Interview with Ricardo Victoria

What’s it been like for you these last several months?

Relatively quiet. I’m working on a strange mish mash of horror, comedy, and urban fantasy for a stand alone and seeing if I can pull it out. I’m trying to get my short stories into shape to publish a couple of collections: one for SFF and one for horror. Other than that, it has been mostly promoting my Tempest Blades series and my book on sustainability explained through SFF.

Feel free to share your publication journey, discuss the amount of labor it took in regards to your project’s editing process, the delirious nature of third drafts, or that one late night you spent staring into a glass of wine, wondering if it’d ever truly come together. 

Long story short: I started writing in highschool, paused for years to get my degree and my PhD, meet people that wanted to write but like me were unsuccessful, so after a drunk chat we shared our skills and created a micro press to publish our short stories (got nominated to awards a couple of times for a couple of stories), while I worked on my first novel. Got a lot of rejections and through a mutual friend from a writing group contacted my current publisher, Artemisia Publishing, who decided to take a chance on this crazy mexican author who wanted to write a science fantasy novel and puts with my ideas while helping me to get the best stories I can write in my second language. Along the way, my wife has supported me, putting up with my loooooooong binge writing nights to get the series done, as well as my academic book on SFF and sustainability, and my mood swings derived from my chronic depression. Right now, I’m taking it slow and working on my next writing projects and my day job obligations.

Share freely any publication news you may have, and please include any links you’d like us to include.

At the moment I have no news yet, so I can only share the link to my Tempest Blades series.

And to my Sustainability explained through SFF book: link.

In two sentences, would you summarize your novel for us? 

I would summarize the whole novel series as this:

found family has to save a world where magic and science collide, while dealing with their individual personal issues… lots of issues.

You’ve mentioned in correspondence that mental health is featured throughout your novel. Was this something that you came into your project knowing you wanted to discuss? If so, did you set any parameters in place for yourself around how you wanted to approach this sensitive subject? 

Not really at first. When I started writing my first novel The Withered King, the mental health part was not on the horizon, just informed the way characters reacted to certain events, due their PTSD caused by the way they got their special abilities (they had to sorta die first, that certainly causes a lot of mental trauma). Because I put all I had into that novel–as I didn’t know at the time if I would have an opportunity to publish more– it reads as sort of a stand alone. When I got the blessing from my publisher to work on the whole series, that was when I started to put mental health as one of the central themes of the story. With The Cursed Titans, it became the main arc for the main POV character of that book, mostly because I was going through a serious bout of depression that was affecting my personal life, and it was the first year of the COVID pandemic. I had to start therapy and taking meds to get by and decided to add that to the book as a way to deal with my depression. In general, I have done that since highschool (when I started writing), because I’ve been suffering chronic depression for decades. So, one of my heroes in the second book onwards suffers from depression, has to go to therapy, take meds, and keep enough presence of mind to still save the day.

The main parameter I keep myself within is to present mental health–in this case, depression, in an objective and balanced way–as any other illness that can be treated; that it’s good to ask for help when it gets too much. Usually in SFF stories, mental illness has been coded as a shorthand for villains, or characters that need to be saved, which is unfair for those of us that suffer from them. Thus, this is why I decided to show that one of the main heroes (and possibly one of the most powerful ones of the cast) suffers from depression, and is the hero of that particular story (and the general arc of the series). I wanted to show that suffering from mental health issues and being the hero are not mutually exclusive. My guideline was to offer a positive representation of a character that suffers from mental health issues, which is not different from suffering any other chronic illness, and that it doesn't stop you from living a normal life–if treated–and certainly doesn’t make you the villain, or the one making awful decisions. 

What is something you’d like readers to take away from your work in regard to mental health advocacy, discussion, or criticism?

That mental health issues shouldn't be coded as a shorthand for villains, that you are not alone, that it’s OK to seek help, that things can improve, that suffering from mental health issues doesn’t stop you from being the hero of your own story, and that it’s OK to seek help. Also, mental health issues need a better, more informed representation and depiction in the media in general, specifically in SFF.

Anything else you’d like to share or for us to share on your behalf? 

Other than that, please buy my books, support indie authors, BIPOC authors, and small indie presses? Stay tuned for my next book release, and remember that you are not alone, and that it’s OK to seek and ask for help.

Drop any social media or website links you’d like us to link to in the interview.

I spend most of my time on Bluesky.

I also have a website/blog (that I need to update more frequently).

And I have a FB page as well.