Why am I obsessed with Joe Abercrombie?

​Never  meet your heroes – that’s what they say, isn’t it?  I’m even not entirely sure who they are so screw what they say.
 
I don’t actually have any heroes, but if I was forced to select one, it would be Joe Abercrombie.  Yuck!  I’m cringing even writing that.  I don’t do hero worship, I hate the idea of genuflecting to anyone remotely famous or prestigious. 
 
So why bring up this nonsense at all?  Well, it’s because yesterday I met Joe Abercrombie; best selling author of The First Law trilogy.  I’d like to say I met him down the pub, and we had a pint together and talked shit about writing and growing up in Lancashire, but unfortunately, that nice little fantasy didn’t quite happen.  Instead, I saw him at a little conference thing called Gollanczfest – he was a speaker there then did a book sighing after.  I got a book signed and I told him how The First Law influenced my own books.  He scribbled something in my paperback copy of The Blade Itself and off I went.  That was that.

​I’m not in any way disappointed in my brief encounter.  I like how he came across at the event and he seemed nice enough when we briefly met.  Maybe it takes at least a pint in a pub somewhere to become disillusioned by your heroes, maybe one day I’ll get the chance – but not today.
 
So why am I waffling about Joe?  What made me want to write a blog post about yesterday’s brief encounter?  Well, I suppose it’s because I want to explain why I think he’s so influential to my own work. 
 
My story begins back in October 2021.  I was on holiday, I had a week by the pool and my love of reading was re-kindled.  I didn’t read any of Joe’s stuff on that particular holiday, I can’t actually recall what I read, but that’s not the point.  The point is that the re-emergence of my love of reading that I discovered on this holiday brought something else to the fore too, my love of making stuff up.
 
In October 2021, I was in a job where I was bored.  I worked from home and had to be at my computer all day in case anyone wanted to get in touch.  But I didn’t have enough work to fill my day.  While I was on holiday, I had an epiphany; I realised I could use my time stuck at  a computer to write stuff.  So when I came home I started writing the story that had rattled around my head for years and had survived two previous attempts to get it down on paper.  By Christmas, 2021, the first draft of The Queen of Vorn was complete.
 
So what has this got to do with Joe? 
 
Soon after I started writing, I realised I needed to read more.  I searched for new stuff to try, and I came across Joe Abercrombie’s books.  I wanted to find a fantasy trilogy that I thought I’d enjoy and The First Law trilogy seemed to fit the bill. 
 
I read this trilogy over the next year, at the same time I wrote my own trilogy.  After I finished The Queen of Vorn, I cracked straight on with its sequels.  So The First Law trilogy was with me the whole time I was writing The Homecoming Trilogy.
 
So what?
 
I loved Joe’s fresh take on the fantasy genre.  Sure, there were lots of familiar tropes, there were familiar settings and some of the characters were even quite familiar, but most weren’t.  Most had dark sides, complex sides and interesting back stories.  They were multi-layered and very distinctive from each other.  They all came with their own threads and intermingled with other characters in a satisfying manner as the trilogy progressed.
 
I wanted to get this stuff in my stories.  I wanted deep, dark, interesting characters…
 
(Note: If you have read neither my stories nor The First Law trilogy, you may wish to skip to the final paragraph, as the following may go over your head)
 
First, I want to talk about Queen Lila.  She’s the antagonist in my first novel, The Queen of Vorn, book 1 in The Homecoming Trilogy.  She has a long back story that featured in my first draft but got axed when I re-wrote The Queen of Vorn last summer.  I aim to make that backstory into a prequel one day – but anyway…  Let’s make her long story short (as we’ll be here far longer than I imagine your attention span will stretch to): Queen Lila starts off as a sweet, innocent young woman, then has a really nasty time of things and turns evil.  A little like how Glokta from The First Law got tortured and became a torturer.  She has some nice Glokta-style practical nastiness traits about her, but she maybe isn’t as multi layered as I’d like.  Looking back, she was the first character I created in The Homecoming Trilogy and so probably wasn’t as influenced by Joe as some of my others.
 
Let’s consider another of my characters: Mark.  Mark’s one of my favourite characters.  He appears in the second book in The Homecoming Trilogy.  He’s not particularly dark, but I think he has quite a few nuanced characteristics.  He’s had a difficult start to life, which contrasts against the cushy upbringing and less complex personality of another character, Tom, quite nicely.  Thinking about it, he has a lot of parallels with Joe’s Collem West.  They are both officers in the military and had unconventional starts in life and carry insecurities about that through their careers. 
 
I’m rattling the rest of my characters through my head as I write this, and on reflection, I, think my more complex characters appear in The Offspring Trilogy, this is the sequel trilogy to The Homecoming Trilogy.  As the name suggests, it focusses on the offspring of the characters from the first three books. 
 
There’s Garrad – the title character in The General’s Son.  He’s a bit like Joe’s Ardee West meets Jezal dan Luthar: he’s not comfortable in his skin, has a bit of a booze problem, he's great with a sword and arrogant at times.  There’s Sarah, she’s a bit like a non-crippled evil version of Glokta.  She’s not crippled physically, but she’s a bit screwed up mentally from childhood trauma.  She’s also very practical, she's a survivor, and necessarily brutal.  And there’s Mikey, he’s the title character in the third book in The Offspring Trilogy, The Prince’s Nephew.  I think he’s my favourite character of any I’ve created.  I can’t actually think of any direct parallels to Joe’s characters because I think he takes bits of them all.  He starts a bit like Logen Ninefingers in some ways - a bit of a thinking man’s barbarian, but from a modern era, but then transforms into something a bit like Ferro, a bit tapped in the head and extremely ruthless, but finally, I think he merges into something akin to Logen meets Collem.
 
I’d always known Joe Abercrombie’s books had influenced my own work, but until I really started to think about it, I don’t think I’d realised how much.  My stories are very different, but my characters?  They were the thing I liked the most from Joe’s books, so I suppose it really isn’t a surprise there’s parallels…thanks for the inspiration, Joe!