Question One: Tell us a little bit about yourself! Where are you from, what’s your favorite color, anything that you want to!

Well hello there! I’m Jesse Pohlman, I’m a science-fiction/fantasy author originally from Long Island, New York. It’s a gigantic suburb where I’m from, almost an extension of New York City which is about an hour away by train. As far as a bit about myself, well, I’m a pansexual pagan, married with two cats. As far as my writing goes, I explore themes like self-understanding and the challenges that having – or not having – a destiny can provide. My favorite color can vary depending on my mood, but I tend to like purples, reds, and black.

Question Two: What inspired your debut novel?

George H.W. Bush was no small part of it, sad to say, though he was far from the only ingredient in the mix. See, I was in my late teens/very early twenties when I wrote my first novel in the “Pillars Of The Kingdom” trilogy, “The Forming.” I was arrogant enough to think I was a great writer, self-publishing was just starting up in swing with companies like Lulu, and I was no small amount of pissed at the way that Republicans treated the gay marriage question, so I took it out in fiction. The Pillars trilogy has three main characters, and one of them is Clarice Saffron, who is quite interested in her lady-love Katherine London. The first book especially emphasizes the development of their relationship from a socially-shunned union to almost a soul-mating. So I kinda did that thing where I emphasized social issues a lot in my first book – you know, along with things like just kinda assuming everything I did was right the first, or maybe the second time.

Question Three: What was the first book to make you cry? And if tears have never been shed then what was the first book that gave you an emotional reaction?

Well, I don’t recall if it made me cry, but a dear friend of mine introduced me to Mercedes Lackey’s “The Last Herald-Mage” trilogy when I was like 14 and I fell in love with Vanyel for all the struggles he went through. Dude makes some bad decisions early on but that’s how it is when you’re young, and as you see the pain he goes through and the growth he makes, it’s fantastic. When I think about literature that gets at the feels, that’s it – and while I go a few years between re-reads, every re-read makes me hyper-emotional, even if I can fight back the tears.

Question Four: Do you have any pets? Bonus points for pictures!

So right now my wife and I have two cats. Ophelia is the older sister. We got her in 2015 when we moved into the city for me to take up a teaching job, and we couldn’t take my cat Ariel because my dad basically stole her (which, fine, they needed each other). So we went out and adopted Opie, and she’s still with us. She’s definitely the lovey-er of the two we have, sitting in her window seat and coming out for pets, food, and love. She’s the one that’ll follow me up to my office and sit on my chest. Then there’s Arya Stark. Her origins are more chaotic; in 2018 the family that lives across the street from DM’d us like, “Hey could Ophelia use a playmate?” Because they’d adopted a cat from a workmate before thinking about it and realized they couldn’t handle it. So we kinda had no choice and we recused this little tiny sick cat who was separated from her mother too soon. My wife led the charge, having experience with young kitties, and nursed her back to health. She’s a scaredy-cat for sure but she’s very sweet, she just hides most of the day because I guess she’s more tuned to rampaging at night. She won’t sit on me, but she loves to lay on my wife’s chest and neck at night.

Question Five: What is your goal as a writer?

This question is hard for me to answer, because I kind of have two-in-one, and it feels kind of cliche to talk about it but it’s also core to my personality, I guess? The general overview is to tell stories that help make the world better in some way. That means, A, coming up with and telling stories that have clear thematic resonance like, off the cuff, “Strongly question anyone who lays out a destiny for you.” I do it for fun, sure, and a lot of my stories include cool fight scenes where the good guy and the bad guy duke it out and it’s flashy and adventurous. But within those adventures and those battles are ideologies and ideas that are fighting it out, too, and it matters as an author who I write winning when because those victories and defeat tell the reader things about what I believe, and what I think they should believe. Going back to my thematic example, even if you admit that your destiny is a certain thing, well, that doesn’t mean you have to do it exactly the way someone else wants. You might be destined to fight the supervillain, but that doesn’t mean you’re destined to let the power structure from which the villain arose survive. But somewhat secondary to that is the fact that the only way my stories can change anything is if people read them, you know? So the secondary part of that goal is to attract readers to actually read my work. And that’s kind of the struggle every author goes through – there’s a certain level of narcissism that it takes to be an author because you want someone else to put almost everything else in their lives down to read something you wrote, and, like, how arrogant is that? Very! But I think I have something important to say, even if it’s just reaffirmations of things my likely readers already know.

Question Six: Do you believe in “kill your darlings”? Did you have to kill a darling you really didn’t want to?

So earlier I mentioned how I once thought I could get everything right the first or maybe second draft. Now I know better. I hire editors, I plot a lot better (yes, I plot more than I pants), and I do take out some stuff and tweak other stuff substantially. I’ve never been in a position where something I’ve written is totally unusable, such as having to pull an entire character out of a book, but I’ve definitely had to take out sentences and paragraphs I really liked, and rearrange things in a way that made me go, “Oh, so this loses something here, but it gains so much over there that it’s worth it.”

Question Seven: Have you ever googled yourself?

In another life I was a teacher, so absolutely I have. I’ve had students Google me, or search for me on social media. And they found me, too, even when I was in college – which, again, we’re talking mid 2000’s here. In fact, I just Googled myself again, and was pretty happy with the first few pages of results. There are other non-relation Pohlmans and Pohlmann’s-with-two-n’s out there, and there’s even been other Jesse Pohlman’s out there apparently, but mostly I’m the only thing that comes up these days; me and my books.

Question Eight: Was there someone in your life that inspired you to write/self publish?

Either good or bad. So I got my start writing in AOL Chat room RPs, such as Rhy’Din. As part of that roleplaying, my friends and I came up with our own games and our own storylines. I coordinated a lot of that, for better and for worse, and a lot of that was basically just creating novels with your friends. Throughout that time I had a lot of teachers and professors suggest to me that I should write, and so I did. Of course, one professor reminded me that he wanted his author-students to be able to eat, so that’s why I was getting a teaching degree, but I’m very lucky with how things worked out and I’m doing alright all things considered.

Question Nine: What are the best and worst things about being an indie author?

The best thing is the amount of control I have over my own fate. I get to keep pretty much all the rights to my work, unless there are occasions where I write for a short story anthology or something like that. I hire my own artists and editors. I’m lucky to be able to afford that, because that’s not cheap. I publish my own books. The worst part is probably the radio silence that can await you when you create a new thing and very few people are actively listening. It’s not so much that you lack a marketing budget as it is you are just a very small fish trying to get by in a world dominated by mega-franchises.

Question Ten: What advice would you give aspiring writers?

Really sit back and think about what paths you want to take, know that there is no one true path, and know in fact that the paths are always changing. Also: Don’t take this as discouragement, just think it through better than I did when I was in shoes much more similar to yours twenty-and-more years ago! 🙂 Self-publishing wasn’t new-new when I started, but print on demand was making it much more accessible. That changed the whole market. Digital distribution is great, and platforms like Itch have features such as bundles which can help get your book into new readers’ hands, but the whole concept of books is turned upside down by serialization – which we all know is far from new, but seems to have an allure all its own. Royal Road and Ream are two names to think about, but you could also set up a Beehiiv (I stay away from Substack because of its financial support of Nazi publishers) or some other newsletter service to serialize your book, and then publish a physical volume when you’ve finished a novel’s worth and attracted readers along the way.