Aura Wielders: Citadel: Interview with B. Dalton

It’s our pleasure to host B. Dalton, debuting author of Aura Wielders: Citadel, the first book in the Aura Wielders portal fantasy series! Out now!

B. Dalton lives in Somewhere, Florida, where he splits his time between walks in swamps, film photography, and listening to dreampop in the garage. He once attended film school with grand visions of turning screenplays into blockbuster movies. When Hollywood failed to come knocking, he dusted off an old computer, set it up in the walk-in closet, and wrote a novel for Novel November instead. Aura Wielders: Citadel is his debut. And yes, the pen name matches a bookstore that went out of business. He’s choosing to see that as ironic rather than prophetic.

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Something answers.

Eli Walsh never asked to be saved. At eighteen, he’s weeks from a two-year church mission he doesn’t believe in, trapped between a faith he’s been faking and a mother whose heart he can’t bear to break.

His best friend Mary wasn’t going to let him go quietly. Goth, furious, and desperate enough to try anything, she drags him to an ancient mound and calls to powers that should have stayed forgotten.

Now Eli is somewhere else entirely.

A world where magic flows through the elements. Where armies clash over territory he doesn’t understand. Where a girl with Mary’s face answers to a different name — and where his memories of home are dissolving like smoke.

He’s not sure that’s a bad thing.

Welcome to the Asylum, Benji! Take a seat by the fire, have a glass of beverage of your choice, and tell me something about yourself that’s not in your bio!

Not in the bio… I think I put all my hobbies there though! lol. That means I’ll really have to reach for something obscure… Here’s one. I’m an avid collector of dead media formats, like Laserdisc and MiniDisc. I’m sure I mentioned photography in the bio, but one thing I probably didn’t mention is I develop my film myself, in the same closet I write in. That closet is a mess of cameras, film, scattered MiniDiscs (which I listen to while writing), and a small table that pretends to be a desk, with an old Mac mini I use to write on.

Tell us about your writing journey! Was it something you always wanted to do? Which path of publishing did you choose and why? What would you do differently now if you had to start over?

I always wanted to tell stories, but for most of my life I thought that meant movies. I went to film school and everything. The plan was screenplays, and the plan did not survive contact with reality, and for a long time after that I just kept filling notebooks with ideas that I was still picturing as movies, which in hindsight was the problem, because I was never going to get forty million dollars and a film crew, but a novel you can just… write. Nobody has to greenlight it. It took me an embarrassing number of years to notice that.

Even after I noticed, I stalled. I tried NaNoWriMo once and quit at 40,000 words, which is a weird place to quit, close enough that quitting hurt. Then last November I tried again and this time it stuck, and honestly it stuck too well, I couldn’t stop, and the draft ended up being two whole books, which is why there’s a sequel coming three months after the first one. That wasn’t a strategy. That’s just where the story stopped.

Publishing-wise I went indie, and honestly it never crossed my mind to do it any other way. If I’m reaching back for a reason, it’s probably that I’m new at this and having someone give me a shot seemed like it would take a while, and I just wanted to get on with it. So the long and the short of it is: impatience.

Do differently? Probably less drafts. On draft 7 or so I had a friend gently prompt me to just get on with it and stop stalling. So maybe that. Learn to move faster.

What inspires your writing? Do you listen to music, stare into the fire, listen to the whispering of the wind, or make deals with the Devil?

Mostly it’s music. Dreampop, shoegaze, that whole hazy end of the pool. I don’t fully understand why it works, something about how it all sounds slightly far away, but it puts me in the right place to write.

I also read a lot of manga when I was younger, so I’m sure some of that inspiration is in there somewhere. Honestly I just want to explore some ideas and characters any way I can and see where it goes.

Also, I don’t know if this counts as inspiration, but I often turn off the internet at the router before I start. That might honestly be the single most important part of my process.

What was the most memorable place you’ve visited? Did it inspire any of your work? How did that experience affect you personally?

The most memorable… probably New Zealand. It’s a beautiful place, and it has an almost otherworldly feel in some parts, and yes, I pictured it often when I imagined characters traversing another world. As for how it affected me, I think mostly it made me want to go back. I spent a lot of time on the North Island, but I’d like to spend more time on the South Island next time.

Talking about Aura Wielders: Citadel, what was the main inspiration for the story? Which aspect of the book was the most challenging to write and why?

The idea had been kicking around in my head for years. I even tried to write it once and gave up not long after. That early version wasn’t a portal fantasy, and it just sat there, inert, until I reframed it as one. I grew up on portal fantasy, the kind of books where a door opens and a kid suddenly gets to matter somewhere else, and I wanted to write one where the door opens at the worst possible moment, when the character’s real life is about to swallow him. Eli isn’t escaping boredom, he’s escaping a version of himself that other people wrote. And then the new world hands him the same problems in a different shape, the life he left mirrored back at him with higher stakes. Once I saw it that way, I had to write it.

Hardest thing to write, no contest, was the first chapter. It’s Eli at four years old, under the dining room table with his siblings, listening to his dad’s voice change in the kitchen. I rewrote it more times than anything else in the book because a four-year-old can’t explain anything to you, he can only notice things, the boots, the quiet, the counting. You have to build the whole scene out of what a small kid would actually register and trust the reader to understand what he can’t. I needed the chapter because everything Eli is comes from that table. But I can’t say I enjoyed writing it, and I still get tense when I reread it.

Aura Wielders: Citadel was published on September 15, 2026. Congrats! If you could have a release party with your MC(s) present, how would that go down?

Thanks! And, oh no.

Eli would find a wall to stand near and stay there. He’d know everything about everyone in the room within twenty minutes and say almost none of it out loud. There’s a decent chance I’d find him in the kitchen helping with dishes that didn’t need help, because that’s a legitimate way to be at a party without being at the party. I’d probably be right there next to him, honestly. It’s my party and I’d also be looking for a job to do.

Mary would take over the music within the first half hour, and it wouldn’t be party music, and if you complained she’d explain to you why you were wrong. She’d also corner people one at a time and ask them enormous questions, like what are you afraid of.

Mirah probably wouldn’t come. She’s got somewhere to be and it isn’t Florida. If she did come she’d stand where she could see the doors, and she and Eli would end up in the same quiet corner without planning it.

What would you say the main themes are in Aura Wielders: Citadel? Is there something you’d like readers to take away from it?

Faith and doubt, and the gap between who people have decided you are and who you actually are. Eli spends the opening chapters faking a belief to protect his mother’s heart, and the book is about what happens when that mask stops being available. I think a lot of people know some version of that, maybe not the religious version, but the mask you wear for someone you love.

The thing under everything else is vulnerability. Eli grew up learning to flinch, and his real education isn’t the magic, it’s discovering that you can show people who you actually are and still be accepted. That letting someone close enough to hurt you is the only way anyone gets close at all. The magic in this world runs on real bonds between people, which the institutions in the book keep trying to manufacture, and can’t. The power system is just that idea wearing armor.

Takeaway… that being seen is worth the terror of it. I try not to be precious about this, it’s a portal fantasy, I mostly want people to have a good time. But that’s the hope underneath. Also, goth best friends are a blessing and should be protected.

Let’s talk a bit about the characters. What was one thing about your MC(s) that you can identify with, and what were the most challenging bits of their personalities to write?

Eli started as a question: what does it cost to be the kid who sees everything and understands almost none of it? He catches every shift in a room, every change in a voice, but the why of it escapes him. He moves through the social world like everyone else got a rule-book he was never given, so he watches, copies, and hopes. Some of that comes from learning to be small in a loud house, and I relate to that part of him more than I’d care to admit sometimes. At one point in my life, I was him.

The challenging part of writing him is that a watcher looks passive on the page. He’s noticing, and noticing isn’t a scene. His choices live in what he doesn’t say, and it took me a while to learn to treat his silences as decisions with consequences.

If your MC(s) had to give a TED talk, what would their choice of topic be and how would they prepare for it? What would you talk about?

Eli would prepare for months. Notecards, rehearsals, the whole thing, probably something about how to read people. And then he wouldn’t go on. He’d be in the parking lot. Maybe someone finds the notecards someday and thinks it would have made a great talk.

Mary wouldn’t prepare at all and would walk out five minutes late like the delay was intentional and the topic would be something uncomfortable, like why every institution you trust is lying to you. But she’d get a standing ovation from about a third of the room and formal complaints from the rest, and she’d be delighted with both.

Me, I’d probably talk about the 10pm alarm. During the draft I’d go to bed early on the bad nights and set an alarm to get back up and write, which sounds insane, and some nights I slept through it, but most nights I got up. I don’t have a grand theory about it. It just turns out you can trick yourself into a book if the tricks are dumb enough. I’d need about six months to prepare as well and I’d still be a wreck though I might make it out of the parking lot if I set an alarm to trick myself into it.

If you were a character in your book, how would you be described? And what would your profession/role be? Do you think you would survive it?

Quiet guy in the background, probably holding some device nobody in that world has a name for. If the book described me at all it would be something like “the man by the wall, who had been there a while.”

I’d want to work in the Citadel’s library. Realistically, with no wielding ability, I’d get assigned something like maintenance, and honestly I’d probably take it, the Citadel is not a place where you want to be interesting.

Would I survive? The book has an answer for what happens to ordinary people who end up in the wrong place in this world, and no. No, I would not.

Describe an asylum set in the world of Aura Wielders: Citadel!

So the world actually has one, in the older sense of the word, asylum as in refuge. It’s called Sanctuary. Neutral holy ground, older than the Citadel itself. It takes in refugees, the sick, the persecuted, basically anyone the rest of Terra has no place for, and it’s been doing that since before anyone was keeping records. It also preserves ancient knowledge about aura, and possibly about other worlds, which is exactly the kind of thing you’d expect the Citadel to have opinions about. The two of them tolerate each other, mostly because Sanctuary doesn’t claim any political power. It’s going to be more heavily featured in a later book in the series.

What’s next in store for you? What are you working on now? Where can readers meet you in the near future?

Book 2, Aura Wielders: Exhibition, comes out December 15, and it’s up for preorder now. I’m in the final revision passes, and editing is apparently my favorite part, considering I spend the bulk of my time doing it. Book 3 has a title, Exile, and there’s enough of an outline for at least five or six books in total—maybe more. I’m treating this as a long game.

Readers can find me on Bluesky, Instagram, and TikTok, all @aurawielders. No live events on the calendar yet, I’m one book into this, give me a minute. I do read and answer everything, eventually.

While you are locked in here for eternity, we will allow you to invite one visitor (fictional and otherwise) – who would you invite? And no, they can’t help you to escape.

Okay, so, when I was drafting the book I posted a chapter every night to a serial fiction site, and there was one reader who commented on every single chapter. Almost always the same thing: “Thanks for the chapter!” That’s it. Every night.

He has no idea what that did. There were nights the alarm went off at 10 and the only thing that got me in the chair was knowing he’d read the last one and was waiting on the next. You can’t quit on a guy like that.

So, him. He can visit whenever. I’ll have new pages, he’ll say thanks for the chapter, and I’ll get back to work.

Well then, it was a pleasure to have a chat with you! Please allow these nice attendants to escort you out. We hope you’ll enjoy your stay in the Asylum! Any last words? 

I mean, a locked room with no internet is basically my writing setup, so I’ll manage. Thanks for having me, this was fun. The book’s out September 15, and if you read it, I hope some part of it stays with you a little while.

*locks door*

Grab a copy of Aura Wielders by B. Dalton! Out now!