#12 E. J. Free 1 on 1 with Mark Atley
E. J. Free, writer and all around good dude
Hello everyone, and welcome to "1 on 1 with Me!" In this series, I highlight a new author and engage in a thoughtful conversation about who they are, what they care about, and their perspectives on various topics. I start with standard questions and then move into tailored follow-ups based on their responses.
I find the format to be conversational, and I truly enjoy it. My primary focus is to highlight the author I am interviewing.
Who am I? I am an author known for creating crime fiction, with a particular focus on complex characters, engaging dialogue, and narratives centered around crime themes. I genuinely enjoy listening to people and letting them share their stories.
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My values
—Everyone matters.
—Be positive.
—Gratitude in everything.
—Default action is compassion.
—Empathy. Always.
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On to the interview!
E. J. Free, writer and all around good dude
Who are you and can you tell me a little about your work? What drives you? What do you hope to accomplish?
I’m a college student, father, and self-published author out of Lincoln, Nebraska. So far I’ve published three superhero novels in the Atlas Legacy, with a fourth on the way this Spring (I’m aiming for early March). I’ve also started to branch out, and I’ve got a sword-and-planet fantasy coming in the Summer or Fall. As for what drives me, my grandma shared my first book with a family at her church, and they read it together as a family and asked for more. That’s the kind of memory I want people to associate my writing with. I want to write a boatload of books that Christian boys want to read, the kind of stuff they don’t teach in schools.
How do you see your relationship with the reader?
My job as a writer is to entertain and edify my readers. Boring fiction, in my opinion, is bad fiction, so my first objective is always to be compelling. My second, of course, is to make sure that they’re being compelled toward real goodness. I’m here to transport my readers to another world and use it to show them truths about the world we live in.
How do you view your characters? What has changed over time, and what has stayed the same? How do you develop complex characters?
My characters are the primary agents of the narrative. My writing is plot-driven – things happen, so what are the characters going to do about it? This approach has been sharpened with time and experience – they used to be a lot more navel-gazey and directionless. One thing that’s stayed consistent is that they start out as an Attitude – “Character X feels this way about the world around them” – and that informs everything from where they’ve come from to what sort of skills or abilities they contribute to the narrative.
I did think of something to add to question three -- I forgot to answer how I develop complex characters.
The complexities of my characters come from the intersection between the narrative and their attitude. Something challenges them and they have to adapt -- how much of their foundation survives? By way of example, Sam Skylar, AKA Atlas, is really a simple man -- he wants to be left alone to do good. Unfortunately for him, he lives in a world where that's not an option for a man of his gifts. So he has a choice to make: be left alone, or do good? The various situations he has to answer that question in, and the ways he answers it, compound to make a character who has no doubt in his values or morals, but is constantly conflicted over what the consequences of his convictions might be for himself and his family, and whether it's worth it.
What is your version of success? Has it changed during your writing journey? How so? What’s different now versus when you started?
Like I mentioned above, my version of success is being part of formative memories for my readers. Growing up we read a bunch of books by Brian Jacques as a family, and those books will always hold a special place in my heart and my wife and I are going to do the same with our kids. Ultimate success for me would be that sort of generational impact. It didn’t start out that way – I wanted to be the next Christopher Paolini when I started, the homeschooler who broke out with his first book and made it big. Obviously, that didn’t happen, so expectations had to shift. I think my current goal is a better one than the original anyhow. It’s more meaningful.
What type of reader are you? How do you view books you read, and how do they affect you and your writing?
I’m a very absorbative reader. I’m always on the hunt for tricks and tropes that catch my attention and keep me hooked, and I like to find ways to incorporate them into my own writing. Reading other people to see what works and what doesn’t is one of the best ways I know to sharpen my own skills. I’ve got a few old favorites I like to revisit too, like Tarzan and A Princess of Mars, to remind me of the kind of adventures I want to tell. I just have to be careful that I don’t accidentally take on another author’s voice as well as their toolkit – I still want my books to be my own.
How do you find readers? What works and hasn’t worked for you? What resonates with you when readers share thoughts about your work? And where do you see yourself in the writing community and publishing world?
The best (most effective and most impactful) way I’ve found readers has been word of mouth from people who’ve read my books. It means my books really made a mark on folks, and they’re the ones who are most likely to be evangelists for them and pick up my future works. It’s not the fastest method, mind you; I’m hardly the biggest name in the indie publishing world. I’m definitely a small fish in a big pond, but I’m content to keep plugging away and building an audience bit by bit. I’ve been experimenting more with social media, but I’ll be the first to tell you that’s not really my strong suit. Still, it’s worth the effort – I’ve made a lot of friends lately by being more engaged online.
—Please provide a brief blurb about yourself, and feel free to promote your recent book or work.
I’m an all-American, Great Plains boy, the descendant of chicken farmers, train robbers, gunsmiths, and exiles. I cut my teeth on swashbuckling adventures and the highest of fantasies, and I’m out to write stories that’ll give my son the same fertile soil for imagination. My latest work, Atlas: Titanomachy, is the third in the Atlas Legacy, and follows the hard choices a simple man has to make in a world of compromise and intrigue, all while flying at supersonic speeds and fighting off building-sized alien invaders. There’s good in this world, and I aim to fight for it.
—Tell me something interesting about yourself that these questions stimulated thought about. And tell me something you want others to know.
I’ve got six fingers on one hand, but only nine toes.
Kidding.
In all seriousness, there is such a thing as too serious. The reason I write adventure stories is because, as grim and dire as the situations on the page might get, they’re not serious. You can put the book down, go outside, touch grass, and marvel at God’s creation. The characters won’t be in any more peril when you come back just because you left, and there is a happy ending waiting for you if you push through the danger.
See, adventure stories let you engage with serious topics in a non-serious way. Analogy and metaphor are powerful tools, because they let you disconnect the real-world associations a topic might have and examine it under its own merits. That’s also why I avoid contemporary fiction, and fiction that inserts contemporary issues whole cloth – if I wanted to read wild and crazy stories about the problems we face as we face them, I’d just read the newspaper. But a wild and crazy story about someone in a totally different situation whose difficulties parallel without mirroring the real problems we face? Now you’re talking.
And ultimately, just like in my stories, there is a happy ending to the real world too. After all the sickness, sorrow, pain, and death, good wins. God wins. The world will be remade the way it was before, unmarred by all the effects of the curse, and our relationship to God will be restored. And it’s that ultimate happy ending that every happy ending points to.
You mention several times the importance of God and Religion to you and in your writing: what qualities do you bring to your writing that highlight this? How do you think this benefits you and how do see it hurting you?
One of the central rules for all my stories is that God is real. Whether the characters do or don't believe in Him really comes down to the character in question, but it's a truth of my fictional universe just as much as it's true in the real one. And that means that Good and Evil are concrete, real forces that the characters wrestle with. My favorite things to write are when characters are forced to wrestle with moral questions as they're dealing with their adventures. Sometimes the religious themes are implicit -- the good guys and bad guys end up aligned appropriately even if they don't outright say that they're Christian -- but lately I've been leaning more into making it an explicit contrast.
A big benefit of grounding my stories in a Christian worldview (I know some fellas who would throw stones at me for using that word but it's the word that fits what I want to say so I'm keeping it) on the writing side of things is that it gives me a big bucket of themes, conflicts, and characters to draw from when I'm in need of inspiration. For example, in Redlanders, the main character starts the story as a shepherd -- the intent was to draw a parallel to David, who was a man after God's own heart and yet also a warrior, and the tension that causes.
There are two big hindrances to being religious when you write fiction. The first is making sure that you're writing it well. And I don't just mean accurately -- I mean it needs to fit the story, it needs to flow naturally from and through the plot. The world is chock-full of religion-infused fiction that suffers for it; just take a look at Hollywood and some of the, for lack of a better term, woke content being pushed out. And make no mistake, that is a religion. I don't want to write the right-wing Christian equivalent of Captain Marvel. I want to hearken back to fiction where Christianity was so ingrained that it was simply assumed and accepted. The other hindrance is one of publishing -- the reason I self publish is, ultimately, because my writing is too Christian for most sci-fi and fantasy publishers, and too sci-fi and fantasy for most Christian publishers. If there's a happy middle ground out there that would get me a better reach and response than doing it myself, I have yet to find it.
You seem pretty optimistic. How do you deal with a negative-narrative-driven world? What advice to you have to give to stay positive? See the best in life? Or get through a tough situation?
To paraphrase C. S. Lewis, joy is a decision. When I was growing up my parents often told me that I needed to control my emotions or I would be controlled by them -- it's a theme that's carried on to pretty much all of my writing in some way. You can't always choose your circumstances, but you can choose what you're going to do about them, and what your attitude toward them is going to be. I would call myself a recovering cynic -- pessimism is more my nature than optimism to be frank. But giving into despair and wallowing in self-pity doesn't get anything done; despondency is one of the Enemy's favorite tools. One of the best pieces of advice I've ever gotten for dealing with depression, the blues, or even just a bad day, is to "mow someone else's yard." Find someone else with a problem that you can fix, and help them with it. It takes your mind off your own troubles, it gets you moving, it gets you involved with someone else, and doing that lifts both of you up.
Self-publishing is both easy and hard. How did you do it? What is your journey? Why did you take that route? What do you hope to accomplish in the self-publishing world? What are tips and trips to it? And how do you find ways to self promote?
I published my first book when I was eighteen or nineteen. It wasn't pretty; I went back and heavily edited it and re-published it as a second edition. I'm sure copies of the first edition are still floating around out there, mocking me. If you find a copy of Atlas written in first-person, you've got your hands on one of those dread things. Break out the red pen and have fun. After that was fixed, I had a pretty quick turnaround on the second book, followed by a very long hiatus where I was busy doing other things -- working a lot, getting married, having a kid. I kept writing, though, and last year I decided to finally dust off the manuscripts I've had gathering dust in my hard drive and see what I could do to get them out in the world. Like I mentioned before, I found that traditional publishing isn't a great fit for my work, so I stuck with what I know -- self-publishing. I put up my books on Amazon and tell everybody I know that might be halfway interested about them. The big trick to success in self-publishing is having enough people who care about what you have to say to make the time and money investment in paying for it. Building that kind of audience isn't easy, but networking with like-minded authors can help you to build that audience by building your brand. It's worth pointing out that "your brand" is mostly not your books, especially if social media is where you build it. Again, the goal is to get people interested in what you have to say in general.
Finally, what’s the negative aspect to self publishing and how do you see yourself overcoming that/those pitfalls?
There are two big pitfalls I can see in self-publishing. The first is that just because you like what you've written doesn't mean anybody else will. The big benefit of traditional publishing is that it's vetted -- they're not going to take a chance on something that they don't foresee an audience for. If you're going to self-publish, the job of finding editors and beta readers who will tell you what works and what doesn't falls on you. The other big pitfall, once you know there's an audience for what you're writing, is reaching that audience. You're one voice in ten thousand, all clamoring for limited time and money. You have to get your books in front of a lot of people before any of them are going to pick them up. Then it's a job of managing the snowball so it continues to grow, rather than shrinking. Part of that is staying consistent with your engagement -- don't just throw the book out there and call it a day. Keep growing your brand, keep making new connections and friends who will recommend your books to other people. Another part of it is to keep writing. If you've got that audience, give them more. Getting people in the door with one good book is nice. Having more good books to keep them interested helps you roll that snowball the right way. Stay focused, too -- don't jump from one series to another leaving people wondering if you're ever going to finish the first. Just be careful not to bite off more than you can chew. Don't promise seven books if you only have the commitment to write two and then get bored. It's a really difficult balancing act, to be sure.
Mark Atley is known for writing crime fiction, with his works often characterized by complex characters, engaging dialogue, and narratives that build tension towards explosive climaxes.
Atley's approach to writing often involves creating intricate plots where characters' histories and motives are deeply interwoven, providing readers with both entertainment and a commentary on crime and morality. His work has been featured on platforms like Audible for audiobooks, indicating a broad reach in the crime fiction genre.
Mark Atley also engages with his audience through social media, where he can be followed for updates on new releases and insights into his writing process
Interesting with an interesting man. I grew up with Burroughs so I will have to take a look a E. J. Free's work.