Famed as a lecturer on the Medieval Celtic history it will probably come as no real surprise that the next step taken by Kari (Photo by Phil Nanson) was to create her own world based on the rich tapestry of what has come before. Here we chat to her about writing, the creative processes and her "guardians" who protect her between the realms as she allows her mind to wander to the gods of rock whilst her muse whistfully dances away...
FT: Writing is said to be something that people are afflicted with rather than gifted and that it's something you have to do rather than want. What is your opinion of this statement and how true is it to you?
KS: It's somewhere between an itch and an obsession. It certainly makes me question my sanity sometimes -- writing and the urge to write can seriously derail your life, even before the part when you're having arguments with imaginary people, muttering to yourself in the street and hunting frantically for some way -- any way -- with which to record the neat idea/cool dialogue/whatever that you just came up with in the shower/at 3 a.m./while driving. I find it hard to start and hard to stop, hard to talk about and hard to ignore, and however much I drag my heels about getting on with it, I always feel better when I make myself sit down and work at it. So an affliction? In a lot of ways, yes.
FT: When did you realise that you wanted to be a writer?
KS: I'm not sure I remember: possibly when I first discovered that books were written by people and not conjured entire from the ether. That would be when I was around 6.
FT: It is often said that if you can write a short story you can write anything. How true do you think this is and what have you written that either proves or disproves this POV?
KS: I don't know. I'm not a natural short story writer, perhaps because the shorts I grew up reading were predominantly the 'neat idea' type -- Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein. So I had it in my head that to write short stories in my favourite genres of SF and fantasy, you needed to be a scientist (or Ray Bradbury, who was clearly a genius). And it was unlikely I was ever going to be that good at science. I didn't really come across the classic fantasy short story -- Howard, Leiber -- until I was quite a bit older, and by then I knew that these belonged to an age and a context that no longer existed. So it felt as if short stories weren't right for me. I enjoyed writing stories at school, but they somehow didn't feel the same as the ones I read in published collections. It was only when I came across writers like Tanith Lee and George R R Martin (whom I already admired as novelists)writing shorts that I realised that this was a form I found attractive and that I might be able to work in. By then I was already trying to write at novel length (these usually came out as novellas, but in structure they weren't shorts.) It seems to me that short stories and novels are rather different disciplines and I'm not n sure that one can and will lead to the other.
FT: If someone were to enter a bookshop, how would you persuade them to try your novel over someone else's and how would you define it?
KS: I'm very bad at self-promotion. I might find out what sort of book they enjoyed and recommend mine if I thought it would be a good fit. I am lucky enough to have a great cover by Chris McGrath and that has proved a good selling point on the book so far, so I'd hope they'd see that and respond to it. If they asked me, I'd say that's it's a swashbuckler, with ghosts and conspiracies, mist-creatures and swordfights, mysteries and salons, shapeshifters, ancient pacts, star-crossed romance and a lot of water.
FT: How would you "sell" your book in 20 words or less?
KS: The Three Musketeers with magic and ghosts!
FT: Who is a must have on your bookshelf and whose latest release will find you on the bookshops doorstep waiting for it to open?
KS: There are so many! Alexandre Dumas -- I've been collecting him since I was 15, but there are still some of his I don't have; Tanith Lee; Roger Zelazny; Steven Brust; Liz Williams; Rumer Godden; Elizabeth Goudge; L M Montgomery; Justina Robson; Phil Rickman; Janet Evanovich; Judith Tarr; Ronald Hutton; Vikram Chandra; Miyuki Miyabe; Louis Cha... I could go on and on and on.
FT: When you sit down and write do you know how the story will end or do you just let the pen take you? ie Do you develop character profiles and outlines for your novels before writing them or do you let your idea's develop as you write?
KS: I start with a character or a group of characters, and a scene. So with Living With Ghosts, I had an image of two men -- one of them injured -- and a ghost on a river bank in a lot of mist, with a sense of great danger all around them. I had some idea of who they were and what they wanted, and I started writing with that in mind. When I came to the end of the first chapter, a woman walked in and announced herself the main antagonist: I was more surprised than my protagonists, as they seemed to know her. That gave me a feel for the book and a vague image of where I was headed, but nothing very firm. Set pieces and key scenes presented themselves at various times (usually not the right ones!) and after a while I found I usually knew where the next chapter or two was headed. But I'm not a very structured writer in that sense. My manuscripts are invariably covered with running notes containing fragments of dialogue, stray ideas and the phrase 'Where does this go'? That being said, once i get going, I try my best to write in order, not to reread more than the previous few paragraphs and not to start on rewriting until I have a complete first draft. The book I'm working on now (it's called The Grass King's Concubine) began with a scene -- two shapeshifters in a house being asked to work magic -- and a series of images (an orrery, two figures riding across a frozen landscape, a palace under amber light). I'm about three-quarters of the way through, I think, and I have a sense of the ending, but it may well be subject to change...
FT: What do you do to relax and what have you read recently?
KS: I read, I do crewel-work embroidery and I watch a lot of films (particularly from Hong Kong and India). I also follow tv shows like Battlestar Galactica, Damages and Heroes. The last book I read was an academic study of late 19th and early 20th century occultism, The Place of Enchantment by Alex Owen. Before that, I read two of C E Murphy's supernatural mysteries (Thunderbird Falls and Coyote Dreams). Right now I'm reading Imran Ahmad's memoir, Unimagined. I read a lot, fiction and non-fiction, and I'll try almost anything.
FT: What is your guiltiest pleasure that few know about?
KS: Many people are baffled by my love for Hindi cinema, but I find the sensibilities and pacing a lot more appealing than a lot of US products. The characters are more believable to me and -- I have to admit -- I enjoy romance and melodrama more than car chases and gun battles. The Indian film industry produces some excellent films and I recommend them highly (my current favourites are Rand De Basanti, about student apathy and the context of rebellion; Teen Deewarein, a character study set in a prison, and Rangeela, a musical with a terrific score, wonderful choreography and a cast of interesting but nice characters).
And I'm a role-player. I play D & D and Feng Shui at present, but I played all sorts of other systems also.
FT: Lots of writers tend to have pets. What do you have and what are their key traits (and do they appear in your novel in certain character attributes?)
KS: I have cats! Three to be precise -- Ahmoon, Iskander and Horus. Mooncat is sweet-natured, home-loving girl, who likes to sit on my desk and wash my fingers as I type. Ish is the boss cat of the three -- he's the one who insists on staying out all night and worrying us. Horus is daft -- he's bright but has no common sense whatsoever and is prone to getting into odd scrapes. They don't get into my writing (although they do shed on it). But my very first cat, Caspian, has a guest appearance (in disguise, as he was grey) as Amalie's tabby cat in Living With Ghosts.
FT: Which character within your latest book was the most fun to write and why?
KS: That's quite difficult to answer. Thiercelin is most like me, so in a lot of ways he was the easiest to write, but at the same time I love to write sword fights, so I had a lot of fun writing Valdarrien and Joyain. Iareth Yscoithi was probably the hardest, as she's so reserved.
FT: How similar to your principel protagonist are you?
KS: And this is another difficult one. As I said above, I think Thiercelin is the most like me: I tend to feel I have to prove myself to people and I can be quite diffident. But Gracielis is probably the principle protagonist, and I suspect that I was more like him when I was younger than I am now. At least, I hope so!
FT: What hobbies do you have and how do they influence your work?
KS: I'm a great one for obsessions: I'll become interested in a subject and read up on it voraciously. A lot of these find their way into my writing in one form or another, be it sharks or astronomical water clocks or seventeenth century French history. My current burning interests is the French Revolution and the history of magic, there are lots of things that I am fascinated by -- fencing, Chinese wuxia novels, sharks, clocks, bridge-building, hill-forts, wind power....
FT: Where do you get your ideas from?
KS: Everywhere. Things I've read or seen or heard, images, things I've come across in my work (I'm trained as a mediaeval historian specialising in the Celtic and Gaelic speaking countries and I've taught that at university level, but I've also been a tax officer, a bar maid, a shop-worker and a P.A.)
FT: Do you ever encounter writers block and if so how do you overcome it?
KS: I have to be very firm with myself or I grind to a halt. I set myself a weekly word count and try and stick to it. Otherwise, I can waste time for weeks and weeks and weeks.
FT: Certain authors are renowned for writing at what many would call uncivilised times. When do you write and how do the others in your household feel about it?
KS: It depends. Usually I work in the day time, as I'm lucky enough to be able to write full-time, and my best writing time is the morning. But if a book is going really well, then I write anywhere and everywhere -- in bed, on the bus, during meals -- and it can be hard for me to stop and go and do something else. My partner is very tolerant, but he gets fed up if I keep writing across something we're meant to be doing together. And the cats really complain if I forget their meal times.
FT: Sometimes pieces of music seem to influence certain scenes within novels, do you have a soundtrack for your tale or is it a case of writing in silence with perhaps the odd musical break in-between scenes?
KS: The key song for Living With Ghosts was Alice Cooper, Poison, which said something that fitted very closely with how the main protagonist feels about his controller. I'm not sure if Grass King has so tight a theme song -- possibly the Blackmore's Night version of Wish You Were Here (not the Pink Floyd piece, but a different song written by L. Teijjo) I write to music or to the radio, as I enjoy the company and I find the rhythms helpful. What I listen to varies -- I tend to have phases of listening to a particular set of CDs over and over, and then moving on. At present, my play-list includes Nolwen Leroy, Histoires Naturelles; Lais by Lais; Renaissance by Faun; Evanescence, Fallen; and various film soundtracks -- Rang De Basanti, Fallen Angels, Once Upon a Time in China. But at other times I'm listening to other artists -- Kate Bush, Seth Lakeman, Live, Gabriel Yacoub, Sandy Denny, Doro. And I love Requiem Masses.
FT: What misconceptions, if any, did you have about the writing and publishing field when you were first getting started?
KS: I think when I was a child and an early teenager, I thought it would be easy -- I'd write the book, send it off and it would be published. But I've been writing and publishing non-fiction for so long (since 1986) that I don't think I had a lot of time to develop illusions. One thing that always used to baffle me in the days of paper submissions was the issue of boxes, though. Publisher would request that a manuscript be sent to them in a typing paper box, which I duly did, but the ms was invariably returned without its box and held together with elastic bands. I always wanted to know what they did with the boxes.
FT: If music be the food of love, what do you think writing is and please explain your answer?
KS: It's an opiate: it possesses, it promises, it creates visions and snatches them away, it leads you on and taunts you, winds you up and lets you down; it addicts and obsesses. Or perhaps a roller coaster.
FT: What can you tell us about the next novel?
KS: It has the working title The Grass King's Concubine. It has shape-shifting ferret women and a journey into the underworld, civic unrest and elemental warriors. It's about the power of the written word, about the fear of change and the problem of property. And bees and water clocks and a stone boat and a mystery. I tend to describe it as 'Orpheus and Eurydice meet the French Revolution: part one'. It's set in the same world as Living With Ghosts, but later and with a different cast of characters. If anyone has read Ghosts, then Grass King is more about the magical side of the world than the human one.
FT: What are the last five internet sites that you've visited?
KS: Livejournal, where I blog as la_marquise_de_ (it's a role-playing reference, alas); The Guardian home page; Amazon.co.uk, the BBC and Pastiches Dumas, a website devoted to spin-offs and homages to the novels of Alexandre Dumas.
FT: Did you ever take any writing classes or specific instructions to learn the craft? If so please let us know which ones.
KS: I attended an SF and Fantasy writing course at the Arvon Foundation, where I had the great privilege of being tutored by Adam Roberts and Justina Robson. It was invaluable, and I'd recommend it to anyone. I've also been to the Milford UK Writing Workshop, which is challenging, invigorating, inspiring and a lot of fun. I'm a member of a local monthly writing group. And I have a shelf and a half of writing books. Most of them haven't proved to be a lot of use, but there are a few that I return to over and over -- Dennis Palumbo, Writing From the Inside Out; Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird; Stephen King, On Writing; Ray Bradbury, Zen and the Art of Writing; and -- for a book with exercises and a learning structure, Ursula LeGuin, Steering the Craft..
FT: How did you get past the initial barriers of criticism and rejection?
KS: It's a difficult area. Criticism is important, but I had to learn to listen, to shut down the initial 'ouch' response and to let myself reject criticisms that seemed to be non-constructive or irrelevant as they could be very derailing. My instinct is to do as the external reader says, and it took me a while to learn that this was not always essential and if something really didn't fit or felt inappropriate, I could let it go. And as for rejection... I'm not a role-model for this: I find it very hard indeed and tend to go away and hide. Or clean the house. That's often very soothing.
FT: In your opinion, what are the best and worst aspects of writing for a living?
KS: I love that I'm allowed to daydream, to work with words (which I love), to stretch my imagination out all over page after page, I love working from home, I love being surrounded by books. I enjoy the company of other writers, I enjoy research and discovery -- I can spend hours upon hours in library chasing up cross-references and hints and images. On the other hand, I have to structure my own time, which I'm bad at; I am on my own a lot and I get lonely and the waiting is a killer.
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