Author Interview: Brad Abraham

Today I am interviewing Brad Abraham, author of the new fantasy novel, Magicians Impossible.

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DJ: Hey Brad! Thanks for agreeing to do this interview!

Brad Abraham: Thanks for having me!

DJ: For readers who aren’t familiar with you, could you tell us a little about yourself?

Brad: I’m a screenwriter, a journalist, a comic book creator, and now a novelist. Writing is something I kind of fell into, though not by accident. Growing up I wanted to be a filmmaker – a movie director, specifically – and on graduating high school I went to Film School to learn how to do just that. But I found the writing process was the part of filmmaking I enjoyed the most; I enjoyed creating the world and populating it with interesting people much more than trying to execute it on screen. In my senior year I wrote and directed one film, but wrote or co-wrote several others, and following film school, I struggled as a screenwriter for several years before breaking “in”. I was quite successful at it too, but I wanted to branch out into other areas of creative writing and that’s where Magicians Impossible was born.

DJ: What is Magicians Impossible about?

Brad: Magicians Impossible is the story of Jason Bishop, a 30 year-old bartender who, following the apparent suicide of his father, discovers that his dad was in fact a magic-wielding secret agent in the employ of the Invisible Hand; an ancient order of Mages who use magic in the service of defending the world against agents of darkness and chaos who call themselves the Golden Dawn. It turns out Jason’s father Daniel was murdered by the Golden Dawn, and now they’re coming for Jason. The only way to survive: join the Invisible Hand, learn the skills of a Mage, and join the battle against the Golden Dawn. But what Jason (and the reader) will soon discover is that in this world of magic nothing is what it seems.

DJ: What were some of your influences for Magicians Impossible?

Brad: I grew up on James Bond movies, and 80s fantasy films, I’m a big Steven Spielberg fan also, and in many ways Magicians Impossible has that Spielbergian feel – think Minority Report meets The BFG. Of course, I’ve read a lot of both these genres – Ian Fleming, Robert Ludlum, Neil Gaiman, JK Rowling, but as far as specific influences I tried to focus more on the iconography of the spy and fantasy genres. But what I did do was read a lot of folklore and mythology; particularly European and Middle-Eastern myths. I wanted the magical aspects of the book to have grounding in the folklore of our world.