Alien meets Apocalypse Now meets the Wizard of Oz

A relaxed, lively chat with the imaginative and bright Tom Julian, author of the terrific sci-fi thriller Timberwolf.

A brief description of Timberwolf in author Tom Julian's words:

Meet Timberwolf Velez, a sort of special ops guy who's trying to stop his former mentor, Emmanuel Gray from restarting an interstellar war.

The setting is sort of in the edges of the galaxy. Humans have been at war with every species we’ve come across. Kind of a xenophobic crusade against aliens and a whole sort of twisted religion has come out of it. The belief is that any aliens who believe themselves made in god’s image (like we do) have to be wiped out. Basically, every species with a theology.

So the crux of the story is that after a hundred years, humanity is finally at peace but Gray has taken on the mantle of religious fanatic and comes across the location of a hidden weapons’ factory called Highland. Timberwolf chases him there to stop him, but there’s a species of brutal aliens called Arnock that are trying to claim the base for themselves as well. I consider it a combination of Aliens + Apocalypse Now + Wizard of Oz.

Wow, thanks for that intense blurb, Tom. Now, on to the interview!

What led you to become a writer?

Oh man—there was no choice. No decision was made that I was in control of! I feel I have always been a storyteller. When I was a kid, I had elaborate backstories constructed for my Lego people and vast worlds created in my mind for them to explore.

Writing professionally was sort of a crime of opportunity. I was really seduced by screenwriting in college dreamed in that direction for a while. I got out to the Star Trek lot back in the 90s to pitch episodes, but my scripts didn’t sell and I sort of put that on the shelf a while. I helped other people out with their books and scripts.

Then I picked up this script I had dormant for a while called “Timberwolf” and started to play with it. About 2 years ago I had it in a place where I wanted it and shopped it a bit. No studios bit, but I had met some folks at the Zharmae Publishing Press. They loved the idea of the script and asked me to turn it in to a book. And hence, my first novel is coming out 8/20/15!

What makes you passionate about writing?

I love when the story goes places that I don’t expect it to. Not on a grand level, because I am a fairly tight planner, but details. If you read Timberwolf, you’ll get the sense that there is a lot going on down corridors you don’t see. That once a scene is over, it continues and everyone else that was there goes about having other adventures.

I don’t do deep world-building per say, but I write what the characters are experiencing at any given time. Not in 1st person, but I show you the story through their eyes. I almost feel like I am cheating, because it may seem like deep world building, but it’s really just a narrow dive in to what specifically a character is experiencing at that time. If you think that works, than I’ve pulled off a great trick. If not, then you’ve seen through the magician’s trick!

Also, I’m fairly good at putting my parachute together after I jump out of the plane, so things tend to come together for me. It may because when I am not writing, I am also writing. Thinking about my characters and their relationships and what is happening with them. Like walking down the street in New York city thinking about my characters. So when I sit down to write, I’ve got a bunch of details I want to use.

Where do you get you inspiration from?

Other writers reading this may get the pitchforks now, but I get a lot of my inspiration from film and TV. I am an extremely visual writer, and my book started as a screenplay anyway, so maybe that’s not such a sin. There’s such good TV out there right now, BTW.

You don’t have to go to the movies to be inspired. I love period dramas like Peaky Blinders. That’s a gangster show about guys in 1920’s England. It’s really great. Great accents, straight up whiskey. Swearing. Love it.

Period pieces are like sci-fi to me, as it’s our world but retro-imagined. We don’t know what it was really like. And frankly, I don’t need my visual experience to historically accurate. I just want it to be well imagined and fun. I hope people think Timberwolf is well imagined and fun.

How would you describe Timberwolf in your own words?

If I was trying to sell it to a studio exec in an elevator, I would say it’s Aliens + Apocalypse Now + Wizard of Oz. After that I would expect them to high-five me, because honestly – all of those things together are pretty awesome, no?

You could also say it’s what would happen if Frank Herbert and Michael Bay had made Prometheus, which has shades of all sorts of blaspheme. It’s set in the edges of the galaxy on frontier worlds. It has an industrial esthetic. We’re living off the stuff we’ve brought out there. Dwellings made from cargo containers and stuff like that.

Why should we read Timberwolf?

People should read Timberwolf because I have taken great care to really make every word mean something. When I write a scene, I put the reader in that scene. I want people to feel like they are under fire when the plasma rifles go off.

Like the Phaelon lizard warriors clacking their swords together in the darkness are coming for them. Like the sentient machine cloud surrounding the planet Highland are suspending them in midair.

Also, in my humble opinion—the book is awesome. You’re going to feel like you’ve experienced an incredibly kick-ass movie, but on a page. And it’s all original. People always complain that everything cinematic is an sequel or adaption or something. Timberwolf is completely new and based off of nothing. I think it will be the start of something big.

Where did the idea for Timberwolf come from?

So odd where it came from. It came from a single scene that sort of happened in my head all at once. I was out pitching to Star Trek and back at the hotel room. I just had a vision of a guy in a rig of fighting armor floating in space amongst a sea of wreckage.

But what was the wreckage about? Why was he floating there? What was his name? I didn’t know those things. It evolved over time and I put it aside for years. I didn’t get bring it back to life until recently.

The name of the book fell from the sky. It’s the name of the main character and it just came to me one day. I don’t even know when it did. Long before I actually started writing. I don’t even know why. It’s such an odd name. It’s unusual even within the sci-fi world in which Timberwolf lives. No one else has a moniker like that. The best I can compare it to is “Fox Mulder.”

What do you expect to accomplish with Timberwolf?

The book is a journey. It goes from a giant space cruiser, to a religious haven, to a rundown space station, to a desolate colony world, to a secret weapons facility. It travels quite a bit and is sort of a travelogue of the frontier.

It also takes you in to the past of this universe as well. You experience a campaign from the mile-high red forest on Phaelon prime before we dropped the nukes. There’s a lot to experience, but I don’t think it’s overwhelming I think it comes to the reader organically.

At the end of the book, I want the reader to feel like they took a really long bath in the story, but not feel overwhelmed by it. I think I achieved that, but I am sure the readers will tell me!

As far as the title, I wanted to create something that was like a monolith. A title that invoked in one word a person of pure danger. A lone player. Someone lurking. Someone precise. You know not to f@ck with this guy. I wanted it to be a simple iconic name that you could take in instantly.

What can you tell us about Timberwolf in your own words (but no spoilers!)?

I can tell you a million things! There are a lot of fun little details. Let’s see. There’s song lyrics sprinkled in it. Songs from 80s and the 90s. Sharp eyed people will catch them. There’s a xenophobic religion that strives to rid the world of aliens that quotes Bono.

I wanted to convey that aliens were not “like us” but with a different point of view or a ridge on their forehead. Meeting aliens in the Timberwolf universe is not a pleasant experience - even when we are not fighting them. It’s confusing, disorienting and at times traumatic.

It’s very unnerving to deal with an intelligence that is not human and I think I convey that unpleasantness. Put that beside the fact that a lot of the characters are trying to wipe them out and you get a sense of what makes people tick out on the frontier.

The title coupled with the cover should give you an idea of what the book is about. A tough looking guy in a rig of fighting smoking a cigar. I think it’s clear that it’s a sort of “industrial” sci-fi story somewhere in the realm of Aliens or Halo. The “space marine” vibe.

There’s also a spider web subtly surrounding him. That’s something I want the reader to figure out the meaning on their own.

Which were the easiest and the hardest parts for you to write?

There are some visual gems in the book. Where I just let me imagination loose completely. Timberwolf was originally a screenplay, so I had to think about “how much would this cost? Is this feasible? How many actors do I need?”

As a novel, the gloves are completely off. Why not hundreds of giant psychic alien spiders? How about a mountain graveyard of thousands of spaceships? A weapons facility carved in to a mountain that’s a mile high. The scale of the world just had no concern to me.

I am really proud of the experience of “Highland,” which is a secret weapons facility that the three main parties in the book maneuver to capture. There’s an industrial beauty to it wrapped in this web of marketing.

The characters are traveling through a “catalog” of everything a sci-fi weapons facility has on sale; implosion grenades, killer flowers, genetically engineered killer beasts. And it’s also all falling apart. That was incredibly fun.

I don’t think there was anything that was any “harder” than anything else. It’s all a little like having a word baby. The contractions can come fast or slow. It was the hardest for me to realize when something wasn’t working and I would have to cut it. I have the story really well outlined, so I’m letting myself fill in the scenes loosely.

I like to write by having a really tight outline and then improvising the details. 9 times out of 10, that works for me but sometimes I’ll write a few thousand words and I’ll just have to give something up. Its tone is wrong or it goes in directions that I don’t like. Or doesn’t fit. You have to kill your darlings.

Do you have a favorite character, scene or situation in Timberwolf, and can you tell us why he, she or it is your favorite?

As far as scenes, I think I like the Golgotha sequence the best. Golgotha is Timberwolf’s home planet that he’s been exiled from. He ends up chasing Gray there and he can’t be there. There’s a massive personal reason why he can’t and it’s heartbreaking. It’ll pull your heartstrings a bit.

I wanted to show that this tough, brutal SOB is a human being like the rest of us. Maybe he’s an amazing warrior, but he grew up in a place and was once a kid and had a brother and a mom and dad. He’s there in a point where he has literally no weapons. It’s just his wits and fists against a literal army.

It wasn’t in the screenplay so it was a blank canvas. It really added some wonderful layers to his character and allowed Timberwolf to get closer to Salla Birdwing, a young woman who is along for this crazy ride.

As far as what character I like best, that’s going to be incredibly obvious when you read the book. I love the antagonist. But who doesn’t love bad guys?

Emmanuel Gray is a piece of work. He claims to be a religious convert and doing what he’s doing in the name of god. But you never know. Is Gray sincere? Is he a charlatan? Is the whole point of all this that he just wants a war to go fight in because that’s all he knows?

He’s very charismatic but at the same time harsh and judgmental. He’s a dichotomy. He claims to be the voice of god, but rants and swears and is incredibly selfish. He was a treat to write.

Will we see more adventures set in the Timberwolf universe?

I leave Timberwolf where there’s clearly a story that comes afterward. There is a huge universe that I have built here. A rich place. It would be a shame if these characters didn’t continue their adventure!

There’s a lot that happens before Timberwolf too and actually my publisher is actually releasing a free short novella along with the book that tells the story of where these characters were 20 years prior to the events of Timberwolf.

It shows the pivotal moment where the dynamic of the three of them comes to life. It’s called “Breacher” and it’s a sort of “how they met” story. It’s an action-packed adventure and I think it will really set up the universe well (and it’ll be free!)

Some stories are what some have taken to calling Message Fiction, due to the fact that there are (conscious or unconscious) messages to be found in them. Did you insert any conscious messages in your story. If so, what do they try to convey?

OK – this could be a long answer. There are strong messages in the book, but I think they are presented in a way that the reader can choose to engage with them or not. I think the adventure is so strong that the messages are an undercurrent.

It’s set in a universe where we have been at war for a 100 years and it’s become all that we know. It’s almost like we kill aliens “just because.” We’ve warped our theology around the fact that surprise – sentient beings have a tendency to have their own theologies and believe themselves made in god’s image too. So it’s really hard on what I refer to in the book as the true “four horsemen” – War, Religion, Politics and Money.

We’ve warped our society to be in love with war and we use religion to justify the ends. And as that happened out politics become influenced by the overriding philosophy and adding to this fact that all these parties are making money off the fighting and tithing. So we’ve got all these powerful factors keeping us in a state of constant war. So much so that we’re not even sure of the reasons anymore or if we believe in them.

If your story is mature in nature (containing graphic sexual scenes, violence, swearing, etc.), what led you to decide that this was the right way to go, despite the fact that it might limit your potential readership?

There are a few swears and if it was a movie, it would be in the PG-13 camp. There’s some violence and a bit of blood, but nothing that I would consider to be limiting to my audience. My cousin’s kid is going to read it and he’s 12.

Finally, is there anything else that you’d like to add?

Timberwolf is my first book, but I feel like I’ve been writing all my life so it doesn’t feel like a first book to me. There was never a time while I was writing it that I was scared of the process. I guess that’s the awesome part about having a publisher ready to take what you write and run with it. That’s an amazing feeling!

I will say that I wrote Timberwolf with the perspective that I might not write another book. That if this one didn’t sell or no one liked it, that I might not write more. I think people will love the book and that there will be a lot of demand for a sequel (I’ve talked about a sequel with the publisher already). But I wrote it holding nothing back.

There was never a time when I was like “I’ll keep that for the sequel” and took something important out. So it might have a “kitchen sink” feel to it, but I think I’ve given the reader the best possible story that I could.

Thank you for taking the time to connect with me Tito!

Thank you for taking your time to provide us with these wonderful answers, Tom!

Read an excerpt from Timberwolf by Tom Julian here.

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