The Qwillery

Claire R. McDougall

Veil of Time
Gallery Books, March 11, 2014
Trade Paperback and eBook, 416 pages

A compelling tale of two Scotlands—one modern, one ancient—and the woman who parts the veil between them.

The medication that treats Maggie’s seizures leaves her in a haze, but it can’t dull her grief at losing her daughter to the same condition. With her marriage dissolved and her son away at school, Maggie retreats to a cottage below the ruins of Dunadd, once the royal seat of Scotland. But is it fantasy or reality when she awakens in a bustling village within the massive walls of eighth-century Dunadd? In a time and place so strange yet somehow familiar, Maggie is drawn to the striking, somber Fergus, brother of the king and father of Illa, who bears a keen resemblance to Maggie’s late daughter. With each dreamlike journey to the past, Maggie grows closer to Fergus and embraces the possibility of staying in this Dunadd. But with present-day demands calling her back, can Maggie leave behind the Scottish prince who dubs her mo chridhe, my heart? 

TQ:  Welcome to The Qwillery. When and why did you start writing?

Rachel:  Thank you so much, Sally! I started writing in elementary school, when the sainted Miss Benny plucked a few of us out of our third grade classroom to join her fourth grade creative writing class. My first published work was a Valentine’s poem I wrote that year which appeared in my local newspaper. I won’t say it was a straight line from third grade to publication of my debut novel, but writing is the only thing I’ve ever really wanted to do.



TQ:  Are you a plotter or a pantser?

Rachel:  I love that word—pantser! I’m something of both. I see my (approximate) destination; in A Highly Unlikely Scenario, the destination (spoiler alert!) was the world saved from certain destruction! I also see an overall structure that helps me get to that destination; in A Highly Unlikely Scenario, I envisioned a three-part structure in which Leonard, my bashful protagonist, makes his way first into the world and then into history. Then I wrote through that structure toward that approximate destination. But I don’t know in advance how I’m going to get there. I plot no more than a few pages ahead and rarely know what’s at the end of each sentence. You have to leave room for the unexpected!



TQ:  What is the most challenging thing for you about writing? Where do you write?

Rachel:  The most challenging thing about writing for me is dealing with distraction. I don’t just mean the Internet, though that’s possibly the worst of it, but even daily minutia: the phone ringing, the postman arriving, the question of what I’ll cook for dinner. This is why I do my best work at artists’ colonies, where beautiful people take care of our everyday needs, and we’re released to only live in our imaginations. I’ve been blessed to attend a number of them; this book was in large part drafted at the Millay Colony and the Hall Farm Center, which is sadly defunct. But otherwise I write at home, in private—never in public. I can’t know when my writing is going to make me laugh, or cry!



TQ:  Who are some of your literary influences? Favorite authors?

Rachel:  I read widely and voraciously—literary fiction, speculative fiction/sci fi, mysteries, history. I love long novels and short stories, and I also find inspiration in museums, concerts, films, my friends, walking around a city ... I recently wrote a quick list on Facebook of ten books I couldn’t get out of my mind when I read them—the kind of list you’re not supposed to overthink, noting only the first names that come to mind—and it turns out all were books I’d read before the age of 25: the Narnia series, Jane Eyre, Dante, Italo Calvino, Charlotte’s Web, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Borges. Somehow I forgot Harriet the Spy!



TQ:  Describe A Highly Unlikely Scenario in 140 characters or less.

Rachel:  It’s a literary romp in which one Neetsa Pizza employee discovers that you can’t save the world with pizza coupons.



TQ:  Tell us something about A Highly Unlikely Scenario that is not in the book description.

Rachel:  I love this question! The book is about all of the above, but it’s also about family—about love, guilt, and sacrifice, and also the intergenerational transmission of knowledge, caring, and values. Specifically, it’s about Leonard’s older sister Carol, a neo-Maoist masquerading as a Jacobite, who gave up a music career to care for Leonard; Leonard’s precocious, comic-book-writing, seven-year-old nephew, Felix, who too often is dumped by classmates onto the Municipal Compost Heap; his beloved Sally, a warrior-librarian on a mission to read unreadable manuscripts; and his grandfather, who came from the Old Country and died when Leonard was fifteen, but who’s still a strong presence in Leonard’s memory.



TQ:  What inspired you to write A Highly Unlikely Scenario? Why did you choose to write genre bending SciFi adventure? Do you want to write in any other genres or sub-genres?

Rachel:  I grew up in Italy and have always been fascinated by medieval history—its art, architecture, literature, religious movements, and so on. Many of the people Leonard encounters hail from that time, and then, of course, in the final third of the book, Leonard travels to thirteenth-century Rome to retrieve his nephew Felix and, incidentally, to save the world. Writing about these real people was enormous fun for me, as was trying to reconstruct what Rome was like during that time (what did the fish market look like? what might a person have seen crossing the Tiber?). I’m also interested in ideologies, and how they affect our behavior, for better or worse; in this book, religious and political philosophies we consider extinct still thrive (Whigs, for example, and Heraclitans). I’m not good with labels, but only something like sci fi (fantasy? speculative fiction?) could accommodate this much suspension of disbelief, this much imagination. But I see myself mostly as a literary writer; my next novel (due out in January 2015) is a more straightforward literary novel. After that? Who knows!



TQ:  What sort of research did you do for A Highly Unlikely Scenario?

Rachel:  I did an enormous amount of research for this book: I read Marco Polo’s Travels, as well as critical writings about his achievements; I looked at ancient maps and medieval engravings; I read about Pythagoreans and medieval mystics and Roman architecture and Jewish life in the Middle Ages and pilgrims’ clothing and the list goes on and on! I’ve created a Goodreads bookshelf of some of the sources that were most important to the writing of this novel. I always do about six times more research than I need—this is the case even with the short stories I’ve written. For me, it’s part of the fun of writing!



TQ:  Who was the easiest character to write and why? The hardest and why? Who is your favorite good guy, bad guy or ethically ambiguous character?

Rachel:  To be truthful, none of the characters in this book was difficult to write: they all felt familiar from the start and I had enormous sympathy for them—all, of course, except the villain Ugolino de Barbarubeis, who chases Leonard around Rome, hoping to hurt him with a brank or a scramasax. He is the only unambiguously bad guy. My favorite good guy is probably Leonard’s grandfather, who doesn’t actually appear in the book, but who ate herring, pored over ancient tomes, and told the young Leonard crazy stories he couldn’t understand. Most of the characters are ethically ambiguous, though: most have made mistakes or have acted thoughtlessly or selfishly at one point, usually hurting someone dear to them as a result. Carol abandons her son to Leonard’s care so she can pursue her revolutionary aims; Leonard’s love interest Sally tries to use Leonard to get information she thinks she needs; Leonard himself was unkind to his grandfather and blind to his sister’s sacrifice. I have a special fondness, though, for Bobolo Savelli, the man who runs the pilgrims’ hostel in Rome. He’s not a bad sort, though he may overcharge Leonard and Sally for the privilege of eating his pottage and sleeping in his flea-ridden bed, but he can’t resist charging admission to see one of the marvels Leonard has brought with him to the thirteenth century, which sends Leonard and Sally fleeing from the Inquisition!



TQ:  Give us one of your favorite lines from A Highly Unlikely Scenario.

Rachel:  “Boychik, the old man said. You’re a good egg. I need you to listen good.” To understand what that means, you have to read the book!



TQ:  What's next?

Rachel:  I’ll be reading from A Highly Unlikely Scenario on the East Coast, West Coast, and some places in between this year (for dates, folks can refer to my brand new, sparkly website: rachelcantor.com), and working with my publisher to edit the next novel (Door Number Two). But I have a residency planned at an artists’ colony later this year where I hope to write new work. Wish me luck!



TQ:  Thank you for joining us at The Qwillery.

Rachel:  Thank you, Sally! This was terrific fun!

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TQ:  Welcome to The Qwillery. When and why did you start writing?

Brian:  Well, if you don’t count Anty’s Avinchir, the dashing three-page illustrated tale of a young ant who sets out on a (very brief) series of escapades before returning home to his parents, I started writing seriously in college. In those days, though, I worked almost exclusively with poetry (I know, I know, horrible career move), both writing and translating. After grad school (more poetry), I took a really great job teaching history, religion, and English, and, while at that job, I started writing fantasy.



TQ:  Are you a plotter or a pantser?

Brian:  Neither, really. I know where each book (and character) is headed, but I don’t have an outline that says, “By page 42 Character A should be dead and Character B should be having a beer.” There are writers who can work that way, but I’d miss out on most of my good ideas, which seem to come up in the process of writing. I’ll be working through a chunk of dialogue, for instance, thinking I’m headed one direction, and suddenly the characters will be arguing about some other issue entirely. I want them to be plotting to take the castle gate and instead some asshole has a hankering to get in an argument about the beer. I guess if I were a true pantser I’d scrap the original direction and follow the beer angle. Instead, I try to see how this new thread fits into the larger tapestry.



TQ:  What is the most challenging thing for you about writing? Where do you write?

Brian:  The most challenging thing about writing is doing the damn writing. You read about authors all the time who say, “Oh, I couldn’t not write. If I go a day without writing I start to lose it.”

I happen to be excellent at not writing. There are all sorts of competing attractions: sledding with my son, drinking wine with my wife, making bonfires with friends, skiing, reading, splitting wood, playing board games and drinking beer… Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy writing, but I have to be ever-vigilant about carving out a chunk of time for it each day. Otherwise, it’ll never get done.



TQ:  Who are some of your literary influences? Favorite authors?

Brian:  Influences are tricky things to nail down. The people I wish had influenced me probably haven’t, and I’m certain that there are hundreds of influences at work every day that I don’t begin to suspect. I shudder to think of all the hours I’ve spent reading the back of cereal boxes.

As for favorite authors? There are too many to count. Ursula K. Le Guin is second to none in my personal fantasy pantheon. Outside the genre, I’ve been just floored by Hilary Mantel recently. And then there’s J.M. Coetzee, although he seems to be hitting the same note a lot these last few books. Or Kay Ryan, if we’re talking poetry; I don’t think there’s anyone writing better poems these days. One of the disappointing things about writing so much is that I read less than I used to, and I really feel the loss.



TQ:  Describe The Emperor's Blades (Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne 1) in 140 characters or less.

Brian:  Three adult children of a murdered emperor -- a politician, monk, and soldier -- struggle to reveal the conspiracy without dying themselves.



TQ:  Tell us something about The Emperor's Blades that is not in the book description.

Brian:  Magic users are known as leaches, and they’re about as popular in Annur (the empire at the heart of the novel) as witches were in 17th century Salem. When discovered, they are almost always executed as abominations and perversions of the natural order.



TQ:  What inspired you to write The Emperor's Blades? Why did you choose to write Epic Fantasy? Do you want to write in any other genres?

Brian:  I read whole shelves of fantasy as a kid and never really left the genre. Even when I was all wrapped up with poetry and teaching, I’d have two or three fantasy novels waiting for me each vacation.

It’s really the scope of Epic Fantasy that appeals to me. Every story begins and ends with character, and you can have many in a large book, different women and men from different walks of life struggling with forces as old as history or as intimate as their own minds. Want a five thousand year old historian? Sure. Want a Goddess disguised as a cook? Done. There’s nothing you can’t do in Epic Fantasy. Of course, there’s nothing to guarantee that you’ll do it well…



TQ:  What sort of research did you do for The Emperor's Blades?

Brian:  No specific research, but two choices proved indispensable. First, I moved to Asia to write the book because the cost of living is far cheaper over there (a few dollars a day). I didn’t anticipate, however, the way in which all those temples, stupas, wats, gardens, palaces, and fortresses would creep into the novel. The Broken Bay outside Annur, for instance, is modeled pretty closely on Vietnam’s Halong Bay.

The second important factor in the book’s creation was my teaching experience. I spent about a decade teaching ancient world history and comparative religion, and again, although this wasn’t specific research, it’s impossible to imagine The Emperor’s Blades existing at all without those years in the classroom. Historical (and quasi-historical) figures about whom I’d previously known nothing – Bodhidharma, Empress Wu Zetian, Mahavira, and dozens of others – all helped to color my own characters, and, of course, I couldn’t keep some of the great events of world history out of my mind when writing.



TQ:  Who was the easiest character to write and why? The hardest and why? Who is your favorite good guy, bad guy or ethically ambiguous character?

Brian:  Kaden was the most difficult. He’s a monk, the heir to the Unhewn Throne, and one of the three POV characters. The trouble with Kaden (and the monks in general) is that he’s worked half his life to eliminate his own feelings and desires. Unfortunately, feelings and desires tend to be the very qualities that allow us, as readers, to invest in a character. Fortunately, Kaden has not completed his training, so though his feelings are more muted than those of his siblings, though his emotional palette is more subtle, there’s still a lot there to work with.

The easiest character was probably the Flea. He’s a veteran soldier in the elite fighting unit for which Valyn (Kaden’s brother) is training. Short, soft-spoken, unattractive, and utterly deadly, the Flea always seemed to write his own lines.

As for favorite characters, it’s hard to say. Maybe Pyrre. She’s a middle-aged merchant with a limp. Why would I like her? You’ll see.



TQ:  Give us one of your favorite lines from The Emperor's Blades.

Brian:  “The mind is a flame. Blow it out.”



TQ:  What's next?

Brian:  Well, the sequel (The Providence of Fire) is finished save for the last edits, and I’m under way with book three. People warned me that it would be tricky juggling promotion for book one, edits for book two, and writing for book three, and they weren’t wrong! I’m not complaining though – I’m just thrilled that The Emperor’s Blades is out there and that I’m getting the chance to pursue this goal I’ve had in the back of my mind for as long as I can remember, probably ever since I wrote Anty’s Avinchir.

Thanks so much to The Qwillery for doing this interview and to all of you for reading it. If you do pick up The Emperor’s Blades, let me know what you think!



TQ:  Thank you for joining us at The Qwillery.

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Peter Liney

The Detainee
Jo Fletcher Books, March 11, 2014
Hardcover and eBook, 352 pages
US Debut

Peter Liney honed his strong narrative skills and attention to detail during his long career as a writer of German, Australian, British, and South African television and radio programs. In his debut novel, The Detainee, Liney has crated a dystopian world in which the state has gone bust and can no longer support its weakest members.

The Island is a place of hopelessness. The Island is death. And it is to this place that all the elderly and infirm are shipped, the scapegoats for the collapse of society. There’s no escape, not from the punishment satellites that deliver instant judgment for any crime—including escape attempts—and not from the demons that come on foggy nights, when the satellites are all but blind. But when one of the Island’s inhabitants, the aging "Big Guy" Clancy, finds a network of tunnels beneath the waste, there is suddenly hope—for love, for escape, and for the chance to fight back.

TQ:  Welcome to The Qwillery. When and why did you start writing?

T.R.:  I started writing January 22nd 2010. It took a year of starts and stops to settle into what the story arc would be for my first book – Journey into the Flame.

I don’t think that I can put my finger on exactly why I started writing. I will say that storylines had always bounced around in my head. I would see a movie and say “Wouldn’t it be cool to write about this? Or what if the writer and director did that with that character?”. The ideas continued to flow, until one day I sat down and wrote my first sentence.

“In a moment, I found myself in a room which was an ancient library. Books of all kinds and from all time…. I have been here before…”

 That exact line didn’t make it into the final manuscript. But it was my first piece of writing and some of what it alludes to remains in the first book as it is on shelves.



TQ:  Are you a plotter or a pantser?

T.R.:  This is only my first book, but I would have to say that I am much more of a plotter than a pantser. Journey into the Flame, along with the other two books of The Rising World Trilogy, have a lot of moving parts and characters. I found that the links and threads that connect the various elements of the series needed to be mapped out first. Some storylines start and end within one book while others traverse all three. That takes a bit of planning.

That isn’t to say that things didn’t change as I wrote the actual chapters. Many new ideas for twists and turns emerged as the characters and conflicts did. A few changes even took place at the last minute, just before my editor took my pen away.

So, the short answer to the question is, I am 80% plotter and 20% pantser. At least for now.



TQ:  What is the most challenging thing for you about writing?

T.R.:  The greatest challenge for me is character development. As in my real life, there are people that I connect with and have an affinity to. I found that writing about these types of characters was easy – I could get into their heads and understand the whats and whys about their life. Characters that weren’t represented by a real-life person in my world were harder for me to develop. I had to research real-life people that I thought closely represented each character.

Adding to that challenge was the practical fact that the book ideally needed to be a certain length, with only so many words. I’d created and written detailed backstories for most of the characters, but, in order to keep the flow of the mystery, I had to make choices as to what backstory elements would be included and which would be left out. This was a real challenge, because as is true in real life – it’s the small and subtle things that define the true character of people.

There is, lastly, the challenge, when writing a trilogy, of developing lead characters over the span of the series. I didn’t want the characters to be completely developed in the first book and then remain stagnant for the remaining two. So many story elements needed to be spread out across the trilogy. I know that leads to readers wanting to know more about a character in the moment – but there are still two more books to come.



TQ:  Who are some of your literary influences? Favorite authors?

T.R.:  Two of my favorite authors are JRR Tolkien and Charles Dickens.

I like Tolkien for creating a whole world, complete with its own history, culture and language. He was able to take the moral compass which guides our current lives and present it in a new and captivating way. My favorite character in Tolkien’s world was Tom Bombadil.

One of my other favorite novels is A Christmas Carol. I’m not sure I have a favorite character. I like them all. This was one story where none of the characters were bigger than the novel that Dickens wrote. I find that inspiring.



TQ:  Describe Journey into the Flame (Rising World Trilogy 1) in 140 characters or less.

T.R.:  In 2027, a series of cataclysmic events shake the world. A few years later, several mysterious books are found around the globe and provide earth’s remaining population the one thing they need: hope. Journey into the Flame moves the reader to the year 2069 where someone has uncovered the true power of those books.



TQ:  Tell us something about Journey into the Flame that is not in the book description.

T.R.:  One of the things that has always intrigued me is reading and learning about people who have done extraordinary things or have incredible gifts and capabilities—individuals who have healed themselves, who possess incredible musical talent at an early age, who can read another’s thoughts. The list goes on. I’ve always believed that all of humanity has these abilities in a latent way. We just haven’t tapped into them. What if all we needed was just the desire to uncover them? Journey into the Flame begins to tug on a singular thread of that tapestry.



TQ:  What inspired you to write Journey into the Flame? Why did you choose to write a genre bending dystopian novel?

T.R.:  The inspiration for the entire Rising World Trilogy is rooted in presenting a view of our world where things are more connected than we acknowledge. Science and religion have been battling for ages – what if there was a way to bridge some of their understandings? What if things that we see as separate and different can be overlaid to present a more complete picture?

I like that phrase--genre bending dystopian novel. One thing that moving a perspective forward to the future accomplishes is that you can change the atmosphere and variables that characters must face. While the moral struggles of the players might be similar to ones we face in the present day, the thought processes and ultimate resolutions to dilemmas can be new and different. So, of course, might the way we think about things in our own lives.



TQ:  What sort of research did you do for Journey into the Flame?

T.R.:  I don’t want to give too much of the plot away, but most of the research for the book was spent in two areas: science and setting.

I spent a great deal of time studying the workings of the human brain and human DNA. There was a lot of refinement required in the manuscript, taking these core elements and presenting them in a way that the reader would not find boring and dry.

I also spent time researching the locations around the world where scenes of the story would take place. I attempted to choose places that I had been to, but in some cases that wasn’t possible. There was also the challenge of setting the story in the future. What would a certain country or city look like in forty years after it might have been destroyed?



TQ:  Who was the easiest character to write and why? The hardest and why? Who is your favorite good guy, bad guy or ethically ambiguous character?

T.R.:  The easiest character for me to write about is a man by the name of Simon Hitchlords. He’s just mean. He has one governing agenda in his life – he wants more power than anyone else. So when I write about him – it’s not difficult to project how he would react to various situations.

The hardest character for me to write about in Journey into the Flame was an elegant and aristocratic woman by the name of Andrea Montavon. She has a sinister streak in her, but she wasn’t always that way. She was difficult to construct because I don’t have people like that in my direct life.

My favorite good guy is Sebastian Quinn. His macro view of the world allows for some interesting insights. My favorite bad guy is Simon Hitchlords. As I said earlier, his decision making is easy – he’s just mean.

My favorite ethically ambiguous character in Journey into the Flame is Randolph Fenquist. But in the second book, there is another character I like even better in this regard. These characters are fun because they most mimic our own lives as we grapple with what is right and what is wrong.



TQ:  Give us one of your favorite lines from Journey into the Flame.

T.R.:  There is a moment where the main protagonist, Logan Cutler says “I can’t imagine a world where people can’t pray.”

I have more, but the question said only one. ☺



TQ:  What's next?

T.R.:  The immediate next thing is the completion of Book II and Book III. They have been plotted out, but I expect many pantser moments (I like that term, I hadn’t heard it before this interview).

After that, we will see. I have ideas for other novels. If I am fortunate, I will be granted the opportunity to write them and have them published.



TQ:  Thank you for joining us at The Qwillery.

T.R.:  You are most welcome. Thanks for having me!

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M . D. Waters

Archetype
Dutton Adult, February 6, 2014
Hardcover and eBook, 384 pages

Introducing a breathtakingly inventive futuristic suspense novel about one woman who rebels against everything she is told to believe.

Emma wakes in a hospital, with no memory of what came before. Her husband, Declan, a powerful, seductive man, provides her with new memories, but her dreams contradict his stories, showing her a past life she can’t believe possible: memories of war, of a camp where girls are trained to be wives, of love for another man. Something inside her tells her not to speak of this, but she does not know why. She only knows she is at war with herself.

Suppressing those dreams during daylight hours, Emma lets Declan mold her into a happily married woman and begins to fall in love with him. But the day Noah stands before her, the line between her reality and dreams shatters.

In a future where women are a rare commodity, Emma fights for freedom but is held captive by the love of two men—one her husband, the other her worst enemy. If only she could remember which is which. . . .

The first novel in a two-part series, Archetype heralds the arrival of a truly memorable character—and the talented author who created her.

Rene Denfeld

The Enchanted
Harper, March 4, 2014
Hardcover and eBook, 256 pages
Fiction Debut

A wondrous and redemptive debut novel, set in a stark world where evil and magic coincide, The Enchanted combines the empathy and lyricism of Alice Sebold with the dark, imaginative power of Stephen King.

"This is an enchanted place. Others don’t see it, but I do." The enchanted place is an ancient stone prison, viewed through the eyes of a death row inmate who finds escape in his books and in re-imagining life around him, weaving a fantastical story of the people he observes and the world he inhabits. Fearful and reclusive, he senses what others cannot. Though bars confine him every minute of every day, he marries visions of golden horses running beneath the prison, heat flowing like molten metal from their backs with the devastating violence of prison life.

Two outsiders venture here: a fallen priest and the Lady, an investigator who searches for buried information from prisoners’ pasts that can save those soon-to-be-executed. Digging into the background of a killer named York, she uncovers wrenching truths that challenge familiar notions of victim and criminal, innocence and guilt, honesty and corruption—ultimately revealing shocking secrets of her own.

Beautiful and transcendent, The Enchanted reminds us of how our humanity connects us all, and how beauty and love exist even amidst the most nightmarish reality.