An Interview with Marie Brennan...

Marie's historical fantasy novel, Midnight Never Come, will be released by Orbit later this month. It's her third book (but her first with them). When I saw the press release months ago on their site, and then visited Marie's site (full of wonderful essays and general interesting content), I knew I had to interview her. I did, though, sort of forget the question every reviewer asks: What can you tell us about your books? Below is the Publisher's Weekly starred review, so you know what we're talking about! ;)

"[T]his rich historical fantasy portrays the Elizabethan court 30 years into the reign of the Virgin Queen, often called Gloriana. Far below ground, her dark counterpart, heartless Invidiana, rules England's fae. Brennan (Warrior and Witch) pairs handsome young courtier Michael Deven, an aspiring agent under spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham, with bewitching fae Lune, who attempts to avoid Invidiana's wrath by infiltrating Walsingham's network in mortal guise. History and fantasy blend seamlessly as Deven and Lune tread their precarious tightropes between loyalty and betrayal. Brennan's myriad fantastical creations ring as true as her ear for Elizabethan and faerie dialogue. With intriguing flashbacks to historical events and a cast of deftly drawn characters both real and imagined, Brennan fleshes out the primal conflict of love and honor pitted against raging ambition and lust for power in a glittering age when mortals could well be such fools as to sell their souls forever."

--

Hi Marie, thanks for taking part, and welcome to my blog! You should, of course, ignore the grouchy elf in the corner with a pipe... and help yourself to cookies (the food of authors)...

Many thanks for having me. I apologize for the wordiness of my answers, but you asked some thought-provoking questions!

What is it about Elizabethan times, and probably Elizabeth in particular, do you think, that makes setting faery tales there so successful?

You may have heard of a little play called A Midsummer Night's Dream, by this guy William Shakespeare ...

Written with some help from The Doctor? Yeah, I know the one!

Honestly, it wasn't just him. Fairies showed up all the time in Elizabethan literature, and so I think that makes the period a natural habitat for the subgenre. Plus it's kind of a matter of "two great tastes that taste great together;" the Elizabethan period is really popular, and so are fairies, so of course people combine them.


That's the logic I followed when I had bread and butter pudding on toast the other day -- considering the time of morning, "logic" may not have come into it, though! Does setting a story in the past allow you more lee-way with the facts, or is there something fun about working within a world you already know and then twisting it into something new? And what additional risks are there with historical fantasy?

There are three parts to that, and I'll answer the second part first: working within the real world and then twisting it is what I love about urban fantasy. Whether it's "closed" or "open" -- whether the average character on the street knows about the supernatural -- I really enjoy watching real things interact with invented ones.

But dealing with the facts is, for me, one of the major risks of historical fantasy. I got, shall we say, a little bit obsessive researching Midnight Never Come. The Internet and my university's library provided me with oceans of information, and then once I knew stuff, I couldn't make myself ignore it, even if no other human being reading the book would ever know the difference. Elizabeth's coronation procession didn't go down Candlewick Street; ergo, I had to revise my plans for that bit. I wanted a particular flashback scene to take place in the early part of the sixteenth century, but the closest annular or total solar eclipse over London was in 1547, so into 1547 the scene goes. Leeway? Not hardly.

Is it ridiculous? Of course. On the other hand, it's part of the pleasure. Being able to weave my story into the known facts without jostling any of them out of place is bizarrely fun, despite the work.

The other risk I run by interacting with real history is, who's responsible for what? I don't ever want to write the sort of story where it turns out all the important stuff was instigated or accomplished by the fae, because that diminishes the real people involved. Novels where the vampires or the magicians or whoever are pulling all the strings behind the scenes just don't interest me. So Invidiana has power, and affects what's going on -- but she's one player out of many in the game.

Having never read your work before, how would you describe what makes your writing different/similar to other authors?

You know, they often tell you to put a bit in your query letters saying what authors your work resembles, but I never did, because I have no idea what to say

I've seen two comparisons to Neil Gaiman so far, probably because of Neverwhere, with the hidden world of London Below. I'm briefly exhibiting a distinct resemblance to Elizabeth Bear, since we're doing the volcano movie thing -- her own Elizabethan historical faerie novel, Ink & Steel, is coming out a month after mine. That's all concept-level stuff, though, all surface resemblances. I don't think I write much like Neil Gaiman or Elizabeth Bear.

I'd like to think my academic background and the way I use it distinguishes me from a lot of other writers. I come from archaeology, anthropology, and folklore, which gives me both fodder for and ways to think about what I write. Theory rarely if ever drives my fiction -- that way, all too often, lies inaccessible writing with too much thinking, not enough explosions -- but it's there, in the back of my mind, making me question the implications of what I have put on the page.

As you're about to leave the country soon, research is obviously very important for you – do you find that with just your historical fiction, or in all your writing? Even when you are creating new worlds, do you find yourself creating a rich history for it?

The research I do for non-historical fiction is more of the "how" sort, instead of the "what." I need to know how things work so that I can represent them properly, whether it's rowing a Viking longship or poisoning somebody with soup. Because there's always going to be a reader out there who's well-educated about, oh, basket-making, who will be more than happy to e-mail you if you get a detail wrong. I do everything in my power to get it right.

For invented settings, I do indulge in rich worldbuilding. I've published half a dozen short stories in the Nine Lands, a world I've been embroidering for years now; eventually there will be novels, too. The different countries there are based on mashups of real-world things I've studied, and I'm trying to make them as anthropologically real as I can. So I can tell you about the old Sahasraran notions of kingship and voice and how that connected to one aspect of their religion, and then how the royal line got slaughtered in a series of wars with the Elesie and the ground of Anahata was sown with salt -- and I can also tell you about their festival for the early harvest and their ritual calendar and oh yeah I've been meaning to work out the symbolic meanings of the eight flowers used in it. Not because readers need to hear all about that, but because it will shape how I write stories -- even ones that have nothing to do with their flower calendar.

Neil Gaiman says that books have genders, irrespective of that of the author that wrote them... what gender would you say your books are?

After the things I've learned in graduate school, I'm sorely tempted to say my books are tobelija or fa'afafine or some other third gender, just to remind folks that gender isn't a binary.

Okay, I actually just went and looked up Gaiman's statement, because I couldn't figure out how to answer this without first figuring out what he meant by it. To some extent he's talking about the audience for a book, and in that sense I suppose I write "feminine" books, because I'm pretty sure I have more female readers than male -- but that statement bothers me because it reflects in part the tendency of many male readers to not read novels about female characters or by female authors, regardless of content. Gaiman's also talking about the type of story, and in that sense I might write more masculine books, since I loves me some adventure and some fight scenes. I like what he says, too, about which relationships in a story are important; it makes me think of Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles, where so many of the interesting relationships, romantic and otherwise, are between Lymond and the women around him. From that angle, I'd say I'm fascinated by cross-gender connections, especially when they aren't romantic.

So, after that long-winded bit of rambling, I think I'm back to where I started: I don't know, except maybe I choose option C.

Faery or fairy? And why?!

I think there's a tendency in fantasy to spell it "faerie" in an attempt to separate it from the Victorians and their trivial little flower fairy concept. I actually put a decent bit of thought into this when I started Midnight Never Come, because of course back in the Elizabethan period they spelled things any which way: faerie, faery, fairie, fairy, whatever you like. The first version is how it's spelled for Edmund Spenser's poem The Faerie Queene, so that's what I went with. (Now the real question is whether I'll change it as the series goes along, so that by the time of the Victorian book I hope to write, it will be spelled "fairy.")

From what culture comes your favourite mythology, and what is your favourite folklore/faery tale? Why do those types of tales appeal to you so?

I'm a dilettante, really. At one time or another I my life I've been moderately well-read on classical, Egyptian, Norse, Celtic, Mesoamerican, Japanese, and Hindu religion. "Favorite" would depend on the mood I'm in; if it's cheerful black-humour fatalism I'm after, then all hail the Norse! Strongly narrative stories that all link into one enormous soap opera? Classical! Bloody tales about how sacrifice keeps the world in motion? Off I go to Central America. (Or at least to books about it.)

If I had to name off a favorite piece of folklore and I wasn't allowed to think about it too much (since that would just paralyze me from making a choice at all), I'd say the Scottish ballad "Tam Lin." I first encountered it in Diana Wynne Jones' novel Fire and Hemlock -- which is also the book that turned me from someone who writes into a writer -- and I've always liked the way it features a proactive, no-nonsense heroine. And, of course, faeries.

“Fairy tales” of the Grimm sort tend to have a moral – what would you say the moral of Midnight Never Come is?

The funny thing about fairy tales is that almost none of them involve fairies.

Lots of the fairy godmothers or wicked fairies you find in their books are actually replacements for witches, that got scrubbed out when the Grimms were cleaning up the stories for children. (They revised their collection endlessly; I'm too lazy to look up the exact number, but I think the Kinder- und Haus-märchen went through something like seven or eight different editions.) And in fact the Grimms didn't call them fairy tales; the title of their collection is usually translated as "Children's and Household Tales." We get that term from the French contés des feés. And Perrault, a French writer, was the worst offender for the moral lessons -- he would tack on a little rhyme at the end, telling you what you ought to have learned from the story.

Stories involving fairies are more often classed as legends, and there are a lot of differences between the two. (I promise, I'm going somewhere useful with this folklore lesson.) Fairy tales usually take place "once upon a time" in a made-up kingdom that never gets named, and their moral lessons mostly got added by nineteenth-century collectors who decided they should be for children and therefore educational. Legends, on the other hand, take place in a specific real-world location -- on top of this hill, or near that oak tree on the cliff -- often at a specific time, and they serve, not as moral lessons, but as warnings. Don't be on that hill under the full moon, or the fairies will strike you blind. Don't dance near that oak tree, or you'll be snatched away as a fairy bride. Etc.

So that's a long-winded way of explaning my answer that the lesson of Midnight Never Come, like that of most fairy legends, is that getting involved with fairies is dangerous business.

What was the first thing you ever wrote, and how good was it?!

It really depends on how you want to define "the first thing I ever wrote." The first story I remember committing to paper? Atrocious, I'm sure, because it was for an assignment in second grade. I noodled around with other decreasingly atrocious things all through elementary school, junior high, high school -- then round about my senior year that I got two ideas which felt fundamentally different in my head. One of those became the first novel I ever finished, and that wasn't bad at all, because finishing what I started was the last basic skill I picked up. I went back a few years later and revised that book substantially, but the ideas didn't really change, and I still hope to publish it someday.

The second of those two ideas, for the record, was the second novel I ever finished -- and that was Doppelganger.

In 2009, from Orbit, you have a book called And Ashes Lie, with a picture of the Great Fire of London, and ominous blood-like ink, dripping the words “Coming soon...” What can you tell us about that book and its relationship to Midnight Never Come? My history is a little flaky, but that Fire was a little later, right...?

1666. (And yes, they found that year ominous back then, too.)

The idea is for there to be a series of Onyx Court books, each essentially stand-alone, but all centering around this faerie court of London. So far the only other one I'm contracted for is And Ashes Lie, but I hope to continue on with a book every century or so.

So it's a sequel of sorts, with continuity among the faerie characters, but definitely something that a person could pick up without having read Midnight Never Come. It'll cover the period from 1640 to 1666 -- in other words, the English Civil War, the Interregnum (when they chopped the head off Charles I and drove Charles II into exile), the Restoration of the monarchy, and then the Great Plague and the Great Fire. It's an action-packed span of time; if Midnight Never Come is my Elizabethan faerie spy novel, And Ashes Lie is my Stuart faerie disaster novel.

I can't wait! On your current site, you have a lot of really interesting essays on the writing process for your novels, as well as the road to publication, grammar, reviews, etc, but I hear there are plans to give you an even more interactive site... what kind of stuff will that include, and how important do you think the Web is to an author?

I'm not sure how much I should say publicly about the upgrades, since I don't know how much of it will happen for real. But at the very least the site will be chock-a-block with extra information about Midnight Never Come -- think of it like DVD extras, giving you trivia or pictures or the half-a-dozen Deven scenes from Act One that I had to replace entirely. I like information-rich sites, where I can learn extra things about a story that's really engaged my attention.

As for its importance . . . I'm young enough that I grew up with computers and had Internet access from the age of fourteen, so to me it's not some newfangled thing; it's a way of life. It offers a lot of ways for an author to communicate with readers, but more than that, it offers ways for readers to communicate back -- a two-way street. And that can be critically useful for an author, in terms of fostering reader engagement. Before the Internet, I think it was easy to think of authors as just names on covers, maybe an author photo at the back; you didn't know them as people. Now you can Google them and find their journals, complete with rambling entries about car trouble and pictures of their cats with bacon taped on. (John Scalzi is going to a special feline hell someday.)

That isn't to everyone's taste. Some authors are uncomfortable being out there in that fashion, or feel like it's an obligation instead of a pleasure. And it can be a heck of a time suck, as many will attest. An Internet presence won't generally make your books sell if you aren't a good writer. But if you are, the Web can connect you to the readers who will most enjoy your work, and that's incredibly valuable.

Well, thank you very much for taking part, Marie! It's been fun and I've learnt a lot (always a good thing)! :) I'm currently reading Marie's novel, and I'm really enjoying it thus far. To find out more about Marie visit her site -- you really should.