I dreamed I was under a blanket, then peeked out. There were uncanny, moving lights in the night sky, and ominous, inexplicable sounds. Suddenly I knew – the way you can know things in dreams, as though someone just told me – that this was the great war going on between the armies of Heaven and the armies of Earth.

Richard Harland – 29 July 2024

The Back Flap

The unique friendship between an angel and a human is the only hope for the future – but can they remain friends?It’ s one thousand years since medical scientists brought a dead brain back to consciousness. When they discovered the reality of life after death, they laid claim to Heaven and set off a war against the angels.Now the Earth is a ruined wasteland. Descendants of the original scientists continue the war with their armies of artificially created Humen. When the greatest of Doctors, the all-knowing Doctor Saniette, takes control of the Bankstown Camp, the fighting moves to a terrible new phase.Miriael is the angel who fell to Earth, ate mortal food and can no longer return to Heaven. Ferren is the young tribesman who has been her only friend since her own kind abandoned her. Together, they work to unite the tribes in an alliance independent of the Humen.But suddenly Miriael has another friend. A beautiful, caring angel visits her in secret and offers her what she most desires: the chance to return to Heaven. The consequences will be extreme … for her, for Ferren, for the world.

About the book

What is the book about?

Ferren and the Doomsday Mission continues the story begun in Ferren and the Angel. The first book introduced an extraordinary ruined world, a thousand years from now, where the armies of Heaven engage in endless war against the armies of Earth.

Through Ferren, a young tribesman brought up in absolute ignorance, and Miriael, a Junior Warrior Angel who’s only been taught more recent history, we learn how the war began when scientists brought a human brain back to consciousness after death, discovered the reality of Heaven and ended up battling against the angels. After many radical developments, the armies of the Earth are now composed of the artificially created beings called Humen, while the descendants of the original human beings live in isolation and ignorance, like Ferren.

Everything changes when Miriael is shot down and survives on the Earth because Ferren feeds her mortal food. For the first time ever, a friendship forms between a ‘Celestial’  and a tribesman (or Residual). Miriael learns that Residuals aren’t simply ignorant and irrelevant, while Ferren learns that the Humen aren’t genuine allies, but exploit the Residuals as mere raw material.

At the start of Ferren and the Doomsday Mission, Ferren and Miriael are going round from tribe to tribe building up a Residual Alliance against the Humen. But the Humen acquire a new and terrible leader, the gigantic, all-knowing Doctor Saniette. One of Doctor Saniette’s aims is to capture Miriael, dissect her and discover the secrets of angelic nature. Another aim is to launch a full-scale invasion of Heaven.

Meanwhile, the Residual tribes don’t trust Miriael as they trust Ferren, and she feels more and more surplus to needs. She thinks longingly of her old life among the angels – and then, miraculously, a male angel called Asmodai appears and offers her a way to return to Heaven. Asmodai is not only beautiful and charismatic, but kind and sympathetic. She can’t help it, she’s tempted!

The consequences for her friendship with Ferren will be extreme – yet it’s their friendship alone that can save the world from endless cycle of war between Heaven and Earth.

When did you start writing the book?

The first version of Ferren and the Doomsday Mission was written about twenty years ago! That was the version, called Ferren and the White Doctor, published by Penguin Australia, but only in Australia. Even then, I knew it wasn’t as good as it could have been. For twenty years it lingered in the back of my mind, along with vague ideas of how it could have been done better. But I never expected to have the chance to rewrite it. I was writing for mainstream publishers, like Simon & Schuster (US), and of course they weren’t interested.

But the fans of the original trilogy wouldn’t let it die! Australian readers who’d fallen in love with the extraordinary Ferren world kept hounding independent publishers about it – until one day, out of the blue, came an offer to do a reprint from IFWG Publishing (based in Australia, but making most of their sales in the US). Was I interested? You betcha! But only on condition of doing a total rewrite of the whole trilogy.

Which is what I’m now doing. I started the rewrite of Ferren and the Doomsday Mission about a year ago. The world was always good and the bones of the narrative were always good – which is why I wanted to rewrite this trilogy, unlike any of my other books. It was the telling that wasn’t up to scratch. I think part of the problem was that Book 1 was written as a standalone, so when Penguin Australia demanded sequels, I had to rush my imagination and do it all in a hurry. The ideas I came up with were great, but the way they got bundled into a narrative – not great!

I think those twenty years in between gave my unconscious mind time to work out how the trilogy was always meant to be.

How long did it take you to write it?

This version took me about four, five months – which for me is fast.

Where did you get the idea from?

I think many ideas come together to make a book when you know you’re going to write it – as when Penguin Australia demanded a sequel to Book 1. But for the Ferren Trilogy as a whole, everything began with a single generative spark – it came out of a dream! Seriously!

I dreamed I was under a blanket, then peeked out. There were uncanny, moving lights in the night sky, and ominous, inexplicable sounds. Suddenly I knew – the way you can know things in dreams, as though someone just told me – that this was the great war going on between the armies of Heaven and the armies of Earth.

I was still watching when one of the lights came hurtling down out of the sky straight towards me.

That was the moment I woke up, but I was still in the drowsy, not fully conscious state when you come out of a dream too fast. And I decided to myself, ‘That must have been an angel shot down and crashing to the Earth … and she must have landed very close by … perhaps she’s dead or perhaps she’s injured …’

I thought some more about it as I came to full consciousness. One thing I thought was, ‘Wow, I’ve been given the start of a novel!’ And I had! It took me a decade to fill out the background behind that first scene, then many, many drafts and versions. But through every draft and version, one thing always stayed the same: the opening scene. With Ferren the protagonist taking my place, the first ten pages of Ferren and the Angel have never varied. They were just handed to me on a plate!

Were there any parts of the book where you struggled?

I’m sure there were for the first version of Ferren and the Doomsday Mission, but I can’t remember much now. I think I often had a sense that I was getting led along a false trail and needed to pull the story back into line – e.g. too many details on the individual tribes that Ferren and Miriael visit. I had to produce the novel by deadline, so I kept pulling and forcing the book back into shape. But with this version, I knew where I was going, set the story up properly from the start, gave it a push and let it roll on all by itself!

What came easily?

As per my last answer. I think I’m much better at telling a story than I was twenty years ago – not better at imagining, but better at getting the most out of my imagination! And better at doing several things at the same time, such as developing a character while keeping the story moving while building a world.

Are your characters entirely fictitious or have you borrowed from real world people you know?

I’m running through a mental checklist of the main characters in Ferren and the Doomsday Mission … Ferren, Miriael, Kiet and Asmodai. The two angels are a special case because they’re transhuman, so no, no single human source for them, only elements of behaviour that I could use. (Just as well there’s no single human source for Asmodai!) I guess Ferren has some of my traits – like dogged, stubborn, determination – but I didn’t have to borrow consciously for him. Kiet is a composite of a cousin of mine (growing up back in England) and three or four other people. She changes in the course of the book and probably  becomes more like my cousin as the story goes on.

We all know how important it is for writers to read. Are there any particular authors that have influenced how you write and, if so, how have they influenced you?

A whole mess of influences from all over the place! When I first wrote stories as a kid, I loved Edgar Allan Poe, so all my earliest stories were full of sable drapes and guttering candles! Then there was Tolkien, who took over my mind as a teenager. Later on, Mervyn Peake and his very strange Gormenghast world … I’ve loved many very different kinds of books, including thrillers, crime, literary classics, and I suppose they’ve all left a mark. I could name fantasies nowadays that relate to the fantasies I write, and also fantasy authors I hugely admire, but I don’t know if they influenced me. If I was looking for influences behind the background world of the Ferren Trilogy, I’d likely fish up some very odd specimens, like William Blake, Dante and Milton!

Do you have a target reader?

Not as narrow as the YA target reader the Ferren Trilogy is being marketed at. That’s the logic of marketing – you can’t target across the board or you end up targeting no one. But I write for the teen imagination in us all, including myself – the peak years for imagination – and I hope for all readers in whom that peak imagination has never faded. I was surprised when some of the strongest fans of the original version were as young as 11 or 12, but not surprised to gather adult fans of all ages. That’s the beauty of fantasy, it doesn’t cleave to the interests of a single age group!

About Writing

Do you have a writing process? If so can you please describe it?

My writing process is an answer to many, many years of writer’s block. I discovered that I had my best inspirations at the end of the day, so I was always jotting down ideas by night, often waking up to grab a notebook. I still believe that’s my best time for inspiration – when the conscious mind is sort of slipping under and the unconscious is half in control.

Trouble is, inspiration doesn’t do the actual writing for you! I spent so many years waffling between heaps of ideas, but always losing self-belief and abandoning stories unfinished. I blamed myself – felt guilty as hell, in fact – but the big mistake was trying to write when I didn’t have the drive. For me, the drive comes first thing in the morning, so that’s when I start nowadays. Regular as clockwork! And the regularity’s a big part of it. I write every day of the year bar Xmas and birthdays, so I know I’m going to write, and I don’t have to fight myself to do it!

It’s not very romantic, but sheer habit can be a great friend to an author. This author anyway! And although I still have some great late-night ideas, nowadays I find there’s also another kind of inspiration I need for writing – the inspiration that produces an idea that the story needs at some particular point along the way. Here’s where the story’s at, here’s where it should end up – but what’s going to happen with this hole in the middle? That’s where you have to have a kind of directed inspiration – if you don’t have that, you’ll be merely filling in the holes with bits of plot filler.

I have a motto for my writing: Everything in a Novel Has To Be Truly Wanted! (Meaning: it would be great for its own sake even if the plot didn’t need it.)

I’d never push my writing process on anyone else, though. It’s right for me, but we all have different problems. The amazing thing is how different writers can work in totally different ways to end up with equally wonderful books. I think I had to struggle more than most to find my way!

Do you outline? If so, do you do so extensively or just chapter headings and a couple of sentences?

I can believe in pantsing it for many kinds of novel, but not for world-creating fantasy. When you’re creating everything from the grass-roots up, you have to make so many elements work together – you can’t just borrow from reality that’s already done the job for you! I hate the word ‘plotter’ because it sounds so mechanical, but I think a fantasy writer has to be a kind of plotter. A non-mechanical kind of plotter who gets things growing together – world elements, story elements, character elements. It’s not an unnatural process just because it’s done in advance of typing in words on a screen.

Maybe I’m pleading for myself, because I suspect I’m a bit unusual in the amount I create in my head before turning it into word. I tend to see things in my mind’s eye long before verbalizing. In fact, I love the process, where a vague picture of what’s going to happen ten chapters ahead gradually comes clearer and clearer as I approach it (and sometimes turns out to be very different to what I thought I was glimpsing ahead!) I’m forever anticipating ahead, and forever revising my anticipations.

The way I look at it – the story itself knows what it wants to be, and it’s up to me to discover it. Like a sculptor revealing the figure inside a block of stone! I think I only half-discovered that figure with the first version of Ferren and the Doomsday Mission – now I’ve finally set it free!

Do you edit as you go or wait until you’ve finished?

I usually scribble lines in longhand, then type them up when they’re fairly final, so there’s a checking as I go along there. But when I say ‘type’, I like to use my iPad and the slider keyboard on it – very quick and easy. But it means auto-spellcheck is coming into play all the time, and that creates endless typos when spellcheck guesses wrong. I don’t bother to look back over what it produces – I reckon I can pick up the typos and work out what I meant in a proofread after the whole book’s finished.

Do you listen to music while you write? If yes, what gets the fingers tapping?

Never tried it! I like humming, singing, whistling along to music, so I doubt it would work for me.

About Publishing

Did you submit your work to Agents?

My first three mainstream SF novels sold without an agent. Then I had one of Australia’s top agents come in for the selling of Ferren and the Angel. Which was good, but … The editor who really believed in the book wasn’t Penguin Australia’s commissioning editor, and when a new commissioning editor was finally appointed, she wasn’t personally very interested in YA Fantasy. However, she went through with the contract because my agent has (or had) huge sway in the Australian publishing industry. Which was fine – except that commissioning editor still wasn’t really committed to the books and let them slide with minimal push and marketing. I sort of fell between two stools, two phases in Penguin Australia’s internal politics.

I guess every mainstream author has similar horror stories – I have others, but I’ve heard many worse!

What made you decide to go Indie, whether self-publishing or with an indie publisher? Was it a particular event or a gradual process?

What decided me was the offer from IFWG Publishing. But now – I just love the fact that my indie publisher believes in and cares about the Ferren books. You don’t get that sort of long-term support from a mainstream publisher, especially now, when every new book to produce instant sales results or the author’s out the door.

Did you get your book cover professionally done or did you do it yourself?

Another benefit of indie publishing. The covers for the Ferren books are by Elena Betti, an Italian graphic artist – God bless her for being such a talent! – but I was consulted by IFWG Publishing at every step along the way. With Pan Macmillan, Penguin, Scholastic and Allen & Unwin, I was generally consulted – maybe Australian mainstream publishers are more kindly that way! – but in the last analysis, the cover and what went on it was publisher’s business. With the Ferren covers, it’s been a 3-way process between the artist, the publisher and myself. I’m the lowest ranking of the 3 – which is how it should be – but my publisher doesn’t set himself at the top. He believes in giving cover artists as much scope to follow their own imaginations as possible. I reckon it’s a great principle – trust your creatives, and they’ll do better work for you!

Do you have a marketing plan for the book or are you just winging it?

We have a plan, but also learning as we go! The way marketing operates now keeps changing so fast that a plan for one year is liable to be out of date the next!

Any advice that you would like to give to other newbies considering becoming Indie authors?

I started out as an indie and now I’m coming round to being an indie again! I’m not a newbie, but the one thing I’ve always held to is that the one sure thing about being a writer is the joy of writing itself. Especially when the story sweeps you along and you can live with it and feel it falling into place! Success comes and goes, but no one can take that joy away from you.

About You

Where did you grow up?

In England – Yorkshire, then Devon, then London, then Suffolk. I migrated to Australia when I was 22.

Where do you live now?

In Figtree, about 60 miles south of Sydney. I’m a few miles from the biggest steelworks in the southern hemisphere, but also on a beautiful bit of coastline between a string of golden beaches and a high, steep, tree-clad escarpment.

What would you like readers to know about you?

I’m a quiet type of person, a bit of a personality-free zone! Maybe that’s why I find it so easy to slip into the lives of my fictional characters and live through their experience. But here’s the odd thing – put me up on stage for any kind of public performance and I turn into a ball of fire! How weird is that?

What are you working on now?

Ferren and the Invaders of Heaven – Book 3 in the trilogy.

End of Interview:

For more, check out this video trailer.

Get your copy of Ferren and the Doomsday Mission from Amazon US or Amazon UK.