Tag Archives: author blog

Voyager Australia |

Writing the Timestalker series by Rhonda Roberts

People always ask me what it’s like writing the Timestalker series. It follows the adventures of a time travelling detective, Kannon Dupree, who solves exotic mysteries set in different times and places. And as the latest book in the series, Coyote, has just come out, I know I’ll need to hone my answer to that question.

But to complicate matters, each book has had its own special challenges. In the first one, Gladiatrix, Kannon journeys to Rome in 8AD and investigates the mysterious rituals performed by an Egyptian Isis-worshipping cult, which in the twenty-first century has become so powerful that it’s challenging Christianity for dominance.

That was a lot of work. I had to set up the foundation for a new series which used time travel, create an alternate present, plus do research on ancient Rome as well as mystical Egyptian cults. Then put it all together in an adventure story.

The next book, Hoodwink, is set in the golden years of Hollywood. After the body of a movie director is found covered in a Mayan occult tattoo and cemented into the floor of his own film set, Kannon Dupree is hired to discover who murdered him. Whilst on the set of Gone With The Wind she stumbles onto a mystery that stretches back to the Civil War.

My research load doubled in Hoodwink. It ranged from 1939 Hollywood, through to the Mayan civilisation via the American Civil War. And, as every good writer knows, you only ever put a fraction of the research you do into your book.

In the latest book, Coyote, Kannon is hired to find the missing diary of a Wild West hero. The chase takes her through the middle of an Indian War, via a mysterious convent of nuns banished to die in the desert and into an ancient pueblo city on a cursed mesa sacred to Coyote, the trickster god.

The photo of me frowning outside the town of Coyote in New Mexico, was taken when I was trying to work out where the hell to locate one of the only truly fictional places in the book – Big Sun Canyon. America’s Southwest is a patchwork of sites sacred to the local Native American nations. (The photo of mesas is from one of these sites – Monument Valley) So I had to work out how to respect their beliefs and still write an adventure story that roamed across their territory. (I’m smiling in the other photo because I’ve just worked out what to do.)

Looking at the series as a whole – all the Timestalker books are basically adventure stories where complex mysteries are solved. It takes a huge amount of planning to tell an exciting story and at the same time unveil clues along the way. Add time travel to that mystery setup and there’s another equally intricate layer of planning. You can’t turn the reader off by making them question why the mystery wasn’t solved in one quick visit to the past rather than a journey that takes around 150,000 words.

So I do the all the planning and research and then I let my imagination take over… You’ve got to love speculative fiction. It’s as exciting to write, as it is to read.

Voyager UK |

Author blog – Robin Hobb on POV

That’s Point of View.  And one of the goals of any writer is to stay solidly within the Point of View of the character he is writing, without making the reader unnecessarily aware of it.

To oversimplify a lot, there are three basic ways to approach POV. 

One is omniscient, in which the reader is looking down, god-like, on the tale.  He knows what is happening twelve miles away, or on the space station orbiting Jupiter just as easily as he is aware of the conversation over tea in the café in London.  So even as he knows that Josephine thinks the tea is too sweet, he is aware that her friend Stella has just returned the packet of poison to her purse under the table.

In what I think of as third person, the reader ‘rides’ with a character, and for that sections of the book, be it a chapter or a few paragraphs, the reader thinks, feels and regards the world as from that character’s mind.  This was the method of story telling I chose for the Liveship Traders and for the more recent Rain Wild Chronicles.  It’s a wonderful way to steep the reader in a character, and to share the secrets of a character that no one else in the book knows.  In the Liveships, it let me put the reader squarely into Kennit’s boots (or later, boot!) and demand that, for a space of time, the reader share Kennit’s skewed view of the world, his contorted idea of justice and even his twisted honor.  In the course of writing Kennit, I came to love this dastardly villain just as dearly as I loved the other heroes who shared something closer to my own value system.  In many ways, I now feel just as fond of the less-than-admirable but self-adoring Hest of the Rain Wild Chronicles once I wrote a few scenes from his POV.  It’s very difficult to don a character’s skin and write from his POV without feeling both kinship and affection for him.

 The third type of POV is my absolute favorite for story telling.  First person.  In first person, the writer dons the skin of a character and tells the story exactly as that character experienced it.   To me, first person is the natural story telling voice.  When a person comes home from work or school and sits down at the dinner table to discuss the day, he always tells the story of his day’s adventure from first person.  And in doing so, he imparts his personal point of view to every aspect of it.  When the writer employs this technique, the reader learns the protagonist from the skin out.  If the character is young or angsty, paranoid or self-righteous, sheltered or worldly, it will all come through in the first person account.  And the writer is free to indulge in letting his narrator shade his telling, either to exaggerate his heroism, or justify his actions, or edit what really happened to put himself in a better light.  It’s all a part of characterization.

First person point of view is also my preference for reading.  Some of my favorite examples of first person narration are actually in the mystery/detective genre.  Archie Goodwin, the narrator of the detective cases of Nero Wolfe (as written by Rex Stout) is obviously a man of action who is very fond of himself. And in time, I definitely came to share his opinion of himself, as well as his fondness and occasional annoyance with his employer.  John D. McDonald’s  Travis McGee series would never have been as engaging if we were forced to view his activities in the third person.  The same is true for Robert Parker’s detective Spenser, and later, his shot-gun toting western side-kick, Everett Hitch as he follows his friend Virgil Cole through a series of ‘lawman for hire’ adventures.

There are other excellent examples of first person deployment in the fantasy and SF fields.  Heinlein used it to great effect in both Glory Road and Have Spacesuit, Will Travel.  Steven Brust’s Vlad is an assassin/witch with a very wry sense of humor, and a deep bond to his small telepathic Jhereg familiar.  Michael Marshall Smith dragged me into his book Only Forward by insisting that I experience a life with his protagonist Stark, in a world so surreal I could not have engaged with it without a resident guide.   I’d be amiss if I didn’t mention my current love/hate relationship with the first person narrator of Prince of Thorns.  Mark Lawrence uses a first person point of view to simultaneously hide and reveal what makes young Jorg tick, until the relentlessly cruel protagonist abruptly becomes all too horribly human and understandable to the reader. 

First person narration is always the hook that will pull me into a story, whether it is the intriguing admonition of “Call me Ishamel,” or the simple announcement, “You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain’t no matter.”  If you want to pull a reader into your writing, or plunge yourself into a story, first person narration is the way to do it.

 

City of Dragons is OUT NOW. Get it in all good bookshops.

Voyager UK |

Lauren DeStefano – Guest Author Blog – Body image, and why you are a badass

Guest blog by Lauren Destefano author of Wither and Fever

About four years ago, before the days of Rhine and Wither World, before I had a social media platform and when I was just a bright-eyed dreamer with a hard drive full of unmarketable manuscripts, I received a phone call. That phone call was an offer of representation from an agent. And at the end of that phone call, my shiny new agent asked if I had a website. I didn’t. She asked me to start one. And so, this blog was born.

And from that very first day, before I had a book deal or any readers, I knew there were certain topics that I’d never blog about. Politics was one of them. Body image was another. The reason I stay away from those types of posts is because I don’t have much faith in my own finesse. There are other bloggers who introduce these topics in a way that is fabulous and thorough. Whereas I ramble a lot, give books away, and show you pictures of how ugly my bathroom was before I exorcised the pink from it.

Today I’m breaking my own restraint to blog about this topic. Maybe it’s fitting, in light of the whole SOPA censorship debacle. Maybe now is the perfect time to say the sorts of things I wouldn’t normally say.

The topic is body image. It’s snowing today, and I thought I’d curl up on the couch and indulge in a little TV before diving into my line edits for Book 3. I flipped through the DVR lineup and decided to watch the latest episode of The Biggest Loser. I was only half paying attention, clicking around on the internet as I usually do, when I heard one of the contestants say that she had dreams of being a writer. She went on to say, “How are you gonna go into these publishing houses and be like ‘Hey, you wanna publish my book’ when you’re the fat girl?”

This ripped my attention from the computer screen. I hit rewind, sure I misheard her. I played it back three times, not just astounded but horrified by what was happening on my television. Was this aspiring writer really citing her weight as the reason she felt a publishing house wouldn’t take her seriously?

We can’t have this. This is not okay.

The most devastating part of this sentiment is that, in addition to this young woman believing her weight is congruent with her success as an author, millions of viewers nationwide have just heard it. How many of those millions are writers? How many are going to feel that they cannot take a step towards their dreams until they’ve lost a few pounds?

Actually, scratch that. How many of those millions have dreams they now fear can’t be attained because of their weight?

If I’m going to go into full disclosure here, my weight is something I have been conscious of for most of my life. It’s something I struggled with in my teens and something I struggle with now. I gained a bunch of weight after selling Wither, between the pre-publication stress and having a job that required movement only from the wrists to the fingertips. I’ve since lost all of that weight, and I know that it is as emotionally taxing as it is physical. And I’m not alone; I can’t count on both hands the conversations I’ve had with friends over the years about calories in vs. calories out, and abdominal crunches and weight watchers points and diet soda. It’s a significant part of my life. And it has nothing to do with my ability to dream or my determination or my worth as a person. It took me years and years to understand this. I used to think of myself as a work in progress. I used to think that I would have a good life when I lost weight. I’m so thankful that I learned the difference between having a goal and having self worth. My wish is for everyone to learn that difference, because it’s a liberating day when you do.

For this Biggest Loser contestant, her weight is something about herself that she would like to change. I can understand that, because my weight is something I am perpetually working to change. And for someone else, it’s another issue entirely. Maybe you think you’re too timid, or too rude, or too tall, or you think you have two mismatched ears—whatever it is. There is nothing wrong with wanting to change the things we don’t like about ourselves; in fact it can boost our self-esteem to know we’re doing something healthy for ourselves. But it becomes a serious problem when we think we are substandard until that change is made. If you’re a writer, write. Write because it’s your dream and because it’s what you love. Write because you deserve to have dreams and it is your right to work for them.

There’s no scale when you step through the door of a publishing house. I can tell you firsthand that there’s just a security guard and an elevator.

You have to believe that you are good enough right now, today, because losing weight or getting an earlobe tuck or dyeing your hair isn’t going to do that. When you look in the mirror, it’s dangerous to dream of The Flawless You. What you should see is your face, your shoulders. You should acknowledge the freckles you may not like or the hair that flips the wrong way. You should know that your tools and your weapons and your mind are all staring back at you. You should be in awe of the power you possess over your own destiny. You aren’t substandard. You are amazing. The person staring back at you in the mirror is the person who is going to go out there and grab those dreams by the freaking balls.

The PB of Wither and TPB of Fever are publishing this Thursday. Buy them at all good bookshops.