Interview: Genevieve Valentine, author of Mechanique

Recently I reviewed the debut novel by Genevieve Valentine, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti. I thought it a brilliant and intriguing book, and as a writer, I wondered about the thought process behind some of the concepts. Genevieve was kind enough to answer some questions for me.

The bones (in the story, circus aerialists have their human bones replaces with light, hollow copper one) represent different things to each character who receives them. What inspired them, and what did they represent for you, the author?

Appropriately enough, bird skeletons were a large part of the influence on the bones. I was looking them up for something unrelated, but the physiology was really interesting and stuck with me as I started writing about what exactly made the performers in the Circus Tresaulti so different. For me, the bones were always a tangible symbol of the sacrifices you make for something you love, though the self-destructive aspect of it often goes hand-in-hand, depending on the character.

The narrative jumps among several voices and points of view. Why did you choose that form?

When I sat down to begin I just started writing, and the scenes I wanted to get down first came first, in the perspective I thought made the most sense. By the time I had the breathing space to sit back and worry if it was going to work, I loved how it was coming together too much to think about stopping.

The story doesn't have a specific setting, either geographically or in time. Why did you decide on that?

I approached it with the idea that the deep aftermath of a war takes on this air of inevitability and surreality, as if it both defined and took place outside of the world now. With a war as big as the one that's implied here, that devastates natural resources and completely shifts the practice of government, old nations and eras slowly cease to matter. It doesn't help that the Circus operates in this landscape as they themselves are a bit unstuck in time by the magic that holds the Circus together.

How well did the artwork by Kiri Moth capture your sense of the story?

SO WELL. Sorry for the caps, but it's awesome. The cover alone is so detailed and evocative that no one could ask for more, but for me, some of the interior art pieces truly hit home. My two favorites are probably the griffin, which is so perfect it's become an emblem for the Circus in earnest, and Elena on the trapeze. The grace and introspection and loneliness of that moment is exactly how I had pictured it when I was writing, and seeing the recreation in my inbox the first time, I clutched my pearls like a dowager.

Thanks to Genevieve for answering my questions. You can find Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti at all the usual outlets.

Interview with Teresa Frohock, author of Miserere

Teresa Frohock is both a friend and the author of Miserere: an Autumn Tale, a book I enjoyed so much that I gave her the following blurb:

"Miserere is about redemption, and the triumph of our best impulses over our worst. It's also about swords, monsters, chases, ghosts, magic, court intrigues and battles to the death. It's also (and this is the important part) really, really good."

You can read my full review here.



Teresa graciously agreed to answer some questions for me about the book.

You and I have both recently written books that include people of genuine, true religious faith (my book is The Hum and the Shiver, out this fall). The pitfalls of this are enormous: the danger of sanctimoniousness, of preachiness (literal and figurative), of simply alienating readers who don't share whatever faith the characters embody. How much did you worry about this, and how did you overcome it?

Thanks so much for having me here, Alex, I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about some of this.

Truth be told, I’m still worried about some of those things. Although I think people who read speculative fiction are open-minded and much more amenable to experimentation than other genres, I still worry that some may suffer contempt prior to investigation. I hope not.

It helps that I have no agenda here. I’m not out to push a viewpoint, Christian or otherwise. I just wanted to tell a story, and as I constructed Woerld, I realized the focus would be on Lucian, who happened to belong to the Christian bastion. From that point forward, I had to educate myself about Christianity and I was really surprised by the facts I found.

The version of Christianity that I present on Woerld is gleaned not just from Biblical sources, but also from the Pseudepigrapha and Apocrypa. I wanted to see what Christianity might have been like before the Schism of 1054 when Rome split from the Byzantine Church. I approached all the religions on Woerld strictly from a scholarly angle at first, then I eased the spiritual elements inherent to the practices of the religion into the story.

I focused entirely on the growth of the individual character and not the dogma of the religion. And that was hard, showing how the adherents struggle with their faith from personal viewpoints. When we speak of Muslims, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, we tend to think in terms of groups, not individuals. I wanted to put the focus on the individual and show that
personal growth doesn’t come from automatically joining a group, but comes through the internal work of the individual.

If you read most religious texts closely, they emphasize a personal contact with a higher power, not group-think. So I did very much what you’ve done with Reverend Craig in The Hum and the Shiver—I simply had Lucian live his life in accordance with the dictates of his beliefs. I’ve always loved Emerson and Thoreau’s writings and their emphasis on the individual’s responsibility to contact the divine within and bring that light into the world through action. That is a concept inherent to all religions and I wanted to illustrate that philosophy in Miserere.

You incorporate a young woman, Lindsay, who must learn both to be a warrior (a common fantasy trope) and to truly believe in God (not so common). What did she represent for you?

Lindsay represents our twenty-first century’s society secular thinking about religion, our preconceptions and our misconceptions. Her exposure to religion comes primarily through the media, meaning she understands the various religions through the extremes of the worst possible examples of the adherents: politicians who mouth their version of Christianity while they actively engage in immoral behavior; a Catholic Church hiding child-molesting priests; jihadists that believe their way to paradise is paved with the bodies they leave behind; Hindus and Muslims and Christians and Jews constantly fighting one another either in rhetoric or with guns.

This is what Lindsay is exposed to day after day, then she is taken to the obligatory church service, plunked in a pew, and told God is love. Needless to say, she’s a tad cynical over the whole thing. Kind of like the rest of us.

So I like having her as the voice of the reader, to question Lucian and the adults in Woerld about how things work. That way I can gently ease my readers into Woerld yet not make the picture too rosy. It’s not. There are serious conflicts among the bastions and the governments in Woerld—it was never my intent to present a Utopian society.

Children aren’t afraid to question the status quo, and they see things very clearly, more clearly than adults want to admit. Lindsay is the perfect lens to view Woerld and its imperfections.

Your novel is definitely a fantasy, and many fantasies create their own religions. You chose to use actual existing world religions. What was your thought process behind that?

I thought about Tolkien and Lewis and wondered what The Lord of the Rings would have looked like if Tolkien had written it as a Catholic story instead of embedding the religious tenets beneath Middle Earth’s mythology, or what Narnia would have looked like if, instead of a lion, Aslan was the Christ. Not being as much of a fan of Tolkien as I am of Lewis, I really started reading Lewis’ works; he had a talent for rooting out the spirituality of Christianity and getting to the essence of its beliefs without sanctimony.

I checked out some other current fantasy titles that used fallen angels, and while they addressed the fallen part of the situation, very few showed it from a Christian angle. I think God’s Demon by Wayne Barlowe was the closest novel to presenting hell from a Christian viewpoint, and I love what Barlowe did with that story. The language he used, the characterization, and his perception of hell as an actual, physical place just knocked me for a loop.

Barlowe took the war in heaven and showed how the fallen angels fought. I’ve always been fascinated by the war in heaven and often wondered: what if it’s still going on? I’m sacrilegious like that.

In the end, I fell in love with the absolute challenge of it. This is my own ego talking now, but I wanted to prove you could write a fantasy with Christians in it without the story becoming insipid or preachy. I began constructing Woerld and realized that all religions have some form of hell or purgatory, so realistically, it wouldn’t be just Christians. I mean why would heaven only use a fraction of its forces to combat evil?

So the other religions started seeping in and with that there must be a hierarchy, and the structure of Woerld evolved until it became what it is in Miserere. The more I worked on it, the more detail seeped in, and again, I just loved the challenge of using real religions.

You have a male hero torn between and among a group of women: his sister, his former lover, and his new protégé. Was there a deliberate thought process behind the gender roles for these characters?

I wanted to step outside of a few of the standard fantasy tropes and twist them. The most common trope from the fairy tales of my youth was that of the beautiful princess who was captured by the evil warlord or witch and rescued by a handsome prince. I wanted to turn that trope upside down and show the handsome prince who was captured by the wicked queen and rescued by the beautiful princess. Only in Miserere, the prince takes a real beating from the wicked queen, the beautiful princess is mauled and half-mad, and the wicked queen isn’t strung too tight either.

That was my primary thinking, then everything sort of got away from me. Most people are conditioned to see men in one of two roles: protector or aggressor. Lucian sees himself as the protector, even though it is Lindsay and Rachael who end up saving him more often than he saves them. He is determined not to abandon them, though, and that’s important, that desire to be a part of someone’s life even if it means constraints on his existence.

Nor did I want the women to be perfect. Rachael had her part in her own downfall; Catarina is a grand case of self-will run riot; and Lindsay thinks they’re all being horribly unfair to Lucian while she downplays his crimes in her own mind.

When I got the cover art for Miserere (by the wonderful Michael C. Hayes), I just cried, it was better than anything I could have imagined. I had been dreading what an artist’s conception of Miserere would be, but more than anything, I feared chain mail bikinis on the women and Lucian standing with Catarina and Rachael kneeling or the women pictured lower in the foreground.



Instead, Michael got exactly what I was doing and busted the tropes with me: they’re all standing with their backs to one another; Rachael and Catarina are wearing the armor they would probably choose; Lucian is on his knees between them; and the walls of the Citadel rise behind them. Catarina’s face is cunning, Rachael is distrustfully looking at Lucian, and Lucian—my
poor Lucian—looks to Heaven, because when you’re trapped between those two women, your only salvation is from above.

Thanks to Teresa Frohock for answering my questions. Miserere: an Autumn Tale is available now from Night Shade Books.

Three questions with Alaya Johnson, author of Moonshine

I reviewed Alaya Johnson's new novel Moonshine here. Alaya was also kind enough to answer some questions about the book.

When you and I first discussed Moonshine back in 2009, I got the sense that it would be a much darker book than it turned out to be. Did the tone change, or did I just project my own atmosphere onto it?

I'd already finished it at that time, so I suppose that it was as dark as it was going to get. I'd conceived of Moonshine as a fun vampire book that was still very much aware of social disparities and justice issues that are often completely missing from urban fantasy/paranormal novels. Those are also issues that interest me in general, so it's entirely possible that I focused on talking about those aspects just because they were important in my formulation of the book, despite its other (possibly more prominent) elements. I never meant for the generally fun tone of the book to minimize the social realities of the era (and my re-imagining of it), but to complement them. My success at this endeavor, of course, is entirely up to the reader.

One difference between the racial and immigrant human minorities, and the "Others" as you depict them, is that the victims of vampires become, against their will, part of a despised underclass. Since many of them have experienced how the other half lives, so to speak, did you consider making Zephyr one of "them" instead of a sympathetic outsider? Why or why not?

Most of the vampires depicted in the book start out as immigrants or members of the lower social classes. That wasn't a coincidence: generally, disease disproportionately affects the poor and disenfranchised, and vampirism is no exception. So they may know how the "other half" live, but only in the limited sense that as human immigrants they had more rights than vampire immigrants (as an example).

I think I used a human outsider as my viewpoint character mostly because it was important for Zephyr to be able to "pass" in the various strata of human society. As a vampire (or as a non-white person), she wouldn't have been able to so easily navigate them. And while that viewpoint would certainly have resulted in an interesting story, it wasn't ultimately where I decided I wanted to take the book.

And, related to the second question, why did you choose to make Zephyr a non-native New Yorker?

Partly because I liked the idea of the outsider perspective, and partly because so much of the power and mystery of New York City comes from its transplants, the non-natives who learn to make it in the city and call it their home. That experience was such a powerful one for me that I pretty much had to use it for my first New York City novel. NYC is also a place to shed your old identity and remake yourself. Zephyr is a few years post-transplant, and the fact of her self-reinvention plays a fairly important role in the story.

Thanks to Alaya Johnson for taking the time to answer my questions. Moonshine will be available May 11.

And go here before Friday, May 7 for a chance to win a signed paperback of Blood Groove.

Interview with Liane Merciel, author of The River Kings' Road

The River Kings' Road, the first novel by Liane Merciel, introduces her world of Ithelas. It's the tale of a knight caught between conflicting desires, a poor woman struggling to save a child, and the fate of kingdoms hanging in the balance. Liane was kind enough to answer some questions about the creation of her world and her writing process.



What came to you first: your characters, their world or their dilemma?

Yesss, starting with the easy ones. Thanks. ;)

The world came first. I've been working in and on the world of Ithelas for about ten years as part of an online RPG I used to run (and still occasionally run when I have time, although that is not very often these days). It's changed enormously over that time, and the version used in the books is itself substantially different from the game version, but one way or another I've been playing in this sandbox for a while.

The characters were the next step. I took a sample of people who could give different perspectives into that world: some who were native to the region, others who were foreigners. Some men, some women. People who had special talents with magic or sharp pointy objects, and people who couldn't wield anything deadlier than a bread paddle. Your usual motley six-pack for high fantasy.

After that, of course, I was stuck trying to find something that could bring all these disparate people together and put them into motion for a plot. Then I thought: what is one concern that transcends gender, social class, and nationality? What's something that anybody could care about? A baby!

Tie a baby to the train tracks and you've got yourself a story. So there's the starting dilemma.

Tell us about your hero, Kelland. The story has him caught between two seemingly unreconcilable choices; was that always your plan?

Kelland is a Knight of the Sun, a bit like a Templar (minus the banking), who gets pulled into the plot because of his unique magical powers and social position. Of all the characters in the story, he's probably the one who has to juggle the most conflicting imperatives: he has to uphold the values of his faith but also maintain its political neutrality; he can't be seen to support one secular ruler over another, even though they're all trying to use him to bolster their own prestige and he needs their goodwill to do his job; he has to protect innocents but also bring evildoers to justice (and, oh, it can be impossible to do both those things at once!). On a personal level, he's torn between the desires of his heart and the duties of his position, with the added complication that if he makes the wrong choice, he'll lose his divinely granted magic forever.

And as if all that weren't enough, he's fairly young -- at the time of the story, he's only had a couple of previous assignments, and nothing like this -- and he's beset by self-doubt because all his life he's been subjected to the Model Minority Myth. Everyone he meets expects that he'll be super extra awesome not only because he's a Sun Knight but because of what he looks like. He knows the truth is that he's just human, but nobody cares about his truth except Bitharn. For everyone else, he has to be who they need him to be.

So he gets to navigate through all that in his early 20s. It's a wonder the poor guy can make any choices at all.

There's an infant at the heart of the story, arguably the most helpless victim of all. What inspired that?

I had to threaten something cute and squishy. It was either a baby or a puppy, and I wanted to reach the cat-lovers too.

How does your heroine, Odosse, differ from Kelland, since both are trying (from opposite sides) to achieve the same goal? And how are they similar?

They're different in that Kelland is one of the most powerful characters in the story, while Odosse is one of the least. She's an illiterate 16-year-old single mother with no money and no social standing in a country where having the wrong accent could get her killed. She doesn't even have a pretty face, which seems to be the default superpower for a lot of fantasy heroines.

Odosse was actually one of the first characters that popped into my head when I was drafting the outline for this story. At the time I'd been reading a message board thread in which a boarder expressed a desire to read a story about an ordinary person who didn't have any special talents and never developed any. It got me thinking: what would happen if an ordinary person -- not a secretly royal Child of Prophecy, not someone destined to become the most powerful sorcerer in the world -- was thrust into a situation that seemed to call for a Hero?

Let's take the archetypal RPG opening scenario: "your village has been destroyed by unknown evil! You are the sole survivor!" What does an ordinary person do in that situation? Swear vengeance and hunt down the villain who did this? Then what, attack him with a ball of bread dough? No. Probably you just try to stay alive. Probably you run away, and grieve, and pick up the pieces of your life and go on. And there's a kind of heroism in that, too -- a more realistic kind, I think -- so I wanted to write about it.

As for how she's similar to Kelland, well, Odosse and Kelland are probably the two most good-hearted characters in the story. They both place others above themselves, and they both try to do the best they can for those people. They just have vastly different ways of doing it.

Do you plan more adventures in Ithelas?

I hope so!

Heaven's Needle,, the next book in the sequence, is slated for publication in March 2011. It picks up the most obvious dangling thread from The River Kings' Road and carries it into new territory, wherein Our Heroes confront an Ancient and Insidious Evil. That one takes a darker bent; it's more fantasy-horror than pure fantasy.

After that, well, we'll see. I'm working on proposals for other ideas, but those are still in the planning stages and pretty nebulous. My plan, tentatively, is to continue the series as books that are linked by recurring characters but each tell a self-contained story. But I'm a noob to this and I hesitate to make grand predictions, so... there's at least one more, it's a lot darker, and it's coming out next year. Let's just go with that. :)

The novel hits stores on Tuesday, March 10, 2010. Leave a comment before March 8 for a chance to win a copy of The River Kings' Road signed by the author.

New interview at Grinding to Valhalla

I'm interviewed at Grinding to Valhalla about The Sword-Edged Blonde.

New interview posted

I'm interviewed about both The Sword-Edged Blonde and Blood Groove over at Graeme's Fantasy Book Review. He asks some fun questions.

New interview, new review

Jeff Cunningham interviews me at his blog, and there's a perceptive review of The Sword-Edged Blonde over at Perrynomasia. Check 'em out!

Interview and chance to win signed copy of The Sword-Edged Blonde

Today I'm interviewed by Zombie Joe at Geek Like Me. This was an old-fashioned sit-down-face-to-face interview, with interaction and everything. He's also giving away signed copies of The Sword-Edged Blonde.

Interview: Mary Jo Pehl of MST3K and Cinematic Titanic

When The Sword-Edged Blonde was released in hardcover in 2007 (it'll be out later this month in paperback; see sidebar for more info), its high-concept idea--sword-and-sorcery fantasy written as hard-boiled detective fiction--led a lot of people to think it was a parody of its two genres, using one (detective) to mock the other (fantasy). This was never my intent. Although I hope there are some humorous moments, I wanted to tell a serious fantasy story, about larger-than-life characters and events, in a way that let the emotional moments reach past any genre tropes and thus truly affect the reader.

Mary Jo Pehl has faced this same issue, in a much more public way. As a writer and performer on one of my favorite TV shows ever, Mystery Science Theater 3000, she helped bring cutting mockery to new heights. As part of the Cinematic Titanic cast, she has continued this. But she's also written a book, a play and a one-man show (literally written for a man).

She was kind enough to talk to me about how having a knack for comedy affects her more serious intentions, and the way the writing process changes depending on the format.

Alex: You have a lot of experience with "comedic deconstruction" (i.e.,
making fun of things); what sort of effect has that had on your other
writing?

Mary Jo: I think it’s taught me to be more analytical. With that, I think my writing has become more honest, both intellectually and psychically. Sometimes I can’t enjoy things at face value, because my mind is busy knitting on how a joke, situation, or denouement was set up and how it paid off. It’s heightened my sense of irreverence. It’s also made me take care with paying attention to my own voice; I try not to be snarky just for the sake of being snarky.

Do you consider your theatrical writing to be essentially comic in nature, or serious with comic elements? And is there an underlying theme that links your writing?

You know, I don’t think I’ve done enough theatrical writing to sense a trend. All writing, to me, is a grand experiment. I’ve only written two or three short pieces for other performers, and a couple of solo shows. In considering them, I think they are serious with comic elements. But I love bathos and pathos, which, to me, is life. Many people have said that my writing has made them both want to laugh and cry. I don’t know if that’s a compliment, and I don’t know if it’s due to ineptitude or actual skill!

Do you worry that your public persona as a comic performer influences the way audiences and/or readers comprehend and accept any serious intent you might put into your work?

I used to worry about that, but then the fretting only got in the way of my work. I think you start short-changing your work when you start worrying about who might think what about it. It’s a just a version of “The Editor” we all have. The creativity starts to be hassled and crippled by the demons of what will people think. But yeah, I suspect I have been passed over for grants and awards because I’m viewed as a comedy writer, and comedy can’t be seriously on its own merits. I’ve written about very serious topics, some of which have had some honest, dark humorous things happen as a part of them, and I feel like they might have been dismissed wholesale because I’m a “comedic” writer.

Oh, well.

What's different about writing material strictly to be read ("I Lived with My Parents"), for yourself to perform ("Here, There and Underwear") and writing for others ("Man Saved by Condiments")?

I don’t know if I know exactly, because I’m not sure I’ve succeeded! Like I said, it’s always a work in progress. I think when you’re sitting alone with a book and words on a page, your head takes it in differently than when you’re in a live performance environment, so I try to write accordingly. I get more specific and illustrative in language, because I want to try to bring the reader into what’s happening. It’s an attempt at verbal 3D, I suppose. In performance, obviously, you can use body language, intonation and facial expression to get a point across or to illustrate a situation. Writing “Man Saved By Condiments” was difficult because I was writing it for a male, and I got really hung up on how a man would speak, act and react to something. Then I realized men were human, so I used that as a starting point!

I read in another interview that "Bartleby the Scrivener" is one of your favorite books. I couldn't tell if that was a joke, but if it's true: why?

No joke -it is one of my favorite stories ever. Two reasons: I’m a big Melville fan, and, for starters, I think it’s an especially interesting from him because he is mostly known for his adventure stories. It’s both quite spare and very evocative; I love the economy of language. But here’s this story about an office worker, from the perspective of someone who’d seen the high seas and remote islands, the life of an adventurer to be sure.

Second, there is something about Bartleby and his situation that I very much identify with. There’s a real absurdist quality in it, and a subversive response to the capitalistic and industrial forces that were coming to bear in that age. While I still continue to contemplate the story, I completely understand Bartleby’s response: “I would prefer not to.” And by the way, if you get a chance to see Sam Ita’s Moby Dick, do. Astonishing.

Thanks to Mary Jo Pehl for taking the time to answer my questions.

I'm interviewed at Patricia's Vampire Notes (and you can win an autographed book!)

It's one week from the release of my vampire novel Blood Groove, and today I'm interviewed at Patricia's Vampire Notes. You can also sign up for a chance to win a signed copy of Blood Groove. Be sure to stop by!

Interviewed by Library Dad

Today I'm interviewed by Neil over at the Library Dad blog.

Interviewed with other reviewers from Guys Lit Wire

Over at Innovative: A Word for the WriTeen, I'm interviewed along with some of the other ace reviewers from Guys Lit Wire.

http://innovativeteen.blogspot.com/2008/09/behind-blog-guys-lit-wire.html

Stop by and leave Gabrielle a comment!