Hello and welcome to this Rapid Fire author interview, where today I’m chatting to Black Library author Rob Young about Longshot, his debut Warhammer 40,000 novel. Rob’s written a few 40k short stories already, and he’s previously featured on Track of Words as a guest reviewer (you can read his review here), but this is the first time we’ve chatted for an interview – and what better opportunity to talk than to celebrate the launch of his debut novel? Part of a growing range of new Imperial Guard Astra Militarum books, Longshot offers an unusual perspective on a Guard novel and promises to be an excellent read. Read on to find out what you can expect from Longshot, the challenges of writing about snipers, where Rob thinks he’d find himself if he was part of a Guard regiment, and loads more.
Track of Words: First of all, congratulations on your debut novel! To start us off, could you tell us a bit about Longshot and what readers can expect from it?
Rob Young: Thanks very much, it’s an exciting time for sure!
Longshot follows Darya Nevic, a sniper in the Cadian 217th, as they’re drawn into an attritional war with the T’au. It’s a story that’s as much about the individual as the wider conflict, and the ways that a single soldier can have a much wider impact than they expect or even want.
ToW: Without spoiling anything, who are the main characters and what do we need to know about them?
RY: The main characters are Darya Nevic, her team of snipers and the Cadians of the 217th – a mix of trueborn Cadians still recovering from the loss of their homeworld, and transplants like Darya who’ve been brought in to try and bolster the ranks.
Of course there’s a whole host of other characters, but I’ll let readers discover them for themselves!
ToW: Where and when is this set?
RY: Longshot takes place on the manufactorum world Attruso during the Indomitus Crusade, a few years after the events of Transplants and Memories of Broken Glass [more on which in the next question – ToW].
Attruso itself has been ravaged and polluted by the Imperium for generations, and with a fierce winter approaching both sides have more to contend with than just each other.
ToW: You mentioned Transplants and Memories of Broken Glass, two short stories you’ve previously written about Darya and the Cadian 217th. Are these prequels to Longshot? What can readers expect from them?
RY: Transplants and Memories provide some background to who Darya is and her journey to where she’s at in Longshot, but they’re absolutely not necessary for new readers coming to Longshot fresh.
Transplants was the first short story to feature Darya Nevic, and is about her return to her homeworld not long after she’s been transplanted into the Cadian 217th. She and two other snipers are sent into a Chaos-occupied city to take out a high-value target, and this shows how the troops on the ground are coming to terms with the way their superiors have chosen to keep the 217th in the fight. Memories was a very interesting one to write, where we see Darya recounting how the Cadians took her from her home regiment – it was fun to flesh out who Darya was before she was transplanted, and it gave me an opportunity to explore a setting that we don’t often see in 40k.
Obviously, if people enjoy Longshot and want to find out more about the events that have shaped Darya, then they can always go back and read the short stories!
ToW: What is it that particularly interests you about Cadians as an Imperial Guard regiment to write about?
RY: They’re in a really interesting position after the Fall of Cadia – after spending so long as the “poster boys” of the Astra Militarum both in-universe and out, they’ve effectively been hamstrung by the loss of their homeworld and only have a finite number of survivors to call upon.
It’s been interesting to explore the loss that’s become such a large part of their mentality, and how they’re adjusting to the non-Cadians who are being transplanted into their regiment to maintain it as an effective fighting force. Having Darya as an outsider-on-the-inside gives us a unique perspective on how that plays out, and how both Cadians and transplants are adapting.
ToW: Following on from that, why snipers? What were the reasons behind choosing that particular specialist, and what challenges did the choice give you?
RY: Snipers occupy an interesting role on the battlefield, especially when two sides still fight themselves to a standstill. They’re specialists fighting from hiding, striking at their enemies at a distance, but they can still see the whites of their target’s eyes through their scopes – there’s no-one else who fights like that, and films like Jarhead and Enemy at the Gates have have helped to build a mythos around them that’s fascinating to me.
It also helped that I’ve not seen much 40k fiction about human snipers in the Indomitus era, so there’s a degree of “write the stories you want to read” to it too!
In terms of challenges, there were a few – I’m not a sniper for one, which meant a lot of research into the history of real-world snipers and how they operated in order to write a believable sniper. That’s been an ongoing process that started before I wrote Transplants, and it’s a subject I still enjoy reading about now.
The second was that real-world sniping is very different to what you see in most films, which is what I touched on in Memories of Broken Glass – there’s a lot of waiting in a hide for your target to come into view. Luckily, reading more about sniper tradecraft allowed me to focus more on other elements of their skillset such as counter-sniping, tracking, infiltration and exfiltration in Longshot, and show that there’s far more to being a sniper than just being a good shot.
ToW: Darya’s nature as a ‘transplant’ is an interesting angle, setting her stories apart from other tales of Cadians – like Justin D. Hill’s Minka Lesk series. Was that a deliberate decision, to explore a different way for the Cadian regiments to survive, or something that came about organically?
RY: It was an organic evolution for sure. The world of Warhammer 40k is a big place after all, and far-flung Cadian regiments need to find ways to survive!
I’m a massive fan of Justin’s work and have loved the Minka Lesk books (as well as the excellent The Bookkeeper’s Skull), but Darya’s story was always going to come from a very different perspective. Telling Darya’s story allowed me to explore what that looks like for the Cadian 217th, without re-treading the same ground that’s already been covered elsewhere.
ToW: You’ve had a few short stories released already, but how does it feel to now see your debut novel about to hit the shelves?
RY: Extremely exciting but weird at the same time! I have to say that Black Library were great to work with throughout; they were encouraging and supportive at every turn, and seemed as invested in the story as I am. That makes a nice change to the day job, but it’s still slightly surreal at this point.
ToW: Could you give us an overview of your general writing process?
RY: With fiction writing you hear a lot about planners vs pantsers, but I’m not sure I fall completely into either camp – what I do is more like orienteering to me. I know what the main story beats and character arcs are going to be before I start, much like points on a map, but the way I get from one to the next is more of an organic journey rather than a set route.
Once I’ve got the manuscript into a workable first draft I go back and rework the story until I’m happy with it. It’s probably not the quickest or most efficient way, but it’s the one that works for me!
ToW: From a writing craft perspective, is there anything in particular that you learned during the process of working on this novel?
RY: It’s a strange one really. Copywriting has been a massive part of my job for over ten years now, so I know how to string together a narrative. When it comes to creative writing the experience is completely different – you get the opportunity to express your own style and write exactly what you want to write, and that’s really refreshing.
Writing something as long as Longshot meant I could really lean into that, and I feel like I learned a lot about my own style and the way I tell stories – it’s all good experience that I’ll be carrying forward into future projects.
If there was a single takeaway, I think it’d be that I should trust my instincts – if something isn’t working it’s worth taking the time to figure out why, even if that means redrafting a section you thought you’d finished!
ToW: To finish off, if you were part of an Imperial Guard regiment what do you think your specialty would be, and why?
RY: I’d love to think that I’d be someone heroic on the front lines, but it’s more likely that my marketing/PR skills would put me in the Commissariat to create propaganda for the Imperial populace!
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Rob Young is a marketer and graphic designer from Manchester, in the north west of the U.K. He writes in his spare time, and his work for Black Library includes the short stories The Roar of the Void, Transplants, Memories of Broken Glass, and his debut novel Longshot.
Find out more about Longshot here.
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Thanks very much Rob for chatting to me, and giving us the lowdown on Longshot. I’m sure you’ll all join me in congratulating Rob on the publication of this debut novel! If you’d like to know more about Longshot, you can check out my review here.
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