Transcript
[0:00] 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 and today I have been joined by the wonderful Kate Dillon who is going to be putting out very shortly. Is this your second novel, Kate? This is my third novel, my third novel in English. Yeah, third novel, Until We Shatter, which I have here in a very attractive, very attractive proof. Thank you. But I imagine the Finnish version will look somewhat similar. So, Kate, it's always a huge joy to meet other writers because I find when we put our heads together, all sorts of interesting ideas come out. And my favorite question to ask authors is to sort of dig out of them, what were the books that actually inspired them as a young reader that actually led them to being an author? What was that book that changed your direction when you were little?
[1:09] It's really hard to say because I was actually quite a weird reader. I was not a big person in the writing community when I was younger. I read a lot. I read ferociously, but I started off reading science fiction and fantasy, but I would just read whatever books my dad was reading because my dad, like he goes through a book like in a day. So I would just pick up whatever he just put down.
[1:32] And then like I went through crime phases. I went through thriller phases like
[1:36] I jumped all around the map. So I think by the time I was just like oh maybe I want to write a book I'd sort of had influences from all over the map so I wish I could say it was just like this one fantasy book changed my life but I think it was just books in general but I think if um so my first few books were in the YA genre so they were young adult novels and if I think we look at the books that really kind of shaped me through that I think it's you know the books that really kind of hit big at the time Divergent was a massive book for me I really really enjoyed that The Hunger Games um I will never admit this publicly which I'm doing right now but I love Twilight in fact I'm I'm still to this day obsessed with Twilight um but just books that put you in the main character's head and I think that's what was different with the young adult genre especially books that were coming out around 2010 to 2016 they were so different from what I was reading in other genres and what I was reading in my dad's genres, which were, you know, much more adult fantasy sci-fi thrillers, you know, so they were a little bit more removed, whereas young adult suddenly was just like first person, present tense, the immediacy of it. So I think those books were probably the ones that affected my own writing the most as I was starting out in my career. Yeah.
[2:53] I think you can be unashamed of liking Twilight because it was, it may be strange for younger people listening to this, but it was so huge, wasn't it? So huge. So huge. It was akin to a kind of YA Harry Potter phenomenon. Yeah. And I think there's something to be said actually to reading a book as a group experience. It's just very different to, in some ways, I love that the book community and the book space has gotten more diverse. And we've got much more range of books, much more range of voices, which is an amazing thing.
[3:29] But back in those days, there were like five big books a year and you were all reading them. There was always somebody to talk to about those books. And in fact, I've just finished off my complete Twilight obsession. I finally found a first edition of the UK cover, which was different from the US one that I'd been searching for for three years. So it's, you know, it's a lot of love for the books that came out of that time. But I mean, even now, though, the YA landscape has changed so much. We are seeing some phenomenal books publishing these days that get to do things
[3:59] that I think authors weren't necessarily permitted to do back then.
[4:03] And we're seeing much more of a range of voices in YA as well, which is really exciting. Yeah that's perhaps we could think about whether whether or not it was about not being permitted or having not yet imagined you can perhaps discuss that when we come to the question about the nature of relationships in your own book but before we get there tell us about till we shatter um you are known at this stage best known for mind walker so those of you read mind walker what what difference are they going to get what where have you gone on your writing journey any so the mind walker books which the first one was mind walker the second one was mind breaker which was a companion novel they are very very much um they are upper ya but they are ya novels and they sit very firmly in the sci-fi genre they are accessible sci-fi but they are sci-fi there's a lot of tech uh it's not real tech it's completely fictional tech uh tech there's not a lot of actual science in the book it's wishful science is what i call it um but it's it's cyberpunk basically Basically, we're not really allowed to use that word because it's very hard as a genre for publishing to break out. So we call it dystopian and we call it, you know, accessible sci-fi. But really, it's a cyberpunk book. It's a cyberpunk duology. Whereas Until We Shatter is a fantasy book. And it's not just fantasy. It's fully second world fantasy. In fact, it has two worlds.
[5:28] So it's very different in that respect. Until We Shatter is also older fantasy.
[5:34] I think we'll discuss this a little bit later, but Until We Shatter sits in the in-between space, which traditionally doesn't exist in publishing. We have young adult books and we have adult books, but Until We Shatter kind of sits in the in-between. And the reason for that is that young adult books so often have to do with coming of age and your firsts as you come into adulthood. And I think Mindwalker and Mindbreaker really kind of fell into that. Whereas Until We Shatter is more about seconds it's second loves it's second responsibilities and it's building yourself back up after you know bad things have happened so it kind of sits in that weird in-between space between young adult literature and fully adult fantasy um which has made it really exciting for me but i don't know uh what publishing is going to do with that quite yet well it has been invented before i remember there was about oh maybe eight years ago the kind of buzz around new adults New Adult, yeah.
[6:31] So I think people will understand what you're trying to do. Yeah, I mean, it never fully took off as a publishing sphere. We're seeing more of it now, actually, that the indie space has exploded because readers wanted New Adult. It was mostly stores and publishers that didn't quite know how to market it. They didn't quite succeed in making bookstore space for it. So it never really took off in the trade publishing space. But I think readers do love it. So I think for those who are interested in that, that's kind of where Until We Shatter sits. It does still appeal to the YA reader. It's got the same POV, the same fast pace, the same voice as you would find in Mindwalker or Mindbreaker. So if you liked those books, if you liked my books for The Pace and The Voice, you will absolutely still find all of those things in Until We Shatter. But Until We Shatter is more geared towards the reader who isn't traditionally that interested in sci-fi and just wants to play in a fantasy playground.
[7:30] Right. So thinking about the actual story, do you want to give us a little tiny hint of what the plot is, like the characters and what they're getting up to? Of course. So Until We Shatter is a heist novel. It is a fantasy heist with color magic across two worlds, one of which wants to shatter the main characters to pieces. Yeah okay thank you so i i found a couple of strong themes sprung out to me as i was reading it and they're connected which is nice like one was the impact of betrayal how that impacts on individuals but also on a group and the other was what it's like to exist in a sort of liminal space between things and this is both as an image of the idea of shattering when under too much strain but also the social position of those with the wrong kind of magic in a way if that's if that's a correct sort of description is there something about those scenes which you felt resonated with this well we're not going to call it ya are we going to call it new adult let's just borrow that that new adult reader in particular um i think for this kind of reader the betrayal specifically.
[8:41] Is when we sort of come into adulthood or we're coming out of childhood it's
[8:47] when we first start to experience real big betrayals. They might not be quite on the scale of what happens in the books. Most of the time, the stakes in our normal lives aren't life or death. The world isn't ending. We're probably not accidentally killing our friends, or I should hope not. But we are going to face some sort of betrayal. You're not going to get a job you want to, or something is going to go wrong at university, or perhaps your parents have decided that you can no longer live in the house, rent free. We're starting to get those moments of, oh, life is actually quite hard and it can be quite unforgiving and people can be quite unforgiving and quite cruel in some respects. And I think as we sort of come into that age, we experience that more. We experience it more without the safety net that we have when we live at home and when we live with our families. And so everything feels big. Everything feels bigger when you don't have that net to fall back on and I think that's what the main that's what the character is in until we shatter really going through their lives are hard because this is a fantasy world and actually they are wanted dead by pretty much everybody on both worlds in the novel but um they don't have a safety net uh the main character Kemi her mom is very very sick she is the provider.
[10:06] Um her entire group of friends including herself they're all illegal so you know if anyone found out that they were half shades, which is kind of like the witches in the novel are basically called shades and there are full-blooded shades and there are half shades and half shades are illegal. So if they are found out, they will essentially get hunted down and killed.
[10:27] So they are very much operating without a net and they are making mistakes and they're making mistakes because, well, they're not that old. They don't have that much life experience. So, you know, young people make mistakes. The problem is their mistakes are exacerbated by a world which is making it very, very difficult for them to make good choices.
[10:47] In fact, it's making good choices almost impossible. And so every bad choice kind of compounds and it culminates in a lot of betrayal, in a lot of heartache and um yeah it's really enjoyable as an author to sort of explore those kinds of big moments in your character's lives yeah i think it's a particularly strong theme it's when i i do a course where we teach novel in the year um one of the sessions halfway through we we start adding in sort of powerful storylines and one of them is betrayal because Because I think all of us instinctively have that deep sort of gut feeling of it's not fair or how could they? And we all really invest in that. The idea of someone you trust who turns on you is very much a way of involving us in the novel and sort of rooting for the characters. But it's also equally interesting when it's the other way around, where your character you're identifying with ends up betraying somebody. Yep and all the cascade of emotion that then happens when you find yourself on that side of the fence which again is a going back to your idea of a more mature experience when we let people down.
[12:04] Yep it's also it's a big big feeling and it's it all comes to do with betrayal is at its core it's a breach of trust as you know we get hurt a lot people hurt us and it's quite it's i mean it's not easy to get over but it's easier to get over when you know you understand okay maybe that person someone's having a bad day or is a misunderstanding but when trust is breached it's much much harder to get over and yeah as an author it's really really fun because obviously the challenge becomes well you know if your character is getting betrayed but they then need to work with those people uh how do they get over that and if they're doing the betray the betraying how do you then redeem them redeem them in the eye of the reader so it presents a really really fun challenge as an author, actually. And it's also a great thing to read as a reader because you're very much involved. So I was interested that the dear old publisher's blurb, All of us authors get this, where we're put in some kind of box. Yep. And where they've put you is in the tradition of the, is it Leigh Bardugo, isn't it? Six of Crows. And I think what they mean here is a shorthand for heist stories about magical misfits.
[13:16] Do you find this, I thought it was quite a good, I wouldn't mind being, you know, it's quite nice.
[13:22] But do you feel you're part of this sub-genre or were there some other influences or genres is what you would like to sort of highlight yourself um yeah i mean it's definitely it's it's they chose that and actually like sometimes when publishing does this choosing you're like i'm not 100 sure that's right but we're gonna go with it whereas this time it's 100 right like it very much sits in that in that sub-genre that is the main genre i would say for the book and you know when i'm recommending the book like heist fantasy is what i lead with first because it pretty much tells the reader everything they need to know if we were going to go dig further down though like i've never really written a book that was just one genre it's just that when it comes to selling books we sort of lead with one because we don't want to confuse people but i think this is and this is again where even though i've moved to fantasy now um a lot of my early influences a lot of the things i love did originate in sci-fi and for example uh so we call this book um six of crows meets red queen um but red queen is just a fantasy version of x-men which is basically it's powers novel the characters all have different powers which is something that i've loved from childhood like i was a massive x-men fan and then obviously i did read books like red queen and i was just like this is just x-men but fantasy it's not even like i would actually argue that red queen has elements of sci-fi in it but don't go saying that on the internet because the internet gets mad.
[14:51] I love that book. It's really, really good. And those powers like always kind of intrigued me in the same way that the X-Men cartoon used to because it's kind of like, everyone gets a power or everyone you're focusing on gets a power, but not all powers are created equal. And actually some powers are really cool. Like I would give anything to be mystique. Like I would be mystique all day long. I would just change my appearance. I would change my hair. In fact, half of the tech in Mindwalker is inspired by the powers that I used to love in X-Men.
[15:23] Because I'm like, I would love to be able to do this. I'm going to invent a piece of technology that will let me do this because I'm never going to have that mutation that lets me do it myself um but yeah so when i was coming into this fantasy world i really wanted to play with powers and one of the things a few early readers have said to me is sort of like the main character uh kemi's power in until we shatter they're like it's a bit naff compared to some of the other powers like you've got you know one of the characters can steal other people's powers and one can you know find people through the city one can move really really fast and then kemi our main character her power is basically to touch things in the shadow world that exists so there's a secondary world in the novel it's called the gray and when the main characters go into it they each have this different power and her power is to touch things and they're like that's kind of not as great as being able to steal other people's powers and they're not wrong but that's what made it so exciting to me because it's like when everybody's got different powers is how does having a power which is traditionally maybe not the most coveted affect your life how does having the coveted power affect your life so we do have the um the character who steals power uh he's not having a particularly easy time of it either because it turns out when you have something other people want they get mad at you or try to use you or manipulate you um so that was something that was really fun for me so and i remember echoes of that in red queen as well, which is there were a bunch of different powers.
[16:52] And as I was reading the novel, I was like, I would want that one, but I'm not so sure about that one. That one's kind of not great in comparison, especially since that book had, you know, matchups, they made them fight. And I'd be like, oh, that one's definitely winning because, you know, that power is way better. I guess as well, the pitfall of making your main character too powerful or the most powerful is you lose the underdog sort of benefit.
[17:18] Because it's a bit like it's hard to make an interesting film about Superman. You can make the origins of Superman film, but once he's fully fledged with all his superpowers, you then have to bring Kryptonite in because he's just boring when he's powerful. So you need to limit powers and it's no bad position to have your main characters way down on the the list um yeah it was also it made like an interesting writing challenge to be like okay well if that's the power you're giving her how is that going to play into the house why why is she the main character if that's her power compared to somebody else's power and it was really really fun with this particular world is how it limits her. So others in the gray, when they don't have her physicality in the gray, they can move through walls, but she can't. She has to unlock doors, which obviously for a heist is a real problem. When you're trying to steal something, walking through walls is great. But actually, what good is walking through walls if you then can't actually grab the thing you're stealing at the very end of it? So it was really fun to play with with the idea of better powers and worse powers and how each of them had their kind of upsides and downsides. And, you know, all of them essentially made a complete nightmare for all the characters. Yeah. And it's also about teamwork, like those sort of Ocean's Eleven type ideas. You need everybody there to make it all work.
[18:47] Talking of which, the book builds up to A Heist Against Impossible Odds. Of course it does. It does. It'd be an easy heist or you don't want to read. How did you think about structuring the story? Because when you do have those intricate pieces that need to come together at the end, were you...
[19:07] A sort of messy writer by sort of writing it and changing it as you went along? Or had you sat down and kind of planned your heist on your own plot in advance? This is the answer that terrifies people. I plan nothing.
[19:21] I am chaos all the way down. I've tried planning books. It does not work for me. Every method under the sun doesn't work. I have to kind of sit down and get through the writing. The answer comes in the writing. And this was actually a book that I sold to my existing publisher on a partial, which essentially means you are submitting the first three chapters plus a synopsis of a rough idea of what is going to happen in the novel.
[19:47] But at the point at which I sold this book, I had a chat with my editor and she's like, so what are they stealing? Because the synopsis was basically like, and they're going to steal a powerful artifact from the church. And that was basically all that said. And she was like, well, what are they stealing? And I was like, funny story. I have no idea. I also don't know why they're stealing it. I just know that they are going to be stealing it, which is a really terrifying place to write from, especially when you're also trying to make things work. Like, you know, their powers are going to have to be necessary for the heist. Therefore, you know, I would have really loved for my brain to be like, well, this is what they're stealing and why, and this is where it's being kept. But most of that was figured out in the writing and actually a lot of a lot of my process is having those ideas and then going back and saying okay so this is how the magic has to change is to accommodate it but one of the weird things about the way my brain works and I can't explain it and I'll be completely honest when I say this it just kind of makes me sound like a bit of a wanker but my brain is doing this all and I have no control and it just connects things when I've without me knowing. And suddenly I'll be like, oh, this is the answer. And then I go back to, you know, retrofit the answer in and I'd already done it. Like I'd already somehow made those connections in my head without even knowing it. So that is just how my brain works. And it's a terrifying, terrifying process.
[21:06] And I will say there is a lot of revision involved. So my brain is good, but it's not that good. I would appreciate a little bit more, you know, structure from it. So I do have to go back and revise a fair bit to be like okay well this was the idea that I ended up going with and so now we've just got to tweak all these things just to strengthen everything to make sure it all kind of fits together but yeah part of the process for me is waiting for my brain to make a connection that I don't know exists yet and just hoping that it will which so far it has done in most cases, but I eagerly await the day when it fails me. And I can really relate to that. I do.
[21:48] I'm writing a series of historical murder mysteries at the moment. And for adults, I do find there's a pressure to plan from the publisher who wants to know what you're going to do. But I often find I get to a certain point where I think.
[22:04] Ah, it's too easy. The answer's too obvious. So therefore, I will kind of use that as a really huge red herring and change directions or suggest there's something else going on so that it gets an extra depth and it's more... So even I don't find my own plot obvious.
[22:24] Do you get what I mean? I find it more exciting to write like that. It is. And I think it's every writer is different. I know some people who will square up and down that they have to plan their novel and they follow their outlines and that's how they get books done. And I tell them my process and like, you can see the life leave their eyes. Like, how do you do this? Why do you hate yourself? But it's, I've tried everything else and this is what works. And I just think it's the quirk of different brains, different people work in different ways. And I feel like there's an alchemy to it that we're never really going to be able to explain. So I just sort of have to go with it. and luckily I have a very understanding editor who has watched me hand in enough books now to know that my synopsis is more of a guide yeah than prescriptive and she's like well I'm not going to give you you know feedback on your synopsis because I'm fully aware you're probably going to change 50% in it of it and I'm like I appreciate you but I promise the 50% I will change I will do my very best to make it make sense and for those of you who are watching this on YouTube there is a very cute series of paws which are appearing behind which is her cat who.
[23:35] That is my cat one of these cases where animals look like their owners because she has um beautiful black and white hair like oh yeah oh she just looked at me meow she's very mad that i'm uh ignoring her yeah ignoring her yeah anyway i'm sorry i i know it's fine i think that's what what we're both saying is that we're aware it needs structure but sometimes the structure is an emergent property rather than something we impose and then fill in like a grid and some people go that way and some prefer a grid it's, Yeah, I think you write whatever gets you to the end is the thing I say is the right for any writer. However you get to the end, whatever gets you there, that's your writing process. Own it, go with it. Try different things. If you want to be like, no, I want to plan, then try planning. But if it doesn't work, there's nothing wrong with you. We just all do this very strange little job very, very differently.
[24:29] So i guess the answer to my next question is probably the same kind of area which was um there were several big twists and reversals along the way and i'm not going to give those away at all because that that's obviously a no-no but um was that of all your sort of amorphous ideas was that something you did kind of know you were writing towards or did your characters sort of lead you to them it sounds like your characters led you there most of the time they lead me but when i do have an idea for a story very occasionally like i'll have an idea of something that has to happen it's it's again it's one of those weird nebulous things that happens in my brain sometimes i get an idea and i need to noodle on it and be like can i make this work will this work and other times an idea comes to me and i'm like this has to work like i will retrofit everything else in this book to make this works because this is canon and sometimes those are twists. So depending on which book, and depending on the twist, certain things I did know I wanted to do. I knew I was working towards them in some way, shape, or form, even if the details around them changed. Other things were, and this is where writing books can be a really collaborative experience. One of the major twists in Until We Shadow was actually my editor's idea. We were in the meeting where I was like, here is three chapters in a synopsis
[25:49] that That tells you basically nothing, but you're going to buy this book. Thank you very much. And, you know, we were just discussing...
[25:56] The very bare bones synopsis. It was one page that I gave her and she was throwing out ideas at me because that's how we kind of brainstorm. Cause you know, I will sit there and I will be like, I promise I'll figure out what they're stealing and why it's going to be great. And she's like, wouldn't it be cool if, and she will throw ideas out at me. And one of the ideas she threw, I was just like, I don't know how I'm going to make this work, but now that you've said it, I can't not do it. It's happened. And it was ended up being one of my favorite twists of the the book so it's actually something really nice um about collaborative uh work when you are publishing books especially where when you've got a great relationship with your publisher and your editor and there's somebody you can bounce ideas off um yeah I mean ideally the wouldn't it be great if also came with instructions so then I wouldn't have to go home and be like oh god how do I know no you don't want instructions but you know instructions rarely come but the idea is like Like, I'm very, very grateful that when it's not my editor, I've got a lot of writing friends and we can brainstorm. And really, all it takes is one person saying a few words in a certain order. And suddenly you're like, oh, this is what we're doing, which is, you know, kind of fun, kind of terrifying, but it's been working. Yeah.
[27:12] So another theme coming out of Till We Shatter is basically the one of you love who you love, which is, I think, a trend in the sort of new adult and YA space and probably in adult novels as well. So Semi has relationships with both male and female friends. In fact, the big serious relationship was with a female friend and the one she's sort of moving towards is with a male friend. It's probably reached the point where this is unremarkable. so you know there will there'll be one day where i stop highlighting this but i think at the moment it's still new enough to worth being mentioned i want to say a few words about your thinking behind this and what you feel books are doing moving into this space now well it's as we kind of mentioned earlier in the chat especially in the young adult space we have been seeing a very big push for diversifying our stories. It used to be, you know, even 10 years ago, it would be quite difficult to find queer characters on the page. Or when they were on the page, there would be side characters. A lot of them would have ended up dying. That's where we got the, you know, the trope bury your gays from, which we now actively as a community are trying to avoid. And it basically used to be that if you had queer characters, especially as main characters, publishers would tell you that your novel wouldn't sell.
[28:37] I mean, I don't think we are completely clear of those days, especially on the US side. There are big pushes over there to stop banning literature with queer characters, especially in young adult novels. It's still seen as something that is, you know, that kids shouldn't be reading and that we're sexualizing kids when we're not. These are real identities that kids share all over the world and they deserve to see them written in stories. And that's.
[29:01] What the push has been, not just with queer literature, but also with diverse literature, because, you know, it doesn't make sense for all the main characters of all books in the world to feature a white main character. It simply is not the world that we live in. It's not the world, the world kids live in. And every child deserves to see themselves in books.
[29:21] For me personally, that choice was, there was a lot of, you know, I did, you know, grow up reading during the time where most books had straight main characters white main characters and you know like so there was a fear against you know should I be writing this how do I write this how do I write this well you know as I've kind of grown from a young adult into adulthood you know I've also been kind of exploring my own identity and something I did with my first novel So with Mindwalker, actually, the early drafts are still in that novel, in the early drafts with bisexual.
[29:59] And when it was coming time to shop that novel, I got scared. And I mean, a lot of readers tell me she still reads that way to them. She reads as bio, she reads as pan, but it wasn't on the page. And I really regretted taking that out in the later drafts. I let fear get the better of me because of, you know, the young adult space can be quite scary to write in. You don't want to do it wrong there's a big responsibility when you're writing for kids that you are you know doing things well and not adding harmful representation into the world um when you do things so I let fear get the best of me and I was ever since that novel I was just like never again like if I want to explore certain relationships in this book like you know I'm going to do the work and make sure it's done properly but I'm going to do it I'm not going to just be like, well, this feels a bit big for me, so I'm not going to do it. And yeah, so I have the Mindwalker relationship sort of, that was male-female, Mindbreaker was a sapphic novel. And this one, I really wanted to explore bisexual identity, which is an identity that I share. And I wanted to do it like, you know, to really touch on the fact that, you know, just because.
[31:09] Someone is queer doesn't mean they are without fault you know because when the push for marginal allies for diverse voices first came out it was just like well don't you know don't make them bad people don't make them do anything wrong because you don't want to imply that queer people are bad people but the honest to god truth is queer people are simply people and they make mistakes and they're messy and you know they they mess up and they have to apologize and start again and And Kemi is that. She messes up a lot and she has to apologize and go again. And sometimes she has to learn that some things cannot be that easily forgiven. Sometimes when you mess up, the consequences are long lasting, perhaps forever. You know, when you break trust, that trust might not be able to be regained. But yeah, I really wanted her to be bisexual. I really wanted her to have on-page relationships with both a female friend and the love interest who is male. And I wanted that to be not a problem. And actually, all of my worlds are queer non-worlds, which means for all of their other faults, and both the Mindwalker world and the Until We Shatter world are horrifying worlds, if you actually think about it. The one thing I decided, like I made an actual decision not to write was homophobia.
[32:25] And that is a choice that I make because we have enough of that in the real world. I think it absolutely has its place in literature. But for me personally,
[32:35] for these worlds, I didn't need to do that. I just wanted a world where people could love whoever they were loving. And it wasn't a problem. It wasn't even a thing to be remarked on. It was just the way they were, the way the world was. and I'm really pleased with how it came out in Until We Shatter. Yeah, and also because you've got your big prejudice against those who have like the half mage status, half witch status, that you don't want to confuse it just as a way of keeping your message. That can stand in for all those things in the real world where there's prejudice against people for things they can't help.
[33:10] Exactly. And it's something that when we create fantasy worlds, we get to choose what to include, what not to include. And I'm like, I'm including a lot of really bad stuff. There's a lot of prejudice. It is there's a lot of you know danger that comes from um deliberate misinformation there's a lot of people you know keeping these half shades you know that they're purging them they're killing them they're hunting them i'm like the world is awful enough i don't need to add an extra element on top of it like there are some novels where you know the authors make those choices they make them for good reasons and it works and it's great for me personally this novel did not need that it did did not need to mirror our world in that way and as the author you kind of get to pick and choose you can be like okay well I'm gonna have this awful thing but I've decided that in my world.
[33:58] Everybody's queer or you know if they're queer it's not a problem and everyone else is just fine with it and you know that is a choice I will likely keep making with my books because I actually enjoy I enjoy reading books that are like that absolutely so um the other thing which I gave a cheer for seeing in your story was the value that was placed on artists and I suppose I've called them artificers people who make stuff um do you want to say anything about the valuing of art in society because you clearly have made a special place within your world amongst all the other the negative things going on, you've not forgotten, um, the value of art in a world of magic.
[34:44] It's again, it's light in the shadows. It's when you're creating, when I'm creating worlds that I feel can be quite, you know, heavy or difficult or hard. It's nice to weave a little bit of light in. It's nice to let the characters have something they enjoy that is pure and that is theirs and that they can turn to when everything else is just awful. Um so one of the main character one of the um found family characters and until we shatter her name is eve and she is an artist and she's unapologetically an artist and wherever she can she will take the time to brighten up their surroundings you know retreat into her arts and take that time away and i think it's probably why she's one of the more well-adjusted characters which is she makes time for simple pleasures in life simple joys you know those quiet moments of reflection she uses them to brighten up the space around her to brighten up the lives of others around her and actually that is why she is much more hopeful as a character than a lot of the others who are perhaps in slightly darker places in the novel kemp for example is in a much darker place because her mom is sick. She has a weight of responsibility on her shoulders. She's carrying some pretty bad secrets and, you know, she has lost the ability to see that light and to indulge in that light.
[36:11] And I think that affects her as a character, affects her decisions.
[36:15] It's what drives all the terrible decision making she's making throughout the book. So it made for a really nice way to show that, you know, sometimes when we forget the good, we only make the bad worse yeah definitely so moving out of the book to your more general writing life um what's how do you get down to writing what are you juggling in your in your life before you actually get down to putting words on a page because I think a lot of people who are listening to this who are wanting to write will be doing it in the midst of perhaps other jobs a busy career maybe studying and they They're always wanting tips of how to actually make that space, carve out that time. How do you do that? So writing is not my full-time job. I'm a video editor by the day. I've actually been freelance for many, many years.
[37:08] Probably around the time I started writing, I went freelance, which meant I was able to pick my hours. It actually wasn't related to writing at the time. It was more related to the fact that freelancers made more money. And at the time, I was sick of my staff job. But I actually found that it enabled me to be more flexible with my hours. Although for the first few years I was writing, my first probably three or four novels were still written around a full-time schedule so I was still working most Monday to Fridays while I was writing and for me the only thing that has worked is discipline and sheer panic I think other people are very very different again it goes back to our brains all function differently so you have to find the thing that works for you for me it's public accountability and discipline I find that if I don't write every day which is not something that everybody should or can do. But if I don't at least attempt to do it, I start to lose momentum.
[38:03] So when I first started, I would set myself a goal of 200 words, which is almost nothing. It's almost not worth it to some people to be like, well, I'm going to write 200 words. But I kept things moving on really bad days. I kept things moving when I was tired from work and when I was grumpy and when I simply did not want to write anything. A paragraph and a half is doable on those days and that it started to set the habit and slowly over time um you know 200 words has become you know 500 words 800 words um now as writing has become more serious for me i do actually carve out more time in my freelance schedule around deadlines for example so right now i'm off deadline so i'm working basically monday to friday when i'm on deadline line, I will sometimes reduce to two or three days a week, depending on what is kind of going on in my life. So...
[38:57] It is a hard balance. I think most people find it hard for a long time in their career. And I think, you know, I'm in a great position where I've published two books already, two other books in Germany and a really weird story that, you know, also has to do with weird publishing things. I've got another two coming and I'm still not in a position where full-time writing can be, you know, my full-time thing, but I am finding ways to kind of work around that. But for days that I'm actually writing, it's psychotic, actually. I will just sit on my couch for 12 hours straight and hope that there will be words and get distracted. And I have to have TV shows playing in the background, which drives people nuts. They can't understand it. But I need somebody to be talking at me on the TV so that I can ignore them. That's the only thing that makes my brain work. I can't work to music. So The West Wing, really, really good for ignoring. I've watched every season of Grey's Anatomy at least seven times I think now in the background writing novels.
[39:59] And I just sit there until either the word count has been met or I go to bed so I think from the outside that can look quite deranged but it kind of works for me obviously if I'm at work then that process will start when I get home and something that I've been doing a lot in recent years is, especially when I'm on an edit schedule, is I have spreadsheets which track my progress and I will upload them to Instagram. They are the spreadsheet months. People go, people weirdly like the spreadsheets. I'm not really sure why, but the reason I'm posting them is accountability. Like if I know that I haven't posted a spreadsheet update in three days, then I know I'm getting behind. And that public accountability actually keeps me writing, which is weird, but it works. So that's how I do it. Yeah, when I first started out as a writer, sort of back at more around your age than I am now, I had a young family and how I replicated accountability, this is pre-Instagram.
[41:05] Is I would be writing the story for my oldest child and I'd read it to her,
[41:11] get to the end of the chapter and she'd say, what happens next? And I said, well, I don't know. That's tomorrow. so I knew that I had somebody who was waiting for the next installment yeah if it was just me waiting for it I would find an excuse and I was super busy absolutely but because she was waiting I thought right I've got to find that time and it was timed around that stage of life for those who've got kids will know it's timed around when everybody is happy yeah it's like plate spinning, baby asleep this one in front of teletubbies and this one doing something else right quick yeah and you need to set yourself up so that you haven't got complicated routines to start writing you just need to open up the computer get down to it yeah so hopefully our two stories might chime with um the people who are listening out there might find some something helpful in that so thinking about the fantasy genre in particular do you have any fantasy related tip to give us for example a book that you think might really um well inspire someone or a film that's taught you a lot uh just just one little tip for someone to go away and look up during the week.
[42:29] I would say, so I don't know where you would kind of look it up, but as I was starting to write Until We Shatter, before that I had written fantasy before.
[42:36] Like I mentioned, I have two books out in Germany, which were not written in German. I do not speak German. I wrote them here. They sold in Germany. It was a weird thing, but they're out there, you know, existing, which is lovely. So I wrote fantasy before, but I really only ever wrote contemporary fantasy before. So something I really had to think about when I was moving into the proper kind of epic fantasy, see second world fantasy space is how does fantasy actually function and so i kind of read a lot of books and i sort of realized something for myself um that i don't necessarily see us talk about so often as to what kind of fantasy you're writing and by that i mean there is there are fantasies that are led by the magic and there are fantasies where magic is part of a much bigger plot where you've got politics and you've got you know uh you've got politics you've got magic you've got or, you know, religions, you know, in the epic fantasy space, a lot of times there is a lot of magic, but it's not necessarily the thing holding the plot together.
[43:34] So I do think fantasy sort of, I mean, it falls into many buckets, but like, if we're doing a very, very hard split, it will fall into one of these two buckets. Are you magic led? Or is magic augmenting your story? And I realized that until now, I'd only ever written a fantasy where magic was augmenting the story. And actually what I really wanted to try with Until We Shatter was to write a book where the magic was sort of leading it. I think the best example I can think of of a book I'd read around that time was it's called Only a Monster by Vanessa Len. And it's got a lot of time travel magic. And actually, if you changed anything about the magic of that book, you wouldn't have a book or you'd have a book, but it would be a completely different book. And that's the kind of book I decided I wanted to write with Until We Shatter, which is I want to write a book where if you take Take away the magic.
[44:23] You have a completely different book left. As opposed to magic where, for example, a character who can shoot fire out of their palms.
[44:31] You could probably retrofit a character who can shoot electricity out of their palms quite easily into the same story. You'd adjust some things, but the story wouldn't necessarily be affected in massive ways. Whereas if you took the gray and the shadow powers out of Until We Shatter, you actually don't have a lot of things left. You don't even have a title anymore. You'd have to change the whole thing. and so i would say look at the kind of fantasy that you're enjoying and ask yourself is it magic led or is it is magic a part of the whole because i think a lot some people for example world builders specifically really enjoy fantasy where magic is one part of a whole because then you get to world build you get your factions and you get your religions and you get your cities and you get your politics and you get to do all of that and magic whereas for me and world building is It's traditionally the thing that I'm not as invested in. So for me, this was almost the obvious choice. I'm not really sure why I'd never allowed myself to do it before, because it's actually all the stuff that I really find really fun, which is magic affecting plot directly without too much else going on around. It's part of the reason I decided to set Until We Shatter in sort of an enclosed city. So there is a wider world. And actually, with the second book in the series, we will get to see some more of that. But it also has an enclosed feel because what I wanted to concentrate in that story was the immediacy of the magic and how the magic is sort of driving the characters and the world.
[46:00] Yeah, that's a really interesting way of just looking at fantasy. I was thinking that one franchise that does this is the Marvel franchise. So sometimes, say like Iron Man, it's not really magic. It's just wishful thinking on technology. Again, right to what you said at the beginning. Until the aliens start coming through from the square. But until that point, it's all basically a real-world story.
[46:28] Then the superhuman elements come in a suit. And then you get something like Doctor Strange, which if you took the magic out… Nothing is the same anymore. It's just a doctor. Yeah, and actually, exactly. Marvel is, I mean, it's a huge influence on me. I've made that no secret. I call the Mindwalker books, They're basically YA Marvel movies in book form because I'm so heavily inspired by the Marvel universe, the X-Men universe. I loved it. I love the pace of it. I love the whimsy of it. I know most people don't find it's whimsical, but I think it's quite whimsical for me. My idea of whimsy is very different to other people's. Guardian to the Galaxy is total whimsical. Very whimsical. But yeah, and it's kind of like Marvel really does it well. They play with both. I think a really good example is how the first –.
[47:16] Movie in every new franchise was always smaller so like for example Thor was you know at the very beginning he gets dropped in the middle of the desert in a town with like six people and the whole movie takes place in a town with six people and then when the movie broke out the next Thor was bigger and the next Thor was suddenly like okay we're gonna go to Asgard and we're gonna you know we're gonna do all these things but you know you can't within even within the same world to really kind of explore both. You can have magic-led stories or magic as a part of a big story. And actually one of the favorite things in one of my, in a couple of the recent adult fantasy book series I've read actually, so The Final Strife by Sara El-Arifi, which is part of the Ending Fire trilogy and The Oleander Sword by Tasha Suri, which is part of the Burning Kingdoms trilogy. Mythology, book one feels like the magic is part of an overall plot because you've got politics and you've got the world building and you've got all of the things around the magic. But then as you go through the series, you actually realize that the magic is driving the world.
[48:22] But it happens in later books because obviously they're trilogies and it takes a little bit of time to get there. So in the first book, I could be like, oh, well, you could change the magic fairly easily, wouldn't affect it but then by book three you're like oh my god like the entire world is driven by this magic actually if you changed anything about it the world would fall apart and that is like I'm in awe of authors who are able to a write trilogies I've never quite gotten to three but also who are able to jump from one type of fantasy to the other so seamlessly it's really it's amazing to read.
[48:58] Thank you. So we always end, we're in all the fantasy worlds by which it could
[49:04] be any book, any game even, any film, movie. Where would you like to go to do a certain thing or be a certain thing? So in honor of Till We Shatter, I thought, well, why don't we try and stage a heist? So where would you like to put on a heist?
[49:23] You can bring in new characters or recruit characters from within that world for your heist whichever makes you think it would be most fun where would you go i would i would a hundred percent and yes i'm obsessed with this i'm gonna go back into the x-men world i'm gonna take my characters from until we shatter and i'm gonna put them in the x-men world i'm gonna force them to work with the x-men which is going to be hilarious i think because you know a lot of the x-men have really cool powers and some of them are just like oh my tongue is weird. Yeah. And it's like, okay, weird tongue guy, how do you fit into this? It's like, what is your purpose? But you have to include him. You have to include weird tongue guy. And I think it'd be really fun to add sort of that kind of magical element and to the science element, which is obviously two of my favorite things kind of coming together.
[50:18] It helps that everybody in my books and, you know, X-Men world is just, deeply sarcastic all the time and really like obstinate so they're not going to want to work together at all um you know they're going to want to probably kill each other for the first half of the heist which is always the most fun you can have when you're writing or watching um so yeah i think it would be really really fun i'd like to also take magneto into the gray from until we shatter because it's a shadow world. There's no metal. And I just want him to be so deeply annoyed that he can't affect anything.
[50:57] Yeah, I thought you were going to say Twilight, but anyway. I just don't know what they would steal. What would they steal? I think for me, I love this, the theme. So I was thinking about applying it to various classic fantasies. My brain went from Beatrix Potter, you know, like little creatures. I suppose, mind you, Peter Rabbit is pretty much a heist on Mr. McGregor's Garden.
[51:24] Or Peter Pan or Narnia. So maybe Peter Pan, I think it'd be really good if, say, Peter Pan and the pirates and the mermaids and the children from the nursery all have to band together to steal something. They all need to preserve Neverland. You know, it could be that realistic. Now I'm thinking about the opening scene of Peter Pan where he's trying to stitch his shadow back on because he wants a shadow. But what if everyone in Peter Pan's land, they've had their shadows stolen? And now they have to go get them back yeah yeah he is breaking in to get it isn't he so yeah i think that'd be quite fun and um yeah let's let's do a heist in peter pan uh sounds good i think and 11 thank you so much kate it's been lovely talking to you and i wish you all the best when um till we shatter is out in the bookshops and online um and presumably there'll There'll probably be also an audio version eventually. Yes, they will be releasing simultaneously an e-book, audio, and hardback. The hardback, actually.
[52:35] I bastard my eyelashes at my publisher and said, can I have secret foil? And they've given it secret foil. So it's going to be super, super shiny, super, super pretty, because I'm a magpie who likes shiny, shiny things. Lucky you. That's really good. I know. So the first version is going to be absolutely stunning. They've done such a wonderful job with this book, like from the cover to... The insides. It's a beautiful book. They've really took my world and made it look good, which I really appreciate it for. And thank you so much for having me. This has been a lovely.
[53:04] Fun time, actually, to let me nerd out. And just now your cat has gone to sleep. He has been soothed by our station. So you've done well. Thank you very much. Thank you so much.
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