Behind The Book With Julie Kagawa & J.T. Nicholas 

I did a Q&A with New York Times Bestselling Author of the Iron Fey Series, Julie Kagawa back in the spring of 2023 and it doesn’t seem like it was over two years ago. This time Julie has returned, and her husband J.T. Nicholas is joining us for this Behind The Book Q&A discussing their new book in The Clan Wars A Throne Betrayed which is the first book in the Legend of The Five Rings series! 

Q: Welcome to Book Notions J.T. and welcome back to Book Notions Julie! For readers who haven’t read The Clan Wars A Throne Betrayed would you like to give a brief description of what the book is about and where the idea came from? 

A: Well, firstly, this is an intellectual property project for the Legend of the Five Rings.  L5R is a popular setting of a number of board games, card games, tabletop roleplaying games, and computer games.  The property has been around for 30 years, and there have been a ton of novels written within it during that time.

In the broadest terms, the setting is a Japanese-inspired fantasy world that draws a lot on the idea of the samurai drama (think Seven Samurai or Yojimbo) but adds magic and monsters out of Japanese folklore.  There’s a lot more to it than that, of course… it’s been a living, breathing world for three decades!  

A Throne Betrayed explores the start of the Clan Wars, a tumultuous time in the Emerald Empire.  The emperor has been murdered, and the heads of the Great Clans are all vying for power.  To the south, the Shadowlands are stirring, and the evil lurking on the other side of the Great Carpenter Wall is readying its own plots and its own armies to strike at the heart of the empire.  Akodo Toturi, the former champion of the emperor, has set out on a self-imposed exile, abandoning his station and power to atone for his failures.  But as the empire teeters on the brink of civil war and the ancient enemy begins to stir once more, he finds himself the reluctant leader of a new kind of army, one made up of outcast ronin, determined peasants, and anyone else willing to fight not for their own glory, but for the good of the empire and well-being of all.

But how can a ragtag band of wandering samurai and former farmers hope to stand against the might of the Great Clans, much less the power of the Shadowlands itself?  You’ll have to give it a read to find out.  😊

Q: I love the world building that it is a Japanese inspired fantasy. Did you two have the most fun creating the world or the characters the most? 

A: Since this is an intellectual property work, the world and most of the characters already existed, in some form or fashion.  We’re both huge fans of L5R and have been playing various games in the world of the Emerald Empire for decades, so for us, this was less about creating new characters and more about making sure the existing characters got the treatment they deserved.  When you work in a well-established setting, you walk a fine line.  You must put some of your own stamp on characters, on people and places, that have existed in people’s imaginations for some time.  For a lot of fans out there, we’re treading on sacred ground, and we wanted to do everything we could to do justice to the characters.  Doing that character work was a lot of fun, especially knowing that we’d be putting a little bit of ourselves into the canon of a world we loved.

The setting (as we’ve mentioned) is something we’ve loved for a long, long time.  We’ve played so many games in the world of the Legend of the Five Rings that it feels like a real place to us, and it’s one we’re always happy to return to.  So, getting to dive deep into all the things about the setting that we love so much was also a blast.

Q: How did the two of you meet and fall in love? What made you two want to write a book together?

A: We met through a writing group of all things.  It started as an online meetup thing, exchanging chapters to read and critique.  Julie knew someone else who was looking to do an in-person critique group, and that person in turn knew another person.  Before we knew it, we had four aspiring writers meeting up at a Borders bookstore every week to critique each other’s work a chapter at a time.  It turned out that writing wasn’t all we had in common, so we started hanging out on non-writing time.  One thing led to another and the rest, as they say, is history.  That was all nearly 20 years ago now.

Q: How many sequels are coming after The Clan Wars A Throne Betrayed? Can you give small spoilers on what fans may expect in future books? 

A: The plan is for a trilogy, but in many ways, A Throne Betrayed is the start of a new arc in the story of the Legend of the Five Rings… well, it would probably be more fair to say a “retelling” or “reimagining” of a beloved story arc.  We can’t give too much away… we’re under NDAs for a lot of stuff… one of the side effects of working on intellectual properties.  But we hope that our partners at Asmodee and Aconyte Books experience wild success and that many, many more stories unfold in the Emerald Empire.

Q: What was the writing process while creating the story? Did Julie write one chapter and J.T. write another chapter and then you both brainstorm? 

A: We have the advantage of sitting within talking distance of each other during our workday, which makes collaboration a whole lot easier.  For A Throne Betrayed, we outlined the entire novel, chapter by chapter, which is something neither of us normally do (in the vernacular we’re both generally pantsers instead of plotters).  But with this, we wanted to make sure we both had the main beats of the story and the characters firmly in our heads and that we both had strong input into what that story was and who those characters would be.  So, we spent a lot of time on that process, to lay down the “bones” of the story.

From that point, it was more of a write-rewrite process as opposed to a trading duties process.  One of us would write several chapters and the other would edit/re-write those chapters.  We would talk about any changes we thought needed to be made.  Stylistically, we both write pretty similarly, close enough that we sometimes have trouble remembering who wrote what, so any changes one of us made was more about tweaking character development than it was about tweaking prose.

The edit process (as in after our editor went through the manuscript and sent back things they thought needed more work or development) was pretty much the same.  Brainstorm the how together, then one of us would do the thing, and the other would check it.  But there was no formal character division (you write this PoV and I’ll write that one) or anything like that.

Q: This next question is my favorite question for authors who choose to write a story together! What is your advice for anyone wanting to co-author a novel with someone else whether it’s with their spouse, family member or friend? Most authors tell me that you must leave your ego at the door. 

A: To date, we’ve only done this once, so it’s not like we’re speaking from a place of vast experience, but for us, it was agreeing on the plan first.  Because we were working from a very thorough chapter by chapter breakdown, there was never really any question of where we should be going or what we should be doing.  Which means there was never really a danger that one of us was going to go off in a direction the other didn’t like.  We had some discussions while developing the outline, where we maybe had separate ideas of where we wanted things to go, but it’s much easier to find that common ground when brainstorming bullet points than it is to come to that realization after someone wrote a 5,000-word chapter.

As for the ego thing… we’ve literally been critiquing and editing each other’s work for 20 years.  And that was before we ever decided to write anything together.  So we’re pretty used to telling each other where we think a bit of writing or story could be improved.  We’re not sure it’s very practical advice to say critique each other for a couple of decades before writing a book together, but that definitely helped. 😊

Q: If The Clan Wars A Throne Betrayed were to be made into a tv series or a movie, who would be your ideal dream cast?

A: We’ll give a bit of a cop out answer and say that, really, the dream screen would be anime.  Anime helped inspire us and helped inspire the original creators of the Legend of the Five Rings universe and beautiful artwork has always been a part of the intellectual property, so it seems like a great fit.  It would be amazing to see what a studio like Ufotable (Demon Slayer, Fate) or MAPAA (Jujutsu Kaisen, Chainsaw Man) could do with it.