JustyceWrites Interview! The Last Sin - Fantasy Spy Thriller 🧙🏼‍♂️

I found a good one. An underrated one! A story that deserves much more attention than it’s gotten. The Last Sin is a High Fantasy Spy Thriller full of magic, mystery, a great cast, and an MC that’s chased by a history he didn’t choose. You know, sometimes you read a story’s chapter 1 and you just know you’re going to be along for a great ride, and that’s what you get here. JustyceWrites’ The Last Sin is a fantastic anti-hero fantasy that will keep you reading chapter after chapter, and I wanted to bring them on to hear from them.

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I’d just like to point out how absolutely beastly Rising Stars is right now.

Interview with JustyceWrites from The Last Sin

Hello JustyceWrites! Thank you for agreeing to the interview, and apologies for taking so dang long for getting you questions. Things have been kind of crazy for me personally, so I just wanted to say I appreciate your patient. Let’s get into it >:). First thing. Tell me about your writing journey, and what kind of stories you were inspired by that led to The Last Sin? What made you want to write The Last Sin over other stories? And for those who haven’t had the chance, can you tell us about your story?

Hey SagaScribe! No worries, I’m grateful for the interview and happy for any chance to nerd out about the story that has taken over my life for the past year. My writing journey started out as a dare to myself. I was watching a live streamer talk about a short story they were writing, and I thought, “Hey, I can do it!” A year and a half later, I finished my first draft of a Dreampunk novel set in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. While I was revising that novel, I had the idea for The Last Sin.

The creation of The Last Sin was like lightning in a bottle. At the time, I was playing Baldur’s Gate 3 with a Sorcerer/Rogue multiclass and listening to the Warhammer 40K Ciaphas Cain audiobooks. These two vastly different franchises combined to create the spark for The Last Sin. For the next five days, all I could think about was the plot, worldbuilding and characters of this series. It got so bad I was barely sleeping and missing meals. Now that you’re curious, I’ll tell you a little about my story.

The Last Sin follows the story of Jacob, a half-elven orphan rescued from danger and poverty by a mysterious woman named Sin. He is whisked away to her mansion, where he vows to follow in her footsteps and train to become the fantasy version of James Bond. When he discovers Sin’s darker motivations, he leaves the mansion, joins a party of adventurers and begins a grand adventure that throws him head-first into the political intrigue of the world and makes him question his upbringing under Sin.

I wear my inspirations for The Last Sin on my sleeve. My Baldur's Gate 3 character is the inspiration for Jacob, and the Warhammer 40K universe inspires a lot of my world-building. Even Jacob’s “spirits below” saying came from the Malazan book series. All stories are remixes of existing stories to some extent, but what makes a story unique is how you blend your influences. The Last Sin is everything that I love about fantasy fiction, and right from the beginning, I knew it was something I had to share with the world.

Jacob, the main character, is the lowest kind of orphan in your world. The twins are down and out tricksters brought in by Sin. You’re really good at painting your characters through dialogue, appearances, and their speech patterns. Each character represents some aspect of the world you’ve constructed. What goes into your character development? How do you plan you your character’s arcs, and their development? Do you pants your way through it or are you trying to hit certain beats with them?

I’m glad you asked! Early on, when writing the series, I binged writing advice videos on YouTube. My favourite booktuber is Abbie Emmons. I loved her content so much that I shelled out $15 and binged her recorded live workshops. Her material on creating characters is some of her best content. I won’t spoil all her secrets, but three things stood out to me:

Character profiles: Every character in my series gets a two to three-page character profile where I write down the character’s appearance, background, goals, ways of seeing the world, etc. It’s a lot of work, but it’s worth it to create fully realized characters that feel like they could be main characters in their own story.

Desire/Fear/Misbelief: A part of the profile is writing down the character’s desire, fear (aside from dying) and misbelief. A character’s misbelief is a deeply rooted belief about the world that is incorrect. This misbelief informs their fears and desires. A character’s arc is the process of them rejecting their misbelief. All my main characters have a pre-planned character arc. Minor characters and villains hold on to or become more convinced of their misbelief throughout the series.

Character references: Another part of the profile is finding character references for how my characters speak. This is the best way to get into their head space when writing their dialogue. For Jacob, I looked up videos of the Artful Dodger from Oliver Twist. For Sin, I watched the old SNL skits of Natalie Portman rapping: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-A0iftflme4

Who is your favorite character to write? What character do you think is the most difficult to write? I always like asking this because I’m usually surprised.

Sin is everything. She’s one of my favorite characters in fiction and the reason why the story is called The Last Sin. What makes her so fun to write is the fact that she is the opposite of the saying, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” At her core, Sin is unrepentantly evil. One of the few things that make her happy in life is the pain and suffering of the people around her. To her, torture is like reading a good book and murder a fine meal. Yet, she puts aside her own happiness and well being for the sake of a higher purpose that she believes in. That self discipline stops her from being cartoonishly evil while also creating a bomb waiting to explode. The inclusion of Jacob pours gasoline on her fuse. He is the one person in the world she cannot kill which contradicts the ideology she has based her whole life around. This internal conflict humanizes Sin and makes her despise Jacob almost as much as she cares for him. Sin and Jacob’s love and hate relationship is the heart of the story and my favourite part of writing it. She also gets the coolest fight scenes.

The most difficult character to write is Jacob coming out of the first story arc. I use a deep POV writing style to immerse readers into the story. That style requires me to internalize the character’s feelings. The problem is Jacob is actively pushing his feelings away. He is effectively emotionless which feels like a downgrade of the character in the early chapters of the second story arc. As much as I didn’t like this, I knew it was an important part of his character development and would make for an overall better story.

Another thing that really stands out to me is your worldbuilding. In the introductory chapters, you really feel immersed in both the world, and within the mansion. The world at large is steeped in political strife and deep history with a hatred toward elves. What do you think makes for good world building? What were some aspects of worldbuilding that you felt were more difficult than others? How did you go about your planning for the world you’ve crafted? Any tips for people when it comes to worldbuilding?

I think the heart of good world-building is having a strong underlying message that you care about. From there, the world kind of just builds itself. For me, the theme of the world is our relationship to land. To some people, land is just an asset on a balance sheet. To others, it is a home worth fighting and dying for. How to allocate land and who gets to own land are the fundamental questions the series tries to answer. Once I figured out the message, I let my mind run wild.

The most difficult part of worldbuilding for me was the timelines and travel distances. My story has multiple conspiracies that hinge on past events, making sure the timelines were consistent with the characters’ ages was a huge pain. Travel distances were also a challenge. Figuring out how long it takes a horse to get from point A to B is not my idea of a good time. It can also drag down the plot. You want the world to feel big but also want to populate it with interesting events to make it feel real and lived in.

The planning process for my worldbuilding was spontaneous daydreaming sessions and ad-hoc Google searches. Once I was done, I put my thoughts and research into a semi-organized OneNote notebook. So far, that has worked, but I’m sure there are more sophisticated systems out there.

Aside from having a strong underlying message, my biggest tip is to just start writing. You will fill in your world as you go and naturally connect the dots. Trust your mind.

Magic flows through your world. The nobles, Sin, the dogs, Jacob, elves, everything. What made you take this avenue of a more open ended magic system? Clearly you didn’t want to just write a LitRPG, and wanted to fill the world with magic. What went into crafting your magic system? Do you think it’s advantageous to your story to work it the way you did?

The Nen power system from Hunter X Hunter inspired the Landbound Magic system in The Last Sin. To me, Nen is the best power system ever created in fiction, and I wanted to do my take on it by studying what makes it so amazing. I discovered three principles: rules-based, open-ended, and character-driven.

Having rules creates expectations that maintain readers’ suspension of disbelief. Being open-ended allows you to surprise readers by working within the rules you establish to do unexpected things. Lastly, I believe a character’s powers should inform their characterization.

While my setting has three distinct magic systems, the Landbound Magic system is the most common. It works on the philosophy that “you are what you own.” How you use your land and what you populate it with determines the kind of Landbound abilities you develop. If you want to be a bard, fill your house with musical instruments. If you want to be a waterbender, you buy a lakeside estate. The rules of the system are clear, the sky's the limit creativity wise and what a character owns lets you know who they are as a person.

All three magic systems are strongly tied to my worldbuilding and, therefore, strongly tied to the underlying message of my story. I couldn’t imagine this story without them.

There’s a lot of really, really fun themes going on in The Last Sin. Revenge, history, heritage, attachment issues, the list goes on. It’s actually quite dark! I like that, of course, as life typically isn’t a bunch of fine smelling flowers. What are some of the themes you really wanted to hammer in on with your story, or maybe some that took you by surprise? Did you plan that stuff out or am I just reading too much into it.

You are not reading too much into it! This story is chock-full of social commentary, and this is completely by design. My goal is to always tell an entertaining story first and foremost but there's a lot of substance if you want to look for it. A lot of this comes from the character profiles. Since every character has a misbelief, every character has an underlying ideology about the world that is “wrong”. There is also my worldbuilding, which was built from the ground up around a deeper social message.

For the sake of time, I’ll focus on only three themes. One is our relationship to resources. My story takes place in a society where a small class of nobles and merchants owns most of the land. It is also a society where owning land gives you supernatural abilities. Equating wealth to magical power was one of my more obvious analogies.

Another theme is racism. In my story, racism toward elves is rampant due to the actions of the Old Elven Empire. After the fall of the Empire, most elves were eradicated. The remaining elves come from the Forest Enclave, a faction of pacifist elves that were never a part of the Empire. Despite this, they still get associated with the Empire and discriminated against. To me, this was a good way of making racism toward elves understandable while still making the elves in the current storyline innocent. In too many stories, people are racist for the sake of being racist, which can come across as silly. In other stories, they make the racists somewhat justified, which is also not great (looking at you, Attack on Titan).

The third theme I want to talk about is the relationship between Jacob and Sin. A big part of Jacob’s character development in the second story arc is realizing that he doesn’t want to follow in Sin’s footsteps. Sin, in many ways, represents the male power fantasy. She is mysterious, badass, respected and/or feared, sexually desired while not being presented in a sexual way and a complete psychopath. She is the type of person the average edgy boy would idolize (I say this as her biggest fan. Lol!). Unfortunately, being Sin is not all it's cracked up to be. Living up to this ideal makes her life miserable. For Jacob, it’s even harder since he’s not a psychopath. To reference Attack on Titan again, watching Eren as a viewer is fun, but being Eren would suck.

One theme that surprised me in an unpleasant way was the threat of sexual violence toward mages (particularly men). I’m not a fan of sexual violence in fiction, but this was a logical consequence of the world I was building. Since all blood relatives of land-owning nobles get Landbound abilities, naturally there would be a cottage industry of criminals who kidnap nobles to produce illegitimate children. Men make the best targets since they don’t need to be around for the whole pregnancy. This concept made me deeply uncomfortable, but after some thought, I decided that I could address this issue in a tactful way. The threat of sexual violence towards men is underrepresented in media, and all too often played for laughs (looking at you, The Boys). Looking back on the second story arc, I think I handled it well.

The infamous favorites question. I think it’s a great way to get to know someone. So, I present to you the grand stage, where the council asks you to recommend your favorite media. I’m asking you for 5 recommendations of any kind of media! Were talking about music, video games, anime, books, tv shows, anything. What are some things that you think everyone should be checking out?

I consume a lot of media, so my recommendations might surprise you. Off the top of my head:

Daredevil Netflix Series: I was rewatching season 3 in preparation for Daredevil: Borne Again, and it is still amazing. It is one of the best superhero shows ever made.

Vinland Saga: One of my favourite manga of all time and a great example of writing with a message in mind. The anime adaptation does it justice.

Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing: Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing comics have some of the most well-written and craziest ideas I’ve seen put on a page. It’s an old comic series but still considered a classic.

The Wire: One of the best TV shows ever made and a big inspiration of mine when writing The Last Sin. The characters, dialogue, plotlines and exploration of systemic issues are all top-tier. One of my favourite things is the level of consequence in the story. Everything the characters do ripples out into the world and affects the plot. It is the level of quality that I aspire to.

Mistborn: I would feel bad if I didn’t mention at least one novel series. The Mistborn trilogy introduced me to Brandon Sanderson and got me reading books again. While the first book is just OK, in my opinion, I was amazed by how he ratcheted up the stakes with each book. By the end of the trilogy, I was bawling my eyes out.

Any questions for me? Anything you wished I asked?

What inspired you to start this interview series?

EASY ANSWER. MONEY. THERE’S TONS OF MONEY IN INTERVIEWING AUTHORS, EVERYONE SHOULD DO IT BECAUSE YOU’LL MAKE BANK.

As for a send off…hmmm. It’s no longer the dead of winter. Please ensure that you get your yearly scheduled sun exposure. Maybe touch some grass? Yuck.

🧙🏼‍♂️Saga Scribe