Most of us have one talent, one gift to call upon to express our passion, or just to impress people at parties. There are however some very irritating people out there who have many, who just seem to have a limitless supply of creativity at their behest and as much as we’d love to siphon these people’s skills into a magic basketball or whatever, we cannot help but admire them. Ari Bach is most definitely one of these people. Anyone relatively savvy with Tumblr will be at least vaguely familiar with Facts I Just Made Up, a wondrous blog that specializes in posting fascinating, interesting lies about tribes of people with webbed fingers, the legality of cannibalism in Japan and how 1 in every 10 epitaphs is a quote from Knight Rider. The blog is Ari Bach’s creation and as it turns out, he has a lot else going for him.
Aside from being fairly prominent for his artwork and his delightfully bizarre comic-strip The Snail Factory, Ari has also just released his first novel: Valhalla, published by Harmony Ink. Valhalla is a dystopic science fiction tale set in future Scotland and it follows Violet, a young girl whose penchant and talent for violence means that she’d considered obsolete in a high-minded, post-war world. It’s a deeply intricate, fascinating tale full of rich ideas and metal-psychic-death-insects. Ari did all the artwork for the book himself, too. In a time when the entire concept of the novel runs the risk of becoming obsolete, young published authors are more of a rarity and with such a wealth of creative talent, we at Vultures jumped at the chance to pick Ari’s brain.
Valhalla contains a very detailed, intricate vision of the future, how did you go about planning it?
I never really planned out the world Valhalla took place in. It mostly just formed around the action and dialogue. When something needed a company to explain its function, I just inserted a company history. When a location was needed I’d just write whatever the book needed with little consideration of developing it fully, then by the time the scene was over I found I knew all about it and had written a good part of that into the actual novel. Beyond that it was just a matter of making sure nothing conflicted and including as many cool concepts and opinions about where we’re headed as possible.
How did you first come up with the concept for the novel?
Watching sci-fi action movies of the 90s like 5th Element, I wanted to make my own. The original concept was nothing but a character named Violet with a mean streak and a lot of action scenes. Over the years I wrote it as a movie script and developed the specifics, and tried to get the film made. It never happened, so I tried it as a novel. The first draft was very short and just described the movie like a bad novelization, but then I filled it out with more depth and changed the story and characters drastically in the process, improving the whole thing by leaps and bounds. Most of the original movie material got stuffed into the second book in the trilogy, with the first novel becoming a sort of origin story.
You’ve been prominent on Deviantart for some time, how do you find the process of writing compares to the process of drawing?
They don’t really compare except superficially, you sketch things out then fill them in. Both come from the same place though, I imagined Valhalla visually first and know what everything in the book looks like, much of it has been drawn and some is even on the deviantArt page. I wouldn’t say I know stories for all the other drawings though, most are simply images I wanted to show without any backstory, many of them from dreams. No dream content made it into the novel, that’s all just stuff I wanted to see happen in a movie or book.
How long did the publishing process take? What did you take away from it?
I first started sending Valhalla out to publishers in 2010 without any success. That summer I self published the book on Lulu, about 75 copies and maybe 25 eBooks sold. But I kept sending the novel out to any publisher or agent who would read it, nothing happening as a result for 4 years. I found Harmony Ink while looking for publishers for another book I’d written more recently and found that while the other novel didn’t fit their guidelines, Valhalla did so I sent it in. I got a contract offer a few months later and signed immediately. Then it was another 6 months of editing and cover art design, and then the release in February. Aside from taking away a better idea of the process, the most important thing I got from it all was that the years of sending it out were worth it. It was 99.9% rejections but it only takes one to accept it, and that’s worth every second of trying.
Do you have any other novels or ideas in the pipeline?
There are two sequels in the works to make Valhalla a trilogy, the first should be out within the year. Then I have two other novels, novellas really, one is horror and one is a kids book. The horror novel was also a film script, and the kids book is an original attempt at a novel. It’s very much like Alice in Wonderland, a lot of people have read very complex, dark psychological meanings into Alice and I wanted to try writing a book that actual had such meaning intentionally. So it reads like a kids book and would be a great surreal adventure for children, but it has much deeper meanings for those who want to dig. Then I have numerous film projects planned, including a Valhalla movie trilogy. I have half a dozen scripts all ready to shoot, I just need funds. The most likely to get made right now is called“Jealous Gods,” a superhero story on a small, funny scale. The Snail Factory comic should also return this summer.
You are perhaps most well known for the ‘Facts I Just Made Up’ blog, how did that start?
The fact blog started as a dumping ground for rejected Snail Factory jokes. A few that didn’t make Valhalla are in there too. I didn’t expect it to be popular at all but it took off fast so I put quite a bit more into it than I’d expected to.
Where does your interest in creating fiction stem from?
Mostly from wanting to see and read things that haven’t been made yet. Valhalla is composed of hundreds of bits and pieces I thought would be cool but have yet to see in film or literature. Reading Harry Potter or other such books, I’m flooded with my own ideas and hopes for what will happen. They rarely happen so I gathered several books worth of concepts, and they sort of fit together like a puzzle to make the complete novels.
Valhalla is your first published book, how does it feel to have a complete work of fiction out there for people to enjoy?
Incomparably awesome. I’m still floating on a cloud from getting published, and can’t wait to finish the next book and start the publishing process again.
Valhalla is available on Amazon, Goodreads and Dream Spinner Press both digitally and in paperback
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