WELCOME TO THE LAST OF THE GREAT FLYING CITIES
It’s 9172, YE (Year of the Empire), and the future has forgotten its past.
Soaring miles over the Earth, Autumn, the sole surviving flying city, is filled to the brim with the manifold forms of humankind: from Human Plus “floor models” to the oppressed and disfranchised underclasses doing their dirty work and every imaginable variation between.
Valerius Bakhoum is a washed-up private eye and street hustler scraping by in Autumn. Late on his rent, fetishized and reviled for his imperfect genetics, stuck in the quicksand of his own heritage, Valerius is trying desperately to wrap up his too-short life when a mythical relic of humanity’s fog-shrouded past walks in and hires him to do one last job. What starts out as Valerius just taking a stranger’s money quickly turns into the biggest and most dangerous mystery he’s ever tried to crack – and Valerius is running out of time to solve it.
Now Autumn’s abandoned history – and the monsters and heroes that adorn it – are emerging from the shadows to threaten the few remaining things Valerius holds dear. Can the burned-out detective navigate the labyrinth of lies and maze of blind faith around him to save the City of Autumn from its greatest myth and deadliest threat?
Oh gods, I wish! Michael Williams is my real name, and it’s so statistically common that I’m not even the only Michael G. Williams who goes to my veterinarian! J I actually wrote a lot under a pseudonym in junior high. Way back when, believe it or not, I would constantly turn in writing assignments under another name. I thought about using that name when I started publishing novels, and in fact I’ve decided to use that pseudonym later when I publish some M/M horror-romance novellas I have working their way forward from the back of my mind.
In the meantime, I have a funny story about writing under my own name: it means I sometimes tell people I write under a pseudonym as a misdirect. I tend to keep a pretty strong barrier between my day job professional life and my writing career, mostly so that people I know in the context of my day job won’t feel like I’m going to try pushing books on them in the workplace. That job pays me to think about a specific thing other than writing, and I want to honor that commitment and those relationships by staying focused on my work tasks. Still, the fact I’m a writer comes up occasionally at work. On one such occasion, the person asking was my boss’ boss’ boss. I told her I write under a pseudonym – and that I preferred to keep it to myself – and gambled there was no way she would just happen to come across one of my novels. I was right! When she retired, she pulled me aside and asked if I would let her know my nom de plume since our professional relationship was ending. When I told her the truth we both had a good laugh over it – and then she read my book! J
What secondary character would you like to explore more? Tell me about him or her.
I would really love to spend more time with the character of Yuri. He’s an old friend and sometimes lover of Valerius, the main character. I think he’s probably the one person Valerius has ever truly and deeply loved. Yuri doesn’t have a ton of time on the page in this novel but there are a lot of things I would like to explore about him. He’s a street-hustling sex worker, and deeply empathetic towards others, and kind but also by necessity wary and opportunistic. In A Fall in Autumn he makes it clear he’s willing to take a risk for a large enough reward. He has dreams, he has a vision of a different future he is willing to work to create, and he has a tremendous amount of personal drive and inner strength. I admire all those things about him. I would adore the opportunity to zoom in on his character for a while and really get to know him. Both he and Valerius see themselves as solving problems and working to get ahead. Where they differ is that on some level Valerius is a disappointed idealist – he believes things could be better for everyone but he’s started to tell himself it’s impossible – and Yuri is still mostly an optimist. He’s a character many people would find disreputable but he embodies much of the very best of humanity.
I would also very much like to explore the character of the bartender at Valerius’ favorite watering hole. It’s a singles bar where people can meet and go out in violation of the otherwise very strict caste system of their culture. The bartender is a “Tom,” meaning he’s a human-cat hybrid. I would love to spend some time figuring out how a cat named Blackie came to be behind the bar at a joint like “Misconceptions.” I know there’s a story there, I just haven’t had the chance to tease it out.
Do you read your book reviews? How do you deal with bad or good ones?
I do! I constantly check for new ones. There are specific persons I know, either personally or through their history of reviewing others of my books, and I look to them as my indicator for whether a book is or is not successful at communicating the ideas I had in my head when writing it. Beyond them, reviews are of course the lifeblood of any author. A book with no reviews does not sell, period. A book with a lot of ratings and a few good reviews has a much better chance. When a total stranger gives me a good review I always kind of want to high-five them. I made a thing and they loved it? Awesome! I love to think I brightened their day, maybe showed them something we have in common between our otherwise completely disconnected lives. A book is always an opportunity for the reader and the writer to sort of clasp hands through time, and when I get a good review I really feel that. When a stranger gives me a bad review I mostly want to apologize to them. It means I wasted their time. Maybe my book just wasn’t for them, maybe they were hoping for a different ending, I don’t know and I never will, and ultimately there’s no “wrong” reason for someone to give it a bad review: a reader has an absolute right to their own subjective opinion, and I have no desire to change that. But I do wish I could, like, tell them I’m sorry.
Tell me about a unique or quirky habit of yours.
It is very, very, very, very, very difficult for me to go to bed or leave the house with a dirty kitchen. There’s just something about it that makes me feel like I have abandoned the absolute foundation of civilized behavior. I have literally lain awake at night upon realizing I left something undone in the kitchen. Something about a dirty kitchen feels, to me, like it’s just one step away from Mad Max. Oh, gods, I feel like I sound like a madman when I say that aloud, but it’s so true. I love cooking and love using up pots and pans and getting the most out of the kitchen and everything in it. (I love trying new recipes and would always rather try something new than remake something I’ve made before.) But I also am a clean-as-I-go cook, so while I wait for something to simmer or for vegetables to roast I’m 100% guaranteed going to be scrubbing or rinsing or otherwise tidying up everything I won’t need again. One day, perhaps the last day I am alive, I will find the perfect zen balance and the meal will be ready one second after I finish cleaning every dish used to make it.
Would you visit the future or the past, and why?
The future, every time. No doubt about it. I want to see what becomes of us. I want to see if we solve the problems we’re facing – global climate change, religious strife, political and philosophical divides, racism, misogyny, queerphobia – and walk bravely into a better future. I think we absolutely can, if we choose to do so.
Every writer who produces something today in hopes of having it read tomorrow is trying to shape that tomorrow, in a very active and direct way. The future I depict in A Fall in Autumn has many of our same problems, and some of those have been blown up to gargantuan portions by that future’s mastery of genetic manipulation and control, but it also speaks directly to some of our problems, such as global climate change. Writing that possible future was a way for me to tackle one of my deepest and darkest fears – that we won’t get our act together in time to prevent the worst of climate change’s effects – by talking about what new society gets put together after everything in our time falls apart. That doesn’t sound like a very upbeat or happy way to go about handling that question, probably, but it was important to me to make the point that whatever happens, humanity will persist. We’ll adjust and go on. We’re exceptional learners, we just usually don’t learn until after the disaster has hit us.
What are you working on now, and when can we expect it?
I’ve just signed a deal for 4 more books in the world of A Fall in Autumn and will be writing the sequel over the summer. I can’t wait! I expect the second book, to be titled New Life in Autumn, will be out a year from now.
Later this year I have several other works, already finished and coming out from Falstaff Books:
Nobody Gets Out Alive will be coming out sometime soon, probably over the summer. It’s the fifth and final(-ish) book of The Withrow Chronicles, my suburban vampire series about a guy who became a vampire in the 1940’s and has declared himself the boss of all of North Carolina’s blood-drinkers. The series is a ridiculously fun sequence of genre mashups – vampires and zombies, vampires and superheroes, vampires and spy thrillers, vampires and war, vampires and their witch frienemies – telling a story that gets increasingly complex as Withrow slowly but surely learns the world of the supernatural is much bigger than he thought.
I also have the four-novella San Francisco urban fantasy series, SERVANT/SOVEREIGN. It starts with Through the Doors of Oblivion, and it’s about some of the most evocative moments in San Francisco’s history – such as the 1906 earthquake and fire – and witches and demons and time travel and real estate scams. I’m just exceptionally proud of it, and I get to really focus on the features of San Francisco I most adore, which are not necessarily the parts of the city they try to highlight for tourists. I don’t know exactly when that one is due out, either, but it’s made it through the content edits and the copyeditor and it’s now with the proofreader, so it’s getting close!
And, last but not least, I’ve reached the rights-reversion point on a bunch of short stories I sold years ago so I’m possibly going to reclaim those rights and produce an anthology of short stories and nonfiction essays I’ve written for various venues. That’s a maybe, though. We’ll see.
Thank you so much for having me – I really appreciate your and your readers’ time and attention. I hope you enjoy A Fall in Autumn and I would love to hear from you about it!
You can find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Goodreads.
Folks who sign up for my monthly newsletter get a free short story and can read the ongoing first draft of a story set in the world of A Fall in Autumn but in our time rather than 12,000 years from now. Give it a shot! I keep marketing to a minimum and try to focus on rewarding your interest with new content.
And thanks again!
Michael is giving away an eBook copy of “Perishables,” book one of The Withrow Chronicles, with this post:
Everybody hates their Homeowner’s Association, and nobody likes a zombie apocalypse. Put the two together, and Withrow Surrett is having a truly craptastic night.
Enter via Rafflecopter:
The sun was over the trees at the southeastern edge of the sloped opening in the forest when I awoke. The sun woke me, actually: its rays on my face, the flicker of shadow and light as it played across my closed eyes. I was half dressed: my shoes off, my feet bare, and my coat spread over me in lieu of a blanket. My shirt was somewhere, probably. I wasn’t wearing it, anyway, and my eyes hadn’t opened yet, but I could feel it nearby the way you can sense an old dog by your chair or a former lover on the opposite side of an otherwise perfectly nice party.
My back curled against something firm and supporting and I felt gentle fingers stroke the tufts of silvery black at my temples. Hematite, a man told me once. I would always love him a little for saying that. My hair there wasn’t yet gray but no longer black and when wet it looked like hematite, and he said it like that meant something deep and significant and mystical I didn’t understand. Having someone’s fingers run through it felt good, though. It felt like a happy memory, like something I didn’t expect would happen much anymore if it ever really happened in the first place.
That simple touch was a comfort to me. It’s the most minor thing and, for that reason, the most missed when it’s gone. I don’t go long stretches without being touched, but it had been a while between caresses. This was that: a caress, and more; not exactly sexual but not exactly platonic. It was that happy in-between we call intimate. I made myself vulnerable to other men, and they themselves to me, more times than I can count in my too-short life. It didn’t always work out, though, that my usual flavor of street trade would show basic human kindness in return for mine.
None of that mattered, though. Those guys were long gone. Right that second, someone ran his fingers through my half-asleep hair, intimate and kind and caressing. I felt vulnerable and that was okay. For a few moments I wasn’t dying and I wasn’t scared. I wasn’t lonely and I wasn’t alone. The sun felt good, and the breeze through the branches sounded like Gaia herself telling me to go back to sleep. I thought for a moment I might be okay with dying fairly soon if I got to wake up like this every morning for the rest of my life.
“Okay,” I groaned. I didn’t move and I didn’t open my eyes because I wasn’t quite ready for the moment to go away even as I lifted the pin to pop its balloon. “You want something. So tell me what it is. Because if I say yes – if– I may not have much time to hold up my end of the bargain.” My voice dispelled all the magic of the moment, but his fingers were still at my temple, resting there, ready to go back to what we shared moments before. I rolled over and looked up at Alejandro, his purple hair down over half his face as he leaned on one elbow. I didn’t kiss him, but I did put one hand to his jaw and brush his cheek with my thumb. I wondered if he could feel that – really feel it, like skin feels it. “Let’s not pussyfoot around this. You want me to do something. The whole story about the angel and thinking someone was trying to kill you was bullshit, but there was something there, something worth chasing, so let’s have the truth now and get on with things.” I tried to smile at him. His expression was completely blank.
With the hand he used to brush my temples, he laid a fingertip behind my ear, cupping my face with barely a single point of contact. He still didn’t smile, but his eyes searched my face, my own eyes, for something. It occurred to me the correct phrasing might be to say he searched my eyes for someone. I assumed he’d been alive long enough to know a hell of a lot of people, and I would bet a nickel he looked for one of them in me. There are a hundred romantic stories about golems: meat sacks like me throwing ourselves at a golem out of infatuation with their embodiment of agelessness.
If he’d been there before, heard a hundred thousand of us wail about mortality and still willing to hear number one hundred thousand one, he must have a lot of love for humankind. No, I thought, more than that: he must have loved the hell out of oneof us at some point. Maybe he was waiting for that guy to walk back into his life, reemerging from the vast but finite pool of genetic factors we possess as a species. I wondered if I simply seemed close enough to that long-lost lover to pass muster for a night.
I also wondered what made a golem want to get laid in the first place: ever the detective, after all.
“I really did see an angel in Splendor,” Alejandro said. He still wasn’t smiling. If anything, he had the muted seriousness, the understated gravitas, I’d long since come to recognize as the posture of someone telling the truth at long last. I wondered how long it had been. “I swear it to you. I swear it.” He surprised me, then, because he didn’t cry, golems don’t have tear ducts, but his eyelids quivered with the autonomic response to strong emotion. He still hadn’t moved at all, and we were shielded from the breeze so that his hair hung straight down like a perfectly still and settled curtain across half the stage of his face. “And I believe it would try to kill me if it knew I were here.”
Michael is also an avid podcaster, activist, reader, runner, and gaymer, and is a brother in St. Anthony Hall and Mu Beta Psi. He lives in Durham, NC, with his husband, two cats, two dogs, and more and better friends than he probably deserves.
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