I sat down with Richard Sparks for what turned into a properly wide-ranging chat. Richard’s best known now for his New Rock novels, but he comes from comedy writing, and that mix of sharp observation and playfulness really shows in how he talks about story.
The basic idea behind New Rock is simple and brilliant: what if you didn’t just play your hero character in an online RPG, but you actually had to live as them? Richard said Elder Scrolls Online helped spark the premise for the first book, New Rock, New Role. That “what would it really be like?” question became the foundation for the whole series. The third book is out now and available, New Rock New Rules,
His protagonist is a middle-aged, widowed schoolteacher and high-level gamer who suddenly finds himself in the body of his own battle-mage avatar. One minute it’s ordinary life, the next it’s wolves, rusty weapons, and real danger. What I liked is that the story doesn’t pretend competence magically transfers across. You might look like a hero, but that doesn’t mean you know what you’re doing, and that gap is both funny and very human.
The core of the series revolves around three gamers who meet online, then get dragged into the fantasy world as their avatars. Richard was keen to stress the diversity of the group, which makes sense if you think about how global online communities actually are. You’ve got Grell the orc warrior, whose real-world counterpart is Australian, and Christa, an Asian-American sword dancer from California. Their relationships start as gamer teamwork, but in the real world they have to deal with fear, uncertainty, and survival in a way that a game never really demands.
We also talked about worldbuilding, and Richard’s approach is basically “rules matter”. The setting has that classic medieval sword-and-sorcery shape, but magic isn’t just a cheat code. It has limits, it takes effort, and it draws on resources like artefacts and energy reserves. Richard’s big thing is consistency. If the rules don’t hold, the reader stops trusting you. So no convenient wizard swooping in to fix everything. The characters have to earn their wins, and honestly, that is always more satisfying.
On process, he’s not one of these people who claims everything arrives fully formed. He works with outlines, but he also allows room for discovery while writing. Characters surprise him, and sometimes drafts go sideways. One advantage he had, because a lot of the series was written before it was out in the world, was that he could go back and tighten things. He can plant small details early that pay off later, so the twists feel fair rather than random.
Humour kept coming up too. Richard’s view is that comedy often comes from things going wrong, and that is true in life as well as fiction. You can see his comedy background in the way he treats heroism. Even someone who looks terrifying, like his orc warrior, can be awful at actually living up to the legend, and that little failure makes the whole thing feel more real.
We inevitably drifted into his television days as well, including his time writing for Not the Nine O’Clock News. He told a story about a sketch that took something grim and flipped it into dark comedy, basically using that uncomfortable contrast to make the punchline land. Whether you love that kind of humour or hate it, it tells you something about his instincts. He likes the line where serious and ridiculous bump into each other.
We also touched on structure, and Richard made a comparison I liked: fantasy and detective fiction have something in common. If you want a twist to feel earned, you have to be ahead of the audience, but not in a smug way. The reveal should feel surprising, but also obvious in hindsight. That’s hard to do, and it’s something he clearly enjoys.
We ended, as these chats often do, with hints of future projects and a bit of teasing about what’s coming next. No firm spoilers, but enough to make it clear he’s still building and still playing with ideas.
What I took away from the conversation is this: Richard’s whole career pivot comes back to one small question. “What if?” Then he builds a world that can survive the consequences of that question. That’s the bit that matters. The humour draws you in, but the structure and the rules are what make it stick.
Richard’s website is here: https://richardsparks.com/
Forum discussion on magic here: https://richardsonsrubicon.com/community/season-5-speculative-fiction-where-worlds-meet/the-rules-of-magic-how-much-is-too-much/