Deconstructing Damsport: a round the world tour of the research and inspiration behind the creation of the city

Picasso famously said: “Good artists borrow; great artists steal.” I won’t go as far as to say that I’m a great artist, but one of the things I love to do is to steal — and I steal a great deal, from all over the place. So I thought it would be fun to take you through a tour of all the influences and steals that went into creating Damsport, the city in which The Bloodless Assassin takes place.

It’ll come as no surprise that I stole from Victorian London, and I purposefully gave a little nod to Dickens in creating Pip, a cheeky chappy urchin. I won’t discuss the Victorian influences though, as I think they’re quite obvious.

The less obvious steals come from all over the world: Hong Kong, Istanbul, Constantinople, Mumbai, Japan, Cambodia, general 17th century Europe, sort of from Colorado, and Macau, at the current count. Often what I stole is utterly random and I doubt you’d be able to spot the inspirations on your own (if you can, bravo!)

Let’s start with the biggest influence: Hong Kong. I live in Hong Kong and grew up in London, so the first thing I did in creating Damsport was to take Victorian London and push it through a Hong Kong sieve. Hong Kong is the banyan trees that grow everywhere, the humidity, the storms, the crookback streets, the smells, the food, the crush of people in the streets. Regarding the banyan trees, the photos below are taken in central Hong Kong. The top one in particular is in Mid-Levels, one of the most modern and built up parts of Hong Kong. Banyan trees can grow anywhere — including out of walls it seems — and the top photo was the inspiration for the rundown house Rory and Jake lived on top of.

Hong Kong is also part of the inspiration for the Wet Market. Fruit/veg/meat/fish markets in Hong Kong are called Wet Markets, partly because the produce for sale is fresh, partly because the floor is always wet, and it’s best not to think too much about what is in the murk on the ground. Especially when you see the gusto with which fish are eviscerated!

(I have a particular walk when wearing flip flops — apparently — which means that with my heels I flick up any mud/sludge/dirt/etc up the backs of my legs. Yes, I’m that ladylike. My many visits to wet markets over the years have made me far more familiar with the wet filth of the ground than I would have liked. It’s grim. Which was why when I had to describe a market I immediately thought of how wet the floor would be.)

We also went to a Wet Market in Cambodia (in Kampot to be precise) that was covered with a hodgepodge of tarps and bits of plastic stretched overhead. It caught most of the rain (it was summer and rainy season) but the water still dripped through the gaps, so that the entire market seemed to be dripping — you could hear the water drip above the chatter of voices. That gave birth to the ‘dripping’ description of the Damsian Wet Market.

The woman sleeping in a hammock among her cuts of meat in the Damsian Wet Market is real — I stole her wholesale:

The book maze at the edge of the Great Bazaar was stolen from Mumbai book sellers, and I still regret that so little of The Viper and the Urchin takes place among the maze of books — stay tuned, this might be the scene of part of a future story! We discover Damsport’s library in The Black Orchid, and I have a bit of an idea for a story featuring scheming librarians, so it’s very much a possibility.

I stole the Old Cistern from Istanbul, and of course I bastardised the Grand Bazaar name, although the Damsian Great Bazaar is nothing like the Istanbul version. I also stole Istanbul’s Blue Mosque to make the baths in Spirepass, and while I was at it, used that kind of architecture to inspire the entire area of Spirepass including its name.

From Wikipedia – the Old Cistern

From Wikipedia – Blue Mosque — inspiration for the Damsian baths.

I purposefully made Damsport a port city so that it could justifiably have a real melting post of influences in terms of its architecture and culture. But in working out its political situation, I turned to Constantinople, another port city. And while there’s nothing actually recognisable from Constantinople in Damsport’s architecture, I used it as inspiration to work out how Damsport would be defended. This led to the creation of the Bottleneck Wall, which led me to the Three Day Battle and to Damsport’s current political situation.

Two very random steals came from Japan. I very much doubt anyone will be able to guess where the Japanese influence is, though. The first is the cats in the Damsian cemetery. I was in Tokyo, wandering about on my own, and I chanced across a cemetery. Now I love cemeteries — I find them fascinating. I went walking around the tombs, and I kept coming across these fat cats, most of them white, bathing in the sun and regarding me with that hostility particular to cats. And I thought there was something delightfully creepy about a hostile cat lounging across a tomb and glaring at me as if telling me to leave.

The fun thing about Fantasy is the ability to take something real and twist it into something fantastical — so these cats became the cats in the Damsian cemetery who are voiceless and who appear only at night.

I also stole an old street sweep from Tokyo. I came across an old man with a broomstick that had to be 2 meters long that he wielded in a semi-circle around him to push dead leaves away. Sadly I didn’t take a photo of him but I thought he was too perfect not to steal. I added the vapour lamps hanging from a pole stuck down the back of his shirt to create the Damsian street sweeps. The sweeps are actually one one of my favourite little details of Damsport.

Closer to home — at least digitally — I stole from a fellow blogger’s blog post: from Sammy over at Bemuzin, which technically means I stole from Colorado, I guess. Back in 2014 she wrote about an exhibition she went to see: the stunning Chihuly Garden Cycle show featuring incredible glass sculptures. I thought glass sculptures was such a wonderful concept that I decided to feature glass sculptures as part of the Revels towards the end of the book.

Speaking of the Revels, another act comes from The House of Dancing Water, an incredible show that I saw in Macau. I stole the masts rising from the water from that show (I won’t say anymore to keep the post spoiler-free). If you’re ever in this part of the world, this is one of the most amazing shows I have ever seen.

I also stole and embellished on 17th century European currency. There was a real problem back then of people shaving or clipping the edges of coins, and then melting all the shavings and clippings and making new coins. This problem is what led to our modern coins having edges with writing or patterns on them, so that if the coins were clipped, it would immediately be obvious. I thought that was a fun detail to steal and I decided that Damsport would have the same problem but would deal with it differently. Since the city has both clipped coins and a quantity of foreign currency flowing through it, the logical thing to do seemed to have them deal in coin weights rather than coin values. The expression ‘making change’ then became a fun literal interpretation: Damsians go to smiths to make change by cutting coins up into smaller pieces.

That said I don’t always realise when I’m stealing, and some steals I can’t identify even now. Crazy Willy and his steamcoach, for example: I have no idea where that came from. Likewise for Susie’s coffeehouse and the butterscotch coffee. I detest coffee, so who knows why that idea popped into my head!

Not all steals are successful, either. My most extensive piece of research came to absolutely nothing. I read a large biography of Isaac Newton’s life when I was thinking about how to develop the science of alchemy for Longinus. Newton didn’t just discover gravity, he was an incredible polymath, but he sadly wasted a lot of his time looking into alchemy and I thought I’d find useful inspiration in his life’s work. Turns out Longinus’ alchemy has nothing to do with Newton’s (not a shocker, in hindsight). Not wanting the time I spent reading Newton’s biography to be a complete waste, I put a little nod to him in the form of the prism found in Dr Corian’s place. It has absolutely no bearing on the story, I doubt anyone noticed or remembered it, but it was a nod from me to me, referring to the research I’d done so I could tell myself that I got at least something out of that book.

I don’t actually think reading that book came to nothing — I got some other stuff from it which might be useful some day. Maybe one day I’ll write a new post like this and tell you one of my characters is partly stolen from Newton’s life. Who knows.

So there you have it, all the steals that went into creating Damsport — at least the ones I can remember. There’s bound to be a great many steals that I’ve forgotten about, and a great many more that I can’t figure out. If you’re curious about any other part of Damsport feel free to ask me in the comments and I’ll see if I can figure out where the inspiration for it came from.

The sequel to The Bloodless Assassin, The Black Orchid also takes place in Damsport, and I’ve added a few more steals — more from Hong Kong (I’m milking the place dry!) a very obvious one from Morocco, and I stole from one of my uncles.

Book 3 in the series is already in the works, but it will take place in a new city and I’m currently creating it (oh such fun!). So far I have influences from Indonesia, more from Hong Kong and Cambodia, a very random steal from Beijing, and an unexpected one from Brittany of all places (a place in France. Papa et Maman — it is indeed from Perros-Guirec). I’ve also taken inspiration from the eyebrows of a singer I really like. I’m hoping to have the third book ready and out by the end of the year, so keep your eyes peeled! In the mean time, if you want to check out The Black Orchid, you can find it here on Amazon. I hope those of you who read it will enjoy it!

PS: I know not everyone reads on Kindle. If you have another kind of e-reader but you want to read The Black Orchid, you can buy it on Amazon, email me the receipt, and I’ll send you an epub instead 🙂 you can find me at celine (at) celinejeanjean.com

Fairytales and Writing processes – an Interview with Emily Witt

 

Today I have an interview with Emily Witt about her new book, A More Complicated Fairytale. Emily is a lovely blogger friend with A Keyboard and an Open Mind (I love how the blog title lends itself so well to an introduction!) and I’m really happy to be sharing this interview with her today!

Thanks so much for being on the blog Emily! I wonder if you can begin by telling us a bit about your story, A More Complicated Fairytale.

Thank you for having me! A More Complicated Fairytale is the story of Caitlin, and her begrudging-friendship-turned-romance with Crown Prince Felipe. Felipe takes a shine to Cait when he meets her during a royal festival, and though she’s not as keen on him at first, when he goes to war to avenge the assassination of his older brother, she enlists as a nurse. She ends up taking care of him when he is badly injured and their relationship continues to develop from there.

It is not a re-telling of any specific fairytale and probably has more in common with historical romance than fantasy, apart from the setting being a fictional kingdom. The title is really referencing the idea of a “fairytale romance” that we often read about in relation to celebrities or indeed, royal romances, too.

What inspired you to write this book, do you remember where the original idea for it came from?

I actually got the idea from a dream I had. I was myself in the dream, and my in-dream boyfriend had gone away for a while. I was moping about that, and meanwhile, a prince showed up and wanted to hang out with me, but I just wanted him to go away so that I could continue my moping in peace. This was three years ago now, so I’m lucky to remember that much, but at the time, it must have been a bit clearer and I somehow saw the potential for a romance!

Did any particular authors or films influence you while you were writing the book?

I didn’t realise it at the time, but my main characters, Cait and Prince Felipe, have a very similar dynamic to Drew Barrymore and Dougray Scott’s characters in the 1999 movie, Ever After. Given that it’s one of my all-time favourite movies and I re-watch it at least once a year, it’s probably not that surprising they snuck in there.

I was working at the Australian War Memorial at the time I started writing, and often got to read the diaries and letters that got donated to the collection there. Knowing the sorts of things that actually got written by the people caught in the middle of the First and Second World Wars really helped me shape Cait and Felipe’s experiences.

I have to agree with you, Ever After is a great film. I loved Angelica Houston as the evil step mother! That’s so interesting that you worked at the Australian War Memorial. Could you please share some of the letters that you read while working there?

Ooh, gosh, good question! I haven’t worked there in a couple of years now, so I’m having to cast back a bit. I do remember a couple of occasions where the family had all the letters in date order in a folder and whatnot, and the last letter was completely innocuous, and then you’d read a family member’s label on the plastic sleeve that this was the last letter they wrote home. It was always very jarring. There was one from a soldier in Vietnam to his best friend – I’m not sure if he was killed very early in the action or what the situation was, but this was the only letter he wrote home and he was killed while the letter was still in transit. I was warned when I first started in that position that I should probably keep a box of tissues on my desk, and with good reason!

On the other hand, as a Doctor Who fan, it made me ridiculously happy to discover an actual Captain Jack Harkness who fought with the Australian Army in WW2 And there was also the reference to some Australian soldiers being put on court martial for stealing watermelons in Cairo, which I thought was hilarious. So it wasn’t all terrible!

Haha, watermelon thieving – that’s a niche crime! I can imagine that the letters must have been quite poignant or difficult to read at times, though. What’s your writing process like? Do you outline or pants? Any particular writerly rituals you could share with us?

I tend to pants my first draft, but it lacks a lot of details. Once I know how to get from A to B, I set about filling in the gaps. Between the first and last drafts, AMCF doubled in length.

I keep a spreadsheet with my daily word counts all added up in there. On days I write over 200 words, I make the row green, and on days I don’t write, I make it red. In theory, it’s supposed to be visual inspiration, seeing all the green and the increasing totals, though sometimes when I go through a period of not writing much, it can get a bit depressing!

What was your favourite part of the story to write? And what was the hardest part to write?

There’s a scene just after Cait starts getting on better with Felipe, where he is showing her some of the special items the royal family has in its library, including the Nardowyn equivalent of an illuminated medieval manuscript of their religion’s sacred text. I’m a librarian by day, so having my two leads bonding over an item like that made me happy.

Having said all of that, I think actually creating a religion was one of the hardest things to do. I knew it would be difficult, and originally tried to create an entirely religion-free world, but it just felt a bit empty. Religion doesn’t dominate my characters’ lives but it’s good having it there as something that informs them.

If you could go back in time to your previous self about to start writing this book, what advice would you give her?

Hmm, good question! The first thing that comes to mind is to tell her to stop stressing about Cait’s name and just roll with it (Cait went through quite a few names, and I wasted quite a bit of valuable writing time poring over lists of names trying to choose something that felt “right”).The other thing would be to stop putting things off because I was nervous. I always took forever to send early drafts to readers or to answer my cover artist’s questions. I’m hoping that now I sort of know what I’m doing, the next book won’t take three years from conception to publication!

I can totally sympathise with the whole putting things off because of nerves — I went through the same thing with my first book! Well thank you so much answering all those questions Emily! 

A More Complicated Fairytale is now available to pre-order on Amazon: 

Most of the young women in Nardowyn swoon over Crown Prince Felipe, but Caitlin has never seen the appeal. When she catches his eye during a royal festival, she has little choice but to begrudgingly go along with his attempts to form a friendship between them, and soon learns that there is more to him than meets the eye.

When Felipe goes to war to avenge the death of his brother, Cait enlists as a nurse to be nearer to him. Here, Cait’s connection to the prince will put her in more danger than she can imagine. But Cait’s never been one to take the easy way out, so if her life is going to turn into some sort of fairy tale, with a prince and a happily ever after, it’s no surprise it will be a more complicated one.

A More Complicated Fairytale — Cover Reveal

Hi guys! Today I’m excited to be part of Emily Witt’s (she of the Keyboard and the Open Mind) cover reveal for her new book, A More Complicated Fairytale. She’s a lovely blogger friend, and I’m so excited for her new book coming out.

So over to you, Emily!

Title: A More Complicated Fairytale

Author: Emily Witt

Release day: April 02, 2016

Blurb:

Most of the young women in Nardowyn swoon over Crown Prince Felipe, but Caitlin has never seen the appeal. When she catches his eye during a royal festival, she has little choice but to begrudgingly go along with his attempts to form a friendship between them, and soon learns that there is more to him than meets the eye.

When Felipe goes to war to avenge the death of his brother, Cait enlists as a nurse to be nearer to him. Here, Cait’s connection to the prince will put her in more danger than she can imagine. But Cait’s never been one to take the easy way out, so if her life is going to turn into some sort of fairy tale, with a prince and a happily ever after, it’s no surprise it will be a more complicated one.

Author Bio:

Emily has been writing since the age of six, but only recently developed the skill of finishing the projects that she starts (and even then, only sometimes). She is currently studying for a Masters in Museum and Heritage Studies and works at the National Library of Australia. In her spare time she can be found watching Doctor Who or curled up on the couch with a hot chocolate and a good book.

You can visit her blog for more information: http://keysandopenmind.wordpress.com

And also her Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/keysandopenmind

Cover design: Thanks to the very awesome K. L. Schwengel – http://klschwengel.com

Excerpt:

Towards the middle of the afternoon, they came across a wooden stage with a banner across the top bearing the words ‘Alfonso the Magnificent, Grand Illusionist’. On the stage, a man was describing the great feats of illusion that the crowds would witness when the show started in ten minutes. Neither Cait nor Ava had ever seen a magic show before, so they bought tickets and found themselves good seats.

For the next three-quarters of an hour, they witnessed mind-reading, card tricks and even a woman being sawn in half! Even Cait had been on the edge of her seat for that finale.

When Alfonso the Magnificent had taken his final bows and disappeared from the stage, Cait turned to Ava. “What did you think?” she asked.

“That was spectacular!” Ava replied. “How do you think he did that last one?”

“There were two women in the box,” said a hooded man who had been sitting on Cait’s other side. “That’s the only way it could be done.”

“Do you think so?” Ava leaned across Cait a little to speak to the man and in doing so, recognised the face under the hood. She sat back again, quickly. “Cait, it’s -”

The cloaked man held up a finger to quickly quiet her. “Please don’t give me away. I’m trying to avoid my guards at the moment.”

He lowered his hood and Cait realised why Ava had been so surprised. She looked at Ava. “Well, won’t Ginny and Bridget be jealous?” She looked back to Prince Felipe with a wry smile. “Our younger sisters are big fans of yours, your Highness. We tried telling them it was unlikely any of us would see you here, but they kept their hopes up. I’m sure they’re going to be frightfully upset about this.”

“Well, I suppose you were right to discourage them. I’m not supposed to be spending my time at magic shows designed to entertain the masses. In fact, I believe I should be dining with the Princess Royal of Brellalan at this very moment.”

“Then why aren’t you?”

Cait didn’t mean to ask such a direct – and perhaps slightly accusatory – question, not to the prince, but it was out of her mouth before she could remind herself who she was talking to.

The prince did not seem too perturbed, though. “Have you ever had to spend time with women who have been raised only to aspire to one day marry a prince?”

“I can’t say that I have, Your Highness.”

“Then count yourself lucky. I would much rather spend my time at magic shows in the company of such charming ladies as you and your friend, than dining with any of them.”

As he spoke the words, a yell was heard behind them, and the prince looked up with a start. Someone shouted “There!” and a group of red-uniformed men of the palace guard pointed towards Cait, Ava and Prince Felipe.

Glancing back at Cait and Ava, the prince quickly stood and replaced his hood over his head. “It’s been lovely,” he said with a nod, and then leapt across three benches and off in the opposite direction to the guards. They shouted again and ran after him, but Cait saw him quickly blend in with the crowds and silently wished the guards luck. They were probably going to need it.

Speakeasies and the Roaring Twenties: an interview with Sarah Zama

Hi everyone! It’s been a little while since I’ve done an author interview, but today I’m super excited to bring you an interview I did with Sarah Zama, she of The Old Shelter blog. She’s got a wonderful new book, Give in to the Feeling coming out and today she’s here to tell us about the research that went into it.

Thanks for being on the blog today Sarah – I’m so excited to be interviewing you! Could you start by telling us a bit about your story Give in to the Feeling? 

Thanks Celine, I’m excited to be here too. I’ve been following your series of fantasy interviews dreaming one day I’d appear in it too. I’m so excited to be here at last.

Since we writers are encouraged to write the blurb for our story in case anyone will ask what’s it about, I suppose this is a great occasion to use just that.

Chicago 1924

Susie has never thought she might want more. More than being Simon’s woman. More than the lush life he’s given her when she came from China. More than the carefree nights of dance in his speakeasy.

Simon has never asked her anything in return but her loyalty. Not a big price.

Until that night.

When Blood enters Simon’s speakeasy, and Susie dances with him, she discovers there’s a completely new world beyond the things she owns and the she’s allowed to do. A world where she can be her own woman, where she can be the woman she’s supposed to be. A world of sharing and self-expression she has never glimpsed.

But she’s still Simon’s woman, and he won’t allow her to forget it.

Soon Susie discovers there’s more than two men fighting over her in the confrontation between Blood and Simon. There’s a fight breaking through the walls of the real world, into the spirit world where Susie’s freedom may mean life or death for one of them. And if Susie gives in, she will lose more than just her heart.

At its heart, Give in to the Feeling is a story of self-discovery. A coming of age, if you will, but with a fantasy twist… which is to be expected from me!

Give in to the Feeling takes place in a speakeasy in Chicago during the Prohibition era, which makes for a wonderful setting. For anyone not familiar with the era, can you tell us about speakeasies?

The funniest thing about speakeasies is that nobody really knows much about them. They had been around for quite sometime before Prohibition. National Prohibition went into effect in 1920, but before that, there had been state prohibition or temperance laws everywhere in the U.S. for decades. This means even before National Prohibition, people in certain states couldn’t freely drink alcohol. Speakeasies provided this opportunity, although under wraps and away from the public eyes. Everything was kept as secret as possible. In fact, one of the theories about the origin of the name ‘speakeasy’ is that owners would invite customers (who of course became quite loud after a few drinks) to ‘speak easy’ so not to be heard and discovered.

These kind of places already existed in the second half of the 1800s, though what we think about when we hear the word ‘speakeasy’ today is Prohibition incarnation of them and the reason is that speakeasies proliferated at an astounding rate during the 1920s.

There were all kind of speakeasy around the U.S. As it was said, all you needed was a room, two people and a bottle of liquor, and that’s exactly what happened in most little towns. Speakeasies were often rooms in private houses where people would gather to drink (producing and consuming one’s own liquor wasn’t illegal, mind you. But if you charged for that… well, that was a different story).

In larger cities, speakeasy could take up any form, including very exclusive restaurants where food was served and shows where offered. These places were hardly secret. One journalist related that it took him about two minutes to find out where a speakeasy was in NYC (he jump out the train and into a cab, and the cab driver asked him whether he fancied a drink in special place). True, there were places that used passwords and membership cards so to shrink the possibility that a Prohibition agent slipped inside unnoticed, but most places just bribed police and agents, so they didn’t really bother about secrecy.

Could you share your favourite / most interesting tidbit from your research into this time period?

I know this not very exciting, but what surprised me more about my research was discovering how much the Twenties were like our own time.

It was a time of shocking change, fast modernization, clash of cultures, phobias of any form of ‘otherness’. It was a time of coping with a life that changed so fast it was hard to adjust to. Attitudes of young people that were so new and different they felt alien. A sense that old, reliable values were crumbling away.

Sounds familiar?

I was also impressed by how much young people of the Twenties looked like us.

I was worried about this aspect of life. Give in to the Feeling and my trilogy are both set largely in a speakeasy, which were places frequented mostly by young people looking for booze and wild jazz dances. But we’re talking young people of nearly a century ago. What would they be like? What would they do? How would they think?

Well, turned out they looked and thought and acted like us a lot more than young people of the subsequent three or four decades did. The Great Depression and then the war years were huge setbacks for any social advancement that started in the Twenties.

A reader of my AtoZ Challege of last year, which was about the Twenties, commented that she thought a few of the things I was talking about started in the Sixties. Not so. That was merely the time when things caught up.

What books (other than yours of course!) or films would you recommend for anyone new to stories set in that time period.

In terms of novels, there’s no competition. My favourite era author is Langston Hughes, who was one of the frontmen of the Harlem Renaissance. If the devil ever showed up offering me to gain Hughes’s writing qualities, I’d give him anything he would ask in return.

Langston Hughes’s style is simply wonderful. Vivid. You can see and smell and hear what he writes, that’s how powerful his prose is. His sight was so keen he could see deep inside his characters. He’s absolutely fantastic.

He was mostly a poet, but he wrote shorts stories and novels too. My favourite is a short story titled Father and Son, the story of a white father and the son he had with his black house maiden. Heart wrenching. All the characters in the story are so strong-willed and so focused you know it can’t possible go well for any of them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In terms of book about the era, the first to spring to mind is always Last Call by Daniel Okrent. That’s one of the newest book about Prohibition and one of the more thoroughly researched. Michael Perrish’s Anxious Decades is my favourite book about the Twenties. It actually covers both Twenties and Thirties, but the Twenties section is the best, in my opinion. Very essential, it doesn’t really go into mush details on anything, but it does touch on all most important aspects and events of the time.

I also enjoyed Erin Chapman’s Prove it on Me a lot. This is an examination of the social position of black women in the Twenties, one that sometimes was very far and different from the flapper’s life.

As for film, Underworld, a silent film of 1927, is my absolute favourite. I know a lot of people thinks silent films are boring and stupid, too simple in comparison with moderns ones.

That’s because they have never watch one.

I found it really interesting that your characters were Chinese and American Indian – it made for a really interesting mix of cultures. Did the decision to do this spring purely from story, or were there large communities of Chinese and American Indian in Chicago during that time?

It mostly happened by chance. Seriously.

The very first idea for Blood and Michael’s stories came to me from Michael Jackson’s video Smooth Criminal (which is one of my favourite videos and songs ever). In that video the lead female dancer is an Asian girl. I just took the two characters as they were and put them in my story.

Michael came from my interests. When I started planning the trilogy, six years ago, I was already very much into Indian cultures. Michael just happened one day and that’s when everything went into place for my story.

There wasn’t a big community of Chinese in Chicago. Large Asian communities were on the East Cost, but the Midwest? Not so much. In fact Chinese people in Chicago were so few it was hardly considered a community at all.

Indians just didn’t leave reservations at the time. In fact, the Twenties is probably one of the bleakest times in the history of any American Indian people. They were shrinking in numbers. Most of the old leaders were dead or dying and there weren’t new ones taking up their place. The U:S. was employing any policy to disband unity and crush cultural proud. Nearly all Indian religious practices were outlawed. Children were taken from families and sent to boarding school, were a large number died and more just became whitewashed. Indians were recognised citizen of the U.S. only in 1924, the same year as Give in to the Feeling takes place. Michael probably doesn’t know he’s a U.S. citizen.

It was very hard. Things only started to get a little better in the Thirties with Roosevelt’s New Deal.

So, I suppose it wasn’t too smart of me to choose characters who were so unlikely to be there. But I promise there is an explanation for that in the story.

In your story you mention beliefs held by the Chinese and American Indians about spirits. Did this come from your imagination or is it based on real cultural beliefs and superstitions?

As well as I tried to be as accurate as possible with the historical setting, I’ve tried to be as accurate as possible with the ‘spirit’ world.

I did go after cultural belief that could make sense in my setting and to the characters I was handling. Luckily, it looks like cultural beliefs about the spirit world seem to touch across culture, so I could envision quite an organic fantasy incarnation of my spirit world staying close enough to actual cultural beliefs.

I was also lucky enough to have first person experience of the cultures present in my story.

When I live in Dublin, I shared my apartment with four other girls and one of them was Chinese. I have to admit Susie own a lot to my Chinese friend.

On the online workshop I was a member of, I met a Mohawk woman who was willing to share knowledge about Indian cultures. I couldn’t believe my good luck. Over the past four years, we’ve become friends and I’m very aware that my story would be – and especially feel – a lot different if I hadn’t met her.

I did read a lot as research for my story, but these personal experience were fundamental. I really think researching Ghost Trilogy has been an enriching personal experience.

I’m a big fan of your blog, over at The Old Shelter, which, for anyone new to it, is stuffed with interesting posts about the prohibition era and DieselPunk. Can you first tell us about DieselPunk as a genre and share some of your favourite reads/films in the genre? 

If I have to be honest, I discovered Dieselpunk by mere chance, but the moment I learned about it, I was hooked. It was very strange, because I was already writing something that could be considered Dieselpunk, only I didn’t know it. In a way, it was like finding my home, you know.

Dieselpunk is a speculative genre that mixes settings of the diesel era and punk elements. There is actually some debate about the definition, but I adhere to Larry Amyett’s ideas. The diesel era goes from the late 1910s (WWI included) to the early 1950s and the story can be set in our world or in a world inspired by this period’s history and events.

The punk element is something more allusive. Many fans think the punk element is the fantasy element. Amyett admits that the fantasy element may be what punks the story up, but the concept is broader. For him, the punk element is a subversive element that may come in many different fashions. If it questions reality how we know it or if it shows it in a different, new way, even if it isn’t fantasy, then it punks the story up and create Dieselpunk.

It’s a more complex (and to me, more satisfying) definition than “it’s Steampunk, but with machines working on internal combustion rather than steam” which you do find on quite a few Dieselpunk blogs and forums.

I wrote about my idea of Dieselpunk in a blog about International Dieselpunk Day, if you are interested to look a bit deeper into the question.

Dieselpunk today is mostly a visual genre. Novels are still in small numbers, mostly located in the self-publishing market. There are authors who are becoming quite popular (I think Ari Marmell, Charles A. Cornell, Bard Constantin, but mostly they are popular inside the community.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Visual stories are a different beast. There are dieselpunk stories that are popular films, some of which broke into the mainstream arena. Indian Jones’s films are probably the most popular of them all, but recently there have been Captain American the First Avenger and the spin-off tv series Agent Carter (which is hugely popular inside the dieselpunk community).

You also do a great post series called The New Woman’s New Look, about how women changed during the 20s and 30s. What’s your favourite thing/tidbit you uncovered when researching the posts? 

I’m having a lot of fun with this series, and the reason I enjoy it so much is that I’m discovering so many things about ourselves. Many things we take for granted appeared in the Twenties for the first time. And as I like to say, history always makes sense. There is always a reason why things happen, and what happened in the Twenties define the entirety of the 20th century.

The history of women is only one of the many changes society went through in that time, but it speaks of a deeper change happening inside the society. Only a small number of women were flappers: they were all a certain age (college student), they mostly belong to a certain class (middle and upper-middle class), they all had time and money on their hands. Many, many women didn’t have all these characteristics at the same time.

Still, when we think to women in the Twenties, we automatically think to the flapper. We think to the fashion and the dances, to bob air and heavy make-up. Women drinking and smoking. Women discovering their sexuality. All of this did happened – to a small number of women. But even women who weren’t actively involved in the change, even men, even older people, all where affected by the evolution of feeling s and ways of thinking the flapper was the more shocking expression of.

As I explained in my first The New Women’s New Look article, the changing fashion and attitude so prominent in the flapper speaks of a wider change in society. A change that went far deeper than women’s look and went right to the core of relationship between genders and ages, between the past and the present. A new way to understand life, closer to what we feel today. What allowed the emergence of the flapper was a profound change in heart and mind that was also the birthing place of society as we understand it today. It’s a lot more than just fashion.

Well thank you so much for taking part Sarah, it was great to have you on the blog! 

Give in to the Feeling – by Sarah Zama

Chicago 1924

Susie has never thought she might want more. More than being Simon’s woman. More than the lush life he’s given her when she came from China. More than the carefree nights of dance in his speakeasy.
Simon has never asked her anything in return but her loyalty. Not a big price.
Until that night.

When Blood enters Simon’s speakeasy, and Susie dances with him, she discovers there’s a completely new world beyond the things she owns and the things she’s allowed to do. A world where she can be her own woman, where she can be the woman she’s supposed to be. A world of sharing and self-expression she has never glimpsed.
But she’s still Simon’s woman, and he won’t allow her to forget it.

Soon Susie will discover there’s more than two men fighting over her in the confrontation between Blood and Simon. There’s a fight breaking through the wall of the real world, into the spirit world where Susie’s freedom may mean life or death for one of them. And if Susie gives in, she will lose more than just her heart and happiness.

Now available for pre-order on:

BARNES&NOBLE | KOBO | SMASHWORDS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Sarah Zama was born in Isola della scala (Verona – Italy) where she still lives. She started writing at nine – blame it over her teacher’s effort to turn her students into readers – and in the 1990s she contributed steadily to magazines and independent publishers on both sides of the Atlantic.
After a pause, in early 2010s she went back to writing with a new mindset. The internet allowed her to get in touch with fellow authors around the globe, hone her writing techniques in online workshops and finally find her home in the dieselpunk community.

Since 2010 she’s been working at a trilogy set in Chicago in 1926, historically as accurate as possible but also (as all her stories are) definitely fantasy. She’s currently seeking representation for the first book in the Ghost Trilogy, Ghostly Smell Around.
In 2016, her first book comes out, Give in to the Feeling.

She’s worked for QuiEdit, publisher and bookseller in Verona, for the last ten years.
She also maintain a blog, The Old Shelter, where she regularly blogs about the Roaring Twenties and anything dieselpunk.

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Fancy a Kindle Fire loaded up with 50 fantasy ebooks?

Guys, I have something pretty exciting to share with you all. If you like fantasy books, then you should definitely check this out.

I’m part of a massive giveaway with 49 other writers, with a seriously cool prize: a Kindle Fire loaded with 50 fantasy ebooks! Even better, this contest doesn’t just have one winner, but SIX! One person wins the kindle, and an additional five people will be given one of the 50 ebooks listed in this giveaway — their choice. It’s a pretty cool way to check out new authors.

If you take part, you’ll also get a chance to earn unlimited extra entries. Click below to find out more, or scroll down to check out the prizes.

Enter the Fantasy Lovers Giveaway Here

The Prizes: One Kindle Fire…

Plus these FIFTY Fantasy eBooks!

    

       

     

        

    

        

    

          

         

    

Well? What are you waiting for? Click here to enter the giveaway.

Of Course You Realise… that this 11-year-old girl has more grit, determination, and discipline than most of us ‘professionals’

It’s been a while since I did a random post of something I found online!

But I just had to share this one. For some context: I was researching rock climbing videos because I was writing a scene where Longinus watches Rory execute a very difficult climb, and sometimes I like to have visuals of what I’m describing so I can better capture details/movements etc.

That scene wound up on the cutting room floor, but this video I found stayed with me. This girl is amazing, and not just because at 11 she’s breaking world records in rock climbing.

How seriously she takes her climbing, her dedication, focus, and discipline at such a young age really puts me and most people I know to shame. That girl’s got some serious chops!

My two favourite quotes from the video:

“To be a really good climber, you can’t just have it. You have to train really hard, so I take it pretty seriously” (an understatement when you see the training she does)

“I like to look for challenges, it keeps me motivated. I don’t like doing the same thing all the time… If I don’t make a route, it’s just motivating because I don’t want to leave it undone.”

Replace climber/route with writer or any other kind of profession, and that’s a pretty perfect summary of discipline, focus, and perseverance! It makes for a very good kick up the arse if you’re feeling unmotivated or falling prey to procrastination…

 

Pollution in Beijing, The Summer Palace and the Temple of Heaven

I know what you were thinking after the last post — ‘the pollution in Beijing is nowhere near as bad as the media make it out to be!’

Not true. That part of the wall was 2 hours drive out of Beijing, and on a day when pollution was low and the weather was good.

Here we are in Beijing, on a bad pollution day — try and guess which one I am. Don’t we look like something out of a post-apocalyptic movie with our anti-pollution masks? (which one do you think I am, by the way?)

We’re in front of the Temple of Heaven there. Not as heavenly as you might wish with the smog, but still a beautiful building.

Here I am with our lovely guide Lee (now you can check if you got it right in guessing who I am in the top photo — did you get it right? Virtual gold star and pat on the back for you if you did)

It was proper smog — like stepping back in time to the Victorian London pea soup. To give you an idea, the World Health Organisation’s guideline for maximum healthy exposure to pollutant particles is 25 micrograms per cubic meter. Beijing gets up to 500. Ouch….

We were only there for five days and yet by the end we all had picked up a bit of a cough and our clothes stunk of coal smoke. For those of you who have long hair and who smoke or have been around smokers, you know that horrible moment when you take a shower and all the smoke trapped in your hair is released once the water hits it? That was a daily occurrence in Beijing.

It was gross.

These photos, by the way, were taken on a sunny day. This was the sun:

What was even bleaker was when we were on the train travelling from Xi’An to Beijing. Then the landscape really became ghostly and incredibly depressing:

Especially because a lot of these sky scrapers were in desolate areas, and empty. Look at them — they look like they’re appearing out of the fog.

During the day it was less obvious, but at night, when we drove past the outskirts of Xi’An, we drove through a forest of skyscrapers, and all of them dark and empty. There’s this weird problem of ghost towns in China, where the government builds entire cities in the expectation of the enormous influx of population from the rural areas — except that once the construction is done, the builders all leave, and the cities remain empty.

We didn’t drive through these ghost cities, but we definitely drove through a weirdly deserted part of Xi’An. The cities themselves are a bizarre concept, based on the expectation that one day people will just move in. These are cities without a mayor, without a culture, an identity, or a history — without anyone actually there (at the moment) to run and organise it. Just a collection of roads and buildings and general infrastructure. As if it had all sprouted up like mushrooms under the rain.

Seeing these empty skyscrapers shrouded in smog was rather disquieting — it also gave me a renewed appreciation of how clean and bright Hong Kong is by comparison!!

On this (delightful) polluted day, we also visited the Summer Palace — winter edition, of course.

It fronted a lake that was completely frozen over, and it had these lovely long promenades that must be very pleasant in the summer. As it was, it was so cold that I hopped and skipped and generally walked like a bit of weirdo in an attempt to get the blood flowing into my frozen toes.

The Summer Palace comes complete with marble pleasure barge, should you wish to be on a boat, without the risk of getting seasick (or would that be lakesick?) It was odd, but very beautiful. Behind it — and we didn’t get a photo of this sadly — were hundreds of yellow plastic pedalos, all marooned in the ice, waiting for the summer heat and tourist hordes. It was a pretty perfect metaphor for ‘low season’.

Alright – next up — the Forbidden City.

The Great Wall of China and an update

Well happy 2016 everyone! I hope the year has treated you well so far.

I’m back at the blog after a bit of an extended hiatus — I was actually brought back by a fellow blogger, Sarah Zama over at The Old Shelter. I’m interviewing her ahead of her new book Give Into The Feeling coming out. I’ve been wanting to interview her for a while, so I’m really looking forward to sharing the interview with you all! Stay tuned for that one.

For now though a quick update on things with me. Firstly, The Black Orchid, the sequel to The Viper and the Urchin is now in the very capable hands of Sue Archer (my editor), so it’s well on track to come out in a couple of months. Very exciting stuff. And while Sue works her magic, I’m starting on a new project that I’ve been wanting to get to for a long time: a Victorian Gothic story set in London. More staying tuned there 🙂

I also had an amazing, if slightly crazy December, with some pretty cool travelling. For Christmas my family came over to this part of the world (Hong Kong and China) and we travelled to Guiling, Yangshuo, Xi’An, and Beijing. While it wasn’t the traditional Christmas (no roast turkey and stuffing for us — not that I mind, I’m not a massive fan of turkey), it was a lot of fun, and we got some pretty stunning photos out of it (by ‘we’, I mean my father. Kind of the reverse of the ‘royal we’)

Now, if I was David Copperfield, I would begin at the beginning of our trip. But being neither Copperfield, nor Dickens (a shame — it would be lovely to be a literary genius), I shall begin by the end of the trip, with what was, by far, the highlight. It’s also probably the most amazing thing I’ve seen in all my travels:

The Great Wall of China.

Prepare yourselves for a glut of photos. It was absolutely stunning:

It literally stretched out as far as the eye could see:

I was reminded of a line from Game of Thrones, when Tyrion Lannister said he wanted to see The Wall so he could piss off the edge of the world (for anyone living under a rock and not aware of Game of Thrones, The Wall is based on Adrian’s Wall in Scotland, separating Westeros — the world — from the wilderness and monsters beyond.) It was so easy to imagine how for the men who manned the Great Wall, that must have been like standing at the end of their world, watching out and waiting for an attack by (what they likely considered) barbarians. It makes you wonder what kind of a life they must have led, waiting in the most remote part of their world for an attack.

The Wall is dotted with watch towers. They’re little more than small, square building, providing only minimal cover against the cold and wind. If the guards spotted anyone approaching, they could signal one another and gather up the troops as needed.

Amazingly, despite how large it is, the Great Wall has never been breached. There have actually been several Great Walls, and the relics we visit these days belong to the Ming Dinasty Great Wall – which is a mere 8,800km long. The official length of the entire Great Wall is 21,200km, and it’s over 2,300 years old.

Parts of it are very well preserved, but of course the vast majority of it is in disrepair, with chunks missing.

We hiked for a good few hours, and because it was the middle of winter (and therefore low season), and also because we went for the part of the wall furthest away from Beijing, we were alone for the duration — which as you can imagine was incredibly special. We could actually stand and look out of the wall, and imagine what it must have been like back then for the soldiers on the wall.

Parts of the wall are seriously steep, mind you – not for the faint of feet! But very much worth it.

It was truly spectacular. A real once in a life time, awe-inspiring visit — and something I definitely plan to use one day as inspiration for a story.

Alright, next up — Beijing.

Recent events in Paris

Please excuse typos and the likes, this isn’t a post I particularly feel like editing, so you get it as a stream of consciousness — warts and all. 

I’m sure by now you’ve heard of what happened in Paris (if you haven’t, now might be a good time to nip out from under your rock to do a quick Google search).

To say that it’s been a shock is an understatement. My brother lives in Paris as do a few of my cousins. Everyone is fine, even though they live near the area of the attacks. My brother sent us a map showing how close the Bataclan (scene of the concert shootings) is to his appartment — it’s a ten minute walk.

Worse, my cousin and his friend were due to go to one of the restaurants that was attacked (Le Castillon). At the last minute his friend decided she fancied Chinese. They were still very close to the scene, and had to spend the night hiding behind the metal shutters the restaurant owner pulled down as soon as the attacks started, but they were otherwise unhurt.

It seems utterly crazy that the choice of Chinese food versus French food meant life rather than death. How can you make sense of that?

In an email my father sent me my and siblings, he said ‘Que faire pour se protéger de ces fous?’ (what to do to protect ourselves against these madmen?)

It’s something that I’ve kept coming back to. The thing is, you can do everything right. You can eat healthy, not drink or smoke, be a responsible driver, exercise. You can be a good, kind person who helps those around you, who cares and tries to make a difference.

But then you choose French food instead of Chinese…

What can you do against that? How can you protect yourself?

Never go out? Leave the big cities and bury yourself in the country? Never take a train or a plane again?

I spent an entire morning doing very little and going over this. Of course arbitrary death is nothing new. We live in a world of tsunamis and earthquakes, of terrible bombings and planes disappearing from the sky. I guess from a personal point of view, it’s just a shock to realise that I could have lost my cousin if his friend hadn’t had a craving for Chinese food.

A craving for Chinese food. How crazy is it that something so insignificant could mean such a life changing and life saving difference?

It’s so arbitrary, it’s a flip of the coin. How can you protect against a coin flip?

You can’t. You can do everything right but still it won’t make any difference when that coin gets tossed.

I took a long detour that morning through ‘What’s The Point?’, and eventually realised that there isn’t a point per se. Not to any of it. Life is random and arbitrary and unfair. In the face of that, all we can do is keep on living and make the best and fullest possible use of our time, whatever that means to each of us.

In the face of life and death coming down to a choice between Chinese food vs French food, the only thing to do is not delay.

Celebrating a Little Milestone

I have reached a little milestone in my publishing author’s journey: I have hit 25 reviews on Amazon, and I wanted to stop and celebrate. Now why 25 and not 20, or 30? I don’t really know — maybe because it’s a quarter of 100, but it seemed like a good time to stop, take stock and enjoy this little success.

In his brilliant commencement speech, Neil Gaiman shares the best piece of advice he ever received, which was from Stephen King. Gaiman was in the midst of the early Sandman success and King told him: “This is really great. You should enjoy it.”

Gaiman then confesses that he didn’t follow that advice, too focused on worrying about the next book, the next deadline…He never really stopped to enjoy that early thrill of success.

Now, I’m not exactly surfing waves the size of Sandman’s success, and yet I can see how that could happen. Even as only a budding published author, I’m already getting caught up in worrying about the next book. Will it prove a satisfactory sequel? Can I get it finished to the level I want in the time I want?

So, remembering Gaiman’s speech, I thought I would take an official pause (and in these days of the internet, what better way to make it official than by writing a blog post?) to stop and enjoy this little milestone.

I’m very aware that in the grand scheme of the literary world, 25 reviews is too small to even be considered paltry. I know of other indie authors who have had more reviews than that by the end of their book’s second month. I also know of authors who’ve had less reviews than that. Each to their own pace and we all have to celebrate our own milestones, such as they are.

Knowing that my book is being bought and being read is such a thrill and I don’t want to risk that sensation diminishing because I’m rushing through everything to get to the next step, or because I’m comparing myself to other writers. Sometimes, it’s important to stop and enjoy the moment. 25 people who are not related to me by blood or shackled to me by matrimony chose to take the time to write reviews about my book. That is such a wonderful thing!!

Of course I’m aware that not everyone will enjoy my book (maybe you, reading this right now didn’t enjoy it), but that’s ok. I love Vonnegut’s take on this: ‘If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.’ You can’t please everyone, after all, and there’s no point trying. Knowing that not everyone will enjoy a given book makes finding those people who have enjoyed it all the more special. It’s like building a tribe, in a way.

So a big thank you to everyone who read and enjoyed The Viper and the Urchin, and who took the time to write those reviews, it really means a lot!