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sawylSkipping over a few things, the last thing I attended was Emma Newman's guest of honour interview with Gareth Powell, followed by an excerpt from her forthcoming novel.
Gareth began by asking where Emma had always wanted to be a writer. Her immediate answer was yes, wrote from age 4 to 17. Applying to Oxford as part of a complicated blood pact with her best friend, she'd been encouraged by her English teacher to drop her Shakespeare essay in favour of a dark short story. They argued and eventually the teacher prevailed; which is just as well because, up for her interview, she discovered, under rather strange circumstances, that the story was responsible for her winning her place. Having managed this, she had writer's block for a decade. completely forgot that she was a writer. When her best friend gave her a book on writing, she rediscovered her urge, learning her craft by re-writing the same novel over and over. She's now a proper writer, but she still worries that someone might come along and say, "Sorry, there's been a mistake and you're not..."
Gareth then asked how she decided which ideas to follow. Emma said it was bit like having a group of schoolchildren tugging at you, but you generally followed the one that sneaked up on you; as Neil Gaiman says, it's idea that's like grit at the back of your mind. She said that she disliked the period between projects and preferred to jump straight from one to another. She's now got a queue of things to do and it's just a case of changing the order in which she works on them.
Gareth then asked about the genesis of The Split Worlds project, first asking how many people in the audience had read it. There was an almost solid field of hands.
Emma said that the stories came from two strands. The first was that she woke up with a complete story about a woman who walks into a the wrong shop and finds a fairy in a bell jar, forcing the shopkeeper into deciding whether to kill her or whether to send her away with no memories and a piece of cake. Because she was doing Friday Flash at the time, she put the story up on her blog and got lots of very positive responses. The second strand came from a game she was GMing for husband: part way through, she realised that what she'd actually been doing was building the world for her next series.
Based on the classic fairytale idea, she decided to write short stories for a year and a day, eventually writing 55 of them. In the middle of this, Between Two Thorns was picked up by Angry Robot and there was a point where she was writing the third book, editing the second, and writing the short fiction. The short stories ended up forming part of the viral publicity for the books, as she asked a different blogger to publish each story.
The stories form a key part of the world, setting up things that are going to become important in the later novels, but which have been baked into the setting from the very start. There is so much material, it can't all go into the book — "It's like putting turnips into a sock..." It needs to be out there for people to find and it was important to work out how the politics of the different factions works and how they balance one another. There are so many details. It's the iceberg theory of writing: there's more going on in the world than the reader ever gets to see.
Why set the stories in Bath? Because everyone sets their urban fantasies in London — although one of novels is set in London — and because she'd already written novels set in London. As a writer she feels inspired and creative in an urban environment and because she tends to notice buildings rather than people, Bath is ideal. It also has a sense of history: it's possible to look at the Assembly Rooms and see them both as they are today and as they were at their peak. Bath makes it possible to see luxury built on servitude and horror; beauty and ugliness in the place. Being a details geek might have been a bit of a disadvantage: she had to remind herself not to spend all her time taking photos of details of buildings but to get on with the writing...
Gareth then asked about the novels' focus on power and control. Emma said that while she hadn't intended to write a feminist novel, she found that as she learned more about the world and saw more and more inequalities in action, she found she had a lot of anger about the current state of politics and a lot of anger as a woman. While she'd been lucky with her friends and not seen sexism around her when she was younger, now it seems obvious; and it was this anger that went into The Split Worlds. The books show people navigating an awful world and although she didn't want the allegorical elements to dominate the plot, they're definitely there.
Gareth asked whether a particular character was her proxy. Emma's reply was that all the characters include aspects of herself — even the horrible and scary Lord Poppy. Cathy is the most obvious answer because the anger is the same, as is the geekiness, but she was also the hardest to write because of the danger of turning her into a mouthpiece of feminist ideals. She needed to be clever enough to escape, but she also needed to be annoying. She needed to be brilliant and also rubbish at the same time. She's also very driven and driven people are often very selfish — it takes her a long time to realise that there are other people around her — and driven people often leave a trail of wreckage behind them. Will and the Gargoyle were the easiest characters to write.
Emma said horror is a common theme across books, where the initial effect is of loveliness that twists into horror at the last. It's like the song Lily by the Smashing Pumpkins; at first it sounds like a love song and it's only at the very end that you realise its from the perspective of a stalker; that the sort of effect she's trying to achieve.
The horror in The Split Worlds is often done as a casual aside. While doing the audiobook of Between Two Thorns, she realised that Lord Poppy's threat to turn Cathy's tongue into a wasp was horrific because it was so casual, in the same tone of voice as suggesting going out for ice cream. One of the goals was to make fairies genuinely scary again: you read the legends and stories about them and they're really horrifying. Magic too is always about a loss of autonomy which is a big thing.
Gareth asked whether Emma could say anything about book four in the series. She said that she's planning to kickstart it but it's hard to talk about without including spoilers for the other books. The Split Worlds was always intended as a five book series, but the idea was to make the first three a complete plot entity in itself. But it's important to explore the consequences. There are lots of books where something that should have huge consequences happens and then everything just carries on as before. Events have to be allowed to play themselves out.
Gareth asked whether she was worried about being typecast as an urban fantasy author. Emma said that she wasn't. She's just sold an SF novel to one of the big five and it's very, very different to The Split Worlds. It was written both as an escape and break from a world she's been living with and writing for a few years. It was also a confirmation that she could still write other stuff; it was like coming home because she's read far more SF than urban fantasy.
The final question was about her existence as a Hugo nominated podcaster and where the idea for Tea and Jeopardy came from. Emma said that a few years ago, when she was looking around on internet, she noticed that there weren't that many podcasts fronted by women. After letting the idea simmer for a while she bit the bullet and brainstormed ideas with Peter. They wanted to it to include tea — because, well, tea! — and they also wanted it to be silly — because there are a lot of good, serious podcasts out there but she's British and inspired by the humour of Monty Python — with a butler and mild peril, but with something serious at the heart of it. The singing chickens came from an idea about chickenising musicals — the original idea was for chicken versions of famous musicals, including an attempt at War of the Worlds that reduced someone (Paul Cornell?) to tears of laughter — and Peter loved it, so it went in. The hardest song to do was Professor Element's chap-hop, and the song from Les Mis got stuck in their heads for a week, sometimes in the original version and sometimes chickenised!
From the floor, someone asked about the forthcoming SF novel. Emma said it had been inspired by ideas about synthetic biology, a particular psychological disorder, and something she'd read about 3D printing on the moon. She said that she was planning to read an excerpt from it immediately after the session.
Someone else asked whether she had a favourite RPG. Emma said that she'd played Masquerade at university but she didn't play other people's games but generally went to GURPS for the basic rules and then created her own. She's not a system head: the world comes first and system came second.
Someone else asked if Latimer could bring her any sort of tea and cake, what would they be? Answer: English Breakfast and her mum's cake.
Gareth began by asking where Emma had always wanted to be a writer. Her immediate answer was yes, wrote from age 4 to 17. Applying to Oxford as part of a complicated blood pact with her best friend, she'd been encouraged by her English teacher to drop her Shakespeare essay in favour of a dark short story. They argued and eventually the teacher prevailed; which is just as well because, up for her interview, she discovered, under rather strange circumstances, that the story was responsible for her winning her place. Having managed this, she had writer's block for a decade. completely forgot that she was a writer. When her best friend gave her a book on writing, she rediscovered her urge, learning her craft by re-writing the same novel over and over. She's now a proper writer, but she still worries that someone might come along and say, "Sorry, there's been a mistake and you're not..."
Gareth then asked how she decided which ideas to follow. Emma said it was bit like having a group of schoolchildren tugging at you, but you generally followed the one that sneaked up on you; as Neil Gaiman says, it's idea that's like grit at the back of your mind. She said that she disliked the period between projects and preferred to jump straight from one to another. She's now got a queue of things to do and it's just a case of changing the order in which she works on them.
Gareth then asked about the genesis of The Split Worlds project, first asking how many people in the audience had read it. There was an almost solid field of hands.
Emma said that the stories came from two strands. The first was that she woke up with a complete story about a woman who walks into a the wrong shop and finds a fairy in a bell jar, forcing the shopkeeper into deciding whether to kill her or whether to send her away with no memories and a piece of cake. Because she was doing Friday Flash at the time, she put the story up on her blog and got lots of very positive responses. The second strand came from a game she was GMing for husband: part way through, she realised that what she'd actually been doing was building the world for her next series.
Based on the classic fairytale idea, she decided to write short stories for a year and a day, eventually writing 55 of them. In the middle of this, Between Two Thorns was picked up by Angry Robot and there was a point where she was writing the third book, editing the second, and writing the short fiction. The short stories ended up forming part of the viral publicity for the books, as she asked a different blogger to publish each story.
The stories form a key part of the world, setting up things that are going to become important in the later novels, but which have been baked into the setting from the very start. There is so much material, it can't all go into the book — "It's like putting turnips into a sock..." It needs to be out there for people to find and it was important to work out how the politics of the different factions works and how they balance one another. There are so many details. It's the iceberg theory of writing: there's more going on in the world than the reader ever gets to see.
Why set the stories in Bath? Because everyone sets their urban fantasies in London — although one of novels is set in London — and because she'd already written novels set in London. As a writer she feels inspired and creative in an urban environment and because she tends to notice buildings rather than people, Bath is ideal. It also has a sense of history: it's possible to look at the Assembly Rooms and see them both as they are today and as they were at their peak. Bath makes it possible to see luxury built on servitude and horror; beauty and ugliness in the place. Being a details geek might have been a bit of a disadvantage: she had to remind herself not to spend all her time taking photos of details of buildings but to get on with the writing...
Gareth then asked about the novels' focus on power and control. Emma said that while she hadn't intended to write a feminist novel, she found that as she learned more about the world and saw more and more inequalities in action, she found she had a lot of anger about the current state of politics and a lot of anger as a woman. While she'd been lucky with her friends and not seen sexism around her when she was younger, now it seems obvious; and it was this anger that went into The Split Worlds. The books show people navigating an awful world and although she didn't want the allegorical elements to dominate the plot, they're definitely there.
Gareth asked whether a particular character was her proxy. Emma's reply was that all the characters include aspects of herself — even the horrible and scary Lord Poppy. Cathy is the most obvious answer because the anger is the same, as is the geekiness, but she was also the hardest to write because of the danger of turning her into a mouthpiece of feminist ideals. She needed to be clever enough to escape, but she also needed to be annoying. She needed to be brilliant and also rubbish at the same time. She's also very driven and driven people are often very selfish — it takes her a long time to realise that there are other people around her — and driven people often leave a trail of wreckage behind them. Will and the Gargoyle were the easiest characters to write.
Emma said horror is a common theme across books, where the initial effect is of loveliness that twists into horror at the last. It's like the song Lily by the Smashing Pumpkins; at first it sounds like a love song and it's only at the very end that you realise its from the perspective of a stalker; that the sort of effect she's trying to achieve.
The horror in The Split Worlds is often done as a casual aside. While doing the audiobook of Between Two Thorns, she realised that Lord Poppy's threat to turn Cathy's tongue into a wasp was horrific because it was so casual, in the same tone of voice as suggesting going out for ice cream. One of the goals was to make fairies genuinely scary again: you read the legends and stories about them and they're really horrifying. Magic too is always about a loss of autonomy which is a big thing.
Gareth asked whether Emma could say anything about book four in the series. She said that she's planning to kickstart it but it's hard to talk about without including spoilers for the other books. The Split Worlds was always intended as a five book series, but the idea was to make the first three a complete plot entity in itself. But it's important to explore the consequences. There are lots of books where something that should have huge consequences happens and then everything just carries on as before. Events have to be allowed to play themselves out.
Gareth asked whether she was worried about being typecast as an urban fantasy author. Emma said that she wasn't. She's just sold an SF novel to one of the big five and it's very, very different to The Split Worlds. It was written both as an escape and break from a world she's been living with and writing for a few years. It was also a confirmation that she could still write other stuff; it was like coming home because she's read far more SF than urban fantasy.
The final question was about her existence as a Hugo nominated podcaster and where the idea for Tea and Jeopardy came from. Emma said that a few years ago, when she was looking around on internet, she noticed that there weren't that many podcasts fronted by women. After letting the idea simmer for a while she bit the bullet and brainstormed ideas with Peter. They wanted to it to include tea — because, well, tea! — and they also wanted it to be silly — because there are a lot of good, serious podcasts out there but she's British and inspired by the humour of Monty Python — with a butler and mild peril, but with something serious at the heart of it. The singing chickens came from an idea about chickenising musicals — the original idea was for chicken versions of famous musicals, including an attempt at War of the Worlds that reduced someone (Paul Cornell?) to tears of laughter — and Peter loved it, so it went in. The hardest song to do was Professor Element's chap-hop, and the song from Les Mis got stuck in their heads for a week, sometimes in the original version and sometimes chickenised!
From the floor, someone asked about the forthcoming SF novel. Emma said it had been inspired by ideas about synthetic biology, a particular psychological disorder, and something she'd read about 3D printing on the moon. She said that she was planning to read an excerpt from it immediately after the session.
Someone else asked whether she had a favourite RPG. Emma said that she'd played Masquerade at university but she didn't play other people's games but generally went to GURPS for the basic rules and then created her own. She's not a system head: the world comes first and system came second.
Someone else asked if Latimer could bring her any sort of tea and cake, what would they be? Answer: English Breakfast and her mum's cake.
