Tag Archives: Writing craft

September 7, 2011 · 12:24 pm

Meet Alisa Krasnostien …

This was cross-posted to the ROR blog. Instead of a writer, this time I’m interviewing Indy Press Powerhouse, Alisa Krasnostein.

Alisa Krasnostein is an environmental engineer by day, and runs indie publishing house Twelfth Planet Press by night. She is also Executive Editor at the review website Aussie Specfic in Focus! and part of the Galactic Suburbia Podcast Team. In her spare time she is a critic, reader, reviewer, runner, environmentalist, knitter, quilter and puppy lover.

 

Q: First let me say mega congratulations on being a finalist in the World Fantasy Awards (courtesy LOCUS) in the Special Award Non-Professional section for your work with Twelfth Planet Press.  I imagine you’ve been popping champagne ever since you found out. Did you have any inkling this was coming?

Thank you! My nomination was totally unexpected and took me completely by surprise.  I’m very excited because I was already planning on attending World Fantasy Con in San Diego.

Q: I was involved in Indy Press in the late 70s early 80s so I know how much work and money goes into this. If you’d had any idea that you’d be ‘working longer hours on the press than my day job and I still don’t have enough time in the week to get to everything that needs to be done.’  – (See full interview on Bibliophile Stalker) – would you have jumped in with as much enthusiasm?

Interesting question. I’m not afraid of hard work. I definitely lean towards the workaholic. I think also, being an engineer has trained me to get absorbed and focused on the task at hand. And the amount of time I work and the amount of work I create for myself is definitely self-inflicted. And I hear I can dial it back at any point in time if I want! I love indie press more now that when I first jumped in and I respect and appreciate the people who contribute to the scene even more so now that I know how much work and dedication and talent goes into everything that gets published. And I also believe that we are limited only by the passion, time, commitment and hard work that we put in. So. No pressure. And no regrets.

Q: And following on from that, if you could go back and give yourself advice about starting Twelfth Planet Press, what would that advice be?

The number one thing I regret is not taking my business more seriously from the start. My advice would be to set up my small press as a small business from the beginning and not rely on a box of receipts or a papertrail for forensic auditing later. I set the financial and business side up several years in and that was most definitely one of the most painful things to sort out. There’s so much more to writing and editing and publishing than the creative side and I would advise myself, and anyone jumping in (both at the publishing and the writing ends), to get a basic handle on accounting, legalese to read and understand contracts and basic business advice (like if you need an ABN and how to structure your business – will you be a sole trader or a company and what does that mean anyway?) .

Q: You did a post for Hoyden About Town on The Invisibility of Women in Science Fiction. It’s obviously a subject you feel strongly about.  Is Twelfth Planet Press seeking to address this issue with affirmative action?

Not in any formal or mandated way. Overall, I don’t have a gender imbalance issue at Twelfth Planet Press – I buy what I like and the best stories that are submitted to me. And funnily enough, that gender breakdown is different to the general norm (though that’s not true of my novella series).

The Twelve Planets – twelve four-story original collections by twelve different Australian female writers – is a project that came from a place of realising, at the time of idea conception, how few female Australian writers had been collected. That’s changed during the time of project development. But the Twelve Planets remains a project that will release over two years close to 50 new short stories written by women. And that’s something that I’m really proud to be doing.

Q: Twelfth Planet Press has had some remarkable wins for a new, small Indy Press. There were six finalistings in the Aurealis Awards this year. Two finalistings on the Australian Shadows Award. And Tansy Rayner Roberts’ novella Siren Beat won the WSFA Small Press Award for 2010. This novella was part of a series of back-to-back novellas that Twelfth Planet Press released.  It’s notoriously hard, from a writer’s point of view, to sell a novella to a publisher. Why did TPP start producing BtB novellas?

Thanks, I was particularly pleased with our Aurealis Awards shortlistings this year coming after seven shortlistings last year. It feels like validation for some of the choices that I’ve made particularly in terms of the direction I’ve taken. And the win from the WSFA was just unbelievably exciting. I’m so proud of the work that Tansy Rayner Roberts is producing at the moment.

I really wanted to have a product to sell at a particular price point, around the $10 to $15 mark. That was really the place that I started at for the novella doubles. I personally love the novella length, especially for science fiction and I loved the idea of paying homage to the Ace Doubles. I especially loved the idea of pairing two totally unrelated works and throwing them into a package like many of the Ace Doubles did. From a gambling sense, if you love one and not so much the other, that’s not a bad deal for $12. And from a publisher’s point of view I like the idea of perhaps enticing readers to find new or unknown to them writers or be exposed to a new genre by buying a double for one of the stories and getting the other one as a bonus. If I make the pairs right!

Q: An editor once said to me, I can’t tell you want I want, but I’ll know when I see it. This is incredibly frustrating to a writer. Can you tell us what you want?

Only that I’ll know when I see it. Sorry! But yeah, we look for what we aren’t expecting, what is outside of what everyone else is writing, that breaks new ground and feels fresh, that stands out from the pack. What I want is the project that stands out cause it’s not like all the other books on the shelf. I specifically look firstly for really solid writing – writing that is unpretentious and doesn’t get in the way of the story. And then I want to be emotionally or intellectually moved or changed by the work. I look for stories that demand my attention and then hold it. I look for stories that tell me something I didn’t know before – about myself, or about society or humanity. I look for a rewarding reading experience. So. Not much.

I’m very busy and I deliberately choose to read submissions when I’m in a bad mood and whilst doing something else. I want what I’m reading to demand attention, to demand I put everything down and just read it to the end.

Q:  A finalist placing in the World Fantasy Awards has to raise the profile of Twelfth Planet Press. Where would you like to see TPP in five years time?

I’d like to see us with wider distribution in brick and mortar bookshops all over the place (long live the bookshop!) and being in a position to pay pro rates for writing, art, design and layout. I’d like to see us pushing genre boundaries and continuing to publish top quality fiction by writers at the top of our field that inspires, engages and entertains.

Q: On a personal note, where would you like to see yourself being career-wise in five years time?

I’d like to be working full time for Twelfth Planet Press.

 

Follow Alisa on Twitter  @Krasnostein

Hear the podcasts on Galactic Suburbia

Hear the TPP Podcasts.

Catch up with Alisa on Linked in

Catch up on FaceBook

Drop by the ASIF Website.

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Filed under Australian Writers, Awards, Dark Urban Fantasy, Fantasy books, Female Fantasy Authors, Genre, Indy Press, Nourish the Writer, Publishing Industry

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September 3, 2011 · 12:34 pm

Meet Paul Collins …

I have been running a series of interviews with female fantasy writers to redress a perception I came across – that fantasy was a bit of a boy’s club. It really isn’t like that here in Australia. We have many wonderful fantasy writers who just happen to be female.

Today I’m interviewing Paul Collins because, for one thing he’s been a power-house of indie publishing for over thirty-five years, and also I thought I’d ask him the same questions I’ve asked the female writers about fantasy writing and gender, to get his perspective as a male fantasy writer.

Look out for the give-away at the end of the interview.

Q: You have over 140 books, including 30 non-fiction hard covers for the education market, 11 anthologies and two collections of your own stories. You edited The MUP Encyclopaedia of Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy and have also had over 140 short stories published. You write and edit all across genres and ages. You’ve been presented with both the Inaugural Peter McNamara and A Bertram Chandler awards for Lifetime Achievement in SF, won the Aurealis and William Atheling awards, and been short-listed for just about every other genre award. I guess that all this makes you a Renaissance man. Yet you left school at 15. What drove you to achieve so much?

I have a vivid memory of walking home one day when I was about twelve. I looked at all the ramshackle houses of our suburb and thought, “This is where I’m going to wind up. Living in one of these and working in a factory”. I knew I’d be leaving school at 15. It’s not that I hated school, but I just somehow knew that whatever I was going to do in life, having a university degree wasn’t going to in any way take a part – it was just going to stop me from earning money for four or five years. I also knew that to break from the future to which I was destined I’d need to pull something out of thin air. When I turned fifteen I had a variety of jobs: electroplater’s assistant, spot-welder, worked on a farm, apprentice clicker (making leather goods) sheet metal worker, to name just a few. At seventeen I was the despatch manager for Metro Goldwyn Meyer. At this point I knew I’d taken a wrong turn. Where to from the heady heights of a despatch manager? I was stuck. There was nowhere for me to go at MGM. Maybe a booker (of films), but that was hardly something to aspire to. I then opted for working three jobs at a time to build up sufficient funds to work for myself. I doubt I knew exactly what I could do at that point – but I think I was planning on opening a cinema. I certainly knew enough about the industry at that time.

Regardless, while I was at MGM I started working as an apprentice projectionist at two suburban cinemas (Delta in New Lynn and The Star in Glen Eden, NZ). I also worked weekends with my uncle in a metal polishing factory. When I had sufficient funds I quit MGM and came to Australia. It’s this background that drove me forward. I wanted to be something other than the guy living in the suburban neighbourhood working the 40-hour week.

Q: Your first book Hot Lead Cold Sweat came out in 1975, almost 40 years ago. In the late 70s and early 80s you ran an indie press, Cory and Collins, during which you published Australia’s first heroic fantasy novels, long before the majors got into the act. Later, with your current partner, Meredith Costain, you edited the Spinout and Thrillogy series in the 90s, which is also when ypu wrote the Jelindel Chronicles. And in 2007 you established Ford Street Publishing and released the new Quentaris Chronicles. You must have seen a lot of changes in the publishing industry. What do you think of the trend for authors like best seller Barry Eisler to turn down half million advance to self publish?

I read that article. And some of it doesn’t ring true to me. I doubt, for a start, that a writer would knock back a half million-dollar advance so they could self-publish. It’s all very well Amazon claiming they’re selling 110 digital books compared with 100 print books, but we need to remember that e-books are a relatively new technology. People are experimenting. When Beta came out people flocked to it, as they did VHS. Where is either of these technologies now? Beta, despite being better quality than VHS, fell by the wayside. Some say Mac is better than the PC, but there are far more PC users than Mac users. Why? Promotion. Whoever has the biggest slush fund to promote their wares wins. So right now, despite there being Kindle and e-pub, both are on the same wagon, especially now that Mac users can download Kindle software and read Kindle books (and vice versa). So all the promotion money, articles, etc, are looking at digital. As a publisher who has dabbled in e-books, I can tell you I am not getting anywhere near the sales that Barry Eisler discussed in his blog interview. Nor is any other Australian publisher that I know of. The problem I see is that there are millions of titles on sites such as Amazon. How will you find the title you’re looking for? All very well if you know the author’s name, but even then you’re battling to find the book. Try typing in Paul Collins for example. There are four writers in Australia alone with this name. And booksellers have yet to find a way to differentiate between us (some use our birthdates, but readers would have no idea how old “their” Paul Collins is).

I don’t see this as a digital versus paperback issue. I think digital complements the paperback. Others feel the same way. Don Grover (CEO of the Dymocks chain) sees the physical book as the dog and digital as the tail.

And I’d also question Barry’s $30,000 income this year for a self-published short story. Before calling me a cynic, let’s remember publishers made such outlandish claims of their book sales right up till BookScan was released. Then suddenly all their highly inflated sales figures dropped like rocks. I doubt there’s a BookScan for short stories, so the $30,000 claim isn’t verifiable. Why would he make such a claim? Obviously so people would download it on the assumption it must be terrific. Cory Doctorow claims to have had 700,000 downloads of his novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom – 30,000 of these came on the first day of release. But they were absolutely free. Even still, that’s a heck of a lot of downloads.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S-eKDYqpEs&feature=player_embedded]

Q: Your new Young Adult book, Mole Hunt, was written for boys, specifically those who read Matthew Reilly, but apparently adults are reading it as well. Did this surprise you?

Not really. It’s sort of YA crossover, although patently marketed as YA. What does surprise though is that it’s had about fifteen great reviews, all of which by women. It’s not the sort of book that I’d expect women to enjoy reading. I mean, Maximus has no redeeming features; the body count is high (two people get killed in the first chapter); it’s young adult SF. I mention the latter because three adult reviewers told me they don’t like SF, but thoroughly enjoyed the book. I’m not complaining of course! Some comparisons have also surprised me. Bookseller and Publisher said it’s a cross between The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Total Recall and Dexter.

Some might think I wrote dystopian fiction because of the popularity this genre’s enjoying. But frankly, I wrote The Maximus Black Files years ago. Incidentally, The Hunger Games kicked off the recent dystopian wave – anyone who’s read my novel Cyberskin (published in 2000) will see striking similarity in the plot – deaths filmed in reality TV, a la snuff movies. I suspect I was ahead of my time!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4tTn_WXCiw]

Q: You say your favourite fictional character is Modesty Blaise. (First appeared as a comic strip in 1963. The author, Peter O’Donnell, went onto write 12 books. The first appeared in 1965. In a time when the James Bond was the ultimate spy and females were his reward, Modesty Blaise was a woman ahead of her time). Does this mean you’ve always admired strong women?

Very funny, Rowena LOL. But to answer your question, I do prefer athletic women. Modesty Blaise would be my dreamboat. Xena Warrior Woman, too, if we’re entering the realm of fantasy. I mentioned earlier the marketing failures and successes between products – I think had a smart producer taken on Modesty Blaise franchise, we’d have easily seen an equal James Bond dynasty. But I suspect all the heads of film companies were macho men afraid to lose their “image” of manhood, whatever, and didn’t think for a moment anyone would suspend disbelief that a woman could be a successful criminal. There was one movie made, and it was a shocker. I was so angry that the film was a spoof. Equal to the time I watched the much-anticipated Bonfire of the Vanities. Fantastic book by Tom Wolfe completely demolished by some idiot filmmaker. It makes you wonder how people get these things so wrong.

Q: Your new publishing endeavour Ford Street Publishing is doing well with Dianne Bates’s Crossing the Line, short-listed for the NSW Premier’s Award, Pool, by Justin D’Ath, short-listed for the Victorian Premier’s Award and a Notable Book in the CBCA awards, plus My Private Pectus by Shane Thamm was short-listed for the NT Read Award. There have been others, such as George Ivanoff winning the Chronos Award for Gamers’ Quest, Notable CBCA novels, etc. In an interview on SPUNC (Small Press Publishers’ site) you say: ‘Surprisingly, I grew up in a house without books. No one in my family was a reader. Marvel Comics were my sole literary diet. Perversely, I think this upbringing has helped me to choose good books. I’m still a somewhat reluctant reader – to grab my attention a manuscript really has to have that special X factor.’ That is an amazing leap from the boy who read comics to editor of award nominated books. Can you tell us what the X Factor is and do you still have your comic collection?

As close as I can come to explaining the X Factor is that books can just “feel” right. The writing has to be good; the subject matter spot on for the time; the plot has to “move” you; the book has to have the prospect of commercial success. There are many ingredients to this recipe. In a few words I’d sum it up as something intangible, like gut instinct. You won’t find it in the Macquarie. Alas, I sold the comic collections in the eighties. I should also mention that freelance editors also work on these titles – I can’t claim all the credit for editing. I usually do the first round of edits, authors respond, and then the books go to freelancers who work with the authors.

Q: I was prompted to start this series of interviews because there seems to be a perception in the US and the UK that fantasy is a bit of a boy’s club. Do you think there’s a difference in the way males and females write fantasy?

Many would disagree and no doubt point to many examples to prove me wrong, but I think women write more character-driven novels while men write plot and action-driven novels. It seems to me that more women then men read fantasy, and this possibly explains why female writers head up the best-seller lists. Women write more emotively than men, and dare I say linger in scenes with description while men will move at a quicker pace. Compare, say, Isobelle Carmody’s writing with Garth Nix’s. Completely different styles. Both are best-sellers, so there’s no question as to who is the better writer. That’s very subjective.

Q: Following on from that, does the gender of the writer change your expectations when you pick up their book?

I should have a diplomatic answer to this question, but you know me . . . I prefer plot-driven, fast forward fiction. If I were to give you a list of ten authors I’d read again, they would all be men. The top three would be Ioin Colfer, Philip Reeve and Peter O’Donnell. If we’re talking about fantasy novels, I’d possibly (and sometimes erroneously) expect a fair bit of romance within the pages of a book written by a female. I’m not remotely interested in romance whether it’s dressed up as fantasy or not. Give me George RR Martin’s Game of Thrones any time. There might be romance there, but it’s well hidden and certainly not an integral part of the plot. As an aside, this isn’t to say I don’t think women can’t write fantasy without romance, or that men can’t write with emotive depth. It just transpires that I seem to prefer male over female writers.

Q: And here’s the fun question. If you could book a trip on a time machine, where and when would you go, and why?

It would certainly be in the past – I don’t think we’re heading anywhere nice. I’m assuming I’d be um, protected, right? Like, “Okay, Scotty, I’ve had enough. Beam me outta here. NOW.” Under these conditions, Roman times circa Julius Caesar’s reign sound good to me, although only if I were a citizen of good standing and in favour with Julius. I’m obviously wiping from the equation poison, deceit, political ambitions and murderous intent. The wine, women and song aspect has obvious merits.

 

Give-away Question: Maximus Black is a true anti-hero. Do characters really need redeeming features? Yes or No? Give your reasons for your decision.

See here for a complete list of Paul’s books and short stories.

See here for a full list of the books from Ford Street Publishing.

Follow Paul on facebook.com/fordstreet

Catch up with Paul on twitter@fordstreet

www.paulcollins.com.au

www.fordstreetpublishing.com

www.quentaris.com

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Filed under Australian Writers, Book Giveaway, Book trailers, Children's Books, creativity, Dark Urban Fantasy, Fantasy books, Genre, Indy Press, Nourish the Writer, Promoting Friend's Books, Publishing Industry, The Writing Fraternity, Young Adult Books

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August 31, 2011 · 10:26 pm

Meet Anne Bishop …

As the next of my series featuring fantastic female fantasy authors (see disclaimer) I’ve invited the talented Anne Bishop to drop by.

 

 

Q: When I met you at the National SF Convention in Tasmania, it was the first time you had been outside of the States. Have you done much travelling since then?

Going to Tasmania is still my big adventure, but I have done a couple of vacation cruises since then–one to Alaska and one to the Caribbean. I’ve also attended a couple of the World Fantasy conventions that were held in the U.S. For me, this is a significant amount of traveling.

Q: I read your first book, Daughter of the Blood (part of the Black Jewels series) long before I met you and was swept away by your vivid imagery. I see there are nine books in this series now. Do you have more planned?

Nothing more planned at this time. Will there be more? I’m sure there will be. With Black Jewels stories, I seem to need a resting cycle where I write other things before I can go back to them–or before the Blood come back to me.

Q: I love the new covers, particularly Daughter of the Blood. How much say do you get in your covers?

For the U.S. covers, I send in descriptions of the main characters so the artist doesn’t have to hunt for the information. For the Australian covers, I’m sometimes asked to send a few ideas of images that could be used as a starting point. After that, the artist’s vision comes into play, and the end result is fabulous.

Q: What was it about the fae that convinced you to write The Tir Alainn Trilogy? Have you always been fascinated by the Fair Folk?

I’ve read stories about the realms of Faery since I was young, but the Fae weren’t the start of Tir Alainn. I was thinking about what I wanted to write after the Black Jewels Trilogy (I already had a draft of The Invisible Ring), and I had decided that I wanted to play with a world that had a more traditional earth-based magic than the Craft in the Black Jewels world. Then one afternoon I was coming home from a convention and saw a cloud formation that looked like the dark cliff of another world sitting on the horizon–a place you could see but could never reach. I said to the friend who was driving, “That’s the otherland where the Fae live.” After that I began to put the pieces together–the nature of the Fae and how they traveled from Tir Alainn to the human world, the nature of the witches, who else inhabited this world, and what was going to enter their lives and threaten their world. So it was actually the witches who provided the first seeds for that world, and then it was characters like the Hunter and the Gatherer of Souls who changed the texture of the story and Tir Alainn itself into something far richer than I had first envisioned.

Q: With The Landscapes of Ephemera Series it looks like you veered more into the love story side of the plot. Was this intentional or did the characters draw you in this direction?

The stories in Ephemera are about heart, about making a life journey, and about making choices, so I guess it’s the world itself that demands the stories spotlight the connection between two people. On the other hand, I would have said Cassidy and Gray’s relationship in THE SHADOW QUEEN and SHALADOR’S LADY was just as much a love story as Sebastian and Lynnea’s relationship.

Q: You also write short stories. Do you write across other genres as well or are these all fantasy stories? I see Twilight’s Dawn is set in the Black Jewel’s World. For a sneak peek see here.

Almost all of my stories fall into the fantasy/science fiction/horror genres. The one exception is a story chapter I did for SUMMER IN MOSSY CREEK, the third book in the Mossy Creek series. Not only was that mainstream, it was the first time I had written a story in a world that was created by someone else. That was a lot of fun, but the imagery of fantasy feels like home so that’s what I tend to write.

Q: I see you are working on an urban fantasy series. This is a change for you. Can you enlighten us?

I wanted to write a story in a world where the characters could have telephones and television and cars–that is, a contemporary setting even if it wasn’t Earth. And I wanted to try my hand at playing with vampires and werewolves (or shifters in this case since they aren’t really werewolves). And you want some humans in the mix because squeaky toys are fun. I had the framework of the world before the characters grabbed the story and ran off with it, so now the rest of the world building is taking its shape from the story.

It’s dark and it’s fun, and I’m never quite sure what the Others are going to do until I type the words.

Q: I was prompted to start this series of interviews because there seems to be a perception in the US and the UK that fantasy is a bit of a boy’s club. Do you think there’s a difference in the way males and females write fantasy?

I hope there is a difference. Where would the fun be if we all saw things the same way and wrote the same kinds of stories?

Q: Following on from that, does the gender of the writer change your expectations when you pick up their book?

Judging by my bookshelves, if I’m looking for a story that is primarily adventure and action and explosions and battles, I lean toward male writers. If I’m looking for a people story that includes adventure and action and explosions and battles, I lean toward female writers. And then there are all the writers on my shelves who don’t fit those choices because the gender of the writer wasn’t part of the decision to pick up the book.

Q: And here’s the fun question. If you could book a trip on a time machine, where and when would you go, and why?

Since I’ve been pondering lately if the TARDIS has a shower and other kinds of plumbing, I’m not sure I’m mentally equipped for time travel.

The official fan site.

Anne Bishop quotes on GoodReads

Anne Bishop on Facebook


 

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Filed under Covers, creativity, Dark Urban Fantasy, Fantasy books, Female Fantasy Authors, Genre, Resonance, Story Arc, The Writing Fraternity, Writing craft

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August 17, 2011 · 9:33 am

Meet Rhonda Roberts …

Q: First congratulations on the success of Gladiatrix. I feel like a proud big sister because I organised the pitching opportunity at the 2006 National SF Con, which led (eventually) to your sale. (Rhonda talks about this experience on the ROR blog). Since your sale what have you learnt about the publishing industry that you wish you could have told yourself back then?

Thanks Rowena, that pitching opportunity changed everything!

One key lesson is that you need to acquire publicity skills asap. In the standard contract you are legally required to help publicise the book. My experience has been that publishers try to work with you on this – so make choices now rather than later. Different publicity methods suit different books and, more importantly, different authors. The key thing is to go with your strong points.

If public speaking is your strength – then find ways to use that. Your publisher can help you make contacts and set up interviews etc. If, like many authors, you’d rather concentrate on the web – then work out which of the available options suit you and how you want to invest your non-writing time.

Whatever venues you choose, make sure you can sum up your book in 7, 30, and 100 words. That will save you a few uncomfortable silences while you try to compress your magnum opus into a bite size chunk and still do it an iota of justice.

Q: I like the look of your web site, Rhonda, very noir, very suitable for a time travelling detective. Do you have a background in graphic design?

That’s great to hear, thanks!

I do have a distant background in art but my husband, Richard Caladine, did all the artwork on the website, as well as the maps that go with the books. We work closely together on these projects, but he does the final images. He’s in the communication technology industry as well as being a talented artist with his own website.

I love all things noir and have spent a lot of time developing that kind of look and feel in the series. The second book, Hoodwink, is set in Hollywood in 1939 specifically because this is my hero’s first real case as a private investigator. So, of course, she had to go back to the era of The Maltese Falcon and the hard-boiled private eye.

If  you like the website now, check again towards the end of this year, Hoodwink comes out in January 2012 and there’ll be some changes and additions to celebrate the launch. J

Q: I see Gladiatrix was nominated for the Norma K Hemming Award. This award celebrates excellence in the exploration of race, gender, class and sexuality. This must have been a thrill. Did you set out to explore this themes, or did it just arise naturally?

Oh yeah, I certainly was thrilled to be nominated! Gladiatrix was my first book and I had no idea whether anyone would even read it. 🙂

Gladiatrix isn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, a sermon – it’s high adventure – but my politics tend to be inclusive rather than exclusive, so I guess they seep into everything.

Q: Gladiatrix was also nominated for the Davitt Award. This award is sponsored by the Sisters in Crime Australia for the best crime novel by an Australian woman. It looks like you are spanning at least two genres. Have you always been a fan of crime and mystery?

Sisters in Crime is such a wonderful organisation – I was absolutely thrilled they liked it.

Why did I venture across genres? Human history is full of deep dark mysteries and many of them involve unsolved crimes, so following a time travelling detective opens up adventures in any conceivable time or place. When you throw a slightly alternate past and present into the mix, then the adventure gets really exciting because anything can happen – and frequently does. J

Have I always been a fan of crime and mystery? On and off. Then one hot, sweaty summer – when I was bored and desperate for something new – I ended up in the crime section, where I discovered the V.I. Warshawski series by Sara Paretsky. V.I. is not only a smart, tough detective in the old school, noir tradition, but is also a compassionate modern woman. What a combination! I was hooked.

Since then I’ve discovered that noir female characters are very exciting people. You never quite know what they’re going to do next – but you can be damned sure you want to stick around and watch.

Q: Your main character, Kannon Dupree is described as feisty and bit impetuous but smart enough to get herself out of dangerous situations. Did you find that your background in martial arts helped you write realistic fight scenes?

Oh definitely. Especially the injuries incurred side of it. J (I’m rubbing my knee with one hand as I type with the other.)

Q: You PHD and work as an academic specialising in knowledge systems in different cultures and historical periods must help you create realistic settings when your main character travels through time. What advice could you give aspiring writers on research?

It depends on what kind of book you’re researching but if you’re writing about ‘a stranger in a strange land’, I’d suggest you start with what’s the same and what’s different? Then ask yourself why is it so?

Find out what your characters need to operate on a daily basis. Then go on to what belief system is dominant. Is it religious, scientific etc…? How does the power structure operate? Gender/class/ethnic relations? What does their technology look like and how does it fit into the socio-economy? Then the more psychological components come in. What is the family unit like? What are their greatest fears? How do they relax? And so forth…

Q: You grew up in Western Australia and spent your holidays rambling around the old gold rush ghost towns. Will there be a Kannon Dupree time travel mystery set against this background?

The series will regularly return to an Australian setting – that will definitely happen.

Choosing what era to visit next takes a bit of planning. There’s a particular arc going on with the main character that is suited to certain eras, so that has to be catered for. Plus some stories come roaring out of my filing cabinet and gleefully hijack the process…

Both of which happened with my second and third books. Hoodwink, (due out in January 2012) is set in Hollywood in 1939. So Kannon can put on her black trench coat and sunglasses, and slink around noir paradise.

The third book, which I’m now in the process of finishing, comes out later in 2012. I can’t tell you what it’s about yet, as my editor has a sniper ready to fire a warning shot if I mention it too soon. J

Q: I was prompted to start this series of interviews because there seems to be a perception in the US and the UK that fantasy is a bit of a boy’s club. Do you think there’s a difference in the way males and females write fantasy?

Really? But what about J.K. Rowling, Ursula Le Guin, Anne Rice and the million other stunningly wonderful female writers over there? What’s going on?

Sure gender can influence writing choices, just as ethnicity, religion, class, age, breadth of life experience, political beliefs etc, etc, can too. But what’s wrong with that? Does anyone still seriously believe diversity isn’t a good thing? The point is on what basis worth is judged…what is valued, which voices are listened to and which ones are denigrated or dismissed.

Q: Following on from that, does the gender of the writer change your expectations when you pick up their book?

Like many fantasy authors, there’s always been a special place in my heart for books – whatever the genre, whoever the author – that show off the might of the human spirit and it’s awesome potential. We need more of those books not less…

At the moment I’m besotted by John Carlin’s book on Nelson Mandela. How Mandela overcame the shackles placed on him because of his colour and basically saved South Africa from genocide. Talk about a true-life fantasy story!

So, I will happily pick-up books with any gender combination of author and subject. But…I won’t buy misogynistic books or ones that treat their female characters like convenient wallpaper – whatever the author’s gender.

Q: And here’s the fun question. If you could book a trip on a time machine, where and when would you go, and why?

My two dogs are wondering why I’m laughing… There are so many possibilities! What was Joan of Arc really like? What secrets are encoded in the Voynich manuscript? What were Buddha’s last words? What was written on the Mayan codices destroyed by the Conquistadors?

But this month the answer is: to the VIP seats at the Rugby World Cup Final, Johannesburg, 1995, and in the limo that took President Mandela back home from the game.

This is the day (a fraction of which is portrayed in the film Invictus) that it became clear that Nelson Mandela had managed to divert the South African nation away from a bloody civil war – when blacks and whites alike celebrated the Springboks’ World Cup victory. I’d dearly love to watch Nelson Mandela’s face as he saw HIS people, the South African nation, share the same emotion at the same time – joy.

Give-away Question:  In the last Census there were 58,053 Jedi Knights listed in Australia. What new religion would you propose for the next one? Why? What would they do and wear? How would you spread it? (Get on to merchandising if you feel that is appropriate.)

 

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July 13, 2011 · 8:55 am

Meet Kim Westwood …

As the next of my series featuring fantastic female fantasy authors (see disclaimer) I’ve invited the talented Kim Westwood to drop by.

Watch out for the give-away question at the end of the interview.

 

Q: I notice that you were ‘a weedy, asthmatic kid who devoured books like dinner.’ Kate Forsyth had a speech impediment and lost herself in books. I was a fat kid who no one would play with, so I lost myself in books. Do you think this ability to be totally immersed in an invented world, then go on to create invented worlds of our own arises from loneliness in childhood?

I’d lay bets on it.

Q: You’ve lived rough, close to the land: ‘For a while I lived on a farm by a river where I learnt to crutch sheep with hand shears, raise poddy calves and hypnotize chooks.’ Does this inspire your writing?

Yes. It’s the things that live at the bottom of the garden of my psyche that I inevitably plunder in my fiction.

Q: I see you did a Bachelor of Music. My daughter did a BA at the Con in Jazz voice. By the time she finished she’d lost her love of music (fortunately, it came back). Have you gone back to music? Are you one of these writers who create a play-list for your current work-in-progress and use it to get into the right frame of mind?

I won’t ever go back to playing classical music. It’s not that I don’t love it; it’s that I’ve loved it too much. The pressure of performance and desire for perfection nearly killed me. I don’t tend to write with music, but I am one of those people who play music REALLY loud in their car. Bach, Gesualdo, Pärt, Snow Patrol, Lamb, Adele: all loud.

Q: You wrote a theatre pieces for ‘dancer, light and shadow’. My uncle danced with QLD Ballet Theatre. Did you have a background in dance? Was that what drew you to write this piece? Do you have a recording of it or has it been lost in time?

My background was in gymnastics and physical theatre, so you could say I was used to choreographing movement. The aesthetic of dance fitted the vision I had for The City of Midnight: a numinous space where sound and solo performer folded in and out of light and dark. And yes, it’s recorded for posterity…just not on YouTube.

Q: Your short stories have been well received, with an Aurealis win and several final listings, as well as Stella’s Transformation appearing in Year’s Best Fantasy 2005 and several stories appearing in Australia’s Year’s Best SF and Fantasy. Just as some stories have a natural length do you think some writers have a length that suits them best?

Before The Daughters of Moab, I didn’t know whether I could write to novel length—I thought I was more suited to haiku. But the story led the way. Now, whenever I return to writing short fiction, I’m reminded of how much I enjoy the challenge of a compact story arc. I like creating a world that fits perfectly in a teacup.

Q: Your first book The Daughters of Moab was forged in the fires of Varuna Writers Retreat. But seriously, you did work on it at the writers retreat. Can you tell us a little about this experience? I’ve always thought it was be heaven.

The Varuna Retreat Fellowship struck the perfect balance for me: the solitude and calm of writing all day (and yes, I did!) followed by the companionship and sociability of other writers in the evening. This suited me better than the routine of ClarionSouth, which I went to in 2004. The Clarionettes, as I like to call them, would be the first to tell you that I was uncomfortable group critiquing early-stage and unfinished stories. For me, letting a story out into the world before it’s ready tends to oxidise and spoil it like a piece of fruit.

Q: There seems to be a playing with gender in The Daughters of Moab, is this something you like to explore?

Yes, there is. And yes, I do.

Q: Your next book The Courier’s New Bicycle is due out in 2011. Is it also a ‘poetic apocalyptic’ book?

Upfront, I should say that The Courier’s New Bicycle is neither fantasy nor apocalyptic—even the poetic has been swapped for pacy. This is a very fast ride compared to The Daughters of Moab. Salisbury Forth is a courier of contraband in an atmospheric but ailing Melbourne at a time of major socio-political change. The first review (Australian Bookseller & Publisher, July) described it as “a disturbingly credible and darkly noir post-cyberpunk tale.” That makes me happy!

Q: I read your description of how the short story Nightship came to be, and found it riveting. When will we see the book?

It’s in gestation. Think an elephant’s gestation.

Q: I was prompted to start this series of interviews because there seems to be a perception in the US and the UK that fantasy is a bit of a boy’s club. Do you think there’s a difference in the way males and females write fantasy?

The UK/US perception is news to me, but being in a club is not what makes a writer special. An individual’s prose style is moulded by such a complex array of things, one of which may or may not be their experience of maleness and/or femaleness. In other words, I don’t want to help reify that rather spurious divide.

Q: Following on from that, does the gender of the writer change your expectations when you pick up their book?

No. The gender of the writer is an irrelevancy to me. Their imagination—and what they do with it—is all that matters.

Q: And here’s the fun question. If you could book a trip on a time machine, where and when would you go, and why?

I’d go back to Britain at the time of the Picts, who painted themselves with woad. Love that blue.

Give-away Question:

Imagine a parcel that you are posting today to receive in ten years’ time. What would you put in it?

 

For a podcast of Nightship see here (skim down).

 

 

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June 30, 2011 · 3:49 am

Meet Deborah Kalin …

As the next of my series featuring fantastic female fantasy authors (see disclaimer) I’ve invited the talented Deborah Kalin to drop by.

Watch out for the give-away question at the end of the interview.

Q: Your manuscript sold from the slush pile to Louise Thurtell during one of her Friday Pitch sessions. This must have been thrilling. Can you tell us a little about the path to publication for your fantasy trilogy The Binding? Did you belong to a writing group?

I can’t remember if I was still a member at the time of the sale, but before attending Clarion South I was a member of the Online Writing Workshop, a fabulous internet writing community that I’d highly recommend.

I first heard of the Friday Pitch shortly after finishing Shadow Queen. What appealed to me was the chance to submit a chapter of my manuscript (as opposed to simply a query letter), and the fast response time of a week (as opposed to anywhere from 3-24 months).

The first response landed exactly a week after I’d submitted — a request for more time, since Louise had been on holidays and hadn’t started on last week’s submissions yet. I remember thinking that was just a whole week longer that I didn’t have to research which market to submit to next.

The second response came a week later — and I didn’t open it until the next day, I was so sure it would be a rejection. Instead it was a request for the full manuscript. Suddenly all my powers of blasé disappeared!

I didn’t have to wait long, however. Louise called me when she was a quarter of the way through the manuscript, wanting to make sure I hadn’t sold it to anyone else. Two days later she called again. She was ten pages from the end, and she was going to take the book to the acquisitions meeting so she could make an offer, and did I have an agent she should be talking to?

I don’t think I made a single coherent noise for at least a month afterwards.

Q: You used to work as a chemical engineer. Are you tempted to write hard SF?

Science fiction, definitely; hard SF … yes and no.

I have a handful of SF novels jostling in my head, just waiting for their turn to be written. But I’ve noticed my stories are always very character-driven, so any SF I do end up writing will probably be more correctly described as soft or social SF. The only way technology would get a starring, centre-stage role is if the world I was writing about featured a type of technology that was a character in its own right.

Q: In a review on Specusphere the reviewer said: ‘Told in the first person by Matilde, who but for her grandmother’s tenacity would, by the time the book starts, already be Duenin of the landlocked country of Sueben, Shadow Queen is a fantasy that keeps the reader on edge and looking over one shoulder for an attack or a betrayal.’ It is unusual to tell a trilogy from first person. Did you find this a challenge?

Absolutely. My default choice for point of view is third person, so that comes a bit more naturally to me than first. But Matilde is the character who loses the most, time and again, and she’s the character with the most at stake from the outset. The story was so thoroughly hers that first person felt like the best — maybe even only — option.

It leads to difficulties in keeping the reader up-to-date on what’s happening when Matilde isn’t on-scene, of course. To be included those scenes have to be related to Matilde, which brings up so much potential for telling rather than showing, and also for the readers to mistake Matilde’s sometimes-unreliable perceptions as the literal truth of what happened.

Q: The Binding books elicited quite a strong reader reaction on the issue of Matilde’s decisions. Infuriating is a word that crops up often. Can you tell us a little more about that?

One of the things I wanted to do, with Matilde’s story, was to create a believably flawed character. I also wanted to explore the issue of powerlessness, and making mistakes, and what that does to a person.

The fantasy genre is full of the boy king (or girl queen) trope: the youngster catapulted into leadership, for one reason or another. And time and again what I saw with this trope was that said youngster performed admirably. If they did put a foot awry, it often didn’t have a serious bearing on the plot.

Apart from being clichéd, and smacking of society’s obsession with youth and celebrity, it’s also painfully unrealistic. An untried young person thrust into a position of power or influence or even just high visibility is going to make mistakes, and those mistakes are going to cost them dear. To anyone watching from the outside, from an experienced perspective, that young person may even seem bleedingly stupid.

Matilde is 19 at the start of Shadow Queen. She’s untested and, though she’s educated in the ways of politics, she’s also been sheltered from it. She’s impatient, in the way of youth. Her main strength is simultaneously a weakness: she thinks on her feet, and she decides fast. She doesn’t second-guess, she just commits.

So when she’s tested, and sorely tested at that, she doesn’t always get it right.

But Matilde isn’t just young, impatient and decisive — she’s also powerless. She’s a prisoner of war, fighting for her life, and she’s doing it almost entirely alone. So her decisions are sometimes not to win so much as to survive — and maybe change the playing field to her advantage in the process.

I think that combination is inevitably going to lead to some infuriating decisions! Hopefully, though, they’ll also be understandable in the wider context of the story.

My favourite characters are the deeply flawed. Too often strength, particularly in relation to female characters, can be interpreted or portrayed quite narrowly. There’s a fabulous post about “why strong female characters are bad for women” with which I wholeheartedly agree.

Q: You attended Clarion South, a six week intensive bootcamp for writers. Can you share this experience with us?

Clarion South was simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting. I remember getting to bed around 1-2am, and rising around 6am, every single day for 6 weeks. In the afternoon I’d take a nap — which was strictly 10 minutes, no longer. (When the alarm woke me out of that nap, it was inevitably to a strong urge to throw up). The sleep debt was so severe that when I got home, I spent the next fortnight sleeping 12-13 hours a night, and taking a 5 hour nap during the day.

It was worth it. The chance to spend 6 weeks in a world where writing wasn’t a luxury but instead a priority was amazing. I found a community while I was there, and that in itself was invaluable — but I also found validation of what I wanted most to do with my time, which was write. At Clarion, no one expects you to put your writing second, or squeeze it in at the end of the day, or put it off or skip it “just this once”. Instead, writing dictates and informs every waking second: talking about the craft, pulling apart your classmate’s stories, having them pull yours apart.

I learnt so much at Clarion I think I spent the next year unpacking it all. Sometimes I still feel like I’m writing with the voices of my classmates in my head, banning me from using “just”, telling me the story starts on page 3, that sort of thing. There’s no way Shadow Queen would have emerged from my head in publishable format so swiftly if it wasn’t for what I learnt from my time at Clarion.

Q: Book one: Shadow Queen and Book two: Shadow Bound are published by Allen and Unwin. I love this line:

‘The story of an unbreakable young woman, The Binding is a study of what defines us, what binds us, and what sets us free.’ Did the first book come out before the second and third were written? Has this proved a challenge because you can’t go back and tweak events in book one to match up with the way the plot has gone? Or do you plan your whole trilogy before you start writing?

I’m definitely a pantser, rather than an outliner. When I sold Shadow Queen and Shadow Bound to Allen & Unwin, SQ was finished but I’d barely started SB.

I wasn’t too worried, because even when I started writing The Binding books, I knew the ending, down to the closing line. So I’d written SQ with an eye towards that ending, and all I had to do in SB was … get there.

This was not quite so straightforward as I’d hoped, of course. (The inevitable lament of the pantser!) Most notably because the plot of SB hinges on Matilde’s vow at the end of SQ, and when I reached the critical moment where Matilde has to face the consequences of that vow and attempt to untangle it, I found myself utterly stuck. The simplest, easiest and most elegant solution was to go back to SQ and change one word of the vow, swap it out for a more apt synonym. But that simply wasn’t an option.

Luckily as a pantser, I’m very practiced at writing without headlights, and I trust my process. Even when it looks like I’m veering away from the ending and I can’t see a way back, or through, the story always ends up where I thought it would — only now it makes more sense. It took a lot of cursing myself, and false starts, but in the end I came up with an alternative solution to that tricksome tangle which I think worked better — so much better that now I can’t remember what it was I originally wanted to change.

These days, perhaps because of that experience, I find I’m tending a little more towards some level of outlining. I’ll probably never be one of those writers with a beat-by-beat outline, but the current work in progress at least has a synopsis to guide me. Although I’ve already departed from it. Oops.

Q: What will you be writing next?

I’m currently working on an urban fantasy about time-travelling faeries and loneliness, which has taken a lot longer than I expected or hoped but I think I have the plot worked out at last. I also have a synopsis-type outline for a third Binding book, which is currently with A&U. I also want to work on something that deals with mental illness in the near future, but I haven’t quite got the idea fleshed out yet.

Q: I was prompted to start this series of interviews because there seems to be a perception in the US and the UK that fantasy is a bit of a boy’s club. Do you think there’s a difference in the way males and females write fantasy?

I find rules breed exceptions!

I also think that what informs an author’s writing — at least in terms of tone, voice and style, if not content — are deeper issues such as education levels, socio-economic influences, the cultures to which that author has been exposed, and the range (or narrowness) of their experiences and opportunities in the world to date. To name but a few.

It’s impossible to separate some of those from a society’s gender roles, so superficially it seems inevitable that there will be some kind of noticeable difference in the writing of men and women that can be traced to gender. But I think that risks ignoring the larger picture.

Certainly I can’t pick an author’s gender simply from a sample of their writing.

Q: Following on from that, does the gender of the writer change your expectations when you pick up their book?

I think it used to – when I was a teen, I learnt to expect male protagonists from male authors, and vice versa. But I’m happy to say I don’t think that’s been true for a long time (if it ever was — my expectations could well have had more to do with the books I was exposed to during those years). These days I don’t even notice an author’s name except to note whether I’ve heard of their work before.

Q: And here’s the fun question. If you could book a trip on a time machine, where and when would you go, and why?

DINOSAURS! To bring one home with me, of course.

Although, to be entirely honest – I think I’d hijack the machine so I could take as many trips as I could possibly ever imagine.

Give-away Question:

Who is your favourite fictional character, and why?

Follow Deb on Twitter:  debkalin@twitter

Find Deb on Facebook

Find Deb onGoodReads

See Deb’s Blog.

 

 

 

 

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June 11, 2011 · 1:11 am

Writing Update …

Over on the RWA blog Dark Side Downunder, I’ve been interviewed by Eleni. If you hope to write paranormal romance, this group are a great bunch, very supportive and lots of fun!

What am I doing right now? Sitting over my keyboard, writing the new KRK trilogy, while nursing a cold, wearing hobo gloves to keep warm. I have cups of hot tea and a box of tissues to help me get through the day. This is the not so glamorous side of a writer’s life.

You’ve heard the saying The Show must go on. Well, with we writers, The Book must go on!

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June 8, 2011 · 6:48 am

Meet Kaaron Warren …

As the next of my series featuring fantastic female fantasy authors (see disclaimer) I’ve invited the talented Kaaron Warren to drop by.

Watch out for the give-away question at the end of the interview.

 

 

 

Q: You lived in Fiji for three years. How did this come about? And do you find living in Fiji has influence your writing?

My husband was posted there as part of the diplomatic service, so we felt a bit ordinary when we came back! I was hugely influenced by Fiji in my writing; the environment, the people, the history, the culture, the shopping, the food, all of it was so different to life in Australia.

The thing is, coming back to Australia has inspired me as well. The stories I’ve written over the last 18 months have been hugely inspired by the Australian landscape. The rivers, the country towns, the suburbia and the winding roads you travel.

Q: I see you’ve sold around 70 short stories (three collections: The Grinding House, The Glass Woman, Dead Sea Fruit (coming soon from Ticonderoga Publications). Would you say the short story is your natural length? Or do you feel equally comfortable writing novel length?

Both. Some stories are naturally short stories, others require far more exploration. I really love both things and love that I can write short and long.

 
Q: Your stories have been described as dark and disturbing. Are you a secret dark fiction (horror) fan? Does this mean you have the kind of dreams that make you wake up with vivid images and the echoes of a scream reverberating around in your head?

I love reading horror stories, but not the slash and burn kind. I also love the best crime stories, the ones that are full of horror.

I’m not such a fan of most horror movies.

I don’t have nightmares all that often; not the sleeping kind. My horrors come from hearing the news, reading the papers and magazines, from listening to the stories people tell, from watching my elderly neighbour be locked up against her will in a dementia ward.

Q: Your mantle-piece must be getting very crowded with the swag of Ditmar and Aurealis Awards you’ve won, since way back in 1996. What do you think goes into an award winning story?

Originality of idea and voice. Sharpness and clarity. A real story. Characters you can believe in.

Q: You sold three dark fiction books to Angry Robot. That must have been a real buzz when the news came through. Slights appears to revolve around death and the afterlife. What inspired you to write this book?

It was an amazing moment, to read the email from Marc Gascoigne telling me he was buying all three novels. I had to ask my husband to read it, because I thought I was dreaming!

My concept of the afterlife in Slights is that you create your own hell by the way you behave on Earth. This was inspired very clearly by the Hare Krsna concept of hell; that your personal hell is designated by the things you do. If you are a drinker, or a meat eater, or a philanderer, a very certain hell awaits you.

Q: Walking the Tree is your second book. Even after reading the blurb I find it hard to pin down the genre. What theme are you exploring with this book?

It’s quite an anthropological theme. I wanted to understand how much difference geography makes; how being born ten kilometres apart can make two people have very different lives.

I also explored the concept of the network; how everything connects.

Then there’s the idea of women in control; women the ones who leave. They are the ones who make the major life choices. I wanted to explore how this would affect people.

I also thought about the need to go home, the draw for home at the end of one’s life. I wondered what it would be like not to have this.

In doing this, I had to change my own perceptions. I had to understand that in the world of Botanica, leaving is important; saying goodbye is a natural thing.

 

Q: Your latest book is Mistification. It looks like dark urban fantasy. Can you tell us a little about it?

It’s the story of Marvo, a true magician. He’s born in a strange room, in silence, and for the first four years of his life he doesn’t speak. He has no opportunity to go to school. Once he leaves this childhood home, he listens to stories, and he learns from all he knows from them.

I think Angry Robot would classify it in their category of WTF!

Q: I was prompted to start this series of interviews because there seems to be a perception in the US and the UK that fantasy is a bit of a boy’s club. Do you think there’s a difference in the way males and females write fantasy?

I’m not sure that there is. I don’t think I can pick a writer’s gender from their writing, unless they deliberately choose to write in a particular way.

Q: Following on from that, does the gender of the writer change your expectations when you pick up their book?

Not at all. I do read some books totally on spec, but most books are either by friends, or have come recommended, so I’m dealing with those expectations instead!

Q: And here’s the fun question. If you could book a trip on a time machine, where and when would you go, and why?

I’d love to be able to solve a couple of long term murder cases! It would be hard to pick which one. I guess Jack the Ripper is a major one I’d love to know the answer to. But I’d also love to know what happened to the Beaumont Children, and to Eloise (another young girl who disappeared when I was about 7). I still have nightmares about all those kids, and feel such sorrow for the families not knowing.

 

Give-away Question:

What’s your favourite bricks and mortar bookshop?

Find Kaaron on GoodReads.

Follow Kaaron on Twitter:  @KaaronWarren

 

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June 1, 2011 · 9:29 am

Meet Nicole Murphy …

As the next of my series featuring fantastic female fantasy authors (see disclaimer) I’ve invited the talented Nicole Murphy  to drop by.

Watch out for the give-away question at the end of the interview.

 

 

 

Q: With your Asarlai trilogy there is a strong love story running through each of your books. Is this because you are a romantic at heart?

Oh, absolutely. Big, soppy, kissy-kissy romantic. I’ll cry at romantic movies. I’ll sigh when the big proclamation of love scene comes. I think about Chandler proposing to Monica, or Lizzie finally accepting Darcy, and I just swoon.

When I started writing, I was trying my hand at epic fantasy and space opera. Then I realised that no matter what I attacked, it came with a strong romance subplot. So I decided to drop the rest of it and have a go at writing a fantasy romance. That was the original draft of Secret Ones.

Q: This trilogy strikes me as a modern take on Irish mythology. What attracted you to use this as a background for your world building.

Ireland came about because I couldn’t figure out how to use Australia. I’d decided the gadda were going to be a race that developed alongside humans but from different ancestors. I tried to make that ancestry Australian, but I couldn’t get my head around how to do that and not do something wrong to Indigenous mythology. So I tried another direction – humans originated in Africa. What’s the opposite of Africa? Answer – Ireland.

The great thing about this is because I’m not dealing with humans, I don’t necessarily have to be true to Irish mythology. The way I see it, the gadda are on the other side of the stories. They’d agree with some of the elements, but others from their point of view would be just plain wrong. So I’ve got the freedom to play within the mythology without having to be accurate.

Q: I hear you’ve put a proposal to your publisher for a new trilogy. Is it in the same world as the Gadda? Tell us a little about it.

It is in the same world as the Gadda. In fact, it’s the sequel to Dream of Asarlai. The new trilogy is called People of the Star and is set two years after Rogue Gadda. I’m taking the new world that’s resulted from the events of Rogue Gadda and really putting the guardians, their friends and family through the wringer.

It’s got the same structure as Dream of Asarlai, so there’s an overarching storyline but each book is a stand-along romance. You’ll be able to read People of the Star without having read Dream of Asarlai, although of course I’d prefer you to do both J

Cross fingers and toes for me that the publisher loves it and wants it too.

Q: I see you also have a story in Scary Kisses and More Scary Kisses. Did you start out writing short stories?

I was writing short stories and novels at the same time. I had more instant success with short stories – the first half a dozen stories I wrote I sold. This however twisted me a bit and while I recognised what I needed to learn with novels and worked hard on it, I kinda coasted with the shorts but as I aimed for better publications, the sales dried up.

Over the past twelve months, I’ve changed things around and started to work as hard on my short stories as I have on the novels and it’s starting to work. Apart from the two you mentioned, I’ve got a story in Issue 50 of Andromeda Spaceways, a flash piece in the upcoming Conflux Cookbook and hopefully there will be more sales this year.

I see shorts as a great way to challenge myself and experiment without having to sacrifice weeks or months to it. Learn in the shorts, apply to the novels .

Q: You went to the Romantic Times Convention in Los Angeles. What was it like? If someone was going to go, what advice would you give?

RT was fantastic! I had such a blast, I’m going to try to go again next year. RT is a convention much like our science fiction ones – panels during the day, social events at night. Except the romance community does things with a flair and bravado that would make a lot of SF people blush – and that’s not just the erotica writers J As RT isn’t just about romance nowadays but also covers fantasy, science fiction and mystery, it’s a great place to go to network with a large number of publishers, agents, writers and most importantly readers! And perhaps best of all – man will you score free books. I came home with twenty, and I stopped grabbing books cause I was worried about weight!

Q: It says in your bio that you were a teacher. Which subjects/ages did you teach and what are your best memories about being a teacher?

I taught primary school and over the nine years managed to cover everything from Kindergarten to Year Six. My favourite time was the three years I spent in Djarindjin/Lombadina, an Aboriginal community on the Dampier Peninsula in WA (north of Broome). It was fun, inspiring, awesome and a time I will never forget.

Q: You won an award for your series of article on mental illness. What prompted you to investigate this subject and what did you as a person take away from writing these articles?

I started to work on it because mental illness is something that’s always interested me. A number of members of my family have had difficulties with their mental health and in fact, I’m currently dealing with depression myself.

The thing I took away is that these are just people. It can be easy to be scared, particularly of some of the more severe conditions like bipolar or schizophrenia because some of the behaviour can be disturbing. But at the end of the day, they’re folks like you and me. They laugh. They cry. They struggle every single day with the impact of their illness and the smallest thing – a smile, a g’day, a nod – can make the world of difference.

Q: I was prompted to start this series of interviews because there seems to be a perception in the US and the UK that fantasy is a bit of a boy’s club. Do you think there’s a difference in the way males and females write fantasy?

I do. Not that I think that one is better than the other and of course there are exceptions, but my experience is that women’s books are different to men’s. I think we’re still in an age where socialisation does impact on the life experiences of men versus women, and that inevitably has an impact on the writing. Maybe not necessarily on the content, but on the tone and the understanding of societal privilege and what perspectives of the content are shown.

I’d love to see an experiment where a range of men and women were told to write the same scene, with the same character outlines and restrictions, and see what happens. Each one would be different, because people are different, but I think you’d find that the women’s writing would reflect a group opinion different to that of the men.

Q: Following on from that, does the gender of the writer change your expectations when you pick up their book?

Absolutely. Does that mean I read one more than the other? Well, at the moment I’m tending to read most within the genre of romance, and particularly paranormals. So I am reading more women than men, because more women write in that genre. Does that mean men can’t? Of course not – Trent Jamieson is writing a fabulous urban fantasy series at the moment.

Q: And here’s the fun question. If you could book a trip on a time machine, where and when would you go, and why?

That’s such a hard question. There’s so many time periods that I love. But I’ve decided on a really personal one – I’d go back to after Worldcon last year and make some changes to my life that I’m sure would ward off the depression.

Nicole has kindly offered a copy of one of her books (you decide). Give-away Question:

Would you want to have magical powers? What would you do with them.

Follow Nicole on Twitter:  @nicole_r_murphy

See Nicole’s Blog.

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May 28, 2011 · 12:11 am

Brain Fry!

There they are, the three covers of The Outcast Chronicles. Big thanks to Solaris and Clint Langley for producing such beautiful covers.

It is the end of May (I know there’s a couple of days left, but I go back to work on Monday, so I only have tomorrow). Now I have to hand in the trilogy. It’s been a long journey. I began the first draft almost ten years ago. There was a rewrite the year I did my Masters and took the first book to ROR. The books have evolved and grown, especially in the last year when I’ve been working on them every spare moment.

What does it feel like to hand in a trilogy that you’ve poured your heart and soul into?

Scary.

My brain is officially fried. (See my 5 stages of writing a book on the Mad Genius Club Blog). I would need to put the trilogy away for at least month then read it from beginning to end before I could even contemplate doing anything more to it.  Since I could go on tweaking for ever and I have the end of May as my deadline it is now time to stop.

Take a deep breath, step away from the trilogy … and turn to face the new King Rolen’s Kin trilogy. What wonderful ideas I have for testing Byren, Orrie, Fyn and Piro!

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Filed under Characterisation, Covers, creativity, Fantasy books, Female Fantasy Authors, Fun Stuff, Genre, Inspiring Art, Writing craft

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