The following is the edited transcript from an interview with Theoden Humphrey,
conducted on Thursday, the 16th of November, 2023.

Q: Who was your favorite teacher?

A: "My senior history teacher, Rocco, Rocco McDougal, who taught pop culture history, and is a lot of the inspiration for the way that I teach and in the way that I act with my students. And then my favorite college teacher was my English Professor Nick Roberts, who I took four or five classes with who did a lot about the methods by which I use for teaching, like discussion of, you know, long works and essays and things like that. And having no deadlines."

Q: What initially inspired you to write your first book?

A: My first book was, [well,] partly it's the achievement of a dream that I've had since I was a kid,... I suppose that I wanted to write a book inspired by Harry Potter, because I wanted to write a young adult book about a child who felt out of place in the world, but then was accepted into a more magical kind of world. And so that's the essential frame of it. But then the biggest inspiration was that I wanted to write a fantasy novel that also included a role-playing game that I wrote as a story. So there's a character [who] runs a role-playing game, which is written out as a fantasy story.

Q: Was there always a plan to make the story (The Adventures of Damnation Kane) a multi-book series? And if so, how many?

A: There was not originally, [as the first book] was only a blog that was supposed to have an entry a week,… I found out about… a fiction blog about zombies that had been going on like, after the zombie apocalypse, and then had gone on weekly posts for like, three years, and the guy was still writing … so I wanted to do that. I was inspired. I wanted to do that, like to have a blog that went on and on. But, I mean, after I got [about] 40 chapters in, I realized that it was a good, like, section of story. And then I decided I wanted to turn that into a book. So it became a book. At that point, it wasn't clear how long it was going to go. Once I started writing the second book as a book, then it was intended to be a three-book series. And that's what it's going to be.

Q: Were there any difficulties you hadn't expected with making your books?

A: It turns out that writing short pieces and then turning them into a longer piece actually doesn't work terribly well. Because the first book now is really too choppy and weird … And there were things that I added because I just needed to fill up like, you know, a certain number of words for a blog post that now makes the chapters that are chopping weird, also kind of too long-ish at the same time. So the transition … from one format of writing to a different format of writing was really quite challenging. And I honestly don't know how well I handled it, but you know, that was maybe the worst part. And then the other thing is continuing with one story for as long as I've been writing it when I have other stories that I want to write has been really difficult because I have, you know, a number of different stories that I want to work on. I had other ideas and there are other sequels to other series like, the first book, "The Dreamer" book is also the first in a series that I've never finished … And then my second book, the one I wrote before the pirate book, was also the first in the series. And I started writing the second book of that series, and I haven't finished them. So those are the things I want to get to [and] be able to get to, [but] I'm writing the damn pirate books, [so] that's been hard.

Q: Was the plan for the covers always the same, like your wife doing the designs?

A:[It was] always gonna be my wife [doing] the cover, she's gonna do all the covers for all of my books forever. What they were [design wise] I left entirely up to her, [and] that entirely came from her. Like, she just drew the pirate ship on the first one, you know, … just because she felt inspired to do that. And then we agreed [it would] make a really good cover. [For] the second one, we talked a little bit about what was going to be on there. And then she decided … what the image [was] going to be. And so that's it. The third book is more my inspiration for the cover. But we'll see how she changes it.

Q: How long did each book take, roughly?

A: So the first one, because I was writing it as a weekly blog, took exactly 40 weeks. So less than a year, because it's 40 chapters from the first book. There's a little bit of a stretch in that because I added other chapters when I first published the book, [but] then I took them out. So currently it is the 40-week book, [though] I do plan to go back and make it the longer [version of the] book that has other chapters. And those chapters actually went really fast because they were fun to write. So [with] that added, you know, maybe a month or two [more]. So [let's] call it basically a year to put the whole first book together. [The] second book, … took a little bit longer, [because] there was a pause, and then I came back to it, … [so it] took about three years. This book has been the longest probably, [at] four years.

Q: Do you have a favorite of the books?

A: Ah, interesting. Um, I kind of don't? probably the third one because … there's a secret that I'm not going to reveal [here]. But I'm so goddamn happy with the reveal of that secret. It is one of my favorite things I've ever written. It still like, affects me when I just go back and read over it again. So the fact that that is in this book is one of my favorite things. I love it. So the third book.