Today it gives the Speculative Fiction Showcase great pleasure to interview Michael DeAngelo, author of D’Aprile’s Fools and creator of the Tellest Universe.
The world of Tellest first emerged in the year 2000. How did your idea develop into a detailed and complex world?
Thank you for your question. It’s always nice to start at the beginning!
I had a love for fantasy for quite a while, but my love for literature subsided a bit at the beginning of high school. It wasn’t until the back half when I had just the right combination of all the sorts of things that I was interested in that coalesced and had me begin using my free time to start creating stories of my own.
It all started with a gifted book, a new computer game, and some free time after a math test. I had only intended on creating a short biography about a character—for a game, mind you—and the story developed around that, creating a life of its own. I feel like along the way I’ve been unearthing new secrets and unlocking new mysteries. It’s easy for me to get attached to my characters as well, and I’m always thinking about how I can make them seem like the leading role in a story of their own, even if they were a bit player in someone else’s tale.
One of the important aspects of the Tellest verse is its collaborative aspect. You encourage other writers and artists to participate. What made you move from being a lone writer to setting up a collaborative multiverse?
Around the time that I started moving on from my original trilogy, I began working on novellas and novelettes. I had wanted to try and learn how to write tighter prose, so I looked on creative writing subreddits. It was there that I was able to meet up with likeminded storytellers, and I ended up offering up some money for contests. I met one of my longest running collaborators nearly ten years ago through that, and he and I will often come together for a few stories every year. The hope is that we can take things a step further, and we can eventually begin publishing feature-length novels for these other collaborators, but we’re taking baby steps for now.
I should mention that I’ve also lucked out by having people that are near and dear to me who have submitted their own stories that have been entertaining reads as well, and they’ve helped to shape the overall tapestry of the world in some great ways.
How does the process work? Do writers approach you or vice versa?
In the case of the people who I know in my day-to-day life, I’ll often see a spark in them that fits the kind of creative vibe that I’m going for. Birds of a feather, and all that. But oftentimes, when I’m collaborating with people from outside of my regional bubble, it’s because they’ve reached out to me for help with a promotion or an editorial review on one of their books. Again, I’ll look for a prose style and similar story structures that feel like they would lend themselves to Tellest, and our friendship usually kicks off from there.
You have a website, fantasywritingprompts.com, meant to assist other authors find their way out of writer’s block and come up with ideas for new stories. This sounds like an excellent idea - what made you decide to create it and what role do you play?
So, when I was in high school, right around the time that I started conceptualizing what Tellest was, I had a creative writing course that I feel did wonders to get me started. Every day we had a writing prompt, and I ended up stitching together a lot of those prompts into what became the first drafts for a lot of what helped Tellest get off the ground. I figured if it was something that could work for me, it could likely work for others as well.
The first concept of the writing prompts existed briefly on the fantasy writing prompt subreddit. That was where I met and brought on Aaron Canton, who has been one of our more prolific partners. Eventually when I turned toward purchasing more art, we stopped that contest for a while. I had always wanted to get back into offering those, and eventually decided to just dive straight into things and purchase the domain and create the site.
It's a lot of work, certainly more than I was prepared for. I had planned to have daily prompts, with ideas, questions for writers to ask themselves, and challenges, but with all the other projects I work on, it just wasn’t meant to be at the time. We’re back to doing weekly prompts, with monthly contests though. We’ll likely do them seasonally, and the idea is that, between seasons, we’ll publish a volume of writing prompts into a book that can be purchased.
Tellest embraces different media, including a tabletop game, Quantum Quest, and a computer game called Quantum Quest: Merge Dungeon. Tell us something about these.
For better or worse, I have a lot of ambitions. Some of it is just to scratch an itch or to sate my curiosity—can I create a tabletop game, am I able to put together a team to develop a video game? Honestly it all comes from a place of trying to create something I love with a bit of a Tellest veneer.
One of my friends and I had been talking about making a tabletop game for a while, and we had some good ideas, but they ended up hitting walls here and there. I remember having the idea for Quantum Quest—which is sort of like if you took Monopoly and added a D&D sort of spin to it—when I was driving to one of my remote sites at the day job I worked at. Something just clicked, and I thought I had everything all figured out, so I went and bought some index cards and spent a night putting together some mock-ups. I took my best friend out to a dinner and started to throw all the index cards on the table, and tried to see if he enjoyed it, and by the end of it, I had an investor. After getting my brother on board, we were ready to start moving forward. Once we auditioned a few artists, we found the one that we’ve been working with ever since. We’ve got an expansion that we’re ready to drop when the time is right, but COVID sort of knocked us off track a bit.
Merge Dungeon is an idle clicker that I’d really like to get on phones, but I still think it needs a bit of polish. We’ve had people play it and they enjoy it, but I think mobile is where it could thrive, and to get that to work the right way, I think we would have to change a few things here and there. We’ll be pivoting back to that when the time is right.
We’re planning on supporting both projects, and many more, in the months and years to come.
The artwork and design of the Tellest website and book covers is very striking. Who designed the art and the concepts?
I have an incredible roster of artists. It’s not just one who brings all the Tellest art to life. I’ve got artists who do work for me from all over the world, including the Philippines, Malaysia, Russia, Ukraine, South Africa, the UK and of course the US. My cover artist is an awesome collaborator from Italy named Leonardo Borazio.
The attempt is to achieve the same level of cohesion and consistency with the art as we do with the stories, and I think we’ve been able to nail that down well.
I post a new art piece on the Tellest site every Wednesday, and I currently have enough content to keep us going until midway through 2024.
Well, I’m certainly no Brandon Sanderson, that’s for sure! But, for a relatively no-name author who especially then but even now is bad at self-marketing, I’ve been able to use Kickstarter to what I believe is a nice success. I would advise anyone who wants to try and use Kickstarter to fund a fantasy project to ensure that people are aware of the project at the forefront, and to promote the project as liberally as they can. It’s not easy, and especially toward the middle of the campaign period, things start to sag. But so long as you have something you believe in, it’s worth doing, if for nothing else just to get the word out. I’ll certainly be using Kickstarter again in the future, more than likely for the Quantum Quest expansion.
Tell us something about your latest book, D'Aprile's Fools, which came out on Oct 26, 2021. Does this book form part of a series or is it a standalone?
D’Aprile’s Fools is planned to be part of at least a trilogy. Whenever I’m working on a story in Tellest these days, I’m trying to think of them as ongoing sagas, in addition to figuring out where they fit into the grander tapestry. D’Aprile’s Fools started as an April Fool’s joke, and then, like most of my projects of that sort, things took off and expanded in the best way. I was also able to loop in some characters from shorter stories, which helped to enrich the world that much more. I’m already very excited for an opportunity to step back into the part of the world that these heroes call home, and to explore more about their trials and tribulations.
Talk to us about the protagonist of the series, Frederic D’Aprile, and his “fools”. Who is the wizard Bixby Alladocious?
I envision Frederic as this veteran warrior who has served his time, and he’s ready to hang things up. War isn’t something that I imagine most people can suffer through forever, and Frederic has seen some dark parts of it. He’s made the best out of it though as well, including meeting and marrying a woman that makes him feel whole. When that’s threatened, it sets in motion what happens for the rest of the story.
In the country of Blacklehn, people with unusual abilities are, at best, ostracized. At worst, they’re hunted down and captured or killed. When we enter Blacklehn in D’Aprile’s Fools, the Ebon Hammer, a vile but powerful mercenary organization, has seized most of the heroes and champions of the land that have these abilities. So, it’s up to Frederic, who has some history with training soldiers, to find these people who are decidedly not champions, and shape them up until they become champions.
Bixby Alladocious is just a blast. He’s a character who was originally introduced in an April Fool’s joke long before the D’Aprile’s Fools crew, so some folks have been able to acclimate to the wizard, his interesting power, and the strange attitude he has because of it. I had to play his power a little close to the chest just by the nature of this story, but I’m very excited to let him go a little bit crazy with his macabre gift in the sequel. Once you open Pandora's Box, it’s difficult to close it up again!
What can you tell us about the Strain?
The Strain is sort of like the magical equivalent of the X gene in the Marvel universe. Because of some of the events of the past, magic permeates the atmosphere, and it can affect places and artifacts, and it can also bestow its gifts upon people. A lot of the time, these people don’t have any magical background; they haven’t studied or apprenticed with a wizard or anything like that. They inherit these blessings or curses and must learn how to live with them.
At the end of the day, Tellest ends up feeling a lot like a universe about superheroes in high fantasy. We have pyromancers, teleporters, heroes and villains with super strength, transformative powers—you name it. And I still feel like we’re just scratching the surface with things. I’m trying to tackle things with a bit of a slow build, but things are moving toward bigger events that require acts of real heroism to preserve the state of the world.
What type of fantasy world is Tellest? Is it a traditional fantasy world (and what does that mean?)
So, because Tellest is an Earth-sized world, there’s a lot that can vary from continent to continent. The idea is that it’s supposed to be a bit more versatile than your normal high fantasy, but not to move too far into the future. We’re a few years out from a black powder revolution where people who don’t have powers (beyond their brilliance) start to understand how to create firearms and cannons and the like. But certainly, the world is supposed to feel like a melting pot of cultures. It’s a society that looks like ours, on top of also having an array of fantasy races as well, that adds another layer of variety to the mix.
How do you see the world - and the series - developing?
Well, from an in-world perspective, we’re going to be shaking things up over the next few years. Most notably, we’re going through a timeline shift that has been sort of made apparent in my blogs and in a few of the short stories, but with an upcoming book release, it’s really in your face that something is happening with the Tellest timeline. The stories I’ve been releasing have been a bit more personal so that I could introduce characters and show what drives them, but we must up the ante a bit more as well. We’re going to start to see stories that have greater threats with world-changing consequences. In the longer term, we might even see other worlds.
On the creator side, we’re looking to continue expanding in new ways, and to improve the offerings that are already out there. As much as I’d love to do it all myself, we need some other Tellest champions to help share their vision with the world as well. We’ve begun work on a children’s book that is nearly a third of the way done, and a bit further out on the horizon I’ve been shaping ideas for the first Tellest comic as well.
Tellest is a massive universe, and while we’ve mostly only seen crossovers between short story characters and bigger novels, we’re drawing closer than ever to seeing the real potential of a world like this. I liken the multiple series that I’m working on now as the Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America movies before they came together in the Avengers. My Avengers is still a couple years out as I wrap up these multiple sets of trilogies, but the notes and the groundwork are beginning to come together.
How do you agree the rules for writing a shared world? Are there limits?
So, we’re working on a few things in the background that allow Tellest to almost live without rules in certain respects. The time-traveling stories open a lot of doors for us, and an upcoming novelization of another project almost blows up the walls that the doors were standing in. The goal is to make it so that parts of Tellest are wholly accessible to fans who want to create fan fictions in the world that could, in theory, be real in a different reality.
The main Tellest timeline that we’re working in right now is still more administrated. If I’m going back to the Marvel analogies, I’m sort of like if Stan Lee and Kevin Feige were combined. I’m still in the creation phase for a lot of these characters—and we have a huge and growing roster—but I’m also working with other creators who are eager to lend their voice and their talents to the world. Oftentimes we have what I call “writer-ready” threads, but I’m always open to pitches as well. Some of our best stories from Aaron Canton came without any real suggestions from me. He just read the material that existed (going so far as to dive into the encyclopedia entries that I had on the Tellest site at the time), and we went on from there. In fact, his work has already lent itself to that massive Avengers-level project we’re preparing.
Even though there are meant to be some creative freedoms, there needs to be cohesion and structure as well, so I work to facilitate that as best I can. I’ll always send kind of like an intro packet to the official collaborative partners we work with, which includes a general concept of what the books are all about, together with some links to study material, as well as a style guide that is meant to be used to keep things feeling consistent, even as you read from authors with distinct voices. And then of course we must make sure that the storylines themselves work with one another in effective ways. You can’t have one tale contradict another, and especially if people are working or adventuring in the same cities or regions, you want to make sure that everything comes together in a nice, organic way.
Tell us about the Tellest Team...
At this point, it might even be worth it to call it an army! I should start with those closest to the action. My wife Rhianna is my muse, and without her, I think a lot of the stories would have lost their luster or would have felt completely different by the time I was done with them. She’s also a storyteller within the universe, and I love every opportunity I can get to have her share her voice. My good friend Nace is an editor for the Tellest universe, who helps me maintain the consistency in voice and style that I mentioned earlier. He also creates his own stories in the Tellest tapestry, with a big one coming through soon that we’re very excited about. My brother Matt and my best friend Kev are pseudo-consultants on a few of the characters that I developed, and I’m always happy to hear their ideas. And we’ve got other helpers like an additional editor and social media team members. And that’s all before we start to talk about other writers, artists, and voice work contributors. We really could be here all day—the music would play to pull me off the stage, for sure.
There will certainly be more books. This year I’m really trying to deliver a high number of releases. During COVID, there were a lot of distractions, so for that first year, we didn’t have anything to really show for Tellest. But 2021 was a return of sorts, and 2022 is supposed to be an even bigger restructuring and return to form. We’re very close to a release for our second short story anthology, featuring 24 more stories in the Tellest universe. I’m working on wrapping up the novelization for Quantum Quest, which is an interesting project indeed. After that, the plan is to complete the first of the Tales of Tellest trilogies, with Wild Magic, the third book in the Ancestral Magic series. If we still have time after that, there are other book projects I’d love to release this year, but as I mentioned earlier, I’m overzealous and ambitious—perhaps too much so!
On the non-prose side, we’ve got that kid’s book that we’re working on, which I hope we’ll be the first of many. We’re also just waiting for the perfect time to drop the Quantum Quest standalone expansion. We may do so with a Kickstarter just so that folks get the best price available, and the option to pick up some exclusive goodies that we think would be fun.
And that’s all just this year. There’s a lot more to come, and with every year, I feel like the snowball keeps getting bigger. I’m looking forward to a nice Tellest avalanche when we can muster that.
What are your favourite novels, movies and games? Who do you consider a major influence?
I think it’s difficult to ignore the experts and most popular fantasy storytellers. J.K. Rowling built a huge world that is deep and rich and feels like it’s always existed alongside our own. George Martin has shown that people can enjoy projects that are vast and follow sizable casts of characters. And of course, Tolkien set in place the groundwork for everything to follow. I love all these authors and their worlds, and they certainly have held some sway, but I think I would have to say I’m most influenced by R.A. Salvatore. If it weren’t for his Drizzt novels, I don’t know that lightning would have struck the way it did to get me moving.
As for other media, as you can probably tell, I’m a huge fan of the Marvel universe. I love how well they’ve been able to tell an ongoing story that seemed so out of reach when I was growing up. It’s for that reason that I’m so into things like The Last Airbender and Dragon Prince as well, I’m sure.
I’m a nostalgic gamer. While I love a lot of the new games that come out, I feel like there were certain charms to older games. The Secret of Monkey Island was written so well and had perfect humor. The Warcraft and Heroes of Might and Magic games have held some sway over me throughout the years. But my favorite game of all time, I think, must be Final Fantasy VI. It’s another one of those situations where it’s got this illustrious cast of characters, each with their own flavor and style, but who come together to tell a great story that feels cohesive. It’s the perfect sort of thing to inspire a Tellest-style world. And to top it off it’s got magnificent music that sticks with you forever!
About Michael DeAngelo:
As the creator of Tellest, Michael not only creates dynamic stories featuring diverse casts of characters, but also helps other fantasy authors spread the word about their own stories and expanding worlds. He has also taken his love for fantasy several steps forward (and in different directions altogether). He has created a tabletop game, Quantum Quest, that leads back to Tellest, and subsequently spun off an idle computer game called Quantum Quest: Merge Dungeon. He also administers a fantasy writing prompt site meant to assist other authors in finding their way out of writer’s block and come up with ideas for new stories.
Michael has an associate degree in Journalism from Bucks County Community College, and while the truth is stranger than fiction, he prefers to play with the characters and events within his imagination.
Michael lives in a small suburb of Philadelphia with his wife—whom he is co authoring a children’s book with—and four fuzzy babies, all of whom join him on adventures in Tellest every Christmas.
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