Scotto Moore

Scotto Moore is the author of Your Favorite Band Cannot Save You, a sci-fi/horror novella published by Tor.com. For fourteen years, he was an active playwright in Seattle, with major productions nearly every year during that time, and 45 short plays produced during that time as well. He wrote book, lyrics, and music for the a cappella sci-fi musical Silhouette, which won the 2018 Gregory Falls Award for Outstanding New Play, presented by Theatre Puget Sound. He also wrote, directed and produced three seasons of the sci-fi/comedy web series The Coffee Table; and wrote and starred in the horror/comedy play H.P. Lovecraft Stand-up Comedian!

Moore's debut novel is Battle of the Linguist Mages.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

The book doesn’t open in the middle of a fight scene; a battle’s not yet raging at the top of the story. So the title is this major clue you can hold onto that the story is absolutely going to build toward a serious mage battle of some kind. Who are the linguist mages, who are they fighting, are they fighting each other, what does linguist mage even mean – the title can’t help you with that stuff. Hopefully it helps you pick up a sense of the story’s absurdist edge. It’s meant to feel heightened, like it’s promoting a cage match or something.

What's in a name?

The only name in this book that had a direct inspiration is the MC, Isobel. In an early draft, we didn’t learn her real name, but she used “Isobel” as her alias in the game because “Isobel” was the name of her favorite Björk song. But this book is partially set in a medieval rave-themed VR game called Sparkle Dungeon, so I do use a lot of elaborate names and titles like “the Dauphine of the Shimmer Lands” and “the Once and Future Gleaming King of the Sparkle Realm and All its Glamorous Provinces; Protector of Shine, Blink, and Glow; Guardian of Prism, Crystal, and Diamond; and Master Commander of the Glittering Monks of Weaponized Psytrance.” The game is very tongue in cheek and self-aware, and those parts of the book are, too.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

I was already trying to write pretty weird sci-fi by the time I was a teenager, so that side of it wouldn’t be terribly surprising. I think the big surprise would be the heavy influence of electronic music and rave culture on the book. I wouldn’t have seen that coming at all. At that age, I was pretty much just listening to classic rock and whatever pop made it onto MTV.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I’m one of those people who is only really capable of writing in sequence. So I live with the beginning a lot longer than the ending and it gets many more opportunities to change while I’m learning about where the story wants to go. And then I frequently start writing with only a sliver of an outline to work with and only the vaguest gut feeling about the quality I want the ending to have. The ending comes into view over the horizon as I write and I can sort of aim the story at it and course correct to get there by revising along the way. That to me feels easier than crafting a strong beginning, which I usually want to have a sharp, instantaneous “you are there!” vibe right from the first sentence. That said, I’m remembering now that the opening was the last thing I wrote on the draft I sent to my editor. A couple of my beta readers urged me to start with more action, and the game is a good vehicle to drop you into an action scene without making it life-or- death stakes, which to me would’ve felt over-the-top. This story’s a bit of a slow burn up until a couple key events change Isobel’s life and send things spinning.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

In my novella, Your Favorite Band Cannot Save You, the MC is a music blogger, inspired by my feelings about music blogging since 2004 or something, so there was a pretty direct correlation between that character’s whole ethos and mine. Of course, I made the MC much more popular as a blogger than I’ve ever been, so the MC is also wrapped up in being an influencer, which is sort of their fatal flaw really. With Battle of the Linguist Mages, Isobel’s clearly got my sense of humor, and she’s also at a point in her life where she’s recognizing for the first time how society is failing in major ways, which is drawn from my outlook as well. She’s much younger when she starts figuring it out than I was, but she’s also living in the future a bit, so it’s more obvious from there that a collapse of the American state is inevitable, is already in progress really.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Music in general has been a major influence, both in terms how much it’s infused throughout my prose work so far (I might have gotten that out of my system at this point), and how much it inspires me just to keep getting up every day. I’ve engineered my life to include music at almost every step. I’ll spare you a deep dive genre exploration, but my life really changed dramatically when a friend introduced me to electronic music in the mid-90s. That opened my eyes to think beyond what I’d grown up with. I made a vow to myself to keep up with current stuff, to stay adventurous in what I listen to, and that’s a foundational attitude for me about the arts in general.

Visit Scotto Moore's website.

My Book, The Movie: Battle of the Linguist Mages.

--Marshal Zeringue