Ask the Author: M.B. Everett
Answered Questions (4)
M.B. Everett
The Purple Sky Saga was born when I smashed two ideas together.
The first: why do fantasy novels so often occur on a future earth, when those magical powers and monsters don't exist here in the present? How did that happen? What changed?
The second: what if the gods of myth were actually real — but not as superhuman as the stories make them out to be? What if they were simply people with a little extra magical ability and a little extra wisdom, accumulated over centuries of living forever?
Once I had those two ideas in the same room, I needed a cataclysm. Something that could end the modern world and reset the board. I read about the Carrington Event of the 1840s — a real solar storm that knocked out telegraph systems across the world — and decided to dial it up to eleven. Fry every electronic device on the planet. Throw civilization back to something close to the neolithic period. Watch what happens to people who have never had to survive without infrastructure.
The answer to that question is where the Purple Sky Saga lives.
But the story really starts with a football play.
On national television, Kanyin Robinson — an NFL cornerback who has no idea what he actually is — does something physically impossible. He knocks away a pass to send the New England Patriots one step closer to the Super Bowl. Nobody can explain it. Kanyin doesn't try.
He will spend the rest of the series wishing he had.
I call it the Immaculate Deflection. It doesn't appear in the first book — it lives in the short story I'm currently writing. But it's where everything begins.
The first: why do fantasy novels so often occur on a future earth, when those magical powers and monsters don't exist here in the present? How did that happen? What changed?
The second: what if the gods of myth were actually real — but not as superhuman as the stories make them out to be? What if they were simply people with a little extra magical ability and a little extra wisdom, accumulated over centuries of living forever?
Once I had those two ideas in the same room, I needed a cataclysm. Something that could end the modern world and reset the board. I read about the Carrington Event of the 1840s — a real solar storm that knocked out telegraph systems across the world — and decided to dial it up to eleven. Fry every electronic device on the planet. Throw civilization back to something close to the neolithic period. Watch what happens to people who have never had to survive without infrastructure.
The answer to that question is where the Purple Sky Saga lives.
But the story really starts with a football play.
On national television, Kanyin Robinson — an NFL cornerback who has no idea what he actually is — does something physically impossible. He knocks away a pass to send the New England Patriots one step closer to the Super Bowl. Nobody can explain it. Kanyin doesn't try.
He will spend the rest of the series wishing he had.
I call it the Immaculate Deflection. It doesn't appear in the first book — it lives in the short story I'm currently writing. But it's where everything begins.
M.B. Everett
Kanyin Robinson is the NFL's best cornerback — and he would very much like to stay that way.
He's not a chosen one who embraces his destiny. He's not a reluctant hero who eventually rises to the occasion with a speech. He's a man who is exceptionally good at one specific thing — reading people, anticipating movement, turning other people's mistakes into his advantage — and who applies that same analytical framework to a world that has stopped making sense.
He is bi-racial, raised in a culture that shaped him into someone who leads with confidence and deflects with humor. He loves his wife Isabel with a quiet ferocity. He would do anything for his best friend Jonas. And he has a gift he refuses to fully acknowledge because acknowledging it would require him to accept things about the world — and about himself — that don't fit the version of reality he's spent his whole life building.
He has a wife, a team, and a very bad feeling about where things are heading.
He's exactly the kind of man you want beside you when everything goes wrong — and exactly the kind of man who will argue with you about whether anything is actually wrong until it's almost too late.
He's not a chosen one who embraces his destiny. He's not a reluctant hero who eventually rises to the occasion with a speech. He's a man who is exceptionally good at one specific thing — reading people, anticipating movement, turning other people's mistakes into his advantage — and who applies that same analytical framework to a world that has stopped making sense.
He is bi-racial, raised in a culture that shaped him into someone who leads with confidence and deflects with humor. He loves his wife Isabel with a quiet ferocity. He would do anything for his best friend Jonas. And he has a gift he refuses to fully acknowledge because acknowledging it would require him to accept things about the world — and about himself — that don't fit the version of reality he's spent his whole life building.
He has a wife, a team, and a very bad feeling about where things are heading.
He's exactly the kind of man you want beside you when everything goes wrong — and exactly the kind of man who will argue with you about whether anything is actually wrong until it's almost too late.
M.B. Everett
That's a question I've spent a lot of time thinking about — partly because the honest answer involves authors who set an intimidatingly high bar.
For world-building, Robert Jordan is the gold standard. The depth of the Wheel of Time — the cultures, the histories, the way the world breathes independently of the plot — that's what I'm reaching for in the Purple Sky Saga. A world that feels like it existed before the first page and will continue after the last.
For magic systems, Brandon Sanderson. The rigor and internal consistency of how dunamis works in my world owes a direct debt to how Sanderson taught me to think about a magic system. Rules matter. Costs matter. The reader should be able to figure out the logic before the character explains it.
For propulsive storytelling and a protagonist who uses intelligence as a weapon, Jim Butcher. Dresden taught me that a smart close-third voice can carry a reader through anything.
Brent Weeks showed me that morally complex characters in a brutal world can still carry genuine hope. And Stephen King taught me something that has nothing to do with horror — the discipline of showing the reader exactly what he needs, no more, whether that's enough to draw his own conclusion or enough to leave the mystery intact.
And underneath all of it, Tolkien. Everything traces back to The Hobbit in 1977 for me. He built the room we're all still writing in.
For world-building, Robert Jordan is the gold standard. The depth of the Wheel of Time — the cultures, the histories, the way the world breathes independently of the plot — that's what I'm reaching for in the Purple Sky Saga. A world that feels like it existed before the first page and will continue after the last.
For magic systems, Brandon Sanderson. The rigor and internal consistency of how dunamis works in my world owes a direct debt to how Sanderson taught me to think about a magic system. Rules matter. Costs matter. The reader should be able to figure out the logic before the character explains it.
For propulsive storytelling and a protagonist who uses intelligence as a weapon, Jim Butcher. Dresden taught me that a smart close-third voice can carry a reader through anything.
Brent Weeks showed me that morally complex characters in a brutal world can still carry genuine hope. And Stephen King taught me something that has nothing to do with horror — the discipline of showing the reader exactly what he needs, no more, whether that's enough to draw his own conclusion or enough to leave the mystery intact.
And underneath all of it, Tolkien. Everything traces back to The Hobbit in 1977 for me. He built the room we're all still writing in.
M.B. Everett
My dad passed away and I needed a place to capture my thoughts and feelings. I also had this world in my head where something happened to kill modern technology, but magic, or as it is referred to in the Purple Sky Saga, dunamis, was given to humanity by the gods. Dunamis naturally heals the bodies of those who can wield it, including aging. So what would it be like to not know you could use the dunamis, but still get the anit-aging benefits. And this short novelette was born which I am using as a reader magnet to introduce readers to my work.
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