scratch, which was obviously hard work! I think I had erred too much on the side of hoping it was going to be a trilogy, so I think that it wasn’t definitive enough as a final book. And also, I think there was a sense that it was possibly too political and not fantasy enough.

One of the things that I wanted to explore was this idea of parenthood and how characters who have a very dangerous job which is incredibly important to them and their family honour, reconcile that with caring for someone who they are responsible for. It raises all kinds of interesting issues because obviously if you’re responsible for somebody and you’re caring for them in a parent fashion, how do you put them in a position of having to poison them repeatedly and put them in dangerous situations?

Even the little day to day things: Jovan and Kalina in the first book were completely free and independent to do whatever they had to do, to run off and investigate something or whatever. Now they’ve got a young person that they have to care for so that necessitates opening up their lives to new people in order to deal with the practical day to day aspects of being a parent.

That was quite important to me because I’m a parent and they’re the issues I deal with and which I think often kind of get skated around or avoided in fantasy, just because it’s hard to have adventures if you have to worry about who’s looking after the kid at home if you have an adventure. Or, “Can I do this right now because she’s with me and I have to make arrangements?” so yes, I had a bit of fun with that. That was a point I really wanted to stick on, so I kind of dug my heels in on the parenthood aspect of the story.

I think it’s a similar thing to why you see so many orphans in science fiction and fantasy which is to say, it’s easier and more convenient to not have to deal with extended family when you want to go off on adventures. It’s easy to put underprepared people in peril for the sake of tension and excitement in the story if they don’t have a responsible adult there to help, basically. I see why it happens, I see the appeal of not having those complications but also I’m very drawn to those complications. I think they’re interesting and I think they’re a critical part of being human, which I wanted to include in the story.

You’ve also a character with chronic illness which is something that again is not necessarily addressed very often in this genre.

Yes and again probably largely for convenience sake, in the sense that it’s easier to make your main characters bad asses who can fight their way out of situations because our culture, Western society, we’ve been inundated with narratives in which violence is the easy answer out of a problem. We dress it up in different ways but ultimately it’s useful and convenient to fit into that world by making characters capable of fighting off or physically getting out of situations. That probably influences it but chronic illness is so prevalent in society – everyone knows people who have chronic conditions – and it’s the same with Jovan’s OCD.

In Australia, one in five people have a mental health issue and it’s something that’s part of the human experience. It’s something that you see for real in your everyday life all the time and I just think it’s important that people get to see themselves in stories and they get to be the hero without it being a story about that thing. Kalina in particular, I really wanted it to be a thing that causes her great inconvenience. She has to deal with the frustrations of it being an invisible illness. If people can’t see it, they don’t understand it, and don’t necessarily believe its severity because they can’t see it. There’s things that are hugely difficult for her but I wanted that not to matter ultimately. She and Jovan are the heroes of City, notwithstanding their personal circumstances, they’re just additional challenges that they face.

We could stand to see a bit more of that in sci-fi and fantasy. Just a bit of disability representation. Characters may have a limp or something but it’s not really something that sucks us into how they address problems or what their strengths and weaknesses are in dealing with whatever the big fantasy challenges are in the story.

I think it becomes a characteristic as opposed to what it really is to people who have it, which is a prism. Their lives are through that prism consciously or subconsciously. How do you put yourself in those shoes? Have you spoken to people with similar conditions? Taking the classic example of walking in someone’s shoes; to make it believable you’ve got to be able to do that.

Yes, I think the key is being a good listener and speaking to people and listening to the experiences of people in situations. I’ve got some personal experience with OCD and I know people who have various mental health conditions and who are very willing to talk about the challenges. Invisible illnesses as well, chronic fatigue. Listening to the stories that people tell about their day to day experiences and the things that they wish that people understood or would do differently, is really important I think.

One of the things that has always been the most rewarding for me with these books is when someone tells me that they really appreciated the representation, that they see themselves reflected in Kalina or Jovan, in a way that they didn’t often feel was accessible in the genre.

That’s probably my favourite thing about the reception: hearing from people who saw themselves reflected, sometimes for the first time.

It happened when they cast a female lead in Doctor Who. You suddenly get a generation of little girls who can be the Doctor and then they brought in the person of colour, female Doctor into the series. Suddenly there are even more who are brought in.

You really can’t downplay how important it is to see reflections of yourself on screen or in stories. It’s not that people can’t relate to people with different experiences but like you said, you can just see the reaction, especially with something as juggernaut as Doctor Who. You can see how important it is, it’s demonstrably important to people. There’s a level of recognition and excitement when you connect with a character in a way where you haven’t connected on that level with them. Even if you’ve been perfectly happy with something, sometimes you don’t even know you’re going to connect with something until you see it and then you realise what’s been missing.

Do you still read a lot round the genre or are you finding that because you’re writing in it, you’re not wanting to, subconsciously, take influences in?

No, I just love reading and it’s my favourite genre, I’m never going to stop. (laughs) I don’t know how people could possibly not read the genre that they write in. I mean, just from a craft standpoint it’s really important to know what people are doing and where the genre is it. I think it’s actually critical to doing good interesting work, to know what’s out there and what’s happening. Just from a purely pleasure standpoint, they’re my favourite books, I’m never going to stop reading them.

I do slow down in my reading when I’m in the thick of drafting and that’s as much to do with time constraints as it is to do with influencing. Everyone poaches off everybody else subconsciously, you can’t help that, but I guess as long as you’re reading a variety of things, I still think there’s a net benefit to you in knowing what’s happening. Every now and then you see a fantasy writer – and this is a big warning sign for me – who says ‘Oh I don’t; I’m changing the genre. I’m not writing it for normal people’. That’s a huge alarm bell for me. You don’t like fantasy? I don’t want to read your fantasy. They think they’re hugely original and nobody has thought of how to do this before and you’re like, “There were eight books that did it better than you last year.”

If you’re not reading it, you don’t know. You don’t know what tropes have been thoroughly overturned and portrayed in different ways and you’re not really in a position to actually know what a fresh take on something is, if you don’t read it. If you don’t enjoy the genre, the lack of love for it is going to come through, I think.

People who think they’re coming in and doing something new are a) usually wrong and b) won’t be edited.

There was so much attention on the first sentence of City of Lies, and it was a great first sentence, a real what the hell are you doing here? Did you feel pressure to come up with something as “iconic”?

Yes, partially because people really did love that first line of the first book but fortunately I’m quite good at first lines. I sort of feel like I can’t get a grip on any story until I’ve got the first line. Once I’ve got it, I get a degree of confidence as to what the story is going to be.

There’s something about a good first line, isn’t there? Because it’s a little promise to the reader that they’re in safe hands. It’s the first line that works for you and as a writer it definitely helps me feel the tone. Like I was talking about parenthood before as an important facet of this story, so it was important to me that the tone was reflected in the first line as well. Because that sets up not only a bit of what the story might be about but also the themes that I’m going to explore in it.

With some people they’ll go back and work on the first line so that it does that, whereas it sounds like, for you it’s almost the gateway drug into it.

Yes. Don’t get me wrong, I won’t necessarily nail it straightaway but once I’ve nailed it…

You know that you have, yes.

With City it was the absolute first line I wrote of the book and it never changed. It came to me as a whole line along with my original conception of the idea and everything else in the book changed at some point or another but not that sentence.

All the right words but not necessarily in the right order at that point.

Yes, totally.

Thanks to Isabelle Ghaffari Parker for aid in arranging this interview.

Hollow Empire is out now from Bantam; click here to order from Amazon.co.uk