The Orbit Website - The Juliet E. McKenna and Julia Gray Interview

It's always exciting to be publishing new writers, and we have two fantastic debuts by British authors in the bookshops now. In December we published Ice Mage by Julia Gray, who Maggie Furey described as 'a spellbinding new storyteller'. And in January we're publishing The Thief's Gamble by Juliet E. McKenna, a magical tale which J.V. Jones has called 'a wonderful debut'. We asked both authors to tell us a little about themselves and their writing.

Who or what inspired you to write fantasy?

Juliet E. McKenna
Fantasy's been part of my life from my first introduction to Narnia at about six years old, and I've always written bits and pieces. Deciding to make a serious attempt at a novel, I opted for fantasy as something I knew I had the resources for in terms of imagination and information readily to hand; I have a lot of books.

Julia Gray
I know it's a cliché, but in fantasy you're only limited by your imagination - and I've got a very vivid imagination, even when I'm asleep. My dreams come in very handy sometimes. For a writer, fantasy is the best of all possible worlds.

How would you describe your novel, in less than 10 words?

Juliet E. McKenna
Compelling adventure, following engaging characters through a richly coherent world.

Julia Gray
A BIG adventure, with magic, humour, romance - and volcanoes.

What will follow your debut novel?

Juliet E. McKenna
My second novel, The Swordsman's Oath. It takes forward the key ideas and questions from The Thief's Gamble, with some of the same characters and some new ones, seeing the action through Ryshad's eyes - the Tormalin sworn man Livak meets in Inglis.

Julia Gray
There's a sequel, Fire Music, which is already written and which will be published by Orbit in July. Then there'll be something new - either a stand-alone novel called Isle of the Dead, or the first volume of a big new fantasy series I'm working on now.

If you could write your own quote for the front cover of your novel, what would it be?

Juliet E. McKenna
Just because it's fantasy, doesn't mean it can't feel real.

Julia Gray
'Funnier than Pratchett, more romantic than McCaffrey, more involving than Tolkien - the book that sold more copies than Lord of the Rings.' Seriously, I don't think I could do better than the quote from Maggie Furey that actually is on the cover.

What advice would you give to budding fantasy authors?

Juliet E. McKenna
Learn to recognise valid criticism; better yet, go and seek it out. Friends who say, 'Gosh, it's wonderful, I loved every page,' are good for the ego. The ones who say, 'The third chapter dragged a lot and anyway, I wouldn't cross the road on that wizard's say-so,' are good for your work.

Julia Gray
Hook your readers early. Make sure your characters are real to you. (If you don't laugh and cry with them, no one else will.) Hear the dialogue. Don't make your plots too rigid; that way you can head off in unexpected directions when it feels right. Trust your intuition. But most important of all: just do it! Coming up with ideas is relatively easy. It's shaping them into a coherent whole that's the hard part - and unless you finish something, you're going nowhere.

Do you have a daily routine when you're writing?

Juliet E. McKenna
Absolutely. Kids up, breakfast, elder son to school, younger to childminder, home to domestic tasks like hanging out the washing, deal with the post, make a coffee, write until lunchtime, quick sandwich while downloading e-mail and replying to anything urgent, more writing, collect kids from school/childminder, be a mum, cook tea, get kids to bed, more writing and/or e-mail, possibly telly if there's anything good on, fall into bed. That's the two days a week my youngest is child-minded, on other days things like shopping, ironing, feeding the ducks replace the daytime writing, though I'll usually still be writing in the evening.

Julia Gray
No. I tend not to be able to do things in moderation. Sometimes I'll be scribbling away (yes, I write and re-write by hand in the first instance) for so many hours each day that I end up exhausted and with my wrist in a splint. At other times progress can be painfully slow. Self-discipline is important, but inspiration doesn't keep regular hours.

Why do you think that fantasy has become so popular over the last twenty years?

Juliet E. McKenna
Everyone I know has a busy and often demanding life; work, family, socially. People need escapism, but a lot of 'serious' literature is people struggling through the same problems. Fantasy offers things you won't find in everyday life: real physical danger, magical challenges, great heroism, chilling evil, dragons!

Julia Gray
Escapism is part of it, of course. In a sense, fantasy has taken over from westerns: perilous adventures in unfamiliar landscapes where the good guys usually win, albeit at a cost. Apart from that, there are now so many really good writers working in the genre.

How do you think fantasy will change over the next twenty years?

Juliet E. McKenna
I don't think fantasy needs to change so much as perceptions of the genre. I'd see it with a wider audience, reviewers keen to recommend a good novel which happens to be a fantasy story, not just ignoring 'swords 'n' sorcery'. Advances in special effects technology should mean more TV and film adaptations, broadening fantasy's appeal.

Julia Gray
I have no idea. Defining exactly what fantasy is right now is hard enough. Every author worth his salt will believe in what he or she is doing, but the diversity of approach is already amazing. I hope fantasy gets even stronger and more popular, because I love being a storyteller, and I'd like to carry on for at least another twenty years!

Do you have any favourite authors in the fantasy genre?

Juliet E. McKenna
I have favourite books rather than favourite authors; The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Legend, The Integral Trees, Hawkmistress to name a few. Authors I look out for include Tom Holt, Sheri S. Tepper, David Gemmell, Katharine Kerr, Larry Niven, Terry Pratchett, J. V. Jones, Melanie Rawn and J. K. Rowling.

Julia Gray
Lots. Mervyn Peake is my literary hero, and Tolkien is the storyteller par excellence, but fantasy encompasses many wonderful writers - Terry Pratchett, Jonathan Carroll, Barry Hughart, Tom Holt and Robert Holdstock, to name but a few.

What would be your fantasy desert-island book?

Juliet E. McKenna
Virgil's Aeneid. If that sounds too high-brow, go and read it; you'll find a hero escaping a falling city, magic used for him and against him, sex, violence, monsters, a quest to uncover a prophecy, rivals to fight and heroic deaths. Doesn't that sound like a fantasy novel?

Julia Gray
The Gormenghast trilogy. No matter how many times you read it, Peake sweeps you away into his world. Of course, it was never meant to be a trilogy. Peake had plans to follow Titus's adventures in several more novels. The fact that he never lived to write them is one of the greatest literary tragedies of all time.

What is your favourite scene from a novel?

Juliet E. McKenna
An impossible question. One glance at a random shelf of books reminds me of Danny Weir trying to pay for a wrecked nightclub with a credit card (Espedair Street), Buck Zimmer dying (A Clear and Present Danger), Elizabeth Bennett facing down Lady Catherine de Burgh (Pride and Prejudice), the firing squad (Captain Corelli's Mandolin). I could go on and on and on.

Julia Gray
The one that immediately springs to mind is the opening scene from Jane Eyre. It's not fantasy, I know, but her pleasure at being able to escape alone and read in secret sums up how I feel about books. I couldn't live without them.

If you could spend a day as a character from a novel, which character would you choose, and why?

Julia Gray
Not one of mine, probably. I love them dearly, but I'm not sure I could stand everything they have to go through! Alice, perhaps. Even in Wonderland she never stands for any nonsense and, even after all her adventures, she gets home safely!

SFX Magazine

Every time an author beats the slush pile to win a commission, it's a substantial achievement. But when your initial three-book contract is expanded to a five-part saga on the day your first novel's published you're venturing into a real-life fantasyland. But Juliet E McKenna's determined that Einarinn will be different to any world currently in print. "I want to steer clear of the great clichés. I just don't have anything to add to that." As McKenna describes it, The Thief's Gamble arose out of a healthy disrespect for the current state of fantasy sagas.

"I used to read huge amounts of fantasy, but found it all increasingly unbelievable, which does sound a strange thing to say about fantasy! It's not the scenarios so much as the characters. Interpersonal interactions you find credible at 18 don't convince when you're in your 30s - the characters aren't rounded enough, and don't have the contradictions of real people. "Instead, I found myself reading more and more crime fiction, but when I started to think seriously about writing, fantasy seemed the obvious thing, not least because you can't do research with two small boys in tow! In a crime novel, if you've got a plot twist dependent on what rail connections you can make, that takes research, whereas fantasy was something I could create convincingly out of my own imagination." Of course, it wasn't that easy, until McKenna thought to take the strengths of modern crime novels and place them in a fantasy setting. "The first thing I wrote was the traditional rites-of-passage novel, and the reaction from publishers was, 'Yeah, well, it's well-enough written, but there's nothing new here. Nothing to mark it out from the six other perfectly competent fantasy novels I get a week...'"

With a baby on the way, McKenna had more important things to do than fret over rejection slips, but once her second child was six months old, she tried again. "I'd been to a presentation from a publisher who'd once turned down Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent, on the basis that a complex American legal thriller was never going to take off in this country! This was pre-John Grisham, of course, and he said, 'A publisher's looking for the same, because they know it will sell, but different.' So I thought the strong, independently minded female does well in crime fiction, and I wondered how she might do in fantasy, with a forceful first-person narrative, and a more immediate approach to characterisation and the details of questing... The result is The Thief's Gamble, a medieval saga with distinct echoes of Yes Minister and Lovejoy where wizards searching for ancient magical relics are reliant on antiques experts and cat burglars. The feuding wizards are particularly reminiscent of Sir Humphrey and his fellow civil servants -or perhaps the Oxford fellows of McKenna's student days? "No comment! There are things I picked up as a student, but I also worked for Unipart as a personnel officer, and organisations in general tend to generate these kinds of dynamics. If you look at Cicero's letters, you could publish all of them in The Guardian now if you changed the names and places. If you read history, you realise the hats may change, but the people underneath stay the same. So Star Trek at least gets that right!"

Hence a rather contemporary approach to language and sexual equality. Women like the heroine Livak can work as thieves and gamblers without anyone batting an eyelid, and characters are more like to shout, "Stuff you, shit for brains" than "Forsooth, my liege." "Well, that actually has a lot more basis in medieval history than you might imagine. As for the language, we're back to character realism there! Language is important to the suspension of disbelief, but it's also important to the suspension of reality. There are a whole bunch of four-letter words you couldn't use, and I think I've gone as strong as I can with a more direct turn of phrase. I try to use other languages' equivalents for English expressions - we might say 'I'll count those chickens once they're hatched,' but the French say, 'I'll skin that bear once I've caught it."' This down-to-earth attitude even extends to the villains. "There are no cosmic forces of ultimate evil. No, sorry, don't do cosmic forces! 'Let's go and fight the appalling forces of intangible evil' Sorry, you mean that's the plot? I don't find it convincing when I'm reading it, so I'm sure as hell not going to write it!" Instead, there's simply warring magicians whose knowledge has been a little limited since the collapse of an ancient empire. "I find those fantasy societies which remain unchanged for thousands and thousands of years fundamentally implausible. Go and read any late Anglo Saxon chronicles and you'll see how much the world's changed in a thousand years. Einarinn is moving towards the Renaissance." That sounds worryingly like another fantasy cliché - the on-going saga. No way insists McKenna. "The second book picks up some of the threads, but it's a story entire of itself. As a reader, I don't like reaching the end of a book to find myself asking 'what happens next? I've got to wait a year to find out? Oh, cheers'. My book-buying budget is very low and I can't afford to pick up a £6 book and find it's the first of the such-and-such sequence, and they're in fact asking me to spend £24."

So the second volume will be a new adventure with the same characters, but whereas The Thief's Gamble alternated a third-person narrative with Livak's personal account, the second will concentrate on the swordsman Ryshad. "We were discussing whether to have a different narrator in each book, but we decided to alternate Livak and Ryshad, because there are very interesting contrasts between the couple. They're male and female, insider and outsider, guard and thief." So what other elements will start creeping in over time. Will McKenna promise to avoid those hoary old clichés? "I think it's highly unlikely you'll ever find a prophecy, and if you do get ancient wizards they're going to be prey to the troubles that ancient wizards would get in the real world, like arthritis and boring everyone to death with tales about people who've been dead for 50 years..."

The Oxford Times Interview

It's not writing a first novel that's the problem, it's getting it published that requires the skill. You have to be resourceful, thick-skinned, determined and patient. And when you have gone through virtually every emotion possible, you also have to find enough courage to lock those precious pages in a trunk up in the attic and start all over again.

Juliet McKenna believes that unless you go through the gruelling process of trying to get published and facing countless rejection slips, you will never produce anything really worthwhile. Her first novel, The Thief's Gamble has just come out. It's a magical fantasy set in the land of Einarinn, which borders Caladhria and Dalasor where the White River flows. Her heroine Livak is a gambler who exists on her wits, living on the fringes of society as a perpetual traveller, who gets dragged into the wizard's terrible magic. All of which is a far cry from Mrs McKenna's daily life as wife and mother of two young children under six, living in the suburbs of Witney. However, it's the mundane, mindless jobs around the house, such as ironing and washing up that offer her quality thinking time. Providing she keeps a notebook at hand so that ideas can be jotted down as they develop, the fantasy worlds she creates sit quite comfortably alongside the practical world in which she lives.

Earning money by writing novels seemed the only way she could juggle the needs of her family with the desire to continue stretching herself intellectually. Once she and her husband Steve had worked that out, it was just a matter of polishing her first manuscript and getting it accepted by an agent, which she discovered was easier said than done. "I did all the right things, got myself a copy of the Writers and Artists Yearbook, wrote interesting covering letters and waited. Some agents sent me a photocopied reply, some said it was nothing special, but a great deal didn't even bother to answer. In the end there was nothing for it but to approach the publishers myself." She admits it turned out to be a very dispiriting experience. "You have to be quite single-minded not to get pulled down by the adverse remarks about work you have put so much time and effort into. In the end it was the reports that HarperCollins returned which helped the most. Unlike other publishers, they actually sent me copies of the readers' comments. Some of the things they said were good but some were bad" She remembers her first reaction on reading these reports was to shout "How dare they say that!" but she eventually came to terms with their criticisms and began to see them as unbiased and objective. She even began reworking sections of her original manuscript. "I soon realised that if I took heed of everything they said it would need too many changes. In the end I hid that first manuscript away and began writing all over again. But this time I had a far clearer idea of where I was going, how to develop the characters and just who the characters should be." She says her writing got tighter too and had much more depth the second time around.

Turning away from her original work and starting again from scratch was something she was able to do after attending a Mystery Weekend for writers at St Hilda's, her old college where she had read classics just a few years before. "Meeting real writers made all the difference. They were so helpful on a personal level. It soon became apparent that the manuscript you get accepted is not the first one you write. It may not even be the second, but if you are determined you will learn to tighten and polish your work until it cries out to be published." She realised that even really famous authors know what it is like to receive rejections slips. "I came away with the knowledge that it is not always the writing publishers object to. Things like the balance of their lists have to be considered. In some ways they want every novel to be the same - but different." She says this in not exactly writing to order, but writing with a heightened awareness of market forces, becoming more alert to what is accepted and looking for ways to ease yourself into a niche. She knew her novel would be fantasy; though she had read widely and across many genres, fantasy called on her interest in history and her fertile imagination in a way other things failed to do.

Now that she has broken through the barrier between would-be writer and publisher, she's working to a five-year plan. Her second novel, which links with the first, is already at final draft stage and two others are sketched out and ready to develop. Would she go through it all over again - the rejection slips, the criticisms, all those returned manuscripts? "Oh yes, it was a sort of apprenticeship every writer has to go through in order to produce something worthwhile," she said.

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