An Interview with Author Nikki Frank
This month Nikki Frank joins me to discuss her current release, Killing Shadows (The Wild Rose Press, September 18, 2024).
Nikki Frank grew up in the Pacific Northwest where she spent twelve years working in aquatics. She loves fantasy and repeatedly gets lost in the worlds of such authors as J. R. R. Tolkien, Tamora Pierce, and J. K. Rowling. When she’s not writing or reading, she enjoys working in her garden and exploring the globe with her husband and two small children.
Believing you can have both adventure and romance in a single story, Nikki sets out to write stories which leave her readers satisfied. She creates a cast of characters who speak to the good in people and weaves them into a fast-paced adventure that will transport the reader into another world.
Welcome to the blog, Nikki!
Let's start with something just for fun: Can you describe your writing space for us?
My favorite place to write is my sectional outdoor loveseat. I set it up under the shade of a sun umbrella on my front porch. Nothing beats a warm afternoon in the shade surrounded by my garden. I’m fortunate to have a yard in a quiet neighborhood where I can get fresh air and work done simultaneously.
Unfortunately, balmy weather is seasonal in Puget Sound. So once the rainy season takes hold, I’m relegated to my office. My desk sits under a window, looking over a thick hedge where a wide variety of birds hang out. Around my desks are shelves filled with my favorite books and those in my reading queue.
Also peppered throughout the room are small reminders of my favorite mythological creatures to write. Dragons, angels, griffins, shi, and even a qilin keep me company. However, the place of honor, directly above my writing spot, goes to a small Porg figurine. My youngest has been obsessed with the little Star Wars birds since toddlerhood. The little guy reminds me of my family and blends with the other fantastical creatures. For those wondering, this also explains the pictures of Porg on family vacations I post on my Facebook feed.
What inspired you to write Killing Shadows?
Killing Shadows trickled in on the back of one vivid imagining: an angel using the crosswalk in downtown Seattle like hopscotch. Being outside the solid plane of our reality, he could use his wings to tiptoe from stripe to stripe. The image stuck with me, drawing up what-if questions. What if one of the drivers could actually see him? What would the angel do? Would the driver cause a wreck? Would they talk? As I answered those questions to soothe my own curiosity, Killing Shadows was born.
As for the remalas, the beings made of negative energy that the angels hunt, they’re an adaptation from a story I started years ago that never fleshed out. I’m glad because the remalas are far superior to my first energy beings, which were closer to something like the Balrog and a black hole combined. The remalas have subtlety, hierarchy, more grotesque descriptions, and a clear evolution rather than simply haunting the pages as rampaging shadows.
Could you give us an overview of the worldbuilding process you used for this story?
Since Killing Shadows took shape from an image involving a crosswalk in Seattle, the setting was easy: Seattle. What took careful crafting was the intersection between our familiar world and fantasy. Thankfully, I’ve got another project involving angels for which I’d done countless hours of research on angels and the lore surrounding them. If I use a well-established supernatural entity, I like to stay somewhere inside the established conventions for that sort of being.
As for the technical details, I plan a generalized world and rule set, then dive straight into my characters. Once I have their personalities on paper, I add details of how their actions will affect the world around them and use that to finalize the details of my fictional world. I keep myself flexible during this process. Just because an idea sounded awesome in my head doesn’t mean it will necessarily pan out on paper. It’s way more challenging for me to shove the narrative around to fit my initial idea than to tweak that idea to fit who my characters have grown into.
And notes. I have all sorts of random notes about the world and the characters sitting around my desk. I always start with the good intention of putting them all in an organized notebook. Yet, I inevitably end up with a notebook resembling a paper hedgehog, stuffed with the bits of scrap paper I used when inspiration struck, and I had to write it down or forget it.
Without giving too much away, what can you tell us about the history and background of the angels in Killing Shadows?
With the human traditions as a framework, the angels in Killing Shadows are fleshed out into a working hierarchy tasked with caring for and maintaining all creation, even beyond what humans can perceive. I used the concept of nine choirs of angels, all with varying powers and abilities. Since God creates each angel by hand, as needed, they are relatively static in their responsibilities, which makes the changes taking place in Killing Shadows particularly difficult for them to cope with.
The angels involved with the humans in Killing Shadows are all between one and three thousand years old, which was fun to play with, as Gabriel was created near the beginning of everything and is literally eons old. Adriel and his fellow angels are wise, experienced, and mature in their interactions with humans. However, when interacting in Heaven, in contrast with Gabriel, their junior status starts to show, and a bit of a sibling or schoolyard dynamic appears.
I also veered off the dogma a little, created a choir of female angels, the Powers, and wrote them as Heaven’s warriors. While not prevalent in the main three religions concerned with angels, other ancient dogmas included prominent female warriors such as the Valkyrie, Diana, the goddess of the hunt, and Sekhmet, the Egyptian war goddess, to name a few.
Could you share a bit about your unique take on the classic “Good vs Evil” trope in Killing Shadows?
While Killing Shadows features angels and the general safety of humanity is in the balance, it’s not a Heaven vs Hell battle. Rather, the evil plaguing humankind is of their own making. And while the remalas can level up compliments of Hell, the pairs of hunters are focused on happenings on Earth.
In so many fantasy stories, good vs evil plays out on a grand stage, with stakes like the survival of a race, a world, or even all of existence. I wanted to draw in and look at evil on a smaller scale. We all know how day-to-day slights, ills, and misfortunes can add up and weigh us down. We also know that you get back what you put into the world; smiles are contagious, and so are foul moods. Killing Shadows takes that concept and deals with what could happen if those individual negative emotions took form, fused, and amplified into something that could then inflict widespread evil.
What kind of research did you do for Killing Shadows? How much research did you do before starting the writing process?
To create Adriel and the rest of the angels, I combed through religious references from Christianity, Judaism, Islamic tradition, mysticism, Kabbalistic beliefs, and the Apocrypha, particularly the book of Enoch. One of the most complicated tasks was compiling a list of angelic names and sorting them by those angels typically grouped amongst fallen and those still in grace. After all, it would be awkward to put out a book only to have readers point out that the good guy is actually a commander in Hell. After sorting all this information, I worked with the general consensus to build the social structure of my angels.
A great example of this is why most of my angels are male and why they don’t have romance or sex as humans do. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are in agreement that angels are all male, which allows them to focus all their attention on God and their heavenly duties. However, some scholars have described angels as sexless and suggested that male pronouns were used because they were the default in the eras when those religious texts were written. A few rare mentions of female angels or angels able to shift their sex are included in those old sources. Female angels, at large, are a construct appearing during the last one to two hundred years. They really gained a place in the modern consciousness via new-age spiritualism.
Which scene or chapter in Killing Shadows is your favorite and why?
Okay, so without spoilers: I’m utterly in love with the scene where Adriel and Serai pull weapons in Flick’s living room and Flick’s reaction to the incident.
A close second would be the scene in which Adriel proves to Flick’s best friend, Jake, that angels are real, even for humans who can’t see them. The proof Adriel returns with still gets me.
For fun: If Killing Shadows had a soundtrack, what would be the top three songs on the playlist, and how do they capture the essence of your story?
I have two songs which I used for writing scenes between Adriel and Serai. Cannons’ “Fire for You” and CLANN’s “I hold You” to encapsulate desperation, sadness, and passion. If you want to know more about the dynamic between them and how those songs relate, please read the book.
As for the book as a whole, I’d pick Era’s “Ameno” and “The Mass.” They’re such a wonderful blend of electronic music, representing the city, and Catholic choir vibes, for the angels, and intensity, for the hunt.
As a bonus, I listened to a lot of 90’s Seattle grunge while writing the day-to-day events in the book.
Were you a young writer, a late bloomer, or something in between? What advice would you give to others who took up writing at a similar phase of life?
In my seventh-grade year, I stumbled across Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness quartet and fell head over heels in love with fantasy. I’d read the Chronicles of Narnia with my mother in grade school, but Alanna sparked some creative need, and I took to devouring every YA fantasy I could find, a more difficult task at the time since Harry Potter didn’t blow the lid off the genre until I was in high school. I wrote fan fiction for Alanna and some of my other favorites as an outlet for my creative itch before the idea of actually writing and publishing my own works even formed.
Near the end of my second year of college, my creative writing professor pulled me aside after class and told me I should write as a career. Fully immersed in the arrogance of youth, I brushed her aside and swore I’d never be a starving artist, then went blithely about doing something completely unrelated to writing. It took years for that pent-up creativity to erupt, turning a dream into a story, then hitting the pages of my typing program in a hot mess I’m still trying to untangle. Yes, I still have a soft spot for my first manuscript, and when inspiration hits, I go back and work on cleaning it up. Someday…
By the time I wrote my first work, it was too late to go back and tell my professor she’d been right. I was an author. I needed to be.
It was a long lesson, but I learned to be mindful of my passions and talents, utilizing and growing them rather than shoving them aside. And I insist on listening to the advice of those more experienced in this industry than myself. I lost the chance to learn from that professor or even thank her for seeing what I couldn’t, but I won’t make that mistake again.
My advice to writers, at any stage, is to openly accept advice from those who’ve gone before you. They’ve seen and recognized talent and know what it takes to develop the necessary skills. The second piece is not to doubt yourself.
What’s next: Can you share what you’re working on next, and what readers can expect from your future books?
I’m working on a sequel to Killing Shadows, but it’s still early, so I don’t have more news yet. Celestials seem to be a theme with my writing right now because I also have some similar projects waiting in the wings incorporating angels or similar beings. Two are YA and involve angels, as I researched them. Neither plays out in the same world I created for Killing Shadows, but both pull from the same existing lore. I also have an adult fantasy waiting for attention, which features pseudo-deities called Tev, immortals reminiscent of angels.
From a thematic angle, my readers can expect a fairly steady course. The characters and world will change, but stylistically, my projects stay similar in tone. There’s darkness to fight, friends to fall back on, things for the characters to learn about themselves, enough humor to keep the book from getting too intense, and fun, relatable characters, both in personality and variety, in the case of supernatural entities.
About Killing Shadows
In the shadows of Seattle, strange things lurk unseen, except by one person, Felicity Landon. After years of ignoring what she sees, a celestial stranger, Adriel, reveals the unsettling truth about the motives of the vile creatures. Felicity agrees to mediate an alliance between angels and humans, a dangerous task made easier with the arrival of Greyson Wheatley, another human capable of seeing the otherworldly.
But as secrets unravel, Felicity’s life hangs in the balance, forcing Greyson to confront his feelings and Adriel to face his past. In the fight against evil, they must battle their own demons if they want to protect humanity from the darkness threatening to consume it.
Excerpt:
Felicity hauled herself out from under her warm covers and groaned at the grogginess clinging to her like a weighted blanket. This morning sucked worse than usual due to the nightmares afflicting her all night long. Over and over, she failed to stop in time, hitting the young man who’d been acting like a complete dipwad, dinking around in the middle of the road. As her dad always said, he was a “Finalist for the Darwin Awards.”
At least she managed to avoid him during the real incident. Though how remained vague in her memory. Fragmented pieces of stopping to get out and check on him remained, along with impressions of horns, swearing from other drivers, and the warm air swirling around them—something gross venting from below the street, most likely.
The man himself hadn’t faded. He had silver hair, not white or old-people gray, but metallic silver. This drooped across his forehead toward teal eyes, making for a striking appearance that stuck out in her mind.
She hadn’t mentioned the event when she told her parents how her afternoon in Seattle went. At the start of the school year, they’d been reluctant to let her drive in the congested city, but the car was a necessity for getting to her Running Start classes.
Today, her classes started at the high school. Felicity stuffed her lunch in her backpack, grabbed a banana for breakfast, and locked the apartment behind her. Four floors down, she headed for the bus stop, where she waited in the dark, peeling her fruit.
The hairs on the back of her neck prickled, standing up, followed by goosebumps all over. Felicity stared at the traffic passing her building. Somewhere behind her lurked something she did not want to witness. For her entire life, she’d seen things she couldn’t define— ghosts, spirits—otherworldly entities. Some were no big deal. They looked like smokey, semi-transparent people. But others…
A huge shiver almost caused her to drop her banana. Horrifying things lurked in the darkest, dankest places. Searching for the source of her discomfort never ended well, so she stopped peeking years ago.
Until next time,
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About the Author
Award-winning author, Joie Lesin is a life-long fiction writer and poet. She is most recently the author of The Passenger. She has long been fascinated by anything otherworldly including mermaids and ghosts. Joie writes character-driven, emotional, atmospheric tales about heartache and hope.