Anna Waterworth - The Girl Who Grew Wings

[Music] Hello and welcome to Mythmakers. Mythmakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Golding. I'm a writer but I'm also Director of the Centre. And today I'm having one of my favourite conversations and that is when I get a chance to sit down with a new to me author who is just beginning to launch herself in the fantasy space. And her name is Anna Waterworth, and she's published with Chicken House. That's a great independent publisher over here in the UK. So Anna, lovely to meet you. - Hi Julia, thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here. - So Anna, we're going to be talking mainly about your new book called "The Girl Who Grew Wings." But before we get to that point, would you like to tell us a little bit about your journey to being a writer? Where have you come from? What's, if you look over your shoulder, what's the back trail look like? - Oh, well, I've always been a writer. I'm sure you'll understand this as well, Julia, 'cause you're a writer. But even when I was young, I used to write stories for my parents to read and, yeah, so I guess I've always been a writer. I started taking it more seriously in my early 30s when I had my first maternity leave. I wrote a couple of books then. The first one was absolutely awful and I will never show it to anyone, but the second one was a lot better, I like to think. I entered that in a competition, in Chicken House's competition for unpublished authors. It got shortlisted. It didn't win, but I ended up getting my first contract from that. under the name of Anna Day though, so it's quite confusing because I got divorced so my name has changed. And so that was for a book called The Fandom, which was a fantasy, kind of a science fantasy novel. And then I've just been writing ever since then really, I think that came out in 2018. Yeah, so ever since then I've kind of carried on writing published books with Chicken House. So we need a little correction there. There's been Anna Day. Yes, it's confusing. Who isn't so new to this. Yeah. But is this the girl who grew wings? Is that your first Anna Waterworth? Yeah. Okay. It's very confusing. I'm sorry about all names. I've also written a fantasy book as Anna Rainbow as well. So that's my middle grade name. So young adult, Anna Day and Anna Waterworth, and children's middle grade and a rainbow. That's my partner's surname. It's all very confusing. I don't know why I have so many names. - No, no, no. You're talking to somebody who already has three pen names. Plus I, my own journey to writing is not unlike yours in that I started getting serious about writing in my early thirties when I was on maternity leave. - Oh, there you go. - Yeah, difference being my third child rather than my first so I'm very admiring of you that you managed on your first maternity leave? Oh, I don't know. Harder on your third, I reckon, when you've got two kids. Well, I was doing a doctorate when I had my first two kids, so there wasn't really a concept of maternity leave. You just kind of, I know. I remember carrying on studying with a book in one hand and baby in the other. Literally, it was multitasking. Absolutely. Well done you. So, The Girl Who Grew Wings is a story about the twins Ikari And is that Cephe? Is that how you say her name? Yeah. I would like to give us a little bit of a description about what goes on in this book. Yeah, okay. So it's kind of loosely inspired by Greek mythology. So if you think of Ikari as being kind of an Icarus, gender-flipped Icarus, so she has to build wings, hence the title of the novel. and Cephe is kind of a Persephone character, so she is Ikari's twin. The way the magic, there's quite a strong magic system in the world, that there's three types of magic that only a special few have access to, and that means that you can either be a healer, so you have kind of magic healing powers, or an embalmer, so you can make sure people travel to the afterlife. Or you can be an alchemist, and that's not necessarily about metals, it's kind of just transmuting the natural world around you. So you can turn storms into a sunny day and rotten fruit into good fruit. And you're only allowed to have one gift in the world that they live in. So when Sephri discovers that she has two gifts, she's suddenly incredibly vulnerable because the punishment for having two gifts is death. So they have this big secret to protect and then it kind of sets in motion this whole string of events where Sephi's stolen and taken to the underworld by demons and the only way that Ikari can help her is by building wings and growing wings. And the only person she can get to help her do that is this kind of mysterious enemy prisoner in the dungeon. So there's kind of a bit of romance there. So there's kind of an enemies to lovers trope going on. >>JM: So your world that you're creating is loosely based on a world where Greek myths are believed. Were you thinking of a particular Greek landscape or is it your own world that you're building? >> Yeah, it's more my own world. I mean, I think people have said to me they can see a bit of Egypt in there, which makes sense because Egypt and Greece are kind of linked historically. A little bit of paganism in there as well, kind of mother moon, father sun. So I think it's borrowed from lots of influences, but is ultimately my own world. But there is a real kind of Mediterranean feel to the world when you read it. It's kind like a marble citadel. You can kind of imagine it having that kind of aesthetic of ancient Greece. - Yes, I think it's a Hellenistic world, isn't it? When the Greek and the Egyptian worlds collide and that's where you get Cleopatra and all that lot. There's Greeks. I don't want to get into that debate because there's been a huge debate about whether or not Cleopatra is the mother of Cleopatra. But anyway, we agree that this Mediterranean world was great big stirring pot of these different things. But obviously this is a world of fantasy. It's not linked to any sense of a historical ancient Greece. So would you say that you were helped on your way to writing this story by any particular influences like other fantasy writers that you have read or any particular...obviously the myths and legends of Icarus and Persephone are in there, But what else can you see going into your melting pot? Oh, I don't know. I mean, I started, I had the idea to write, I've always wanted to write an Icarus rewrite because it's been one of my favorite stories since I was a kid. And I agreed it with Chicken House in like 2017, I think. So I started writing it well before kind of Greek myths became very prominent in literature. You know, that's quite a fashion for them now. So I don't think any of those influenced me because I started writing it well before that. I think it's probably just influenced by all my fantasy love, you know, in the sense of that kind of big world building and I mean obviously the Greek mythology is in there but I think just all those big worlds I love so much, you know, Lord of the Rings, Avatar, Harry Potter, they're all chucked in there, you know, I mean it's nothing like Harry Potter but just in the sense that there's like a sorting hat moment where they kind of, obviously there's no magical hat but they get sorted in, they have a, oh what's the word I'm looking for, they have a ceremony where they're chosen which magical power that they have, they already know, but it's kind of making it formal. And that has kind of sorting hat feels to it or kind of a little bit Hunger Games feel to it. So there's loads of different influences in there. But to be fair to you, that's only because the sorting hat is based on what happens to us at school. I've got vivid memories of going to my secondary school and sitting in a huge hall. I hope they do it better now. And you were literally called out in forms and you'd look around thinking, oh, the person I knew has just gone off that through that door and I'm left with these people. I don't know. I mean, there is a feeling of being sorted. At most school experiences. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, we had houses at school and earned merits and things for our houses. So, yeah, I think you're right. I think everything fantasy is often, you know, well, nearly always just an extension of real life, isn't it? Yes. I call it like a laboratory. I'm going to ask you a question about that a bit later, but it's like a place that you can run an experiment when you're looking at something in real life, you move it sideways into how would this work out if these were the rules in my fantasy world. So, just checking back to your sort of connection to the twins story, is there any particular relationship between you and twins or you and sisters? Have you got some kind of basis in your own life that you were drawing on to flesh out the interaction between Ikari and Sefi? Well, I mean, I've got a sister myself, so probably drawn on that a little bit. I've got children. I've got three kids. So looking at their kind of sibling relationships. Yeah, probably just my own family. But I'm just checking you weren't a twin because it's quite important. I'm not a twin. No, no, I'm not. One of them is just a few minutes older than the other, but that gives her the feeling of responsibility. Oh, yeah. Ultimate power. I'm always older. Yeah. So what part of the story did you find you enjoyed writing the most? Is there a section where you look back and have that, I mean, when writing really goes well, there's a kind of euphoria, isn't there? That you're in the, you're in that zone. Is there parts of this story where you look back and think, yes, that that fell into place really nicely? I think probably for me the climax was probably the best bit of writing because I had the two, so it's told from Ikari and Sefi's, like it's a dual perspective, so you've got two points of view and they kind of weave together. And for the first half of the novel Ikari and Sefi are occupying the same space, so that's quite interesting because you get to see similar events from kind of different points of view. But then when Sefi's stolen and taken to the underworld. They both have very different stories that kind of weave together. So at the end, there was like a coming together of the two threads. And I felt like that really paid off, you know, all that kind of hard work of careful plotting and making sure everything fell in the right place. It kind of really paid off. I find writing multiple perspectives much harder, but more rewarding. Oh yeah, definitely. It's one of the things that when I'm teaching creative writing that obviously I applaud ambition, but if someone comes with a multi-perspective story, it is just so much harder to make us care about both. Well, I think two sides is okay, but when you get to three or four or five, you have to be very good at what you're doing to make it make us care. Yeah, absolutely. I've never been brave enough to do more than two. Maybe next book. Next book. So there are also some very dark sections right from the start. So, you know, bear that in mind, reader, just to be aware that it's not a soft and gentle world that these twins are living in. How do you handle writing those moments of great pain? So there's obviously great physical pain that the characters go through with the loss of their mother and the punishment that's meted out to Sefi right at the beginning. But there also is spiritual and physical pain going on at the same time. How do you handle that in what is a YA book? Yeah, I think that's a really interesting question because I always think of young adults, kind of teenagers and young adults, as kind of cognitively being pretty much on a par with adults but it's kind of not what we know from neuroscience. It's the frontal lobe development that maybe hasn't quite got there yet. We don't get our full frontal lobe development until we're about 25. I always think they can handle emotions in the sense that they're feeling big emotions. We don't want to patronize young adults too much because they're amygdala. It's all there. if anything, the emotions are stronger when you're younger, because you haven't got the kind of cognitive - not necessarily the cognitive, but the understanding of consequences and that kind of prefrontal stuff isn't quite there as much to help as a protective factor. So I think it's important that we help young adults and teenagers kind of process those really big emotions. And it's quite a safe space anyway, because it's a book. It's not actually happening to them. But then, like you say, you don't want to be traumatizing people. And there is a line. So I think I work quite closely with my editor for that, because obviously they are a children's publisher. They specialize. That's all they publish, Chicken House. They don't publish adults. So they're very, very specialist in that area. So if I'm at all worried, I'll just run it past them. And actually, there was one scene near the beginning that made it all the way to kind of copy, edit. And then when we sent the book out to get endorsements, there was a couple of writers that actually said, "Oh, hang on a minute. This doesn't sit comfortably." And so we had to adapt that scene to make it more child-friendly. So, well, young adult friendly. So I think even editors can maybe not get it wrong because it is subjective, but maybe overstep where that kind of blurry line is a little bit sometimes. So it's a difficult one. It's such a question of... It's like seasoning a dish. It's not like a rule. You gotta work out if you got the balance. So I would say, looking at it myself, that the way you handle the mother's death at the beginning, which is hopefully something nobody experiences in life -because it's a sort of punishment-- -'Cause it's awful. Witchcraft punishment. I won't tell you more than that. But you do have a moment of transformation, a beauty at the end of that scene, which kind of is a relief for the reader. Which, that's the image that you stay with rather than the pain that went before. -Yeah. -And I think in the case of the punishment of Sefi, it's her anger carries you through it. It anesthetized you to what's being done to her, in a way. So, that's where a strong emotion actually helps protect from dwelling on the... what's happening. So, Anna, one of the most difficult things as an author is when you're putting in highly dramatic moments which have some potential to trigger other people. I'm not saying, you know, the absolute extreme of putting a trigger warning on Jane Austen or something, which I've heard, not like that, but I mean, really serious subjects. So, I noticed that in your book, you have a moment of-- which refers to some... sexual abuse, but you say also that it was revived during, potentially revised during a later draft. Is that the section that you toned down to make more palatable for this age group? (EP): Yeah, yeah absolutely because we'd had feedback from, I think when we sent it out to authors to get endorsements, one of the authors came back with that feedback and I think someone else did as well. I think one of the copy editors maybe came back so quite late on in the process, we changed, we just kind of toned the scene down a bit and made it like you say more palatable for the age group, a little bit more age appropriate. Yeah so it's a tricky thing because you want to honour the real experience of the thing. Absolutely, absolutely, yeah the sad reality is that girls do get sexually assaulted, but I guess it's maybe just knowing where to draw the line and that's when editors and other people can be really quite handy because I guess the line is a little bit subjective, a little bit blurry. - Oh completely and it changes from publisher to publisher and editor to editor. So I think as long as, I mean you're writing for a sort of YA market and I think the only time as a parent giving children a book that I had a problem was when I felt that the material should have been YA flagged and wasn't. And so, you know, yeah, it's a tricky, tricky area because you don't want to censor what people think should have felt like a character. Anyway, I was interested to find that you've had that experience. So, that's actually part of the editing, editing experience. But how else did you find that whole process of submitting a novel, going through the editorial. Was it problem free or did it have a... No! Is it ever problem free? Oh yeah, I think I've yet to experience that. Actually that's not true, my last book actually was quite easy but yeah, The Girl Who Grew Wings was, the submission was easy because I got the contract before I wrote the book. So I just pitched the idea and Chicken House gave me an advance to write it, so that was really handy, like I didn't even have a plot or anything, so that was easy, but I think that was probably the only easy bit because then I wrote it and then I got my first draft feedback and it wasn't terrible or anything, but when I read it through I just wasn't happy and I just decided to rewrite the the whole thing. So absolutely nothing from the first draft is in what you read today. So I just started from scratch basically. So when I was supposed to be getting my second draft feedback, I was basically getting my first draft feedback and then I had to rewrite the second half again. So the first half was okay, the second half needed rewriting. So there's just a lot of rewriting, a lot more than what I've ever done before. So it just meant it kind of meant that we were still doing quite big changes at line edit and copy edit. So for people who don't know you kind of do your first draft, your second draft and then your line edits and then it goes to a copy editor where they really kind of pedantically look at grammar and make sure it's kind of fit for publication. Sorry I know you know that Julia but not everyone will but normally on line edits you're just picking up on grammar and words but I was still like making big changes on paragraphs some things so, oh sorry, so that felt a little bit rushed compared to kind of other books I've written where it felt like there was more time and space but I mean I like to think it's a better book because of all the work that I did but maybe a more difficult experience, kind of heartbreaking deleting it entirely. It's interesting isn't it, I think there's a certain courage involved in being an author of jacking something in and saying, let's start again. The ideas are good and what have you, but let's break it down and have another go. It's drastic, but also it's really cleansing and inspirational. I've done that on other occasions with books where-- - Oh, that's good to hear. - Yeah, because in fact, and certainly when I'm doing some screenplay writing, that happens all the time. Few words involved in screenplay, so it's not quite as painful. But you're circling an idea saying, how best should this story be told? Doesn't mean what you've written was rubbish. It just means that you've circled around and thought, well, I'm going to tell it this way instead. And clinging on, like cutting and pasting stuff from the old draft can actually be a bit of a drag on what's good about rewriting. So yeah, well done for doing that. - Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And I think as writers, we can get a little bit precious about our words and see them as like little babies and kind of not want to kind of just get rid of them. But I think you're absolutely right that there's something really quite cleansing about just going, right, gone. Yeah. Start again. You kind of put it in a file on the computer and just say, right, there it is. You never look at it again, of course, but yeah. Yeah. It's sort of psychologically safe. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And then I guess as time goes by, you kind of lose the urge to think, oh, maybe I'll use it again, and you just carry on. And it's almost like a kind of very mild grieving process, isn't it? That to begin with, you kind of want to stay close to it. And then as time goes by, you're able to kind of move on a little bit. - Yeah, maybe it's more like moving house. - Yeah, yeah. - Something like that, where, that's how I tend to think about it. So we were thinking about the sort of role of fantasy and as the center of fantasy, we often are thinking about the social purpose of fantasy and what it's doing. OK, some people say, right, it's escapism. That's what it does. But I'm quite clear in my own head that very often fantasy is the best way of telling a story about the real world. Our lived experience is sometimes best in a fantasy package. And I can see elements of that in your story. So without reductively making it into an allegory or anything like that, were you thinking about it as like a exploration or a laboratory test for some ideas that you're interested in the sort of current political climate? Yeah, I mean I think so. It's very much, it's a very feminist novel. I think for me I'd had quite a few bad experiences. I'd come out of a divorce and had a few bad experiences with the patriarch. So it's very much kind of playing on my mind. And I think what maybe what I was trying to explore in the Girl Who Good Wings, maybe more unconsciously at the time, sometimes it's not always a conscious process, is it? Was kind of what happens when women have more power than men. How is that dealt with by society? You know, because in the Girl Who Good Wings, it's actual powers, you know, that only women can have more than one calling and how is that dealt with at a societal level in a patriarch society. But then thinking about the real world, how are women who are deemed too powerful, how are they dealt with, not talking about me necessarily, just any woman who for whatever reason is threatening to men. How is she treated? And, you know, and history shows time and time again, it's generally not that well. Yeah. As a trans woman, so. For me, the moment when I really saw this, having sort of thought, oh, we've moved on. Watching the American president, presidential election back in 2016, when there was the Hillary Clinton versus the Donald Trump debate, suddenly gender suddenly seemed incredibly relevant to, I mean I know there is whole swathes of other issues about why you may vote for one not the other, but just looking at on the gender, the gender side of it seemed incredibly unfair. Yeah. The way she was criticized and also discounted because she was female in many ways. I think the sort of, if she was there like quickly transgendered and became male, genuine and everyone's accepted her as that, all of those things would have gone. The whole looming behind her in the debate stage, the sort of association with her and what it was perceived her husband, all that stuff seemed very gendered. Whereas if you could list up the things which you might question the former president for doing on the gender front and you know the courts have found various things out about him. Yeah, that was all kind of just waved by and I thought, oh we really haven't moved on, have we? I think it will be much better once we get, particularly America, once America has a female president I think we really will have crossed a state in the same way as having a black president did with Obama. Yeah. So, I the politics of it, you know, the actual policies, I'm talking about the actual identities of people. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, you're absolutely right. You can see it in politics, can't you? The way I mean, I'm no fan of Margaret Thatcher, please don't think I am. But the way she is spoken about as compared to maybe other prime ministers who have had just as strong a kind of right wing. There's just obviously gendered differences there. I think I've always worked in the NHS. I don't now, I'm private now, but I always worked as a psychologist in the NHS. And I have to say that NHS is quite female dominated. And I think I just lived in this little bubble thinking that women were generally as respected as men. And we kind of like you said, got past that. And I think going into the court arena was a huge shock, really opened my eyes as to how women are still judged just on their gender. And you know, I mean, it happens for other groups as well, you know. In some ways it was an eye-opener for me that made me more empathic because it made me more aware of how other groups are judged just for something that they haven't chosen and just for being the way they are. So, you know. Yes, and of course these comments are attached to people of different faiths, like Islamic faith or people of different colours or sexualities. I mean the same patterns are seen. It's because we all like to attack the other. I mean, hopefully I don't personally, but we as a human race. Absolutely, absolutely. I mean there's a whole psychology school dedicated to group dynamics and how we kind of favour the in group by pushing away the out group and but the thing is we we should be better than that you know. Yes we have those emotional drives but we also have higher level cognitive thinking and we should be able to move past that but anyway clearly not all the time. (EP) But that's where fantasy helps because you know if I say Hillary Clinton like now everybody gets immediately there is a strongly positive or strongly negative with the action. Whereas if you say, I'm talking about a priestess in my fictional world who's going for high office up against, you know, immediately you strip away all the personal heritage of the last few decades that has gone around the real people. And you can look at the dynamics afresh. And that's what I like about fantasy. Yeah, I think that's such a good point. Absolutely. Margaret Atwood says that in her speculative fiction, she uses that term rather than science fiction, she has never put anything that doesn't already exist in the world. Yeah, and that's sad considering she wrote The Handmaid's Tale. Yeah, yeah. Oryx and Crake is another one of that experimentation. So yeah, good stuff, but it's useful to look at fantasy as a way of commenting on the present and of course you only have to look at 1984 which is perennially relevant it seems even though we've gone way past 1984. So you mentioned to me that you also have a new project that you're working on. Do you want to tell us a little bit about your next book? (EP) Yeah, that's Fantasy II because obviously fantasy is what I love writing and reading and watching. So it's middle grade, so it's for a younger audience than YA, so it's for age 8 to 12, and it's kind of a mash-up of Robin Hood and Jim Carrey's The Mask. So it's about a 12 year old girl who finds a highwayman's mask in her grandpa's shed, and when she puts it on it transforms her into an infamous highwayman, and then she kind of has to save the queen and the queendom. It's very feminist as well, because there's no king, it's just a queendom. So yeah, so feminist fantasy seems to be what I tend to write. But yeah, it's a lot of fun, it's a lot lighter, a lot more lighthearted than The Girl Who Ruined, as you'd expect, because it's for a younger audience. Yeah, it's a kind of fun adventure kind of book. So many of our listeners will be experimenting with their own writing. Do you have some top tips that you find work with your writing process? Yeah, I mean probably my favourite top tip would be to kind of ditch the perfectionism, which I know is easier said than done, but a lot of us kind of feels like when you write it has to be as good as kind of what's going to end up being published and just to kind of reassure people that most people's first drafts are generally terrible and it's better just to write something and even and I guess just going on from that kind of not waiting for motivation and inspiration to strike but just to start writing and then the motivation and the inspiration will come. So So, you know, just to basically not to prevaricate, not to anxiously avoid writing. And then another tip would be just to write what you love, because you're going to spend a lot of time with it. So kind of, I wouldn't advise looking at the market and thinking what's selling, and then trying to write that. And that's it, obviously, because the market changes quite quickly anyway. So just just write what you enjoy. Did you want to tip? That's fine. If you have another one, that's fine. Do share it with us. I think that your your thing about just, you know, avoid perfectionism is something I need to keep hearing. So I've had a day where I've really done everything but right. You get days like that where you know I've done everything except the thing I'm supposed to be doing. Not counting this podcast obviously. And one of the things I need to remind myself of is the reason I'm held up is I need to, I know that I've got to get from somewhere to somewhere else and I don't want to write that bit in the middle because it bores me. So actually I'm just thinking, "Oh, I can just write this is the bit in the middle and leave it and just move on." Because of course I would have edited that out anyway as I go back through. So if you're stuck in your manuscript because you've got flagging interest in how they get from A to B, it could be that's really great is going to happen in that and you don't know, but you could just say right well let's go to B. We do like a cinematic cut right there at B and then you can worry about both slots together when you read the whole manuscript and if it's still a massive gap you can say right what goes in that gap and that probably will help me move on from where I am stuck at the moment. Yeah I think that's such good advice and I think it's Susan Dennard talks about magic cookies, cookies as in eating cookies, not computer cookies, and if there isn't a cookie, what's the cookie in the scene, the bit that you want to eat. And if there isn't one, just ditch it, don't have it, find the cookie and if there is no cookie, don't write it. (EP) Yeah, for me, it's something has to happen, is the way I've always, you know, something that forwards the wider plot has to happen at that point. And I might realize what it is later on because of the complexity. I might think, "Oh, I need to have seen that in earlier. Oh yeah, I've got that gap. Let's go and put it in there." So you can use it because obviously it's just you in this world for however many months it is you writing it. give yourself permission to skip, to go forward, keep going forward. Excellent. So we have a section where I always ask my guests where in all the fantasy worlds is the best place for something and in honour of your book, I was wanting to ask you where is the best place to grow wings? Where would you like to be a person and then grow some wings to fly around? >> It would have to be Pandora from Avatar because it's just so beautiful and you could sail around all those little floating islands and meet those little dragon things that they fly around on. I can't remember what they're called. I think that would just be an amazing place to have wings. >> Yeah, no, that would be great. I think, I mean, obviously Middle Earth, but you know, I don't always want to say Middle Earth as an answer because that would be great too. Yeah, but maybe thinking about it that it'd be quite fun to revisit Neverland, you know, the Peter Pan flying. That always looked great fun. Yeah, and to visit it without the, in a modern context, because if you have you ever read that book to your own family, because actually some of the attitudes in it are a bit dated, shall we say? Yeah. It's quite good for someone to have a real good old go at it as from a more contemporary perspective, shall we say? Yeah, there's a lot of re-enactments at the moment. There is one out there, you know, that someone's probably... Probably there is, probably there is. But anyway, I think, yeah, you're right, someone's obviously going to have done that already. Let me know if that was you, because I'm out there, because I'd be interested. But anyway, flying around because the way everything connects quite smoothly and lots of things to see in one place, plus you're flying from Edwardian London, that's the bit I'd really enjoy is flying around and sort of visiting places, landing on rooftops. That would be great fun. >> Yeah, the mermaids, that'd be fun. >> Yeah, going to the mermaid lagoon, exactly. >> Yeah, I'd love that. >> And is there something that you can recommend our fantasy loving listenership, something perhaps you might have watched or read that you think is well worth putting on the list for people? (EP) Well I just got on the Fourth Wing Wagon, which is a really popular fantasy book at the moment and I did enjoy that actually. (EP) What's that called again? (EP) Fourth Wing. It's huge at the moment. It's by, is it Rebecca Yarros, I think it is, and that's kind of like a dragon, people who ride dragons, like an academy for them. It's a little bit older than YA, but it still reads a bit younger, like I still would have placed it maybe as new adult. - So is it a bit like a successor to Anne McCaffrey kind of world? - Who's Anne McCaffrey? - Oh my goodness, I'm showing my age here, she was like the big dragon lady back in the the... Yeah, Dragon Riders of Pern. I went back and I thought, gosh, this is... I read this as a teenager because there's some strange things about it. >> It will be very like that. For me, it was like an older version of How to Train Your Dragon. >> Oh, okay. So somewhere in between the two. I will look that up. My fantasy tip is I've watched the last season of The Witcher over the last few weeks. And I want to recommend one particular episode, which I think is episode Five. It takes place at a party. And what I'm, why I'm recommending this is I think it has a really interesting structure in that it goes a couple of times through the same events showing it from different points of view. But it's very unlike actually how the rest of the series is written. I don't know who was in charge of that particular script, but I thought it was a really interesting experiment of form. Something I've seen more in a heist movie where they sometimes do that, where they replay it and you see who switched what, you know, like in Ocean's Eleven or one of those things. But it had that in a party scene. So I actually enjoyed the series as a whole, but this particular episode, there were a couple of standouts and that was my favourite just from the way it was written. Yeah, that sounds great. Yeah. So I think Henry Cavill is now leaving that series and we're getting one of the Liam Hemsworth or somebody is. So we'll have to see. Games, yeah. Yeah. I wonder if they'll actually say, don't you look different? Or if they'll just carry on. Just pretend it's normal for people to have different faces. Is it going to be James Bond or is it going to be Doctor Who? Because Doctor Who, they make a big thing about mutilating. And Doctor Who, and in James Bond, it just turns out, - Everyone's gone, off we go. Totally new bloke. - My job's different, you know, ends different. It's all fine. - Yeah. Fabulous, thank you so much, Anna. - Anna, thank you for having me, it's been great. - Yeah, we had to come back a couple of weeks later 'cause we had some tech difficulties in the middle, which is if you're watching this, you might realize we've changed clothes because over the course of two weeks, we do. And backgrounds in your case, yeah. Yeah, you've moved miles. But anyway, thank you very much for coming back. been a delight talking to you and do get back in touch when you've got something new to talk to us about in the next book. Brilliant, will do. Thank you so much Julia, it's been a pleasure. Thanks for listening to Mythmakers Podcast brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. Visit OxfordCentreForFantasy.org to join in the fun. Find out about our online courses, in-person stays in Oxford, plus visit our shop for great gifts. Tell a friend and subscribe, wherever you find your favourite podcasts worldwide. (upbeat music)