Interview with Erin M. Evans

I was delighted to catch up with Erin M. Evans, whose book Relics of Ruin won the 2025 Endeavour Award for distinguished science fiction/fantasy books written by Pacific Northwest authors.

Erin M. Evans is the author of the Books of the Usurper series, beginning with Empire of Exiles, and the award-winning Brimstone Angels saga, set in the Forgotten Realms. She is a co-host of the podcast Writing about Dragons & Shit, and a cast member of the actual play series Dungeon Scrawlers. Erin lives in the Seattle area with her husband and sons. She can be found online at her website and on Bluesky.

NoaF: Congratulations on winning the Endeavor Award! Where were you when you found out you'd been shortlisted, and what was your reaction?

Erin M. Evans: I think I was in the middle of texting with a friend about Worldcon plans when I got the email telling me that Relics of Ruin was a finalist for the Endeavour Award, and I was absolutely shocked. My publisher had submitted it, and I’d pretty much assumed that as a sequel it wasn’t likely to get far (which was my mistake—this isn’t the first time a mid-series book has won). Plus, when I went to look at the list of submitted works, there were so many really amazing books on there—it really was an honor to be nominated. But it’s a book I’m really proud of and I’m grateful the judges saw its strengths.

NoaF: What do you enjoy most about writing the Books of the Usurper series?

Erin M. Evans: I went into these books deciding to do everything I loved as much as I could. So I didn’t skimp on the setting: the empire in the first book’s title is a collection of ten protectorates in a kingdom sealed behind a wall of salt, iron, and dead sorcerers after a catastrophe involving shape-changing colonizers; fast-forward a hundred years (and one failed coup that wasn’t cleaned up as well as everyone thought) and now we have a murder. I put in a bunch of characters I loved—very smart people geeking out about things they love, while also having mental health issues, while solving murders. And mystery plots! Because I love making problems for myself. Relics of Ruin in particular centers on a misplaced skeleton in the archives, which meant for the first time ever, I got to put the bone facts part of my degree to work in a book.

NoaF: In addition to the Books of the Usurper series, you're also writing for RuneScape, and previously you've written Forgotten Realms novels. What are the different challenges with tie-in writing vs. writing “creator-owned” novels?

Erin M. Evans: With tie-in, I’ve always described it as “working around immovable pillars.” When it’s entirely your own creation, you get to change whatever you want, and while you develop a sense of what’s got to stay—what is “load-bearing,” so to speak—you really can tear the whole thing down and start again if it’s not right. When you’re working in an established setting, there are going to be things you’re allowed or even asked to change or contribute, but there are also these immovable pillars—pieces that you have to work with or around. 

This is especially evident when you’re working with an IP that wasn’t made primarily to tell a linear story. With very high-level monsters in D&D, they can have “legendary resistances” where if an effect should hit them, it just doesn’t. They have a limited number of these, and so finding out a monster has this means you know you have to get it to spend them. In a novel, this would be immensely unsatisfying—I would look at that and go, “Okay, in this fight scene, it’s going to avoid getting hit in some clever ways.”

That’s what that’s there to represent—a monster so tough and wily it doesn’t just take the beating. Immersion is better than clarity. But, on the other hand, when I’ve run games and tried to weave those legendary resistances in as a narrative element, my players didn’t understand what was happening until I told them flat out—they need clarity more than immersion there.

There are also things that are the way they are in D&D or RuneScape, because they are fun in a game or provide necessary clarity for players, but they feel odd and flat if you try to port them straight over to a novel. So you have to find a balance between not breaking the rules so badly it doesn’t feel like the same setting, and tweaking things so it feels like a plausible version of what the rules are meant to represent. RuneScape has a very simple one: the map is sized so you can feasibly run around it. But if you said, “Yes, you can sprint across the world in fifteen minutes,” that would feel very weird! So, okay, we don’t look at how far it actually is between these places; we look at how long it feels like it should take, and go from there.

NoaF: You're currently cohosting a podcast. Tell us a little about that.

Erin M. Evans:  Writing About Dragons & Shit is the podcast I co-host with B. Dave Walters and Treavor Bettis. We used to host a Twitch show called Champions of Lore, for Codename Entertainment, where we would talk about lore from Dungeons & Dragons, which was a ton of fun, and Treavor pitched us on the idea of having a writing podcast on the side. I always describe it to people as “the really fun conversation you have after a great panel.” I love talking about writing and I love hanging out with these guys, and it’s a ton of fun to have guests join in. Because we work in a bunch of different fields, we’ve had all sorts of people come on, from novelists like Patrick Rothfuss and Melissa Caruso, to game designers like Shanna Germain and Keith Baker, to comic book writers like Jim Zub and even psychologists like Ben Searle to talk about writing and burnout.

NoaF: I hear fans of the podcast have their own special nickname?

Erin M. Evans: So, when we did Champions of Lore, we would occasionally get notes from our producer that we needed to stop going on so many tangents. Stick to the source material! When we started WADS, we realized—literally in the middle of recording—that no one was going to stop us going on whatever tangent we thought was good for elucidating the topic and entertaining the audience. Or we just wanted to talk about! And early on, we had a listener question, and B. Dave said, “It’s gonna spawn a whole lot of tangerinos,” meaning tangents. But then we started getting letters from people declaring themselves to be “Tangerinos”—and that’s super caught on. So it did indeed spawn a lot of Tangerinos, I guess! (They’ve also developed this custom of opening their letters with more and more elaborate titles for us, which never fails to delight me.)

NoaF: How did you get started in publishing? Did you always see yourself becoming a writer?

Erin M. Evans: I started out interning at a small press called Per Aspera Press. I learned a lot about what goes into publishing a book. Then with that experience, I went to work for Wizards of the Coast as a novels editor. But I have to admit, I always wanted to write more than I wanted to do anything else—I just loved books and I wanted to do anything I could to work with them. So while I was working on my craft by writing, I was also learning a lot by editing. I wasn’t at it very long in the scheme of things, but I think it was good practice.

NoaF: For the last question, I’d like to give you a chance to plug your favorite authors. Who should Nerds of a Feather readers have on their radar?

Erin M. Evans: Some of my long-time favorites include people who are definitely on readers’ radars: Martha Wells, Susanna Clarke, Connie Willis. But some of my recent favorite reads have been Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove, The Two Lies of Faven Sythe by Megan O’Keefe, the Echo Archives series by Melissa Caruso, The West Passage by Jared Pechaček, and Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan.

Gabrielle Harbowy is an editor, writer, and literary agent based in Southern California. She can be found at gabrielle-h.bsky.social or gabrielleharbowy.com