Catching Up with…Ismael Manzano
This week, I'm
catching up with author, Ismael Manzano, whose debut novel, Soulless, will be released on March 8, 2016 by
Fantasy Works Publishing. Ismael and I first met when I was asked to interview
him for the Bronx Chronicle (You can read that interview here) I was so
impressed with him and so intrigued with the premise of Soulless that I invited him to talk to me
for this blog, an invitation he graciously accepted.
Hi Ismael. Thanks so
much for agreeing to chat with me again. Why don’t we begin with you telling us
a little about yourself.
I’m a husband to a fellow writer and a father to a hyper
little boy, and I’ve aspired to publish my own work since as far back as I can
remember, only finding success last year.
I understand your wife is an editor and also a writer.
What’s that like—living with being intimately
involved with another writer?
It’s
been wonderful. Before I met her, I was the only person I knew who was
interested in writing, so whenever I showed anyone my work they offered me
nothing but praise—more because they were just impressed that I bothered
writing anything than because they actually liked what I’d written. Which
sounds good on the surface, but none of us are perfect and we need constructive
criticism in order to grow.
When
my wife began writing as well, it opened up a whole new avenue for me. One in
which we could bounce ideas off of each other and critique each other’s work in
a safe and honest environment. That I respect her work tremendously also helps
because it means I respect her evaluation of my stories. When she says
something is good, I believe it, and when she says it needs work, I take a step
back and force myself to examine it objectively. I don’t think I would have
ever grown as a writer surrounded by people who mean well but don’t understand
the craft.
Soulless is your first published book, though I know you’ve been
writing for a while. What was the key to your success that led to your book
getting out to the public?
For me, the key was to never give up. I’ve written plenty of
things in my life, some that I thought were really good and some that I thought
were really bad in hindsight. Regardless, publishers rejected them. Rather than
give up, I moved on to another project or went back to the beginning and took a
look at the story anew, hoping to find a way to make it stand out.
I know like me, you I
write everywhere and whenever you can. And that can be a challenge. How long
did it take you to write Soulless
start to finish?
Soulless, start to
finish took me about a year. That’s from the concept to the final word, but
I’ve written other manuscripts in half that time.
Do you do a lot of
research for your writing?
Yes. During my outlining I try to research whatever I think
I’ll need to avoid any roadblocks along the way, but I leave room to do more
research as I write.
Writers tend to talk
a lot about whether they are plotters, those who plan their stories in detail
before beginning to write, or pantsters, those who fly by the seat of their
pants and write as they go letting the story tell itself. I’m a definite
pantster. Which are you—do you create detailed character and plot bibles for
your stories?
Actually I do both. It depends on the story. I usually write
a moderately detailed outline, but as I go along, I usually find something that
needs changing and that in turns changes the direction of the rest of the
story. So I don’t try to write an outline so rigid that I can’t make room for
changes. For Soulless, I didn’t need
a plot bible, but I had a lot of characterizations written into my master
outline.
Where do you begin
when you write a story? With a scene, a character, a sentence?
I usually start my stories with a concept or a theme, and
try to find the best costume to drape over that theme. The themes don’t always
feature prominently in the story, because the story sometimes evolves beyond
the impetus that spawned it, but it’ll always be there somewhere. For example, Soulless began with the question, ‘What
if you never found your purpose in life?’ Now the theme of what happens when
someone’s purpose is not realized, or is taken away from them is still in the
book, but it stopped being the driving force of the story somewhere in the
third or fourth revision of the outline.
Have you ever used an
incident from real life in one of your books?
Surprisingly, for someone that mostly wrote epic fantasy
stories, I did find ways to put real life events into my stories. While it’s
not true for Soulless, another story
I’ve been working on has deep roots in my childhood experiences, although the
events are covered in fantastical elements.
What challenges did
you face getting your stories out there?
The biggest challenge was learning to accept rejection
without taking it personally.
What has surprised
you about the journey to publishing Soulless?
I wasn’t prepared for how personal the editing process felt.
Let’s talk about Soulless—what’s
it about and what do you hope readers will take away from reading the book?
Put simply, Soulless is about a
woman searching for her place in the world, for her purpose in being. The soul
trading business, and all the chaos that it brings into her life is the impetus
for that discovery, but at its core, the story is about Charlotte seeking
something that had been denied to her by the untimely illness of her father.
There’s an underlining theme to this book, and that’s this: what happens to a
person when they lose their purpose in life? I didn’t intend to beat anyone
over the head with that theme, and I hope it does not come across that way, but
I do hope readers will catch glimpses of it throughout the book.
And, Soulless is
Book One of a trilogy, correct?
Actually no. I planned four
books for this series, but there’s a possibility for a fifth, if the events of books
three and four run longer than expected. It’s one thing in the outlining phase
to say that a character goes to a place and convinces someone to help them, but
when you’re in the scene, submerged in the characters, you might find that
character A and character B have too much friction to work together, and you
have to create an alternative path which might take longer and might place the
character in situations you hadn’t previously thought to explore. Things have
changed in the story from the original inception, and I’m allowing myself an
extra space, in case more changes pop.
Ismael, thanks so
much for stopping by. I can’t wait to read Soulless
and I wish you much success with it.
About Soulless
The devil's not the only one buying souls; both sides need bodies to fight their war, and both have something to offer in return. Nearly anything is possible, if you are the type of soul they're looking for. Charlotte Furio learns this the hard way, when a spirited and mysterious woman named Trisha follows her home one night and gives her ailing father a simple choice: a healthy body for his immortal soul.
His decision introduces Charlotte to
the world of soul brokering, and Charlotte is not only drawn to it, but finds
she has a knack for it. Having lived the last decade of her life with only one
purpose—to care for her increasingly disabled father—Charlotte sees this as her
chance to give direction and meaning to her own life, and the lives of other
people. To help them as Trisha had helped her father.
This mission is quickly derailed
when Charlotte is framed for the murder of one of the brokers' leaders. Where
she once had only one purpose, now Charlotte has two: get her father's soul
back and find a way to prove her innocence before it's too late.
Buy Links
About Ismael Manzano
Ismael Manzano was born and raised in New York City, and has
lived his entire life in the Bronx,
Ismael is an avid reader of fantasy books, and knew at an
early age that he wanted to be a writer. He worked his entire life to hone his
craft to achieve the goal of removing the prefix, ‘aspiring,’ from his title,
and referring to himself as a writer.
He has written many reviews and social commentaries for the
web magazine, G-pop.net. Recently, Ismael has found success publishing his
short stories, Playing in Shadows, at
This Dark Matter, and Cold, was published in July 2015, at Grey
Matter. In 2015, Fantasy Works Publishing signed his Urban Fantasy
series, Soul Broker.
You can catch up with Ismael on line on Twitter, on Facebook,
on his blog, or on his Fantasy Works Publishingwebsite.
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