A Country of Eternal Light by Darby Harn

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Welcome to It's Raining Books. What inspired you to become a writer?

I don’t know if anything in particular inspired me to become a writer. I was always writing or ideating. I remember being very motivated by things like Star Wars and X-Men comics and then later on a book like The Hours by Michael Cunningham or a poem by Seamus Heaney to want to write better. To keep moving down this path I’m on, which has led me to A Country Of Eternal Light. I suppose in some ways it’s a distillation of all those different influences.

Do you have a daily writing routine? If so, please share.

I always to try begin by going over the previous day’s work. Review, revise, and then continue from there. My schedule is so fluid that sitting down and doing a thousand or five thousand words at any one time is impossible, so it accumulates through the day. So I try to work a little in the morning, a little in the afternoon, a little in the evening. By the end of the day, if it’s a good day, I’ll have 2000 words or so.

What is your favorite book?


Frankenstein remains near and dear to my heart for reasons I can’t really explain.

What is your favorite movie?

Star Wars, without a doubt.

In your books, who is your favorite hero and please introduce him?

The main character of A Country of Eternal Light is Mairead, who I suppose is the hero. She’s certainly a hero to me, in the way she faces her grief with grace and strength and dignity. She faces the end of her life, and of all things, with an indomitable grit that is endearing.

Would you date your favorite hero/heroine?

I think Mairead deserves better.

New releases anytime soon?

Next up for me is Nothing Ever Ends, which is the third book in my Eververse series. This series is a literary take on the idea of superheroes. Publisher’s Weekly said of the first book, Ever The Hero, “Harn’s entertaining debut uses super powers as a metaphor to delve into class politics in an alternate America.” Nothing Ever Ends will be out in September or October.

Ma shuffles into the kitchen, coat on like she’s going somewhere. She sees the radio and remembers.

“Not today,” I say, but she switches it on anyway.

Six past and now time for today’s obituaries. Katie Burke, Kilmurvey, Co. Galway, 14th October, suddenly, sadly missed. Iranian quake toll rises. Russian oil fields under water. The Pope condemns American abortion initiative for all remaining pregnancies. Scientists hold vigil over Saturn, her rings scattered like a snowdrift across a country road. All her moons buckshot. Jupiter suffers the most, swollen and bruised like an aging prizefighter, determined to die in the ring.

The government handed out these little LED tickers. Alarm clocks, like, to put on the refrigerator. Counts down the seconds until the rogue black hole intersects the orbit of earth. A year from now. That’s all we have left.

If that.

The tides will drown us first. One of the comets will hit us. A planet or a moon will, or comes close enough to yank the earth from its orbit. What difference does it make? What difference is cancer? Parkinson’s. A heart attack. A bullet. A car. A black hole. All our deaths are projectiles, hurtling through blood streams or interstellar space or dark coastal roads at targets with no proper sense of the size of the barrel they’re swimming in.

I switch the radio off. “I don’t want to hear this.”

About the Author:

Darby Harn studied at Trinity College, in Dublin, Ireland, as part of the Irish Writing Program. He is the author of the sci-fi superhero novel EVER THE HERO. His short fiction appears in Strange Horizons, Interzone, Shimmer, The Coffin Bell and other venues.

Website: http://darbyharn.com
Amazon Author Page: http://amazon.com/author/darbyharn
Goodreads: http://goodreads.com/darby_harn
Twitter: http://twitter.com/DarbyHarn

Facebook Author Page: https://www.facebook.com/Darby-Harn-255976537767428

Buy Link: https://www.amazon.com/Country-Eternal-Light-Darby-Harn-ebook/dp/B0921W3QNF

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