Laini Taylor, who wrote the YA fantasy Daughter of Smoke and Bone, and was shortlisted for the National Book Award for Lips Touch: Three Times, has a great smile, a winning way with an audience, a wicked sense of humor and pink hair.

Taylor was on the last leg of her book tour promoting Daughter of Smoke and Bone when I met her at Copperfield’s Books in Petaluma, California. Taylor attended the Santa Rosa Junior College, just up the road from Petaluma, and graduated from Berkeley with a degree in English, so she is practically a local, even though she now lives in Portland, Oregon with her artist husband Jim and their daughter Clementine.

She spent a few minutes with me, discussing growing up, reading and writing. I asked what her favorite book was when she was a child, and she wasn’t sure she had one. Taylor grew up as a Navy kid, moving from place to place in Europe, and didn’t feel the service library for kids was that good. She remembers reading a lot of Madeleine L’Engle. “And Forever. I remember reading Forever, by Judy Blume,” she said. “And a lot of teen romances. They were sweet and clean.”

Taylor said that as a teenager in Orange County, she had no cool place to hang out; no cafés or music places, or even good bookstores then. “The teenagers hung out in the parking lot of the In And Out Burger,” she said. “One of the great things about Portland is that there are so many things for young people to do.” In part, she created the Poison Kitchen, one of the colorful locations in Daughter of Smoke and Bone, as a gift to her younger self; a cool place to hang.

Since I had just read Daughter of Smoke and Bone, (read my review) I had a few questions for Laini about the book. I was curious about the “tooth fairy” theme (teeth exchanged for wishes) and Laini addressed this during her presentation. “When I knew what the teeth were for,” she said, “I knew I had a book.” I had other questions, too, so we discussed them by email:

Marion: Prague plays a big part in Daughter of Smoke and Bone, especially in the beginning. Have you been to Prague or is this an imagining? If you have not, what resources did you use to develop the city?

Laini: I have been to Prague and love it! I went first in 1996, then again in 2004, this time to research a graphic novel with my husband Jim. Our first graphic novel, The Drowned, had just come out and we were plotting our second — which we never ended up doing because I decided to finish writing my first novel Blackbringer instead. So, flash forward to 2008 when I was trying to choose a setting for this new story that would become Daughter of Smoke and Bone: Prague was really the perfect location. Sadly, you are right that there is no Poison Kitchen. I made it up in pure wish fulfillment on behalf of my own teenage self who had no cool cafes to hang out in! Incidentally, I had not yet been to Marrakesh when I wrote the book, but pieced together my picture of it from narrative accounts, blogs, photos, and Youtube videos.

Marion: You seem like a truly original voice not only in the YA fantasy field but in fantasy generally. Do you have influences? Who are they?

Laini: Influences … I’m a fan of Angela Carter, and other writers very gifted with prose (and weird, highly original stories) like Margo Lanagan and Kelly Link and Neil Gaiman. Harry Potter was transformative for me in reminding me, after college, that fantasy was what I had always loved and what had made me a reader. I also love Philip Pullman and Garth Nix. Their fantasy creations — daemons and the necromancer’s bells, respectively — are ideas I wished I had come up with myself!

Marion: This is not a question, and it’s a hope, not a wish. Zusana is a delightful character and I hope we will see more of her in the upcoming books. Karou, a delightful character too, is a little more constrained by the plot, while Zusana has more freedom. Does this make her easier or harder to write?

Laini: Just about the only thing I have been freely giving away about book 2 is that you WILL see more of Zuzana! There was just no way she wasn’t going to barge her way in J. Seriously, Zuzana is such a necessary character, for the levity and brightness she brings to the narrative. It’s not that I shy from darkness, obviously, but I want there to be fun and richness and humor. I want these books to be places the reader wants to LIVE, and if they are purely dark and tortured … who wants to go there? Zuzana is a joy to write, one of those characters who just kind of leap onto the page like it’s a stage built for HER, and I’m so sorry I had to kill her off in book 2 … Ha ha. Just kidding. Maybe.

Marion: Lately it seems I’ve read a lot of YA with sad endings. That may be a coincidence but I don’t think so. Daughter of Smoke and Bone has a tragic ending. Do you agree? It is just where the book ends as a part of the overall story, or do you have a point to make with the sad ending? Why do you think YA may be moving into a “sad” phase?

Laini: I’m not trying to make a point with “the sad” and honestly, I’m not always a fan of that! I can think of books where it felt unnecessary. (I agree with you it’s happening a lot!) I think you can look to Lips Touch for my overall sensibility: three stories, two happy endings. I want my characters to be happy. Oh, not right away, of course… they have to earn it! I’m not certain what kind of happiness Karou can achieve, if any (or at least, I’m not telling!) but I am in no way committed to tragedy. The ending of Daughter of Smoke and Bone was really the only possible ending, the only possible break, and I knew I was leading up there, and I knew it was right, but there was a part of me that hesitated a little. But only a little.

Marion: In one passage in Daughter of Smoke and Bone, you mention that various clans and tribes of chimera, even those who were enemies, were driven together into this one city by the seraphim. That mirrors the experience of several Native American tribes during the Indian wars, where hereditary enemies were pushed together onto reservations. Did you know that and was that a deliberate comment, or was it just the natural extension of the events in the book?

Laini: Well, I did think about various historical models, yes (and thank you), but in this case it’s an envisioning rather of: supposing the Native Americans hadn’t been corralled together by the enemy, but rather had chosen to band together against the onslaught and had successfully protected their own territory as one great tribe, for centuries. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” is a powerful scenario to me, and one you might see more of in the trilogy…

Thanks to Laini Taylor for fitting me into her tight schedule! Read our reviews of all of Laini Taylor’s work.

Recently I enjoyed chatting with Emily Fiegenschuh about her new book The Explorer’s Guide to Drawing Fantasy Creatures which provides step-by-step instructions and diagrams for drawing and coloring 25 fantastical beasts. Emily is an experienced fantasy illustrator — you may have seen some of her art in D&D rulebooks and you can read about her other projects at her website. We’ve got a copy of The Explorer’s Guide to Drawing Fantasy Creatures for one lucky US winner. Just leave a comment for a chance to win. Here’s a preview:

Justin: First of I would like to point out that The Explorer’s Guide to Drawing Fantasy Creatures is not just an instructional book, it’s an incredible piece of art in itself — so much beautiful stuff in there! To see the artwork and then the processes behind the pieces was a real treat for me. I’m not much of an artist. I consider using more than three colors on a miniature to be an accomplishment. I really enjoyed The Explorer’s Guide for reasons beyond its instructional material. How much was the art “fan” and not just the aspiring artist on your mind when putting together The Explorer’s Guide?

Emily: Thank you for your complements on my book and for the chance to talk with you! I appreciate your comments on the book’s value as an art book in addition to being an instructional book. My focus was on making a nice-looking book that would be helpful to aspiring artists. When working on The Explorer’s Guide to Drawing Fantasy Creatures, art fans were on my mind as much as they would be with my other projects. It has always been my hope that my work touches at least one person in some way, so I pour everything I can into each painting.

I always try to do the best work I can on every project I take on. I do this for my art director and audience, but I also do it for myself. As the saying goes, I am often my toughest critic! This book was probably the most personal project I have done in my professional career up to this point because the decisions about what to include were almost entirely up to me. While there is always room for creativity in the illustration field, there are requirements that need to be fulfilled for each job. Character and creature descriptions need to be followed or the action of a scene needs to match the story. There is always room for artistic license, but considering the client’s needs is essential. In this case, once my proposal was accepted and I knew I was going to be working on a how-to book on creatures, the rest was up to me. I thank IMPACT and my editors for allowing me to approach the art in the way I saw fit.

Justin: Some artists have a hard time communicating their processes, and even fewer are able to teach them. You do both very well, so I wonder: has a book like this been something you’ve always wanted to do?

Emily: Thank you for your compliments on what has been a new endeavor for me. I honestly never imagined I would write a how-to-draw book. I was lucky to have met an editor from IMPACT Books at one of my appearances at Gen Con Indy, which I have been attending for the past several years to display and promote my other fantasy work for clients like Wizards of the Coast and Cricket Magazine. Soon after returning home, I found myself discussing a contract for a book deal!

I like sharing and critiquing art with friends who are fellow artists and thought that someday in the future it might be fulfilling to teach art in some capacity, though I did not imagine doing it in book form. I found I really enjoyed the process of making the book, especially as I worked on the “Exploring the Basics” and “Creating Your Creature” chapters, because I wanted to impart as much of the information that I had learned at art school and over the past ten years as a professional illustrator as I could to young artists. I tried to tap into the things I would have loved to learn when I was a beginner; concepts that I still find helpful and use to create my own work every day.

A source of inspiration to me when working on The Explorer’s Guide was How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way. I had this book in middle school and the techniques suggested for sketching interesting poses and powerful gestures changed the way I thought about drawing characters. Preston Blair’s animation books were also important. These books gave me a jump start in learning about drawing dynamic figures before I even sat down at my first figure drawing session. When writing my book, I also wanted to encourage readers to take what they’ve learned from the demonstrations in my book and explore their own ideas; to not feel boxed in by what I have done. It was important to me (even if a bit messy in some spots) to attempt to express in the demos a “natural” way of constructing drawings to match more closely to the way I frequently build up a drawing. There are so many ways to approach art, I wanted to not only show what I would do or how I did it, but also let the reader find their own way of working.

Justin: I’ve read that you use traditional methods to create your artwork. Using pencils and paints rather than a Wacom tablet and healthy selection of Photoshop filters. It’s seems the digital/traditional hybrid art is sweeping through the fantasy genre, lead by artists like Chris McGrath and John Picacio. Has it been tempting to go digital? I personally believe there is room for both, but I think there is a sort of intangible purity in knowing a piece was completely created with no help from a computer.

Emily: I notice a lot of fantasy novel covers are going in that direction but I agree that there will always be room for both traditional and digital illustrations. Artists like Dan Dos Santos, Donato Giancola and Gregory Manchess work with oils and are among the most highly sought after fantasy and science fiction book cover artists.

Many artists do make the switch to working digitally because it allows more freedom to alter the work at any stage as well as the ability to work more quickly towards a deadline. While I do occasionally work digitally at some of the preliminary stages of my illustration process, the final art is exclusively traditional aside from value and color adjustments made to a scanned piece of art in order to match it to the original. I prefer to do most of my drawings with a pencil in sketchbooks, and my painted work is created with gouache on cold-press watercolor paper. I do have a Wacom tablet that I share with my husband (who is also an artist) and I will use that occasionally to make adjustments to drawings that I’ve scanned in. I’ll use Photoshop to do things like shrink a head that’s too big or alter costume details.

Making revisions to a sketch at the request of an art director is also more convenient digitally, as long as they aren’t too extensive. In that case I usually re-work the drawing on paper. I will also use Photoshop to create color and value studies before moving on to a final illustration. Adopting digital media can increase efficiency, and I admire artists who have been able to adopt digital working methods while retaining the same style they previously worked with traditionally. The main reason I have chosen not to switch to digital is that I haven’t developed a feel for it. Even with the Wacom stylus, using the computer seems counterintuitive to me. I like the feeling of a brush or graphite on paper, and the more intuitive process of mixing paint on a palette. I’ve always had a tough time using the color picker in Photoshop and getting the color I want. Everything looks so saturated! Ending up with an original piece of art that is unique in all the world is a special feeling. It’s also nice because it can be sold to collectors who might prefer to buy original art!

Justin: Your creatures’ facial expressions always give me pause because they hint at something going on in their minds. The minotaur is a good example. He looks rather annoyed at having been painted. Is he just grumpy, or is there a story there? How do you go about deciding on the emotions your creatures display?

Emily: I’m really glad to hear you liked the minotaur! That turned out to be one of my favorite images from the book. While I’d say I didn’t have any particular history in mind for the minotaur aside from the mythological tale, instead of making him look like a brutally cruel beast, I chose to humanize him a bit and make him look angry, but also sad. He’s been imprisoned in the labyrinth because of his frightening appearance, not through any fault of his own.

It’s a great compliment to hear that my characters and creatures have a soul; something going on underneath the surface that can be discerned by the viewer. This might sound a little weird, but ever since I have been drawing characters I’ve felt as though maybe what I’m really doing is unearthing a person or creature that exists in some other place and just bringing them to life here. I imagine some writers might feel the same way. I’ve been drawing since a young age and often invented characters. I try hard to convey a personality or emotion through a drawing. I’m drawn to and influenced by the same quality in other artists’ work. I’m always most affected if I can empathize with a character, even if that character is just a two dimensional drawing or painting and I might not know anything about them beyond what’s presented in the image. That thing beyond the image, that magic being made between the viewer and the image is something special.

When I want to convey the personality of a creature or character I ask myself questions like: what are they doing, why are they doing it, what would they be thinking or how would they be feeling in the situation I’ve imagined? As far as how I draw such an image, when it comes to something like a facial expression on a human or humanoid character I make funny faces in the mirror. For a creature, if I use animal reference for inspiration I might try to inject some of the quality of that animal’s essence into the creature.

Justin: What’s next for you? Any special projects you can share?

Emily: Trying to keep up with my blog! I’m working on a painting demo that complements a bonus online creature-drawing demo for The Explorer’s Guide to Drawing Fantasy Creatures. I’m also continuing my illustration work for publisher Inhabit Media and their Inuit Mythology Initiative.

Sometime in the future I hope to break into more illustration work for the young adult fantasy market.

Justin: Thanks for answering my questions, Emily!
I truly enjoyed The Explorer’s Guide to Drawing Fantasy Creatures, it was a delight to read and learn from. I hope it sells a billion copies. I’m sure we’ll be seeing more from you in the future! Readers, leave a comment for a chance to win a copy of The Explorer’s Guide to Drawing Fantasy Creatures.

Earlier this week I reviewed Daniel Polansky’s debut novel, Low Town, and I mentioned that I loved the setting, characters, and tone of the novel. Mr. Polansky sent me this piece in which he discusses some of the influences behind Low Town.

Slums of the Shire
by Daniel Polansky

Occasionally you’ll be with a group of people and they’ll get to talking about their favorite historical epochs, nostalgic for lives they never led. One person will talk up their childhood love of the Wild West, another reveal a penchant for Victorian England. This last one just has a thing for corsets, but it’s better not to call them on it.

When my turn rolls round I take a sip of whatever we’re drinking and look at my shoes. “The mid 90′s were pretty good,” I say lamely. “Slower internet and everything, but at least we had penicillin.”

Perhaps it’s my being a history buff, but the past sucked. For about a millennium and a half after the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe just seems like a real shit place to reside. Lots of rooting in filth until you die at thirty a half mile from where you born. Nominally the nobles had it better, but still, your fever would have been treated with the application of leaches and your pretty young bride had like a one in two chance of surviving child birth.

This probably is why I don’t understand fantasy — that is to say that collection of high medieval tropes collected by Tolkien and gleefully reproduced by two generations of descendants.

Take elves for instance — though perfectly capable of imagining a world where higher intelligence evolved in a species separate from humanity, my powers of make believe fail when positing that the relation between said species would be anything beyond unceasing warfare. Even a cursory glance at human history reveals our collective willingness to commit genocide on fellow homo sapiens — how much quicker would we have been to eradicate a separate species competing for identical resources? If elves existed, our ancestors would have hunted them down to extinction and erected a monument to the accomplishment.

But I digress.

Even when nestled comfortably in a quest to kill a dragon or overthrow a dark lord or what have you, strange thoughts plague me. What does the shady side of Gondor look like? How many platinum coins would a dime bag set me back? What is the point of hobbits? They’re just short, fat people. People are plenty fat as it is.

Low Town is sort of my attempt to answer some of those questions (not the last one). It’s the story of the Warden, a former intelligence agent and current drug dealer, whose gradual slide into self-destruction is briefly checked by the discovery of a dead body in the neighborhood he runs. An ill-timed bout of conscience rattles the easy cage of venality he’s built for himself, and leads him on a collision course with the life he’d left behind. The Warden is a guy trying to survive the next few days, and not particularly squeamish as to what that requires — the sort of person more likely to populate a classic crime novel than to be found stocking the fantasy section of your local Borders (RIP).

More broadly, Low Town is an attempt to meld the best aspects of noir with a low fantasy setting — a meeting of tastes which I think complement each other nicely. The spare language and fast pace of good noir offers a pleasant counterpoint to the sprawling — one might even say bloated — length of much modern fantasy. On a somewhat broader level, the tendency of fantasy to focus on world-shaking events often renders it irrelevant to the average reader, whose life relatively rarely devolves into single combat against vaguely satanic analogs. By contrast, noir is concerned with the individual, with greed and lust, sins all of us can comprehend to some degree. Low Town centers on the conceit that a world with magic wouldn’t be altogether different from a world without it. People are still (on the whole) selfish, stupid creatures, focused almost exclusively on the immediate satisfaction of their basic desires, only now some of them can shoot fire out of their hands.

That’s the idea at least. It comes out today (August 16^th) in the US and Canada, and on Thursday (August 18^th) in the UK and Commonwealth. I hope you check it out and see if I’ve succeeded, or if I’m just a pretentious clown. Or both.

Instead of asking one author several questions, we’ve asked several authors just one question. Please leave a comment or suggest a question for us to ask in the future. We’ll choose one commenter to win a copy of Jesse Bullington’s The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart on audio CDs (or, if you’ve got bad taste, something else from our stacks).

Question: Which speculative fiction character created by another author are you kicking yourself for not dreaming up first?

Rachel Aaron: I’m going to have to go with Killashandra from Anne McCaffrey’s Crystal Singer books. The whole series was pretty cheesy 80s sci fantasy (especially the final 2 books), but I LOVED IT, mostly because Killashandra was ambitious, powerful, clever, and completely unapologetic about being so awesome, even when she got herself into major trouble. She was a savvy business lady who got the hot guys by force of personality. Three books wasn’t nearly enough Killa, and if I ran the world, I would grab the series from McCaffrey and run with it.

Jesse Bullington: Most recently, she’s the nameless (as far as my sieve-like brain recalls) narrator from J.M. McDermott’s brilliant trilogy-opener Never Knew Another. McDermott gives her a great, unique voice that perfectly captures both the feel of the world and the intricacies of the character; there’s poetry and brutality in equal measure, but both seem organically hers instead of existing to simply make her McDermott’s mouthpiece. She’s devout in her faith, being a priestess, which makes for an interesting, compromised narration — McDermott’s very grey world and cast of characters are all seen through the black-and-white filter of the true believer. Also, she wears a wolfskin hood, which is worth ten thousand cool points, and is a shapeshifter, which tacks on another ten Gs, at least — I’ve rarely come across such a smartly rendered psychology of a liminal character, sure, but also: wolfskin hood. Yes.

Gail Carriger: Terry Pratchett’s The Luggage. The Luggage doesn’t say much, and he doesn’t appear often, oh but when he does, he always steals the scene and readers know hilarity will ensue. Described as part portmanteau part homicidal maniac, always grumpy, sometimes lovelorn, The Luggage may be the greatest comedy character since Marvin the Paranoid Android. One wonders what would happen if the two ever met.

Seanan McGuire: If I could change the world so I’d created one character created by someone else, it would be the revolutionary Goldilocks from Bill Willingham’s fantastic Fables. Heavily-armed, seriously twisted, and more than a little bit insane… what’s not to love?

L. E. Modesitt, Jr.: Because my characters are so closely tied to my worlds, I can’t say that I’ve ever gotten the feeling that I wished I’d come up with another character first, but I will say that I’m really in awe of the world/characters that Roger Zelazny created in Creatures of Light and Darkness.

Thanks to these authors for sharing their secrets with us! One random commenter gets the Bullington audiobook.

Here’s another installment of FanLit Asks. Instead of asking one author several questions, we’ve asked several authors just one question. Please leave a comment or suggest a question for us to ask in the future. We’ll choose one commenter to win a copy of Jack Vance’s The Eyes of the Overworld (one of my favorites!) on audio CDs (or, if you’ve got bad taste, something else from our stacks).

Question: Which speculative fiction writer has had the greatest influence on your own writing style and what, specifically, do you find most inspirational about that writer’s style?

Alex Bell: Definitely Terry Pratchett. His Discworld novels got me through the horror that was secondary school. I loved them for their escapism, warmth and humour and the way they put a smile on my face and made me feel better able to cope with real life!

Erin Bow: Ursula LeGuin. I love many things about her, but as a writer I’m most inspired by the real-ness of her invented worlds. Narnia might well fit in a wardrobe, but Earthsea could fill an ocean and not neglect the whales.

Chris Evans: Tolkien‘s classic fantasy construct showed me the power of myth and complex layering in world building while George MacDonald Fraser gave me insight into the bond between soldiers in time of war. My style is very much a reflection of these two authors’ approaches to grand geo-political concepts on the one hand, and intimate portraits of human (or elf and dwarf) character under extreme duress on the other.

Kevin Hearne: Neal Stephenson taught me that you can write an incredibly brainy book full of ideas and still appeal to a wide audience with deftly written action sequences and a nuclear bomb riding in a sidecar. His spec-fic kung fu still impresses me to this day — and Snow Crash, particularly, is looking eerily prophetic these days.

Matthew Hughes: It’s Jack Vance by a long shot.  I am drawn to his minimalist description, his ironically detached dialogue, and the way he implies humor without reaching for the pig’s bladder.  He is the only author that I knowingly reread.

Mindy Klasky: My writing style has been most influenced by one of my early fantasy idols — Katherine Kurtz, particularly her first six Deryni books.  I devoured those volumes in middle school, reading them so often that I had large portions memorized. Kurtz’s writing often alternates witty, expository dialog with richly-detailed descriptions (particularly of ritual and architecture). Unconsciously, I adapted a similar style for my own books. Except, um, my writing doesn’t often focus on architecture; I tend to describe food :-)

Ken Scholes: Hand’s down, it was Ray Bradbury. His stories started wowing me in the second grade and at 13, I discovered his essay “How to Keep and Feed a Muse” in the textbook On Writing by Writers. I knew after reading it that I had to be a writer. I wrote him soon after and he was kind enough to write back and recommend some books on writing for me, advising me to write 1,000 words a day. I started writing my own stories then and thirty years later, I dedicated my third novel, Antiphon, to him.

Please leave a comment or suggest a question for us to ask in the future.

Michael Pryor is the author of THE LAWS OF MAGIC, a young adult series which begins with Blaze of Glory and ends with the just completed but not yet released Hour of Need. He has written over two dozen novels and now that THE LAWS OF MAGIC is completed, is working on the start of a new historical fantasy. He currently resides in Melbourne, Australia and graciously took some time to answer some questions about THE LAWS OF MAGIC and writing in general. We’ll be giving away a book from our stacks to one commenter.

Bill Capossere: I enjoyed reading THE LAWS OF MAGIC and I’m wondering how the storyline came about?

Michael Pryor: I’d written nearly twenty books by the time I was considering the project that became THE LAWS OF MAGIC. I’d just finished writing a series that was traditional high fantasy — full of castles, knights, battles and so on. I wanted to write a fantasy set in a different historical period and the Edwardian period just before the First World War appealed to me as a time of great political ferment and significant social change. Add a little magic, I thought, and I’d have the perfect setting for some rip-roaring adventures.

Bill: How much of it was plotted in advance?

Michael Pryor: I wrote Blaze of Glory as a standalone adventure, but with an eye on a series. I did plot it out completely, so I knew where it was going to end, but I knew that the setting would support more books. When the chance came to extend into a second book, and then four more, I sat down and planned the overarching series arc, plus the individual adventures that would make up each book.

Bill: The books each resolve a singular problem while the overlying series arcs involving war and Tremaine progress but aren’t resolved. Did you plan on that kind of structure and why?

Michael Pryor: I don’t mind the cliffhanger type of series, but I firmly wanted to write a different sort of series, a novel sequence, if you will. Each book has its own story which is resolved at the end but, as you point out, the overarching narrative involves looming war and the master magician who is doing much to bring this about. I wanted standalone books as I think it lets readers begin midstream much more easily, providing multiple access points for people to join in.

Bill: There are lots of books out there dealing with young people learning magic, lots of alternate history books, steampunk books. What makes THE LAWS OF MAGIC stand out amidst the crowd?

Michael Pryor: The approach to magic in THE LAWS OF MAGIC is different. I wanted magic as a rational, intellectual pursuit, and I use the history of science and the scientific method of inquiry as a parallel. I wanted to stay well away from vague mysticism and instead have magic as something that could yield to careful experimentation, documentation and cerebration. With this, THE LAWS OF MAGIC is different, but I will add that the combination of romance, comedy, fantasy and political thriller has rarely been attempted in an Edwardian historical context …

Bill: In my reviews, I called the books “charmingly old-fashioned” — reminiscent of old-time romance adventures and older YA like Tom Swift or The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew — and said Aubrey was a bit of a mix of a young Sherlock Holmes, Tom Swift, and Hermione Granger. Any comment?

Michael Pryor: Spot on. Part of my writing (and any author’s writing) is a tribute to their influences. The tradition of brave adventures, bold comrades working together, was very much part of my reading as a youngster and I was sorry that the whole notion of heroism was seen as out of date. Young people need heroes — we all need heroes — and to read about young people doing their best to do the right thing in extraordinary circumstances is both entertaining and useful.

Aubrey’s friend George Doyle has a surname that is a deliberate nod to Sherlock Holmes’s creator. I’d always enjoyed Holmes’s adventures, and in preparation for writing THE LAWS OF MAGIC I reread the entire collection of stories. Not just for their cleverness, but for details of setting, language and manners. Invaluable.

Bill: Did anything catch you by surprise as you wrote?

Michael Pryor: What did take me by surprise was the romance. I didn’t plan to write a story with a romantic element, but two characters insisted on liking each other. At first, I prised them apart because such a thing wasn’t in my planning, but everything they did and said pointed toward a developing relationship. In the end, I listened to them instead of sticking blindly to my plan, and I was glad I did.

Bill: One of the things I truly enjoyed about the series was the way you took time to develop Caroline and Aubrey’s relationship, unlike a lot of books and films that throw a pair of strangers together, toss in a stressful situation, and end up with “love.”

Michael Pryor: Part of their cautious attraction is historical. In fact, the way they talk and meet without a chaperone would have been considered almost improper. But this circumspect hesitancy is wonderful to work with, for a writer. The manners and morals of the time allowed me to have misunderstandings, uncertainties, longings and yearnings, quite a bit of pining, all of which are aspects of relationships that are often hastened through in today’s more abrupt world. I felt it added a certain sweetness, and respect, that showed a sign of young relationships that is important.

Very early on, I did know that that it wouldn’t be a relationship that was rushed into. Caroline was far too sensible for that.

Bill: How do you balance story, pace, and historical detail? How obsessive a researcher are you? What percentage would you guess of your research/notes actually makes it into the books?

Michael Pryor: I love my research, and it’s easy to get lost in its seductiveness. I have to control myself, sometimes, and tear myself away from the details of history.

I do remind myself, constantly, that just because I found a really cool bit of history, it doesn’t have to make it into the story. I have read historical novels where the overriding intention of the author seems to be to show us every single thing he or she dug up while researching. The result is that characters and narrative are swamped, dragged down by detail. I aim to use historical detail mostly as incidental, background stuff that adds to the texture and tone, rather than making a big deal of it. At a rough estimate, probably about 20% of my research makes it into a book.

Bill: For various reasons, such as pacing, increased tension and humor, etc., I felt the books improved as they went on with Heart of Gold a bit of a step up and then the series really finding a strong footing in Word of Honour (feel free to disagree with the premise). Did you think the books improved as you went, were there aspects you wanted to work on after Blaze of Glory, or do you want to just thumb your many-times published nose at me and move on to the next question?

Michael Pryor: A fair, and perceptive, comment! Looking back, that’s how I see the books working, too. Blaze was written with some hesitancy – I hadn’t been signed up to write it. It also had to do a lot of work that the other books don’t. For Heart of Gold and onwards, the world had been set up, the scenario put in place, the characters formed and working – all thanks to Blaze. The tone was perhaps less confident in Blaze, too. Aubrey’s whimsical, intelligent diction really takes flight in Heart of Gold.

Bill: You have a concluding book for the series that you’re working on (or finished?). What are your feelings as you bring such a long-running series to an end?

Michael Pryor: It’s sad, coming to the end of a long series. Those characters, the ones I’ve worked with for eight years, are now going on with their lives without me … The final chapter of Hour of Need, the final book of the series, was immensely difficult to write. As well as the usual pressure to write a satisfying, complete conclusion, I had the overwhelming need to write an ending that would be right for Aubrey, Caroline and George. They deserved it.

Bill: And now that it’s over, if you could ask two of the characters from THE LAWS OF MAGIC one question each, what would the question (s) be and whom would you ask them of?

Michael Pryor: I’d ask Aubrey how he prefers to tie his tie — full Windsor knot or the four-in-hand knot.

I’d ask Caroline about the best way to disable an armed attacker while not having a hair fall out of place.

Bill: A lot of YA minimizes the adult presence. Sometimes it just ignores them, sometimes it kills them off, sometimes it makes the adults simply too insignificant or too dumb/oblivious to matter. The parents of your main character as well as Caroline’s parents are highly important figures and clearly smart in their own right — a Prime Minister, a naturalist, an artist — and while they play relatively small roles in terms of page count, their actions are significant to the plot. How did you envision the adult role in a series centered on young adult characters?

Michael Pryor: I was determined to avoid the missing parent syndrome that is, as you point out, rife in YA books. For all the lip service to writing ‘realistic’ fiction, so many of these books have no adults, which simply isn’t realistic as all. To this end, I wanted a story where the main characters not only like their parents (shock!) but the parents do appear in the stories and have roles of their own. And not just as wise Obi-Wan counselors, but with lives of their own, ambitions and desires of their own. This was a very important aim for the series.

Bill: Another aspect I really liked was how magic isn’t simply based on in-born talent. Aubrey is not a great magician because he’s got lots of “talent,” but because he studies it constantly; he’s always thinking about it, always looking for connections and cross-applications, always learning, even from the villain of the series. I also liked the use of Laws and languages and the way it works almost like math, with equations and substitutions, an interior logic, and the like. How did you approach the magic? Did you have it fully in your mind or fine-tune it as you went along?

Michael Pryor: When approaching a new Fantasy book (or series) the question of magic is one of the foremost in my mind. How’s it going to work? What are its limitations? How can I make it different and refreshing? I’ve always been interested in Science — the history and philosophy of science and the scientific method. I’ve also been concerned at the contemporary trend to decry, suspect or condemn science, mostly through lack of understanding of what science is. Part of my aim in THE LAWS OF MAGIC was to address this. Like mathematical ability, some people in this world do have innate talent — but this isn’t enough. Hard work, training, and study are needed to make the most of it.

The general idea of the magical system was well worked out before I began. Spells would be like mathematical formulae. They could be worked out by careful experimentation and observation. The actual number of spells and their effects, however, did grow as the series went along…

Bill: What would you say distinguishes YA literature, if anything?  As a follow-up, what distinguishes good YA from bad YA?  I won’t ask you to name bad YA writers or books, but could you tell us a few you’d recommend?

Michael Pryor: Some YA literature is easily distinguished, but some isn’t. I have many adult readers for THE LAWS OF MAGIC — it has crossover appeal. Some people say it’s the age of the main characters, but I think it’s more than that. I like to believe that YA literature pays more attention to narrative than some adult, literary fiction. Story still matters to Young Adults.

Distinguishing between good and bad YA, to me, is the same as distinguishing between good and bad books in any sphere. Firstly, the story must engage. There’s a million ways to do this, and a million ways to write something that fails this first test. Character is vital. Interesting, well rounded, believable characters are important, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t be outrageous, outlandish or extraordinary. A real narrative is crucial, too. If nothing happens, you don’t have a story. You might have a lovely piece of writing, but you don’t have a story.

I’d recommend any of Garth’s Nix’s books, but especially Sabriel and its companion volumes. Alison Goodman’s Eon is a ripper, and I’ll give a plug to fellow steampunker Richard Harland with his Worldshaker.

Bill: Can you recall for us one or two of those magical moments of response to a particular scene in a book or two — those sort of “shiver moments” that make one fall in love with the magic of reading all over again

Michael Pryor: I still remember reading THE LORD OF THE RINGS for the first time. I had many, many moments of pure stupefaction, but in particular I remember the tension and the terror when Frodo and his friends were fleeing Hobbiton, trying to get to Bree, chased by the Black Riders. Brrr.

Sometimes when I read, I simply cheer out loud at particularly rousing points of the story or when I’m mightily impressed with the writer’s craft. The last time I did this was recently, when I re-read Neal Stephenson’s BAROQUE trilogy. What a writer.

Bill: What sort of projects do you have in hand or in mind in the near future?

Michael Pryor: I’m working on a new historical fantasy set in London in 1908 — the year of the first London Olympics.

Bill: I will look forward to that! Thanks for joining us!

Readers, we’ll give away a book from our stacks to one commenter.

I recently chatted with C.J. Henderson, whose book Central Park Knight, sequel to Brooklyn Knight (which was really fun!) is being released today by Tor. We’ll be giving away a copy to a couple of commenters.

Justin Blazier: Thanks for taking time out to answer some questions for me. Your writing ranges across several genres. You’ve had successes in Horror, Detective, Adventure, Comedy, Sci-Fi and Fantasy. The Brooklyn Knight series seems to provide a home for all your varied writing interests. Was that the plan?

CJ Henderson: No, not at all. First off, it couldn’t have been because, well… I don’t actually ever have a plan. I make things up as I go along. All I knew when I started was that the character’s name was Piers Knight, and that he was a curator at the Brooklyn Museum, because I had worked that much out with the editor. I also had a fairly good handle on the character of the intern because I had decided to model her after a friend of my daughter’s I thought would be perfect for the part (ironically, I discovered after I made that decision that her friend had just been awarded an internship at the Brooklyn Museum for that summer, so I guess she was even more perfect for the part than I thought).

I knew it would have horror and mystery, because that was fairly well implied in what the editor and I had discussed. But everything else just worked its way in as I went along.

Justin: So, if you make things up as you go along, where did the original idea for The Brooklyn Knight come from?

CJ: In a nutshell, it was the idea of the original editor, the late Brian Thompson. He loved matching people to projects, and he was really good at it. He was a Brooklyn boy like myself, and he loved the Brooklyn Museum. He pitched the idea to me to have a curator at the museum get into some kind of urban fantasy mischief. He was an enormous fan of my Teddy London supernatural detective series, knew the work I had done for the Lovecraft estate with their character Inspector Legrasse, and the Zarnak stories I had done for the Lin Carter estate. He also knew I was getting a little bored with doing so many action adventure horror novels and shorts centering around hard-boiled detective types.

He realized (even if I didn’t) that I needed to shift gears. He also knew I was getting into a lot of lighter stuff, and so he put together an idea he thought might be perfect for me. He was right, of course. I took to the idea of Knight immediately. The first novel simply flew out of me. I knew so much about the character before the first chapter was finished, it amazed me. In fact, I still know tons more than the audience does.

Justin: I liked Prof. Piers Knight’s character quite a bit. He was simultaneously both frustratingly aloof and charming to those around him. I compared him to Indiana Jones in my review, but I don’t think the two characters would get along if left alone together. In your opinion what sets the professor apart from his relic-hunting peers we see in other works?

CJ: Wow… you know what I just said about knowing things the audience doesn’t? Well, I have to be a rummy here and dodge this question. You were sharp enough to notice that Knight is a bit different. That he acts just a bit out of step with others. For once (haha) that’s not bad writing on my part. No, he is different. He does have a secret. And just as there were clues ladled into the first novel, there are more in the second. The secret (first part, anyway) won’t come out until the third.

And yes, Piers would see Jones as an opportunist, as a user of people. Jones succeeded so brilliantly because of his amoral nature. It was great writing. Piers has no problem with making hard choices, but he would have blown up the Ark rather than let it fall into the hands of the Nazis. Indiana Jones is a little boy who has to have what he wants when he wants it. That’s what makes him adorable and why women love him and want to reform him, and why they forgive him when he acts badly. Women are hardwired to forgive children when they act stupid and self-centered. If they weren’t, none of us would survive childhood. But Piers is an adult. He is his own man. There will be no molding of the professor by outside forces any time soon. Adults can’t be forgiven by others. They have to accept responsibility for their actions.

Man, I talk a lot, don’t I? If I don’t curb myself, we’ll be here all day. Next question.

Justin: You dabble in the humor business a bit and you’ve even written some humorous fiction. Brooklyn Knight had its fair share of funny moments. How important is it for you to make your readers laugh from time to time, even though the overall tone of the novel is fairly serious?

CJ: I wouldn’t say it’s important to me. It’s more that humor just comes to us in real life all the time. Sometimes we see it and sometimes we don’t. Two of my absolute favorite horror movies are Ghostbusters and Tremors. Both of these movies are filled with humor, but one of them is thought of as a comedy and the other as a horror movie. I really do believe it’s only the presence of so many comedians in Ghostbusters that made them promote it as a comedy. The storyline itself is straight horror… and Lovecraftian horror at that.

For instance, none of the Knight short stories have that much humor. I think it’s because novels give me more time to relax and get into character situations, where the shorts have to be story-driven, straight forward, zoom-o kind of things. I love writing humor, my three most recent short story series have all been mostly comedy-driven. But to stop straying all over the place from the question, no, I don’t plan comedy in my novels, look for places to stick it in, or fret if it doesn’t happen. I just let things flow.

Justin: Where has all the comedy in speculative fiction gone to? I like to read and write humor and often wonder why I don’t see more of it on the shelves in the SFF genres. With the success of legends such as Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams, you’d think we’d see more.

CJ: I don’t know what to say. I love comedy, as I just said. But, it also took me twenty years of being published before I chanced writing any. I think it takes a great deal of skill to turn out decent comedy. I find myself holding my breath anytime I send one out, waiting to see what the editors say back to me. The problem with comedy is that so much of what is passed off as humor is topical — transitory. Funny today, maybe even tomorrow, but next month? Who knows?

I do stories now about two sailors, Rocky and Noodles, which are sci-fi military musical comedies. Monty Python meets Abbott and Costello kind of stuff. There are a lot of Star Trek references which, if people catch them, will be funny, but I don’t rely on those for the humor, because yes, old farts like me think the sun rises and sets with Classic Trek, but the younger audience, who knows? And, nothing turns off an audience faster than an entertainer so in love with something they find fault with their audience for not getting how “clever” they are.

The Challenge of the Unknown series centers around a network news show dedicated to info only on UFOs, haunted houses, witches, werewolves, et cetera. The idea came to me thinking of the old ABC show Sightings, which ran for two years I believe, actually only covering such news. I always wondered, what would happen if these people went into one of these haunted houses and peoples’ heads started spinning, and stories started pouring out. These are much in the Ghostbusters vein, with the humor coming from the absurdity of the situation, and horror based more on the hideous things Hollywood types do to each other rather than buckets of meat and blood being thrown against the wall.

I guess the answer is, humor is tough. Even out of the two examples you gave, I never got into Pratchett, but I chased down every scrap of Douglas Adams. Yeah, humor is subjective, and scary. You have to have iron pants to submit humor.

Justin: The new book, Central Park Knight is releasing today. How was the writing of book two? I know, for some authors, book one is sort of a feeling-out process, and book two can be easier or more difficult depending on how you felt about book one.

CJ: Book two was a lot harder. Since the clues being hidden were closer to the surface, since essentially the second book is the second act as far as the big reveal is concerned, they took a lot of effort to conceal. I hate authors who write books which don’t end, basically telling the reader, “hey, you want more, you want answers, wait for ‘em, or go away. I don’t care enough about you to bother.”

Think back to the original Star Wars. Now, sure, that story doesn’t end. When the first movie is over, the rebels are still in terrible trouble. But, we’re given enough of an ending that we’re all happy. As the old-timers (like myself) in your audience will remember, there was no talk of a sequel. We all thought that what we had seen was all there was going to be.

Well, that’s the way I write my novels and even my short stories. The ending is the ending. Period. I always want whatever I deliver to the public to feel like that’s all they’re getting, and for it to be a satisfactory meal. So, yeah, this one was harder because to achieve that sense of completeness, I had to work a lot harder.

Also, on a more mundane level, the idea of the series is that Piers will have a different intern in each book. Intern is by its definition a transitory position. And, I didn’t just want to bring in a clone of the first intern. Even if the public loved her, it was a cheat. Why bother changing characters if there’s no real change? So, to give myself a challenge, I brought in someone completely different. Different on every level, just to make myself work harder.

And, while I was at it, I thought, why not do that on all levels? You see, another thing that irks me about some series writing is the way the characters do the same things every time. It’s like a female character on a TV show who always wears boots, jeans and a tank top. Does she own no skirts? No suits? No gowns? No sneakers? Anyway, where a lot of writers would have Piers search the museum for mystical weapons suited for the new menace and then dispatch it, I didn’t want things to be that easy. So, as soon as he assembled the weapons in the second book, I pull the rug out from under him so that we can see if he has any worth as a thinker, as a man.

Yeah, I set myself a number of challenges in the second book, and I probably made my editor (the incredibly patient and insightful Kristen Sevick) wonder if the merchant marine might not be a more rewarding career, but I had a good time and was happy with what I accomplished. Now I’m just waiting for the world to return the report card.

Justin: How many more of the Knight series can we expect? The Professor has the potential to carry a long-term series. His talents and interests lend themselves to some great stories.

CJ: How many we can expect is up to Tor, of course. Hopefully sales will justify their continued faith in the series. I know the third book inside and out. In fact, if folks go to my website, posted right now are the stories “An Excess of Joy,” which is the first few chapters of Central Park Knight, and “Pragmatic,” which I know, and well, I guess now everyone else knows, is what I plan to make the first few chapters of the third novel.

Like I said, there’s going to be a big reveal in the third book (and no, you can’t figure it out by reading “Pragmatic”), but it’s a reveal for the audience only. In the fourth book, I want that reveal to be made to the world at large. The fifth would be Piers dealing with the world having found out his secret. Then, in the sixth, there would be a reveal to Piers about his secret. And then… well… after that trying to tell you what I know without giving anything more away gets impossible. So, let me say that I see the possibility of a lot of books myself.

Now, I only know the actual menace and some of the plot for the third. I know nothing of the stories of the others, just the big moments. Whether it’s vampires, werewolves, bad-ass fairies, killer clowns, I don’t know. Knowing that the menace in the third book is another massive one, I’d like to calm things down in the fourth. Of course, I thought I was going to do that in the second, and well… that didn’t work out, did it?

Justin: Which authors have had the biggest influences on you creatively?

CJ: Wow, well… in no particular order, just as they pop into my pea-sized brain… ah… Stan Lee, Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clifford D. Simak, Jack Vance, Rex Stout, Douglas Adams, Alfred Bester, John Brunner… I could probably go on, but how many people can be the “biggest?” Better stop before I water down the honor too far.

Justin: Where/when did you get your start writing? Has it always been something you’ve wanted to do?

CJ: My earliest memories are of telling stories to the other kids under the street light at night. I have always been a storyteller, and I always will be. The fact that I was able to get my work into print and make my living from writing has been a terrific blessing, but I would have been doing it no matter what. Yeah, it’s what I always wanted to do.

Justin: I read your bio on your website. You point out a fact that most readers don’t realize — that more than likely their favorite author has a day job *gasp*. Your list of past jobs is quite extensive. One on the list was “Lounge Lizard.” What exactly is a lounge lizard, and how exactly does one become said lizard of the lounge?

CJ: It’s just an old term for someone who sings in a lounge. It’s meant to convey a sense of not the Frank Sinatras and Tony Bennetts, but the guys who are only cheap knock-offs of them. For every Lady GaGa there are ten thousand really sad and awful imitators. Now, hopefully I wasn’t that bad, but I did get into a suit and sing in bars for very little money, knocking out stuff like “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” for people who were just trying to drink and not be seen by anyone who knew them while they tried to hook up with people who were not their spouses. Oh, my sad, sad past.

Justin: Looking back over the years of your writing career and comparing that to what new authors go through now, do you think things are better or worse for aspiring authors?

CJ: Yes. Not being a wise-guy, it’s easy to talk about how much harder things were back when, or how hard they are now, depending on how one wants to be viewed by those to whom they’re speaking. But, for new authors, things are as they are. They don’t know what it’s like to have print magazines in every drug store that people actually bought and read, but on the other hand, they don’t have the fear and mistrust of the internet that a lot of older writers have in the back of their minds. They accept the world for what it is, because that’s what it is.

Having had to walk uphill ten miles every day to sell a story when I was young, having grown up in an era when self-publishing was a dirty word, it’s easy to look around and talk about the vast opportunities that folks have today. But, it’s always goddamned hard for people to break into any aspect of training. Look at all the American Idol-like shows. That fierce competition, the fear, the panic and hope and desperate desire, that’s all of us. Dancers, singers, sculptors, photographers, comics, writers — all of us — we all want to make it, get the checks, hear the applauds, feel the love, and we all have to go up against a world full of others who want the same things.

There is always a terribly small and finite amount of reward to spread around amongst the hordes of hopefuls who desire to be recognized for their talent. People write for a lot of different reasons, and they don’t usually know what it is they’re trying to do, or why they’re doing it. They just know they have to do it. And it hurts to be rejected just as much now as it always has. Being told you’re no good, that you need to improve, that you’re services are not required at this time, whatever, hurts just as much now as it always has.

And yeah, I know this isn’t exactly what you asked, but it’s the best I’ve got. Yes, I’ve written some 70 books/novels, had hundreds and hundreds of short stories and comics published, thousands of non-fiction pieces printed, and I’m still scrambling after the next sale. There are a handful of writers who can churn out anything and have it end up in print without worry. For the rest of us, it’s a scary, numbing, humiliating crapbag of a job, with one of the sweetest rewards any human being has ever received, one of the most golden rings ever snagged.

It’s always been hard, and it’s always going to be hard. If it wasn’t, everyone would do it. And then getting published wouldn’t mean anything. And in a way, getting published doesn’t really mean anything. People with no talent get published all the time. People whose work will not last even unto their own demise get read by millions.

What’s hard is getting published, and getting read, and then getting reread. What’s hard is writing something that will affect the way people think and live their lives. That will touch their souls. That will make them cry. That will make them a better person. That will make them remember you in their prayers.

That’s what’s always going to be hard. And it should be.

Justin: I always like to ask authors their opinion on the state of the industry. Some are a bit nervous as things move quickly into unknown territory, with the internet and electronics changing the landscape almost daily. Where do you see SFF publishing in the near future. Is it really all doom and gloom? Or are we on the brink of a renaissance of sorts? Maybe something else entirely?

CJ: You’re talking to a guy who’s getting away with writing scifi military musical comedies. Science fiction is in a recession right now because science itself is in a renaissance. Every day, something’s being cloned, or a new app is changing everyone’s perceptions, or a new element is being identified, a new origin for the universe is being uncovered … I mean … I just saw something yesterday on the fact that cars can now parallel park themselves. Are you kidding me? Really? Crap!

Also, genres take turns. A marketplace gets saturated and has to fall to rise again. Fantasy is pretty big right now. Steam-punk is growing, but in both fantasy and sci-fi directions.

I’m not nervous, but I write everything. I miss writing hard-boiled detective stuff, but the market isn’t there. Also, I’m not as angry and crazed as I was thirty years ago when I was knocking those stories out all over the place. Now, I want to laugh, and to make other people laugh, so I do a lot more comedy. I also want to give people hope, and to try and get them to believe in themselves and their ability to accomplish things. That’s a big part of whatever I write, no matter what genre I fold it into.

So, for the SFF marketplace in the near future, all I can say is, it will be doom and gloom for those who don’t give the public what they want, and butterscotch and sunshine for those who do.

Now, of course, figuring out what people want … and when they’re going to want it … well, wow … talk about asking for the philosopher’s stone …

I really enjoyed chatting with C.J. Henderson and will look forward to hunting him down at a local convention this summer. Central Park Knight released today, so be sure to check it out. If you comment below, we’ll enter you into a drawing to win a copy (winners will be announced in the comments, so check the box to subscribe to the comments). You can also find more of C.J.’s work on his website. His site is full of samples and short stories. Personally, I enjoyed the Rocky and Noodles story quite a bit.

Australian author Pamela Freeman has written for both adults and children. She is best known in children’s literature for her Floramonde trilogy and its award-winning spin-offs Victor’s Quest and Victor’s Challenge. Her books for adults include The Castings Trilogy and the upcoming Ash and Ember which will be released on April 26 in the US. (Read my reviews.) Leave a comment below for a chance to win a book from our stacks.

Rebecca: I’ve heard it said by some authors that readers mistakenly think that it’s easier to write for children than it is for adults. Do you think that’s true?

Pamela Freeman: The only way that writing for children is easier is that the books are shorter. But even that doesn’t mean much. Victor’s Challenge, which won the Aurealis Award for best illustrated book last year, took me 13 years to write!

A lot of people (especially parents) start out trying to write a kids’ book because it’s less intimidating. But writing simply is a difficult skill to acquire, and telling a straightforward story without talking down to your audience isn’t easy, either. The fewer words you have, the more each word has to be exactly right. I think writing a good picture book (which I’m not that great at) is far harder than writing a good novel for adults — there’s no wiggle room in a picture book. But I think, in a way, that all writing is equally difficult, if you are writing what is the best thing for you to write.  The trick is in figuring out what will suit you best!

Rebecca: On that note, what was the biggest challenge/difference when you moved from writing the Floramonde books to The Castings Trilogy?

Pamela Freeman: It was much harder to make that transition than I had expected. Mostly it was about layers of meaning and feeling in characters, and coming to understand that I could pause and reflect on the action in some detail without boring my readers. Layers of complexity, pace and character interactions were all more detailed than I was used to. I think I have the boredom threshold of an eight-year-old, which is terrific for writing kids’ books, but I had to fight against the instinct to just keep things moving.

I was encouraged in this by my thesis supervisor (Blood Ties was my doctoral thesis), but I’m afraid she encouraged me too much, as I think the pace of Blood Ties is actually a little slow. I tried to improve the pace in subsequent books, and I think I may have finally got it right in Ember and Ash — although I’ve been told that reading the trilogy as a whole, in the omnibus, the slower pace in the first third feels more appropriate than when you read the books separately.

Rebecca: Your exegesis on “Monarchy in Epic Fantasy Fiction” is closely tied to The Castings Trilogy. What first piqued your interest in the subject of kings; enough to write a trilogy that deconstructed the use of them in fantasy fiction? Specifically, the trilogy has no interest in putting any rightful king back on the throne. How did you want to challenge or subvert the usual tropes and expectations surrounding how the monarchy is usually portrayed in epic fantasy fiction?

Pamela Freeman: I believe in democracy. I am very thankful to live in one. I don’t understand why anyone would want to live under any other political system. So I have always been puzzled about why fantasy writers from democratic countries keep writing stories where the main aim is to put a king back on the throne. This might have been acceptable from JRR Tolkien, who after all was born when Queen Victoria was on the throne, but surely modern writers should be interrogating that system more than they do?

While some writers, notably Ursula Le Guin, have looked more critically at the monarchical system in recent books, the tendency is still to write as though the concept of ‘the rightful king’ has its basis in truth.

As a student of history, I resented the depiction of the would-be kings in fantasy fiction. The men who have united a country have, in reality, been bastards who haven’t cared how many people died in the pursuit of their ambitions. We don’t see those kings in fantasy fiction, only the ‘good’ kind.

So in Castings I showed a country on the verge of unity where the person who wanted to be king was a complete evil bastard, much worse than the ‘villain’. I also wanted to show the lives of ‘ordinary’ people as worthy of interest.

Rebecca: In the final paragraph of your exegesis, you mention the literary links that exist between our ideas concerning the rightful king, godhood, the Golden Age and Eden, to achieve what Tolkien called the “eucatastrophe.” How did you feel you resolved the expectation in the reader’s mind for “peace and plenty and the rightfulness in the order of things” without using the traditional plot of a king reclaiming his throne at the end of The Castings Trilogy?

Pamela Freeman: What I was trying to do was to set up a situation of extreme injustice and then show that the resolution of the story would lead to a restoration of justice and equity. This is, I believe, what lies underneath the desire for the ‘rightful king’ — a desire for a world in which the weak are protected and the strong controlled. By satisfying the underlying desire, I hoped that readers would find the resolution as satisfying as a more traditional ending.

Rebecca: My favourite part of The Castings Trilogy was the way peripheral characters had their chance to tell their stories in the POV chapters that were strewn amongst the Bramble and Ash narrative. By the end of the trilogy, these stories were an essential part of the way in which the story was resolved. Was that your plan right from the start?

Pamela Freeman: Absolutely!  In fact, the whole idea started with those stories. The first chapter, The Stonecaster’s Story, was written in 1996, and began a whole series of short stories. It took me a while to realise these were part of a larger narrative. Without giving a spoiler, I can say that hearing Bishop Desmond Tutu talk about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa showed me how those stories could be the climax of the larger story. In addition, I wanted to show that not only the ‘special people’ in the books (Bramble, Ash, Saker, etc) had stories worth hearing. I wanted the structure of the story to reflect its democratic principles, by allowing many voices to be heard.

It also allowed me to vary the emotional tone of the narrative. The first-person stories are much denser and more emotional than the main narrative, because you can’t ask a reader to exist at that level of intensity for 450,000 words. But having the stories allowed me to have richer, more complex feelings explored concisely — like the cream filling in a sponge!

Rebecca: This is a bit of an odd question, but was there a reason that Bramble never gave her horse a name? She always referred to him as “the roan.”

Pamela Freeman: He was given a name when he started to race, and Gorham called him ‘Thorn’. When I wrote the first scenes between him and Bramble, I felt very strongly that naming him felt to Bramble like a claim of ownership, and their relationship wasn’t based on ownership, but something deeper. I had to write how she thought of him, but ‘the roan’ wasn’t really what she thought. Her mental image of him was deeper and more sense-based than those words convey, but unfortunately I couldn’t describe that time after time in the story. The fact that Bramble didn’t name animals was one of the things which, I hoped, showed that her relationship to the natural world was different to most people’s. It was this which allowed her to adjust to the hunter’s life in Full Circle.

Rebecca:Your next book, Ember and Ash, is out in April. What can we expect from it?

Pamela Freeman: Ember and Ash is set about 20 years after the end of The Castings Trilogy. Some familiar characters return and some new ones are introduced. Ember is the daughter of Martine and Arvid; Ash is the baby who was born in Blood Ties and named after the main character. I wanted to explore the difference a generation makes — the world of the trilogy has changed significantly because of what happened in Full Circle, and the children who have grown up in the new world have different attitudes and preoccupations.

It’s not a spoiler to say that the story starts with Ember’s new husband being burnt to death by the Power of Fire, and that this starts a desperate attempt to reach the seat of his power, Fire Mountain, by the main characters. On the way we get to see parts of the world we have never known about, like Starkling, which is a refuge for the shape-shifters of the Domains, and the Ice King’s country. There are new kinds of magic, and new places with their own enchantments.

As it’s a single book, the pace is much faster than in the trilogy, and the ending is rather more spectacular. I’m hoping people will enjoy it!

Rebecca: I can’t wait to read it! Thanks for spending some time with me and the FanLit readers!

Readers, leave a comment below for a chance to win a book from our stacks. We’ll announce the winner in a comment, so please subscribe to comments.

Recently I had the opportunity to chat with Skyler White about her latest novel, In Dreams Begin, which tells the story of a modern woman, Laura, who is channeled into the body of Maud Gonne and falls in love with W.B. Yeats . She is also the author of and Falling, Fly (see my reviews of Skyler’s books here). Both novels explore such themes as creativity, body image, and true love — all of which are fertile ground for conversation… Leave a comment for a chance to win a copy of In Dreams Begin.

KELLY: Reading In Dreams Begin, I couldn’t help but notice the character of Olivia Shakespear. Between her first name being Olivia and her last name being also a literary name, I was sure you’d put her in there as a manifestation of the Olivia from and Falling, Fly… and then I did a little poking around online and found that she had actually existed and been Yeats’ mistress… and I was thinking, “Wow, what a fun little coincidence!” So I’m partially wondering if you did end up envisioning her as “our” Olivia despite her having been historical…

SKYLER: ::grin:: Olivia Shakespear literally made me laugh out loud when I found her. No, she was just bonus. I toyed with working her as our Olivia, but it felt forced, so I just left that alone, but I did make sure she made it into the book as a little Easter egg for close readers. The research for this book just turned up so many overlaps and coincidences and oddities that I got to the point of half-believing my own fiction.

KELLY: One issue raised in In Dreams Begin is the question of how much of your inner self to reveal to a partner. Several characters note in this book — and Olivia also noted in and Falling, Fly — that in our modern times we reveal too much, talking about every little deep dark secret until there’s no mystery anymore. Then again, I definitely got the sense that Laura couldn’t fully fall in love with Amit until she integrated with her shadow-self, the part of her that was clumsy and insecure and in pain.

SKYLER: I keep wondering about that too — how much of yourself to show a person… It’s funny having two books out in the public sphere, and feeling like the other parents at my kids’ school and folks I meet for the first time at conferences etc. all have a kind of insight into my soul that I don’t into theirs. Although the books are odd enough that the simple fact that they don’t connect to everyone tells me something about those with whom they do. I have felt both more exposed and more connected than I would have expected. But it’s tricky, yes? Especially in the early stages of a relationship, or if you’re dating someone who seems to think you’re better than you think you are. And I think that’s the tension that’s most interesting to me… the conflict between who I think I am and who I aspire to be. I like books as sample ways of being, and the idea that other people — real, historical or fictional — can inspire and alter us. And I don’t know if it’s a shameful lack of confidence or an admirable flexibility that makes me so interested in alteration. And yes, I think you got it exactly, that Laura has to integrate Ida before she can really give all herself to Amit, who really is able, even eager, to love even those unattractive, mangled parts of her.

KELLY: I’m really interested in the phrase “books as sample ways of being.” Because they are. They let us vicariously live lives we wouldn’t necessarily choose to live in reality, or sometimes, try on a life and decide we want our real lives to be more like that. I’ve had major revelations about my own life and what I needed to do with it by reading fiction and having something resonate.

SKYLER: Me too! And there are books I go back to again and again and find something new in them each time — that something different resonates. People are so different one from another, but there are enough overlaps that we can wear each other’s clothes. Not every person fits — or is even interested in trying on — all clothes, but we all, for the most part, need armholes and legholes and poking our heads through a different neck can show you amazing things about yourself. It feels like that writing too, sometimes. On the really good days. You get these compound sensations of imagining what it would feel like to be a different person, how the world might look to them, what things might hurt or help you.. and at the same time altering and determining the eyes they see through and the things shaped them. It was part of what I was playing with in having Laura inhabit Maud, how I felt inhabiting Maud, and Laura for that matter, pushing my awareness into edges of another’s being. Looking out from behind their eyes.

KELLY: And Laura, when she’s inhabiting Maud, is trying on a sample way of being too. It’s partially “what would I do if I’d been born into this whole other time period?” but Maud is different in other ways too, from her body type to the fact that she, unlike Laura and Will and Amit, is not an artist.

SKYLER: Right! Maud’s lack of imagination is fundamental to Laura’s ability to possess her. And yes, that “what is the Victorian era like from both inside and out” is very much something I wanted to do. I wanted to be able to do both the “fish out of water” experience of seeing the time and its conventions with new eyes, and I wanted to be able to look at it from within. It’s one of the reasons I wanted Ida as a second POV character.

KELLY: But of course when Laura gets into Maud’s head, she puts her own “stamp” on her anyway, and Will falls in love with the Maud who talks to him about art, not the one who’s fighting in the revolution. So even when she’s trying on this whole other life, she’s still Laura in a very essential way.

SKYLER: Exactly. Because we are not our bodies. That which is essential, to use the word you so aptly chose, isn’t corporeal, and isn’t what is loved in the kind of perfect love she has with Yeats. And I wanted to explore that too — what it would feel like to be loved not because of or in spite of how you look, but simply without any regard to that at all.

KELLY: And speaking of body type, I keep thinking of how Laura spends a lot of time worrying about her own body— working out and playing soccer, then thinking she looks too athletic — but when she gets into Maud’s body, which she realizes is “fat” by today’s standards, she feels really comfortable in that skin nonetheless, and sees it more as a means of feeling sensations rather than something to be brought under control.

SKYLER: I really think that’s historically right. And I think that’s why she feels more comfortable in it. Because it’s hers for feeling through rather than other people’s for looking at. When she is able to experience her body (Maud’s body) directly and not at the one step remove of wondering how it looks to others, she enjoys it more.

KELLY: (Random aside: I’m now remembering that I used to have a couple of Yeats’ lines about Maud, or ostensibly about Queen Maeve, on my LiveJournal profile, to help inspire body confidence. “She could have called over the rim of the world any woman’s husband to be her lover/and yet had been great-bodied and great-limbed, fashioned to be the mother of strong children/and she’d had lucky eyes and high heart”)

SKYLER: One of the best Maud biographies is titled “lucky eyes and a high heart,” and I actually considered the calling any woman’s husband line as a chapter header. I love how powerless Yeats perceives men to be in that equation. Weird, if you think how little power women actually had. But yeah — Maud was hugely tall, six feet even, way, way more than was fashionable a hundred years ago when average for both men and women was smaller than today. But her height was clearly part of her beauty and appeal, and she was proud of it. More about how much power there is in story, yes? If height is heroic, and strong and magical, as Maud believed and Yeats wrote, how could you not love to be tall?

KELLY: Right, because the Sidhe were tall! Maud would have embraced any aspect of herself that helped align her with the legends, I think. Even today, we still idealize height and expect our idols to be tall. So you get that *blinkblink* moment when you meet someone famous and they’re shorter than you imagined. Height is bound up in glamour, I think… which brings us right back to the Sidhe, doesn’t it?

Thanks for chatting with us again, Skyler! I always know I’m going to have my brain tickled when I read one of your books.
FanLit readers, you too can have your brain tickled! Comment here for a chance to win an advance reader copy of In Dreams Begin.

Joining me today is the highly acclaimed author, Jesse Bullington. Jesse’s first book, The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart was a critical success, and you would be hard-pressed to find a book with a more divisive response from reviewers. Personally, I adored the book, so I’ve been itching to talk with Jesse for quite some time. His new book, The Enterprise of Death was released last week and it was the perfect time to catch up with him. Jesse also plans to stop by to answer any questions you may have, so be sure to make a comment or two. Orbit has also been nice enough to offer a copy of the new book to one commenter chosen at random. So with out further delay, the interview:

Justin: I think it’s been long enough since The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart was published that I can ask you to reflect a bit on the whole writing/publishing process of your first book. Was everything as you expected? How does it compare so far to your experience with your second book?

Jesse: It’s funny, because I thought I had very realistic expectations of how the process would go, and it turned out to be completely different than I anticipated. Mostly this was a good thing — I really expected the road to publication to be much slower, frustrating, and difficult than it actually was. Granted, it took me a couple of years to get an agent, but that was pretty much what I’d been led to expect, and in fact was a bit quicker than I’d anticipated, and after that it all went very smoothly. Everyone at Orbit is incredibly considerate of their authors, and I was consulted about everything, from the cover art on down. Again, I’d heard so many horror stories about the process that I kept expecting something awful to happen, but at a certain point I realized that I was in the most capable hands imaginable, and once I relaxed things went even better. Things with The Enterprise of Death have been every bit as painless, so to date the experiences have been similar.

I also wasn’t really expecting such a positive reaction to the novel, especially from authors I personally admire. And surreal and wonderful as it is to hear that someone whose work you love enjoyed something you wrote, hearing from random strangers that my book entertained them was somehow even more satisfying, and equally unexpected. Every single time I hear from a fan it catches me off guard in the best way possible.

On the other hand, I underestimated the effect having strangers bash my work on the internet would have on me. Early on I gave an interview, I think to Falcata Times, wherein I was asked if criticism bothered me, and I gave an answer along the lines of “hell no, I’m a badass new god who drinks the blood of haters breakfast, lunch, and dinner.” This was pretty easy to do before I’d really been hit with a load of negative reviews. Brutally honest book reviews are really, really important, and taste is of course subjective, but having something you’ve poured all this emotion and energy and thought into dismissed in a nasty and often personal fashion can really sour a day. I know, stop the presses, artists don’t like bad reviews, but it was something I wasn’t really expecting — normally I’m pretty good about taking criticism, I think, and most of the negative reviews I received didn’t give me pause — hell, many were positively helpful — but a few of them suckerpunched me with their vitriol.

Justin: What are some the most memorable reactions to your work, both good and bad?

Jesse: For all my whinging about bad press, most of the negative reviews I’ve received have been more amusing than hurtful, whatever the intention of the critic might have been. There have been calls for it to be burned, advisement on the necessity of taking a bath following a reading of the book, and the not-so-subtle implication that death would be preferable to reading the thing. I’ve also been compared to Satan, which is something of an accomplishment for a debut novelist, I think. One of the especially nasty reviews that actually got under my skin took a quote from The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart out of context to imply that I was misogynist, which was memorable in how awful an experience it was — one would think a professional critic could draw a distinction between a character in a novel and the author of said novel, but apparently not.

On the other hand, there have been some really great reactions, and for the most part that’s what I focus on. Being compared to authors I admire is a great feeling, and it’s interesting to see critics sometimes compare me to authors I haven’t read in ages but dearly loved when I did. In terms of a single soundbite, Kirkus’ remark that Brothers Grossbart was “as grotesquely pleasurable as picking a scab” sticks in the memory pipes, no doubt!

Justin: I think the burning one was mine. I meant it in the most complimentary way possible. I believe I also suggested the book could be given to any individual you wished to have condemned to hell. I did give it five stars though, securing my isle seat into the everlasting fire.

The Sad Tale was simultaneously both low-brow and literary. It’s that duality that makes me feel that your work is important to the fantasy genre. I had never read anything like it… and still haven’t. Will The Enterprise of Death continue to push the boundaries in similar ways?

Jesse: I hope so — for all the belly-aching above about bad press, I think shaking people up and sometimes pissing them off is important for art to stay fresh and exciting. Enterprise is fundamentally different from the Brothers Grossbart in a lot of ways, and so I expect some of the readers who really enjoyed my debut will be turned off by this new one — not because it’s even filthier or weirder, because I don’t think that it is at all, but because it’s a very different sort of book, and I suspect that some readers crave the comfort of knowing what to expect from a book. That is, having read and enjoyed something, they expect the author’s other work to closely hew to what they’ve already enjoyed, and if the follow-up is too different they’ll feel somehow let down. For me, nothing is more important than moving outside of our comfort zones and exploring new territories — so while Enterprise is going to push boundaries, they won’t necessarily be the same boundaries I tested with the Brothers Grossbart. I’ve bitten off more with Enterprise, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the response, be it positive or negative, will be stronger with this one.

Justin: I agree that the reader needs to be challenged from time to time. I love my Dresden Files for their straight forward story telling and good versus evil structure. I also enjoy books like your own where maybe I’m being messed with a bit. If done correctly, as I feel you do, it can create a truly unique experience for the reader. Now, I know you have an academic background in history and folklore, and that was quite apparent when reading The Sad Tale. It looks as if The Enterprise of Death is built on the same foundations. How much actual research do you have to do when writing?

Jesse: I do a lot of research, some of it online but mostly through the local university’s library system. I research before getting started with any novel, continue to research as I write, and then do even more when I have a rough draft to work from. I accumulate hundreds of notes to myself as I’m writing a novel on details to research. When necessary — and possible — I try to talk with experts about specific issues in addition to what I can get from my texts. With Enterprise, for example, I exchanged quite a bit of correspondence with the head of the Archeological Society of Berne, who was incredibly helpful. Since I like the idea of my work taking place not in an alternate history but in our actual record I try my best to keep things as close to reality as possible.

Justin: So tell us a little about Awa, the protagonist in The Enterprise of Death. How is she similar or different from your bearded brothers?

Jesse: In a lot of ways she’s the opposite of Hegel and Manfried — they’re straight white men, she’s a black lesbian. They’re western European mutts, she’s a Fon of Dahomey. They have a rigid worldview, and everything they encounter enforces this preexisting paradigm. She, on the other hand, is curious and open-minded — she’s a character in search of meaning even as she acknowledges such meaning may be beyond human ken, whereas for the Brothers Grossbart the meaning is obvious and irrefutable. I think she’s a much smarter character than either Grossbart, and as a result she’s more complex, more conflicted, and undergoes many changes throughout the novel, versus the rather static Manfried and Hegel. She’s also a necromancer, which would put her into immediate “witch” territory for those pious Grossbarts.

Justin: The Sad Tale was hard to classify into a particular genre. Fantasy is the genre it seems to mostly settle into. I think that’s partly due to the story’s bestiary. The Sad Tale had one of the more disturbing renditions of a manticore I’ve ever read. Does this trend continue in The Enterprise of Death, without giving too much away?

Jesse: It does. I’ve always been into history, and the folklore that grew out of it, so writing historical fiction wherein the beliefs of the day are taken as real is a very natural and fun exercise for me. If anything, Enterprise has more fantastical elements than Brothers Grossbart, but I expect with future books the pendulum will swing back and forth — one of these days I’d love to do a second word fantasy, but I’d also like to do historical fiction with little or no obvious supernatural elements.

Justin: There has been a recent uptick in the online debate about the nihilistic trend some believe fantasy is taking. If this trend were represented as an army, of course being lead by Master Colonel Commandant Abercrombie. You would be at minimum a flag bearer, and more than likely a frontline General. I imagine your coat of arms bearing two bearded fellows holding shovels standing over a mutilated corpse of some sort. My imagination paints this as a rather short and one-sided battle. Since one side obviously cheats and takes no prisoners (unless their attractive) and the other side is full of pixies and milkmaids… wait, I’m getting distracted, back to the topic at hand. Is fantasy really trending nihilist? In my opinion, fantasy is just reflecting trends that are happening in literature as a whole. Fantasy with more “classical” themes is still quite available. This newer edgier fantasy is just growing along beside it. What say you?

Jesse: Oh man, this debate. Honestly, it all just seems so pointless and facile — are we really going to pretend that this might be something new, that Robert E. Howard’s fiction wasn’t nihilistic? It would be laughable if it weren’t for the fact that these attacks on “gritty” new fantasy authors carry a sometimes unstated but fairly obvious message that things were better back when everything was (often literally) black and white, ala Tolkien and Howard (one of the few genuine similarities between those two authors is their problematic representations of “exotic” dark skinned peoples). N.K. Jemisin and others have called this out as dog-whistling, and I’m inclined to agree — we should always be very suspicious of calls for a return to the good old days, and never more so than when said good old days consisted of awesome white dudes defeating the totally evil and bestial brown people. Hell, if that icky element wasn’t underlying this whole debate it would just boil down to “we like vanilla more than rocky road,” and I couldn’t care less what some old-guard windbag thinks of my personal sundae. Unless he posts a nasty review about my work, of course, in which case I’ll cry about it in a future interview.

I’ll add that one of the sillier, more clueless arguments I’ve stumbled over in the course of this debate is the idea that because many second world fantasies take their cues from Medieval Europe they must in turn be populated with characters possessing strong moral compasses or they become unrealistic. The reason given is that because the Christian Church played a huge role in Medieval European life the vast majority of the people of that era must have behaved a certain way, holding tight to Christian ideals and having uncompromising views of good and evil. This is idiotic — if that were the case, the Medieval period would have been a time of peace and unity and not, as is recognized by virtually every respectable historian, an era characterized by endless, bloody power struggles, with countless factions and individuals murdering and torturing each other every chance they could get, a time of political and religious turmoil where moral ambiguity was the name of the game. In short, the sort of setting which Abercrombie excels at rendering, along with his co-conspirators in the League of Nihilistic Guttertrash Perverts Invading Genre.

Joe Abercrombie is popular because he’s a great writer who tells great stories, not because he’s gritty and readers are looking for that right now — Abercrombie rocks and his novels are serious page-turners, end of story. For what it’s worth, I like Tolkien (The Hobbit more than The Lord of the Rings). I like Howard, although I’d hesitate to call him a great writer. Both of these writers have a cave troll’s worth of warts to take into consideration when discussing them, Howard more than Tolkien, but whatever. Both authors preferred Heroes and Villains to flawed, complex characters, and as you point out there’s no dearth of contemporary fantasy novels that take the “classical” approach to fantasy, with Chosen Ones and Dark Lords and All That Noise, so why bother complaining? Human nature, stupid, narcissistic, human nature. I’m a fan of Cugel the Clever but want fuck all to do with Thomas Covenant — who cares? Bah, just thinking about all those look-at-meeeee essays makes my brain hurt — the bottom line is that I’m in favor of reading things that I haven’t read a hundred times before, hearing new voices and tales, be they gritty or dreamy, mithril hard or harpy feather soft.

Oh, and the standard of my unit in LONGPIG is a skeletal-winged turnip with a wreath of gilded beard hairs floating over a platter of sundry cheeses — still time to enlist, Generalissimo Abercrombie is always happy to have another rosy-faced recruit in our septic trenches.

Justin: Nice! I will write Commanderalissimo Abercrombie and attach your sponsoring papers post haste! I’ll be enlisted in no time. I wonder what my life expectancy as a new recruit will be? Probably depends on how much faster I am than the other recruits… or if I have some special powers.

Let’s say you’ve been granted the power to be a were-critter. On a full moon you get to roam the countryside terrorizing locals, loping through their streets and possibly raiding their garbage. What denizen of the wild would you choose to be, and why?

Jesse: This is a good question, and one that requires both careful consideration and a resolute commitment to not make jokes about furries. Aquatic and flying creatures seem like obvious choices, given the potential for exploring new environs, but there is also the innate appeal of the wolverine aka skunk-bear — who wouldn’t want to be a giant musk-reeking ferret? But then what of the bat-eating centipede, which combines the wall-scaling abilities of a normal centipede with the sheer nightmarishness of a vermicious knid? Decisions, decisions. I expect that if you check back with me in, say, ten years time, I should have an answer for you.

Justin: Okay, expect a tweet from me in ten years, then… Which reminds me: I think it’s safe to say that technology has changed a lot in the publishing industry, and one of the things it has changed is accessibility to authors. The link between fans and authors is completely different than it was just 15 years ago. I remember writing letters and waiting weeks to get a response. Now I just drop an e-mail or a message via social network and get a reply, typically directly from the author. Twenty years ago I would have been thrilled to get a pun-filled form letter from Piers Anthony. How important is it for an author to create an online presence in today’s market? I actually think it’s gotten harder for new authors. You are now an essential piece of your publisher’s marketing team.

Jesse: For me the hardest part is staying on top of things without losing myself in the timesink that is the internet. Blogging on my website doesn’t really come naturally to me so I’m rather thankful for the social networking sites that help me stay somewhat plugged in without having to come up with fascinating essays for my website every week. In terms of interacting with fans, I’ve made a lot of friends that way, so again, I mostly see the bright side of it. I remember hearing that Vincent Price supposedly answered every fan letter he ever received, and I think that’s a very worthy goal — so far I’ve stayed on top of it, I think, but in all honesty I tend to be rather sieve-minded, so if anyone out there has dropped me a line and has yet to hear back by all means give me a gentle reminder.

Justin:  I was recently perusing your website and stumbled across the Fan Art section. I have to say your fans really captured the spirit of the Brothers Grossbart. My particular favorite was the masterpiece by Bryce Dayton. I don’t really have any questions about them. I just wanted an excuse to post Bryce’s picture, which makes me laugh every time I look at it.

Jesse: Yeah, Bryce’s piece is a thing of beauty to be sure! I’ve never been much of an artist, so holding contests and such to coerce those more talented than myself to do what I cannot is one of the definite perks of my success.

Justin: One last thing. As a fellow facial hair aficionado, I must say yours is quite bold. Is it necessary for the male author/artist to partake in the art of pogonotomy (god bless Wikipedia)? Personally, I have entered into my Cave-Man period, not completely unlike Picaso’s Rose period. I remind my wife that it is essential to my very being to keep the shrub growing, but I have been known to take bribes in exchange for trimming. The last great shearing netted me an ipod.

Jesse: Shame is what happens when life attacks and you are unprepared — no amount of facial hair will save you at the Crunch. Generally speaking, however, a verdant facial flourish is rarely a bad idea for anyone, regardless of gender, sex, or profession; however, those who stare into the beard should know that beard also stares into them. The most important thing is to neither know nor show fear when the decision to cultivate is settled upon — when a friend expressed concern that his own Darwinian chin might cause strangers to incorrectly presume him a fixed-gear carrying member of the Hipster movement I offered him this quote from a manual I have found cause to consult over the years:

A fundamental aspect of beard-wearing is coming to terms with the fact that certain undesirables will attempt similar facialscape improvements. Do not let this dissuade you, for as Abalone Smythe commented in his editor’s note to the Summer 1874 edition of Moustachios Quarterly, ‘It is the bearer who makes the beard and not, as these dreadful day laborers with their ear wax stiffened curlicues would have it, the lip weasel that makes the gentleman.’ That Smythe was a charter member of the fascist Royal Harumph Party should in no way impinge on the underlying wisdom of his observation that one should tend, as Voltaire would have it, to his own garden.
—Col. Reginald Louche. The State of the Face, and Other Observations on the Decline of the Proper Dandy. Stratford-Upon-Avon, Briarheart Press, 1923.

Justin: Brilliant.

That’s it for now. Once again I’d like to thank Jesse for spending some time with me. I will say that this was the most fun and interesting interview I’ve ever done. Be sure to leave comments and questions for Jesse. Every commenter will be entered to win a copy of The Enterprise of Death, provided by the nice folks at Orbit.

Retired reviewer Robert Rhodes recently had a chat with Alex Bledsoe, author of the Eddie LaCrosse Mysteries and the Memphis Vampires novels. His third Eddie LaCrosse novel, Dark Jenny, will be available in print (Tor) and audio (Blackstone Audio) next week. Tor has generously offered a couple of copies of Dark Jenny for FanLit readers who live in the United States. If you’d like one, just leave a comment below and we’ll randomly choose two winners. Be sure to check back next Tuesday to see if you’re a winner.

Robert Rhodes: I’ve had the pleasure of reading (and reviewing) the first two Eddie LaCrosse novels, The Sword-Edged Blonde and Burn Me Deadly. Dark Jenny is high on my reading list. What’s familiar in the newest tale? What’s different?

Alex Bledsoe: The tone is familiar from the other books, but both the structure and the setting are different. In this case, Eddie tells the story to a group of people snowbound at Angelina’s Tavern, so it’s a flashback to events that happened prior to The Sword-Edged Blonde. The story proper finds Eddie in an isolated island kingdom, where he knows no one, and under suspicion of murder.

RR: Which sounds highly promising. Eddie is a memorable character and narrator. A quick way to describe him might be as a blend of Conan (the Cimmerian primarily, with a dash of O’Brien) and Sam Spade, but that might be an oversimplification. How did you ‘meet’ Eddie? What were your first impressions of him, and were they accurate?

AB: I first thought of Eddie in high school. He was inspired by the laid-back, scruffy Captain Dallas in the original Alien movie. He’s changed over the years (and hopefully gotten deeper), but the mellow world-weary attitude and the deliberately disreputable appearance have remained.

RR: Why a medieval-fantasy setting for Eddie’s adventures – versus a historical-medieval setting, for example, or a Jazz Age-fantasy setting?

AB: I think there’s something primal about the lone hero, sword in hand, facing the bad guys. There’s that direct contact you don’t get with guns or more modern weapons, plus the sense that the individual combat might truly change things for a lot of people. As for fantasy, it allows the presence of magic and otherworldly beings that you couldn’t have in a strictly historical setting. And it makes a nice contrast with the character’s world-weary, pulp detective voice.

RR: One of the distinctive and refreshing features of the first two books was your evocation of the setting. Even though swords and horses abound, you manage to evoke, through dialogue and descriptive details, something other than a generic, medieval-European atmosphere. Are there particular places that have informed or inspired your world-building? Places in your native Tennessee, perhaps?

AB: I want the background to be just that: background. I’ve read a lot of fantasy where the worlds were so incredibly detailed that (a) you couldn’t keep up without a map, index, and glossary and (b) the writer often shortchanged the characters and story. I try to find analogs for the contemporary world, so that even if it’s a little odd, the reader will know immediately what it’s supposed to be without footnotes. For example, I often give “make” and “model” names to Eddie’s swords; it’s clearly an echo of the way a modern detective might talk about guns, but it also tells you a bit about how the society as a whole views their weapons.

RR: Speaking of weapons … in the first two books, Eddie gives and takes his share of wounds and flat-out beatings, and I have to say that the combat scenes seem quite realistic. How do you, or do you, ‘choreograph’ the combat scenes? Do you act any out, with or without your kids? Do you have any personal experience with weapons or martial arts?

AB: I’ve taken some fencing classes, and anytime you have sons, lightsaber battles often occur. I’ve also had a couple of edged-weapon injuries that stuck with me – no pun intended. But the main thing is to just think through cause and effect, remembering the character and what’s been established about him, and to keep it realistic. Eddie doesn’t fight on a whim, and when he does fight, he’s out to win as quickly and efficiently as possible. That means his fights tend to be very short, because if he’s not sure he can win quickly, he won’t fight.

RR: What kind of (gentler) research have you done for Eddie’s stories?

AB: Often it’s not the kind of research you’d expect. Historical detail isn’t really a priority, since I’m creating my own world, but I’m also deliberately working with archetypes and variations of folklore. That means that, for example, in Burn Me Deadly I had to not only create believable dragons, but I had to decide what they meant to the societies that encountered them and kept their memories alive. I read many books on dragons, and learned a lot about what they represented to the people who believed in them.

For Dark Jenny, I read a lot about the meaning of Arthurian stories, how they developed, and what the various societies got from them. The book that let me see the story as I wanted to tell it was The Betrayal of Arthur by Australian author Sara Douglass. It was her nonfiction take on what the legends mean, and while I don’t share her conclusions, her book showed me how I should be thinking about them.

RR: Which leads to three reading questions: Which works do you consider your core, primary influences in terms of fantasy writing? What’s a recently published fantasy novel you’ve enjoyed? What are a couple of your favorite non-fantasy books?

AB: 1. Memory and Dream by Charles de Lint; Stoker‘s Dracula; and White‘s The Once and Future King. Also, given my generation, you can’t discount the influence of the original Star Wars.

2. The Alchemy of Stone by Ekaterina Sedia.

3. Joseph Conrad‘s Heart of Darkness and Ceremony by Robert B. Parker.

RR: Tell us a little about your writing process. Do you prefer a particular desk or coffee shop? A particular time of day? Any special books or knick-knacks you like to keep nearby?

AB: I get up early before everyone else so I can have the house to myself for a while. Because I’m a stay-at-home parent of two small boys, I have to be able to work pretty much anywhere. Often I’ll write in the body of an e-mail so I can easily retrieve it from the nearest computer. When I’m revising, I print out the pages and go to a local coffee shop, where the white noise of conversation helps me concentrate and the lack of distractions (TV, internet, etc.) keeps me on task.

RR: Returning to Eddie … who would be a good candidate to play him in a movie? And does Stefan Rudnicki, the voice of the audiobooks for the series, sound like him?

AB: As I said, he was originally inspired by the 1979-era Tom Skerrit, so that’s who I still see in my mind’s eye. Fans have mentioned Sean Bean, Gerard Butler, and Clive Owen, but among actors in the right age range, I’m partial to Paul Gross, the Canadian actor who starred in the awesome series “Slings and Arrows.”

And Stefan is great. He gets the weariness and the slight amusement perfectly right. I can’t tell you how pleased I am each time a new book comes out and Stefan returns to narrate it.

RR: And finally, assuming Eddie survives in Dark Jenny, can you share anything about his possible further adventures? About how much of his past has been fully explored?

AB: I’m currently writing Eddie IV, which I can summarize in one word (pirates!) and which will give a lot of background, not of Eddie, but of one of the other recurring characters. It also introduces a new professional partner for Eddie, a woman who’s his equal and perhaps even tougher. I’m trying not to repeat settings, story elements and themes, so hopefully it’ll be a whole new ride for my long-time readers.

RR: And a wild, fun ride it’s been so far. Many thanks, Alex, for your time, and on behalf of the FanLit community, congratulations on Eddie’s success and the release of Dark Jenny. Cheers!

Readers, leave a comment below if you’d like a copy of Dark Jenny. We’ll choose two United States readers. Check back next week to see if you’ve won.

Ian Whates is a manically busy man. He has written dozens of short stories, published several novels, and has edited several anthologies. He runs his own publishing company, NewConn Press, though his work has also been published by Angry Robot and Solaris. As if that’s not enough, he is also a director and Chairman of the British Science Fiction Association. Ian’s novel City of Dreams & Nightmare was included in FanLit’s Best of 2010 list (read my review), and its sequel, City of Hope & Despair (read my review) will be released in the US on March 29, 2011. I was grateful to recently catch up with Ian so I could ask him a few questions.

Ryan Skardal: In City of Dreams & Nightmare, you introduced readers to Thaiburley, or the “City of a Hundred Rows.” Thaiburley seems to have a little of everything — arkademics, lizard men, and street-nick gangs. What was the inspiration for this city?

Ian Whates: The initial inspiration was a local news item on the TV about Burghley House, a nearby stately home. The report featured the mansion’s roof, which includes a dramatic array of elegant, slender chimneys and ornate crenelations. There’s a walkway built around the inner circumference of the roof and the views from here — both looking out over the surrounding estate and inward over the roof — are designed to be visually stunning from wherever you’re standing.

I was instantly captivated by this roof and imagined it expanded to cover a vast city. As soon as the report finished, I dashed to the computer and started tapping away. The drama unfolded as I typed:  there’s someone desperate to reach this roof, a place he’s never been to and not supposed to go. He’s a teenager, a thief; he’s already overcome many obstacles to get this far and has nearly reached his goal, but is thwarted at the last by witnessing a murder and being seen by the culprit…

At the time I was 60,000 words into a high fantasy novel, meant to be my debut as a novelist (which I still intend to finish one day) but this new story wouldn’t be denied. It muscled through to the fore of my brain and took over.

I’d read and loved China’s Perdido Street Station a few years previously and Alan Campbell’s Scar Night more recently. Both feature unique cities which inhabit the books in the same way that Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar does in so many of his Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories. I’d always promised myself that one day I’d create my own wondrous and fascinating city, a place both quirky and dangerous… and here was my chance! After that, it was just a case of letting my imagination run riot and taming the results into coherent form.

Click cover to read the first chapter of City of Dreams & Nightmare

I was reminded of Perdido Street Station while reading your work, particularly because many find China Miéville’s work politically charged. New Crobuzon’s leadership seems so hopelessly corrupt that it demands revolution. Thaiburley, with its upper classes actually living above the lower classes, seems to have a lot of potential for political tension. Can readers expect to see a class conflict in City of Light & Shadows?

Conflict, no, but tension, yes. As you say, with the ruling classes living in the Heights and the poorest living in the City Below, there is a gulf, as expressed in the first book when the Kite Guard Tylus arrives in the under-City expecting co-operation but is met with cynicism, and all but ignored. It’s also evident in the hatred that still exists in the City Below for the Blade, the government’s chief enforcers. However, in Thaiburley, class isn’t the only factor that determined the positioning of the Rows. So, for example, the Sanitation Workers and Refuse Burners Row is towards the middle of the city, while the Shopping Row is at a low level. The latter for reasons of practicality. Produce enters Thaiburley either at ground level into the Market Row or via the river into the City Below. Far more sensible for the Shopping Row to be just above these than struck fifty Rows away.

You’re right, China portrays the political corruption of New Crobuzon’s leadership brilliantly. In fact, politically corrupt or wholly inept leadership is what a reader expects in these situations, which is why I very deliberately went the other way. That’s been done, and done very well. So Thaiburley’s government is essentially benevolent and well-meaning. Yes, there are those who are corrupt, self-serving and greedy for power, which provides the springboard for the drama in the first book, but essentially the Council want the best for their city. They’re just overworked and unable to deal with things or even notice everything as swiftly as they’d like, particularly in the City Below, which is so far removed from their immediate environment. In book 3, the Prime Master attempts to explain this to an unreceptive Kat, who grew up fighting in the gladiatorial hellhole known as the Pits — eventually closed down by the government but allowed to exist for too many years before it was.

So, yes, there are political tensions, but they’re not the driving force of the narrative in this particular story arc. That’s provided by a conflict that goes much deeper and has been around for far longer. But who knows what might feature in future visits to the City of 100 Rows?

Thaiburley is such a rich, vibrant setting, so I was surprised when Tom and Dewar left it. What made you decide to send Tom’s band out of the city in City of Hope & Despair?

Thaiburley is a vital element of the story and I was determined this should remain the case in the second book as it is in the first. The city’s continued presence and development occur in the two plotlines featuring Kat and the Tattooed Men on the one hand and the Prime Master on the other. However, I didn’t wish the City of 100 Rows to be viewed as an isolated environment. I wanted readers to appreciate that there’s a world beyond Thaiburley’s towering walls. By having Tom, Dewar, Mildra and Kohn follow the course of the Thair, I’m able to show the river in various moods — deep, broad, slow moving waterway, swollen flood plain, cascading mountain torrent — and take the protagonists through a variety of diverse cultures along the way. By moving part of the action beyond the city, I can bring in elements such as the Mud Skipper and the skimmers which would never have fitted inside Thaiburley. It also enables me to expand on Dewar’s past.  Both this and revelations regarding Thaiburley’s origins, which the trip ultimately reveals, become increasingly relevant as the series progresses.

Many fantasies focus on the perspective of a single hero that discovers his powers during adolescence. In City of Hope & Despair, you devote a lot of pages to the perspectives of Dewar and Kat, not to mention several other characters. What was it like trying to write your story from so many perspectives?

It all comes down to perspective. Before embarking on a novel, I’d spent a couple of years focusing on short stories (about 40 published in various venues to date). In a short story there’s only scope for a limited amount of world building and it’s comparatively easy to keep the narrative tight and create a convincing scenario from one character’s perspective. In a novel, particularly one with the amount of action, political intrigue and differing motivations present in the City of 100 Rows, things get a great deal more complicated. I knew that if I told the story simply from one viewpoint — Tom’s, say — there would be a lot going on ‘off screen’; things vital to the plot but not in Tom’s presence or hearing. With just one central character, the only ways to inform the reader of these would be to either include a lot of info-dumping, or to feature the voice of an ‘all-seeing narrator’, neither of which appealed. So I went for more than one narrative viewpoint, in order to provide a fuller story in the most natural way I could. Besides, I like Dewar, Kat and Tylus as characters, and enjoy writing about them.

The only real difficulty with this approach comes when two narratives overlap. Where a scene has to be viewed from two different perspectives, it’s vital that you say something new with the second and don’t dwell on what’s already been covered in the first. To be honest, I enjoy working with a limited number of viewpoints (three or four) rather than just one. You have to keep tight rein on the respective timelines, but I think it helps to keep things fresh for both the writer and, hopefully, the reader.

Take a peak at City of Hope & Despair:

THE CITY OF A HUNDRED ROWS books have been published by Angry Robot, and The Noise Within has been published by Solaris. You also run an independent publisher NewCon Press. What has it been like to write for two different publishers while also running NewCon Press?

A number of responses spring to mind, not all of them polite… ‘Manic’ is probably the simplest, though by no means adequate. NewCon Press started by accident. I’d intended to compile, edit and publish (none of which I’d ever done before) just one anthology, as a fund raiser. The process proved an incredibly steep learning curve, and seeing the finished book (Time Pieces) was so exhilarating that suddenly all the sweat, anguish and frustration involved were forgotten, and I thought, ‘Hey, I could do this again!’

Five years and seventeen titles later, here I am, having edited and published most of the UK’s top genre names (Brian Aldiss, Christopher Priest, Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds, Gwyneth Jones, Tanith Lee, Neal Asher, M John Harrison, Ken MacLeod, Adam Roberts, Brian Stableford, Ian Watson, etc) plus a few non-Brits (Kelley Armstrong, Gail Z Martin, Pat Cadigan, Tricia Sullivan — both honorary Brits — etc) and about to launch two new titles that will only add to those lists (with stories from Neil Gaiman, Charles Stross, Dan Abnett, James Lovegrove, Lauren Beukes…).

As for writing two different series for two different publishers, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed doing so. The two are very different in their settings. The NOISE books are space opera with a twist, the THE CITY OF A HUNDRED ROWS series is urban fantasy with steampunk overtones and SF underpinning. I’ve written the different volumes alternately, which has helped to keep things fresh. Hopefully the readers will agree. With the second volume of each imminent — City of Hope & Despair in March, The Noise Revealed in April — we’ll soon find out.

Juggling the writing, the editing and the publishing (plus other commitments) is time consuming to say the least — I tend to do around 60 hours most weeks, more when the pressure’s really on — but this is work I love. Yes, there are frustrations and aggravations at times, but that’s life.

Fans of THE CITY OF A HUNDRED ROWS books can expect to see a third and final installment in the series, City of Light & Shadows, soon. However, in the meantime, you are also editing several anthologies. Do you find it difficult to go from editing to writing and back again?

The simple answer is no. You’re right; I’m currently compiling and editing four anthologies — two for my own NewCon Press, a new ‘Mammoth’ title for Constable and Robinson/Running Press (co-edited with Ian Watson), and a new anthology for Solaris. I’m also writing the third CITY book, due to be released in spring 2012. Deadlines for all of these are looming large, and I can’t pretend I’m on schedule with each and every one of them, but I’ll get there.

The writing has to take priority. That’s what I am first and foremost: an author. However, after you’ve tapped away for a number of hours, immersed in your own world, it’s actually quite refreshing to step back and consider somebody else’s work for a while. Nor do I find it difficult to slip into ‘editorial mode’. I’ve spent so much time editing in recent years that I find myself doing it in my head with almost everything I read. It’s difficult to switch off rather than on. Yes, there are times when editorial commitments have to come to the fore, when I set the writing to one side and concentrate on working on a bloc of submissions, but even that provides a break from the usual routine. So far, it’s all worked pretty well.

In addition to your editing and your writing, you are a director in the Science Fiction Writers of America and the British Science Fiction Association. It seems like you keep an unusually busy schedule. Do you plan to branch out even further in the future?

Just to set the record straight, I was a director of SFWA — I stepped down a year or so ago, replaced by the excellent Australian author Sean Williams, who I’m sure will do a much better job than I did. To be honest, this was one commitment too far. I never had the time to devote to the role that it deserves and when I did try to involve myself I was generally way out of my depth. I recall in particular being constantly urged to participate in a debate about the pros and cons of the organisation relocating its registered office from one US state to another, with emphasis on the intricacies of the tax implications… Sorry, but I live in the UK, and have no knowledge whatsoever of the different tax systems operated by US states, so I found it impossible to offer an informed opinion.

Yes, I am still a director of the British Science Fiction Association, and, indeed, have been its chairman for the past three years. This does involve a considerable commitment, but at least I know what I’m talking about here. I’m a great advocate of the BSFA and all that the organisation stands for; it’s entirely about the fans — those people who watch, read and play SF — and let’s face it, we’re all fans at heart. Yes, authors, editors and agents are members, but that’s because they’re fans too. In 2008 the BSFA celebrated its 50^th Anniversary, making it the longest established Science Fiction organisation in the world, which is quite something. I’m not sure how much longer I’ll have the time to devote to the role and don’t want to neglect another position as I did with SFWA, but I’ll keep doing this for as long as I believe I have something to contribute.

As for branching out further… if anything, I’m planning the opposite. In recent years I’ve been one of the two key organisers (along with the inimitable Mr Ian Watson) of the NewCon conventions here in the UK (roughly every two years), which have featured guests such as Iain Banks, Ken MacLeod, Storm Constantine, Paul Cornell, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Pat Cadigan, and Liz Williams, not to mention contributions from Alan Moore, Gwyneth Jones and others. For the most recent (October 2010) I found myself with so many roles towards the end — programming, hotel liaison, membership secretary, treasurer, entertainments officer, etc — that it became ridiculous. For the weeks leading up to the con I had to ignore everything else and devote myself entirely to the event, which proved incredibly stressful and I was a nightmare to be around. So, for the moment, my con-running days are over.

Okay, here’s a question we often like to ask: Is there a question you wish interviewers would ask but they never do? If so, what is it, and what’s the answer?

Hmmm… is there…? Where do you get your ideas from? Good Lord, no. Perhaps, what are you planning next? (An SF adventure romp best summed up as ‘Sherlock Holmes meets Firefly’) But no, that’s been asked before. Okay, as a contrast to anything else we’ve covered, how about: How do negative reviews affect you?

With both my ‘first’ novels, The Noise Within (Solaris) and City of Dreams & Nightmare (Angry Robot) I’ve been very lucky. All the initial reviews were highly positive, enthusiastic even. However, that was never going to last. When I write a book, I set out to create the sort of novel I’d want to read, which I’d be happy to shell-out my own precious cash for. People’s tastes differ, and of course what appeals to me won’t appeal to all. I knew when I started writing that not everyone was going to like the results and that’s fine. Criticism is healthy, and negative opinions are just as valid as the positive ones. So long as all involved realise that they are just that:  opinions. The person responsible for the first truly negative review I received subsequently blogged to say that his conclusion — that this was ‘a bad book’ — wasn’t an opinion at all, it was fact, even going on to reference some of the existing highly positive reviews and dismiss them as inexplicable and irrelevant. That level of arrogance is very frustrating because as an author you daren’t reply. You just have to shrug and get on with it. I’m very passionate about what I write. Of course I’d love everyone to love my books, but in the real world I’ll settle for most people doing so. To date, that seems to be the case. The onus is on me to keep delivering. I’ll do my best.

Readers will be given quite a few opportunities to keep reading Ian’s work this year. City of Hope & Despair is out in March, and The Noise Revealed, will be released to US readers in April. NewConn Press will also release two anthologies edited by Ian, Further Conflicts and Fables From the Fountain, in April and May, respectively. Finally, Solaris Rising, an anthology for Solaris, is scheduled for release in November. I hope you enjoyed learning more about Ian Whates.

As usual, commenters are entered into a drawing for a book from our stacks.

I recently had the opportunity to chat with Alan Dean Foster about his new book Predators I have Known. Mr. Foster is a highly regarded and best selling author with over 30 years worth of published material. He is considered to be a Grand Master of movie novelization. He wrote the official novels for some movies you might recognize like Star Wars, Aliens, Star Trek, Transformers,  and many others.  He is also the author of the popular Humanx Commonwealth novels, as well as the fantasy series Spellsinger. He is a prolific traveler and explorer, drawing inspiration for his stories from the many exotic places he’s visited. Predators I have known is a collection of some of the more harrowing encounters he’s had over the years. I have read Predators and enjoyed it a great deal, so I jumped at the chance to talk to him about it.

Justin: Thank you for taking the time to do an interview with me. You have quite a following in the SFF community and it’s an honor to get chance to ask you some questions. I want to ask you specifically about the book, but I also want to ask  about traveling in general. I’m sure you plan on having more adventures in the near future. Why did you decide to write Predators now?

Alan Dean Foster: People have been after me for years to write a travel book. I could never think of an approach that interested me enough to sit down and start writing one. It occurred to me that everyone likes stories about animals. And the more drama, the better.  So one day I just started jotting down the encounters I’ve been lucky enough to have, and this expanded into a book. I’m certainly not done with travel, or with critters.

Justin: The tips and instructions, along with names and specific locales all gave Predators I Have Known an almost “travel guide” feel at times. Was this intentional? As an aspiring traveler I appreciated the tips and advice sprinkled throughout the narrative.

ADF: Absolutely intentional. More than anything else I want readers to have the feeling that they’re visiting these places with me, and that if they so desire they can visit them themselves. I wanted to show that you don’t have to be a funded scientist or a reporter for National Geographic to experience some of the great places and challenges that the planet has to offer.

Justin: That was something else I appreciated about the novel. All these amazing encounters you describe, and most of them are quite accessible to anyone who truly desires to experience them. Which reminds me a of an ad campaign The Travel Channel ran a few years ago where they would tell the viewer to “Be a Traveler, not a Tourist.” In your opinion, what’s the difference?

ADF: Tourists tend to travel in groups, like grapes. They follow more or less prearranged schedules that prevent them from delving deep into the places they visit. Whereas a traveler takes his or her time, lingers over that which piques their interest, and is able to skim over that which doesn’t engage them. A traveler takes the side roads, a tourist hits the high spots.

Justin: I’m not going to ask you your favorite place, I know from the book that’s an impossible question for you to answer. I would however like to ask which place, people, or animal surprised you the most? Surprised you by not being at all what you expected or had imagined?

ADF: I’d have to say northern Borneo, and sadly so. The days of Alfred Russell Wallace have been subsumed in humanity’s mad dash to the future. Flying into airports in cities with exotic monikers like Kota Kinabalu and Kuching only to find that they’re more modern and flashy than the airport in your home town is a bit disconcerting. Being able to access the internet from the depths of the jungle, or hitchhike back to your hotel after viewing orangutans in the wild, deflates the sense of exoticism that you previously connected with such places. The world is shrinking far faster than most people believe. All you need is to see an AC/DC concert shirt on a Huli tribesman in highland Papua New Guinea, or observe an Amazonian Indian on his cell phone.

Justin: I remember being in Boy Scouts and thinking that all you need to live in the wilds was a compass and a hatchet. Now I’m pretty sure cellphone has been added to that list. When traveling there are things you should always have on hand. I tell people to bring plenty of socks. Douglas Adams might tell you to bring a towel. What does Alan Dean Foster say?

ADF: Because the world has grown so small and commerce so widespread, you can usually buy much of what you might need at your destination. Always have with you (besides any personally necessary medication) aspirin and Imodium. I take a small, cheap, battery-powered electric toothbrush. A couple of band-aids. Daily vitamin (fills in what you don’t get from strange diets). Emergency dental swabs (for toothache). Coagulating powder (stops bleeding from most any minor cause). A compact and cheap rain poncho. Small roll of duct tape (repairs backpacks, suitcases… and sandal straps).

There’s more, but it depends where you’re going. Don’t need leech socks, for example, in Sweden.

Justin: Any plans to write more non-fiction in the same vein as Predators I Have Known?

ADF: I’ve been fortunate enough to have a lot of interaction with non-carnivorous animals as well as predators. I reckon that would make an interesting companion volume. Everything from hoatzins to hippos.

Justin: You have an incredible body of work, and a legion of fans. What if I were new to Alan Dean Foster, where would you recommend I start?

ADF: For SF, For Love of Mother-Not (the first Flinx & Pip book). For fantasy, Spellsinger (the first in the series). For horror, Into the Out of. For any of the foregoing, or just general interest, any of my short story collections.

Justin: Now I’m going to go a little off topic since I have the attention of a veteran author. I hear all the time about the publishing industry being in its death throes. Are e-books the end of physical books? Can they co-exist in the future market? Since Predators is exclusively digital, I’m guessing you’ve probably thought about this.

ADF: I believe there will always be physical books. E-books don’t look like much on a shelf. With an e-book you acquire memory but not physicality. There will always be a market for people who want to hold as well as read a book. The number of people who buy an e-book and then go out and buy a physical copy for their permanent collection has been something of a surprise to publishers, I think.

Justin: Does your curiosity and love for the outdoors and traveling have roots from anything specific from your childhood, or maybe your family?

ADF: I grew up reading Scrooge McDuck comics. Here was this little old man, with feathers.  He needed to wear glasses and he used a cane. None of which stopped him from traveling all over the world and having the most marvelous adventures. I figured if an old man could do it, so could I. And thanks to Scrooge, I never had any fear of growing old. Still don’t. My family was exclusively, almost obsessively, urban. When my mother got my sister and I our one dog, she got a basenji, an African dog that doesn’t bark. I still remember her reaction when an oppossum appeared in the walnut tree in our San Fernando Valley backyard. You would’ve thought it was a T-rex. I wanted to try and pet it (I was six at the time). For whatever reason, I’ve always been fascinated by the natural world, to the point of ultimately inventing dozens that I can only visit in my imagination.

If I wasn’t a writer, I’d be a tour guide.

Justin: Thank you again for chatting with me. I highly recommend Predators I have known to anyone who enjoys traveling, animals, or any good true to life adventure stories. I found your accounts to be exciting, humble, and informative… an excellent combination. Your fans will certainly not be disappointed, and I am looking forward to more. Predators I have known is being published as an E-riginal from Open Road Media. It is available for purchase at Amazon.

FanLit welcomes urban fantasy author Allison Pang to the hot seat. Her debut novel, A Brush of Darkness, was released in January. Today she chats with us about ballads, World of Warcraft, and whether it’s a good idea to strike bargains with faeries. Leave a comment for a chance to win a copy of A Brush of Darkness (U.S. addresses).

KELLY: A Brush of Darkness draws upon the old faerie ballads, such as “True Thomas.” How did you first become interested in ballads, and how did you decide to incorporate them into a novel?

ALLISON: I first learned about that poem from the back of the Brian Froud/Alan Lee book Faeries when I was about ten or eleven. My aunt had a copy and I was so fascinated with it that whenever we would visit I would pretty much just hide myself in a corner and look at it. Eventually, she just gave it to me. As far as using the True Thomas ballad itself, it wasn’t until I started thinking about the CrossRoads as a concept and the division of the OtherFolk that it came into play.

KELLY: When we’re all finished reading your terrific book, what should we read next? Or, to phrase it another way: Read any good books lately?  ; )

ALLISON: Of course! I’ve just finished up Jill Myles’ latest, My Fair Succubi, and I’m part way through J.R. Ward’s Crave. Next on tap are Sherwood Smith’s Inda and the rest of Seanan McGuire’s OCTOBER DAYE series. (Have I mentioned how much I love my Kindle? I love my Kindle. Love it.)

KELLY: World of Warcraft figures in the plot of A Brush of Darkness in a hilarious way. Do you play MMORPGs? If so, how do they influence your writing — other than by cracking me up in hysterical laughter?

ALLISON: Oh yeah. I actually am a WoW player, but that’s about the only MMORPG I have time for these days, though I’ve certainly dabbled in others. The rest of the time I break up between things like standard RPGs like Dragon Age or Mass Effect or games like Civ V or the Sims.

I don’t know if they influence my writing directly — the WoW scene in BoD I sort of threw out there as a bit of a joke. It’s had mixed reactions. Some people love it and some people find it terribly cheeseball.

KELLY: What would your little corner of the dream realm look like?

ALLISON: Heh. A stone cottage beside the sea.  : )

KELLY: When a human becomes a TouchStone, they gain certain perks (like not aging) but also become subject to certain restrictions (as in the case of Abby, who cannot travel beyond Portsmyth). If you had the chance to become a TouchStone, would you do it? If so, what stipulations would you insist upon?

ALLISON: You know, it would totally depend. I could see maybe trying something short term like a night or so, but unless the perk was *really* good (bacon for life? LOL), I don’t think long term would work for me. I suspect most of these bargains have a way of biting people in the ass, even if it’s not intentional. So… no, I probably wouldn’t.

KELLY: Thanks for stopping by FanLit, Allison!

Readers, leave a comment for a chance to win a copy of A Brush of Darkness (U.S. addresses).

Joining us today is UK author Mark Chadbourn. Mark has a distinguished career as a journalist for The Times,  a screen writer for the BBC, and a writer of award-winning fantasy. I came to know his work last year when Pyr sent me a copy of The Silver Skull. Pyr has a knack for publishing good-looking books, and this one in particular looked sharp with its snazzy Chris McGrath cover. The Silver Skull ended up being one of my picks for FanLit’s Favorites 2009. Since then I’ve followed Mark on his blog and I’ve have consumed more of his work. Book two of The Swords of Albion, The Scar-Crow Men releases this week. I was excited to get a chance to talk with Mark, and to give FanLit readers an opportunity to get to know him a little better. Pyr has offered to give a copy of The Silver Skull and its sequel The Scar-Crow Men to one lucky commenter, so I won’t keep you any longer. Here is my chat with Mark Chadbourn:

Justin: Thanks so much, Mark, for stopping by. I’ve been a fan since first reading The Silver Skull, and this interview is long overdue. I was surprised once when you sniffed out my review on my zero-hits-a-day personal blog. I realized then how much of a double edged sword it must be to be an author who is adept at navigating the internet. On one hand you have instant access to the pulse of millions of readers; on the other hand you have instant access to the pulse of millions of readers… Ha! Is it difficult to not keep setting Google alerts, or to resist keeping a constant eye on your Amazon ranking?

Mark: I don’t actually have Google Alerts set or read any online reviews unless I am specifically pointed to them or stumble across them by accident. (I don’t quite know how I came across yours). On the one hand, who cares what people say about your work. And on the other hand I’m sure it can be absolutely soul-destroying if you actually go out there searching for reviews. You only have to look at Amazon where most reviews these days are five-stars or one-star. No book is for everyone and you’re going to come across people who loathe what you do. What’s the point in reading that? Plus, these days just about everyone who buys a book posts their thoughts/review/whatever online. The net is like a bar. You’ve got the couple in the corner having a quiet conversation, a few people debating some topic of interest, lots of people having fun in a raucous way and a few shaven-headed, piggy-eyed tattooed guys at the bar bellowing their opinion into people’s faces. Would you really walk in there and say, “What do you think of me? What do you think of my work?” And if you did, what kind of answer do you think you’d get? Apart from being sickeningly needy, I can imagine it can actually undermine the very skills you need to do the writing job. I have a handful or reviewers I respect and trust and I look to their opinions to see how I can improve my work. That’s good enough for me.

If I am pointed towards a thoughtful review of my work, I will often contact the writer to let them know I appreciate them taking the time. And those insightful reviewers do help me focus my thoughts and look at areas of improvement. They deserve to be told they’ve helped me.

Justin: I had never actually thought of the “internet as a bar” comparison, but it certainly fits. I see a lot of authors in a state of information overload. They get overwhelmed with data. I have a Google alert for everything you can imagine. If I ever reach even a modicum of notoriety someday I’ll be sure to keep your words in mind. The internet is changing a lot of things in the publishing industry, for instance, right now it’s apparent that digital publishing is a force to be reckoned with. With that in mind where do you see the publishing industry going in the next 10 years, in particular with SFF publishing?

Mark: When people answer this kind of question, they tend to look at the issue in a vacuum when it should really be seen in the context of all the tumultuous changes that are sweeping through society. The change in the last ten years has exceeded that in the last hundred years, and the rate of change is only increasing — so trying to predict ten years into the future is… a little demanding. A consequence of that is that you can no longer look back to predict what’s going to happen — all the rules have changed. Certainly, most media companies, businesses and politicians are struggling to cope with losing their old models. Technology isn’t only altering the way we consume and interact within communities in an unprecedented manner, it’s also changing the very way we think. One result is people now want information and entertainment easily and immediately. Ebooks serve that function and are in tune with the way people increasingly live their lives. Paper books, not so much.

Certainly, no one really likes change, so intellectually they attempt to hang on to the things they know. People love books, the touch of them, the smell of them. They don’t want to lose them as artefacts. Everyone uses this as an argument why they’ll never go away, but they’re missing the economics argument (one of my areas of study at university). It doesn’t matter if ten million people want to keep buying books if the profit model demands ten million and one. I think the tipping point for the moment when publishers decide paper versions are no longer viable is much closer than many people realise.

My old UK publisher announced in a recent email to investors that currently a quarter of all SFF books are now digital. The growth rate is phenomenal, mainly because our genre has readers who are early adopters. Because of the correlation between technology and the reader profile, I think SF paper books will go relatively soon. Fantasy will take a little longer.

The result of the shift to ebooks will mean greater choice for the reader. I used to work, briefly, in the music industry and you only need to look what’s happened there. Broad genres no longer exist. There is no “rock” consumer, no “dance/soul” — there are hundreds of sub-genres and not a huge amount of crossover. You’re already seeing some of that in fantasy now. People who will only read books with dragons, secondary world novels, whatever. Diversity will lead to a growing readership in the end, I think, because eventually everyone will have their own particular taste catered for.

Justin: I see your point with the SF books, but I say never underestimate us book nerds and our sentimental nature. It will be difficult to get rid of  paperbacks. Though I agree that many publishers will eventually reach a point where they are deciding whether or not to continue printing physical books. Personally I haven’t jumped on the e-book bandwagon just yet. It’s funny that my mom adopted it earlier than I did. Let’s move on to another effect of digital publishing: piracy. What about file sharing/piracy? How much of an impact does it have on the industry, in your opinion? I’ve read the pros and cons to both sides of the debate. Is there room for a middle ground here?

Mark: It’s a problem, certainly. The vast majority of authors don’t make a great deal of cash and every lost sale impacts them in two ways — in their capability to put food on the table for their families and, ultimately, to continue writing for a living, and in the likelihood that publishers won’t commission any more work from them. But I don’t think it’s a great problem. There’s a study out there which says the 24-34 generation is happy reading pirated work, but the coming 16-24 generation takes what some would call a more, perhaps, moral approach. They’d rather pay. I do think there are a lot of people who will try an author if the work is free, rather than risk money on something they might not like, and they might then be prepared to pay for future work. But it would be good if that was a transaction that the author and reader agreed was acceptable. The other point is that a great deal of pirated work looks absolutely terrible… poorly formatted… If you’re happy going crazy trying to make sense of the words, then fine, but I’d rather have something I can, you know, read. In the near future, I think publishers and authors will be adding value to authentic books to make them more attractive to the paying customer.

Justin: I want to ask you a few questions specifically about the Swords of Albion series. You are currently writing a series of blog posts called “Finding Fantasy in the Past” and it’s answering some of the questions I have about the historical background of your novels and your motivation for choosing the Elizabethan era as a setting. I recommend that our readers check out these posts on your blog, but my question is, besides the Elizabethan era (late 16th century) is there any time frame in human history you’d particularly like to tackle?

Mark: Every era is endlessly fascinating. History is rich, and human endeavour is a place where you could lose yourself with the same sense of wonder you find in fantasy. I would point to my novel Jack of Ravens, which Pyr will be reprinting next year (as the first of the last three books in the sequence that began with Age of Misrule). It features the central character traveling across different eras of human history, which were all my particular favourites — what we call Celtic times, Roman Britain, the Elizabethan Age (it has the first appearance of Will Swyfte), Victorian times, WWII and the Sixties. I could easily set a novel in all those times.

Justin: You try to keep things very real in your stories. If there is ever a Fairy uprising I will be grabbing my Chadbourn books and keeping them for reference. I remember thinking how refreshing it was for an author to actually consider how a 16th century person would react to seeing something like an actual Fae manifesting magic in front of their face. They’d lose their damn minds. It’s such an integral part of your stories. What made you decide to take that into account, when nearly every fantasy I’ve ever read goes around it somehow?

Mark: I used to be a journalist and in my daily life I’m firmly rooted in the real world. I’m interested in psychology, among other things, so I’m always looking at how people react to experiences. Most of the books I’ve written are in some way set at the point where fantasy slams into reality. I think that space is the most interesting place to be. The contrast is the thing. The more reality you have, the more fantastic the other stuff appears. The more bleak something is, the more uplifting the eventual success. I think in this way fantasy says a lot about who we are, as human beings, about our place in the world — and the genre doesn’t have to be as purely escapist as some of its detractors say. Just because it says “fantasy” on the spine doesn’t mean you have to have people acting in an unrealistic manner.

It also helps that I’ve studied a great deal of folklore, including accounts of people who claim to have experiences with things they consider to be the Fae, with that strangeness and madness and creepiness. Most of them were truly, truly disturbed by what they thought they encountered.

Justin: I agree, people often forget that traditional folk tales do not usually paint such a nice picture of fairies. If Tinkerbell were true to form, she’d be spending her time floating children over London and then dropping them to their deaths on a nightly basis. The fairies in your stories are really quite frightening, especially in the Swords of Albion. What was it that led you to choose the more sinister portrayal of the Fae in your books?

Mark: A lot of my writing is based on the folklore that’s existed around the UK and the rest of Europe for millennia. In the old stories, say the ones from the Viking Age or the early medieval period, the otherworldly was a source of great fear. It was responsible for everything that went wrong in people’s lives. It’s only in very modern times where fairies were considered something for the nursery. For most of history, people had all sorts of tokens to ward away the attention of the ‘Good Neighbours’ or the “Fair Folk’. Even saying their name could draw them to you, it was said.

Our stories of fairies are really degraded memories of the Celtic gods. As the culture changed and the Christian religion crept in, these powerful, mercurial, dangerous gods who lived underhill or beneath lakes and the sea, in the liminal zones, became smaller, magical beings who were just as powerful and dangerous. The old religions existed for a long time after Christianity took root, and people would often have a cross and a token of Woden hanging in the same house, so these things weren’t forgotten. They just changed. For instance, when you look at the development of the word ‘leprachaun’ it comes from the Gaelic for ‘Little Leaping Lugh’ and Lugh was the Celtic sun god. So fairies always were powerful, frightening beings who could shape our lives and drive us to madness — I’m just getting back to basics.

Justin: After The Scar-Crow Men, what’s next on your agenda? I believe Swords of Albion is meant to be a trilogy. Will it be the traditional fantasy trilogy of 4 to 6 books, or are you really going to stick to the just-three-books kind of trilogy? Will Swyfte is such a great character and the world you’ve created there is stunningly detailed. I just can’t imagine there only being three novels taking place there.

Mark: I’m just starting work on The Devil’s Looking Glass, which is the final contracted work for Swords of Albion, at the moment. But the books were never conceived as a trilogy — they were simply standalone stories which describe the battles in a greater war. You can come into them at any point without needing prior knowledge. Three were contracted because that’s the way the publishing industry works, but I always considered the possibility of writing more if the interest is there — and it seems to be. There’s also movie interest. And there are so many other stories to tell with these characters in that world. I’ve barely touched on some very interesting parts of the globe in the Elizabethan age. Plus, I do very much like Will Swyfte as a character and there are some secrets in his past I would love to get to.

Justin: A Will Swyfte movie would be phenomenal. I want a part as “Random Terrified Villager #1”. It’s good to hear the number limit on the books thus far is only a contractual limitation rather than a creative one. After reading The Silver Skull and interacting with you on your site, it inspired me to write some on my own. I’ve written nothing I’d ever share with anyone besides my dog, but it’s writing nonetheless. As a writer, who do you look up to, or which other writers inspire you?

Mark: Within the genre, Ray Bradbury, Michael Moorcock, John Crowley, Stephen King, Alan Garner, Alan Moore — all helped shaped my interests, along with the Weird Tales writers like Lovecraft, Howard and the rest. Outside the genre, Umberto Eco, John Steinbeck, Iain Banks, and a lot of crime novels. I like to read very broadly, including a great many non-fiction books. I think it’s self-destructive for a writer to read only within his or her chosen genre.

Justin: What’s the daily routine like at the Chadbourn household? Do you have a certain way you get prepared to write?

Mark: I divide my time between writing novels and screenwriting — I’m a writer for BBC Drama — so I do a lot of writing. The trick, then, is to find ways to maintain levels of concentration and creativity. I do that with a lot of variation in the daily routine so it doesn’t become boring. Writing is great and it would be a terrible shame if it started to feel like a job. I always work on a MacBook so I can move around — sometimes in my study, in a cafe, in the pub, in the garden or a park in summer. And I always listen to music on earphones while I’m working. it helps set the mood sometimes, but it also keeps the outside world at bay, allowing me to sink into that deep concentration you need to write. Most of the time I don’t even hear the music that’s on. Then I always break for some kind of exercise — I run five miles a day, or workout at the gym, or do yoga. The endorphin rush is an aide to creativity.

I try to start at 9am and work through the day, but sometimes I like to write at night because that feels like a better fit for me. Not very social though! Stephen King talks about writing being a muscle that you have to exercise and that’s true. I’ve found that the more you write the more you can write, and the better you write. It’s easy for writers to slip into the ‘waiting for the muse’ mindset — I know one writer who does 100 words a day and thinks that’s a good day’s work. There’s a huge amount of pretension around writing, that doing a small amount each day equates with crafting. In the end, it’s just laziness. The quality of writing doesn’t come from the amount of time spent on each sentence but on the depth of concentration that can be maintained. If you can sink in to deep concentration for hours you can produce vast amounts of quality work. But that varies from writer to writer.

Justin: As an extension to the above question, what’s your process for writing? I know you are a heavy researcher. Do you outline a novel before writing it out, or do you just dive right in and go? Any particular tools you use to help you write?

Mark: The amount of research I do for these historical fantasies is huge, yes. Books, libraries, museums, galleries, locations. But with the crafting of the plot, I work with “tent-poles” to hold up the structure of the story: I know how it starts, the important events and turning points along the way and how it ends. Among all that there’s a lot of space. The heavy-lifting is always done by the unconscious — that’s where the really creative, surprising things arise from while you’re writing and you’ve got to allow space for that to intrude. I find heavily outlined works become dry and often formulaic. You have to have the quirks and the randomness that make a story come to life. As to tools, apart from the MacBook, I always carry a Moleskine notebook when I’m out in the field which is great for capturing details and impressions. I record sounds and notes on my iPhone. I use Evernote for clipping webpages and Dropbox for backing up work and working across devices. I mainly use Scrivener for the actual writing — books and scripts.

Justin: You’re responsible for my addiction to Evernote. I’m constantly adding various reminders, notes, and ideas to it. I can access it from my phone, my PC, my Ipod… it’s awesome.  My last question: Any plans to drop over to the US for a visit and a book signing or two? I love when people ask an author when they will be visiting [insert far away geographical location], like you have your own private jet standing by for your book tour. Maybe the people at Pyr Books will let you borrow theirs.

Mark: I’ve been to the US a few times in the past, and I’ve been meaning to come over the last couple of years — my editor Lou Anders has been nagging me to go to DragonCon — but pressure of work kept me away. I definitely plan to come in the near future, though. I want to set a few weeks aside to travel around.

Justin: Whenever that happens be sure to let us know. DragonCon is the ultimate destination for fantasy nerds the world over. Hopefully someday FanLit can send a contingent there. We can meet with you and the Pyr crew and ride around in their jet. I want to thank you again for stopping by. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Good luck on the new book, and all the great things you have going on!

Hope everyone enjoyed the interview. Don’t forget to leave a comment for you chance to win a copy of both The Silver Skull and The Scar-Crow Men.

Rebecca, who lives in New Zealand, recently met with NZ author Helen Lowe to discuss the release of Ms. Lowe’s second novel The Heir of Night (first novel in her series The Wall of Night). Read Rebecca’s reviews of The Heir of Night and Helen Lowe’s children’s novel, Thornspell, on our Helen Lowe page.

REBECCA: What was the first glimmer of inspiration that you had that eventually led to The Wall of Night? To be more specific, one of the book’s major ideas is that of the Wall and the Houses that live there, whose task it is to guard Haarth from the Swarm. What was the thought-process behind the concept of the Wall?

HELEN: My very first inspiration came when I was about nine years old and read Alan Garner’s Elidor, which is about a world trapped in darkness. I was living in Singapore at the time, where twilights are very swift and come complete with bats and other intriguing — to a NZ kid abroad — creatures. The real world experience and the world of the book combined to spark the idea of a twilit world (as opposed to the absolute darkness of Elidor.) The idea stayed with me, even after my return to NZ, and then when I first read The Lord of the Rings (at about age 14), the background story of Beren and Luthien also very much caught my imagination. My envisaging of their world was also built around a twilit glamour of power and mystery, which I began to translate into my own imagined world, with a range of stories and characters worked around it. Those initial stories were very Tolkien and Lewis influenced, and also drew on the Norse myths, which I knew well enough to recognise as strongly informing Tolkien’s world — especially it’s heroic history (e.g. Luthien and Beren, Turin and Hurin.)

The idea of the alien Derai garrisoning their mountainous and wind-blasted shield wall on the world of Haarth came a lot later again, when one day I thought: “What if the people fighting the ancient enemy were not defending their own world, but were a kind of alien invader themselves? And what if their society was not clear cut and certain, but deeply fractured?” I jotted those first ideas down, together with an initial concept of the Keep of Winds and the main character, Malian, but the real story only began to evolve from that point once I started writing it seriously.

REBECCA: Any other books or source material in general that you drew upon for The Wall of Night?

HELEN: I had always loved fairytales, but I began consuming myths and legends avidly, again from about age eight, when I was entranced by a poster of the twelve Olympians that my teacher put up on the classroom wall. I wanted to know more and began the process of reading first the Greek and then the Norse, Egyptian and Celtic myths, as well as folklore and legend, King Arthur and Oliver and Parsifal. Those stories absorbed my imagination and I also loved the epic sweep of stories like The Iliad and The Odyssey, as much as their emotional power. The next step, of course, was that I wanted to tell my own stories, once I ran out of stories already told. (Which is why, by the way, I still have several school cases of these stories under my desk.) But for me, the idea of “story” is constantly being sparked, usually because I see or hear or read something and think:  but what if it didn’t happen like that, but like this? What if the Saxons had defeated the Normans at the battle of Hastings, or Luthien and Arwen didn’t have to give up their immortality because they married humans? What would actually happen if King Arthur came back as the legend says he will? Once you start to play with ideas like that they tend to develop a life of their own and very often a story will “fall out of the air”.

REBECCA: While I was reading, I was especially intrigued by those little hints that you gave about the Houses not being indigenous to this world, which in fact have instead traveled there from another dimension entirely. Why did you choose to add this little touch of (what felt like) sci-fi to an otherwise straightforward fantasy setting?

HELEN: I think the only answer to that, other than what I have said already, is: why not? [Smiles] There are no “rules” after all, that say the two may not overlap. Also, although it is only a little touch at present, the alien element is an important part of The Wall of Night series in terms of the cultural dimension of the story.

REBECCA: It provides an interesting point of view considering the original inhabitants of Haarth are not warmly disposed toward the people who have essentially brought a war into their world, though naturally from the Derai’s viewpoint they are the ones fighting an inevitable enemy and the rest of the world should be grateful for their protection! It brought to mind debates surrounding military occupation and fear of foreign invasion; were there any “what if?” scenarios based on actual history that were in your mind when you came up with this conflicting state of affairs?

HELEN: No, I don’t believe I was consciously thinking about those things. The Heir of Night and Wall series is primarily a “yarn being told”, and not an allegory or extended metaphor. But I did a significant part of my growing up in an isolated, predominantly Maori community where the sense of grievance over the 19^th century Land Wars and subsequent land confiscations was still very much present. I later worked in the area of Maori land and cultural issues, including for the Waitangi Tribunal, so it may be that these sorts of cultural reflections are always subconsciously there for me and “work their way out”.

REBECCA: In my review I described Malian and Kalan as archetypes, that of “the rebellious princess” and the “naïve social outcast”, both acting as familiar touchstones so that the reader can be introduced more easily into the exotic elements of Haarth. Would you consider that a viable description of them, or do you envisage them differently?

HELEN: I don’t think you can ever argue with how a reader experiences a story, because that is their unique experience. But I know that for me, as the writer, I don’t see Malian as rebellious in the traditional sense. For me, a very important part of the story is where, having learned that she is probably the prophesied One-to-Come, she puts aside rebellion and accepts that responsibility and her duty: as Heir of Night, and to the Wall and the Derai vigil:

” … Most of all, she longed to be free of whatever destiny Yorindesarinen had seen for her in the fire, which felt too dark, too heavy for her slight shoulders.

Yet even as she felt this, another thought came winging in: But what would happen if every Derai forsook the Wall for a life that seemed easier, more pleasant? What would have happened if Yorindesarinen had not shouldered her duty and stood forth against the Worm of Chaos? And if she, Malian of Night, really was the prophesied One but abandoned her duty, leaving the House of Night and the Derai Wall to stand or fall without her, then it would not matter where on Haarth she dwelt. Night would fall everywhere.”

So if she is rebellious, then it only inasmuch as she steps outside some of the Derai restrictions in order to pursue her acceptance of that larger responsibility.

REBECCA: We first see her when she has snuck into the Old Keep to elude her guardians, causing considerable worry among her nursemaids. In most stories this act would be seen as an endearing act of defiance, but in light of your previous answer, would you consider it a mark of immaturity instead? Or something that lies between the two extremes? I ask because her story is very much one of growing up and accepting responsibility.

HELEN: Ah, interesting question! I think it is partially immaturity, but partially also — if you recall — that Malian is very much a child alone and so finds her own amusements, but is also challenging and testing herself, e.g. with that initial climb to the Hall of Mirrors. Forgetting the time and “doing her own thing” though, is just being young! Part of the testing of herself, of course, arises because she is being trained intensively for leadership responsibility — but because she is still a minor her role is limited. Yet quite early on, when Malian goes into the main hall for the formal feast, she consciously longs for responsibility and to play her part in the Derai cause. But because she’s young, she thinks about this in terms of “dreams of glory” rather than in a more adult way. The passage I quoted above, though, comes when Malian has been through a lot more, so the decision she is making is also much more “mature”.

The whole rebellion question is important to me because from the beginning, Malian is very much a “duty, honor, country, self” (or in this case “duty, honor, Derai Alliance, self”) person. She isn’t rebellious in that sense at all. The subversion of the trope is subtle, but I do believe it’s there. Although you’re right: initially, when she is free to do so, she does kick up larks, i.e. she’s a gal of spirit.

REBECCA: And what about Kalan?

HELEN: In terms of Kalan as the naive social outcast, I have always seen his importance as that of a member a group that have been ghetto-ized and oppressed because of the fractures within Derai society discussed above. So the class he belongs to is oppressed, but he is not personally oppressed within that class, nor outcast from it—although it is not a life that he wants for himself. In this way I do see him as different from the traditional outcast who is often a “person alone” figure, out of step with the entirety of the rest of their society, e.g. Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melnibone, who is both albino and an apostate from the traditions of his mainstream culture.

Overall, my writer’s vision for both Malian and Kalan is that they are the central characters of the story and so ultimately The Wall of Night series is about their development—and both how, and whether, they can resolve the conflicts within Derai society, as well as the wider—and so far, I agree, traditionally conceived—conflict with the Swarm of Dark.

REBECCA: Names are always a strong indicator of a fantasy world. Where do yours come from? That is, how do you create names like Malian, Asantir, Haimyr, and what comes first: the name or the character? Does one influence the understanding of the other?

HELEN: Hmm, that is not an easy question to answer, in the sense that it varies. Some characters, like worlds and story ideas, spring fully-fledged from the air, complete with their names — Sigismund in Thornspell was like that, and so, too, was Asantir, in The Heir of Night. You do have to be careful, though, because the original Honor Guard captain in Heir had a different name and was only a minor character before I decided that there were too many characters with very similar names and I needed to change a few. But as soon as I wrote down the new name of Asantir, which I thought “sounded good”, the whole character changed immediately: looked different, had a very different back story and basically told me that she was a major character. And I had better sit up and take notice! So changing names can be a dangerous business. The few times since the “Asantir incident” where I have had to change a name, I have been very careful to hold the character as conceived in my mind and experiment with names until I find one that suits them as they are. But as for the actual names and where they come from—honestly, it’s another one of those intuitive, organic processes that I “just do.”

REBECCA: The topic of fate and destiny are threaded throughout The Heir of Night, and Malian herself is the subject of a prophecy. Lots of epic fantasy deals with the themes of fate versus free will; on the one hand, destiny is a good way to get the plot moving, but on the other hand, you don’t want to disrupt the character’ autonomy by having their sole motivation being “because destiny says so.” What for you is the relationship between these characters’ destinies and their free will?

HELEN: I have talked about the influence of myth and legend on my own storytelling, and fate, prophecy and destiny are very important elements of those traditional stories — and sometimes, particularly in the Greek myths, the protagonists’ attempts to exercise free will actually bring about the fated doom! So not surprisingly, fate, prophecy and destiny do figure in The Heir of Night and the Wall series. As a society, the Derai believe in the prophecies that have driven them from the beginning of their long conflict, such as: “If Night falls, all fall …”, but I think this is one of the important differences between Malian and Kalan in The Heir of Night: she fundamentally accepts her role as Heir of Night, while he is in rebellion against his lot — but whether these alignments continue through the series remains to be seen…

REBECCA: I also noticed a gradual expansion in the setting and tone of the book as it went on. Part 1 is confined primarily to the citadel, but by Part 3 Malian and Kalan have passed through into the wide world. Was this a conscious choice or did it happen naturally in the course of writing?

HELEN: Both! I originally envisaged the story as containing at least elements of the hero’s physical journey, i.e. the quest that involves travelling to other lands and places. As the story evolved, I contemplated keeping the action entirely within the physical confines of the Wall of Night, i.e. at one point the story development offered that possibility. But then the story evolved further and the deepening of the cultural elements drove in the other direction — that to work, the story needed to include a wider experience of the Haarth world. And biased though I am (!), I do think it is a wonderful world, one I hope readers will enjoy.

REBECCA: This is your second published book after Thornspell. Both are classed as “fantasy” but there are several pretty big differences between them. In particular: what’s the difference between writing a “self-contained” story like Thornspell, and Wall of Night, which is the first book in a trilogy?

HELEN: Well, Thornspell is a fairytale retelling and The Heir of Night (and Wall series) is epic fantasy — although I did notice that some people at Worldcon were starting to talk about it as “dark fantasy” as well—so that is an obvious difference in sub-genre terms. Thornspell is set in a kingdom “far way”, but one that is still very much of this world with an overlap into the faerie realms. Heir is in a separately conceived fantasy world, which means that as the author you have the opportunity to do a lot more world building and world building is a lot of fun, so it’s nice to have the scope to work with that! With a series, you can also have more central characters, simply because you have room to accommodate their stories. That is a very big difference to me: that Thornspell has one single, point-of-view character (which helps keep the storyline tight) while The Heir of Night has seven, i.e. Malian and Kalan as well as five secondary characters (and another three who don’t get point of view sequences in Heir but are still very important to the story.) Another major aspect of writing a series has been the need to always remain aware of the need to sustain continuity, both of plot and character, over four books.

REBECCA: As stated, Thornspell had a basis in both history and a familiar fairytale. In comparison, did you find world-building from scratch for The Wall of Night a challenge?

HELEN: You know, it didn’t feel like a challenge at all, because for me world building really is just fun. And it also happens very naturally: the worlds have a habit of springing almost fully fledged from the ether and into my mind. This was true for both the Thornspell world, which I “saw” immediately as a very “of-this-world”, Holy Roman Empire, Renaissance period backdrop, whereas the twilit world of The Wall of Night had been in my mind for a long time. Some of the other elements though, just evolved naturally through the evolution of the story (e.g. the Winter Country) and by extending my imaginative eye to think: well if the Wall is like this, what is the adjoining country going to be like? And after that …? So for me, “world” happens very naturally and organically.

REBECCA: How much research was involved in the writing of each book? At a guess, I would say that a book set (however tenuously) in the real world would involve some degree of research for accuracy’s sake, whereas people would assume that a purely fantasy setting allows you to “go wild”. Would you say that’s true?

HELEN: Hmm, you know, I’m not sure … I believe that the initial Thornspell world emerged partly from my knowledge and love of history, and I am very familiar with that period, so my research was more a matter of filling in gaps. And I deliberately fudged some elements of the history, mainly in terms of time period and available technology and weapons — not wildly, but more extending the Renaissance influence in some areas and contracting it in others — because the more historically accurate you are, the more the book becomes history and not fantasy and I really wanted to keep that fairytale/fantastic element.

So can you go wild with a completely distinct world, as in The Heir of Night? You know, I don’t think you can. The world has to work in a way that readers can believe in, and for that to happen, consistency and continuity have to be core to the way the world is constructed. And don’t forget that in Thornspell I had that overlap to the faerie realm where I could have gone wild if I had wanted to — but because of the natural and organic way in which the worlds evolve, I didn’t really consider doing that: the story “told” me the how and the why of the world and I “went with” that process.

REBECCA: How much are you allowed to divulge about the sequel to The Wall of Night, The Gathering of the Lost?

HELEN: I can tell you that … I am working very hard on the manuscript at present and it’s about two thirds complete. I can also tell you that the action is still centered around Malian and Kalan, and you will see some, but not all, of the secondary characters from Heir (although those other characters will definitely be back in the final two books.) I’d also like to say to readers that I know there have been long delays with some fantasy series, and as a reader I am frustrated by that, too, and it is why I have made a personal commitment not to let that happen with the Wall series. Basically, I am working on it every day—and hey, I already know how it ends.

REBECCA: Finally, this is a question that is usually asked at the end of all FanLit interviews which has become a bit of a tradition: What is the one question you never have but would love to be asked, and what would the answer be?

HELEN: Oh, duh! I have just gone completely blank. Ok, ok, here it is … a few people have said to me (and I paraphrase) that I have a gift for writing and am a reasonably switched on sort of a gal, so why don’t I write literary / contemporary realist fiction—the implication being that that is the real deal and Fantasy-SciFi (F-SF) isn’t. The answer, as an exclusive first for you and FanLit readers [smiles], is that I am first and foremost a lover of story. And F-SF, in my experience, contains some of the very best stories, with grandeur and sweep, what-if ideas, and wonder, and tremendous passion and heart. Put quite simply: F-SF stories rock! I love them—and that’s why I write F-SF, too.

For this third edition of the semi-regular feature Living With The Writer, we welcome our first husband to the hot seat. Today we talk to Dave Fenn, husband of Jaine Fenn who has two books (Principles of Angels and Consorts of Heaven) published through Gollancz. Dave is a rather private person, so we express our gratitude that he was willing to spill some details about his life with Jaine.

Gollancz have very kindly put up three copies of Jaine’s latest book, Consorts of Heaven, for a UK giveaway! Please leave a comment for Dave in order to be entered into this giveaway. For those US readers who wish to put your names forward – if you are successful, you can pick a book from the FanLit stacks. Please make sure you say whether you are US or UK based!

AMANDA: Hello and welcome to FanLit! Thanks for agreeing to be another Living with The Writer victim. How are you today?

DAVE: Not too bad this afternoon. Jaine’s back in the garret working on the next book while I enjoy the Spanish Grand Prix.

AMANDA: First of all, can you please introduce yourself in your own words?

DAVE: Well I’m Dave and for three days of the week I’m a quality manager for a small engineering company. One day of the week I spend with the South Downs Volunteer Ranger Service which lets me get out in the green and helps keep me fit. I also do some volunteering for SUSTRANS looking after a local section of the National Cycle network.

We try and spend the later parts of our evenings together and a reasonable part of the weekend, but it depends on how the writing is going. So I started playing an online science fiction game, EVE, with some of my friends to keep me occupied when Jaine’s busy.

AMANDA: How did you and Jaine meet?

DAVE: Jaine and I met within a few weeks of our first year at college. We had some friends in common and both joined the science fiction society. It seemed like we hit it off almost immediately and we’ve been together ever since.

AMANDA: Did you know that Jaine was an author prior to your meeting or was it something she dropped on you afterwards?

DAVE: It was clear Jaine was into writing from the beginning. But she had to concentrate on the essays necessary for her degree during our early years together. So early writing from Jaine came as role-playing scenarios for our friends at college, which needed less polish.

AMANDA: What is your personal interest in fantasy and science fiction?

DAVE: I started reading science fiction and fantasy when I was seven, so it seems like it’s always been part of my life. I’m more into science fiction than fantasy these days, but I still have room for both. I also like science fiction and fantasy movies and have a reasonable collection.

AMANDA: Have you enjoyed attending conventions as the attentive husband, or is it something you prefer to skip?

DAVE: I greatly enjoy conventions, though rarely as the attentive husband. You see Jaine and I have attended and even run conventions from our first times together. Jaine being a recognised author is quite a new innovation. We are both recognised by a lot of British fandom in our own right, having been around so long. So conventions are for me a time to catch up with old friends that I maybe don’t see that often elsewhere.

What has made a difference for me is that more people in the business side of Science fiction now recognise me at conventions. In particular I get to meet authors more often and less formally than before.

AMANDA: What is your favourite part of Jaine being a writer?

DAVE: It’s great that Jaine is a published author and is seeing her dreams fulfilled. She’s been telling her stories to a smaller audience for years. But now she’s finally getting the wider exposure she’s worked hard for. But truth to be told, the best thing is finally to be able to read the stories in print and see the smile on her face when each new book comes out.

AMANDA: How does the writing fit around your daily lives?

DAVE: Jaine has a day job in the mornings, but gets down to work after lunch. She tries to stick to a word limit each day which means that we usually sit down to share dinner about eight. To offset this we try and find more time together at the weekends, but this varies depending on how the writing is going. Overall though, it works for us. But we’d both be happier if Jaine could give up the day job.

AMANDA: What is the hardest part of being the partner of an author?

DAVE: The hardest part is not being to help when the writing isn’t going well. At these times Jaine has to put in more hours and it’s stressful for both of us. Most of the time, however, Jaine is able to write quite freely so it’s not normally a problem.

AMANDA: If so, do you perform test reader responsibilities and advise on plot? If not, do you read Jaine’s books once they’re released?

DAVE: I often act as a sounding board for Jaine’s ideas, and as a sanity check on the science. My interest in maths and physics comes in handy on these occasions and I keep myself up to date with reading and occasional study with the Open University. However, the plot is all Jaine’s, even if she does insist on exploring the latest ideas with me over pizza whenever she thinks she’s stuck. But it’s more like the cardboard analyst, as she usually already knows the answers but needs to convince herself.

AMANDA: Thanks so much for agreeing to talk to us today!

Jaine Fenn’s website can be found here. The third book in her series, Guardians of Paradise, is due in September 2010 from Gollancz. Don’t forget to comment for a chance to win Consorts of Heaven (UK) or a book of your choice from our stacks (US). (Tell us where you’re located.)

Photo of Dave and Jaine Fenn are courtesy of James Cooke.

Today we welcome Skyler White to FanLit! Her debut novel, and Falling, Fly (reviewed by me) hit the shelves in March, and her second, In Dreams Begin, will be released in November. Comment below for a chance to win a copy of and Falling, Fly. Ms. Skyler will personalize and send a copy to two lucky FanLit readers!

KELLY: On your website, you mention that you’re involved in ballet and have a master’s degree in theater. Have your experiences on the stage (and backstage) affected your writing? If so, how?

SKYLER WHITE: I started taking ballet when I was really young, as an antidote to a ridiculous level of childhood energy which would now almost certainly be diagnosed as ADHD. Wish I’d found something as effective for the attention part of that! I still dance (although not ballet … ack, the mirrors! the tights!), but I don’t think I could put the hours in on my rear writing if I didn’t have dance as exercise and release. I don’t think it impacts the content of my writing though, just my ability to write.

My experience in theater probably does work its way into my writing though, if for no other reason than I studied a lot about the writing of plays. Also, working with actors puts you in very close contact with a wide range of personalities, which is useful for a writer. And I was a stage director, so it was my job to read the plays and visualize them. Trying to imagine what actors and set and staging would look like, how to dramatize a moment physically or stage it symbolically, that all was very useful training. And the theater company I worked with most was founded by three deeply passionate and very different people. Learning to negotiate with the other two and communicate with my actors taught me a tremendous amount about collaborative work, because no matter what you hear, writing, in my experience, is NOT a solitary profession. You have early readers and an editor and a copyeditor, and eventually critics and readers whose opinions and ideas can hugely improve your work and encourage (or discourage) your efforts. I think theater taught me to value that over almost everything, and how to take criticism and how to defend my choices.

KELLY: One of the things I noticed while reading and Falling, Fly was that many of your angelic characters have literary names (Olivia, Ophelia) and many of your mortal characters have religious names (Dominic, Adam). I found this really thought-provoking! May I ask what inspired this choice? (If it’s not too big a secret, that is!)

SKYLER: Oh, I’m so impressed! I don’t think anyone’s caught that yet. Yup. It’s a little game I was playing with myself. Madalene, too – her spelling is Magdelene (as in Mary) without the “g” (which belongs elsewhere, as you know!) Peter and Paul are Dysart’s disciples, although I gave him a literary name (the psychiatrist from Shaffer’s play ‘Equus’) and the boy in the bar is Jacob, because he wrestles an angel … I’m getting carried away, sorry. But yes, I’m playing with the lines because the stories are immortal, and humans are divine.

KELLY: Hmm, yes, I do believe I’ve seen that “G” somewhere. ;-) Another fascinating element is the way L’Hotel Matillide is constructed so that no energy is wasted; there are cogs and gears to recycle things like fidgeting into usable energy. To me, that’s both a really original creation and a logical extension of the way Hell’s denizens feed on energy in other respects: blood, sexual desire, etc. How did that idea come to you?

SKYLER: I don’t really remember specifically, but you’re spot on in the general vein. The crucial idea for me was that Hell is fueled exclusively by humans. There’s no organic, nature-based driver behind it. It’s all us. We make and maintain it ourselves.

KELLY: Can you tell our readers about your upcoming novel, In Dreams Begin?

SKYLER: Happily! In Dreams Begin inhabits the same story-world as and Falling, Fly, and there are some important character and plotline overlaps, but In Dreams Begin is a dark time-travel horror/romance based on my personal history and the occult movement of the late Victorian era. Laura, a contemporary graphic artist, wakes up on her wedding night channeled into the body of Maud Gonne, the famous Victorian beauty, Irish revolutionary and amateur occultist who may have been part faerie.

In Maud’s body, Laura, our modern, professional woman, while still coming to grips with Victorian rules and outfits, meets WB Yeats, the Irish poet. He’s wildly romantic, ridiculously passionate, and she, of course, falls (rather embarrassingly) in love with him, only to wake up back in Portland. The story tracks Laura and her new husband over two weeks, and Laura, Yeats and Maud Gonne over almost thirty years, all completely obedient to actual history.

Yeats really was involved in the occult. He and Maud Gonne really did have a marriage “on the spiritual plane,” and Maud was, at the time, in the Irish countryside, widely considered to be of the Sidhe, a kind of faerie known for spiriting away the souls of wives on their wedding nights! It’s been a tremendously fun project to work on because history kept handing me such amazing stuff, allowing me to explore body-image, feminism, fidelity and about six different kinds of possession across a hundred years, through several perspectives and all echoed in lines from Yeats’s published poems and Maud Gonne’s autobiography.

My editor at Berkley has done an amazing job securing rights for me, so I’m going to be able to include the most relevant quotes and historical annotations in the manuscript, which is very exciting! In Dreams Begin is due out November 2.

KELLY: In your interview with SciFiGuy, you mentioned that you always have four books going at once. What are your current four?

SKYLER: I’m just reading three at the moment. I’m still reading Rimbaud, plus The Gaudy Night and Elif Batuman’s The Possessed (which is wonderful btw!)

KELLY:And finally, a silly question: and Falling, Fly features a literally hellish hotel. What’s your most hellish hotel experience (or travel experience in general)?

SKYLER: That’s a great question! I was doing some research for In Dreams Begin last summer, traveling mostly in Ireland with a few days in London, but I had one thing I really wanted to see in France. In Samois-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris, in the same graveyard where the legendary gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhart is buried, there’s a little memorial chapel where Maud Gonne buried her first child, Georges, and where she, with her married French lover, one Halloween night, tried to re-incarnate him, and conceived her daughter Iseult instead. When history gives you something like that, you put it in your book! But I didn’t know what the chapel looked like or how it was constructed, and I’d tried to write the scene without that information and just couldn’t do it. So I booked two nights in France: an expensive one in Paris (because they all are) and, to make up for it, a remarkably inexpensive one in Avon, which is as close as the trains get to Samois.

I don’t speak French, and I’ve never traveled alone in a country where I don’t know the language, but I had amazingly detailed directions given to me by a total stranger on a web travel site. Following those on blind faith (or foolishness), I took a bus to the train station. At the train station, I realized that one cannot just assume that there will be trains going where you want at a time convenient to you. I waited several hours and finally got on a train. The pre-recorded stop announcements are all given in very fast French, and it’s too dark out the train windows to read the station names. I got off the train at a desolate stop, completely uncertain I was in the right town. This was where it got hellish.

My directions from there were to walk to my hotel, a mere five minutes’ walk away. But it’s dark, and there’s construction that Google Maps hadn’t shown, and I had to go to the bathroom. I had no idea which street to take. All the roads were empty, so I struck out with my rolly-bag down the first street that radiated from the train station. I walked ten minutes without seeing anything, turned around, and walked back. I did this down each of the next three streets, including one with loitering French youth watching me from a dark parking lot, talking loudly, possibly to me, possibly not, but certainly watching me and my very loud rolly-bag rolling down the street past them and then back up the street.

Nervous, tired, frightened and having to pee like never before in my life, I finally hit on the right street, found the hotel and discovered it locked up tight. The lobby is dark. But there was a large ATM-looking thing by the door, and after much cursing, digging through folders for confirmation numbers, guessing at the French, and bouncing rapidly from foot to foot, I got a little printed receipt with a door code on it. It unlocked the lobby door and my room door, and my rolly-bag tripped me in the final mad dash for the bathroom.

It was a terrible hotel room, complete with bunk beds, blood stain on the floor, and screaming Armenians down the hall. I sleep well and long anyway. The next morning, I managed to convey to the lobby guy that I wanted to leave my suitcase with him and come back for it that afternoon. I headed confidently back to the train station, where I discovered that buses, like trains, are not scheduled to please me. There are two to Samois. One at 8 AM, one at 4. If I waited for the four o’clock bus, there won’t be another back to Avon. So I got directions from the very lovely French woman at the train station who keeps shaking her head and saying “You understand not!” to me. I assumed she was referring to my pig-headed insistence on walking the five kilometers to Samois rather than waiting for the bus, and off I went. Hell-free again. It was a gorgeous walk along a road through the woods of Fountainbleau – Maud and her dog Dagda were fond of walking here – so I was checking through the tree-trunks for their ghosts. The weather was perfect – sunny, but not too hot – and I was happy and relaxed with hours to explore the graveyard and catch the bus back.

Samois was one of the most beautiful towns I’ve ever seen. I stopped into a pub to use the restroom (amazing how critical the most basic things can be when you’re traveling) and had a gorgeous espresso from an ancient copper machine behind the bar, much to the amusement of the two old men drinking beer who kept lifting their glasses to me and grinning, as though they’re on to something really clever that I’m just too slow, or too American, to understand. I found the cemetery and Django’s grave with no trouble, but the one photo I’ve seen of Georges’ chapel is definitely not his. There was someone else’s name on it, complete with pictures of the married couple buried there.

The only other chapel in the graveyard had no name on it, but peering through the grate in the front door, I can see it had rusted, hinged metal doors in the floor, which jibes with Yeats’ description. I was grateful that there was no one around to watch me, though, because it took me three running jumps to get a hand on the ledge of the window in the back wall. After that, barely holding on with one hand, I poked my camera, lanyard firmly around my wrist, into the crypt to get a glimpse of the opposite side that I can’t see through the much more conveniently located door window. Maud paid for the grave to be maintained in perpetuity, and she would not be happy with the state of things. There was a shovel and bucket in the chapel, and the little altar has collapsed. It made me sad, this big empty, ruined thing marking her grief and her lost child. I tidied it up as best I could, and left a little paper heart for Georges.

I found the bus stop in Samois, but it was hours from due, and the day was still gorgeous, so I walked back to Avon to find the lobby locked up tight again. I found a cleaning lady who spoke about as much French as I do, but no English. We gestured wildly to each other, miming suitcases and desks and men who should be standing behind them, and eventually she called someone and went back to cleaning rooms. After about ten minutes, the guy who took my rolly-bag that morning re-appeared, unlocked a room behind his desk and returned my luggage. I took a stunningly well-timed train back to Paris feeling like locked doors, blood stains and missing desk guys aside, the hotel in Avon was worth it.

I hope you felt the same about your visit to the hotel I made up in Ireland!

KELLY: Absolutely! Thank you for taking the time to chat with us.

Skyler White is author of dark fantasy novels and Falling, Fly (Berkley, March 2010) and In Dreams Begin (Berkley, November 2010). She lives in Austin, TX. Learn more at Skyler White’s website. Comment below for a chance to win a copy of and Falling, Fly. Ms. Skyler will personalize and send a copy to two lucky FanLit readers!

Another of Gollancz’s heavily promoted debut authors is all set to release his book Wolfsangel on 20th May (reviewed by Amanda). In celebration of that, we’d like to introduce you to M D Lachlan! He sits down and chats with us about research, Norse mythology, and whether Lad Lit is an appropriate genre tag…

We have a giveaway linked to this interview: three lucky UK readers can get their hands on a copy of Wolfsangel by leaving a comment for M D Lachlan below. That’s right, folks, it is a UK-only giveaway this time round – but US readers who wish to leave a comment will be entered into a drawing to win a book from the FanLit stacks. Please specify whether you are a US or UK reader in your comment!

Amanda: Welcome to FanLit – how are you today?

Mark: Very well. Beset by my children, like Boromir by the Uruk-Hai, but apart from that well.

Amanda: First of all, can I ask you to describe Wolfsangel in your own words and suggest why readers of FanLit may like to buy it?

Mark: It’s a new take on the werewolf myth, Norse mythology and magic itself. It’s a historical fantasy set in the early 9th century that involves Vikings, werewolves, witches and dark, strange gods. I’ve been told it’s something very new in fantasy – particularly the view of the werewolf and of magic. If you enjoy a page turning adventure interspersed with some extremely odd and sinister magic, this is the book for you! It’ll give you the werewolf as you’ve never seen the creature before! Also, it’s got terrific reviews from a host of authors you might know – Joe Abercrombie, Mike Carey and many others. It’s just starting to get reviews in the mags and blogs and, so far, they’ve all been great too.

Here’s one I really liked from Wertzone:

‘(A) primal force ripped screaming out of the annals of Norse mythology, drenched in blood and tragedy.’

Amanda: Wolfsangel is not the first book you’ve had published – you have also written in the genre of “Lad Lit”. What prompted the move into genre fiction, and do you intend to publish anymore under Mark Barrowcliffe as well as M D Lachlan?

Mark: I’d argue about the ‘Lad Lit’. I’d just call my earlier books comedy. As lots of critics noted, my work actually bore no resemblance to stuff like Nick Hornby and Mike Gayle. That said, the tag brought me a few readers so I shouldn’t complain about it. Yes I do. I have something that I’m sort of toying with but I’m worried it’s a bit too dark a comedy for a mainstream audience. Or even any audience. It’s the funniest thing I’ve written but a little bleak.

Amanda: Are you noticing differences between speculative genre readers and those who read your previous novels?

Mark: I meet speculative genre readers, which I never did my mainstream readers, though not for want of trying. Speculative readers are much more engaged than mainstream readers, much more ‘fannish’ – and that’s a good thing. Any writer wants people who engage with their work in a passionate way and there are no better fans than SF&F fans for doing that.

There are many more chances to meet them than mainstream fans especially through conventions. They’re also frighteningly well informed, so – because my stuff is rooted in real mythologies – I need to make sure it’s very accurately portrayed.

Amanda: In Wolfsangel, the level of historical detail is key to the authentic feel of the novel: did you do a lot of research for the novel? What did this involve? Were you never tempted to write purely historical works?

Mark: I grew up as a Norse mythology nut and knew a lot about the Viking period anyway. I re-read the Edda – the ancient Norse myths that were recorded in 13th century Iceland and I re-read a lot of the sagas. They’re important to give you the feel of what you’re trying to write – that weird Viking mix between a hale and hearty barnstorming approach to life with something much darker and more disturbing lurking beneath.

What kills you is the detail. How extensive was the deck on an early longship? What did an early Celtic Christian monastery look like? What was a monastic church made of, stone or wood? I tend to just write it as I imagine it but read lots of history books as I’m going along and amend accordingly. When I try to describe something I don’t know about, I’ll look it up. I also used a lot of books written by re-enactors because they have practical detail in – like the practice of having a cooking fire on a ship on top of the ballast stones.

Fantasy is in my blood, I grew up obsessed by it, so it didn’t occur to me to write pure history. I don’t plan what I do anyway. This story sort of popped out of me when I was writing something else – it suddenly emerged on the page. I didn’t make a conscious decision to write it. The Viking story arrived first as the backstory in a WWII adventure – the history of an immortal werewolf. Hopefully the series will eventually go forward in history to WWII and beyond into the present day. The WWII story is written and I’m pleased with it. The present day story is planned and that’s quite exciting too.

That said, I have a YA idea which is straight history.

Amanda: Linked to this, how did you find it trying to balance between historical accuracy and the needs of the story?

Mark: Not hard. I was worried that there’s a love story in this and that it might not be strictly historically accurate to put one in. Did people think in terms of love before the chivalric period? I think the answer is ‘yes’ from the research I’ve done.

Often a historical point can drive the plot. Longships, for instance, weren’t much cop in a storm, so the Vikings would beach in bad weather if they could. Also the correspondences between Finnish mythology – which features in Wolfsangel – and Norse Mythology gave me some creative food for thought.

The fantastic elements are derived from real historical sources and anything we don’t know – the berserker practices, for instance, I’ve filled in with educated guesses. Because it’s a fantasy you can take more liberties than in a strict history – Authun’s Moonsword, for instance is clearly an Arab scimitar. The true scimitar arguably doesn’t really appear for several more centuries – though it probably existed in crude form at around this time. Wolfsangel is a magic story, though, and the presence of the blade may be explained in later books…

You can’t take too many liberties because you lose authenticity so I’m always scrupulously attentive to the history. It actually makes things easier. Pure fantasy authors have to make stuff up when it comes to their world an make sure it all fits together. I just have to find it out and can concentrate on character and plot. It’s using a different part of the brain so you’re directing less of your creative effort to world building.

Amanda: Regarding the locations used in the novel, did you visit the Scandinavian countries to get a feel for it? If not, is this an area of the world you would like to visit?

Mark: Yes, I did. I got The Times to send me out to Norway to do an article on The Troll Wall, which features in the book.

It’s a stunning country and The Troll Wall is an amazing phenomenon – a mile high vertical cliff. I went to the top of it and I’m still shaking. The Norwegians are great fun too – nuts, as the above article says. If you get a chance to go to Norway, go. You’ll have to sell your house to buy a cup of coffee but it’ll be worth it.

Amanda: Linking Vikings and werewolves is an inspired idea (particularly given the heavy presence of wolves in Norse mythology): did you have an epiphany moment where it came to you fully-formed or were you working it out gradually in your head?

Mark: Actually I was worried it was a bit of an obvious one. The whole culture is shot through with werewolf stories. I’m really surprised it hasn’t come up before. The quote at the start of the book comes directly from a saga: ‘Brother, you cannot talk about me like that, scolding a noble man, for you ate a wolf’s treat, creeping to dead bodies with a cold snout, being hated by all.’ Of course someone may have combined Vikings and werewolves before. I clearly haven’t read every fantasy novel ever written. My epiphany moment was when I realised who the werewolf was, so to speak, how he fitted into the wider Norse myth.

Amanda: Just a cheeky question: do you prefer Odin or Loki?

Mark: Loki, by far. He’s the only Viking god who isn’t also a god of war. Odin, god of the hanged, poetry, madness, magic and war. Thor god of thunder and war, Freyr, god of fertility but battle-bold. Loki’s a trickster figure but he plays his tricks on the gods. He tends to help humans. Odin is mad, unknowable, treacherous and strange.

Amanda: The use of the ‘Wolfsangel’ rune in the book is another clever touch, but, when you introduced it, were you aware of the more negative connotations it has been given in recent times? Was this a concern? Has the book been translated into German yet? If it hasn’t, is there an intention to change the symbol used?

Mark: I knew the rune from seeing it in a book when I was a kid and its three meanings (which are in Wolfsangel, I won’t put the spoiler in here) fascinated me. Its origins are obscure – it bears similarity to an ancient Viking rune but also to a mason’s mark of the 13th century.

When I was researching the book I did come across its unpleasant adoption by a small number of Nazi units in WWII and, subsequently, by a small number of neo Nazis. I was mortified because that rune was part of my imagination from a young age. I thought long and hard about putting it in.

The first thing that made me think I was justified in using the symbol in the book was that it is still used in Germany today – in the coats of arms of various cities. Its Nazi connotation isn’t strong enough even in Germany to warrant its removal. The German publishers certainly haven’t raised it as an issue. I have checked the German law on the rune and it relates to its context. If you’re using it as a symbol of a repellent ideology, it’s illegal. Any other use, the law allows.

Secondly, I don’t think we should allow the far right to hijack an entire mythology and make it theirs. The Nazis ransacked Norse mythology and history and turned it to their own aims. Some of this history is unreclaimable. The Swastika, for instance, which in its runic use is speculated to be a symbol of the thunder god Thor, can never be used free of the vile connotations given to it by Hitler.

Many other lesser known runes, though, were adopted by the Nazis either directly or in slightly adapted versions. Notorious, of course, is the S of the SS – the so called Sig rune which appears to have been adopted from a rune of the Viking futhark – but other runes were appropriated too – the Hagal rune, for instance, which appears on the inside of the ‘death’s head’ ring of the SS. There are many, many other examples. The whole Norse pantheon was used, and even worshipped, by the vicious fruitcakes of the Nazi high command.

So you have a choice. You say ‘this mythology is entirely contaminated and I’m never going to use anything of it’. Or you say that the Nazi view of the mythology was itself a corruption – and not a very subtle or imaginative corruption at that – of what we know of Norse mythology and you reclaim it. I didn’t set out to make any political point in Wolfsangel but I did set out to give my individual vision of Norse mythology, which is a million miles removed from that of the Nazis.

The Nazis focused very strongly on the warlike qualities of the Norse gods. There are other much more complex strands both in the figure of Odin – king of the Viking gods and the trickster figure of Loki. I bring them out.

Plenty of other writers have written stories involving the runes and they seem satisfied too that the mythology is out of the Nazi’s shadow.

So, in short, I did think about my use of the Wolfsangel rune but I decided that if I couldn’t use that then I couldn’t really use any of the mythologies or symbols the Nazis raided. We’re not talking about the swastika here. The Wolfsangel rune’s Nazi associations are not widely known outside the closed and idiotic world of the extreme right and so have little chance of causing offence.

Also, ordinary and flawed humanity is shown as a valuable thing in Wolfsangel – a view that undermines any Nazi ubermensch posturing.

This was explored when Wolfsangel had a WWII component. The main character in the WWII story is an aristocrat and describes the wolf’s head that is his family’s crest as ‘one of those many venerable symbols the Nazis have so presumptuously appropriated’.

Just a word on the Vikings whose mythology the Nazis lifted. To my mind the Vikings were a very inclusive race. OK, they did a fair bit of plundering and sacking but, if you read the contemporaneous history – people like the Franks under Charlemagne weren’t shy around a bit of bloodshed either. Vikings showed themselves keen adapters of other cultures – the Viking warriors who settled in Northern France had lost most of their language and much of their cultural identity in a couple of generations and become the Normans. The Varangian guard served under the Byzantine emperors and Vikings founded modern Russia. In every place they appear to have adapted local customs and intermarried. Something of a blow to the racial purity brigade.

Amanda: With hindsight, is there anything about Wolfsangel you would like to change?

Mark: Not really. I’ve had the chance as there is a big delay between handing the book to the publishers and it coming out. I’ve read the book many times as it goes through the production process and if there was something I wanted to change then I would have done so. Oh, yeah, the Mini Cooper in chapter four. Only joking.

Amanda: How goes the writing on the follow-up to Wolfsangel? And, roughly, when can we expect to see it?

Mark: Extremely well. You’ll see it next year in May. It shows what publishing schedules are like – my deadline is this June. It’s a belter, I think.

Amanda: Are you prepared to offer our readers any hints about what to expect in the next book?

Mark: Can’t say too much without giving away the plot of Wolfsangel. It’s more of a thriller than Wolfsangel, though the signature strange magic is still there. My model was an early medieval 24 with a werewolf instead of Jack Bauer. It’s set 100 years after Wolfsangel and features some characters who have turned out well. Prepare for shocks! It’s given me a few surprises writing it, which is a good sign.

Amanda: Are you still involved in journalism? Which publications are you writing for at the moment?

Mark: I am involved. I’ll write for anyone who will pay me within reason! I write for the national press and magazines, when they ask me.

Amanda: Can you tell us briefly about which events and conventions you are planning to attend this year (after your enjoyable report about Eastercon)?

Mark: I’m going to Alt.Fiction and The UK Games Expo

Amanda: Thanks so much for allowing us to talk to you! Any last words for the readers?

Mark: Last words? Do you know something I don’t? Just do let me know what you think of the book if you read it!

Mark’s website can be found here and he is also on Twitter as @mdlachlan. Read Amanda’s review of Wolfsangel and don’t forget to leave a comment to win a book! (Wolfsangel for 3 UK readers, a book from our stacks for a US reader).

Here we are with the second edition of Living With The Writer, a semi-regular feature where I grill the partners of those authors that entertain us with their speculative fiction. My guest today is a very special one: I’d like to introduce Deborah Beale (a name that may well be familiar to some of you), otherwise known as Mrs Tad Williams. Read to the bottom to find out details of some very lovely book giveaways, courtesy of Deborah!

AMANDA: A very warm welcome to you, Deborah, and thanks so much for agreeing to conduct this interview for the readers at FanLit. First things first, can you introduce yourself in your own words?

DEBORAH: I’m a woman who works in a room of her own in California, with a glorious view of a hill. I’m someone who always tries to live every moment to the maximum because that way there can’t be any regrets. I’m obsessive and perpetually uncomfortable in my own skin. I have more desire than I have time and energy, so it cheers me up to think about how eternal it all is. I have laughing Buddhas on my desk. I have two growing kids and we’re all beginning the teen years, which is frightening and huge and already quite a rough passage. I run the business that is the backbone of Tad, Inc. I write with Tad – we collaborate on a series of children’s books. I write a whole bunch of stuff on Twitter. Tad and I live entwined lives.

AMANDA: If it isn’t too personal, can I ask why you’re not Mrs Williams?

DEBORAH: I’ve never used Williams and styling myself ‘MrsTad’ for Twitter is the first time I’ve ever used Tad’s name in connection with me! I’m quite enjoying it! I have a thing about patriarchal naming (and Tad does, too) so I’ve never been able to do it before in good conscience (and, besides, in the sci-fi and fantasy world my name has a little bit of recognition, so I’m not about to jettison that!)

AMANDA: Would you tell us a little about a typical day in the life of Tad Williams and Deborah Beale?

DEBORAH: I’m up early, between 6 and 7, and Tad’s up late, around 10 or so. We have separate offices right now but I’ll be back in the big office when my mum comes to stay from England – she’ll reclaim this room for her own. I like to work early when my energy is best. Tad has no settled time of day right now, other than not in the morning. I spend blocks of time online, juggling all the business pins, but if I’m sunk in writing something (at this moment in time I’m between projects) then I prioritise the writing and do my best to cut off from things and get work done. For parts of the day Tad either plays basketball, or lies on the bed or a sofa, thinking. The thinking is critical to the writing process; at some point he has done enough work in his head to go and nail down his 12 pages a day (sometimes in only an hour or two), which is what is happening right now, being his meeting-the-deadline speed, and is quite intense. At some point in all of this the kids come home from school and dinner happens. There are also homework struggles and chore issues round about this time, and bathing issues too – the kids not the parents! Tad is then the hero who puts the kids to bed whilst Mom reads and crashes out.

AMANDA: How did you meet Mr Williams? Was this as a result of your work in publishing (Deborah was one of the founding members of the Orion Publishing House)?

DEBORAH: I was Tad’s British publisher, and after a while we fell in love. It was neither politic nor wise, and involved a two-year hell quest to achieve our fairy tale ending.

AMANDA: Since we’re talking about it obliquely, how did it come about that you were a founding member of Orion? Was this something you always wanted to do or did you fall into it rather by accident?

DEBORAH: Oh, well, when I was a kid I wanted to write, but the wind blew me sideways on that one. So then I pursued book publishing, because I’ve always been (as my niece calls me) a books fanatic. I chased my breaks and I worked hard. I didn’t get much of a break at first, one result of which was I ended up working with and sometimes writing all kinds of non-fiction and fiction books whilst thrashing my way around the industry. In the end that turned out to be a blessing. Then my break came, working for Anthony Cheetham, who is a publishing entrepreneur; and when he plus his wife Rosie Cheetham (now de Courcy) and his business partner Peter Roche started up a new company, they asked me to join them. Which was heaven and hell all combined, as is, I imagine, any start-up venture.

AMANDA: Why and when did you take the decision to move out to the States?

DEBORAH: After the Grand Adventure of the Orion Publishing Group, I was at a point where I felt I had done a great deal and wanted to stop and have children. And, basically, learn to write too.

AMANDA: And you seem to have learnt very well to write, going by the fact you and Mr Williams are now collaborating! How long have you been doing this, and does it fulfill the dream you had as a girl to become a writer?

DEBORAH: Our Ordinary Farm books started in the middle of the aughties, I think.

Nothing would fulfil the dream I had as a child, short of a Pulitzer, and Oscar, and all them awards (and the money, ha!) If I had really been able to follow that particular dream, then I would have ended up a journalist, because I think that is where my particular strengths are. But then I would have been unlikely to meet my amazing man, so what kind of life that would have been, who knows… I have the writer’s life now, any which way, and before that I had an astonishing life as a London media-chick with a bit of a brain. Nothing about the London life was accidental, and I had to be brave and overcome quite a few things: ultimately the whole damn enchilada’s been wonderful, despite life’s woes.

AMANDA: Have you been one of Mr William’s test readers since the early days? If so, do you wear the hats of both ‘publisher’ and ‘partner’ and how do these conflict when offering advice?

DEBORAH: Being involved in Tad’s work as a reader/editor – that tends to be sometimes yes, sometimes no (and I have to say that Tad’s editors at DAW, Betsy Wollheim and Sheila Gilbert, are the BEST). It depends on what else is going on in our lives. I had less involvement with Shadowmarch, but probably more with Otherland. The upcoming ‘Angel Doloriel Books’ (working title) I had more involvement with at a conceptual stage: I’ve never done that before – it took the form of us working together with Tad’s initial synopsis.

Business and personal don’t often clash for us, but when they do there can be lots of hurt feelings and pouty faces for everyone, ha.

AMANDA: Since you are both busy working on respective projects at any given time, do you ever find it difficult deciding who takes priority?

DEBORAH: I don’t think we ever have clashing priorities. Our interests are all wrapped up in each other. We don’t have anything in the way of power battles, either. We do have occasional flaming yelling arguments that upset the kids and the dogs and cloud everything till they’re resolved. I suspect we exert gravity on each other, as we live and grow and change; sometimes we pull each other over, sometimes we’re running hand in hand through the daisies.

AMANDA:When do you feel proudest of Mr Williams?

DEBORAH: Ooh, I get all squidgy when he pulls off a cool speech. There was a moment in Germany when he was accepting the Corinne Award, which is like a national book award in the US, or maybe a Whitbread in the UK (except I think that’s gone now). And Tad, doing his speech in German, live on national TV, stepped on his own joke. Which actually worked to make it even funnier, fortunately (a line about Schwarzenegger’s mangled English being the model for Tad’s German).

There are a lot of moments like that that go by me, if I’m touring with Tad, or at a convention with him. It’s a lot of fun. He’s a grand performer, and when he’s up there having a good time, well, it’s the best. I’ve seen him reduce a room of thousands to helpless laughter.

AMANDA: With regards to the travel: has it been extensive? Do you always travel with Mr Williams? How does this affect family life?

DEBORAH: Sometimes I’m with him, sometimes I’m not. Sometimes we travel as a family. Sorry, I don’t have anything interesting to say – except that I’m hoping to take our kids to Montana this year to visit Christopher Paolini and family, because they kindly invited us and it will be good for the kids to see a successful writer who isn’t their father!

[Deborah told me that this dragon eye was doodled on their message board by Christopher Paolini!]

AMANDA: Finally, what are the upsides and downsides of being the partner of such a well-known and beloved fantasy author?

DEBORAH: There’s a Michael Marshall Smith novel ‘Only Forwards’ (which in itself is a killer title and a bit of a mantra round here!) I seem to remember there is a room in the novel where the gravity is adjustable. I think about that room and imagine what it would be like to live with -  lightweight over here, much heavier over there. Living with Tad is a bit like that for sure. Funnily enough, I think I’ve only recently discovered this, which is a bit of a while into the process, ha!

The upsides most definitely include him. It’s living with a man who has this incredible mind. Tad’s my buddy and we do it all together.

AMANDA: And on that note, which brought a slight lump to my throat, can I just say thanks so much for your honesty and eloquence. It’s been fabulous having this insight into the working life of Tad and his amazing wife.

I hope you all enjoyed that interview! It would be great if you could leave messages for Deborah showing your appreciation for her time – she posts under the name @MrsTad on Twitter and I’m sure would appreciate the additional followers!

As mentioned above, Deborah has also kindly provided a couple of book giveaways to accompany this interview: you can either request a signed copy of The Dragons of Ordinary Farm or a set of the Shadowmarch books currently released (that being Shadowmarch, Shadowplay and Shadowrise!) Please leave a comment and mention which drawing(s) you’d like to be entered into.

Today we welcome Blake Charlton, debut author of Spellwright, into the chair to talk about bullying, doorstop tomes, and Internet presence! Have a read of the interview all the way to the bottom to find details of a Spellwright giveaway.

AMANDA: Hi Blake and welcome to FanLit! Let’s get down to some serious questions straight away: It is no secret at all that you suffer from dyslexia – in fact, you’re loud, proud and very supportive of all those organisations helping to assist the people who are afflicted by this disability. Was there a particular moment when you first realised you were different from the other kids? Or was it something picked up by your parents?

BLAKE: I clearly remember waiting after class while my grandmother was called into a conference, maybe in first grade, possibly the end of kindergarten. I’m not sure how, but I knew it was because I wasn’t able to do some of the basic things other children did. My mother tells a better story. I don’t know if it’s true, but mothers are insistent in these matters. According to her, there was a reading exercise that involved reading cards with simple words on them to the class. Apparently I would watch the other children, memorise the order of words, and then repeat it when it was my turn. No one, it seemed, had picked up that I couldn’t read… until one day I accidentally dropped the cards. I saw that their order hadn’t changed, and so picked them up and started “reading” them. The problem being that I was holding them upside down.

Not far into first grade, I was pulled out of the classroom for extensive testing. By then, I knew something was up. At the time, I was mortified at being identified as different. But now, I realise how fortunate I was to have been diagnosed so early. I’ve heard other Learning Disabled folks talk about “generation zero” as being the first wave of students who were tested and diagnosed early on. I feel very fortunate that I was among that number.

AMANDA: Speaking of being identified as different – we all know kids can be cruel: did you find yourself marked out by them or bullied?

BLAKE: Riding the short bus was a drag, and a lot of the children in non special-ed classrooms would mark us out when we were getting off of the bus. I had it easy compared to some of our peers who used wheelchairs or other assistance technology. Being visibly different made them easier targets. But, as you note, most everyone is at sometime subject to the cruelty of children; the harder part for younger disabled people, I think, is how we mark ourselves internally, how we separate ourselves from “normal” children. It’s a subtle process, and (for me at least) took a long time to recognise.

AMANDA: Do you have any advice for parents whose kids are reluctant readers?

BLAKE: The particulars of the case would help. But generally, I can suggest letting younger children see you read and telling them how much you enjoy it. For older children – always the trickier ones – it might be helpful to change media and material. Some people are visually wired and want to hold a book, while others love being read to and audiobooks. Perhaps offer to buy a few downloaded audiobooks for the child’s iPod or phone. I’m a big fan of comic books (though I sadly don’t have time to read any myself lately) and think any child who shows interest in comic books should be encouraged. Books similar to the comic books might be suggested.

AMANDA: Taking a small sidestep, and dealing with the way in which your dyslexia affects your writing, do you find a need for more alpha/beta readers to approve first drafts?

BLAKE: Probably yes? I’m not sure how many readers other authors go through. I do know that when proofing a manuscript, I need another pair of eyes to catch errors involving homophones (words with different spellings but the same sounds e.g. carat, caret and carrot). I’m extra nice to my proofreader friends right before I have to turn in a manuscript.

AMANDA: Finally on the subject, and just for fun, do you have any favourite or loathed words (in terms of meanings or just how damn hard they are for you to spell)?

BLAKE: Just one? I’m breaking into a sweat just trying to narrow a list down to ten favorite words. If I have to – and given that I’m currently piecing all the different parts of an early draft together – I’ll pick the word “concinnity” n. harmony in the arrangement or interarrangement of parts with respect to a whole.

My least favorite words are all determined by illogical orthography. One might suppose that any word ending in -ough should end in the same sound. But we have dough, bough, enough. The ‘ff’ sound at the end of ‘enough’ in particular makes me rant about English words being stupid. But of course, modern English has borrowed plenty of words that drive me insane. Chief among them is ‘bureau’ from the French. I actually just had to Google search my approximation of that word to find out how to spell it.

AMANDA: Let’s deal a little with the book itself – it’s been receiving some glowing reviews including one from our very own Robert T. In fact, Robert wanted to ask the following question: Spellwright has one of the most imaginative and complex magic systems I’ve ever read in a fantasy novel. Where did the idea for it come from? How did it evolve over the years?

BLAKE: During my days as a rabid pre-med undergraduate, I spent an obscene amount of time in the library thinking about two things: chemistry and English literature. Years struggling with dyslexia had given me a sense of how fragile written language is, how easily its meaning could be corrupted, and how illogical and imprecise it is. And yet my love of fantasy had shown me how beautiful it could be. Tolkien was fond of saying that he created Middle Earth for his dreamed-up languages, not the other way around. Meanwhile, my studies in biochemistry revealed how biopolymers ( like nucleotides in DNA and polypeptides in proteins) form something analogous to a written language. In a sense, they consist of letters and words that might be translated or transcribed. They might be rendered useless or harmful by a misspelling – a mutation.

In one particularly dull English class, I began to wonder what if written languages were more like molecular languages? What if you could peel a paragraph off the page and make it physically real? Could you pick your teeth with a sentence fragment? Thrust a sharply worded invective at an enemy’s throat? How would physical language shape culture, technology, history?

As my daydream grew I escaped my cold, pre-med self and remembered the wonder that only good speculative literature imparts. Tolkien created Middle Earth for his languages; could I imagine a world built by – not around – its languages? Instantly my disability provided the answer.

AMANDA: Do you think there is a particular importance to creating a unique and comprehensive magic system?

BLAKE: It’s a fine point, but rather than particular ‘importance’, I’d say a particular ‘potential’ to creating a unique magic system. The creation and adherence to such systems is rare, partially because it is difficult to do, partially because it is not necessary to write a deeply moving or entertaining book. Whatever magic-system an author creates, the plot and characters are going to be more important. That said, in the creation of a comprehensive, megawatt magic system the author may create an analogy for the scientific laws that govern our existence. That allows the author to write about something that is simultaneously strange and familiar.

Dune is about traveling across vast stretches of space, and the addiction to petroleum that allows this to happen. Robert Jordan‘s One Power is at once about a male and a female magic and about the battle of the sexes. In creating an original magic system an author creates a literary space in which a story can be told with multiple layers of meaning.

There’s been a rise of little-magic-much-brutality-moral ambiguity fantasy. It’s great and gritty stuff. Most often in such books, magic is scarce or unpredictable. The sympathetic characters rarely (if ever) live very long or succeed. It’s an interesting development because rather than creating a comprehensive magic system to explore different layers of meanings, it proposes a diminished or random magic system to explore meaningless. I love reading these gritty fantasies. But I’m very happy to write classic, megawatt magic system fantasy. Not too many other people are doing it right now, and it allows me to explore big flashy ideas like language, meaning, and the fundamental components of life.

AMANDA:You spent nearly 10 years writing and developing Spellwright . Will you be able to keep a tighter schedule for Spellbound ?

BLAKE: Most definitely. In fact, I have a ticking time bomb under me called student debt. I have the rest of this academic year (the medical academic year starts in June) to write full-time and then another full academic year as a research assistant for the Stanford Department of Internal Medicine. I HAVE to finish both books in the trilogy before then or I think the federal government turns me into a goon. What’s more I learned a lot from writing that first novel over and over again. I’m much better at stream lining the described technical aspects of my magic system. Of course my work will need revision, and of course I occasionally head down the wrong path, but I do this less frequently than before.

As I write this, I have 85,000 words of a Spellbound first draft and expect it to run ~140,000 words. The hardest part, actually, is the surprising amount of time a newbie author must devote to self promotion: online interviews, emails, blogs, Twitter, bookstore appearances. I’m told that declines as one gets further away from publication.

AMANDA: Are you worried about a sophomore slump?

BLAKE: When I was ending Spellwright, the fear of a sophomore slump was all I thought about. As a reader, I am most likely to stop following an author if the beginning of the second book is slow. I’m not sure why, but I think many other people do likewise. The beginning of a second book is a difficult point for a new novelist. You have your whole life to write your first novel; for your second, you have a year.

So, with the end of book one, I came up with a strategy: instead of ending it right after the climax, I extended the narration to cover the emotional repercussions that the wild events of the book would have on the protagonist. While doing this, I was able to position all the characters into the places I want them to start book two. Some have criticised the end for being drawn out by 10 pages or so. It hasn’t yet been a major criticism, but it is a valid one. I deliberately chose to lengthen the ending so that I could start off book two with a bang.

It might be a little early to say – drafts change – but as of now, I’m really excited about how the strategy has worked out. Book two comes charging out of the gates and gains speed. It’s a chance I’m taking: draw out the end of book one to help keep a reader hooked during the transition to book two.

AMANDA: Spellbound is the second book in the trilogy. Are you worried about ‘middle book syndrome’?

BLAKE: No. The Spellwright trilogy uses much of classic fantasy; however, the employment of a single, continuous, ever-expanding narrative is not one. Spellbound takes place nearly a decade after the first book and concerns the pivotal political and military events that take place over the course of a few hectic days.

All the books in the series are epic fantasies. However, each book adopts a different main theme and employs elements of different plot structures. So, for example, Spellwright concentrates on a “coming of age” theme and employs murder mystery elements. Spellbound concentrates on a romantic theme and employs the plot elements of a political thriller. As of now (and could very well change in the writing of the book) Disjunction will examine the themes of rebellion and redemption and employ elements of a war narrative.

By keeping each book’s time frame narrow, I ensure that each book tells a complete story that encapsulates the most important parts of the trilogy’s story. More important, for each book, I can keep the speed of the story very high.

AMANDA: Your novels appear slim on the bookshelves in this day of the fantasy doorstop tome! Was this a conscious decision?

BLAKE: Very much so! Part of that is practical: medical school forces me to write fast and write short. Well, short for epic fantasy. When working on Spellwright, I spent a lot of time thinking about how mystery novels are plotted and paced. Epic fantasy likes to use the quest travelogue – usually as a party that splits up to show the reader an entire continent, or as a steadily growing party making a B-line for Ye Olde Centre of Nefarious Power. There’s also, maybe, a number of authors who, disliking the quest motif, are writing excellent fantasies that wander around without a unified purpose. I think there’s life yet in the contained classic quest stories, especially when we look for cross pollination with other genres.

AMANDA: You are getting quite the reputation as being one of the friendliest authors on the Interweb – are you seriously this nice in real life? Or is it all a front?

BLAKE: It’s all a front. I never log onto the Interweb before my morning coffee. Beforehand, it’s not too pretty.

AMANDA: How do you feel about the interaction between author and reader these days?

BLAKE: I think social media has created a wonderful environment for reader/author interaction. From an author’s point of view, it provides invaluable feedback and a fair dose of inspiration – discovering so quickly and so directly that a work has an effect on a reader helps you keep your hands on the keyboard. It’s also a lot of fun. The readers I’ve interacted with so far are all interesting and often very funny people.

But there’s a fine art to being an author on the Internet. I certainly haven’t mastered it yet. There are plenty of online pitfalls. A vicious critique can put you creatively out of commission. You can spend too much time blogging, tweeting, emailing, and so on and not enough time writing. But, over time, one can learn to aggregate and filter the information. I am worried by those readers who are not vocal on the Internet. I think one has to remember that there is an inherent sampling bias (to hit you with a medical research term) to internet reader/writer interaction. But, even so, I’m optimistic and having a lot of fun.

AMANDA: Sadly, we’re almost at an end! But I’ll just ask one more question: what do you do when not being a med student or writing? Or do they fill all the hours in the day?

BLAKE: With those two masters, there’s not much time for anything else! Social life is kept to the minimum level that keeps me sane, no TV, no movies. The long hours of writing can get lonely, though I have been fortunate enough lately to make writing dates with the local, lovely and witty steampunk princess Gail Carriger. However, as lonely as writing is, medicine is intensely social – patients, peers, physicians, all in an emotionally charged atmosphere. The two of them make a good counterbalance.

AMANDA: Thank you so much for stopping by and asking our questions in such a thorough manner!

Blake Charlton’s debut novel Spellwright is already released in the US, and is being released in the UK on 27th May 2010 (Read Robert’s review and listen to the first 4 chapters). You can learn more about the author at Blake Charlton’s website and follow him on Twitter: @blakecharlton

As mentioned above, Blake has kindly provided THREE copies of Spellwright - leave a comment for us saying just how much you adore Mr Charlton and you will be considered! (US only, sorry!)

In case you haven’t noticed, we’re fans of Guy Gavriel Kay, and Rob and Stefan recently reported that Mr. Kay’s newest novel, Under Heaven, which releases today, is definitely up to par. (Comment below for your chance to win a copy.) While striving to suppress his enthusiasm about speaking with his favorite fantasy author, Rob was recently able to chat coherently with GGK about his newest work

Robert Rhodes: As with your previous books, I greatly enjoyed and admired Under Heaven. The setting of this novel is likely to be fresh to most Western readers. Which elements of 8th-century China and the Tang Dynasty first drew your interest? Which struck you as being particularly relevant to the present?

Guy Gavriel Kay: This book actually started taking a vague shape back in 2003, with my reading in and about the Silk Road. I thought I would approach China’s history indirectly that way. Ysabel hijacked the idea when we went to France in 2004 to work and live for a year, even though I thought I was going there to research and write that Silk Road book. And when I revisited the idea three years later, I had started to read Tang Dynasty poetry — one of the great, transcendent periods in literary history — and that got me going a little differently. As I began to focus my reading on the period, the richness of material and the amazing complexity of High Tang history began to engage me. One Asian Studies academic I came to be in touch with wrote me, ‘I always knew you’d get to the Tang.’ I wrote back, ‘I’m glad at least one of us knew!’

RR: Which character in Under Heaven did you first create or fully develop? What was your first image or impression of him or her?

GGK: I think in this case it was the main protagonist, Shen Tai. (It isn’t always a main character for me.) Primarily because one dazzling poem by Du Fu (the greatest of Tang poets, probably) gave me a starting point for the novel, by a mountain lake among the dead. I had to begin sorting out just who this person was, why he was there (though I never work all of that out at the beginning). I also knew, quite early, that I’d bring in a figure inspired by one of the other master poets, Li Bai, and that became the character of Sima Zian, ‘the Banished Immortal’.

RR: The valley of Kuala Nor seemed like a distinct, ‘sacred space,’ separate from the world at large, as is the cave of ancient paintings. What are your own separate or sacred spaces in the world?

GGK: Hmm, is it bad form to offer a mild dissent? Kuala Nor, a mountain lake and meadow, is a remote, physically beautiful place, but it isn’t sacred. In a real sense it is ‘unholy’, rendered so by the extreme violence imposed upon it by war. Tai’s actions as the novel begins have been an attempt to redress aspects of that violence, burying the long-dead, laying them to rest. Where I agree is with the notion that it is a removed, solitary place, apart from the hurly-burly of the world. (What I called the ‘dust and noise’ in the book.) That is the key contrast the opening offers, and the memory that lingers (I hope) through the story that unfolds when Tai leaves the lake. Personally, I think we all have our own ‘talismanic’ landscapes and settings, the ones that come to be deeply important in our inner lives, usually for very personal reasons. I began my writing career by ‘separating’ myself from the rest of my life in a fishing village on the south coast of Crete, not far from the Minoan ruins of Phaestos … and images of that village, the sea, the cliffs and hills above it are always with me, even today. It is where, I suppose, I started on this path as a novelist.

RR: On that path … when you write, do you listen to music? (I tend to associate your work with that of your fellow Canadian, Loreena McKennitt.) Or do you have any enlightening or bizarre writing rituals you’d like to share?

GGK: Loreena and I discovered, long ago, that we were at the same university at the same time, and even shared some professors … but we never knew each other then. I’m very comfortable being associated with her in your mind, and many readers share your thought. Her name has come up often as someone who might be perfect for music if some of the books were filmed. I tend not to listen to music while writing; I don’t want it to too directly infuse the rhythms of the prose (though I have colleagues who actively seek that effect in their work). Rituals? Oh, fine, you’ve been very polite so far, I’ll give you one. When I finished my very first novel (never published) in that village on Crete, I stood on the rooftop of the place where I was living and looked out at the sea and let out an absolutely primal shout that lasted awhile and disturbed not a few donkeys and Cretans down below. I do the same thing at the end of every book. In New Zealand, when I finished The Wandering Fire, the two year old son of the friends we were living with as I wrote came charging down the hallway into my work room to jump into my arms — Laura and his mother had warned him the yell might be coming that day. He’d been waiting for it. My sons, even when very young, came to wait for it as well, when they knew I was close to finishing. Does that story annihilate the jaded curmudgeon image entirely? May we pour a scotch, please?

RR: Soon enough! I understand that you intend to visit China but chose not to before or during the writing of Under Heaven. However, I believe you wrote Ysabel while visiting France. What prompts you to visit or not visit a place that provides the inspiration for a work in progress? Artistic intuition? Logistics? Or something in between?

GGK: I used to go away for focus and solitude, not for a direct link to the book I was doing. Tigana began a change, but it wasn’t planned out. (Don’t trust authors who say everything was thought through beforehand.) We wanted to live in Tuscany for a time, I had a book that took inspiration from Renaissance Italy, and then I got there and said to myself an equivalent of ‘whoa!’ … because it was so damned obvious how much it would help the book for me to be there looking out at olive groves and vineyards. But I hadn’t gone with that in mind. It was a belated revelation. For Arbonne, which came next,  we did go to Provence deliberately to register ambiance and context, but that was the only time it was so conscious. As I said above, Ysabel abducted me, when we got back to Aix-en-Provence after a decade away: the overwhelming impact of the place shifted the novel I’d gone there to write into one about where we were.

RR: A follow-up on the subject of places: in some of your earlier works, such as A Song for Arbonne and The Lions of Al-Rassan, the world of the story features two moons, and there’s often a brief but poignant reference to Fionavar, identified in your Fionavar Tapestry trilogy as the first world and the Platonic form for other worlds. The world of Under Heaven, by contrast, isn’t explicitly linked to that broader cosmology. What, if anything, should a reader infer from that difference?

GGK: Not a whole lot, I hope. I always saw the Fionavar references as a small grace note, a wry nod backwards to that primal world notion, a tip of the hat to early readers. Not any kind of cosmic unifying exercise. The two moons became a symbol of ‘we are not here’ and offered me some lovely chances at effects of light, legend, contrast. But I dislike being too predictable, and I suppose an element in the case of Under Heaven was a simple desire not to do what might have become too entirely expected. I’ll add that the figure who inspired my main poet character was notorious, legendarily, as a poet of the moon, and it struck me early that coming ‘back’ to our single moon might let me achieve a different set of effects with moonlight.

RR: This is simply an impression, but it seems your writing style, particularly in Under Heaven, has increasingly included shorter sentences and image-based fragments, which can create a more poetic than prosaic texture. At the same time, the main character, Shen Tai, aspires to write fine poetry, and his advisor, Sima Zian, “The Banished Immortal,” is a masterful poet. Why is poetry so deeply ingrained in this story?

GGK: I can’t even begin to decide if your impressions are right or not yet; the book’s too close still. I do know that for The Last Light of the Sun I made notes to myself about making the language harder, colder, less lyric (except in some specific scenes) to match the setting, by way of contrast to the earlier three books or so which had been more southern, decadent, sophisticated. For Under Heaven, one issue I was thinking about, in terms of language, was finding a balance between the very formal culture I was presenting and a very informal society I was presenting it to. Poetry is important in the book in part because it was so important in the Tang. It is literally true, not my invention, that examinations for the higher ranks of the court’s civil service required demonstrating a skill in poetry. It was regarded as a core dimension for civilized men. And often for women, too, at that level of society. The same is true, incidentally, of music.

RR: Sadly, music’s been the bane of my own civil service career. But let me ask a question as a writer: many modern writers attempt to captivate readers by techniques such as rapid-fire action sequences or other plot points, or a close viewpoint that highlights the immediacy and all-encompassing importance of the ongoing events. You often seem to take a different approach. For example, you often use a more distant, omniscient-author viewpoint that may interrupt the main storyline with a section focusing on a minor character or historical feature. Similarly, you make it clear — by describing the legacies of deceased characters, such as Shen Tai’s father and the previous prime minister, and providing hints as to events after the novel’s end — that the story in Under Heaven is part of a greater whole. What are the benefits of using this broader narrative?

GGK: ‘Benefits’ is a loaded word here, because it can be argued that for readers searching for a certain kind of escape in fiction there’s actually a detriment here. Bottom line for me, I guess, is that I’m trying to serve story, themes, characters — and by extension my readers — as well as I possibly can, taking a long time with each book. In pursuit of that, I’m really aware of what I call the ‘architecture’ of a novel, the overall arc and shape of it, and sometimes those rapid-fire openings you cite can mangle the shape and arc badly, however much a reader might be used to them from other media. I know I can be seen as contrarian in this, by conventional genre standards. As for what I sometimes call the long-focus passages … I am endlessly interested in having the books cross lines of class and society, offering both an intimately personal scale and a very large one. Taking the long view, the historical one, plays a role in shaping this … and in the case of Under Heaven it happens to suit the tone and style of Chinese history-writing very well. I like placing what might appear to be a huge tale in an even larger context … because that’s how we live our own lives. We have a context.

RR: Many of your characters, in this and other novels, are well-born, well-educated, and able to participate in extremely subtle or nuanced situations and dialogues. In our age of sound bites and direct, even blunt, forms of communication, such as text messaging, is subtlety declining in conversation and relationships? And do you ever take modern communication aspects, or developments such as e-books, into account in your work?

GGK: Interesting angle on that issue. Let me try this, by way of Tennessee Williams: I have always relied on the intelligence of strangers. I’ve made a career, for better or worse, assuming that those elements of our culture, and those writers, that treat their readers (or watchers or listeners) with a measure of trivialization may well reap a commercial benefit (Dan Brown, anyone?), but they are usually surrendering a creative one. I’m trying (again, for better or worse) for more. I’m at-ease assuming that readers are simply more willing to be stretched, engaged in more complex ways, than these other writers are. The sped-up elements of our culture you mention do put pressures on writers, editors, filmmakers to hit hard and fast (and on readers to expect it!), but my sense is there’s a legitimately large world of those who aren’t entirely (or always) satisfied with this, who find a sense of being rewarded when a writer treats them as adults by offering characters in a story that works (or tries to) on that level.

RR: No doubt your readers agree. With the partial exceptions of The Fionavar Tapestry and Ysabel, your works are set in pre-industrial times. Have you considered setting a story in a futuristic age?

GGK: As I always say, and it isn’t just a posture … I never know what will come next. You’ve mentioned two (or four, depending how you count!) books that incorporate modern characters. That’s not inconsequential, I hope, in this regard.

RR: Very true. At the beginning of your career, you assisted J.R.R. Tolkien‘s son, Christopher, in the editing of The Silmarillion. Have you had the opportunity to see Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings?

GGK: Yes.

Oh, fine. Not the place for a cute answer? I thought they represented honourable filmmaking, an attempt to grapple with the limitations (and strengths) of film adaptation, and the demands of a huge budget with the requirement to have a huge audience to justify that.

RR: Are you at liberty to discuss the status of any cinematic adaptations of your own works?

GGK: There are no non-disclosures in place, if that is what you mean. (Courteous question, thank you.) At this point I tend to describe the Hollywood interaction as a low-grade fever. There’s pretty steady background noise emerging from various possibilities, but nothing has become … music yet, to push the metaphor. I speak regularly with my L.A. agent (because he hates emailing!), and he fields ongoing discussions down there. Hollywood at this moment is an anxious, stressed-out place, and the big-budget projects being greenlighted tend to be those where sequels and/or huge guaranteed reader bases (Twilight, Harry Potter) can be assumed. If I were a betting man, I’d bet something will happen, but I wouldn’t bet the mortgage.

RR: And finally, do you presently have a favorite Scotch you would recommend to your loyal readers?

GGK: Oh, Lord, a variant on the favourite child question! So many distilleries, so little time. Hmm. I’ll bypass some of the well-known names (Macallan, Highland Park) that I love and mention one called Springbank, in Campbeltown. Goes back to early 19th century and is just wonderful. And as a small bonus for asking engaging questions, I’ll shift gears and mention a drink we were just introduced to in Bermuda this winter by a bookseller there. Called a “Dark and Stormy” (great literary cocktail name!), it is dark rum — technically it has to be Gosling’s Black Seal Bermuda Rum — and ginger beer, with a lime wedge. With summer coming, it is awfully appealing. Go try.

RR: Checking airfares to Bermuda right now. Thank you, Guy, for visiting us. I enjoyed learning more about you and your works, and I know our readers will, too. Till next time, cheers!

Dear readers, we’ve got a hardback copy of Under Heaven to give away. Comment below for a chance to win!

Today I’d like to welcome Joe Abercrombie to Fantasy Literature. Joe is the author of The First Law Trilogy (The Blade Itself, Before They are Hanged, and The Last Argument of Kings) and the stand alone work Best Served Cold. His next book is titled The Heroes and is set to release the first quarter of 2011. All of his work has been popular and highly regarded, especially here at FanLit. I was excited to get the opportunity to talk with Joe about himself and his work. Pyr Books has also agreed to give away a full set of The First Law Trilogy to two lucky Fanlit commenters! So be sure to leave a comment for your chance to win.

Justin: Thanks for stopping by, Joe. It’s an honor to have you with us. Let’s get started… We’re interested in your “getting published” story. Will you tell us about your experiences in getting The Blade Itself published?

Joe: Once I’d finished a draft of The Blade Itself that I was happy with I set about trying to get it published in the usual fashion – sending a letter and 50 sample pages to agents specializing in sf&f. Spent about a year collecting photocopied rejections. Then a friend of mine who knew I was doing it and worked for an educational publisher found himself on a desk editing course with Gillian Redfearn, who had just then started as an editor at Gollancz. He persuaded her to have a look at it, she liked it, asked to see the rest, and I got an offer a week later. I was pretty thrilled, as you can imagine, but things move slowly in publishing (after the initial interest), and the first book didn’t actually come out until over a year later, by which point I think I was already starting on the third book.

Justin: So the “read my friend’s manuscript actually worked?… nice! What’s the biggest adjustment you’ve had to make since becoming a full-time writer, besides the additional garage for your new Ferrari collection, and the boarding house for your mistresses?

Joe: The toilet seat carved from a single enormous diamond is cold when you first sit down on it. But it soon warms up. In all honesty it’s been a slow and steady shift from a not very serious hobby, to a serious hobby, to getting a contract and obviously taking it more seriously, to it being a part-time job, to it being a full-time job, over the course of about six or seven years. So in a sense I’ve been adjusting steadily the whole time, and I still am.

Justin: Do you have a certain ritual before getting into the writing frame-of-mind? Like Yoga, blood sacrifice, or just some quiet alone time?

Joe: Not really. I have two little girls these days, so there’s no time for rituals outside of the endless round of feeding, playing, putting to bed. Oh, I do have a desk that’s on motorised legs, though, so that I can sit or stand at it. I usually sit to do revision and e-mail, then stand for the actual nitty-gritty of the writing. So maybe motoring it into the standing position would count…

Justin: I need one of those in my cube at work. Being able to adjust the height for proper napping would be great. Anyway… I’m super pumped about the next book! How far along is The Heroes?

Joe: I’ve just finished the first draft of the fourth part of five, and it feels like it’s coming together pretty well. There’ll be a fair bit of editing and revision to do, as there always is, but the current release date of February 2011 looks good still.

Justin: Very nice, it’s always a wonderful to see a talented and prolific writer. Those two things don’t have to be mutually exclusive. I know you try to do something a little different from book to book. What’s The Heroes going to bring to the table that will set it apart from the rest your work?

Joe: Well, in some ways it will be pretty similar. It features quite a few characters from The First Law, and I’d like to think it has a similar mixture of awful yet lovable characters, bladder-loosening humour and bowel-loosening action. But this time around it’s very focused in terms of time and place – the book covers the events of a single battle, so the vast majority of it happens in one valley over the course of three days. It follows six characters on both sides and at different levels of command, and their paths converge and cross in various surprising, hilarious, and horrible ways. So it’s an attempt to do a classic war story in a fantasy setting, really – A Bridge Too Far meets Lord of the Rings – and get across a sense of the epic scale of a great battle while still telling some human stories within it.

Justin: Speaking of Lord of the Rings, has anyone approached you about translating one of your books to other media, like film, or television, or even a graphic novel type of thing?

Joe: A couple of people have approached about one thing or another, but inquiries are many and results are few. I’m not holding my breath.

Justin: John Malkovich as Bayaz… what do you think?

Joe: I can see that. Perhaps he’s a little too overtly clever and sinister though? Might you want someone who comes across a bit more like your bluff but pleasant uncle? Who looks like the friendly local butcher you wouldn’t want to cross. Then the dark side might be a bit more surprising. Bob Hoskins, maybe? Wouldn’t have been my first choice either, but I once saw a photo of him, bald, with the beard, and he looked perfect.

Justin: Super Mario as Bayaz? I’ll have to do some serious google image searching now. I can only imagine the results I’m going to get from looking up “Bob Hoskins’ beard.” Speaking of strange, what’s the strangest thing you’ve gotten from a fan? I love asking this question! Seriously, I send you guys fans send you guys all kinds of strange things.

Joe: Can’t say I’ve received anything particularly strange. Now I’m disappointed. A couple have sent me pictures inspired by the books, of varying quality. But to be honest I’m always shocked and delighted when anyone reads the books and likes them. I need nothing more. Apart from the money, of course.

Justin: US fans feel sorely neglected by the lack of your presence. Any plans to change that for The Heroes?

Joe: I’m hoping to make it over to the US this year, probably the east coast in the fall, but it’s a long way from confirmed, and I wouldn’t want to jinx it. Can you imagine the public outcry if I offered dates and couldn’t arrive?

Justin: This is a little off topic, but I feel the need to ask, since I know you’re a gamer: so is it Xbox 360 or PS3? Personally I haven’t been able to stop playing Trials HD for the 360… I just can’t quit. Annoying friends keep beating my scores… it’s driving me crazy. What games have your attention at the moment?

Joe: I’ve got a PS3, not out of the spiritual conviction that some gamers seem to have, but just because a friend of mine has an Xbox so exclusive titles I tend to play with him. Plus I never really enjoyed the sense that there was a helicopter taking off in the corner of the room while playing. Recently very much enjoyed the old school roleplaying style of Dragon Age, and the newer school action one of Assassin’s Creed 2. At the moment I’m playing Bioshock 2, looking forward to the latest Final Fantasy and Red Dead Redemption later in the year. There have been a lot of excellent games about lately – feels as if the latest generation of consoles have finally come into their own. Probably just in time to be replaced by a new generation. You know, like with fantasy authors.

Justin: You have to watch those upstart fantasy authors, you know the type. They think they can make fantasy all dark and violent… the nerve of those guys! What If I’m currently not reading the latest from Joe Abercrombie, what else should I be reading? Any particular book that you think readers should pick up?

Joe: Older books by Joe Abercrombie? This may be disappointing, but I must confess to not reading a lot these days, and most of what I do read is non-fiction of one kind or another, particularly a lot of history. But I’m currently reading and very much enjoying George Pelecanos’ The Way Home. As far as sf&f goes I liked Finch a lot, Jeff Vandermeer’s latest.

Justin: I remember something you wrote once jokingly that someday you will have to explain to your children about the content of your books. Seriously, what are you going to tell them?

Joe: Within these covers you will find all you need to know about life.

Justin: Their therapy bills are going to be high… Next Question: Ok, You, Brent Weeks, Pat Rothfuss, and Sam Sykes are locked in a 4-way duel to death, who goes down first?

Joe: Have you seen the size of Sam Sykes? I would try and talk Rothfuss and Weeks into bringing the giant down together, then aim to mop up the survivors…

Justin: Any words of encouragement for aspiring fantasy writers?

Joe: And contribute to my own extinction? Never.

Justin: Thank you, Joe, for giving us some of your time. I enjoyed the interview a great deal. Best of luck on the future release, and I’m sure we’ll see you again soon!

FanLit readers, learn more about the author at Joe Abercrombie’s website. Be sure to leave a comment below for a chance to win one of two sets of the First Law Trilogy! Check back in a week’s time to see who won.

[Note: Amanda (who lives in the UK) has previously published this interview with Sam Sykes at her personal blog.]

Gather round, people – I’m slightly nervous to present interviewee Sam Sykes – self-styled ‘Angriest Man Alive’ and debut author of Tome of the Undergates (to be released by Gollancz on 15 April 2010 in the UK). Sam has already conducted an interview with Aidan Moher, over at A Dribble of Ink where they discussed… well, video games and cover art and other such boy things. After reading (and reviewing) his book I wanted to try and draw out a little more about the man behind the book and how he went about writing the death and mayhem that fills the pages of Tome. As usual, we’ll give away a couple of books to commenters. So, without further ado…

Amanda: Welcome, Sam! How are you today?

SAM: Suitably irritated and full of meat, thank you.

Amanda: That’s, ah, good to hear… Let’s kick off gently and ask first about what constitutes a typical day in the life of Sam Sykes!

SAM: Assuming I’m lucky enough to have made it home last night, I typically pull myself out of wherever I fell on the floor. There are many soft things on the floor. Some of them are moist. I avoid those. I quickly pull down the blinds and peer through; the sunlight usually burns my eyes, so I try to sleep until five or six in the evening. Frequently, I find the police out there, looking for me. They’ve caught onto the fact that I laid a false trail in the woods where they chased me. They are persistent. They have hounds with them today, sniffing the earth. I am not worried. I evaded hounds before. Hounds, bullets, the shrill cries of the enemy, the hushed whisper of their gun barrels brushing against the leaves as they leveled their weapons at me, and took aim and–

What?… No, that’s not the story to Rambo. That’s my life! Rambo copied ME!

Amanda: Just a normal everyday life then! Seriously, what gives with calling yourself the ‘Angriest Man Alive’?

SAM: You’d be angry, too, if you’d seen what I’d seen, if you’d smelled what I smelled.

Amanda: Ha, so much for getting the inside scoop on the man who parades as a ninja in most of his author photos! Let’s try this: part of your reputation comes from your lively banter on the Internet with your readers. How do you feel about the greater interaction between authors and readers these days? Does it help or hinder? Is it something you enjoy?

SAM: It’s a treat for me, really, because I love attention. That may come off as crass and shallow, but it’s basically true. I like it when people are interested in my book and myself. And I like helping them find out whatever they want to know about it. It’s just an immense treat to have someone interested enough in you to seek you out and ask questions, so naturally, I’m happy to answer them. These days, one doesn’t sell just a book, they sell the author with it. This has created, in my opinion, one of the best and most accessible network of authors ever.

I’m not sure an aspiring author can even go without a web presence because of it. The internet has been the de facto form of communication, hype and delivery for ages now. If there was an author out there who got by solely on verbal word of mouth, I’d very much like to read his book.

Amanda: I honestly can’t think of an author these days that doesn’t have at least a website (even if they don’t mouth off, starting feuds all over Twitter with other authors). Two questions there: fancy giving us some hype about your new website www.samsykes.com and extended plans with it? And exactly how many authors do you now have on your black list?

SAM: Well to address the feuding, and I could get in severe trouble with my publishers for telling you this, it’s not so much personal as professional trash talk. You see, the publishing world is not unlike the movie Highlander, with various authors competing with each other for the spot of supremacy. However, as a lot, we tend to be pasty, underexercised and apathetic, so our sword-slinging duels to the death tend to rage in semi-polite insults over email and twitter that occasionally degenerate into “yo mama” contests.

Feuds are divided into “blood,” “formal,” and “spit.” Blood feuds are soul-deep contests of anger that rage between myself and other people who probably wonder what the strange man sending them angry emails are about. Formal feuds are undeclared states of perpetual aggression based on envy and spite that I have running with currently every other author in existence. The sole spit feud is pretty much me and Adam Roberts trying to spit in each others’ mouths while yawning.

As to the site, you might notice that, at a glance, it looks like any other jerk’s website, save for that little button up there saying: “LORE.” This is the solution I came up with for a professional quandary: I have a lot of world to share, but I don’t necessarily want to shove it down the readers’ throats in prose form (not that they wouldn’t appreciate it, but I find it can be a little irritating for readers to discover a history lecture in their fantasy). So, the lore tab is there for me to offer little tidbits, incentives and extras from the book without actively forcing it on other people.

Amanda: You’re keeping busy, for sure. But I guess you’re also busy at work on a follow up to Tome of the Undergates – how is the writing going?

SAM: Not bad, actually! At the moment, the book resembles the chubby, unpopular girl from one of those teen Cinderella stories. Right now, she’s laughed at, what with her pimply face, love handles and paint-covered overalls. But we will embark on a joyous 80′s montage, (set to something catchy, like “I Ran So Far Away,” I think) and we will make her lose weight, wear nicer clothes, put on make-up and maybe pad her bra a little and soon, the captain of the football team (you, the reading public), will fall desperately in love with her and you’ll realize perhaps she was this beautiful all along and the way she gorges her food and snorts when she laughs and covertly farts in your mouth when you yawn is just part of her charm.

Tempted yet?

Amanda: I think with a response like that, you’re rather lucky I’ve already read the first book and have therefore been sucked into needing to read the second! Since we’re indirectly talking about girls, let’s deal with this question. What do you think your debut novel offers to the female readership of SFF books? Did you think about a target audience as you were writing it?

SAM: This is kind of a tricky question, isn’t it? Women, I think, are pretty discerning in their reading and want interesting plots that affect them. The typical fantasy female character usually has two routes to go: either she’s totally head-over-heels in love with the male protagonist or she’s out to prove male society wrong and usually becomes something of an unintentional parody in the process. Hell, for those who also read YA (as the readership tends to blend a little), the new trend has become for females to not only be upstaged, but totally irrelevant in their own stories, being a sort of passive disease caught by the male characters.

I don’t really subscribe to that theory. I don’t particularly subscribe to the idea that women and men are all that different, actually, in terms of conflict. We handle our problems differently, maybe, and we react to them differently, but we have the same desires: to be loved, to have purpose, to not fail. In short: girls fart. Men fart, too. We’re all embarrassed by it, but we move on.

The female characters in Tome of the Undergates do exemplify this attitude, I think. One is a strong, confident woman convinced by her racial creed that her personal feelings are a symptom of a disease… who farts. Another is a woman questioning her role in society and whether she even makes a difference, while at the same time wondering if she can actually do good through the typical fantasy problem solution of “kill stuff.” And another is seven feet tall, purple and has a fondness for ripping off limbs.

None of those really factor in all that much, though. As I said, I think we all want the same thing out of a story: conflict, relationships, plot and probably one or two dismemberings. I’ve got that in spades.

Amanda: Having read Tome of the Undergates I agree with the fact that you are definitely writing in some strong female characters there! I think my favourite character in the book is Kataria – did you have a favourite while you were writing?

SAM: I know it’s kind of a cliche to suggest this, but I really do love all of them and I think that by having fun with each of them, the reader will also be in a position where a different point of view is something to love as opposed to moaning “oh jeez, another chapter with this character.” I think what made them fun to write was the fact that none of them are easily categorized, in my mind.

Lenk appears brave and practical, but is occasionally willing to sacrifice it all for someone else. Kataria is tough-as-nails and excruciatingly violent, but possesses a vulnerability that disgusts her. Asper’s strength is buried under a mountain of doubt and dread while Denaos has secrets one wouldn’t expect of a coward. Gariath, naturally, was one of the most fun because he simply doesn’t give a crap. And Dreadaeleon… well, I suppose if you combine the ability to spew fire and lightning with a self-loathing, insecure, annoying seventeen-year-old nerd, you can’t help but have fun.

Amanda: And I certainly did have fun! While I read about the dismembering and crotch-stomping, it did occur to me to wonder where your ideas come from? Did the book spring fully formed? Did you have any issues with the characters taking you in directions you weren’t expecting?

SAM: Well, most of my characters are mentally disturbed, so…

I mean, of course characters surprise you frequently. If they didn’t, why would anyone want to read them? If the hero always did the right thing all the time, no one would ever wonder what he was going to do when the village was burning and he had to save the orphanage or the bank. If the villain was out to do evil for evil’s sake, no one would ever watch what he was doing because he was obviously about to steal an orphaned kitten’s college fund or something similar.

Granted, it’d be really easy if they could follow that set pattern, but if it was really easy, there’d be no reason to read it.

Writing scenes is equally tricky and for less logical reasons. On occasion, I’ll have an idea that’s fully fleshed-out and meets all the criteria I need it to meet and is just exquisite in my head, then I’ll put it on paper and see it’s absolute trash. At that point, it’s fairly difficult to move forward, so I sometimes need to abandon it if it’s really giving me trouble and move onto something else. Other times, it’ll weigh heavily on my conscience for awhile and then I’ll get something out of the blue that totally inspires me and changes the entire course of the story.

There’s a scene, for example, where the character of Denaos, a cowardly thief with particularly black secrets, really came to life for me and probably for a lot of readers. That scene, originally, was totally clownish and stupid with vague, childish threats being made that only served to make the character even more of a parody than he pretends to be. Then I saw a torture scene on the HBO show Rome and thought: “fuck, that looks painful.” From there, the scene, even the character of Denaos, came clear as day to me.

Just goes to show how tricky, and utterly whimsical, this whole process can be.

Amanda: You seem pretty comfortable with being a full-time writer. Have you always wanted to be a writer, or did you dabble with other career paths first?

SAM: For a long time, I was actually a writer of a specific kind of romance subgenre known as “Presidents in Lust.” You can find my opus: “Coolidge on the Brink” under my pen name of Mavis Bernard. Before that, I bottled my urine and sold it to French-Polynesian Witch Doctors (if you’re reading this, Pierre, you owe me sixty francs).

Truthfully, I didn’t know if I always wanted to be a writer, but I did know I was too lazy and incompetent to do anything else.

Amanda: Well, since you mentioned laziness, do you find it easy to get up and write every day or do you suffer from procrastination? What leads you astray?

SAM: Pretty much everything. I’ve got this lovely situation in which I’m an author cursed with a short attention span. I’m frequently twittering, facebooking, farting about…wait, shit, is my editor going to read this?

AHAHAHA WHAT IS PROCRASTINATION I AM UNSURE I HAVE BEEN WRITING FOR PAST SEVEN YEARS NO STOPS NO BREAKS I PEE IN MASON JAR AND USE IT TO NURTURE FLOWER I AM A WRITING MACHINEMACHINEMACHINEMACHINEMACHINE

Amanda: So, moving rapidly on from the writing process before you get yourself in trouble (!), we’ve all had a chance to see the cover art of your book and I know you and Aidan chatted about it. What is your take on the differing opinions that have cropped up?

SAM: The cover’s a fun source of debate. Girls seem to like it, men seem to hate it. Perhaps our problems are quite different, after all? To me, it’s pretty hilarious. Griping over cover art is a time-honored pastime, right up there with arguing over whether urban fantasy is real fantasy and complaining about George R.R. Martin. I don’t even have a hooded figure on the cover and I still get lumped in with that oft-maligned (perhaps unjustly so) crowd. I truly look forward to the day where I set a trend and “wet, shadowy figure” becomes the hated grudge.

I don’t begrudge people their God-given right to complain, really. With absolutely no offense intended to the various bloggers out there, the ones that are typically the most vocal in their scorn, they are a very small percentage of the people we’d like to have read the book. Chances are, they’d read it, anyway, and just have some fun bemoaning it. So, I mean, it’s really a choice: do we try to attract 80% of the population or do we tailor it so that we aren’t crucified by Aidan Moher again?

One of these days, though, I’ll make a Special Bloggers Edition of Tome of the Undergates. Its cover will be a grizzly bear at a tea party with a robot. It’ll be meta as hell and I will finally achieve the love of the reviewers I so desperately crave.

Amanda: Well, that’s one way to deal with the detractors! It isn’t too long now until the release of the book in the UK. How excited are you and do you have plans for the book launch?

SAM: I actually have no idea what happens. I have placed myself at the beck and call of my publishers, who I hope are plotting to both expose me to a lot of media and keeping me out of jail for exposing myself to the media.

Amanda: Okay, last question: acknowledging the fact that SFF readers rarely buy just one book, tell us why everyone should rush out and buy yours?

SAM: It underscores a lot of familiarity with a lot of new and innovative stuff. It takes a neat look at a lot of fantasy tropes and does new and interesting things with them, really. It goes deep into the psychology and philosophy of an adventurer and dregs out the really nasty, unpleasant stuff in a really fun way. I think a lot of people who are bored of fantasy political thrillers and fantasy boys with uncommon destinies will enjoy it.

You may notice that sounded a lot like the response I gave at A Dribble of Ink. Well, there are two key differences! For one, this one is far more condensed and for two, I didn’t threaten to weld peoples’ anuses shut in the last one!

And I think that is an… unusual note to leave the interview on… Thanks so much for your time, Sam. Remember, people, Tome of the Undergates is out in April in the UK. I can guarantee that the book itself is just as depraved, aggressive and downright mad as the man himself – make sure it’s first on your list come April!
Today one US commenter will win a copy of Jim Butcher’s Changes (reviewed by Justin) and one UK commenter wins a copy of Jonathan L. Howard’s Johannes Cabal the Necromancer (reviewed by me.) (UK commenters, please indicate you’re in the UK.)

We’re pleased to welcome today one of the defining authors of epic and urban fantasy. Jim Butcher has thrilled fans for a decade and Beth and her husband Gert were happy to chat with him about his work. Mr. Butcher recently published the final volume of his high-fantasy series CODEX ALERA. The twelfth volume of THE DRESDEN FILES, entitled Changes, comes out today! So, two lucky commenters on this post will win a copy of Changes!

Beth & Gert: Now that you’ve finished CODEX ALERA (and what a finish, too), the question that springs to mind first is, what’s next? And have you thought about going back to Alera at some point?

Jim Butcher: I’m not quite sure what will be next. I’ll be making that decision after I finish writing the thirteenth book of THE DRESDEN FILES, sometime this summer.

B & G: How did you come up with the original idea for CODEX ALERA? We’ve heard rumours that it involved a bet on whether you could combine the Roman empire and Pokémon… is that true?

B & G: The bet was actually centered around writing craft discussions being held on the then-new Del Rey Online Writers’ Workshop, I believe. The issue at hand was central story concepts. One side of the argument claimed that a good enough central premise would make a great book, even if you were a lousy writer. The other side contended that the central concept was far less important than the execution of the story, and that the most overused central concept in the world could have life breathed into by a skilled writer.

It raged back and forth in an ALL CAPITAL LETTERS FLAMEWAR between a bunch of unpublished writers, and finally some guy dared me to put my money where my mouth was, by letting him give me a cheesy central story concept, which I would then use in an original novel.

Me being an arrogant kid, I wrote him back saying, “Why don’t you give me TWO terrible ideas for a story, and I’ll use them BOTH.”

The core ideas he gave me were Lost Roman Legion and Pokémon… Thus was Alera formed.

B & G: So it is true! :-D   Okay, the next upcoming book of yours is Changes, the twelfth of THE DRESDEN FILES. The title seems apt; judging by what’s been let out so far, there are big things afoot. Even the title itself is a departure — previous books have all had titles of two words of equal length. It starts to seem like the series is entering its second phase. Is this an accurate assumption? And what changes will this entail for readers?

Jim Butcher: I would actually call this the series’ third or even fourth phase, if I was going to use words like “phase” to describe the progression. I tend to work on a event-by-event basis.

I decline to ruin anyone’s fun by describing what changes will be entailed for the reader. But Changes is certainly a significant milestone in the story.

B & G: THE DRESDEN FILES feature a large and well-developed cast. Are you planning on putting out any more novellas exploring this cast, in the vein of Backup?

Jim Butcher: I’ve already written one for Murphy, which will appear in Side Jobs, the first DRESDEN FILES short-story collection. But as far as single novellas go… no, I’m not at all sure I’ll be writing any of those again. A number of fans were extremely upset with Backup for a number of reasons, and their reaction has made me more than a little wary about pursuing more of the same.

B & G: Something a lot of readers enjoy about THE DRESDEN FILES is that while the books stand alone, they also build a larger story — an overall arc. Now, you’ve previously mentioned a plan involving twenty books capped by an apocalyptic trilogy. How is that plan holding up so far?

Jim Butcher: I’m a couple of books behind my original outline. At this point, I’m telling everyone that the series will be twenty-ish books, followed by a trilogy. The net result is that there will probably be at least a couple more “case” books, like we’ve seen so far.

B & G: You’ve put out a writing guide to help aspiring authors. Any chance of seeing more of this, perhaps a full-sized guide book of your experiences and what you’ve learned as an author?

Jim Butcher: It’s one of those things I sincerely intend to get around to doing, one of these days — which is not quite the same thing as “never” but it might be close.

Honestly, all of the craft I know is essentially the same material explored by Jack Bickham and Dwight Swain, only dumbed down to the level where I was able to understand and apply it. The work of both of them is available from a number of vendors. I would encourage any aspiring writers to check out what Bickham and Swain have to say, rather than waiting for me to get organized enough to write the Denny’s menu version of the same material.

B & G: Speaking of other authors… In academia, you know you’ve achieved something when your article is quoted by someone else. It’s rarer to see quotations like this in fiction, but how do you feel about this? Would you call it an accolade to have a book of yours mentioned by someone else’s fictional character?

Jim Butcher: Absolutely! Writers are one of the toughest audiences to please, and it makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside to get a shout out from your fellow professional storytellers.

B & G: A topic that has garnered a lot of discussion recently is the relationship between authors and fans. Do you think you have “responsibilities” towards your fans?

Jim Butcher: Frankly? I don’t have any responsibility to the fans, beyond writing a book. They, in turn, don’t have any responsibility to me, other than acquiring the book legitimately.

Of course, I also think it’s professionally and personally stupid to leave the writer/fan relationship at that. It’s smart for me to produce books in a timely and regular fashion, just like it’s smart for me to provide the means of getting a book autographed. It’s smart for me to appear in public occasionally, and get to actually meet the readers face to face, and to be as friendly and courteous as I can when I do. It’s smart for me to tell a fun and satisfying tale. It’s even smart for me to talk with fans about the story thus far, and to hear their opinions on various characters and story events. And I try to do all of that, whenever I can.

To me, a fan/writer relationship isn’t about obligation, about who owes what to whom. It’s about giving, and it’s about pride. I try to give the readers my best effort with everything I write, and every time I finish a project, I want it to be something in which I can feel proud.

But to any fans reading this — don’t worry. I don’t expect anything from you guys beyond acquiring the book legitimately. I’m low maintenance.

B & G: Your author bio mentions you’re a martial artist. Would you tell us more about that?

Jim Butcher: I’ve always preferred the term “martial arts enthusiast.” “Martial artist” implies that I am a skilled and dedicated practitioner. “Enthusiast” just means that I really, really like them. And it’s by far a better description.

I’ve trained in Ryukyu Kempo, Shorin Ryu, Tae Kwan Do, a little Aikido and a little Kung Fu, but it’s not as though I’m a master — or even a serious student — of those arts. Mostly I just punched or kicked stuff, sparred with others in the class, cracked jokes at inappropriate moments, and generally enjoyed myself.

B & G: Okay, Beth always likes to ask: Is there one question you wish somebody would ask you, but nobody ever does? If so, what is it, why, and what is the answer?

Jim Butcher: Not so much! See above, re: low maintenance… But seriously, I just take the questions as they come, rather than grinding gears in my brain thinking of the question I want someone to ask.

Except, of course, when I’m telling knock-knock jokes. If I don’t get the courtesy of a “Who’s there?”, we may have to throw down.

B & G: And Gert especially wants to know: Is it true that Butters is next in line for becoming a Knight of the Cross?

Jim Butcher: I always answer this way to questions about the future storylines of the series: that I refuse to answer on the grounds that it will spoil someone’s fun.

Besides, I take perverse glee in sing-songing, “I’m not gonna tell you, I’m not gonna tell you!” It’s like heroin for writers!

This year, particularly, promises to be chock-full of writer heroin…

Thanks once again to Mr. Butcher for stopping by!  Remember: two lucky commenters will win copies of Changes. But don’t let that stop you from buying it!

I recently had the great pleasure of dining and talking with urban fantasy author Jaye Wells, whose Mage In Black hits shelves today. In fact, in our two-book giveaway, one lucky commenter on this interview will receive a free copy of Mage in Black while a second will receive a copy of Red-Headed Step Child. So, be sure to comment below.

Ms. Wells is one of my favorite new urban fantasy authors. Her books are driven by action and suspense and spiced with humor and remind me of the popular series by Jeaniene Frost and Karen Chance. To be honest, though, I was a bit nervous about a face-to-face lunch with Ms. Wells, because during my research, I stumbled across reports of her stunningly brutal brawl with fellow Orbit author Nicole Peeler.

SB Frank: [sits to order] Out of curiosity, are these violent tendencies something that happen frequently when you’re out in public with fantasy authors, or, say, um, fantasy critics?

Jaye Wells: [laughs and picks up a menu] No, no, I only assault other fantasy authors who deserve it… [Rants for several minutes about why Nicole Peeler deserved it for daring to disagree with her]. My point is that critics are perfectly safe… unless, of course… [Laughter snaps off suddenly. Eyes transform into sharpened gimlets.] You liked my book, didn’t you?

SB Frank: [gulps] Ha, ha. Never fear. You are in no danger of getting a bad book review from me! [On a completely unrelated note, see my four-star review of Mage in Black here].

[Still, despite my initial nervousness, I had a good feeling that I was going to like Ms. Wells because I’d read on her website (www.jayewells.com) that she had “decided to leave the facts behind and make up her own reality.” Those who know me know that I have extensive personal experience with this particular lifestyle choice. In fact, it is somewhat of a Frank Family tradition, though unlike Jaye we are merely dedicated amateurs, not paid professionals. Ms. Wells’ website also claims that she has a life-long fascination with the arcane and freakish. So, I asked her about this.]

Jaye Wells: As far as I can tell, my fascination has two sources. The first is that I’m a recovering Catholic. No offense to any believers out there, but being raised in a church that actively employed exorcists had an interesting effect on my young, overactively imaginative mind. For example, I used to believe a vampire waited outside my window at night for me to go to sleep. It’s funny to think about now, but back then it caused many sleepless nights. But I guess at some point in my life, my fear turned into fascination. In high school, I discovered Anne Rice‘s Vampire Chronicles and just couldn’t get enough of them. They’re not horror, per se, but seeing heavy Catholic undertones used to portray monsters as heroes shifted something for me.

The other source of my twisted sensibilities is that all the men on my dad’s side of the family were involved in emergency services. My dad was mainly a fireman, but he did consider becoming a mortician at one point. In addition, both my mother and father were involved in the police reserve force when I was quite young. Therefore, I spent a large portion of my youth around people with unique perspectives on things most people find uncomfortable. Gallows humor is pretty common as well as spinning good yarns for entertainment. I remember spending hours around my grandmother’s table listening to the adults crack wise and share tales about their exploits. I maintain that this early exposure to dark humor was critical to the development of my own sick sense of humor and fascination with the darker sides of human nature.

[Wells’ twisted sense of humor comes out early on in Mage in Black, when Wells’ protagonist, Sabina Kane is assaulted by vampire assassins in a convenience store. Throughout the novel, the humor was well developed, a balance between witty narration, clever dialogue, comical situations, and great character interactions.]

SB Frank: Let’s move to the inevitable where-do-you-get-your-inspiration-from question. You claim that you take inspiration from objects as mundane and diverse as porch lights and wine bottles…

Jaye Wells: You know I think part of this just has to do with how my brain is wired. It’s not really a conscious effort to find ideas anymore. My mind just tends to make odd connections between seemingly disparate items. For example, the porch light you mentioned. I was driving by an apartment complex one night. Outside one of the doors, someone had replaced their regular bulb with a red one. For some reason it fascinated me. Now, probably the person did it because that’s all they had or because they thought it was cool. But to me it became a secret signal, like they used on the underground railroad or something. Since most of my stories tend to include a vampire, I started thinking about a vampire on the run, desperately looking for this red light and the safety it symbolized. That idea was the inspiration for a short story I wrote called “Red Life.”

That said, I always try to warn new writers not to fixate too much on ideas. I see sparks of ideas everywhere. Most writers do. It could be a conversation, a news story, a soup label, whatever. But ideas matter much less than execution when it comes to story. That’s what non-writers don’t get when they ask “Where do you get your ideas?” We get them everywhere. What they really want to know is, “How do you do that?” And the answer to that question is, you sit your ass in the chair and flesh out the idea and characters, you type and revise and then do both some more until you have a story. Ideas alone are worthless.

SB Frank: You (as do several other fantasy authors) place a great deal of symbolic significance on the apple. I get the whole Garden of Eden thing, but what I’m wondering is: why fruits and not vegetables? Sure, I mean fruits are sweet and tempting and kids would rather rip their own heads off than eat vegetables, but it still hardly seems fair. If you were going to pick a vegetable to be the symbol of loss of innocence and whatnot, which vegetable would you pick, and why?

Jaye Wells: Hmm, loss of innocence? Has to be asparagus. Beyond the phallic and aphrodisiac implications, there’s the whole unfortunate, um, urination issue. Asparagus is a lot like evil, I guess. It’s fun when you’re eating it, but you’ll pay the price later.

SB Frank: Hm… Darn. I had this idea for a children’s book with a magic asparagus. Now, I may have to choose another veggie… Changing subjects, I understand you’re currently contracted for three books in the Sabina Kane series. What else is in the works?

Jaye Wells: Even though I pitched the series as a trilogy, as I’ve gotten deeper into Sabina’s world I’ve realized there’s just too much there for only three books. I’m hoping that once I turn in the third book, Green-Eyed Demon, that my publisher will want more. Other than that, I have another urban fantasy series bubbling on the back burner. I can’t really talk about it yet, but it’s got major elements we haven’t seen yet in the genre.

SB Frank: Well, I for one can’t wait. Thank you so much for joining us today at fantasyliterature.com!

Readers, be sure to comment on this post for a chance to win a copy of Mage in Black or Red-Headed Step Child.

Fantasy evokes a lot of emotions from me.  Giggling usually isn’t one of them.  But I giggled through much of Soulless, the first book in The Parasol Protectorate by the peerless Gail Carriger.  After being properly introduced, Ms. Carriger politely assented to being interviewed for the benefit of our dear readers.  The transcript of that conversation follows.  Ms. Carriger has also generously donated a signed copy of Soulless (reviewed by me) to be donated to a lucky reader, so leave a comment or question for her and you may be the lucky winner!

Ruth: Usually when talking about new authors, I can compare them to other authors that are well known. Your work can be described as “What would happen if P.G. Wodehouse and Jane Austen decided to write urban fantasy together.” What was the inspiration for that unusual combination?

Ms. Carriger: I love Wodehouse and I love Austen, and the Victorian era falls in the middle time-wise and suits steampunk, so it just kind of happened organically. It’s what I wanted to read, but couldn’t find, so I figured I better write it. I still can’t believe others wanted to read it also. To me, that’s the unusual part.

Ruth: I found the difference between the vampire and werewolf societies in Soulless quite interesting. Were they based on historical civilizations?

Ms. Carriger: The werewolves are based on wolf pack dynamics mixed with the British Regimental system of the day (which aren’t so very different if you look into it closely). The vampires are based on wasp hive dynamics mixed in with some early Renaissance ideas on espionage and politicking.

Ruth: You have werewolves and vampires as an established part of British upper-crust society. In your version of the history of British Empire, are any of the big names from the past supernatural? I think Henry VIII as werewolf might explain a few things.

Ms. Carriger: I don’t think King Henry was a werewolf (though he’d make a very good one) but the supernatural was the real reason for his break with the Catholic Church. I (so far) have kept away from any really big historical names. But in the third book, Blameless, there are 2 more minor names that students of history may get rather excited about, one from Roman times and one from Elizabethan. The vampires pretty much ran the Roman Empire so I’d cast a jaundiced eye at those trixie Caesars.

Ruth: The whole vampire v. werewolf dynamic in urban fantasy is almost overplayed. Beyond the historical setting, what sets your take on the supernatural apart from everything out there?

Ms. Carriger: There’s no magic. None at all. Instead, Victorian scientists are struggling to understand vampires, werewolves, and ghosts using the scientific standards of the day. This results in steampunk gadgets and crazy theories centered about the existence of the soul. In addition, Soulless is very lighthearted in its approach to the supernatural, some might even say silly (e.g. newly minted vampires suffer from fang-lisp). Also the werewolves wear opera glasses and the vampires are gay – well not all of them, but still… did I mention silly?

Ruth: You excel at silly. I giggled through significant portions of Soulless. Do you ever write something and think, “Nope, that’s too silly”?

Ms. Carriger: No, which may be a fatal flaw. I’ve actually been called to task for a particularly ridiculous scene in the second book. So I just made the character in question drunk.

Ruth: Octopodes play an important, yet unexplained role in Soulless. You have promised elsewhere that all will eventually be explained about the mysterious presence of the cephalopods in the books. Did you choose them because of a personal fascination with the animal, or is it strictly professional?

Ms. Carriger: Oh, it stems from a totally unprofessional obsession with invertebrates in general and octopodes in particular. I love how smart, and cute, and squishy, and tasty they are. They are everything good rolled together in eight-armed glory. When I write it is more a matter of making sure the story has a place for an octopus, than making the octopus fit into the book.

Ruth: Have you ever been fishing for octopus? What’s your favorite way to eat them?

Ms. Carriger: I’ve never fished for octopuses. One of my professors used to wax poetical about his Greek fishing village and how they whack dead octopuses against the streets to tenderize them and hang them out on clotheslines. “You know you’re in Greece,” he used to say, “When you wake up to the sound of an octopus being slapped of a morning.” Coincidentally, my favorite way to eat them is Greek style – grilled with lemon, olive oil, and fresh oregano. Heaven.

Ruth: You have the next two books in The Parasol Protectorate coming out this year. What are your plans after that?

Ms. Carriger: Funnily enough, my agent asked me that same question recently. As a result of some discussion and thought, I now have two secret projects in the works, and one additional not so secret project that’s for my own amusement – the history of Alexia’s scandalous father. I’ve also got two shorts on my plate: a non-fiction steampunk piece and a paranormal romance story. 2010 is going to be a busy year.

Ruth: Those are a lot of different writing projects. How do you keep them straight? Do you outline everything in advance or just jump right in to the story and see where it takes you?

Ms. Carriger: Militant outliner. Sometimes a story will start without me. As in, I’ll wake up, sit at the computer, and just start typing. Then I have to force myself to stop and bang out an outline or neither of us have any idea where we are going. I don’t like to ramble – except in interviews (apparently). As to keeping the projects distinct from each other, that can get difficult. Usually, I pick something for the week and try to just work on that, but other projects may crowd in and want to be worked on instead. It can get very discombobulating.

Ruth: Do you ever have characters who just won’t go along with the outline? What do you do in those circumstances?

Ms. Carriger: All the time. I pretty much just let them do what they want, they usually know what is happening better than I do. Sometimes I have to cut them out later, but usually it has some sort of plot twist relevance near the end. I love it when that happens.

Ruth: Can you give us any clues as to what Alexia might be up to in the next two novels?

Ms. Carriger: Well, there are werewolves in kilts in the second book, and Italians in nightgowns in the third.

Ruth: How involved were you in the creation of the Alexia paper doll website? I haven’t had that much fun since playing with Barbies in grade school. I think I may have actually squealed when I realized you could change her hair by clicking on it.

Ms. Carriger: Did you see her hair falls down when you put on her nightgown? And you can change her facial expressions too! It was Orbit‘s idea but they brought me in on it early on. Every outfit, background, and clothing option comes from Soulless. I prepared a full on dossier with images and other information for the lovely woman who designed it. You can download the dossier, if you like, from my website. It’s in the DVD extras section, under People, Places, & Plot.

Ruth: Do you have a favorite BBC miniseries? Something you watch when you need inspiration?

Ms. Carriger: I would say Cranford is my favorite, although I can watch both the BBC’s Pride & Prejudice (long version) and their North & South over and over and over again. Regency House Party is also brilliant.

Ruth: Assuming you could meld time and books, do you think Alexia and Elizabeth Bennett would have been friends?

Ms. Carriger: You know I think they might. Difficult to tell; I imagine Alexia is rather forward and hard to get along with.

Ruth: You have quite an extensive DVD extras section on your website, and your blog is a wealth of interesting and amusing information. Do you feel maintaining a web presence affects the work you do as an author, and if so, how?

Ms. Carriger: Currently, it seems monumentally detrimental. I blame Twitter. But mostly I think it’s been positive. People have been really kind about interviewing me and reviewing Soulless. I do feel like it’s part of my job. I’d say I spend half my day online, at least.

Ruth: You’ve coined the term “bustlepunk” to describe your work. How successful have you been in getting bustlepunk recognized as a sub-genre?

Ms. Carriger: Oh, that wasn’t me, that was M.K. Hobson. I like the term, and I’m all over accepting it, but I do think bustlepunk falls under the larger umbrella (or should I say parasol?) of steampunk, and until steampunk really becomes a well-known genre it seems needlessly complicated to subdivide it further. In addition, Soulless already labors under so many different labels, it seems a tad silly to add yet another to the mix.

Ruth: Are there other writers doing steampunk or bustlepunk right now that you particularly enjoy or recommend?

Ms. Carriger: Sadly, I am the victim of WBD (writer book deprivation) – I rarely have time to read anymore because I have to write. When I do read, I try to keep to books outside my genre, so as not to be influenced unduly. However, I have heard some great steampunk short stories. I caught J. Daniel Sawyer‘s “Cold Duty” recently, and loved it.

Ruth: What is it about steampunk that attracts you as a genre as a writer? Are there conventions of the sub-genre that you don’t like or want to subvert in some manner?

Ms. Carriger: I like the future as the Victorian’s saw it, full of manners, proper dress, organization, and ridiculous gadgets. It’s a world very open to the bizarre, and one that happily mixes science with the supernatural. The 1800s spawned gothic literature, which, in turn, spawned romance, horror, sci-fi, and fantasy, so there is a wonderful circularity to writing steampunk now-a-days.

Certainly I’m subversive. Steampunk sometimes forgets how outlandish, colorful, and absurd the Victorians were, and how optimistic their ideas of progress and world domination. There are very few of us writing light-hearted fancy dress steampunk, and I’m really hoping that changes. The more ridiculousness the better!

Ruth: How much research goes in to writing in a historical setting like this?

Ms. Carriger: A whole lot. I spend at least half of my writing time doing research. Which I to say, if I wrote in a contemporary setting, I would write 2x as fast. But I do love the research and learning new things, my head is now full of exciting facts like the difference between a hassock, a tuffet, and a pouff.

Ruth: Okay, so what is the difference between a hassock, a tuffet, and a pouff?

Ms. Carriger: They are all basically the same thing: a footrest or stool that is covered and padded. In Victorian times the following distinction was drawn: a hassock is more likely to have feet and be square, a tuffet is usually round with feet like a covered stool, and a pouff is round with no feet.

Ruth: Do you end up collecting a lot of historical odds and ends in your research? I have a mental image of your home looking like a cross between the Smithsonian’s costume collection and a mad gnome’s workshop.

Ms. Carriger: Actually, I am so sorry to debunk that charming notion. And while I have some nice vintage jewelry, a few costumes, and some old books, I actually prefer to live in a very modern environment, all clean lines and neutral colors with modern art and no clutter. You’d never guess would you? However, I have quite the collection of octopus jewelry. It began years ago and only escalated after the publication of Soulless.

Ruth: There’s a significant amount of romance flowing throughout your stories. What’s the difference between writing an action scene and writing a sex scene?

Ms. Carriger: The action scene is about a billion times easier to write. I love action and dialogue, embarrass myself when writing nookie.

Ruth: Some authors are very down to business, and others have certain routines they must follow. Do you have a specific ritual to writing? A favorite pen, a specific chair, a tiara?

Ms. Carriger: Yes, very ritualistic. I have wrist supports I strap on, and a little egg timer I use (20 minutes) so it’s a bit like some kind of armored marathon. Then I reward myself with tea and sometimes chocolate.

Ruth: Writing in a British setting, I imagine you must be quite an expert on teas. Do you have a preferred tea? Bag or loose leaf? Pot or by the cup?

Ms. Carriger: Oh, just a tea dilettante, I assure you. But I do have a keen interest in the proper execution of the perfect cuppa. (Warming the pot, milk first, tea cozy a moral imperative, etc.) I do have a preferred tea, but it’s hard to find, it is Twinings English Breakfast Gold Label (black box), and it has to be imported from England. It’s mild in flavor but very strong in punch. Method of distribution depends on the company. For myself a bag and mug will do, and I usually default to a daily tea like PG Tips, rather than the Gold Label. For casual visitors its the good tea in a proper pot, but bagged. For formal occasions, and my mum, it’s loose leaf in a pot and some kind of biscuit – the whole ritual. However, and I am unswerving in this, you must, must, must use whole milk.

Ruth: Milk chocolate or dark? And do you prefer things in your chocolate or do you like it unadulterated?

Ms. Carriger: Dark chocolate with red wine or milk chocolate full of lots of stuff. Bits of toffee, coffee beans, mint, raisins, nuts, you name it, I like my chocolate with serious personality.

Ruth: If you could write in any other author’s world, would you? And which world would you choose?

Ms. Carriger: Probably not. Although, I wouldn’t entirely rule it out. There are some worlds that I wouldn’t mind playing in from a seriously farcical direction. But the owner of the world would have to be open to their creation begin made fun of. A friend of mine runs the The Metamor City Podcast and I keep threatening to write something ridiculous about were-beavers for him.

Ruth: Finally, besides eating your cat, what is your zombie plan?

Ms. Carriger: Well, I have this vague idea of escaping to Alcatraz island, depending on whether the zombies can travel under water or not. Otherwise, I plan to head out to the coast to some obscure fishing village: isolated, ready food source, and one can always take to the ocean if necessary.

Enter to win a signed copy of Soulless (reviewed by me) by leaving a comment or question!

Kelly Lasiter recently interviewed Marjorie M. Liu about her recent projects. Read Kelly’s reviews of The Iron Hunt and Darkness Calls on our Liu page.

Kelly: The Hunter Kiss series grabbed me from the first sentence of The Iron Hunt: “When I was eight, my mother lost me to zombies in a one-card draw.” I love that line, and I’ve been wondering ever since… how did that sentence first come to you?

Marjorie M. Liu: My mom was the inspiration, actually. She doesn’t play cards, she’s not into zombies, she would certainly never gamble away her child. — but when I was a kid, my mom and I would go for long drives and have ‘big adventures’ together, which I suppose influenced the opening prologue — this idea of a mom and daughter in the car, on the open road. And I was sitting there, thinking about that, thinking and thinking — about the book I wanted to write, which did have zombies in it — and what would be the worst, weirdest thing that could happen to a mother and her child. Losing a kid to zombies, in a game of cards, just came to me.

Kelly: One of the things I love about the Hunter Kiss series is the relationship between Maxine and Grant. I’ve seen a lot of urban fantasy novels where romantic tension is generated by the frequent addition of new partners. I can’t help but think that you’ve taken a more difficult route – but also a more emotionally moving one. What’s your secret to keeping the spark in a fictional relationship?

Marjorie: It’s not that I don’t like romantic triangles — when they’re done right, there’s nothing better. But it seems to me that not every woman, and not every man, is going to always be pulled emotionally in different directions. Sometimes you just meet someone, and it’s good, and right, and you don’t mess with it. That’s how I feel about Maxine and Grant. Of course she’s going to feel emotional ties to others — but emotional ties aren’t the same as romantic love. Maxine loves Grant. Grant loves Maxine. It wouldn’t make sense to write them any differently.

But you’re right — it is more difficult to maintain. Romantic tension is one of the things I love about writing romance novels, but in that genre, there’s a new couple in each book. Nothing really has to be maintained — just generated. In the Hunter Kiss series, which follows the same couple through multiple stories, you have to find ways to create that slow burn that just gets hotter and brighter as time goes on. I don’t have a secret for doing it — I just really get into the characters, and try to imagine what would make them afraid, what would turn them on, all the little gestures that carry that love and tension between them.

Kelly: The third Hunter Kiss book, A Wild Light, comes out in August. Are there any hints you can give us about what lies ahead for Maxine?

Marjorie: It’s not an exaggeration to say that everything changes in this book. For Maxine, for others. Readers will learn more about the prison veil, the demonic army, the Avatars… and Maxine herself. What is she, exactly? Who is she supposed to be? And can she handle what she discovers about herself? All those questions will be answered — mostly.

Kelly: I can’t wait! … Okay, let’s talk about your comics. How does writing novels differ from writing comics? How are they similar? How does your work in comics affect your novels, and vice versa?

Marjorie: I say this all the time, but it’s true: the difference isn’t all that huge, because it’s still storytelling. Writing novels is harder, because they’re longer, and you don’t have an artist to rely on when you need to convey emotion, a scene, the world itself. I have to spell that out. But writing novels is more satisfying, too — because you’re fully immersed. You’re there.

That, and you OWN what you create. I love writing comics, but I’m borrowing those characters. They’re not mine, and I always keep that in mind.

When writing comics, the emphasis weighs more heavily on dialogue (at least, for me it does). That’s where I try to start, and then I fill in the visuals, and break down the pages. Each comic is only 22 pages long, so it’s like writing a short story each time — every word and scene counts.

But what I love best, besides getting to write Wolverine and Daken, and the Black Widow — and hey, for a brief time, the Fantastic Four — is the art. Oh, man. It is a crazy beautiful thing working with such talented artists, who just take those words and then spill them out in such lovely ways. I never get tired of it.

Do the comics influence the novels, and vice versa? I’m not sure. I would say, in a way, that the novels influence the comics more so than the other way around, but it’s hard for me to say at this point. Ask me again in a couple years and I might be able to give you a better answer.

Kelly: Since we’re talking about influences, let me ask the obvious question, but one that I actually really want to know the answer to: What writers have most influenced your work?

Marjorie: Too many to name. I’m a firm believer that everything I read influences me to some degree. But I remember the writers who made me look at words and stories differently: Isabel Allende, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Charles de Lint, Frank Miller, Kelly Link, Sara Donati. I’ll remember others later, I’m certain, but those are the ones who come to mind, first.

I have to add, though, that I had a professor in undergrad — Peter Fritzell — who also changed the way I looked at writing. He taught a course in non-fiction essays, and I learned more under his tutelage than at any other time in my education.

Kelly: Okay, we talked about novels and comics, so on to games: In April, Passionfruit Games is releasing the game Tiger Eye: Curse of the Riddle Box, based on your romance novel Tiger Eye. I’ve been a fan of adventure/puzzle games for some time, and the ones I like best are the ones that combine the mystery with character development and emotion. Between that and the fact that I thought the novel was lots of fun, Tiger Eye sounds right up my alley! What can you tell our readers about the game?

Marjorie: First of all, thanks! The game follows the novel very closely — which means it’s about psychic Delilah Reese, who purchases an ancient riddle box in Beijing’s dirt market, and discovers that it contains a (gorgeous) shape-shifting warrior, Hari, who has been cursed to exist in the box, and serve as a slave to whomever opens it. Dela, of course, isn’t interested in making Hari serve her, and the two set out to break his curse — and stop the people who are hunting them for the box, to obtain its power.

The game designers (an award winning team) did have to tweak some sections here and there, in order to fit the game structure — but if you’ve read the novel, you’ll recognize the scenes — and if you haven’t read the book, you’ll still know exactly what’s going on, and hopefully, you’ll be drawn in by the romance. We really worked hard to keep Hari and Dela’s relationship a central part of the game — but having said that, this is for all ages. Mostly. I think there might be some naked ass.

The game itself is structured around puzzles, hidden objects, thought-games — literally, in some cases, as every time Dela uses her psychic gifts, the player plays a “psi” mini-game. The designers (to steal their words for a moment) mapped out scenes that took place in the book, and then translated those events into game form — so that when Dela buys the box from another character in the novel, there are puzzles that the player has to solve first before continuing onward.

It’s been wonderful fun. If folks want to learn more, they should head over to the Passion Fruit website.

Kelly: That sounds like tons of fun and I will definitely be checking out Tiger Eye! Okay, one last thing I’d like your opinion on: Where do you see the urban fantasy genre going in the next few years?

Marjorie: My only expectation is to be surprised. I’ve given up trying to predict anything — except that there will be great books published. I know this. And great books sometimes create their own trends.

Thanks to Marjorie M Liu for taking some time to chat with us! And speaking of zombies, comment below for a chance to win David Dunwoody’s Empire: A Zombie Novel. If you don’t want that book, you can pick something else from our stacks.

It occurs to me that there are very many interviews with fantasy authors to be found on the Internet – this very site conducts many of them, and I’ve enjoyed every one! However, few people bother to talk to the long-suffering partners behind those who create the books we know and love. It is fun for us to dip into the fantasy worlds created by these authors – but how must it feel to the people who dwell in them full-time? With this in mind, I decided to create a feature called Living With The Writer, where we talk to those significant others.

First up is Michaela Deas, wife of Stephen Deas who wrote The Adamantine Palace, one of the  great debuts in 2009 (John’s and Robert T.’s review of this book can be found here). Let me know how you like this new interview series, or comment on the interview below for a chance to win a book from FanLit!

Amanda: Hi Michaela, welcome to FanLit! To start, how about introducing yourself and giving us an insight into your situation while ‘Living With the Writer’? I can quite believe that looking after an author becomes a full-time occupation, but I’m guessing that this is not all you do!

Michaela: Hmm… Glamorous wife of a successful writer who is planning world domination?! No… wait… damn, now I’ve given our plans away! How about: German wife, part-time muse and PA of a fantasy author, domestic slave to our two small boys and can opener for three mad cats? Trust me, being married to a writer who indulges in a day job on the side is not as exciting as it sounds!

Amanda: To be honest, it sounds frenetic! Tell me a little about being a part-time muse to a writer – what are the perks and what are the lowlights?

Michaela: It is seriously cool getting to meet loads of authors. And let’s not forget all the lovely folks at Gollancz! They have been so very welcoming and nothing short of awesome since Day 1 and they really didn’t have to: after all, I am not one of their writers, Steve is. They have very generously included me in everything and have happily put up with me being part of “Team Deas” from the start. Also, there is the ever-increasing stream of ARCs that I get to enjoy thanks to Steve being published by them. It means that, although one day we might have to move to a substantially larger house in order not to be swamped by books, I get to enjoy some novels way before release (I mean, how great are Horns and Wolfsangel?!) Obvious lowlights? None detected so far!

Amanda: You seem to have a great relationship with the people working to get Stephen published. Would you say that extends to other authors as well? Do you regularly meet up with them?

Michaela: Not regularly, no, but there are an increasing number of book launches and pub get-togethers that we get invited to. These are usually great fun and a very welcome way of meeting new authors, making new friends and catching up with some old ones. It doesn’t feel as though we’ve become “real” friends with other authors yet, but we haven’t been on the circuit for long enough for something like that to truly establish itself. We have met some wonderful people along the way so far! I mean, I had dinner with Pat Rothfuss, an evening out with Robert V.S. Redick (who is probably one of the nicest people one could hope to meet), shared takeaways with Richard Morgan and Joe Abercrombie. C’mon, what’s not to like?  :-D   By the way, Steve reckons I’ll get more attention at Eastercon for all the name-dropping on here than he will from writing books!

Amanda: Let’s backtrack slightly and pick up on something interesting you mentioned: German wife. Are you German by birth? Did you live there until meeting Stephen? Do you miss it?

Michaela: Yes, born in Hamburg – never lived anywhere else prior to coming to the UK. These days I don’t miss Germany as such (and wouldn’t go back to live there again now), but I do miss my big circle of friends. There is a history there with some of them that cannot be replaced. A few of the friendships go back over 25 years and that level of intimacy would probably take a similar amount of time to achieve over here with newly-acquired friends.

Amanda: Okay, I’ve had a read of Stephen’s website www.stephendeas.com , and he very sweetly mentions meeting you as one of his life highlights. I’m intrigued to find out how you met – especially taking into account the fact that you’re German by birth!

Michaela: There is a persistent rumour that I am actually Steve’s continental mail order bride that he had shipped over to henceforth do his bidding! :laugh: Well, there is a grain of distorted truth in that, apart from the fact that we met as friends on-line and I boarded a plane rather than walked the plank! And, between you and me, I am obviously in charge now! ;-)

Amanda: Well, obviously! That is a lovely story: did you have a common interest that enabled you to meet on-line or was it just kismet? How long have you been together now?

Michaela: It’s nine years this year – and I’d do it all again tomorrow! Steve’s profile page stated that he could legitimately call himself a rocket scientist, had set fire to Wales (twice!), and believed in fairytales and myths. That was me sold! Plus, his taste in music identified him as an old rocker and aging Goth – just like myself. I had to get in touch!

Amanda: So, were you aware of his writerly ambitions right from the get-go, or was this something he revealed gradually? What were your thoughts when he told you: positive? Or skeptical that someone could make a success of writing fantasy fiction?

Michaela: I was very much aware of his writing from the word go, and I remember being really quite impressed by it. Not just the quality of what he was producing, but the fact that he had this amazing imagination and the tenacity to continue writing and chasing his dream to one day be a published author. Humour and intelligence are something I find very attractive in people. Make me laugh and I’m yours! Well, almost…

Amanda: Now you’re giving away secrets! Let’s move on to some questions dealing with the creative process of Stephen’s books… There have been some well-known husband/wife creative teams in the fantasy field. Have you been greatly involved in Stephen’s creative process? Does he bounce ideas off you? Are you one of his test readers?

Michaela: Erm, pretty much yes to all of the above. More with some books than with others. For example, we spent a weekend drinking tea in the kitchen and going for walks in the countryside while plotting the initial ideas/outlines for The Adamantine Palace. He asks my advice on most things and frequently suffers my scathing remarks when something isn’t quite right with what he’s written. More often than not, his editor agrees with me!

Amanda: During the writing process, how much support does Stephen require? Does this differ depending on whether he is just starting out with a first draft or whether he is at the “business end” of the book?

Michaela: We do bat ideas for new synopses about a lot. Also, the closer deadlines get, the more he will ask for evenings off and nag me to get on with proof reading his drafts so that I can give him my views on them. So, I guess it gets more work intensive at the start and towards the very end for me. In the middle he quite happily shuts himself away somewhere and all I hear is the relentless clacking of keys interrupted by occasional demands for tea and tubs of ice cream!

Amanda: When Stephen is deep in a novel, do you feel as though you have to make sacrifices for his art?

Michaela: Writing books is essentially a lonely art form as is all the paraphernalia that comes with being published, and so it does eat away at the time we have as a family. To be honest, it doesn’t impact on us that much because he simply isn’t successful enough for it to take up too much time – yet, anyway!  [AR: Michaela remains confident that this will change soon!] And, to be perfectly frank, I do enjoy evenings on my own when I can watch my way through episodes of “Dexter” without having to feel guilty about abandoning him! One thing I have to say, though: it does get a bit irritating sometimes when you’re trying to have a “normal” conversation with him and his mind is constantly occupied with nothing but plotlines, character descriptions and guesstimating the next advance payments!

Amanda: You have a strong Internet presence and have commented on blogs that reviewed Stephen’s debut novel: how do you feel about the reviews he has received? How do you personally cope when there are less than brilliant reviews?

Michaela: It’s tricky. On the whole I agree with the criticisms that have been made and I obviously love it when someone has really enjoyed the book (especially when they’re not friends or family!) And I try not to take bad reviews too personally but I don’t always succeed. Maybe because the whole thing still feels kind of unreal. I’m still waiting for the day when Simon Spanton (his lovely editor) rings up and cackles down the phone, telling us “you didn’t really think we were serious, right?!”

Amanda: From chatting to some other authors, I don’t believe you’re alone in that last sentiment! Finally, let’s finish off with Michaela Deas, rather than wife of Stephen. What are your current ambitions, hopes, dreams? Do you have any latent burning desire to be a novelist?

Michaela: My current dreams and ambitions are very simple and basic ones, I reckon. For all of my family to stay in good health, for Steve to be able to continue doing what he loves and hopefully be able to write full time in the future. I can’t wait to take the kids traveling, which is something that both Steve and I really enjoy. And I would love to go back to work at some point – but the right kind of job that fits around everything just hasn’t come my way yet. Something with people and books would be great – Gollancz, I’m looking at you here! :-D

Do I have aspirations of tormenting the world with my own literary exploits? No, not at this point. People have been nudging me about this for some time now. Simon Spanton, for example, told me at the recent SFX Weekender that he wouldn’t be surprised at all if I submitted my own manuscript within the year. Let’s just say that right now there is no story burning to be told but one should never say never…

Amanda: Thanks so much, Michaela, for taking the time to respond to these questions! I know you were somewhat bemused at the request, initially, but I think it’s deeply interesting to hear about “living with the writer.” You’ve certainly given us some insights! For those interested, Michaela has indicated that she would be happy to answer any follow-up questions people might have via Twitter – her username is @adamantine_lady

And thanks to everyone for reading – I hope that this feature was of interest! How about letting me know your thoughts and suggesting possible other candidates that I can harass… ah, contact?  :-D  Comment below for a chance to win Adrian Phoenix‘s Beneath the Skin, or some other book from our stacks.

Today, we are pleased to welcome fantasy author Rachel Vincent. Rachel is the author of two outstanding fantasy series: SHIFTERS and the YA series SOUL SCREAMERS. Shift, the latest novel in Rachel’s Shifter’s series, starring werecat Faythe Sanders, which went on sale this week. Please join us today in welcoming Rachel and be sure to comment on this post for a chance to win a copy of Shift, which she is graciously donating.

SB Frank: In your SHIFTERS series, I really enjoy how Faythe is constantly challenging traditional female role models in the Pride. In Prey, I think it was, Faythe finally began to understand and accept the vital role that her mother had played in the Pride despite not having a formal position except as the Alpha’s wife. As the pride politics turn deadly, does her mother’s role in the pride continue to grow and expand? Or how do you see that playing out?

Rachel Vincent: Yes, I think it does. She’s always had a vital role; she’s just been content to play it behind the scenes for most of Faythe’s life. But in the first chapter excerpt of Shift (available on my website) we get a glimpse at how strong Karen Sanders can be, and where Faythe gets her mouth.

SB Frank: Do you see yourself as a champion for female independence in other areas of your life besides your writing?

Rachel Vincent: Oh, I don’t see myself as a champion for anything. My job is to entertain. But if you’re looking for more than just an exciting read, the SHIFTERS series can be read as a commentary on gender and racial equality and the importance of fighting for both. Or, it can just be read for fun. :-D

SB Frank: I understand that you have two cats, Kaci and Nyx. Do their personalities or quirks ever find their way into your fictional werecat characters?

Rachel Vincent: No, not really. My werecats are cat instincts, human brains, and a mix of social norms. My house cats just want to eat and lie around all day. Nyx is very cuddly, though. And Kaci’s very stately and standoffish.

SB Frank: Aw. They sound adorable. We’re huge cat lovers around here. Your website, www.rachelvincent.com, says that you are a recent transplant into the deep south. I personally am a US expatriate now living abroad in Texas. Where are you transplanted from? And how do you like living in the South?

Rachel Vincent: I lived in Oklahoma for the first eleven years of my adulthood, then spent almost a year in Louisana, which is where I lived when I wrote that bio. But now I live in San Antonio, and I love it! There’s a great mix of cultures, generally warm weather (though I’m expecting a sweltering summer), and soooo many restaurants to choose from. And there’s a Godiva store three miles from my house. What more could a person want?  :-D

SB Frank: I know that San Antonio is one of our family’s fun vacationing spots, though we haven’t hit the Godiva store yet.  In addition to your werecats novels, you also have a very popular YA series, SOUL SCREAMERS, with two books released so far, My Soul to Take and My Soul to Save.  Do you find it difficult to write for a YA audience? More satisfying?

Rachel Vincent: It’s not that the YA audience is more difficult to write for, but since I’m newer at writing YA than writing for adults, I want to make sure I get it right. So a lot of extra time, energy, and stress goes into my YA novels, and I stress a lot more over the reviews.

SB Frank: Ah, those YA reviews, I get them in my household constantly, and it can be quite stress inducing …and at times strident.  So, what’s next for you? Do you plan to continue these series for a while or to move on to another project?  Anything exciting in the works?

Rachel Vincent: The SHIFTERS series draws to a close this October, with the release of Alpha, the sixth and final book. But the SOUL SCREAMERS will continue (I’m currently contracted through book 5) and I have a new adult series coming up next year. So… I’m definitely staying busy.

SB Frank: Wow. Congratulations on all the great news. I, for one, am rushing out to read Shift and have the the SOUL SCREAMERS on my to-read list.

And for our visitors today, remember to comment on today’s post for a chance to win your own copy of Shift or if you can’t wait that long, buy it now and we’ll let you choose an alternate prize from the Fanlit Stacks. Justin will announce winners next week.