Author’s Interview: Unraveling the Light in the Dark series: A Deep Dive with Author Ulff Lehmann

Before we dive into the fascinating world of Ulff Lehmann’s 'Light in the Dark' series, let’s take a moment to introduce the brilliant mind behind this captivating saga. 

1. Hi Ulff, Can you start introducing yourself and sharing a bit about your journey as an author and what initially drew you to writing?

I’m an English writing, German author. So far four of my novels and several short stories have been published. How did I become an author? From my earliest, non-traumatic memory on, stories have always dominated my life. Here in Germany we have a long tradition of full cast audio dramas, some originals, some adaptations of existing work. Of course I had the obligatory child-friendly adventures, but one of the few that really stuck with me was a drama retelling part of the Odyssey. I was fascinated by the hero Odysseus who first blinded the Cyclops Polyphemus and then tricked him to tell his fellow cyclopsi(?), cyclopses(?), his fellow one eyed giants that “Nobody” had blinded him, so the giants stopped worrying, allowing Odysseus and his crew to escape. This story has stayed with me for the past almost 50 years since I first heard it.

So, essentially, this is where it began. I didn’t know it then, though.

Courtesy of parental abuse, I had minimal sense of who I was and what I wanted to do, so I meandered through life, desperately failing to fit in.

After my second nervous breakdown I went into therapy and it was there that I found out I needed to write to be well. That I was a storyteller. It wasn’t so much what drew me to writing but rather what I needed to do to stay alive. Without writing, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, because I probably would have killed myself long ago.

2. Your "Light in the Dark" series has captivated many readers. How did the concept for this series come about, and what was the inspiration behind starting it?

The “concept” arose from one singular event, really. In 1992, I wanted to be part of a club my friends were in. Mainly because of all the crazy stories they told us about the drunken antics they were part in over a given weekend. I begged them to let me join them, until they finally relented. So, this fantasy club, FOLLOW, had been around for some 20 years before that, and people playacted their characters from on of the club’s own fantasy world’s many realms. To be part of the club, you had to come up with a character, name and all. And even wear some sort of costume to represent your character. At the time I was into Conan the Barbarian, and I wanted a name that sounded similar, had a similar ring to “Conan”, that’s how Drangar came to be. At first there wasn’t much more than the name. You also had to decide where your character lived, your clan so to speak. Clan decided the “cultural” background. I decided to join one of my friends in a Celtic-inspired clan.

Eventually, I wanted more than just getting drunk on the weekends, so I began to flesh out Drangar’s story. I wrote a few longer short stories, but felt hindered by the club (I had to ask for permission to do certain things, because in a shared world you can’t just destroy the ducal palace without asking the “duke” if that’s okay, if you catch my meaning) and my limitations in terms of language. Back then I wrote in German, it was a German club after all, and I never considered writing in English… until I did.

Many of the elements that show up in Shattered Dreams are echoes of what I wrote 30 years ago.

I had been running role-playing games for years before I joined FOLLOW, and long afterwards, and that always included a lot of storytelling. That was the other part of the equation.

When I eventually left the club, I decided to write the story I wanted to tell, which was, and still is, essentially the story I had begun in ‘92. Only now I would write it in form of a novel or three. But those books I wrote in the late 1990s never saw the light of day. Very few people have actually read them, and I might serialize them on my homepage at one point, just for laughs.

It was during therapy that I began to write “for keeps.”

3. You initially considered publishing this series as a trilogy but decided to expand it. How did this shift impact the storyline and the development of the characters?

Initially, there were three books: SHATTERED DREAMS, SHATTERED HOPES, and SHATTERED BONDS. I came up with the names while working on what would become Shattered Dreams. Dreams already was a big book, with 152k words or so. I knew where each book began and ended, or rather I knew where Dreams began and ended, and Hopes began and ended, and Bonds began. I knew little else in between. So I wrote Dreams, finished it, and began working on Hopes. Hopes was a monster. 300k words after editing out around 17k words or so. It was massive, and I was immensely proud of it. Everything I had learned when writing Dreams I put to use in Hopes, and I even had one author’s copy printed from KDP (or whatever it was called at the time). 

I had entered Dreams in to the Self Publishing Fantasy Blog-Off (SPFBO) for 2017 but didn’t advance into round two. But before that happened, my friend Charles Phipps had contacted his publisher, Crossroad Press, and told them about this amazing book he had read (Dreams) and that they should make an audiobook of it. Their response was they wanted the whole package, print, ebook, audiobook. So while Dreams was still running in the 2017 SPFBO, I signed a contract with Crossroad Press, and was already announcing I’d drop out of the race, which was unnecessary because at about the same time it was announced I wouldn’t move on to round 2.

By that time I was working on Bonds already. Crossroad’s publisher extraordinaire, David Niall Wilson, had already told me there had to be a new cover, something I was fine with. Then he told me that Dreams’s 152k or however many words was the upper limit of what they could responsibly put in one book. I asked if he had already looked into the manuscript for Hopes. He did immediately and gave me a definitive “No!” on the length of that book.

I was in a bind now, the concept for covers and titles were tied to the progression of the story. The titles showed Drangar’s development, freeing himself from nightmares, realizing there were no easy answers, freeing himself off the shackles of his past. Dreams, Hopes, Bonds. Splitting up Hopes was easy, comparatively, since the chapters are written with cliffhangers anyway, I just had to pick a convenient cliffhanger, which I did. Coming up with extra names, that was trickier.

Initially, I suggested that I could go the To Green Angel Tower route. To Green Angel Tower is the final book in Tad Williams’s Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy, and it was so massive, that for the paperback version they had to split it into two 800-ish pages books! I suggested that, and it was rejected. I had to come up with two in-between titles, so that I would still end the series with Shattered Bonds.

Since I had already written what were now books 2 and 3, these could be released, separately, without much hassle.

The problems I had with writing Shattered Walls, aka book 4, were not because of any rethinking of the story, far from it. Up until then, I could skirt by with the knowledge I had of medieval life, for the most part. But Walls, I realized after writing the pitiful first 60% of the book, was a different animal. For one, my shorthand “my elves are like Imperial Romans” now came to bite me in the ass. I had a vague idea what was what in the Roman army, but not enough to actually create something believable.

 I also had some health problems, family tragedy, and more drama, which all delayed Shattered Walls, but the main problem was: understanding the organization of a Roman Legion, and how it operated. So I became a bit of a sage concerning Ancient Rome, nothing to truly write home about, at least in my opinion, and there’s so much more to learn, but it helped me write the best book of the series so far.

4. With such a rich array of powerful and unique characters, do you have a personal favourite? Which character did you find the easiest to write, which character was the hardest to kill, and why?

Characters… which one is easiest to write? None of them, all of them. It’s difficult to explain. They’re real to me, I merely write down their stories, and the more they progress and grow as people, the more difficult writing them becomes. Initially, you have a character. With the exception of Drangar who has been with me since 1992, the characters hop onto the page when I introduce them to the story, the reader, and to me. I don’t know these people until I do.

For example Anne, I didn’t know who she was until I wrote the first scene with her. She was easygoing, a warrior woman with a sense of humor, and a noble. She was the leader of this warband. That she hated duplicity is something many of my characters have in common, mainly because I am the same way. (I’m getting more into the duplicitous mindset, but it took me a long time to understand it enough to write about it properly.) Initially, I had planned for her to at the very least become a comrade in arms to Drangar, but the more of her story I revealed to myself (yea, it is as crazy as it sounds) the more I realized that this woman would not abandon her family, her warband, her duty. So her role changed in the overall story, not so much for herself.

As such I try to pay attention to what the characters want, or what their duty is.

Drangar is my favorite, so much of my personality, my trauma I projected into him. Once you know Drangar, you also know a great deal about Ulff. Personality-wise, of course.

It’s always hard to write about the tragedies, and killing characters off is never easy. Well, it’s easier to kill of non-viewpoint characters, I’m not that attached to them. However, I hate “plot armor”, no one is invincible, everyone can and will be wounded, and the wounds will reflect the situations. If you survive the fall onto a roof 10 meters below you, you will be severely injured and will never be the person you were before the fall. 

Killing, maiming, injuring, it all happens, and if a character acts stupidly, they will bear the consequences. They’ll also bear the consequences if the opponent is prepared.

5. Creating compelling characters is no small feat. Can you walk us through your thought process when crafting these strong and diverse personalities?

How to create a character… I don’t know. They just happen.

Okay, not quite true. As I’ve mentioned before I ran role-playing games for decades, and sometimes the game master has little to no time to come up with an NPC the player characters just encounter. You jot down a name, and have little else. Most of these NPCs never develop beyond that, but sometimes, when a player wants to interact further, you have to come up with personality and a rudimentary background in the spur of the moment.

For example: A beggar sits at the side of the road, asking for alms. Now, one of the players asks the person their name. The game master now has to come up with a name. “People call me Griff, so I’m Griff.” Those few words already tell me a lot, and I just wrote them, came up with Griff. It shows the beggar doesn’t care much about who he actually is and has adopted the name passersby have given him. Maybe he was a grafter, or maybe it’s because he has been searching for a griffon pendant he claimed to have lost for a while. 

Both possibilities lead to different backgrounds. I go with the pendant. Now, what does it stand for? Griffon riders? A royal seal of sorts? A family heirloom? Combine either with the latter and you have part of the background, something you can develop further. And so on. The possibilities are endless… at least to me. I have a knack for asking “why does so and so happen?”

Same goes for people like Urgraith Mireynh. The first thing I had was a FANTASTIC name. I really am proud of this one, it just screams sinister history. So I already knew he’s no pushover. I also knew he hated nobility and their intrigues. Then, out of the blue, he caresses the breastplate he can no longer wear. He’s out of shape, he’s older, and he has a bad back. Voila, Urgraith Mireynh, High General of Chanastardh is born.

Sometimes, oftentimes, it’s just a matter of finding one tiny detail, be it the griffon statue, or the ornate breastplate, and the rest falls into place. I can’t really explain that bit, it just happens.

6. Is there a particular moment or aspect of the series that draws from your real-life experiences or inspirations?

No character is perfect; they all have problems, traumas to deal with. I can relate to the trauma, because of my own private hells. One of the primary “themes,” I think, of all books is one’s place in society. The ostracized mercenary, the near-immortal Chosen, the Wizardess displaced in time, the general who is pressured into going to war, the elf who takes the responsibility for something in order to keep the peace… in the end, they’re all alone, or feel alone, mainly because they are by circumstance, choice, or accident outsiders.

I’ve felt alone most of my life, the outsider. So I can relate. My circumstances were different, thank goodness, but the feeling of being all alone is the same.

There’s also battle. I’ve never been in a war, but I have been in fights, as a pupil, back in the 1980s. I know what it feels like to be overcome by this sort of tunnel-vision where the opponent is the only thing that matters, at the moment.

I try to draw on emotions, feelings I am intimately familiar with. Unfortunately, most of those are negative: loneliness, despair, hate, anger, rage, sadness. Some are positive: lust, desire, laughter. When I don’t know a feeling, or am unfamiliar with it, I try to avoid writing about it.

7. Managing numerous characters and their backstories must be challenging. How do you keep track of all the different viewpoints and their intricate details throughout the series?

I have it all in my head, really. The characters are there. By the time, I’m finished with a manuscript, I have read and rewritten the entire thing 5 times. A sixth pass happens when I talk things through with my editor. So, aside from writing a 150k word book, I have read the thing 5 times. I’m a deep reader, my editor’s hat is never really off anymore, so reading other books, the errors literally poke me in the eye. Moreso with fantasy than other genres, but still. I’m intimately familiar with the characters.

Do I have a list? I have two! One for overall dramatis personae, just names, maybe with familial relations and a note whether you bought the farm or not, but that’s it. The second list is an overall army roster for the elven legions. Starting with the commanding officers, and then going into cohort and century levels. 

I don’t know every name of every legionnaire, I’m not that crazy, but I know who commands the legion, and who the officers in cohort or century are, not all, but I add them when needed. Most are nothing more than names on a page, but it’d be unrealistic to only have conversations between two named generals when it’s a staff meeting.

Maybe it’s my IQ, maybe it’s my experience as game master, maybe it’s a bit of both, plus the intensive writing and reading periods… I don’t know.

8. Given the length and depth of this series, how much time did it take to complete each book and the entire series? What kind of writing routine or strategies did you employ to keep on track?

I wrote Dreams and Hopes (now Hopes and Fears) in therapy, as part of therapy. Back then I came up with a sort of ritual. Get up around 8-ish, meds, tea, cigarettes, TV for 2 hours or so. Then shower, get dressed while listening to loud music, then to my favorite café with the novel I was reading and my smokes. Read for an hour, smoke some cigarettes, and drink a cappuccino. Then, around 11:30 or so, go home, put on my writing music (I listen to movie soundtracks while writing), switch on my computer, and write.

Doing this, I had the first draft of Dreams finished after 3 months. Now, I must say that the majority of the plot points had already existed before. In the unpublished novel of 1998 or so and the short stories I had written in FOLLOW. I knew exactly where what would happen, and how. All I needed to do was write it, better. Three months to hammer out some 168k words or so. Then I let the book rest for a few months, to get my emotional distance from it.

 I still smoked cigarettes, drank cappuccino, read books, but nothing to do with the book I had written. Two months later, I printed out the entire book, grabbed my smokes, a notepad, a pencil, and hogged a table in my favorite café, from 10:30 to 17:30, for three or five consecutive days. Then I went to work. I read the book with a pencil, noting where I needed to fix stuff, where I needed to add stuff, and crossing out the stuff that was redundant or stupid. 

Once that was done, I fixed the document. Let it rest for 2 months, and did the same thing again. And again. And again. And again. Refining everything, honing it to the point where I couldn’t see anything anymore. This way I deleted over 10k words from the book.

It was expensive. Why? Because a cappuccino per day, every day, for 3 months, at 3 € per cup, plus the days I spent in the café, yeah, expensive.

So for book 2 (now 2 and 3) I had to change things. No more café, no more cappuccinos, just reading at home before writing. For the editing process I spent my time at a friends place. It took 5 months to complete, I think. And much longer to fix everything of that 314k words monstrosity. But even then it was done with comparative ease because, again, I had the original FOLLOW stories, and the sequel to that unpublished book of 1998, or so. I wanted to reach the end point of both the short stories and that original works, because that pretty much signaled the end of everything I had mapped out over the past 15 years at that point.

You already know why book 2 was split.

Book 3 I had begun before I signed with Crossroad, but it was in rough shape. That was in 2016, or so. I had had trouble sleeping, or being awake. Turns out I had sleep apnea, but before that was diagnosed I underwent surgery in my nose, which didn’t fix the sleep problem (duh) but oh well. So, anyway, once I started sleeping again properly, I needed to refocus stuff. I realized that I needed to do major research if I wanted to show how a proper elven legion functioned. Instead of writing, I read, a lot about the Roman army. Some other things threw a wrench into the works, so that it ultimately took me 6 years to finish Shattered Walls. Add to the personal problems, the fact that I was now swimming in uncharted waters. 

I didn’t know how and where the story was going. For the first time I didn’t have multiple locations for the characters but just one location for all of them. It required a major rethinking on my part, and once I thought I had it all down, I realized that I hadn’t considered one crucial thing: the enemy. Everything was written from the protagonists’ perspective, but the enemy wasn’t a stupid thing that merely attacked! No, I was dealing with a cunning bastard who was smarter and more experienced and much more ruthless than any of the viewpoint characters. So I had to rethink the entire battle, essentially the entire book, as it basically depicts just one battle over the course of a week or two. That took a lot of time and planning. But, in the end, I know it was all worth it, because I had also learned a great many things that are now helping me with book 5!

9. If you weren’t an author, what other artistic or creative pursuit do you think you would have explored?

In university, I studied movie and TV sciences, with the ultimate goal of becoming a movie director. That obviously didn’t pan out.

The problem with the question is this: I didn’t figure out I needed to be an author until I was 35 or 36, up until then I didn’t really know who I was, so anything else would not have truly been in the cards to begin with.

10. As a successful author, what does it mean to you to be recognized for your writing? How does it feel to reflect on your achievements and the impact your work has had on readers?

Success… what is success? In this day and age, money seems to be the one metric most people use to mark success. By that metric, I’m not successful at all.

I, however, view success differently. I do what I love, I survive because I do what I love, and I know my words, my stories have touched many of those who read them.

They are not easy books, many will not like them because I don’t present plot on a silver platter. Much like life, we only know what’s what long after a moment has passed, and if we are lucky, we can say “I’ve made a difference.”

Is there a recipe for success? No, not really. You write what you love, stories you want to read, you take your time, hone your craft, and if you’re lucky, people will come to appreciate the result.

And if they don’t? You still did what you loved.

If there’s one person whom your writing helped through a tough time, then you’ve succeeded.

Money isn’t a metric for success.

11. Finally, did you enjoy this interview? Is there anything about the series or a character or your writing journey that you’d like to share with our readers that isn’t covered in the books? Or, just for fun, why did you kill the squirrel? 😆

 This interview was fun. I managed to write about a few things I hadn’t considered for a while, or that I never explicitly spoke about. It’s not complete, of course, some things are only hinted at, but that’s okay. If it isn’t clear to hopefuls out there: read, read, read, read, and then read some more before you write. And then read again, learn story, learn about characters, learn delivery. 

Far too many “authors” vomit their first draft onto paper and publish it after fixing the commas. It takes time! In my late teens until my late 20s, I read one 300 page novel per week, sometimes per day. I don’t know how many tens of thousands of pages I have read. Read everything, not just “the classics,” read song lyrics. Hells, I was a singer, had a band when I was 19/20, I wrote all the lyrics, didn’t know shit about rhythm, but I figured it out all the same.

Understand history and context. As a writer you must understand these things, nothing just happens, there’s a reason for everything, don’t be afraid to question everything. No one is the sole keeper of wisdom, not a preacher, or a teacher, or a parent, or a grandparent… “Because I said so” is not an answer. “I don’t know” is, it might not be the answer you want, but it’s the only answer that person will give you without resorting to lies.

Writing must be honest. If you don’t know about something, do your research. And no, YouTube videos are not research. Watching Bollywood won’t teach me about Indian history either. (I watched Ashoka all those years ago, and I found it more bewildering than anything else.) Watching Hollywood movies won’t teach you about the USA, I learned that the hard way.

Read, read, read, and then read some more. Never stop learning, broadening your horizon, nothing must be sacred, because only if you start asking the questions that make you feel uncomfortable, then you will touch a hint of greatness, of understanding. (and now I feel like a fucking guru)

Why did I kill the squirrel? I wanted to show heroism. There’s no heroism anywhere else in the book. Everyone is surviving, hanging on to whatever gives them hope. Bright-Eyes is the same, until he sacrifices himself for his friend. That’s heroism.

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