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On Sunday, Carol Ryles and I dropped in on Villaincon, a small SF convention in Perth. Sadly, it was nowhere near as well attended as it should have been. It seems to me that fannish conventions are not doing as well as they once did. There are so many other calls on our time these days, and besides, events such as SupaNova cast all smaller events into the shade.
But there is still a place for the smaller, more intimate convention, where you can catch up with your friends in the bar and pick up all the latest goss. There are many people I never see outside of conventions – due, again, to all myriad of little things that take up so much time. But you can go to a con knowing that you’re going to meet like-minded people, new ones as well as old friends. So I was really pleased to learn that next year there will be no fewer than four conventions in Perth!
The first is the annual Genghis Con. I must admit I’ve haven’t been to this one, because I’ve always thought of it a student gig and my student days are well gone. However, while it did indeed start out in 1992 as a student con, run by SF aficionados from our universities, I’m assured that while it retains its low budget profile, plenty of older people attend. The 2012 offering will be held from 20-22 January at St Georges College, UWA, and it costs only $25 to attend plus $80 per night accommodation – which includes breakfast.
Then comes Swancon, which I’ve been attending for about ten years. I’ve felt quite bereft the odd time I’ve had to miss a year! It’s held over the Easter long weekend (5-9 April next year) so there are four whole days of panels, discussions, academic papers, book launches and socialising. The venue for next year hasn’t been announced, but it will be at one of Perth’s many lovely hotels. It’s going to be called Doom-Con this time, to reflect an apocalyptic theme. The overseas guest-of honour will be no less a personage than Brandon Sanderson, while local girl turned Brisbanite Marianne de Pierres will be the Australian GOH. Fan GOH will be Chris Creagh, a lecturer at Murdoch University. (Chris is the initiator of the Murdoch University Science Fiction Foundation, which is helping with the preservation of the Murdoch Uni Library's valuable collection of speculative fiction material)
If you book and pay for Swancon before the end of December they’ll give you really good deal, too! Only $185 full price or $140 concession for the four days.
Next up will be one that’s close to my heart – the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre Mini-con on Sunday, 9 September. This one-day gathering of writers has been held at Greenmount in the Perth Hills every two years since 2004, so this will be our fourth venture into the convention business. It’s only a baby con – just the one day and well under a hundred attendees – but because of that it’s intimate and chatty, with interesting panels, a good lunch and lots of books to spend your money on. And the authors could well be in attendance to sign them, too. More news will be posted here closer to the time.
And lastly will come Crime Scene on the 29-30 September at Novotel. This is a new venture for Spec-fic in Perth, but a logical one because a lot of SF readers also read crime, and SF writers often need to research crime for their works. It’s hoped that guests will include crime writers and experts on police procedure, forensics etc. This con doesn't have a website yet but you can find them on Facebook.
So, add the various fund-raising functions and it will be a busy year on the SF front in Perth. And that’s without even thinking about cons in the other state capitals! Maybe we can give you a run-down on those events in another post.
Showing posts with label swancon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label swancon. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Juliet Marillier talks to Egoboo
Multi-faceted Perth-based writer Juliet Marillier recently gave Egoboo an hour out of her very busy schedule to talk about Druidry, Wagner, fairy tales, conventions and her writerly life. We had a handful of questions for her – and here they are, along with the words of wisdom she gave us in reply.
Joanna Fay set the ball rolling by asking: Do you draw on your druidic beliefs and practices in your writing?
Juliet: I actually came to Druidry through writing. When I was researching Daughter of the Forest, my first book, I found I needed to research Druidry because one of my characters was destined to become a druid. Just at that time, Philip Carr-Gomm of the UK-based Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids (OBOD) visited Perth to give a workshop for the University of Western Australia’s extension program. I went along to hear him and was impressed by his unpretentious, non-guru-like manner. He told us the story of Taliesin and how the Order sees story-telling as an integral part of spiritual practice. I was so intrigued that I enrolled for OBOD’s correspondence course. This felt rather like coming home – there were so many similarities between the Order’s teachings and my own belief system. Druidry recognises the power of storytelling for teaching and healing. We see ourselves as part of the web of life on earth, and that means sharing responsibility for the health of the planet. Conservation and sustainability are important in druid work. Another key belief is that the divine exists within all living beings. This ensures that we respect all forms of life, ourselves included. These beliefs can’t help but flow through to my writing.
Joanna: I’ve heard that you’re a Wagner enthusiast, like me. Do you find this influences your writing, too? And how about other music, art, and other literary forms? Are they also influences?
Juliet: My mother loved Wagner! I remember going the home of some Austrian friends when I was about ten, and over a series of evenings, listening to the entire Ring Cycle with musical score in hand. I was captured by both story and music. But although I enjoy Wagner and opera in general, these days I prefer to listen to folk music – Celtic and Hispanic music in particular. My CD collection is 95% folk music. I don’t usually listen to music while I’m writing, but when I do I choose something appropriate to the story and setting – that usually means some form of traditional music.
I love the Pre-Raphaelite painters, especially Waterhouse (I was delighted when Pan Macmillan brought out an edition of the Sevenwaters books featuring his paintings on the covers!) but whether they are actually an influence on my work is a moot point. I like many fairytale illustrators, notably Kinuko Y Kraft, who created the lovely covers for my two YA books, Wildwood Dancing and Cybele’s Secret. Most of the art work on my walls at home is fairytale based. I guess fantastic art has been an unconscious influence since childhood.
As for other literary forms, I read widely. For recreation I prefer general fiction and literary fiction. I love writers who combine excellent craft with great storytelling. I read very little fantasy.
Satima Flavell: Do you follow any fantasy writers at all?
Juliet: If you look at my bookshelves, you’ll see that I do love some fantasy writers. One is Joe Abercrombie, whose work meets my criteria: craft plus storytelling. All the authors I enjoy create characters with a lot of depth, and one reason I don’t care for much epic fantasy is that there’s often an emphasis on worldbuilding at the expense of character development. There are exceptions: Abercrombie is one, and others include Guy Gavriel Kay (I especially love Tigana and The Lions of Al-Rassan) and Jacqueline Carey. I also enjoy Neil Gaiman and I think Orson Scott Card is a great craftsman who sometimes gets carried away by his personal philosophies. In Australian fantasy, you can’t go past Margo Lanagan. Her Tender Morsels was utterly absorbing.
Satima: What else might we find on your bookshelves?
Juliet: Plenty of mainstream and literary fiction, and, of course, lots of folklore and fairy tales! A lot of non-fiction, too, mostly research-related: customs, languages, geography, history. Books on the writer’s craft. Favourite children’s books. Knitting books. Dog books.
Helen Venn: You’ve used myth and fable in your work a number of times. How do you work it in? And how do you keep it fresh?
Juliet: I’ve loved fairy tales and folklore since I was about two, so traditional storytelling creeps into my work in all kinds of ways. Generally it comes out in the manner of telling or in the choice of big themes – courage, friendship, true love, faith, honour. But sometimes I use a story as the basis of a book – I’ve done this for three of my thirteen published novels. I’ve always loved the Six Swans story, on which my first novel, Daughter of the Forest was based. I wanted to place a real family in the middle of those terrifying events and see how they coped. That fairy tale also appealed because of its strong female protagonist.
For Wildwood Dancing I took the stories of The Twelve Dancing Princesses and The Frog Prince and developed the plot around elements of both. Heart’s Blood uses Beauty and the Beast as its framework, but it is a much more complex and layered story than the fairy tale. I made many changes so my story would resonate for contemporary readers, but kept all the parts I loved most: secret garden, cast of mysterious retainers, magic mirrors. There’s more about this on my website: http://www.julietmarillier.com/books/hbauthorsnote.html
As for keeping it fresh, there are two main reasons for using fairy tale material: firstly, because you love it and secondly, because it fits the story you passionately want to tell. If you keep both of those in mind, the "how to" should become clear as you go.
Helen: What are the problems inherent in writing a story such as Heart’s Blood, which is so obviously based on a well-known fairy story?
Juliet: It depends on how closely you’re basing your work on the fairy tale. Some writers might twist the story to make it fit into, say, a feminist paradigm, or they might re-tell it as humour. One challenge is to make a story acceptable (and relevant) to contemporary readers rather than retaining the mores and values of the period in which it was first written down, since these could be unacceptable now. You need to do that without losing the charm of the original. For example, in Beauty and the Beast, a curse is lifted at the end and the hero becomes handsome. I didn’t want to send a message that physical beauty is necessary for happiness. Anluan in Heart’s Blood has a physical disability caused by a childhood illness, not a curse. He still has it at the end of the story, but has learned that it makes no difference to the people that love him.
Sarah Parker: How did you enjoy this year’s Swancon and the panels you were on?
Juliet: I’m not much of a con enthusiast generally, but this one was fun: well-organised, and in a spacious, comfortable venue. I especially liked the inclusion of the Romancing the West writers’ workshops under the Swancon umbrella. I would have liked to see hands-on writing workshops for speculative fiction writers too, not only for romance writers – it felt odd to me that the romance stream got “how to write better” workshops and the spec fic stream got “how to get published” workshops.
My panels were well attended and brought out some interesting questions. I especially enjoyed "Writer as business person/Writer as entertainer" with Sean Williams, Justina Robson and Simon Brown (who was an excellent facilitator). It was notable for frankness and good humour.
Satima: And how about your workshop on using fairy stories in writing romance?
Juliet: The quality of writing that came out of the workshop was very pleasing. It’s hard to write something that’s both creative and polished under workshop conditions. And I was happy to learn later than some participants had gone home and developed their ideas into stories.
Not only was it great to share my lifelong love of fairy stories with other writers, it also provided me with the opportunity to try out some ideas preparatory to presenting the material as a one-day workshop in Santa Barbara in June, for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). That workshop is called Old Bones, New Flesh, and is based on fairy tales as inspiration for creative work.
After Santa Barbara I fly on to New York, where I’m delivering the keynote address for the Women’s Fiction Chapter at the Romance Writers of America convention. I’ll base it on the ways in which women pass on wisdom from one generation to the next. And then to Lisbon for the release of Seer of Sevenwaters in Portuguese.
Thank you from all of us here at Egoboo, Juliet Marillier!
Joanna Fay set the ball rolling by asking: Do you draw on your druidic beliefs and practices in your writing?
Juliet: I actually came to Druidry through writing. When I was researching Daughter of the Forest, my first book, I found I needed to research Druidry because one of my characters was destined to become a druid. Just at that time, Philip Carr-Gomm of the UK-based Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids (OBOD) visited Perth to give a workshop for the University of Western Australia’s extension program. I went along to hear him and was impressed by his unpretentious, non-guru-like manner. He told us the story of Taliesin and how the Order sees story-telling as an integral part of spiritual practice. I was so intrigued that I enrolled for OBOD’s correspondence course. This felt rather like coming home – there were so many similarities between the Order’s teachings and my own belief system. Druidry recognises the power of storytelling for teaching and healing. We see ourselves as part of the web of life on earth, and that means sharing responsibility for the health of the planet. Conservation and sustainability are important in druid work. Another key belief is that the divine exists within all living beings. This ensures that we respect all forms of life, ourselves included. These beliefs can’t help but flow through to my writing.
Joanna: I’ve heard that you’re a Wagner enthusiast, like me. Do you find this influences your writing, too? And how about other music, art, and other literary forms? Are they also influences?
Juliet: My mother loved Wagner! I remember going the home of some Austrian friends when I was about ten, and over a series of evenings, listening to the entire Ring Cycle with musical score in hand. I was captured by both story and music. But although I enjoy Wagner and opera in general, these days I prefer to listen to folk music – Celtic and Hispanic music in particular. My CD collection is 95% folk music. I don’t usually listen to music while I’m writing, but when I do I choose something appropriate to the story and setting – that usually means some form of traditional music.
I love the Pre-Raphaelite painters, especially Waterhouse (I was delighted when Pan Macmillan brought out an edition of the Sevenwaters books featuring his paintings on the covers!) but whether they are actually an influence on my work is a moot point. I like many fairytale illustrators, notably Kinuko Y Kraft, who created the lovely covers for my two YA books, Wildwood Dancing and Cybele’s Secret. Most of the art work on my walls at home is fairytale based. I guess fantastic art has been an unconscious influence since childhood.
As for other literary forms, I read widely. For recreation I prefer general fiction and literary fiction. I love writers who combine excellent craft with great storytelling. I read very little fantasy.
Satima Flavell: Do you follow any fantasy writers at all?
Juliet: If you look at my bookshelves, you’ll see that I do love some fantasy writers. One is Joe Abercrombie, whose work meets my criteria: craft plus storytelling. All the authors I enjoy create characters with a lot of depth, and one reason I don’t care for much epic fantasy is that there’s often an emphasis on worldbuilding at the expense of character development. There are exceptions: Abercrombie is one, and others include Guy Gavriel Kay (I especially love Tigana and The Lions of Al-Rassan) and Jacqueline Carey. I also enjoy Neil Gaiman and I think Orson Scott Card is a great craftsman who sometimes gets carried away by his personal philosophies. In Australian fantasy, you can’t go past Margo Lanagan. Her Tender Morsels was utterly absorbing.
Satima: What else might we find on your bookshelves?
Juliet: Plenty of mainstream and literary fiction, and, of course, lots of folklore and fairy tales! A lot of non-fiction, too, mostly research-related: customs, languages, geography, history. Books on the writer’s craft. Favourite children’s books. Knitting books. Dog books.
Helen Venn: You’ve used myth and fable in your work a number of times. How do you work it in? And how do you keep it fresh?
Juliet: I’ve loved fairy tales and folklore since I was about two, so traditional storytelling creeps into my work in all kinds of ways. Generally it comes out in the manner of telling or in the choice of big themes – courage, friendship, true love, faith, honour. But sometimes I use a story as the basis of a book – I’ve done this for three of my thirteen published novels. I’ve always loved the Six Swans story, on which my first novel, Daughter of the Forest was based. I wanted to place a real family in the middle of those terrifying events and see how they coped. That fairy tale also appealed because of its strong female protagonist.
For Wildwood Dancing I took the stories of The Twelve Dancing Princesses and The Frog Prince and developed the plot around elements of both. Heart’s Blood uses Beauty and the Beast as its framework, but it is a much more complex and layered story than the fairy tale. I made many changes so my story would resonate for contemporary readers, but kept all the parts I loved most: secret garden, cast of mysterious retainers, magic mirrors. There’s more about this on my website: http://www.julietmarillier.com/books/hbauthorsnote.html
As for keeping it fresh, there are two main reasons for using fairy tale material: firstly, because you love it and secondly, because it fits the story you passionately want to tell. If you keep both of those in mind, the "how to" should become clear as you go.
Helen: What are the problems inherent in writing a story such as Heart’s Blood, which is so obviously based on a well-known fairy story?
Juliet: It depends on how closely you’re basing your work on the fairy tale. Some writers might twist the story to make it fit into, say, a feminist paradigm, or they might re-tell it as humour. One challenge is to make a story acceptable (and relevant) to contemporary readers rather than retaining the mores and values of the period in which it was first written down, since these could be unacceptable now. You need to do that without losing the charm of the original. For example, in Beauty and the Beast, a curse is lifted at the end and the hero becomes handsome. I didn’t want to send a message that physical beauty is necessary for happiness. Anluan in Heart’s Blood has a physical disability caused by a childhood illness, not a curse. He still has it at the end of the story, but has learned that it makes no difference to the people that love him.
Sarah Parker: How did you enjoy this year’s Swancon and the panels you were on?
Juliet: I’m not much of a con enthusiast generally, but this one was fun: well-organised, and in a spacious, comfortable venue. I especially liked the inclusion of the Romancing the West writers’ workshops under the Swancon umbrella. I would have liked to see hands-on writing workshops for speculative fiction writers too, not only for romance writers – it felt odd to me that the romance stream got “how to write better” workshops and the spec fic stream got “how to get published” workshops.
My panels were well attended and brought out some interesting questions. I especially enjoyed "Writer as business person/Writer as entertainer" with Sean Williams, Justina Robson and Simon Brown (who was an excellent facilitator). It was notable for frankness and good humour.
Satima: And how about your workshop on using fairy stories in writing romance?
Juliet: The quality of writing that came out of the workshop was very pleasing. It’s hard to write something that’s both creative and polished under workshop conditions. And I was happy to learn later than some participants had gone home and developed their ideas into stories.
Not only was it great to share my lifelong love of fairy stories with other writers, it also provided me with the opportunity to try out some ideas preparatory to presenting the material as a one-day workshop in Santa Barbara in June, for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). That workshop is called Old Bones, New Flesh, and is based on fairy tales as inspiration for creative work.
After Santa Barbara I fly on to New York, where I’m delivering the keynote address for the Women’s Fiction Chapter at the Romance Writers of America convention. I’ll base it on the ways in which women pass on wisdom from one generation to the next. And then to Lisbon for the release of Seer of Sevenwaters in Portuguese.
Thank you from all of us here at Egoboo, Juliet Marillier!
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Interview with Glenda Larke
Glenda Larke is the author of nine books, Havenstar (written as Glenda Noramly), the Isles of Glory trilogy – The Aware, Gilfeather and The Tainted, the Mirage Makers trilogy – Heart of the Mirage, The Shadow of Tyr and Song of the Shiver Barrens and most recently The Watergivers trilogy of which the first two books, The Last Stormlord and Stormlord Rising are out. Stormlord's Exile, her tenth book and the final one in The Watergivers trilogy, is to be released later this year. She has been shortlisted for the Aurealis Awards several times and is a finalist in the Fantasy section of the 2010 Aurealis Awards with Stormlord Rising - results to be announced May 21
Egoboo WA caught up with Glenda in the build up to Swancon 2011 where she is an invited guest.
Welcome Glenda.
On your blog you describe yourself as exotic. You have certainly lived in a variety of places. What started you on your travels? Where have you lived?
I started on my travels aged about nine -- in the wash-house of our farm in Western Australia. That was where a stack of old National Geographics was kept – black and white ones, from the 1930s. (No, I’m not that old, just the magazines were.) I loved reading them and dreaming of getting to all those places.
I left Australia for the first time when I was at university, on a New Zealand hitchhiking holiday, paid for by working on Rottnest Island as a housemaid every vacation from the time I was fifteen. I’ve hated bed-making and ironing ever since, but that holiday was fantastic.
Since then, I’ve lived in Malaysia (including Borneo), Austria (Vienna), and Tunisia. So that’s four continents and an island altogether.
How have these moves impacted on your writing? Positively? Negatively?
I don’t think there has been a negative impact.
On the positive side: where can a fiction writer go wrong with travel? There are ideas to be had everywhere. The desert scenes in the Mirage Makers and the Watergiver trilogies came from my Australian travels outback, from the Sahara of Tunisia and Algeria, from flying over Iran.
Other inspiration for stories came from the millipedes of the tropical rainforest, bird stacks off the coast of Britain, Indian water painters, fish traps on mangrove mud flats, Asian street markets, Roman ruins…
Travel has certainly ensured that I can write anywhere – from airports to fishing boat decks or in a tent. Or, believe it or not, on a sun-lounge under a casuarina, overlooking the aquamarine waters of Krabi Bay, Thailand. Which is where I am right now, typing this answer.
You started out writing non-fiction articles so what was it that led you to write fantasy novels?
I actually started with fiction when I was about eight, and I’ve never stopped. My first published stuff, though, was non-fiction. I didn’t start with fantasy; my first novels were a mix of thriller, exotic destination and romance, rather like Mary Stewart novels. I changed to fantasy when I realise that anything I wrote set in the real world was going to freak out some of my husband’s relatives, who seemed unable to separate the writer from their writing. Of course, I loved fantasy as a genre, too!
You build intensely detailed and believable worlds. I remember an interview with Elizabeth Jolley who said her novel, The Well, started with a single image of a well and grew image by image until she had the idea of a story. What comes first when you are writing a novel – the setting or the story?
I always start with a single idea.
Havenstar started with a conversation about how convenient it would be if a map altered according to what was happening on the ground. This was in the days before the GPS. (Or, for that matter, J.K.Rowling. Do you think I could sue her for pinching my moving map idea?)
The Aware arose out of a comment someone made about how he was sick of fantasies because they were always set in the Middle Ages, with castles, horses and dark forests with wolves. So I thought I’d write a whole book set on a sand spit with nary a castle or a horse or a forest. The era was vaguely 1800 A.D., but still one reviewer called it medieval, so you can’t win.
After the idea, I commence building the world in my mind. I rarely write anything down at this stage. The progression to a story comes easily when I start having to answer questions like: What sort of person would be important/in trouble/a hero/a villain in this kind of world?
In the Havenstar world, the answer was a mapmaker would be of paramount importance. In the Watergiver trilogy, it was someone who can supply water. In The Aware it was the person who could see magic.
My next trilogy, just begun, has its origins in two ideas: What if you have a society which believes one in every set of twins is born evil? And: Trading in bird of paradise feathers made people rich in Europe a couple of hundred years ago. What if the birds had had a way to fight back?
What, for you, is the hardest part of writing a novel?
It varies from book to book, but there is always a stage where I am sure my writing is terrible and or boring. Sometimes I am right, and I have to re-write a large chunk, or re-arrange the way the story fits together. Sometimes I am panicking unnecessarily, or so my beta readers tell me. There’s no single or consistent problem. It can come at any stage of the story and the method of solving it varies. Sometimes I cut scenes, or I might add them. I might discard a character or include a new one.
At the micro level, for me the hardest thing in writing is to “get the hero out of the room”. Most writers will know what I mean. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with rooms or even with travel; it’s the problem of connecting two scenes so the transition makes sense without giving a lot of boring detail.
For example, if your protagonist has to dose his companion with a sleeping draught, where does he get the drug? It’s hard to make an explanation interesting when the method used has no impact on the story and is, in fact, utterly irrelevant. Yet if you don’t explain the “how”, then readers will ask in annoyance, “Hey, where did he get the drug from? He didn’t even have any money a moment ago, let along access to an apothecary!”
I hate getting the hero out of the room.
You write very strong female characters – two of my particular favourites are Blaze Halfbreed and Ryka Feldspar. So how do you develop these characters? What makes them memorable?
Well, I’ll leave it up to readers to decide whether the characters are memorable and why. Characters for me develop all by themselves as the story continues, moulded by events as they occur. I always have an idea of who they are at the beginning, but only rarely do they follow the path that I planned for them.
All I knew about Blaze at the start of The Aware was that she’d had an appalling life as a child and she’d survived by being strong. Only later did I discover that she had a soft centre, and a self-deprecating sense of humour. Ligea, in the Mirage Makers, was strong in a very masculine way, often ruthless, because she was raised by two very nasty men who used her as their weapon of choice in an international conflict. By the end of the trilogy, she’s a very different person.
Ryka was a challenge right from the beginning. I wanted a pregnant woman who is placed in a terrible position, yet who refuses to hate. Her relationship with Ravard was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to write, because it involved the interaction between the abused and her abuser. I wanted her to be the strong one, even though she was constantly in the position of the weaker. I hope I succeeded, without ever appearing to belittle the experience of women in such situations. How to end the story of Ryka, Kaneth and Ravard was a further challenge. I actually changed the ending several times before – I think – I got it right.
What was the first book that you remember reading that stuck in your memory?
There are three. One was a West Australian book by Katherine King, called Australian Holiday, which my mother read to me. I so loved that book, possibly because it was about things I knew – the Australian bush.
The second is one of the Milly Molly Mandy books. I can’t remember the exact title, but it was one of the first books I ever read by myself. However, it was mostly memorable because I was reading it on the (public) bus going to school when I was five and I missed the school bus stop. The school principal came looking for me by car… I remember that very clearly indeed!
The third was important because it was the last book my mother ever read to me: an unabridged version of Little Women printed in a tiny font. I was about seven, and once she’d read a chapter or two, I took the book from her because reading aloud was too slow, and I had to know what happened next. I’ve been a compulsive reader ever since.
With Stormlord's Exile, the final book in The Watergivers trilogy, coming out later this year in Australia what comes next?
I’ve started another trilogy, the first book of which is tentatively titled The Witchery of Spice. It’s about great trade routes and birds of paradise, set in an imaginary world equivalent to c.1600 A.D. of our history. Think Elizabethan-like buccaneers and Low Country burghers clashing as they venture into Far Eastern trade; think Western colonists confronting Eastern cultures in the spice islands of the tropics. Add in magic and mayhem, heroes and heroines from both hemispheres…and that’s just beginning.
Thank you, Glenda.
Egoboo WA caught up with Glenda in the build up to Swancon 2011 where she is an invited guest.
Welcome Glenda.
On your blog you describe yourself as exotic. You have certainly lived in a variety of places. What started you on your travels? Where have you lived?
I started on my travels aged about nine -- in the wash-house of our farm in Western Australia. That was where a stack of old National Geographics was kept – black and white ones, from the 1930s. (No, I’m not that old, just the magazines were.) I loved reading them and dreaming of getting to all those places.
I left Australia for the first time when I was at university, on a New Zealand hitchhiking holiday, paid for by working on Rottnest Island as a housemaid every vacation from the time I was fifteen. I’ve hated bed-making and ironing ever since, but that holiday was fantastic.
Since then, I’ve lived in Malaysia (including Borneo), Austria (Vienna), and Tunisia. So that’s four continents and an island altogether.
How have these moves impacted on your writing? Positively? Negatively?
I don’t think there has been a negative impact.
On the positive side: where can a fiction writer go wrong with travel? There are ideas to be had everywhere. The desert scenes in the Mirage Makers and the Watergiver trilogies came from my Australian travels outback, from the Sahara of Tunisia and Algeria, from flying over Iran.
Other inspiration for stories came from the millipedes of the tropical rainforest, bird stacks off the coast of Britain, Indian water painters, fish traps on mangrove mud flats, Asian street markets, Roman ruins…
Travel has certainly ensured that I can write anywhere – from airports to fishing boat decks or in a tent. Or, believe it or not, on a sun-lounge under a casuarina, overlooking the aquamarine waters of Krabi Bay, Thailand. Which is where I am right now, typing this answer.
You started out writing non-fiction articles so what was it that led you to write fantasy novels?
I actually started with fiction when I was about eight, and I’ve never stopped. My first published stuff, though, was non-fiction. I didn’t start with fantasy; my first novels were a mix of thriller, exotic destination and romance, rather like Mary Stewart novels. I changed to fantasy when I realise that anything I wrote set in the real world was going to freak out some of my husband’s relatives, who seemed unable to separate the writer from their writing. Of course, I loved fantasy as a genre, too!
You build intensely detailed and believable worlds. I remember an interview with Elizabeth Jolley who said her novel, The Well, started with a single image of a well and grew image by image until she had the idea of a story. What comes first when you are writing a novel – the setting or the story?
I always start with a single idea.
Havenstar started with a conversation about how convenient it would be if a map altered according to what was happening on the ground. This was in the days before the GPS. (Or, for that matter, J.K.Rowling. Do you think I could sue her for pinching my moving map idea?)
The Aware arose out of a comment someone made about how he was sick of fantasies because they were always set in the Middle Ages, with castles, horses and dark forests with wolves. So I thought I’d write a whole book set on a sand spit with nary a castle or a horse or a forest. The era was vaguely 1800 A.D., but still one reviewer called it medieval, so you can’t win.
After the idea, I commence building the world in my mind. I rarely write anything down at this stage. The progression to a story comes easily when I start having to answer questions like: What sort of person would be important/in trouble/a hero/a villain in this kind of world?
In the Havenstar world, the answer was a mapmaker would be of paramount importance. In the Watergiver trilogy, it was someone who can supply water. In The Aware it was the person who could see magic.
My next trilogy, just begun, has its origins in two ideas: What if you have a society which believes one in every set of twins is born evil? And: Trading in bird of paradise feathers made people rich in Europe a couple of hundred years ago. What if the birds had had a way to fight back?
What, for you, is the hardest part of writing a novel?
It varies from book to book, but there is always a stage where I am sure my writing is terrible and or boring. Sometimes I am right, and I have to re-write a large chunk, or re-arrange the way the story fits together. Sometimes I am panicking unnecessarily, or so my beta readers tell me. There’s no single or consistent problem. It can come at any stage of the story and the method of solving it varies. Sometimes I cut scenes, or I might add them. I might discard a character or include a new one.
At the micro level, for me the hardest thing in writing is to “get the hero out of the room”. Most writers will know what I mean. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with rooms or even with travel; it’s the problem of connecting two scenes so the transition makes sense without giving a lot of boring detail.
For example, if your protagonist has to dose his companion with a sleeping draught, where does he get the drug? It’s hard to make an explanation interesting when the method used has no impact on the story and is, in fact, utterly irrelevant. Yet if you don’t explain the “how”, then readers will ask in annoyance, “Hey, where did he get the drug from? He didn’t even have any money a moment ago, let along access to an apothecary!”
I hate getting the hero out of the room.
You write very strong female characters – two of my particular favourites are Blaze Halfbreed and Ryka Feldspar. So how do you develop these characters? What makes them memorable?
Well, I’ll leave it up to readers to decide whether the characters are memorable and why. Characters for me develop all by themselves as the story continues, moulded by events as they occur. I always have an idea of who they are at the beginning, but only rarely do they follow the path that I planned for them.
All I knew about Blaze at the start of The Aware was that she’d had an appalling life as a child and she’d survived by being strong. Only later did I discover that she had a soft centre, and a self-deprecating sense of humour. Ligea, in the Mirage Makers, was strong in a very masculine way, often ruthless, because she was raised by two very nasty men who used her as their weapon of choice in an international conflict. By the end of the trilogy, she’s a very different person.
Ryka was a challenge right from the beginning. I wanted a pregnant woman who is placed in a terrible position, yet who refuses to hate. Her relationship with Ravard was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to write, because it involved the interaction between the abused and her abuser. I wanted her to be the strong one, even though she was constantly in the position of the weaker. I hope I succeeded, without ever appearing to belittle the experience of women in such situations. How to end the story of Ryka, Kaneth and Ravard was a further challenge. I actually changed the ending several times before – I think – I got it right.
What was the first book that you remember reading that stuck in your memory?
There are three. One was a West Australian book by Katherine King, called Australian Holiday, which my mother read to me. I so loved that book, possibly because it was about things I knew – the Australian bush.
The second is one of the Milly Molly Mandy books. I can’t remember the exact title, but it was one of the first books I ever read by myself. However, it was mostly memorable because I was reading it on the (public) bus going to school when I was five and I missed the school bus stop. The school principal came looking for me by car… I remember that very clearly indeed!
The third was important because it was the last book my mother ever read to me: an unabridged version of Little Women printed in a tiny font. I was about seven, and once she’d read a chapter or two, I took the book from her because reading aloud was too slow, and I had to know what happened next. I’ve been a compulsive reader ever since.
With Stormlord's Exile, the final book in The Watergivers trilogy, coming out later this year in Australia what comes next?
I’ve started another trilogy, the first book of which is tentatively titled The Witchery of Spice. It’s about great trade routes and birds of paradise, set in an imaginary world equivalent to c.1600 A.D. of our history. Think Elizabethan-like buccaneers and Low Country burghers clashing as they venture into Far Eastern trade; think Western colonists confronting Eastern cultures in the spice islands of the tropics. Add in magic and mayhem, heroes and heroines from both hemispheres…and that’s just beginning.
Thank you, Glenda.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Book Launches at Swancon: Belong and Scary Kisses
So, the good news is: I've got my contributor's copies of Belong and it looks very pretty. I've read several of the stories and can't help thinking what an awesome job everyone has done: writers, editors, printers and British and Australia Post for getting "Belong" to Perth on time.
Thank you and hugs to Belong's fantastic editor, Russell B Farr.
Belong will be launched this Thursday at Swancon 9pm at the All Seasons Hotel, 15 Robinson Ave, Northbridge. I'll be there, along with Sonia Helbig and we'll both be reading a teaser from our stories: Sonia's is "Initiation" and mine is "Deeper Than Flesh and Closer", which is about a vastly changed future Earth that has been colonised by refugees from the past.
Also being launched at Swancon -- this time Friday at 10pm -- is Elizabeth Gryzb's anthology, Scary Kisses. The anthology is a collection of sexy and scary paranormal romance which will definitely whet your appetite. And the fantastic cover is by Amanda Rainey.
Contributors to Scary Kisses include Annette Backshall who is a member of our writer's group at the KSP Writer's centre and one amazing lady. When she's not fighting fires in Perth as a professional firefighter, she writes an awesome story and is a great critiquer as well. Date with a Vampire is Annette's first publication. Go Annette!!
If you can't make it to Swancon, both books can be ordered from Indie Books Online
--
Carol.
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