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The Big Idea: Sheila Jenne

Posted on July 24, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      11 Comments

Authors often use the past for inspiration. But what point does the inspiration of earlier days become a problem for the setting our author wants to write for? It’s a question Sheila Jenne confronts in this Big Idea for Black Sails to Sunward.

SHELIA JENNE:

My dad has two major obsessions: space and the sea. Since he couldn’t join Starfleet, he joined the Navy. He always loved telling us about old Navy traditions from the Age of Sail. So it was pretty natural for me to want to combine these two family obsessions by writing a book about sailing in space.

I’m far from the first to do it, of course. There’s Honor Harrington and David Drake. Even Star Trek itself has been described as “Horatio Hornblower in space.” But, I decided, I wanted to do it better. More real Navy traditions. That real salt-air, sea-shanty feel.

To prepare, I brushed up on Hornblower, Master and Commander, and Mutiny on the Bounty. But I quickly stumbled onto a problem.

The Age of Sail was horrible.

If you really want Navy tradition, you can’t just have pretty uniforms and funny lingo. You also need impressment, flogging, and the death penalty for way too many crimes. Life ashore was brutal enough, and life at sea was worse. Could I ethically even write about this stuff? I didn’t want to do it the way many authors do, downplaying and excusing the harshness. But if I omitted the floggings, it felt less honest.

In the end, the answer was obvious: my Martian Imperial Navy is the bad guy. Of course it would be steeped in tradition, and strict class boundaries are indeed a long tradition. Even today, there’s a difference between officers and enlisted, though that difference doesn’t mean what it used to. In my books, the class differences have instead calcified: those settlers who arrived on Mars first, before the space elevator was built, are nobles, and everyone else is a commoner.

Lucy, the noble main character, arrives in her midshipman’s berth completely unprepared for any of it. Her life planetside was stratified, but she’d never seen anyone flogged before. Why, I wondered, would she put up with this?

The answer is that we often put up with whatever society has told us we should. Lucy has been prepared her whole life to prioritize her social bonds with other nobles over her conscience. It takes her quite a while to learn any differently.

Writing the story this way also contextualizes this age’s favorite heroes, the pirates. Pirates were, of course, robbers and murderers of the high seas. Why do we like them so much? I don’t think it makes sense unless you understand what the Navy was. A lot of pirates were deserters or fleeing from problems on land. There weren’t many places you could really be free of the strictures of the society of the time, especially if you were poor, queer, or non-white.

So in my book, the pirates are still a rough bunch, but we sympathize with them a lot more when we know what they’re coming from. Mars is tyrannical; Earth is the enemy. You can’t live forever in space without a source of air. So what else are they supposed to do but steal?

Fiction often shows the conflict between the forces of order and those of chaos. Sometimes we’re rooting for the good-guy space military to beat criminals and rebels; sometimes the rebels are the good guys rising up against an unjust authority. In a world where authority has gone far overboard, it’s definitely time for underdog pirates to show up and change the game.

Black Sails to Sunward: Amazon US|Amazon UK|Barnes & Noble|Waterstones

Author socials: Website|Twitter

The Big Idea: Jennifer Estep

Posted on July 20, 2023    Posted by Athena Scalzi      1 Comment

Author Jennifer Estep is back with another Big Idea for the second installment in her Galactic Bonds series. Come along to see how writing the second book of a series is actually preferable for her, and how much she enjoyed the process of bringing us Only Good Enemies.

JENNIFER ESTEP:

Only Good Enemies was released earlier this week. Woot! It’s the second book in my Galactic Bonds science-fiction fantasy series.

Ah, the sophomore book. Sometimes, I think writing/releasing the second book in a series is an endeavor that is even more fraught with peril and potential pitfalls than writing the first book. In years past, if book #1 in a series did well, I would sometimes dread writing book #2 instead of just enjoying the success of book #1.

Why? Well, no author wants to hear that they have fallen into the dreaded “sophomore slump” and book #2 just isn’t as good book #1. But it can be a delicate balancing act to give readers everything they loved in the first book and still push the characters, conflicts, and plots forward in new, interesting directions in the second book. 

But over the years, I’ve realized something important—that I usually enjoy writing book #2 in a series much more than book #1 and my sophomore stories are some of the best and most creative books I’ve written.

I love origin stories, so I always enjoy writing the first book in a series and coming up with my characters, the magic system, and the overall worldbuilding. For example, in Only Bad Options, Galactic Bonds book #1, I introduced Vesper Quill, a lab rat (think inventor/engineer), and Kyrion Caldaren, an elite Arrow warrior/assassin. Vesper and Kyrion have an unwanted connection that compels them to join forces to get to the bottom of a deadly conspiracy. Since the book is science-fiction fantasy, it also features a mix of psions/magic users (people with telekinesis and other mental abilities) and technology (spaceships and blasters), along with a variety of climate-themed planets. 

But in some ways, writing Only Bad Options felt like I was setting up the pieces on a gigantic game board in my mind. I often feel this way when I write the first book in a series—that I’m so busy introducing the characters, the magic system, and the worldbuilding that I don’t have space in the book to really dig into those things the way that I want to.

As a result, I have started looking at book #2 as a sophomore book. In other words, an opportunity to do more with, well, everything. To create more clashes/conflicts between my characters, to show the lasting consequences of their actions, and especially to give them more opportunities to succeed beyond their wildest dreams or fail miserably. To me, this is the best part and the true magic of writing a sophomore book—the opportunity to add more complex layers to your characters, magic system, and worldbuilding. 

For example, at the beginning of Only Good Enemies, Vesper and Kyrion are still dealing with the fallout from everything that happened in the first book. As a result, they are both keeping a major secret from each other. Vesper’s secret could potentially kill her and Kyrion, while Kyrion’s secret could destroy the fragile trust that Vesper has in him, as well as create new enemies for them both. 

So right from the beginning of Only Good Enemies, the two main characters are clashing with each other. How they discover and react to each other’s secrets—and how the secondary characters and villains discover and use the information—drives a lot of Vesper’s and Kyrion’s actions, reactions, and emotions for the rest of the book. To me, it makes both Vesper and Kyrion much more interesting characters to read (and write) about and adds a lot more complexity to their story arcs.  

In other words, with Only Good Enemies, I feel like I am finally sitting down at that mental game board, knocking over all the pieces I set up in the first book, and seeing how they fall and impact the characters and the overall story. And you know what? It’s a lot of fun, especially writing all those pew! pew! pew! action scenes. :-)

Which do you like writing (and reading) better—the first book or a later book in a series?

Only Good Enemies: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Powell’s

Author socials: Website|Twitter|Instagram

The Big Idea: Stephen Blackmoore

Posted on July 19, 2023    Posted by Athena Scalzi      4 Comments

If we don’t remember history, we are doomed to repeat it. But what happens when the past comes crashing into the present? Author Stephen Blackmoore plays with this idea in the ninth novel of his Eric Carter series, Cult Classic. Follow along in his Big Idea to see how he picked which cult to highlight in this new installment.

STEPHEN BLACKMOORE: 

Cult Classic, the ninth book in the Eric Carter series, about a necromancer in Los Angeles with, let’s call it anger management issues, involves a bit of apocalyptic time magic forcing 1920s L.A. and present-day L.A. to crash into each other like a five-car freeway pile-up. Downtown skyscrapers replaced by three-story flophouses, Red Car trains appearing in the middle of traffic, the Valley turning back to orange groves, all courtesy of a long-dead doomsday cult.

The books are noir, horror, urban fantasy, half a dozen other genre labels you want to throw at them. But more than anything else, for me at least, they’re books about L.A..

One of the things I’ve always loved about this town is the illusion that it has no history. It reinvents itself piecemeal on a daily basis, tearing itself down in one neighborhood while building itself back up in another. We live in snapshots of what stands today while conveniently forgetting what stood there the day before. Gentrification, thy name is Los Angeles.

Take the Hollywood sign. Even if you’ve never seen it in person you probably know about it. It’s an icon. But you might not know that when it was erected in 1923 it was studded with thousands of light bulbs and read HOLLYWOODLAND to promote a new real estate development for whites only. The place wasn’t very subtle about it in its advertising, either, and used redlining, laws specifically designed to control where certain minorities could live, to keep out the “undesirables”.

We have a lot of things like that, places and events where history has been forgotten or ignored. Our stolen water, Sleepy Lagoon, the 1871 Chinatown massacre, the Black Cat Tavern, the embarrassment that is the 1942 Battle of Los Angeles.

For Cult Classic I wanted to refer to a real cult. I’m lazy like that. Whenever possible I’d rather use something from real life because real life is usually crazier than anything I can come up with. And L.A.’s history of batshit crazy cults does not disappoint.

There’s the Manson Family. You might have heard of them. They were living on a ranch in Simi Valley when they decided to murder seven people across two nights in 1969.

Aleister Crowley’s Thelema religion also had a foothold. It attracted the likes of Jack Parsons, a rocket scientist before there was rocket science and one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who enjoyed its heavy emphasis on orgies and sex magic. Parsons hosted the Great Beast himself for a while in his home in Pasadena where Crowley made him a high priest.

In 1945 Parsons and a friend performed a ritual to summon the Thelemic goddess Babalon resulting in a book called Liber 49, an occult text he transcribed onto a series of slate tablets using… 

Ya know, there’s no way to really ease into this one. He whacked off onto the tablets and then used a stylus to write through his jizz like ink. Presumably he stayed very-well hydrated.

Not to be outdone on the crazy cult action, this buddy of his was L. Ron Hubbard who wrote some absolutely atrocious science fiction and would later go on to start the Church of Scientology. Fun fact, there are more Scientologists in Los Angeles than anywhere else in the world. 

Yay us.

There are a lot more, The Foursquare Church, Synanon, Mazdaznan, the Reform of the New Testament Church, and so on.

But let me tell you about The Divine Order Of The Royal Arms Of The Great Eleven or the Blackburn Cult.

In 1922 May Otis Blackburn and her daughter Ruth claimed to be in contact with the Archangel Gabriel who had dubbed them the Two Witnesses, a pair of prophets from Revelation 11:1-14, who would be present at the Apocalypse. They were transcribing a book of divine knowledge for him and claimed that once the book was completed at the end of 1924, it would trigger the End of Days.

Nothing special there. Lots of cults built on a similar idea. But Blackburn took hers in a particularly L.A. direction. When the shit hit the fan the resulting world would be ruled by eleven queens who would ride out Doomsday with their followers, living in splendor in mansions on Olive Hill, now Barnsdall Park, just a little southeast of the aforementioned Hollywoodland.

She pulled off this scam the way everybody else does; find some rubes who aren’t nearly as smart as they think they are, preferably with money, play to their greed, fear, hope, etc., then wrap it all up in a lot of portentous horseshit and redirection.

Don’t knock it, it worked. The grift netted May something like $4M in today’s money.

But then, on January 1st, 1925, just as the Apocalypse was supposed to happen, Willa Rhoades, a sixteen-year-old girl who May claimed was going to lead them all into this brand-new world of splendors, sort of, well… died.

The coroner ruled it was not foul play, but to be fair he didn’t get a chance to see her for a while because they kept her on ice (a few hundred pounds worth per day) under her foster parents’ house in Venice in a copper-lined coffin as May continued to tell them that her resurrection was right around the corner.

After four, yes FOUR, years of this, Willa’s parents finally went to the police, who retrieved her coffin and one containing her seven puppies named after the seven notes on Gabriel’s trumpet.

Stories quickly came out about unusual deaths like member Frances Turner who died during treatment for a mystery ailment that involved being baked in a stone oven, disappearances like Ruth’s husband, Sam, who was probably poisoned but whose body was never found. Animal sacrifices, fucked up power dynamics, a lot of stolen money. Oddly not much jail time for anybody.

I’d found my cult. Like I said, real life is crazier than anything I can come up with.

Cult Classic: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s 

Author’s socials: Website|Twitter

The Big Idea: Jayne Cowie

Posted on July 18, 2023    Posted by Athena Scalzi      7 Comments

There is profit to be made off of violence. What if there was a way to profit off of preventing violence, as well? Author Jayne Cowie takes us into the world of her new novel, One of the Boys,  to show us how violence is a treatable, fixable thing there. Read on to see the details of predicting and preventing violence within her world.

JAYNE COWIE:

A couple of years ago, I wrote a book called Curfew, about a near future Britain in which all men are electronically tagged and not allowed out after 7 p.m. When I told people what I was working on, women laughed, and men went a bit pale and tended not to say anything at all. The difference in responses fascinated me. After all, we all agree that male violence is a problem. We pretty much all agree that women should be safe in public spaces, and in their own homes. What we can’t agree on is how to achieve it. 

Trying to answer that question took me from a curfew to the idea behind my latest book, One of the Boys. Ever since Rosalind Franklin took her first X-Ray of DNA, we’ve been fascinated by the idea that what and who we are is all down to our genes. And thanks to the Human Genome project and sites like Ancestry.com, we’re linking genes to traits on what seems like an almost daily basis. We love the idea that we were born this way. No-one can criticize you for things that are beyond your control. It’s not your fault; it’s your genes. 

But what about negative traits? What about aggression and violence? If we insist that being untidy and bad at maths is innate, then it follows that we have to accept that maybe these are, too. But maybe that’s a good thing. If serial killers are genetically different to the rest of us, maybe we can identify them before they start. 

Picture this: a geneticist studying men who end up in prison for violent crime finds that they all have a particular gene in common. It doesn’t seem to occur in men with no history of violent behaviour. Two years later, you’re in hospital, looking down at your precious newborn son, so young, so innocent, and a doctor walks in and asks you if you’d like to have him tested for this particular gene. 

What do you say? 

The sharp conflict of born versus made runs through the heart of One of the Boys. If you have a fixed idea of what a boy is from when he’s only a few days old, you’re going to judge everything he does. You’re going to read things into normal behaviour – tantrums, aggression, losing his temper – and perhaps see them as worse than they really are. Other people will treat him differently. He’ll be excluded and pushed out. You could argue that those people are right to do so. They have to protect their own children, after all. That’s part of parenthood. We don’t let our children play with matches or knives. It follows that we shouldn’t let them play with a child who might hurt them, either. 

And yet . . what if that child is your son? How do you deal with a boy that has the potential to be violent, but hasn’t yet done anything wrong? You can’t stand back and do nothing, waiting until he does harm before you intervene. That’s basically the situation we have now. But you also have a duty to protect him from those who see him as other and less, because again, he’s done nothing wrong, and may never do anything wrong. 

The idea that one day soon we may be able to identify the young boys who are on this road and guide them in a different direction seems simple on the face of it. But what society would do with this information isn’t simple, though it’s predictable. When I was worldbuilding for One of the Boys, I looked into the history of other medical technologies, like IVF, amniocentesis and the contraceptive pill. I watched documentaries on Ritalin and looked at posts on parenting forums where mother’s to be discussed prenatal testing. 

Where there’s muck, there’s brass, as my grandmother used to say. (Brass, for those not from the north of England, means money). It was immediately obvious that there would be drug treatments and that they would be expensive. There would be parenting classes, and books, and vitamins and supplements, and YouTube channels and TV programmes. And on the flipside, private schools and nurseries that offered a guaranteed ‘safe’ experience for your daughter or negative son. The test would be big business. That would become a reason to keep it going, even as it split society in two. 

And then, as the boys hit adulthood, aging out of school and into the workplace, things would shift again, and the long-term effects would become clear: a disposable workforce, with minimal protection in law, and few other options. Capitalism thrives on workers like these. 

I like stories that live in the grey, that can see both sides, the good and the bad. Life is complicated. I want to write things that reflect that. I decided to write about 3 mothers – one with a negative son, one with a positive, and one who doesn’t know. Weaving their stories together was tough. I think One of the Boys was the most challenging book I’ve written so far, not just because I had Covid in the middle, but because there were so many threads to weave together. And it was written in a way I’d not done before – I was actually deep into a different book but it wasn’t working. I had to come up with something else and quickly. I started with half a dozen elevator pitches, then a detailed outline, and then several drafts followed by 4 rounds of editorial revisions. There were pieces I couldn’t make fit until the very last attempt. But I think it was worth the effort, and I hope you do too. 

One of the Boys: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Books-A-Million|Bookshop|Powell’s 

Author’s socials: Instagram

The Big Idea: Kemi Ashing-Giwa

Posted on July 14, 2023    Posted by Athena Scalzi      2 Comments

Tea is best enjoyed with friends. So is revenge! Author Kemi Ashing-Giwa brings us a tale of tea, friendship, revenge, and so much more in her new novel, The Splinter in the Sky.

KEMI ASHING-GIWA:

There wasn’t one singular idea that sparked The Splinter in the Sky; it was more of a situation. For the first few months of quarantine, whenever I wasn’t attending class on Zoom, I would read the news, watch the news, and doomscroll on Twitter.

I needed a healthy way to process everything I was learning and feeling, and since writing has always been a great comfort to me, it seemed only natural that I should start a new project. From the get-go, I wanted this story to have: (a) an assassin who takes revenge on the empire that razed her homeland; (b) a close sibling relationship at the center because there will never be enough of those stories; and (c) lots of tea, because that was my current obsession. From this hodgepodge surfaced a tea specialist-turned-spy-turned assassin who embarks on an interplanetary quest to rescue her sibling and avenge her fallen lover. Being a pantser (at the time), I cracked open a Google Doc and got right to work.  

I soon ran into a major problem: while a character running around kicking ass and taking names is always fun to write and read about, there’s not much substance in it. What’s the point of it all? Say Enitan successfully saves her sibling and gives her lover’s murderers a taste of their own medicine… Then, what? The classic hero’s journey typically ends with a return to the normal world. But the “normal world” of The Splinter in the Sky is a broken one; it’s the world that allowed for the bloody colonization of her moon, for the abduction of her only remaining family member. Enitan’s enemies aren’t just the people who personally ravaged her home and her life. Her enemy is the system itself—the autocracy on the brink of sparking yet another war of conquest. So the whole Holy Vaalbaran Empire has to go. (Or, at least, it has to change on a fundamental level).

Of course, a single person can’t take on a superpower alone, even if she’s a polyglot and knows a lot about tea. She’d need a great deal of help: allies, and even—dare I say it—friends. I’ll be honest, I did not want to write about found family (at first). I just wanted a bloody cathartic revenge tale. But my initial plan wouldn’t have made for a good story, and it wasn’t even true to myself. At the end of the day, I’m an inveterate optimist, and the tale I’d originally imagined was missing the very thing that got me through quarantine and everything that happened in it: hope. 

I’m sure you found that as corny as I felt writing that, but it’s true. Hope is no less powerful, nor less meaningful, than rage or sorrow. And, maybe, that’s the real big idea in The Splinter in the Sky. Hopefully, I did a good job of conveying that in the book. 

The Splinter in the Sky: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Books-a-Million|Bookshop

Author socials: Website|Twitter

The Big Idea: Julia Vee and Ken Bebelle

Posted on July 13, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi

You start with an old idea, and from this old idea, you can create something new. So Julia Vee and Ken Bebelle learned, as they looked to legends from their heritage for the new novel Ebony Gate.

JULIA VEE and KEN BEBELLE:

When we started writing what would become Ebony Gate, we took inspiration from Asian myth, using foo lions, hungry ghosts, and death gods instead of the standard fare of vampires and fae that already populated our shelves. In particular, we focused on Lóng, the Chinese dragon. Chinese dragons date back to the I Ching, but their appeal is timeless. Post-Ming dynasty Chinese texts tell of nine sons of the Great Dragon Father, each with individual strengths and powers. These dragon sons were powerful gods, capable of controlling the weather and water. We wanted to carry these old myths forward into a modern setting.

We imagined an entire civilization of people descended from these Nine Sons of the Dragon, what their culture and rules would be like. Each family’s identity is based on their Hoard, a trove of artifacts and precious gems, soaked in dragon magic, granting them wealth and power. They model their lives after their dragon gods and call themselves Lóng Jiārén, dragon family. Lóng Jiārén live like apex predators. They are:

• Secretive
• Acquisitive
• Territorial
• Powerful
• Fiercely loyal 
• Prone to violence

For millennia these Lóng Jiārén lived among regular humans, hiding their secrets and husbanding their power. With their amazing talents, they built empires in the shadows. But Lóng Jiārén are not precisely humans, and their dragon nature cannot be denied.

To self-govern, these descendants of the dragons lead ritualistic lives. Their society is governed by laws that supersede any other code of conduct, the first being “Protect the Hoard.” They trade debts and favors that are bound by honor and magic, payable for the duration of one’s bloodline. Wealth, power, and succession are all predicated on the ability to survive amongst the most dangerous people on the planet. 

But in this strict society, misfits chafe under the yoke of these rules.

Despite being born into a family with a lavish hoard, Emiko Soong never fit in. She’s the Broken Tooth of Soong, and has always been an outsider, struggling to carve out her place in this world of the dragonborn. Ebony Gate is a story about one woman navigating the rocky path between a world rife with violence and secrets, and the other one oblivious to the predators who walk among them.

What started as a big idea to bring Chinese dragon lore into contemporary fiction became something much more personal for us—exploring the theme of growing up as diaspora, with a foot in two worlds, and charting a new path that sits somewhere in the middle ground. It turned out, we were writing about our own struggles—but with magic and dragons. The diaspora experience is one of change and adaptation. We hold on to certain old ways, while learning the new ways. 

We’re American, but also Asian-American and we didn’t see ourselves represented in the fantasy fiction we grew up with. There’s something very painful about being cast as the perpetual foreigner in the place where you grow up and raise your own family. It was important to us that our protagonist be Asian, as well as representative of our experiences. And while we are not descended from dragons, our parents’ story of coming to a new world certainly echoes in Ebony Gate. 

In the same way that our upbringing was influenced by old and new cultures, we believe that what we do with our lives also changes the landscape of our home. Along the same vein we hope that Emiko’s story helps broaden the landscape of fantasy fiction. Ebony Gate is a diaspora story with old world legends, new world problems, and a heroine we can all root for.

Ebony Gate: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop.org|Powell’s

Julia’s socials: Website | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | TikTok  
Ken’s socials: Website | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram

The Big Idea: Stephen Aryan

Posted on July 12, 2023    Posted by Athena Scalzi      3 Comments

As a child, author Stephen Aryan wanted to see people like him in fantasy books, but rarely did. Now that he writes books himself, he made sure to represent his roots in his new novel, The Judas Blossom. Follow along in his Big Idea to see how this first installment of the trilogy came to be.

STEPHEN ARYAN:

So, why did I write a historic fantasy book set in Persia? And, have you ever felt like an outsider?

If you’re reading this in America then you may have noticed my surname. Forget what you think you know, as that came from a Frenchman in the 1850s who thought racism was a good idea. Fair warning, his wiki entry is an eye-opener. It actually comes from the term Aryan or Arya, which was used in ancient times as an ethnocultural self-designation by Indo-Iranians.

I was born in Iran, but moved to the UK as a baby, and I’ve lived here my entire life. I’m one of a small but growing community of Geordie-British-Iranians, from in, or around, the city of Newcastle. In the 1980s in England, the racial mix in schools was not what it is today. Add in the fact that I’ve been tall my entire life, and am now well over six feet tall, and it’s fair to say that growing up, I kind of stood out.

So reading fantasy growing up, there wasn’t anyone like me, and yet. Tanis Half-Elven came from two different people and had a foot in each camp. Weis and Hickman also wrote the Rose of the Prophet trilogy in the late 1980s, set in a pseudo Middle-Eastern setting, with a cast of characters that are all people of colour. Most of the people in Le Guin’s Earthsea books had brown skin. Although there have been many others over the years, these three are my earliest recollections of seeing someone familiar. Now, own voice books are far more common, and there are fantasy series with connections to many different countries around the world.

Given all of that, you can begin to see why I have a vested interest in making sure that a series set in 13th century Persia (the old name for Iran until 1935) feels as authentic as possible. However, with thousands of years of history, and a culture rich in poetry, art, music, and literature, with gloriously delicious food, and a people known for being outspoken, passionate and warm, I knew trying to convey all of that to the reader would be difficult. As it turned out, writing this trilogy was the biggest challenge of my writing career. I felt an enormous weight of responsibility bearing down on me.

You see, I wanted to tell a dramatic story, but as a historical fantasy series, I knew I would have to massage the facts to make it a more cohesive narrative. Historians may get upset about things I’ve changed, ignored or got wrong, despite my research and that’s fine. At the same time, I also wanted to immerse the reader in a different time and place, giving them a peek at a culture they probably know little or nothing about. 

In 2014, the incomparable Anthony Bourdain, in his Parts Unknown TV series for CNN, visited Iran and, for the first time in years, we caught a glimpse of what life was like for ordinary people. The situation has obviously changed a lot since then, but, without making this political, what’s happening now just demonstrates what I touched on earlier, about Iran being a land of passionate people, and forthright women.

My hope for this book, and this series, is that the reader goes on an exciting adventure and has a great time until the very last page. My wish is that a few readers become interested in finding out more about the country, culture and its people. And my deepest desire is that, one day, a little kid reading it sees something familiar in the characters, and doesn’t feel so alone.

The Judas Blossom: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s 

Author socials: Twitter|Instagram

The Big Idea: Rachel Cantor

Posted on July 11, 2023    Posted by Athena Scalzi      2 Comments

As much as people love the classics, sometimes they need an update. Luckily, author Rachel Cantor is here to bring us a modernized look at the Brontës in her new novel, Half-Life of a Stolen Sister. Follow along in her Big Idea to see how she swapped out the 1800s for the modern era.

RACHEL CANTOR:
I was overseas working on my first novel when I ran out of books to read (something that could happen before the blessed advent of e-readers). I was beyond thrilled, then, when I found Charlotte Brontë’s Villette in a dusty corner of a Danish bookshop. I’d never read Villette, despite it being the favorite book of a college chum whose opinion I madly respected: probably I knew it couldn’t match Jane Eyre, which had always been my favorite book by a super long shot.
The preface stunned me. It described how, one by one, Charlotte Brontë’s four sisters and one brother died young, the first at the age of ten, the last at barely thirty-one, leaving Charlotte, for all intents and purposes, alone, likely for the rest of her life. Having reached the “spinsterly” age of thirty-three, she could not reasonably expect to wed. Lonely and wrecked by grief, she survived and, by some measures, thrived. How? How had she done it? My novel, Half-Life of a Stolen Sister, arose not so much out of a Big Idea as a Big Question. I wanted to understand.
For almost a decade, I kept the thought of a Brontë book in my head: when the time came, I would read novels, biographies, letters, and anything else I could find, and based on these sources, write four long stories from the point of view of Anne, Emily, Branwell, and Charlotte, respectively. Each would take place during a particularly important time in their collective lives; all would have as their natural backdrop Yorkshire, England, 1821-1855.
Big Problem: I am not a “realistic” writer; I adore historical fiction but I am even more definitely not a writer of realistic historical fiction. Luckily for me, I was (am) capable of enormous literary self-deception: more than ten years later, when it was time to write this book, I went for it. I bought all those research books and read, or reread, all those novels. Which was when, mercifully, my imaginative sub-brain, which is much smarter than I am, took over. I say mercifully because my imaginative sub-brain wasn’t interested in the plan I’d held on to all those years (my Big Idea, possibly): instead, it immediately placed young Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne Brontë not on the moors, not in quaint Haworth Parsonage, but in a park, where they hid behind bushes, conferring on “talkie-walkies” and looking for spies.
What?
When they left that park, it was to sketch dioramas at a nearby museum; when they returned home, it was via a subway to a rent-controlled, much-too-small apartment. I had migrated this family, through a process mysterious—a process I still can’t say I understand—to a mid-sized North American city, probably in the late twentieth or early twenty-first century.
This shift was, obviously, decisive. It changed everything—it had to. No longer would I try to write in a manner to which I’m not suited; rather, I could rely on my strongest skill, which applying my imagination to questions of the heart. And possibly have fun doing so.
Thus I was able to convey the father’s extremely rushed (and entirely unrealistic) search for a replacement wife, seemingly moments after the death of the mother of his six children, via a dating-site profile.
Thus I could allow Charlotte’s publisher to share his thoughts about the sisters’ secret identities on a public radio show.
Thus Charlotte could express unmediated anguish following the loss of Branwell, Emily, and Anne in her diary, and a more curated version of same through letters.
And so on.
This freedom was exhilarating. It allowed me to present Charlotte and those around her not as inert figures in a wax museum (or romantic figures striding across the moors, or delicate ladies coughing tubercular phlegm), but rather as people who grow and change and spat and try really hard to do well—people who are, in other words, very much like us. It brought me close to their joys and sufferings and complications and achievements, which in turn allowed me to answer my Big Question—How did she do it?—long after I’d abandoned my Big Idea.

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