Greetings and salutations! First of all, I want to say thanks to Angela for having me on the blog. Thanks so much Angela!
As some of you may know, I have a new book out – Spider’s Bite, which is the first book in my new Elemental Assassin urban fantasy series.
As the series title suggests, the heroine of the book is Gin Blanco, an assassin codenamed the Spider. In fact, the first line of Spider’s Bite is “My name is Gin, and I kill people.” So I thought I would talk a little bit today about what it’s like to write an assassin character.
I like assassin characters. I always have ever since I started reading epic fantasy books in high school. Eventually, I decided to write my own assassin in my own fantasy world, and thus Gin Blanco and the city of Ashland was born.
I was recently able to interview Richard Doetsch, author of The 13th Hour, reviewed here. Which also made my top picks of 2009.
The 13th Hour takes a different spin on time travel. How did you come up with the idea of doing a novel in reverse?
I had never seen a novel written backwards before and thought it would be a great challenge. I think we all have a moment in life that we would like to change be it a decision at work, something we said to a girlfriend or boyfriend, or sometimes something greater like expressing our true feelings for a friend or family member before they slipped out of our lives or saving someone from a tragedy if we could only reach out our hand in that one fateful moment. I think it is something universal, something everyone thinks about at some point, something that bridges languages and cultures. How great would it be to act on hindsight?
If you could go back in time to change some event in your past, would you?
No, I think we are the sum of our failures and successes, our missteps and achievements. Our character, our lives are shaped by the unchartered lives we lead for better or for worse and it’s really the obstacles and tragedies we face that form us and give us the tools and abilities to tackle the future.
What obstacles did you face in writing such a complex story?
Writing the thirteenth hours was like playing five games of chess in my head at the same time. I wrote the story backwards in the same way the reader experiences it. In so doing, I had to remember the future and the past. It was difficult but fun as it was like a giant puzzle whose every move reverberated throughout the story.
While the element of science fiction is there with time travel, The 13th Hour is more of a mystery thriller. What section do you think your novel should be shelved?
Without question, in the thriller and mystery section. My stories are really thrillers with heart along with a very slight dash of fantasy. All of my stories have a very slight bit of fantasy in them while remaining firmly routed in reality. That little bit of the impossible helps to give a bit of a sense of wonder and is part of my signature. Most of the people who have read and enjoyed it are thrillers readers who picked it up without thinking of it as sci-fi.
I read that New Line Cinema bought the film rights. Any further news on that?
Barb and JC Hendee are the authors of the fantastic Noble Dead saga. Through Stone and Sea releases next month from Roc Books. _________________
What can you tell us about your upcoming release, Through Stone and Sea?
Barb: This is the “fattest” book our publisher has let us get away with to date. Hah! It’s an exciting tale. Wynn, Chane, and Shade travel to Dhredze Seatt, the mountain stronghold of the dwarves, looking for the ancient texts that Wynn’s superiors confiscated. Unexpected threats and mysteries quickly arise.
JC: Along the way, the readers will be introduced to a new race as well as a new culture, with a long history that most of the world doesn’t know about. In addition some characters who appeared briefly in the first book play some startling, more active roles. There is lot more going on in Wynn’s world than even she ever knew about, and perhaps the royal city of Calm Seatt isn’t as calm as everyone thought.
How did your ideas/thought process for Magiere and Leesil come about?
Barb: One night, we were researching another project when we came across an interesting entry in a book called The Vampire Encyclopedia by Mathew Bunson. It related information regarding the origins of the “dhampir,” a name given by Slavonic gypsies to the child of a vampire. In medieval Serbia and Yugoslavia, charlatans took advantage of this myth by pretending to be dhampirs. They would convince a troubled village that it was beset by a vampire, and that only a dhampir could see the undead creature. Then they would stage elaborate “battles” and claim they had destroyed the vampire—and charge the village quite a fee. This is what sparked the original idea, and the story of Magiere and Leesil began to grow.
JC: From there, we considered the fantastical possibilities. We asked ourselves “what if one charlatan had to face the concept that vampires were indeed real—and that she was a true dhampir?
Our aim was always to write fantasy, not vampire fiction, and we wanted to write a female protagonist living the more active side of action fantasy in a role most often reserved for male characters. And so Magiere came into being. Leesil followed quickly, first shown only to the reader as a sidekick, but it wasn’t long before everyone (including the readers) saw how he would shape – and perhaps had always shaped – the story and Magiere’s world in new ways.
Magiere, the dhampir, has such a complex back-story. Did you plan it out ahead of time, or was it a gradual process?
