u/CraigSchaefer

Hello, all! As Craig Schaefer, I've written a lot of urban fantasy weirdness, including the Daniel Faust series, the Harmony Black series, and the Wisdom's Grave trilogy, along with a whole smattering of work on the side. My novel Sworn to the Night was an SPFBO finalist and several of my books have been translated into German by Heyne Verlag (an imprint of Random House.) I'm a hybrid author, working in both traditional and self-publishing.

This week marks the release of CATCH AND KILL from the awesome crew over at Aethon Books, the first book of a new series where I fast-forward to the future of my odd little fictional multiverse. And in the future, magic is a corporate asset. It's seventy years after an event known as the Battle of Broadway exposed the supernatural world to the masses, and now Hell has an embassy in Washington, you can take college classes in applied sorcery, and the most popular late-night talk show host is a succubus. The world of corporate espionage has adapted, with curse-slinging witches and contract-bound zombies on the company payroll.

Emily Yeats, a blue-collar witch from Brooklyn, offers a valuable service: she and her found family of misfits (a chromed-up retired mercenary, a sapient android who moonlights as a dominatrix, and a hacker who aspires to become a real-life catgirl) stage break-ins and test their clients' security, teaching them how to defend themselves against real criminal threats.

It's a relatively safe, relatively legal way to make a living, until a scorned media executive comes to Emily with an offer she can't refuse, hiring her to dig up dirt on a rival. Emily never wanted to do "black bag" work, but she's strapped for cash and has to make payroll so…just once can't hurt, right?

So anyway, that's when everything goes horribly wrong.

Inspirations for the series, on the sci-fi side of the story, include the works of William Gibson (a writer I've looked up to since I was a teenager), movies like Strange Days and Robocop, Max Headroom, and the games Shadowrun and Cyberpunk 2077 (or for my tabletop peeps, Cyberpunk RED. Or 2020 if you're seriously old-school.)

On the fantasy side, one day I got to wondering what my First Story setting would look like, projected generations into the future and with the masquerade destroyed, and ended up writing some books about it. (You do not, however, have to have read anything else of mine to pick it up: I deliberately wrote this as a jumping-on spot for my books.)

Beyond the fun of taking a world I've been working in for a decade, shaking it up and turning it on its head, I wanted to speculate about how humanity would recover and rebuild from an existential apocalypse, learning that everything they thought they knew about the universe was a lie. In part it's about what would happen to the wonders of magic under late-stage capitalism (hint: it involves commodification, control, and rampant enshittification.) It's also a story about a moral question: when a man is so wealthy and powerful that the law answers to him and him alone, how do you stop him from causing more harm? How far will you go, and what price are you willing to pay?

Random things about me? I have depression and OCD, which has done a lot to shape my trajectory (writing literally keeps me alive); I'm a professional wrestling fan (AEW, not WWE); and when I needed a change of scenery, I packed up my life and moved to Providence in Rhode Island, simply because H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe were once here and I thought some of their genius might rub off on me. It hasn't happened yet, but I keep hoping. I also enjoy tabletop gaming (big fan of Shadows of Brimstone and Fallout: Wasteland Warfare), and I recently finished the campaign for the new World of Warcraft expansion. I liked it; my Blood Elf paladin did not, not even a little bit.

I'll be here all day to discuss my books or anything else you want to talk about, checking in whilst trying to crack a thorny outlining problem. Thanks for having me! And now, I'm making coffee.