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When you’re a writer, you get to play god … and I’m here to tell you, it’s incredibly satisfying. You set the rules,  you create the world and the characters, and then you get to move them around on the chessboard you’ve made up and nobody can tell you you’re wrong! What’s not to love, eh?

Directing plays is a bit the same, really … so is it any wonder that when I’m not slaving over a hot keyboard I’m slaving away in my local theatre, bossing hapless actors about the stage, telling them how to walk and talk and dress and smile?

In every writer there lurks a little … or a lot … of the megalomaniac.

The biggest difference between writing and directing is that when you’re directing, you’re interpreting someone else’s words.  You’re filtering their creation through your own experiences, your own creative computer,  seeing things that maybe the playwright didn’t know were there … or putting your own unique spin on the text so that they might not actually recognise what you’ve done with their precious masterpiece!

Which might explain why people like Joss Whedon now say they won’t write movies unless they also get to direct them …

But the big intersect between writing and directing is the fact that in both cases, you’re dealing with story. As a writer, you really are a director of your own interior movie which you attempt to capture in words on a page. That’s why there’s so often a disappointing gap between the story that’s in a writer’s head, and the one that ends up as the book. The imagination is infinitely elastic, whereas words on a page are so … intransigently two-dimensional.

Still, that’s the ongoing excitement about writing – seeing how closely you can narrow the gap between the story in your head and the one that ends up between the book’s covers.

At some point, whether you’re the writer reading back over your own story, or you’re the director bringing someone else’s story to life, you end up doing the same thing: deconstructing the words to uncover their ultimate meaning – analysing characters to find out who they really are, how they really tick, what makes them the people they appear to be … and the truth that lies beneath the masks we all wear.

Writers and directors live their lives submerged in story. We eat it, breathe it, sleep it and quite often find that it’s more real to us than the real world beyond the confines of the stage, or the page. And I find that in helping to bring other writers’ stories to life on the stage, I help to sharpen my own eyes when it comes time to look back at the books I’m writing. Somehow working with other people’s words helps me to clarify my own. Every writer whose play I’ve directed has taught me something important about character, about dialogue, about narrative construction, about story momentum …

As a writer I’m still learning. As a director I’m still learning too. And while I’m learning, I have to tell you, I’m having an awful lot of fun. It’s actually quite therapeutic, you know, letting the Inner Megalomaniac out to play …

 Karen Miller

I am currently putting the final touches on The Chaos Crystal, getting it ready to send into HarperCollins tomorrow and to Tor (my US Publishers). This set me to thinking about a question I get asked at every single workshop I run, (and I’m often emailed the same question) regarding the correct way to format a MS for submission.

Nothing gives you away faster as a rank amateur than a poorly presented manuscript. Here then, are some tips and hints that might help:

All MS’s should be:

Jennifer Fallon

Where did Royal Exile come from? That’s a very good question. I want to say I have no idea because instinctively that’s how I feel but ideas for books arrive for no reason and often with little warning, and always, always for me at an inconvenient time. By this I mean that an idea occurs to me when I’m halfway through book one of a brand new series. Could there be a more poorly timed moment for inspiration on another series? But many fantasy authors say the same so I am reassured. And on the plus side it’s motivating to have another story calling to you … it spurs you on to complete the current one.

I recall I was in Tasmania, working hard on Emissary I think, when this murky scene of a man, woman and child would not leave me alone. It had nothing to do with Percheron – in fact it looked in my mind’s eye as though it was from The Quickening. I kept banishing it but it nagged on the rim of my thoughts, constantly clarifying itself; the picture kept getting clearer and then I began to hear the voices of the characters and I could see their features and then I could feel their emotions. It was not a pleasant scene I might add. In fact I’d describe it as harrowing. No one was moving much in it; the three characters remained fairly static so I had very little to go on but as soon as I saw a bird in the background, I realised it was an omen. In the midst of a highly emotionally-charged scene in Emissary, I realised I was letting into my life the next adult fantasy I would write and I knew this because there is always at least one bird in my fantasy tales – don’t ask why, because I don’t know. And his presence in that brief vignette of no dialogue proved to me I needed to take notice of this scene.

I stopped writing Percheron and gave myself one hour to cobble together some thoughts and was surprised how quickly this scene yielded the very loose threads that I figured I could weave into a story that could span three books. I’ve already mentioned that I don’t write to plans and I hate to plot ahead so this synopsis – if you want to call it that – was just a few paragraphs of ramblings but I sent it off to my agent and he really liked it. He pitched it to the overseas publishers and they liked it too. HarperCollins in Australia gave me the thumbs up and Valisar, the series, was essentially in motion. I had to put it aside then and focus fully on Emissary, Goddess, The Whisperer for younger readers and another novel in a different genre.

But now Royal Exile is finished and edited and that is a wonderful feeling. I had no idea as I embarked upon it as to where this story was going and I had very little notion of where it had come from, but I rarely let those minor details trouble me. I put my faith in the characters and as I anticipated they revelled in the freedom to take the story wherever they wanted. Before I knew it I had a cast of thousands and a pile of sub plots to juggle.

It is a return to the familiar landscape of The Quickening. In fact I would say it’s set not that far from Morgravia. I will begin writing book 2 in October 2008 but in the meantime I do hope you enjoy Royal Exile when it’s released worldwide from September 1 this year.

Fiona McIntosh

In exciting news, the Percheron trilogy has not been sold into Denmark, meaning that the series will now be available in seven languages, possibly with more to come later this year. You can read the series in French, German, Dutch, Polish, Czech, Russian and of course Danish, not to mention English. The three books that make up the Percheron trilogy are: Odalisque, Emissary and Goddess.

Author Fiona McIntosh has recently returned from a research trip into Cyprus, Greece and Turkey, amassing material that will be revealed in books 2 and 3 of her new series, Valisar. The first book of the series, Royal Exile, will be published worldwide by Harper Voyager in September this year.

For the lucky people in Shakespeare-A-Go-Go land, aka Britain, Fiona will be touring in 2009 – so keep an eye out for more info on that, later in the year. In the mean time, be prepared for some wonderful writing from Fiona on this blog, as she discusses the inspiration behind Valisar, the way she writes, her travel and research to get the world in this latest series right, and much, much more.

Click on the image of Odalisque to read an excerpt.

Taelian

Last night we had the first ever meeting of the Voyager Book Club, and a rousing success it was!

We had the luck to actually have the author of the first book present, K E Mills, author of The Accidental Sorcerer. We started off by discussing the upcoming books in the Rogue Agent trilogy - which might give you an idea of how much everyone enjoyed The Accidental Sorcerer, as we would all like to read more.

We discuss all manner of things, from the main themes of the book (for example, the way almost all of the characters are in disguise, one way or another), to what constitutes actual ‘evil’, to the best actors to play key roles in a film version of the book!

If you’re interested in taking part in further book club sessions, please visit the message board at Voyager Online.

Thank you to Nyssa from http://aboygoesonajourney.com for providing us with a chat room to have the discussion.

For those of you interested in reading more from K E Mills, her first series (written as Karen Miller) is called Kingmaker Kingbreaker and starts with The Innocent Mage (I couldn’t resist putting up the Spanish publication image) and ends with Innocence Lost. Her second series, The Godspeaker trilogy, begins with Empress of Mijak, continues with The Riven Kingdom and concludes with Hammer of God (which is out in June).

Visit Karen’s website for more information, or go to Voyager Online.

One of the great joys of fiction for me is reading about food.  I love the feasts Brian Jacques meticulously describes for his mice.  When my nieces were young I went through Jacques and put recipes to a dozen of his dishes and we ate them and enjoyed them.  His food is delightful because it’s possible.

One of the things I hate about some books is how very dull or how very impossible the food is.  One of the make or break elements of fantasy novels is how small details bring a world to life or kill it dead.  In fantasy novels where the voyage is great and arduous, the food is more likely to kill it dead than bring it to life. 

This is where consulting a food historian can make a difference.  Since I’m the only food historian at this computer (actually, I’m a cultural historian with most of my research being medieval, but I teach and write about food history for the same reason I love reading about food in novels and for exactly the same reason I have a stash of chocolate in my cupboard) and since I’ve been asked about this over and over, here are a few ideas to keep in mind when you’re penning your Great Fantasy Travel Masterpiece.

1.  If you need equipment for cooking, someone has to carry it.  In The Lord of the Rings, this was Sam’s job.  There was a reason he got on well with the packhorse. 

Pity there was no space in his massive post-packhorse backpack for liniment for his strained shoulders.  I expect that’s why he’s such a stoic character.  Carrying pans will create stoicism, every time.  Well, almost every time.  When it doesn’t create stoicism, the saucepans are thrown or dumped.  In which case the cooking solution is lost.  I’ve often wondered why more characters don’t starve to death en route.  Maybe more writers need to study the sad history of Burke and Wills?

2.  If you need ingredients for cooking someone has to carry them.  Or buy them.  Or buy them and carry them.  Or hunt/wild harvest/steal them and carry them. 

Not only can this lead to sore shoulders and frayed tempers (”You’re the one who said potatoes were good journey food, why do I have to carry the d* things!”), but it really delays travel.  If your travelers are nature-loving elves who live off the land, they either need an amazing capacity to digest the inedible or vast tracts of their long lives to find food.  Or maybe the trusty servant (Sam, again) has the capacity to see farmhouses and negotiate good prices for chickens (”Give me this and I won’t break your arm.”) Your historical example for this one is the armies in Spain during the Napoleonic Wars. 

3.  Staying at pubs is good.  Inns are very plausible and sensible.  Rich and good food, ready when your voyagers are.  Perfect.  Except where your travellers are going through the wilderness.  Cooked food (and beds) are a product of civilisation. 

Now, I do understand the temptation to have epic travelers journey to a town each night and stay there.  It might be related to the English roots of modern fantasy (and the socio-economic reasons behind Sam carrying saucepans comes into this too) but unless your climate and mountains and other cool-looking things resemble the south of England and you have the population density to match, it just can’t happen. 

There is unlikely to be hot stew waiting at happy inns (or dark and dangerous inns) in desolate regions.  Why?  Because the innkeeper would go out of business in three months, tops.  Inns needs supplies and they need daily custom, not just occasion epic travellers.  They’re on busy roads and in busy regions and usually in towns, not in the lorn wilderness.  This makes gentle travel terrific for some novels and rather less terrific for others.

4.  Real-life epic travelers in the wild used to prepare majorly for their journeys.  They didn’t just take off.  They couldn’t.  For one thing, they couldn’t trust to their faithful mobile phone (or fantasy equivalent) to get them out of trouble (the ‘ring a friend’ solution to big fat problems). 

 One of the things they prepared was travel food.  There are guidelines you can get hold of from explorations in the nineteenth century and those guidelines will give you a very good idea of what sort of equipment your people can realistically take with them and, more importantly, what sort of food. 

My favourite authentic travel food is a soup that’s so rich that it could be cut into squares.  All you need to do is heat some water (boil it if you want to be safe from odd gastric illnesses) and then you have a meal*.

Compare this with the standard stew that travelers eat in fantasy novels.

Big equipment, big preparation and even bigger cooking time.  If you can’t have soup, then at least you can have Johnny cakes, which was classic swaggie food until quite recently.  A bit of flour, a twist of salt and a small pan and you were right as rain for travel.  Bored, badly nourished, but right as rain.

One day I might write a story where epic travellers insist on carrying their equipment and wild harvesting and eating stew and being truly colourful and properly epic.  The end of the world will have come well before they reach their destination, of course, but they won’t care.  This is because that big pot and the dishes they eat out of and the amount of cooking they have to do will wear them out well before then. 

*I have a recipe for this soup.  Seriously.  If you want it, come and visit at my regular blog or my food history blog and ask politely. 

Gillian Polack is a historian, a writer and an educator. She’s also a regular at the Voyager Message Board.

Just thought I would share some excitement from Voyager’s Evil Headquarters - apparently a fabulous Voyager author is going to be surprising us at HQ with a visit on Thursday! Who? I don’t know … as it’s top secret. As to who she’ll be surprising, well, at HQ we have a group that meets on a monthly basis, called the Cabin Crew, and we sit around one of those wonderful big boardroom tables and plot world domination chat about Voyager books and why we love them (and eat sandwiches) and discuss upcoming author signings, covers we like/don’t like and so on … it’s very interesting to see how people in a company can have so much in common - and alot of them do some very interesting things at and away from work. We’ll be having some guest blog posts from some of the people who work with Voyager, or who do things that Voyager fans might find interesting! In his alternate life, one of the Cabin Crew members is a swordfighting swashbuckling lad who will be blogging about swords and possibly sorcery. So keep an eye out! (and hopefully it will all be fun and games and no one will lose that eye)

One of our PZ message board members, Gillian, will be blogging on her work as a historian, and it will definitely be interesting to see what she talks about, those of you trying to work out settings for medieval plots will no doubt glean plenty from what she says. And on that note … yesterday I did a 20 kilometre walk (training for the Oxfam trailblazer) and have completely reassessed the likelihood of fantasy characters who walk for days on end, cross country and climbing up to mountain passes etc. It HURTS to walk for that long (we did 5 hours of scrambling up and down rocks and fallen trees! IT HURTS ALOT. And it’s exhausting, and if I were a fantasy character then the bad guys would have long ago caught up to me and put an end to my muscle-aching misery. Just an insight!

I’ll see if I can take some pics of our guest author and put them up later in the week, in the mean time, look out for some great posts from people who love fantasy, a guest post from Fiona McIntosh and of course, the fabulous Fallon Friday post from Jennifer, who has got a tiny bit of spare time somewhere now that she’s finished writing The Chaos Crystal (see her last Fallon Friday post to see just what else she does in an ordinary day)!

Taelian

Wolfgang from Faster Than Light is keeping Voyager authors busy!

Tony Shillitoe is having a chat with Wolfgang on Wednesday May 7th at 11.10am WA Time

Karen Miller will be doing an interview on Wednesday 14 May at 10am WA Time (was previously 7 May)

If you’re not in WA then Faster Than Light offers a podcast. And to check out the time differences between the Australian states, click here.

I think some people have a romantic notion of writers… that the only way to produce a creative work is to hire a gorgeous little cottage on the west coast of Ireland, drink copious amounts of seriously good scotch and let with story flow.

I wish!

But I have finished The Chaos Crystal, book 4 of the Tide Lords series. All that is left now is for my beta readers to come back and tell me how brilliant I am if there are any typos or plot holes I missed, so I can send it in.

So I’m sure you’re wondering how I manage the creative process (well, even if you aren’t, I’m going to tell you).

Did I hire a cottage somewhere gorgeous? No, I renovated one house and moved to another. Three days before the book was finished, I thought I’d have to move again, but this turned out just be fate playing prank on me.

So, I hear you ask (at least I’m assuming that’s who the voice in my head is) what sort of things did you surround yourself with to facilitate the production of this 160K word creative epic?

Well…

·      I worked full time for a goodly portion of the writing (well, I turned up to the office every day… working?… not so much.)

·      I worked on my Masters Thesis

·      I renovated a house

·      I moved house

·      I helped nurse a kitten with 2 broken legs back to health

·      I reviewed about 30 movies

·      I drove to Melbourne and back (6000 km round trip)

·      My son got married.

·      I was shortlisted for an Aurealis award

·      I had a book launch with John Rhys Davies

·      I attended three Supanova conventions

·      I babysat my grandson everyday after school

·      I wrote 60,000 words of a new series

·      I hugged the Hulk

·      I walked two 50kg dogs for an hour a day

·      Spent five days as the jury foreman on a rape trial

·      I wrote 3 short stories

·      I blogged every day

·      I delivered 4 workshops on writing and world building

·      I did a screen-writing course

·      I had a stories published in the Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine and the Official Stargate Magazine

·      1 wrote a 40 page film treatment which nobody will let me call Attack of the Killer Drop Bears

·      And I didn’t lose or gain a single pound in all that time

Go figure…

Jennifer Fallon

As a beta reader, I can tell you that Jenny’s creative process is definitely working! The Chaos Crystal is amazing … and worth waiting for when it comes out in December and ends the Tide Lords quartet (or ‘Fallon Four’ as we in Voyager Headquarters are calling it).

In the mean time, click here to visit Jennifer Fallon’s website.

Part two of our Q&A with Kylie Chan, author of White Tiger, Red Phoenix, Blue Dragon.

Do you ever wish we had gods running around the way that Xuan Wu and co do in your series?
Oh goodness no! Particularly the White Tiger, could you image the trouble that one would cause? And Chinese believe that when you die, you are judged by courts in Hell, and punished by demons – tortured, in fact – for all the crimes that you’ve committed during your earthly lifetime. Then you’re given a drink that erases your memory, and you’re sent back up to Earth until you get it right. Doesn’t really sound terribly fair to me!

Did you always intend to write a second trilogy or could you just not bear to leave Emma in such a plight?

I originally planned to write one trilogy, three books. The first book grew and spread and became the first trilogy. So the story that I’d planned for one book grew into three! The story for the second book will take up the second three books. I can’t help it, it just keeps flooding out, and the characters take over the story and make it more complex, and interesting things keep happening.

So I never planned to leave Emma where she is, but I never planned for her to take quite so long getting there. And she still has a very long way to go. I’ve left her in an extremely complicated predicament at the end of book three, and now we have the journey to put her life back together and to return her most loved people to it.

Do you actually know any of the fighting styles that Emma and John use, or are they purely from [non-violent!] research?

My son is a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, I’ve never actually practised that Art but I attended every single lesson when he was there (I can now count to ten in Korean).

At the moment, I don’t have the time to practise my Arts. I am looking around for a new school to join though, I know exactly which styles I’d like to pick up again and it’s just a matter of finding classes that fit in with my extremely busy schedule of writer, worker, and mother.

I am a senior belt in Wing Chun. This is the martial art that Bruce Lee practised (until he controversially modified it into his own style called ‘Jeet Kwun Do’). It’s a Southern Chinese style, ‘soft’ and ‘close’.

‘Soft’ means that it focuses more on disabling the opponent with pressure-points and leverage rather than hard hitting (Tae Kwon Do is a ‘hard’ style, they practise a lot hitting blocks of wood, therefore Leo’s famous quote about it in book one – which I personally think is untrue and undeserved, Tae Kwon Do is a beautiful and worthwhile martial art). A top Wing Chun practitioner can disable someone and knock them to the ground without actually hitting them at all, just using their own body weight against them.

‘Close’ means that it’s not long-range kicks and punches, but close-in attacks that are through the opponent’s defences.

This is not a showy type of martial art, and the basic form, or ‘kata’, isn’t very much to look at. In fact any time I’ve performed the ‘Siu Lim Tao’ basic form for anyone who doesn’t know the style, they’ve fallen over laughing. So much for that.

I have done a lot of Chow Gar as well, ‘Gar’ means ‘family’ or ‘clan’, so this is the Chow Clan style. It focuses on showy animal-based forms (‘tiger’ and ‘crane’) and has a lot of really fun weapon forms. My sifu (master) insisted on me practising with nunchucks and doing the nunchuck form even though chucks and I really don’t get along. I never got to learn double sword, but my double stick form (with a broomstick from Woolworths that I’d sawn in half, way to go $2.49 for a lethal weapon) was complete and I was often called up to demonstrate it. I was about a third of the way through learning the double daggers and the single sword, so I’d love to get back into that and learn the complete forms.

I learned a Yang Tai Chi set (There are five basic styles of Tai Chi, each named after the clan who created it, and a couple that are ‘national standard’ sets in China) and I would love to learn some of the other Tai Chi forms. Once again it’s just a matter of finding a school that fits in with my schedule.

I’m not as accomplished a practitioner of the Arts as I would like to be, I don’t have a black belt in anything, and I wouldn’t call myself advanced level, merely intermediate. I hope to get back into it, though, and finish that black belt!

I’d also love to try some other styles, such as the Japanese forms of Karate (long hard) and Aikido (extremely soft). There simply aren’t enough hours in the day to do as much as I would like.

Kylie Chan
Visit Kylie’s website or visit Voyager Online for news on other great fantasy authors.