The 40 But 10: G. Signore

 

I've pulled together 40ish questions - some bookish, some silly - and have asked authors to limit themselves to answering only 10 of them. That way, it keeps the interviews fresh and connectable for all of us!

Today we are joined by G. Signore. He is the author of The Cost No One Chose, Book I of The Open Debt, and the creator behind VARENIVA. His work focuses on speculative worlds built around rules, consequences, moral choice, and the human cost of systems that appear rational until reality stops behaving as expected.

What made you start writing?

It actually started as an experiment rather than a lifelong ambition to become a writer. I wanted to see whether I could take a complex idea, give it precise rules, build a coherent world around it, and turn it into a story that could stand on its own.

At some point, the experiment changed. The characters, the rules, and especially the consequences started creating questions I genuinely wanted answered. I stopped wondering whether I could write the story and started wanting to know where it would lead.

That became The Open Debt. So I can't really point to the moment I decided to become a writer. I can point to the moment I decided this story needed to exist.

 

Describe your book poorly.

People mess with reality. Reality sends the bill to the wrong address.

 

Do you read the reviews of your books or do you stay far far away from them, and why?

I read them. If someone has spent hours inside a world I created and then taken the time to explain what worked or didn't work for them, I want to know.

I don't think every criticism should automatically lead to a change, because different readers can want completely different things from the same story. But patterns matter. If several people independently react to the same element, that's information worth paying attention to.

I tend to approach reviews the same way I approach most things: not as a verdict, but as data. Sometimes uncomfortable data, admittedly, but still useful.

 

If you met your characters in real life, what would you say to them?

I'd probably start with an apology.

Not because I regret what happens to them, but because I know exactly why it happens, and they don't. As the author, I'm responsible for putting them in situations where every solution has a cost and even the right choice can hurt someone else.

Then I'd probably avoid telling them what happens next. I suspect some of them would have very strong opinions about me if they knew.

 

What's something that's true about you but no one believes?

Probably that I became an author without really being a reader.

I've always had a complicated relationship with reading. When I was younger, I mostly associated books with school and obligation, and even later I struggled to stay engaged with them for very long.

Strangely, that became part of the reason I started writing. I wanted to build a story that would keep giving me a reason to ask what happens next. In a way, I ended up trying to create the kind of book I had never managed to find for myself.

I realize that "I wrote a novel because I wasn't much of a reader" sounds slightly backwards. But apparently that's how I got here.

 

What's your kryptonite as a writer?

Knowing when to stop improving something.

I naturally tend to treat a story like a system: if I see something that can be made more coherent, more precise, or better connected to everything around it, I want to fix it. The problem is that there is almost always something else you could improve.

At some point, refinement stops being progress and becomes an excuse not to finish. Learning to recognize that line has probably been one of the hardest parts of writing for me.

Sometimes the most difficult decision isn't what to change. It's deciding that something is finished.

 

If you could time travel, would you go back to the past or forward into the future?

Forward. Definitely.

The past is fascinating, but we already know at least part of what happened. The future is the unanswered question.

I'd want to see which ideas survived, which problems we solved, which new ones we created, and which things we were completely wrong about. I'd probably be less interested in seeing flying cars than in discovering what people fifty or a hundred years from now consider perfectly normal.

Of course, knowing the future would immediately create another problem: deciding whether I should change anything when I came back.

And given what I write about, I should probably know better than to try.

 

What's on your literary bucket list?

I want to complete The Open Debt and see the story reach the scale I originally imagined for it.

But my ambitions go beyond a single series. I'd like to build different stories and worlds while continuing to develop the system behind them, VARENIVA OS™, which grew out of the way I organize, test, revise, and maintain consistency across a narrative project.

Ultimately, I'd like VARENIVA to become something capable of producing more than one story or one saga without losing the structure and identity behind them.

So my literary bucket list is probably less of a list and more of a construction project. Apparently I'm incapable of choosing the uncomplicated version of anything.

 

What's the one thing you wish you knew when you were younger?

That not knowing exactly where you're going isn't necessarily a problem.

I used to think you needed a clear destination before starting something important. Over time, I've learned that some of the most interesting things I've done began with curiosity rather than certainty.

The Open Debt is a good example. I didn't begin with a lifelong plan to become an author or build a publishing project. I started by testing an idea and following where it led.

I think I would tell my younger self to experiment more and worry less about whether every experiment already has a practical destination. Sometimes you discover the destination by building the road toward it.

 

Describe your book in three words.

Choice. Debt. Consequence.

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Out now

Purchase your copy here

Reality can be corrected, but every correction creates a debt. And the person who pays may not be the one who made the choice.

When measurements, memory, and evidence begin to disagree, Teren is forced into a world where two answers can both be true and every attempt to restore order carries a human cost. The Cost No One Chose is an adult speculative fantasy / science fantasy novel built around a rule-driven world, mystery, moral choices, and the consequences of changing reality.