About the writing

I mostly write fantasy but am intending to traverse into different genres. With every story that I write, I try to avoid clichés and everything that’s done before. In a way an impossible task, but why not try it anyway? Mostly I tend to avoid one-sided characters and predictable story-lines. People aren’t generally bad, despite what the internet sometimes wants others to think. People are generally good. Pretty much all of them are, at least from their own perspective. So how is conflict created? How do all these good people start to oppose each other, and then hate each other in such a manner so that they might kill? What seems beyond reason becomes reality all too often. What’s it like when we don’t only hear from the victor, from the ‘good person’? Which side do you support? Is there even a specific one that you should support? Would you prefer the likeable, funny character above the one that has better morals? Far from always they’re the same character. Questions and themes like these I like to mix in my work. As for predictability, plot armor doesn’t exist in my work as well as the last-minute savior. Or perhaps the latter one does show up but they dies immediately. A reader shouldn’t know what’s coming next. They might expect anything they want though, and can be right or wrong.

Aside from all this seriousness, I like to mix humor in as well. Not silliness per se but humor in dialogue for example. It makes things more realistic in my opinion, and funny, which is apparently the actual point of humor.

I love to create rich worlds with history in which our adventure can take place. The world doesn’t exist for our story, it was there long before, same as the races that live in it. In my work they experience conflicts large and small. Some can be solved by words…others can’t.

I could go on and on but hopefully this gives you a quick insight of what to expect in my writing.

Why in English and not in your native language?

So my mother doesn’t read the gruesomeness that happens in my books and think her upbringing has failed.

In all seriousness (as above wouldn’t even work, because she speaks English just fine as does basically every Dutch person), for fantasy I’m used to reading it in English or hearing it in movies and videogames, especially from a later age. I’ve always preferred reading is that way so the text stays true to what the author meant, however pretentious that might sound. Because of this, when I read about a wizard, I think of Gandalf or a murdering warlock in Game of Thrones. When I read about a ‘tovenaar’ (Dutch word for wizard), a cartoonish Merlin pops up in my mind or perhaps the theme song to an old children’s show called ‘Tita Tovenaar’. Simply put, English in writing fantasy feels more native to me. Of course, my potential audience is also dozens of times bigger. Now, hundreds of millions will read my work. Or, more realistically, sixty readers instead of thirty.