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hrjOne of the exciting things about moving on to the release-and-promotion stage of being an author is becoming part of a larger community of writers, reviewers, and readers. Through a chance intersection on Twitter, I met Tami Veldura when she was looking for an interview subject for an e-mail newsletter she writes for her fans. She writes in various intersections of the sets of fantasy, science fiction, and gay romance. If you enjoy the interview, please check out her blog and website and see if it's to your taste. The interview will be in the newsletter she sends out at the end of January but she gave me permission to post a copy on my own blog in advance.
Tami was delightful to work with on this interview -- I hope all my publicity contacts are as much fun.
* * *
Tami: Gender balance (or rather, the lack thereof) in all of our media forms is becoming a major discussion. Writing in the GLBTQ space tends to bring that into very stark relief. Have you ever found yourself correcting gender imbalance in your work? Has the awareness of a need for balance become stronger since you've started writing lesbian fiction?
Heather: I find as the years go by, I’ve become less and less interested in media (books, movies, etc.) in which women are not the primary focus. There was a time in my life when I wrote stories with male primary characters, but not anymore, and not in any of the stories that I’ve published. So there’s definitely gender imbalance in my work, but it’s an imbalance in favor of the feminine. It’s not that I don’t include male characters--in fact, if you count distinct named characters in Daughter of Mystery, there are 55 women to 90 men. But the women are primary. They are the protagonists, the key social context, the everyday antagonists and friends, the networks and hazards. This continues with the sequels (with one nearly finished in first draft and another handful sketched out hazily). One of the overarching themes of the Alpennian stories is women’s friendships and women’s bonds with each other: familial and social as well as romantic. The books in the series will be bound together, not simply by the carry-over of specific characters, but because each set of protagonists will be drawn into the story and drawn into each other’s lives via their ties to other women.
If, instead of counting distinct people, you index importance by counting the distinct characters named in each chapter and add them up, then the women come up on top by a significant margin, despite starting with a numeric imbalance. (I should mention that I’m a serious numbers geek, among everything else.)
So I wouldn’t say that I’ve become any more aware of a need for balance in my writing; rather my writing is a way of creating the sort of balance that satisfies my own soul.
Writing in an early 19th century historic setting, a story about two women of a certain class will naturally be a story about women’s lives and women’s friendships. The everyday lives of women in this setting were more gender-segregated than we’re accustomed to. And although both my primary characters interact with men regularly, those interactions are always a marked state and fraught with social hazards. One of the fun things about writing lesbian romance in historic settings is that it can often be much easier to justify a homosocial environment than it would be in a contemporary setting.
Tami: You went to school for Zoology but later dove headlong into linguistics for 2 advanced degrees. Have you found a linguistics background changes the way you write or read? Has it been helpful or a hindrance to your creative process?
Heather: Linguistic awareness pervades everything I do when writing. It’s not just a matter of individual word choices. Having a background in linguistics gives me a lot of tools for analyzing the mechanics of how the story does or doesn’t work, and how to fix it when it doesn’t. I don’t have to rely on whether the structure “feels right”, I have a good chance of comparing the “right” and “wrong” sections and being able to come up with a structured description of what it is I’m doing when it’s “right” so that I can keep doing it more often.
Let me give a specific practical example. The point of view in Daughter of Mystery is structured as a very tight “camera view” third person, alternating between the two protagonists. In a particular character’s chapter, all descriptions, all knowledge, all relationships and understanding should be consistent with the person whose POV it is. When I’d finished the first draft and started doing revisions, I noticed that the way the POV character was referenced in the text felt inconsistent: sometimes very close and intimate, sometimes very distanced. When I analyzed the two “feels”, I realized that it felt “wrong” when I referred to the POV character by name unless it was as the agent of the verb. So in one of Barbara’s chapters, I could say “Barbara said ... Barbara turned ... Barbara felt ...” but I couldn’t say “So-and-so told Barbara ... So-and-so touched Barbara ...” I did a lot of rewriting to stick to that rule, but I feel it made a major difference in the stylistic consistency.
On the story side rather than the writing side, I tend to add a lot of language-related scene setting. Many of the characters are multi-lingual, which is normal and expected in their historic setting. There are passing references to code-switching (using different languages in different social contexts) or to the fact that upper-class entertainments would often be in French or Italian rather than the local language. An analysis of language usage and language history are key elements in Margerit’s explorations of the ceremonies involved in the Mysteries of the Saints, so language becomes a key plot element on occasion.
Another way in which linguistics is important in my writing is an attention to the sociological importance of names and forms of address and reference. My setting is a socially-stratified society, where class, family relationships, and the intimacy of personal relationships are important drivers in the choice of language people use in talking to or talking about each other. So there are a lot of layers of information in the text about the relationship of the characters to each other and how they feel about each other embedded in their language. You can trace the development of how Barbara feels about Margerit by when and why she slips up and refers to her aloud by her given name.
Tami: I subscribe to the idea that one should never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Your debut novel is historical (with a sequel and 3rd in the works) and much of your education and employment is research focused. Do you find it difficult to take historical data and translate it into a story that may not be accurate enough to pass the dissertation review?
Heather: It helps that I’m writing historic fantasy, not strict historic fiction! I prefer to keep my plots and settings as solidly grounded in actual history as I reasonably can, simply because I feel that makes for a better story. But my most important goals are to write a “fun read”, to write about characters I can identify with deeply, and to write about that subset of possible history in which my characters can have their adventures and have their happy endings.
I have some trunk novels (that I hope to get back to) that are more strictly historic in that they don’t include the magical elements present in Daughter of Mystery (and aren’t set in invented locations). But the “history” that I’m using as inspiration includes historic literature and historic imagination. I expand my sources to include things that people in history considered to be true, or considered to be possible, not simply what we would now consider to be strict historic truth. So I’ll cheerfully write about Viking maiden-warriors, or cross-dressing Arthurian knights, or fantasize about exactly what the trobairitz Bieiris did with Maria beyond writing poems addressed to her.
And history is wider and full of more wonderful things than your high school history books summarized. One of my long-term projects is to gather together a “sourcebook” of historic motifs (real-life, literary, and artistic) that can be useful to modern authors in creating lesbian historic fiction. So far I’ve compiled essays on the topics of cross-dressing/passing women and on sexual activity between women. I focus primarily on Europe with some forays into the Near East and primarily on the Roman Empire up through the Renaissance. There’s a lot of really fascinating information out there if you know where to look. And there’s no need to do extreme violence to historic fact in order to create lesbian historic romances that will satisfy modern readers. It’s more of a challenge than simply making stuff up, but I love a challenge.
Truth shouldn’t get in the way of a good story, but a good story can be ruined for me by unnecessary invention or complete disregard for truth. In the same way that I enjoy strict-meter poetry because the ability to create beautiful language within a formal structure is just that much more delicious, I enjoy the challenge of writing an entertaining and enjoyable story that also is based firmly in factual history and finds the possible happy stories that can exist within it. They may not be typical stories, but what novel is ever based on the typical?
So to the question, I’m not writing stories that would pass a dissertation review because I’m writing stories, not histories. But neither do I find it limiting to write historic fiction that is grounded solidly in historic fact. Indeed, I often get my best inspirations from historic fact and the story grows from there.
Tami: You have spent extensive time learning the details of older civilizations, particularly in their languages. How do you keep details that might be intellectually interesting but are unhelpful to the story out of your fiction? Have your studies ever spawned ideas for stories?
Heather: My best reality-check for not indulging in “researcher’s disease” is my beta-readers. I have a collection of smart, analytical women who are perfectly willing and happy to tell me when I need to prune something back. But I also know how dreadful it is when I’m reading someone else’s novel and trip over undigested chunks of background research. Sometimes you have to write it in during the first draft just to keep the juices flowing and then cut it out in the re-write. If anything, I worry that I leave out too much of what I “know” about my setting, forgetting that my readers don’t have access to the inside of my skull.
Historic research is one of the richest sources of inspiration for my stories. The primary focus of my dissertation research was Medieval Welsh texts of the 9th through 15th centuries, which was an outgrowth of an interest in pre-modern Welsh history in general. My file cabinets have an entire series of outlines and beginnings of drafts for lesbian historic romances set at various points of Welsh history. (Welsh princess kidnapped by Viking warrior-maid! Bard’s daughter comforts the lonely wife of a crusader! Daughter of a Welsh mercenary in the Hundred Years War returns home in male disguise to claim her patrimony and is trapped into marrying the daughter of the man being displaced by her return.) The larger field of medieval European literature is also full of inspiration. Some day I plan to write a novelization of the tale of Yde and Olive that has the “right” ending. Yde gains such renown as a knight in male disguise that she is offered the hand of the emperor’s daughter in marriage. In the medieval tale, the situation is resolved either by a magical sex-change or by a last-minute spouse-substitution, but it doesn’t take much rewriting at all to end things differently. (Tami: I NEED to know when this story is available to read!)
I’m strongly inspired by the research and writings of historian Judith M. Bennett as discussed in her seminal article "’Lesbian-Like' and the Social History of Lesbianisms" (Journal of the History of Sexuality : 9:1-2; 1-24). (Yes, my interview has citations and footnotes.) (Tami: article is free as a PDF) To over-simplify, she believes in researching lesbians in history not strictly in terms of women proven to have had sexual relations with women, but also in terms of the spaces and opportunities in women’s lives where lesbian relationships could have existed. Contexts that created opportunities for lesbian relationships whether or not we have evidence that specific women took advantage of them.
One of the things that provides me with continuing inspiration from historic sources is the annual medieval studies conference at Kalamazoo, Michigan. I get to hear all the latest research in women’s history and gender studies as well as being free to take in my other favorite research topics such as textile and clothing history. (And the medieval studies conference is where I met my girlfriend, so there are added benefits.)
Tami: Most people would find a historical romance far too much to take on as their debut novel, yet here you are with Daughter of Mystery. Can you tell us a bit about why this story came to be? Did you find the drafting process to be much different than that of your nonfiction publications?
Heather: Daughter of Mystery is far from my first writing project. I’ve been writing stories more or less since I was seventeen. So that’s almost forty years of practice! At various times I tried marketing my writing, but for much of my life I was writing mainly to get the stories out of my head. (It was getting crowded in there.) I got serious about writing professionally when I was in grad school and had a part-time job as an editorial assistant at Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine. That experience not only gave me a community of writers to bounce energy and ideas off of, but it gave me some valuable opportunities at a time when my writing skills were up to the task of taking advantage of them. I made my first professional sale to Marion for one of her Sword and Sorceress anthologies (Tami: still running, submit today) and made my first sale to someone other than Marion when a phone call came in to the magazine offices from Mike Ashley looking for a story for his anthology Chronicles of the Holy Grail that took a Welsh angle on the grail mythology.
But I took a bit of a break from working on novels while I was writing my dissertation, and when I came back to fiction after that, I was unhappy with my approach to writing longer works and wanted to experiment with an entirely new process. Daughter of Mystery started out with a fragment of a dream involving a young woman who was some sort of dependent on an older, wealthy man who was dying while they were far from home. To provide for her after his death, he gave the woman into the control of a stranger--something she doesn't discover until his will is read. Obviously much of the “feel” of that dream-fragment was altered as the story expanded, but I always write best when I begin from a single emotionally-charged scene.
Previously, I’d tended to plot out stories in detail, create them in my imagination in whole, and then start by writing the “good parts” first. This tended to result in a few good scenes strung together by some very thin gruel indeed. So as an experiment, I held myself strictly to starting at the beginning and writing straight through to the end, and to not visualizing the story in detail more than a few scenes ahead. (I have all sorts of wonderful visual metaphors for my process, especially “surfing the wave of story”.) I also persuaded myself that I wasn't writing a novel, I was indulging in an exercise in the writing process. In any event, it worked and what grew out of it was the best thing I’ve ever written.
It’s funny you should ask about how writing novels compares to my non-fiction writing. My day-job involves writing industrial failure investigations and there are some surprising parallels in the process. I may start out with a general notion of the shape of the story/investigation but not know entirely how I’m going to get from point A to point B. I usually find it useful to write from beginning to end, even if I don’t know the details of the middle, so in both types of writing I often stick in place-holders for data, scenes, etc. that need to belong there for the proper structure and flow of the document, so that I won’t get bogged down waiting for the details to be available. And both processes involve lots of spreadsheets to keep track of those details. I live and die by my spreadsheets.
Tami: I'd like to diverge into your past a bit. Can you give me a day in the life of an Editorial Assistant?
Heather: Well, it was a very small office--a total of five people and only two of us were focused solely on the magazine--so there was a bit of almost everything. About the only thing I wasn’t directly involved in was submissions processing. There was answering correspondence, including selecting items for the letters column; proofing, copy-editing, and formatting stories and columns after they’d been contracted for; and helping out with paste-up. In the course of the four years I worked there, we went from doing literal paste-up on layout boards to handling everything electronically in PageMaker and handing it off to the printer as an electronic file. We also did our own subscription fulfillment, so every quarter everyone pitched in to stuff envelopes, stick on address labels, and bundle them up by zip code.
Tami: I adore spreadsheets, but more making them than using them. Can you elaborate a bit about yours for writing?
Heather: Fairly early on in the process of writing Daughter of Mystery, I needed a way to keep track of characters, place names, and the invented terminology of the fantastic elements of the setting. Eventually this expanded to tracking which chapters each character appeared in, so I could tell whether I might need to re-introduce them when they next appeared. I also needed a fairly detailed timeline to keep track of what the characters were doing as well as events happening off-stage that needed to be accounted for. And because this is an alternate history, not a completely invented world, I needed to keep track of what real-world events were happening at the same time that might possibly have repercussions in my story. (At one point I ended up shifting the entire timeline of the story by about a decade to relate it more plausibly to the Napoleonic wars.)
The other major spreadsheet I used was for generating names and vocabulary for my invented culture so that I was creating a consistent “look and feel” that was still distinct from any actual European language. (That could be an entire essay in itself.) Lately I’ve added EverNote to my arsenal, which has been useful for setting up “character sketches” for all the major characters, including clips from historic portraits to use as a visual touchstone when describing them.
Tami: Was there anything unexpectedly difficult about the drafting, editing, or publication of this novel? Anything your non-fiction experience simply didn't prepare you for?
Heather: In terms of story-telling, the most unexpected challenge I had to deal with was the religious aspects of the story. This is a story about people who are living in a deeply traditionally religious society and where a major plot point (the magical “mysteries of the saints”) are a twist on genuine historic Catholic beliefs and practices regarding the intercessory powers of patron saints. (The twist is that those intercessory powers manifest a lot more concretely in the world of the story than they ever have in our world.) Now, I’m an atheist and my family background is Quaker, so I have a decided outsider’s view of traditional Catholic practice. But my challenge was to create characters who are sincere and thoughtful believers. Fortunately my beta-readers included several people who could nudge me in the places where I hadn’t got it quite right, but that’s the world-building aspect that I’m most proud of having done successfully.
In terms of the overall process of creating, selling, and publishing a novel, I didn’t run into any serious road bumps. I’ve been hanging out socially with professional authors for decades now and paying close attention to the business in general. And I always do lots of background research on any project I tackle. I had a good idea of what to expect and what it was reasonable to aim for. While this is my first long piece of fiction, it isn’t my first book sale. I wrote Baby Names for Dummies for the Wiley “Dummies” series (under a pen name). Daughter of Mystery is considerably shorter than my doctoral dissertation, involved much less background research, and didn’t take as long to write. So, all in all, I think I was thoroughly prepared for the project.
Tami: Your editor, Katherine Forrest, sounds like exactly the right person to polish a novel like this, no less than the ‘founding mother of lesbian fiction’ according to her bio. How was she to work with? Did both of your visions for this novel align well?
Heather: My interactions with Katherine were astoundingly positive, given what you hear about editors in these days of tight publication budgets. Her editing was thorough enough to tell me she’d taken the job seriously, and light enough to encourage me that the writing was as good as I thought it was. And the more substantial edits she asked for were ones I agreed with thoroughly. I don’t know to what extent she might have a distinct “vision” for the novel. It felt like she was quite content with my own vision and was focused on polishing up a few minor rough edges.
My interactions with the entire Bella staff have been nothing but positive and professional and I feel validated in having put them first on the list when I was at the point of sending Daughter of Mystery out for consideration.
Tami: You're working on book two, now. Is this a direct sequel to Daughter of Mystery? Can we get some clues as to what new dramas are playing out?
Heather: It is a direct sequel in that it continues the same characters and settings, but there will be a new romantic focus. The original seed for the plot was to look around at the secondary characters in Daughter of Mystery and ask, “Who deserves her own romance?” The answer seemed obvious, and the history and circumstances of that character gave me an instant head-start on the non-romance elements of the plot. I don’t want to give too much away because the starting point of Book 2 reveals a number of things about the ending of Book 1, but the romantic couple from Daughter of Mystery are still prominent, political intrigue still abounds, and this time the fantastic element focuses on alchemy and the mystical properties of gemstones. But Daughter of Mystery is entirely complete and wrapped-up when it concludes. I have no plans to write cliff-hangers that carry over from book to book. I love writing complex, multi-layered plots with a lot of background detail that provides jumping-off places for future developments, whether later in the same story or in a future book. By the end of Book 2 you will have met one of the romantic protagonists for Book 3 as well as several other key figures in that story...but you may not know it yet.
Tami: What does the future look like for you? More long-form fiction?
Heather: I do have an idea for a series of connected novels set in my invented country of Alpennia. I have plot-threads currently planted that will take a total of at least five books to complete (at which point, no doubt, there will be even more possible stories set up). I also have an idea for an Alpennian story set in the 15th century, inspired by historic events and figures that are mentioned in the 19th century stories. The plan is to write it after Book 3, so that still has some time to percolate. I already have a short story that’s a sort of prequel to Daughter of Mystery that I tossed off for a lark, but I’m waiting to release it until the novel has been out for a while because it’s best appreciated once you already know the characters.
Now that I’m back in the writing habit, I’d like to get back to short fiction interspersed with the novels. There are a couple of stories that might best be described as “what if the medieval Welsh Mabinogion included lesbians?” that I’d like to pull out and polish up a bit. I actually sold the first one to Jinx Beers for her Lesbian Short Fiction quarterly but the magazine folded due to health issues before it could appear. (Tami: Autobiography for Jinx on amazon) And I’d like to wrap up the series of short stories I wrote for Sword and Sorceress with a final novella-ish piece and see if I can find a home for the whole collection -- ideally while shapeshifters are still in fashion, though mine definitely don’t fit in the “urban fantasy” category.
After that? Who knows. It would be fun to go back to the medieval Welsh historicals that I’d set aside and see what I can do with them now. Jumping genres entirely, I have an itch to write a modern murder mystery set at in a biotech company, but that one hasn’t grabbed me by the throat and demanded, “Write me!” yet. Let’s just say that ideas are not my limiting factor!
...
Margerit Sovitre did not expect to inherit Baron Saveze’s fortunes—even less his bodyguard, a ruthlessly efficient swordswoman known only as Barbara. Wealth suddenly makes Margerit a highly eligible heiress and buys her the enmity of the new Baron. He had expected to inherit all, and now eyes her fortune with open envy.
Barbara proudly served as the old Baron’s duelist but she had expected his death to make her a free woman. Bitterness turns to determination when she finds herself the only force that stands between Margerit and the new Baron’s greed.
At first Margerit protests the need for Barbara’s services, but soon she cannot imagine sending Barbara away. And Barbara’s duty has become something far more hazardous to her heart than the point of a sword. But greater dangers loom than one man’s hatred—the Prince of Alpennia is ill. Deadly intrigue surrounds the succession and the rituals of divine power known as The Mysteries of the Saints.
Heather Rose Jones debuts with a sweeping story rich in intrigue and the clash of loyalties and love. She can be found on twitter, facebook, and check out her website for more about her. Daughter of Mystery is available directly from Bella Books.
Tami was delightful to work with on this interview -- I hope all my publicity contacts are as much fun.
* * *
Tami: Gender balance (or rather, the lack thereof) in all of our media forms is becoming a major discussion. Writing in the GLBTQ space tends to bring that into very stark relief. Have you ever found yourself correcting gender imbalance in your work? Has the awareness of a need for balance become stronger since you've started writing lesbian fiction?
Heather: I find as the years go by, I’ve become less and less interested in media (books, movies, etc.) in which women are not the primary focus. There was a time in my life when I wrote stories with male primary characters, but not anymore, and not in any of the stories that I’ve published. So there’s definitely gender imbalance in my work, but it’s an imbalance in favor of the feminine. It’s not that I don’t include male characters--in fact, if you count distinct named characters in Daughter of Mystery, there are 55 women to 90 men. But the women are primary. They are the protagonists, the key social context, the everyday antagonists and friends, the networks and hazards. This continues with the sequels (with one nearly finished in first draft and another handful sketched out hazily). One of the overarching themes of the Alpennian stories is women’s friendships and women’s bonds with each other: familial and social as well as romantic. The books in the series will be bound together, not simply by the carry-over of specific characters, but because each set of protagonists will be drawn into the story and drawn into each other’s lives via their ties to other women.
If, instead of counting distinct people, you index importance by counting the distinct characters named in each chapter and add them up, then the women come up on top by a significant margin, despite starting with a numeric imbalance. (I should mention that I’m a serious numbers geek, among everything else.)
So I wouldn’t say that I’ve become any more aware of a need for balance in my writing; rather my writing is a way of creating the sort of balance that satisfies my own soul.
Writing in an early 19th century historic setting, a story about two women of a certain class will naturally be a story about women’s lives and women’s friendships. The everyday lives of women in this setting were more gender-segregated than we’re accustomed to. And although both my primary characters interact with men regularly, those interactions are always a marked state and fraught with social hazards. One of the fun things about writing lesbian romance in historic settings is that it can often be much easier to justify a homosocial environment than it would be in a contemporary setting.
Tami: You went to school for Zoology but later dove headlong into linguistics for 2 advanced degrees. Have you found a linguistics background changes the way you write or read? Has it been helpful or a hindrance to your creative process?
Heather: Linguistic awareness pervades everything I do when writing. It’s not just a matter of individual word choices. Having a background in linguistics gives me a lot of tools for analyzing the mechanics of how the story does or doesn’t work, and how to fix it when it doesn’t. I don’t have to rely on whether the structure “feels right”, I have a good chance of comparing the “right” and “wrong” sections and being able to come up with a structured description of what it is I’m doing when it’s “right” so that I can keep doing it more often.
Let me give a specific practical example. The point of view in Daughter of Mystery is structured as a very tight “camera view” third person, alternating between the two protagonists. In a particular character’s chapter, all descriptions, all knowledge, all relationships and understanding should be consistent with the person whose POV it is. When I’d finished the first draft and started doing revisions, I noticed that the way the POV character was referenced in the text felt inconsistent: sometimes very close and intimate, sometimes very distanced. When I analyzed the two “feels”, I realized that it felt “wrong” when I referred to the POV character by name unless it was as the agent of the verb. So in one of Barbara’s chapters, I could say “Barbara said ... Barbara turned ... Barbara felt ...” but I couldn’t say “So-and-so told Barbara ... So-and-so touched Barbara ...” I did a lot of rewriting to stick to that rule, but I feel it made a major difference in the stylistic consistency.
On the story side rather than the writing side, I tend to add a lot of language-related scene setting. Many of the characters are multi-lingual, which is normal and expected in their historic setting. There are passing references to code-switching (using different languages in different social contexts) or to the fact that upper-class entertainments would often be in French or Italian rather than the local language. An analysis of language usage and language history are key elements in Margerit’s explorations of the ceremonies involved in the Mysteries of the Saints, so language becomes a key plot element on occasion.
Another way in which linguistics is important in my writing is an attention to the sociological importance of names and forms of address and reference. My setting is a socially-stratified society, where class, family relationships, and the intimacy of personal relationships are important drivers in the choice of language people use in talking to or talking about each other. So there are a lot of layers of information in the text about the relationship of the characters to each other and how they feel about each other embedded in their language. You can trace the development of how Barbara feels about Margerit by when and why she slips up and refers to her aloud by her given name.
Tami: I subscribe to the idea that one should never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Your debut novel is historical (with a sequel and 3rd in the works) and much of your education and employment is research focused. Do you find it difficult to take historical data and translate it into a story that may not be accurate enough to pass the dissertation review?
Heather: It helps that I’m writing historic fantasy, not strict historic fiction! I prefer to keep my plots and settings as solidly grounded in actual history as I reasonably can, simply because I feel that makes for a better story. But my most important goals are to write a “fun read”, to write about characters I can identify with deeply, and to write about that subset of possible history in which my characters can have their adventures and have their happy endings.
I have some trunk novels (that I hope to get back to) that are more strictly historic in that they don’t include the magical elements present in Daughter of Mystery (and aren’t set in invented locations). But the “history” that I’m using as inspiration includes historic literature and historic imagination. I expand my sources to include things that people in history considered to be true, or considered to be possible, not simply what we would now consider to be strict historic truth. So I’ll cheerfully write about Viking maiden-warriors, or cross-dressing Arthurian knights, or fantasize about exactly what the trobairitz Bieiris did with Maria beyond writing poems addressed to her.
And history is wider and full of more wonderful things than your high school history books summarized. One of my long-term projects is to gather together a “sourcebook” of historic motifs (real-life, literary, and artistic) that can be useful to modern authors in creating lesbian historic fiction. So far I’ve compiled essays on the topics of cross-dressing/passing women and on sexual activity between women. I focus primarily on Europe with some forays into the Near East and primarily on the Roman Empire up through the Renaissance. There’s a lot of really fascinating information out there if you know where to look. And there’s no need to do extreme violence to historic fact in order to create lesbian historic romances that will satisfy modern readers. It’s more of a challenge than simply making stuff up, but I love a challenge.
Truth shouldn’t get in the way of a good story, but a good story can be ruined for me by unnecessary invention or complete disregard for truth. In the same way that I enjoy strict-meter poetry because the ability to create beautiful language within a formal structure is just that much more delicious, I enjoy the challenge of writing an entertaining and enjoyable story that also is based firmly in factual history and finds the possible happy stories that can exist within it. They may not be typical stories, but what novel is ever based on the typical?
So to the question, I’m not writing stories that would pass a dissertation review because I’m writing stories, not histories. But neither do I find it limiting to write historic fiction that is grounded solidly in historic fact. Indeed, I often get my best inspirations from historic fact and the story grows from there.
Tami: You have spent extensive time learning the details of older civilizations, particularly in their languages. How do you keep details that might be intellectually interesting but are unhelpful to the story out of your fiction? Have your studies ever spawned ideas for stories?
Heather: My best reality-check for not indulging in “researcher’s disease” is my beta-readers. I have a collection of smart, analytical women who are perfectly willing and happy to tell me when I need to prune something back. But I also know how dreadful it is when I’m reading someone else’s novel and trip over undigested chunks of background research. Sometimes you have to write it in during the first draft just to keep the juices flowing and then cut it out in the re-write. If anything, I worry that I leave out too much of what I “know” about my setting, forgetting that my readers don’t have access to the inside of my skull.
Historic research is one of the richest sources of inspiration for my stories. The primary focus of my dissertation research was Medieval Welsh texts of the 9th through 15th centuries, which was an outgrowth of an interest in pre-modern Welsh history in general. My file cabinets have an entire series of outlines and beginnings of drafts for lesbian historic romances set at various points of Welsh history. (Welsh princess kidnapped by Viking warrior-maid! Bard’s daughter comforts the lonely wife of a crusader! Daughter of a Welsh mercenary in the Hundred Years War returns home in male disguise to claim her patrimony and is trapped into marrying the daughter of the man being displaced by her return.) The larger field of medieval European literature is also full of inspiration. Some day I plan to write a novelization of the tale of Yde and Olive that has the “right” ending. Yde gains such renown as a knight in male disguise that she is offered the hand of the emperor’s daughter in marriage. In the medieval tale, the situation is resolved either by a magical sex-change or by a last-minute spouse-substitution, but it doesn’t take much rewriting at all to end things differently. (Tami: I NEED to know when this story is available to read!)
I’m strongly inspired by the research and writings of historian Judith M. Bennett as discussed in her seminal article "’Lesbian-Like' and the Social History of Lesbianisms" (Journal of the History of Sexuality : 9:1-2; 1-24). (Yes, my interview has citations and footnotes.) (Tami: article is free as a PDF) To over-simplify, she believes in researching lesbians in history not strictly in terms of women proven to have had sexual relations with women, but also in terms of the spaces and opportunities in women’s lives where lesbian relationships could have existed. Contexts that created opportunities for lesbian relationships whether or not we have evidence that specific women took advantage of them.
One of the things that provides me with continuing inspiration from historic sources is the annual medieval studies conference at Kalamazoo, Michigan. I get to hear all the latest research in women’s history and gender studies as well as being free to take in my other favorite research topics such as textile and clothing history. (And the medieval studies conference is where I met my girlfriend, so there are added benefits.)
Tami: Most people would find a historical romance far too much to take on as their debut novel, yet here you are with Daughter of Mystery. Can you tell us a bit about why this story came to be? Did you find the drafting process to be much different than that of your nonfiction publications?
Heather: Daughter of Mystery is far from my first writing project. I’ve been writing stories more or less since I was seventeen. So that’s almost forty years of practice! At various times I tried marketing my writing, but for much of my life I was writing mainly to get the stories out of my head. (It was getting crowded in there.) I got serious about writing professionally when I was in grad school and had a part-time job as an editorial assistant at Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine. That experience not only gave me a community of writers to bounce energy and ideas off of, but it gave me some valuable opportunities at a time when my writing skills were up to the task of taking advantage of them. I made my first professional sale to Marion for one of her Sword and Sorceress anthologies (Tami: still running, submit today) and made my first sale to someone other than Marion when a phone call came in to the magazine offices from Mike Ashley looking for a story for his anthology Chronicles of the Holy Grail that took a Welsh angle on the grail mythology.
But I took a bit of a break from working on novels while I was writing my dissertation, and when I came back to fiction after that, I was unhappy with my approach to writing longer works and wanted to experiment with an entirely new process. Daughter of Mystery started out with a fragment of a dream involving a young woman who was some sort of dependent on an older, wealthy man who was dying while they were far from home. To provide for her after his death, he gave the woman into the control of a stranger--something she doesn't discover until his will is read. Obviously much of the “feel” of that dream-fragment was altered as the story expanded, but I always write best when I begin from a single emotionally-charged scene.
Previously, I’d tended to plot out stories in detail, create them in my imagination in whole, and then start by writing the “good parts” first. This tended to result in a few good scenes strung together by some very thin gruel indeed. So as an experiment, I held myself strictly to starting at the beginning and writing straight through to the end, and to not visualizing the story in detail more than a few scenes ahead. (I have all sorts of wonderful visual metaphors for my process, especially “surfing the wave of story”.) I also persuaded myself that I wasn't writing a novel, I was indulging in an exercise in the writing process. In any event, it worked and what grew out of it was the best thing I’ve ever written.
It’s funny you should ask about how writing novels compares to my non-fiction writing. My day-job involves writing industrial failure investigations and there are some surprising parallels in the process. I may start out with a general notion of the shape of the story/investigation but not know entirely how I’m going to get from point A to point B. I usually find it useful to write from beginning to end, even if I don’t know the details of the middle, so in both types of writing I often stick in place-holders for data, scenes, etc. that need to belong there for the proper structure and flow of the document, so that I won’t get bogged down waiting for the details to be available. And both processes involve lots of spreadsheets to keep track of those details. I live and die by my spreadsheets.
Tami: I'd like to diverge into your past a bit. Can you give me a day in the life of an Editorial Assistant?
Heather: Well, it was a very small office--a total of five people and only two of us were focused solely on the magazine--so there was a bit of almost everything. About the only thing I wasn’t directly involved in was submissions processing. There was answering correspondence, including selecting items for the letters column; proofing, copy-editing, and formatting stories and columns after they’d been contracted for; and helping out with paste-up. In the course of the four years I worked there, we went from doing literal paste-up on layout boards to handling everything electronically in PageMaker and handing it off to the printer as an electronic file. We also did our own subscription fulfillment, so every quarter everyone pitched in to stuff envelopes, stick on address labels, and bundle them up by zip code.
Tami: I adore spreadsheets, but more making them than using them. Can you elaborate a bit about yours for writing?
Heather: Fairly early on in the process of writing Daughter of Mystery, I needed a way to keep track of characters, place names, and the invented terminology of the fantastic elements of the setting. Eventually this expanded to tracking which chapters each character appeared in, so I could tell whether I might need to re-introduce them when they next appeared. I also needed a fairly detailed timeline to keep track of what the characters were doing as well as events happening off-stage that needed to be accounted for. And because this is an alternate history, not a completely invented world, I needed to keep track of what real-world events were happening at the same time that might possibly have repercussions in my story. (At one point I ended up shifting the entire timeline of the story by about a decade to relate it more plausibly to the Napoleonic wars.)
The other major spreadsheet I used was for generating names and vocabulary for my invented culture so that I was creating a consistent “look and feel” that was still distinct from any actual European language. (That could be an entire essay in itself.) Lately I’ve added EverNote to my arsenal, which has been useful for setting up “character sketches” for all the major characters, including clips from historic portraits to use as a visual touchstone when describing them.
Tami: Was there anything unexpectedly difficult about the drafting, editing, or publication of this novel? Anything your non-fiction experience simply didn't prepare you for?
Heather: In terms of story-telling, the most unexpected challenge I had to deal with was the religious aspects of the story. This is a story about people who are living in a deeply traditionally religious society and where a major plot point (the magical “mysteries of the saints”) are a twist on genuine historic Catholic beliefs and practices regarding the intercessory powers of patron saints. (The twist is that those intercessory powers manifest a lot more concretely in the world of the story than they ever have in our world.) Now, I’m an atheist and my family background is Quaker, so I have a decided outsider’s view of traditional Catholic practice. But my challenge was to create characters who are sincere and thoughtful believers. Fortunately my beta-readers included several people who could nudge me in the places where I hadn’t got it quite right, but that’s the world-building aspect that I’m most proud of having done successfully.
In terms of the overall process of creating, selling, and publishing a novel, I didn’t run into any serious road bumps. I’ve been hanging out socially with professional authors for decades now and paying close attention to the business in general. And I always do lots of background research on any project I tackle. I had a good idea of what to expect and what it was reasonable to aim for. While this is my first long piece of fiction, it isn’t my first book sale. I wrote Baby Names for Dummies for the Wiley “Dummies” series (under a pen name). Daughter of Mystery is considerably shorter than my doctoral dissertation, involved much less background research, and didn’t take as long to write. So, all in all, I think I was thoroughly prepared for the project.
Tami: Your editor, Katherine Forrest, sounds like exactly the right person to polish a novel like this, no less than the ‘founding mother of lesbian fiction’ according to her bio. How was she to work with? Did both of your visions for this novel align well?
Heather: My interactions with Katherine were astoundingly positive, given what you hear about editors in these days of tight publication budgets. Her editing was thorough enough to tell me she’d taken the job seriously, and light enough to encourage me that the writing was as good as I thought it was. And the more substantial edits she asked for were ones I agreed with thoroughly. I don’t know to what extent she might have a distinct “vision” for the novel. It felt like she was quite content with my own vision and was focused on polishing up a few minor rough edges.
My interactions with the entire Bella staff have been nothing but positive and professional and I feel validated in having put them first on the list when I was at the point of sending Daughter of Mystery out for consideration.
Tami: You're working on book two, now. Is this a direct sequel to Daughter of Mystery? Can we get some clues as to what new dramas are playing out?
Heather: It is a direct sequel in that it continues the same characters and settings, but there will be a new romantic focus. The original seed for the plot was to look around at the secondary characters in Daughter of Mystery and ask, “Who deserves her own romance?” The answer seemed obvious, and the history and circumstances of that character gave me an instant head-start on the non-romance elements of the plot. I don’t want to give too much away because the starting point of Book 2 reveals a number of things about the ending of Book 1, but the romantic couple from Daughter of Mystery are still prominent, political intrigue still abounds, and this time the fantastic element focuses on alchemy and the mystical properties of gemstones. But Daughter of Mystery is entirely complete and wrapped-up when it concludes. I have no plans to write cliff-hangers that carry over from book to book. I love writing complex, multi-layered plots with a lot of background detail that provides jumping-off places for future developments, whether later in the same story or in a future book. By the end of Book 2 you will have met one of the romantic protagonists for Book 3 as well as several other key figures in that story...but you may not know it yet.
Tami: What does the future look like for you? More long-form fiction?
Heather: I do have an idea for a series of connected novels set in my invented country of Alpennia. I have plot-threads currently planted that will take a total of at least five books to complete (at which point, no doubt, there will be even more possible stories set up). I also have an idea for an Alpennian story set in the 15th century, inspired by historic events and figures that are mentioned in the 19th century stories. The plan is to write it after Book 3, so that still has some time to percolate. I already have a short story that’s a sort of prequel to Daughter of Mystery that I tossed off for a lark, but I’m waiting to release it until the novel has been out for a while because it’s best appreciated once you already know the characters.
Now that I’m back in the writing habit, I’d like to get back to short fiction interspersed with the novels. There are a couple of stories that might best be described as “what if the medieval Welsh Mabinogion included lesbians?” that I’d like to pull out and polish up a bit. I actually sold the first one to Jinx Beers for her Lesbian Short Fiction quarterly but the magazine folded due to health issues before it could appear. (Tami: Autobiography for Jinx on amazon) And I’d like to wrap up the series of short stories I wrote for Sword and Sorceress with a final novella-ish piece and see if I can find a home for the whole collection -- ideally while shapeshifters are still in fashion, though mine definitely don’t fit in the “urban fantasy” category.
After that? Who knows. It would be fun to go back to the medieval Welsh historicals that I’d set aside and see what I can do with them now. Jumping genres entirely, I have an itch to write a modern murder mystery set at in a biotech company, but that one hasn’t grabbed me by the throat and demanded, “Write me!” yet. Let’s just say that ideas are not my limiting factor!
...
Margerit Sovitre did not expect to inherit Baron Saveze’s fortunes—even less his bodyguard, a ruthlessly efficient swordswoman known only as Barbara. Wealth suddenly makes Margerit a highly eligible heiress and buys her the enmity of the new Baron. He had expected to inherit all, and now eyes her fortune with open envy.
Barbara proudly served as the old Baron’s duelist but she had expected his death to make her a free woman. Bitterness turns to determination when she finds herself the only force that stands between Margerit and the new Baron’s greed.
At first Margerit protests the need for Barbara’s services, but soon she cannot imagine sending Barbara away. And Barbara’s duty has become something far more hazardous to her heart than the point of a sword. But greater dangers loom than one man’s hatred—the Prince of Alpennia is ill. Deadly intrigue surrounds the succession and the rituals of divine power known as The Mysteries of the Saints.
Heather Rose Jones debuts with a sweeping story rich in intrigue and the clash of loyalties and love. She can be found on twitter, facebook, and check out her website for more about her. Daughter of Mystery is available directly from Bella Books.
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Date: 2014-01-18 11:53 pm (UTC)hey, that's been my approach to dissertation writing, too! the place-holder approach has saved my sanity and made the whole process much faster, too. it never occurred to me to use the same approach for fiction.
(cool interview. can't wait to read the novel. :-)
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Date: 2014-01-19 01:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-19 02:04 am (UTC)(oh dear god. i've become that person who talks about nothing other than dissertation. i'm so sorry.)
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Date: 2014-01-19 06:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-27 06:07 am (UTC)That is so Heather.
Great interview!