Character Profile: Joshua Mason

Joshua is the first character we truly see in Ashes of Ruin, outside of side characters. He’s our introduction to this world, and as I sit here, trying to think about a profile for him, I wonder where I should begin that wouldn’t spoil anything. Yet there’s something to be said for a character like this, so let’s get started.

If there’s anything I could say about Joshua, it’s that his initial caution in the first book soon turns into a pure dedication throughout the rest of the series. He’s a shunned character to start, told by many within his family and society that he’s nothing more than the dregs, a tool for the use of others. He’s the forgotten one, lying in wait until the time is right, even though he’s not the one to start his journey down this path. If anything, Joshua has learned to keep himself in the shadow of silence throughout his whole life, not because he wants to, but because he learned the skill for his own survival. So we have this reluctant hero, the one plucked from his home only to be placed on the path of greatness out of pure necessity. When we begin Ashes of Ruin, we have to wonder where his mind is, since the “fish out of water” part of our story is going to be seen through his eyes, for the most part. He’s abducted, though it’s more an act of grace since they needed it to look convincing; and yet even when he’s on the road, it’s his overall kindness that hinders him.

So why would I make Joshua a kind soul in this bookish world of morally gray protagonists? For those of you following Ashes of Ruin, you know quite a bit about the themes I put in there, and Joshua’s story resonates with many. You can only take it for so long if you’re good to everyone, only for them to turn around and crap all over you. He lives in a society where many are rewarded with power for taking another person down.  The first person he opens up to, Thomas the Searcher, takes advantage and has him arrested, only to be tortured by Micha.  It’s, no doubt, my own personal views of the world we live in.  It doesn’t matter who you’re nice to, or who you show kindness towards.  It only matters where your destruction will get them.  I know too many people who take pride in tearing another down because it means they get their way, or even worse, survive.  And that’s the true crux of the matter with Joshua’s character.  Many actions happen throughout the series because of Joshua’s heart.

Sadly, he learns from that. When people take advantage of him for being kind, he turns around and tries to be prideful. It’s the main reason for his first failure at the hands of the Prophet. If he wasn’t so prideful of who he was, that fight could’ve gone differently, but he chose arrogance. He chose to demand power in the sight of others, and was abandoned. But spending that year within the Architect’s Mind humbles him, and shows him what the right path toward his future should be. It’s not about kindness to everyone. It’s about understanding the past of what they went through. I’ve done what I can in the past to learn from the mistakes I make, and there’s one thing that it always comes down to: you never know what the person tearing you down is going through. Does that excuse their actions? No. But it helps to understand.

I can’t say any more about what Joshua goes through, because it would spoil things, but I can tell you that much of his story is expressed in my own.  I was once brought into a meeting where a person continued to tell me all of my problems and how it affected them.  The only thing I could think of while this was happening was that it didn’t sound like them.  And after that meeting, going through all of those statements in my mind, one thought pervaded: this didn’t sound like them.  And I began to look into events that would help me understand.  While that meeting was one of the worst I ever went through, I do think a greater understanding was needed to see what was happening in the long run.  

Joshua’s kindness will be the death of him in the long run. That’s not a spoiler, more so just a figure of speech. Bad things happen to good people because they do the right thing, and I think we can see that in Joshua. We can all see the struggle because we face it every day. The moral of the story? Well… watch Ted Lasso.

Blog Post #3: Get to Know Me (Part III)

Oh boy, I knew I’d be bad at this. Let’s hope I can improve with the new year.

When the writing began, and the creations starting flowing, I remembered a piece of advice from a fellow writer of non-historical fiction. A piece of advice that helped with the flow of what would become Ashes of Ruin. “When forming an outline, never use ‘and then.’ Instead, use ‘because of,’ and write your storyline that way. If you follow that, the stories won’t sound like events that happen in occurrence with one another, but because of them.” It’s still one of the best pieces of advice I remember getting. So I started writing the outline and what I wanted to see happen. I wrote down my A to Z plan, and found that I was writing the outline backward. But even further, I found that I was writing a story that linked itself instead of having to create transition material to get from A to Z.

And since the story was to be cathartic for me, I didn’t focus on what was selling on the market at the time. I wanted to write my story, and if I followed what others were doing, it wouldn’t be true to myself. Surprisingly, I found that the more I hand wrote the story, the more I found a change in my writing style. Because the hand writing version of the story was helping me, I would only input any of it onto type until I was at least ten chapters ahead. By the time I put Chapter One onto a word processor, I found things I wanted to change, discussions that I needed to expand, and more. To this day, there are moments when I have to hand write a scene when I’m not sure how I need it to go. And in this process, I found something.

The narcissist who found power within themselves to continue their abuse toward me, even though I was slowly starting to heal in therapy, had deeper issues than what was projected onto me. Now I know what you’re going to say. “That’s usually how narcissists operate.” But I was young and thought people could change their ways for the better. I put narcissism in some of the characters in the book, and the deeper their stories were told, the more I understood the pain they had gone through. In many ways, the characters I created soon took on lives of their own, and when I wrote them, I didn’t have to think hard about how they would interact with the world around them.

But what about our heroes? What do they offer for their character growth? Most of what the heroes go through is a philosophy I’ve always found fascinating. The world is gray. There are very few people in my life that live on morally white or black end of the spectrum. I think I’ve met one person in my life who I can say is truly good. Others are in the gray, even those close to me. Our heroes don’t always do good things, but that only means they’re flawed individuals. I found my own issues that I was working through with therapy, seeping out and entering their lives. Our main character, Joshua, goes through a journey of self-discovery that grows into an overreach of his power. It goes to his head. When I thought I was finally healing through some of the therapy sessions, when I started to take my life back, there would be an incident with the narcissist, and I was thrust back down. It was almost a punishment for standing up against them. And so I wanted to create that for my main character.

There are characters who deal with issues in their past, or the lack of a past, and others who suffer because they try to be too good. It’s one of the reasons I find these characters living in my own life. But as I began to flesh out these characters, I also noticed that some of their problems were also within me, and I embraced them. It helped me learn more about how to move forward in my life. And in the end, my therapist told me I was making great strides. Still, to this day, I think the writing of Ashes of Ruin is what saved me from myself.

Next time, I’m not going to promise weekly, I’m going to change it up to talk about profiles of some of the characters you find in the book.

Blog Post #2: Get to Know Me (Part II)

Oh boy… I told myself I wouldn’t be one of those blogs that had one post, and then nothing else. Now look at me. I’m sorry for the tardiness of this post, but honestly, I forgot I had the blog. I’ll try to keep up with it weekly.

I ended the last post talking about my wavering confidence concerning Ashes of Ruin, and I guess some of that continues to this day. I’ve always said that it’s easier to criticize than create, and for creatives out there, the lingering doom of failing your audience is always on our minds. I don’t want to write a book that someone hates. No one does. But there’s always going to be someone who didn’t care for the book, or doesn’t connect with the writing style, or just states that they found errors and was forced to put it down. FYI, I consistently find errors in traditionally published books all the time.

I mentioned in the last blog post that my past caught up to my mind. What did I mean by that? I think the most crucial moment of my life that was creeping up on me was in my early adult life when I went through a very abusive narcissistic relationship. It was that event that started my path down depression. But when I thought the relationship was over, narcissists do what they do and manipulated everyone around me. I was lost. I was in a position that no matter what I said, no matter how many pieces of evidence I presented to the contrary of what was being spread, they never believed me. It came down to the influence this narcissist had over the people they were informing. Rumors were abound and I was alone.

So when it came time for Ashes of Ruin to come out, I started to panic, wondering if this individual would come back to haunt me. How would I protect myself in a situation like this? And the answer is fairly clear. You can’t.

As a creative, you put yourself out there. Once you publish your work, it’s out in there. You can’t unpublish it. Sure, you can stop having it printed, but you can’t stop others from selling it, or pirating it. And it was things like this that almost destroyed my confidence. But Jenn kept pushing me to get the book out there. She believed in the story and in many ways, she believed in me. Yet I was still afraid to publish the new edition of this story I’d written, the very story I wrote to get me through my depression. Oh! That’s a story worth telling.

After getting out of the relationship with the narcissist, or at least I thought I was out of the relationship, I went to therapy. I needed to go. Even though Jenn was a support system who continues to support to this day, I needed a third party. My therapist started by recommending that I come twice a week to start since the abuse from that relationship was strong. And they also told me that if I needed to see them more, that was fine. And we talked. And talked. And talked. We eventually came upon the issue within me at the time. The abuse was so strong that it would most likely be there forever. It wouldn’t hinder me through everything, but it’s something I’ll always have on my mind. There’s even days when I still think about what happened, focusing on crucial details that would’ve protected me, conversations that could’ve been stopped, etc. So in order to boost my confidence, they recommended that I journal. Now when it comes to confidence, I had none. I struggled to write those college essays where you had to talk about yourself and now my therapist wanted me to journal. I never had success with that before. I’d always get a journal, write one or two entries, but then just forget about it. And then it dawned on me after writing the first entry. In order to get over the narcissist, I not only needed to take my life back, I needed to claim it for myself.

Because I was a forgotten person after that relationship. I forgot who I was. I was starting to believe what the narcissist said about me. In my loneliness, I truly thought I was one of the worst people this world ever saw. But when I began to write that story that would soon become Ashes of Ruin, I saw the same thing starting to form. I was a nobody who had to grow into his own confidence. I was someone who made stupid mistakes that paid for them dearly. The only solace I had was to write this story. To this day, that’s what I love about fantasy. You get to just go away into another world.

And as major events occurred, events that allowed me to breathe through the trauma, I learned that I did have confidence. I just needed to create a situation where I found myself overcoming it all. I created the Architect’s Mind as a way to help myself calm, an infinite system of healing for myself. And the discoveries that came about truly guided me in how I wanted this story to form.

Blog Post #1: Get to Know Me (Part 1)

Hi everyone! Thomas B. Matthews here, and as a new author of Romantic Fantasy, I wanted to introduce myself and why I chose this path.

Fantasy, to me, has always been more than an escape. People often use that definition of fantasy as a means to explain the reason why we read it, but I think it’s much more. Of course, this definition could be used to describe any genre fiction out there. Where horror allows us to feel fear in what we don’t know, or don’t expect, science-fiction allows us to feel the endless possibilities of what could be. While romance allows readers to feel warmth inside of them from love the characters exude, adventure allows us to live outside the realm of possibility. Seriously, have you ever read one of those adventure novels? If I had an adventure like that, I’d never want for anything.

But what about fantasy?

I think the fantasy genre when I was growing up, pre-Lord of the Rings movie days, [I just dated myself] fantasy was something to be mocked. I was introduced to Star Wars at a young age when I first saw Return of the Jedi on television. [Strangely enough, I watched the original trilogy backwards which took all the fun out of the storytelling at first.]. And there was a general consensus that just because Star Wars took place in space, it was science-fiction. And I think for any millennial, our first foray into fantasy was either The Chronicles of Narnia, or Harry Potter. I was thirteen when I read the first Harry Potter book and there was just something about the opening novels that felt off to me. Perhaps it was because the characters were younger, and I couldn’t connect. However, at least where I grew up, fantasy was something to be mocked. Even all the great fantasy films of the 80s were nothing compared to great dramas, or even the highest of comedies.

When I first dove into fantasy, it all started with reading Lord of the Rings. I knew the movies were coming out, and the trailer intrigued me enough to look further into it. But after finishing that, I attempted other novels and I just couldn’t get into them. And as the years went by, it seemed I had small outbursts of enjoying the fantasy genre here and there. There was a brief moment where I read The Wheel of Time, The Witcher books, and The Sword of Truth, but that was also an age where those were still fairly popular. I’m not deriding anyone who reads them now, I just don’t see them having the staying power within the online community.

But I think it was the most recent bout of fantasy that got me back into this in full swing. It all started with [drum roll for the predictable] A Court of Thorns and Roses. I heard about this book series on Instagram [shocker] and while I didn’t know a lot about it, I decided to look into it. When I first mentioned it to Jenn, my wife, her eyes widened. She hadn’t read the book either, but it had a sort of reputation in her line of work. [She’s a librarian.]. After doing some digging, I found the series on Hoopla and downloaded the first book. And for the first four hours,…I was bored. I admit, I almost quit, but something kept me there. Perhaps it was the presence the book had all over the country, the recognition that it was the next big thing. And I’m glad I stayed on. June of 2023 was when I got back into reading, and I have to admit, I’ve read more since than I’ve ever read before.

But it wasn’t until Jenn and I were headed to a famous used book store in Connecticut when she reminded me of a fantasy story I once wrote. And she even said that there were many ties to the same genre as A Court of Thorns and Roses. By this time, I was onto Throne of Glass, but Jenn had dived into the former as well. She encouraged me to go back and find the file with the stories I’d written and retool them, tighten the story, add to what’s missing, and try to publish it. It took me a bit, but I finally found the flash drive with the files on it, and printed them out only to discover that not only could I enhance the story, but that it wasn’t that bad to begin with.

But Jenn knew.

She always knew. She told me they were engaging plots, realistic characters with real-world problems that connected with her, and that she felt the magic system was unique. [Though I still debate her on that one to this day.]. But not only was I rewriting this series of books, I was also reading more modern publications. I got a chance to see what kinds of writing styles to emulate, the types of books that I wanted to sell, and the stories people wanted to read. I also learned what not to do when it came to the re-write. Some story elements were not what appealed to the broader audience any longer, some of the writing style in certain chapters were too dense when the action needed to be moving forward, and the dialogue needed to be given a new life.

And as I was giving the dialogue new life, I found that I personally had a new life. Bringing these stories back brought inspiration to me, a drive to get the project down once and for all. It was a means of showing myself that I could do it in the face of failure back when they were first written. I needed that shot in the arm to get myself going, to find the truth inside of myself that I could DO it. But as the work continued, the past caught up to my mind.

And it began to tamper with my confidence.