Dedicated to golfballshifter

In this interview, we are thrilled to introduce E. Paule, a kind and concise author who describes himself as "your average sarcastic, introverted, yacht rock-obsessed Chinese-Australian rail enthusiast." Paule's story is one of the winners of the summer colab contest "Last Summer". 

ContemporaryLit:  Can you tell us something about yourself?

PAULE:  I spent most of my childhood being a hopeless contrarian. I always wanted to be different from other people, no matter what that took. This ended up burning quite a few bridges and meant that I somehow ended up with a completely different set of cultural reference points to everybody else, but well... I was young, dumb and stubborn.

ContemporaryLit: How did you hear about Wattpad?

PAULE:  I think I saw some ads while browsing online. I'm always slow to join social media platforms, so it took a while until I got curious enough to find out more about it and open an account.

ContemporaryLit: Why do you read?

PAULE: At the very beginning I read to improve my English. Then afterwards I read for enjoyment. More recently I read to get a taste of the particular genre I happen to be tackling at the moment.

ContemporaryLit: Can you tell us something about your fantasy story?

PAULE: The People's Alpha is my first attempt at writing a werewolf fantasy story. It's a mainly a subversion of werewolf tropes, an account of long-suffering werewolf alpha Jim's interactions with victims of mate-kidnappings, werewolf alpha failsons, swashbuckling private security bosses, softly-spoken megalomaniacs, faceless bureaucrats, and his own dissenting pack members.

ContemporaryLit: What is your favorite genre to write and read?

PAULE: The real world is where I get most of my inspiration from, so the vast majority of what I read on a daily basis is non-fiction: news articles, essays, reviews, forum posts, etc. My current read is How To Steal A City by Crispian Olver, an expose of corruption in South Africa. 

As for fiction, I generally tend to read across a lot of genres. Mystery/thriller is probably the favourite. Detective stories to be precise. I've also read quite a bit of contemporary YA recently due to one of my current WIPs being in that particular genre. 

 As for writing, I write in a combination of genres. I prefer working in low fantasy as I can draw inspiration from the real world and current events easily, but also have more freedom for mapping the intricacies of my world than I would have in a more realistic setting.  

ContemporaryLit: How did you get your idea for the story?

PAULE: Like all great stories of the modern age, it started off as fanfiction. My world started off as one inspired by the works of the author May Gibbs. It was a city built onto the branches of a huge gum tree, populated by these tiny gumnut people. It was at that point mainly a vehicle for me to explore my interests in public transport. I think I spent most of the time just drawing maps of the tram system. I tried writing a novel out of it but gave up after a few days.

I joined Wattpad a few years later. At first, I mostly just uploaded short stories I'd already written long ago. Then, on a whim I accepted a request to edit a fairly popular werewolf book and was hooked on the genre. I'd never been familiar with werewolves, but I realised it would be perfect for my world. So I quickly scaled my world up to 1:1, changed the inhabitants to werewolves.

ContemporaryLit: How do you pick names of your characters?

PAULE: Usually it just comes to me. I guess it was easy for the People's Alpha, because I could just pick from the pool of stereotypical werewolf Alpha names- Landon, Xavier, Ryder, Clayton, etc.

ContemporaryLit: What can we expect next from you/what are you working on? 

PAULE: Writing the People's Alpha was quite a learning curve: many parts of my world were not fully fleshed out when I started writing, especially the democratic section of the world. The pack-ruled part of the world was arguably less developed, but that was not a big deal because I didn't have a very clear image of it in my head yet, and I could make stuff up as I went along. 

 But now my next few stories are set in the more established part of my world so the days of making things up on the fly are over. My current focus is developing the north-eastern suburbs of the capital city, Corviston. I already have most of the main rail corridors mapped out. Developing the road network and naming the suburbs will be the next step.

ContemporaryLit: Do you have some advice for young writers? 

PAULE: Don't research something with the objective of writing a story in mind. Treat it like it's your hobby or your profession, like your life depends on it. Forget that you are even writing a story. Just focus on learning as much about that particular thing as you can. The story will come to mind. 

 Don't be discouraged if your first attempts at writing are bad. Most authors started off that way. It might take two or three novels before you get some sense of your writing style and an intuition for the mechanics of writing a novel.

ContemporaryLit: Thank you for your time and answers! We wish you well with your writing endeavors and cannot wait to read some more works of yours! 

PAULE: Thanks so much! I'm honoured.