Category Archives: Evan Braun

After six thousand years of captivity, the Grigori are free. With time running out, Ira Binyamin leaps into action, amassing a network of allies to wage all-out war against this new yet ancient threat. But as his mentor Aaron warned him long ago, to wage this war he must bear an awesome responsibility, one that will exact a crushing toll on his body, his conscience, and his very soul.

Dispatched by his new masters on a mission to the northernmost reaches of the world, Sherwood Brighton must come to grips with the consequences of his life-altering decision in Shamballa. To find what he’s searching for, he’ll have to look deep within himself and confront the harrowing terror shrouded in the recesses of his own mind.

Opposing forces swirl toward their ultimate confrontation as Ira, Brighton, and those they hold most dear return to the place where it all began… where the worth of humanity will be settled once and for all.

* * *

It goes without saying that it’s a lot harder to finish a project than to start one. Finishing a project when a crowd of people are watching you with their own silent (and sometimes not so silent) expectations is even harder. This is where I find myself now, upon release of my third novel, The Law of Radiance, which also happens to be the concluding volume of The Watchers Chronicle, a story I started telling back in 2011 with my friend and writing partner, Clint Byars. 1,232 pages—and 322,141 words—later, the story is complete. And it’s one that I am immensely proud of.

In 2011, when The Book of Creation came out, I felt ecstatic. How could I not? My first novel was published, right there in print, on the shelf in the bookstore, the fulfillment of a very long dream. But the Watchers Chronicle, really, is a single story, so while the book was out, the whole story was not. Indeed, I wasn’t even a third of the way there (29.9 percent, to be precise). I still had a long way to go. I didn’t even know how many books it would take to finish, which is why I pointedly didn’t call it a trilogy right off the bat.

But here we are, and I can finally say that I’ve completed my first large-scale writing project. If you happen to be one of those people who only likes to start reading a series once the whole shebang is available at once, then have at it. I invite you to dive in!

Along the way, I’ve gotten some favorable reviews. My favorite came from the Winnipeg Free Press, my local newspaper, which wrote: “There is an important difference between someone like Dan Brown and Evan Braun: Braun writes with some literary sophistication.” Depending on what kind of emphasis you place on the word some, that’s great validation!

The Law of Radiance was a much longer and more complex affair than I anticipated at first. Indeed, as late as this past March, I contemplated splitting the book into two separate novels which would have each been approximately equal in length to the first two books in the series. Instead I took the alternate route, trimming down the fat to fit it all into a single book, working on the presumption that editing down is almost always preferable to expanding outward—at least for me. And each time I browse through Radiance, I become more certain that I made the right decision. Even at a smaller word count, it’s still a full third longer than either Book of Creation or City of Darkness. I’m quite sure that every word is earned.

It’s currently available for $3.99 for the Amazon Kindle, the Kobo, and the Nook. Not only that, but the print edition is on the way, hitting stores and catalogs on Thursday, July 9. I’ll be hosting a launch party at McNally Robinson Booksellers at 7:00 p.m. that night—so if you happen to be local to Winnipeg, Manitoba, I hope to see you there.

Excerpts and reviews are available here.

Evan Braun is an author and editor who has been writing books for more than ten years. He is the author of The Watchers Chronicle, whose third volume, The Law of Radiance, has just been released. He specializes in both hard and soft science fiction and lives in the vicinity of Winnipeg, Manitoba.

On the Road… with Google Street View

May 24, 2015

Evan Braun

Evan Braun Software Writing Tools 1 Comment

My recently completed Watchers Chronicle is by and large a travelogue. The stories hit every continent, more than a dozen countries, and even more cities and countrysides. At book signings, I am often asked if I have visited all the locales featured in the book, to which I must sadly answer, “No. I wish.” Frankly, I don’t have the budget or time for first-person research on that scale. Very few authors do, including those many times more successful than me.

So what’s an author to do? With a story like this one, the locations exist in the observable world. I can’t just make up geography to suit my needs. The cities and streets and lakes and fields and mountainsides are all real. They exist, and therefore they need to be as accurately depicted as it’s possible to do from the confines of my home in the middle of the Canadian prairie. It’s very flat here, and I can see an awfully long way, but I can’t see all the way to Switzerland.

Fortunately, Google can. Specifically, Google Earth. Google Earth is an encyclopedia of visual information sorted geographically. If you want to see locally sourced pictures and information from any location in the world, all you need to do is scroll to it on Google’s beautiful globe of accurate and increasingly detailed satellite imagery, and there you will find everything you could possibly hope for. It’s a geo-lover’s paradise.

The most powerful tool in the arsenal is Street View. A fleet of Google vans has been busy crisscrossing the globe’s million-or-so highways and streets for about a decade now, capturing a constant stream of 360-images as they zoom through urban centers, savannahs, high-altitude plateaus, and stunning sea sides. You can literally jump to just about any street you can think of and see for yourself exactly what it looks like. You can study the buildings, the passersby, the sidewalks, the shops, the road surfaces themselves, the soil and terrain, the trees and vegetation, even the wildlife, literally everything available to the eyes. Do you want to know exactly what the terrain is like at the opening to I-50’s Eisenhower Tunnel in western Colorado? No problem. Do you want to see which shops and restaurants adorn New York’s Times Square? Easy. Do you want to track the exact route between London’s Piccadilly Circus and Heathrow International, and capture all the sights along the way? Done.

What a resource to travelogue authors everywhere. Jack Kerouac never could have imagined this.

Of course, these research tools don’t fill in all the gaps. Your imagination still has to bring these still images to life. And of course the eyes only account for one of the five(ish) senses. You still have to fill your story with the endless sounds, smells, and tactile details needed to create a truly rich and diverse literary experience.

That said, Google Street View really is the perfect place to start. Unless your story is set on Mars. Except, actually, Google is working on that too…

Evan Braun is an author and editor who has been writing books for the last two decades. He is the author of The Watchers Chronicle, whose third volume, The Law of Radiance, has just been released. He specializes in both hard and soft science fiction and lives in the vicinity of Winnipeg, Manitoba.

No Evil Required

April 24, 2015

Evan Braun

Author's Perspective Character Conflict Craft & Skills Evan Braun POV 1 Comment

Evil exists in the world. In fact, to some degree it exists in all of us—a dark side that usually only emerges in our most private thoughts but may occasionally peek into the light of day. For the most part, we don’t let this happen. Indeed, for the most part we are good people. In evolutionary terms, goodness propagates itself more successfully; evil is inherently maladaptive.

The worst kind of motivation for a villain is intrinsic, deep-seated evil. They’re evil because they were born that way. Or they crave power obsessively. To me, this almost never rings true. I suppose there are some people like that in the real world, but they must be a rare breed. Most people think of themselves as more or less good—not necessarily saintly, but closer to Mother Teresa than to Adolf Hitler.

Intriguingly, even the people who really are closer to Adolf Hitler probably view themselves as being closer to Mother Teresa, and this is fertile ground for growing conflict in our stories. First of all, a villain is not the same thing as an antagonist. You don’t need a villain to tell a good story, but you probably need an antagonist. What’s the difference? Well, think about it this way. Sometimes you just have two fairly normal people who just happen to want very different things… perhaps even diametrically opposed things… and thus the clash happens. (Exhibit A: Sad Puppies vs. Social Justice Warriors; no evil, moustache-twirling villains here, but a hell of a lot of conflict-enriching antagonism.)

When building a story, try setting up a conflict between two or more sides in which every side could be anchored by a strong, relatable protagonist. The only difference between a protagonist and an antagonist is often the fact that the protagonist gets the primary point of view; if you swap things around, those two characters can easily switch roles without changing the fundamentals of the story.

As a thought experiment, it could even be interesting to try actually writing the story from different points of view. Walk in your antagonist’s shoes; make them the protagonist and see what happens.

Indeed, conflict requires no evil. Just opposition. And effective, relatable, compelling opposition is rarely in short supply.

Evan Braun is an author and editor who has been writing books for the last two decades. He is the author of The Watchers Chronicle, whose third volume, The Law of Radiance, is forthcoming this spring. He specializes in hard science fiction and lives in the vicinity of Winnipeg, Manitoba.

The Upside to Being Messy and Unfocussed

January 6, 2015

Evan Braun

Character Evan Braun Rewriting Storyline No Comments

RubiksCube For the most part, I’m a gardener. And proud of it! If you’ve spent any amount of time in the writing community, you probably know what this means: I explore my story as I go along, finding my way to the ending through a process of trial and error rather than moving through the book strictly according to a preordained outline. I don’t eschew outlining entirely; I do keep fairly detailed outlines of the two or three chapters ahead of wherever I happen to be in the story on a given day. Working this way gives me confidence in the story’s immediate future, but beyond that I admit it can get a little murky. I only have a general idea of how I want the story to resolve while I’m in the midst of it (usually it’s a solid, workable idea, but nonetheless I only work out the details very generally).

This doesn’t mean the endings aren’t well-earned or carefully orchestrated. In fact, I feel that working this way forces me to spend a lot of time considering how satisfying various plot and character developments will be when push comes to shove. If any particular idea isn’t panning out, I don’t have qualms about jettisoning it in favour of an alternate approach. In my experience, this allows my books to get better, stronger, tighter as I work through them, solving them in the same way one might tackle a Rubik’s Cube. (Full disclosure: I’ve never managed to solve a Rubik’s Cube, so I guess that’s a bad example.)

So what does this have to do with character? Everything.

When you don’t have an airtight outline guiding you through the storytelling weeds, you have to create potential in your characters. In the earlier stages of writing a novel, it’s profitable to spin dozens of little threads that may or may not pay off in the long run. You don’t have to tie them all together. Once your story is worked out, you can trim the book down to focus only on the threads that coalesce. At the beginning, though, the key to creating great, story-propelling characters is to pinball them off other characters and events to see what sticks. In my experience, this leads to a host of options which can be exploited down the road.

This can feel messy and unfocussed while in progress, but a lot of the detritus doesn’t make it into the final cut. I end up writing a number of early scenes that don’t see the light of day, because they don’t lead anywhere interesting. But I often won’t know if particular character combinations work until I attempt them. So Margaret clashes with Fred, and Fred makes a pass at Steve, and Steve can speak with the ghost of a long-dead alien consciousness from Europa, and the long-dead alien consciousness from Europa… The point is, none of these may be central to the premise of my story—at least to begin with—but the few threads that really click create enormous depth and interconnectivity to my characterizations in the long-term. And several of them likely will become central to the premise by the time I type “The End.”

Knowing what will come together and what won’t is a mysterious, unscientific alchemy I have yet to master—and maybe I never will. But in the meantime, I’m going to keep the gardening the hell out of my characters and sees what sprouts up. Sometimes it’s this. Other times? Not so much.