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. I'm an author, but I also run the activities of our centre. And today I am joined by Megan Whalen-Turner. Have I said your middle name right, Megan, just to get that? It's Whalen. Whalen. Whalen. Megan Whalen Turner, thank you.
[0:30] I'm particularly excited to talk to Megan because she has successfully steered her craft through the choppy waters of publishing since her first book was published in 1996. That was the era of the same time as the first of the dark materials, the Philip Pullman books and the Harry Potter started coming out around then. It was obviously a very special time for fantasy literature indeed and Megan was part of that wave. Now Megan is coming over to the UK shortly to appear at the Bath Literary Festival because her series The Queen's Thief is now going to be made available to those in the UK and the Commonwealth after having not been fully available to everyone. So before we talk about you and your background ground megan would you like to just sketch out what the queen's thief is like who's it meant for and what's it about so um it it there's a short answer and there's a long answer i'll get the the very shortest answer first um the thief opens with a young extremely clever thief who may or may not have an impulse control problem because he has been uh.
[1:49] Challenged to steal something, the seal ring of the king. And he has not only successfully stolen the seal ring of the king, he immediately went and showed it around in a wine shop as proof that he has stolen the king's seal ring, which is why the book opens with him in jail. Because that's what happens to people who show around their spoils in public. And people expect that he's going to remain in jail for the rest of his life. But an advisor to the king needs to have something stolen. And the agreement is that our hero can get himself out of jail in exchange for stealing something that will convey upon the bearer the right to rule a neighboring country. So he's out of jail. He is on his way to steal something that most people think doesn't even exist. And that's the opening of the story for The Thief. And it was the first book. It was published in 1996. And in 1997, it won a Newbery Honor Book Award. And when my editor called me to congratulate me, she said that there was a librarian there who had something she really wanted to say to me, which was, where is the sequel?
[3:12] And at that point, I did sort of lay out in my head the rest of the books. And they did take about 20 more years to actually write down. I like to say that I thought up the whole series then in the next 20 minutes and that it took It took another 20 years to write. But because you are the director of the Oxford Center for Fantasy, I will say that when I was when I was creating these books, I really needed to have a setting. I didn't feel that I had this idea for The Thief. I had this idea that there would be a moment when you realized in this group of fellow travelers that one of them is not who you thought.
[4:00] But I couldn't get started on this idea until I had a setting. And the one thing I was really certain about was that I didn't want it to look like Middle Earth. Okay. But of course, growing up mostly in the United States and in the eastern half of the United States, one of the advantages of where I grew up is that when I stepped outside my door, it was really very easy to imagine that I was in Middle Earth. Tolkien's books were hugely important to me growing up. And Middle Earth was hugely important to me growing up. And my know my imagination was living in middle earth um that when i when i first what i first noticed in in my adolescence was how many books were knockoff of tolkien how many world worlds had things that weren't actually dwarves but looked just like dwarves and weren't actually orcs but looked just like orcs. And I didn't want to do that. So I wanted to find something that wouldn't look like Middle Earth. And it turned out to be exceptionally challenging.
[5:11] And what I found, luckily, during my first trip to Greece in 1992, was exactly the landscape that I was looking for. So the world of my books, the landscape of my books looks very much like the Mediterranean, because I knew that no one would confuse it with Middle Earth, but that everybody would have a sense of familiarity with that world. World um and so i took these things i took my idea that um i would have this group of travelers and that they would be on their way to steal something um and i took the idea of a landscape that was not middle earth but that was going to be recognizable and i took a sense that i love rosemary suck cliff's books oh yes and i wanted to have that grounded feeling of of historical fiction in my work and i uh loved joan eakin another of my favorite i think she had a book called the necklace of raindrops yes yes there will be chase and black hearts and battersea and in those books in particular she has just a delightful twist of of absurdity in her work and I loved the humor of Diana Wynne-Jones Howl's Moving Castle.
[6:36] Another great, I just want to say another great Oxford writer Diane's and the.
[6:44] Reason that I'm published and, I owe my entire writing career to Diana. I wrote to her when I just had a couple of short stories and sent them to her. And she recommended that I send them to her editor at Greenwillow Books, Susan Hirschman. And Susan Hirschman agreed to publish me. So without that first cover letter from Diana, I don't know where I would be right now. Yeah. We often talk about the sort of the Tolkien and the Lewis and Philip Foreman. And we must do one of these myth makers totally devoted to Diana Wynne-Jones at some point. That would be wonderful. Yeah. That really would be it because I feel like she's like the godmother to any number of writers. Writers and um and i think i have always thought that it would be wonderful to not maybe to have a zoom but some connection to meet up with all of the other people that that she fostered and the people in turn that they fostered um then i don't know get everybody together at some writing convention or something like that or just a tea party or a chance to meet in person all of these people that I feel like are sort of distant cousins.
[8:05] You've given us a great idea. I'm going to park that one. I think I need to follow that up with you after this. Just to sort of put a sort of coda on this, which is I remember meeting her once shortly before she passed away at a children's literary quiz.
[8:22] And I was on her team with David Fickling, who is a well-known publisher. He's the publisher of Philip Pullman. I remember feeling I was like a baby writer at the time. I remember feeling a bit out of my depth, a bit, you know, So I felt I'd suddenly entered the premier division having been knocking around in the conference league. That's a UK reference. There's probably an equivalent. It was like being an Olympic runner after having just run for your high school, that kind of gap.
[8:49] But she was incredibly down to earth and not at all very welcoming. So I can imagine her nurturing young writers. So going back to The Queen's Thief, for those of you who wait for a series to complete before starting it and i have my daughter in mind when i say that because she says i have to wait till it's all there um the the series is completed it's six books plus my accompanying world expanding stories isn't it yes that's right yeah you can go and get it all now which is great for those of you plus there are audio versions which i know is a massive part of the market are you pleased with the audio versions of your book i'm i'm I'm delighted. I don't know how I got quite so lucky. I like the recorded book audio versions made, you know, back in 2001 or 2002.
[9:43] And then Harper Collins decided to do another version with Steve West. And he's just a wonderful performer. And he is British. And we had numerous phone calls. And he worked to produce a different accent.
[10:04] For each of the different countries represented in the book. So the world of The Queen's Thief is really a world based in the Mediterranean with very small countries that are under threat from a very large imperialist empire that is determined to just roll over them. And these three countries and our hero, Jen, really have to navigate some way, not only for them to survive individually, but for all of them to survive together.
[10:38] And each of them has a slightly different accent in West's version of the audiobook, which is wonderful. And I really thought that that was the best. And I still think it's a wonderful, wonderful version. And when Hodder said, you know, we'd like to do an audio version, I thought, well, you know, Steve did this really excellent job, but they got me Owen Finley. And um and he also has done an absolutely outstanding job reading the books and how i got so lucky to have two such splendid versions going at the same time i don't know but i'm just thrilled and and people can listen to some or both or whatever they like and i think easily move from one audiobook to the other because the reading is exactly what I wanted it to be.
[11:40] Which is not bubbly, not excitable. It just allows you to sink very naturally, I think, into experiencing the story instead of just hearing it. Well, I'm definitely going to look those up. I love audiobooks. It's actually my favorite way these days of absorbing new fantasy because i'm sort of free to imagine uh and i and if a good voice artist is is brilliant so your main character is now this is where i'm thinking maybe a greek pronunciation eugenides well we call him jen okay because he goes by jen for short um and uh the thing about names is that uh.
[12:30] When I was very young, I got into a knock-down, drag-out fight with a cousin about the pronunciation of the Anna Green Gables books. Okay. And I had it stuck in my head that Anne lived on the island of Avanolia off the coast of, you know, Nova Scotia. And, oh, I guess, or rather, Avanolia, Prince Edward Island, Avanolia. And my cousin gently explained to me that it's Avonlea.
[13:02] If you look, there's like one L in that word. It's Avonlea. And I'm like, no, it is definitely Avonlea. I'm convinced. You can't change my mind. Anne of Avonlea. And the fact that I was wrong didn't change my mind. And the fact that I grew up to be a much more reasonable adult still stuck in my mind that it's Yana Vavinolea.
[13:28] And I'm so stubborn about this that, by golly, when I wrote my book, I have made it a point to tell people when they ask me how to pronounce the names that my book is a collaboration with the reader. You can pronounce that name any way you want it. okay never let never let anybody tell you that you're not saying that name right you can call him Bob and and so I have the way I pronounce the names yes but that doesn't necessarily mean that they are the right way to pronounce the name I yeah I have a slightly different approach if well particularly if it's a historic name so I wrote a book early on in my career set in the viking world and i was very interested by the story of a traveler who came to the court called to king alfred who lived in the northernmost part of norway as far north as you can grow corn and he tells king alfred what happens if you sail north up the crinkly bits of norway to the land where people change into bears.
[14:33] Oh, I like that. And the man's name was O-T-H-E-R-E. So as I wrote this book, I was calling him in my head, Othir. No, Othir. That's it. Which was fine. I wasn't doing the audio version of that book. Someone else did it.
[14:52] And then I was at the York Viking Festival of all publicizing this book in a local library somewhere and in the audience was a man dressed as a viking who introduced me and then there was a very scared because it was like for younger people and then there was also this odd chap sitting on his own with a tome on his lap open a real tome and when he got to the questions he said um by the way do you know that you say his his name Ot Hira. And would you like me to read the original Norse of the bits you quote from your Egil saga or whatever it was I'd quoted? And I sort of said, oh, yeah, okay. But I wasn't so sure about him then talking in Old Norse or whatever it was. But I was grateful for the correction. But I wish he hadn't done it in front of my audience. Right, right there in front of everyone. Yeah. Yeah, I would have thought uttira, you know, because the O's in modern Norwegian are a little bit more the way we say. I wish you'd been there. You could have argued it with him. Uttira? Yeah, maybe I've misremembered that, but it was definitely uttira as opposed to uttira. See, if you write a fantasy, you get to say them however you want. Yeah, exactly.
[16:17] So, wonderful. So I say Eugenides. Eugenides. And I say Aurelius and Talaus and the queen is Irene. And I pronounce it Edis and the country is Sunis.
[16:37] But as I said, other people pronounce that word very differently. And I feel like once you get it stuck in your head as you're reading the book, that that's what the character's name is, that you can just stay with that. Yeah. And this was a series that won you the Newbery Award. And you also say rather charmingly on your website that you spent one glorious week on the New York Times bestseller list. Well, well done you. Right. I think I should update that. I think I spent, I twice spent one glorious week on the New York Times bestseller list. The only time I go to the New York Times is to do a Wordle. I've never appeared in it. So well done. That's brilliant. So you've already mentioned growing up that you had this sort of, I suppose what we call the anxiety of influence of Middle Earth. For those of you who've done your English degree, you know what I'm talking about. A lot of us write with the sense of other writers behind us and that fearing that we can't find our own place. And you solved it by a whole geographic transplants, so you're not reproducing the same mythic landscapes and the elves and the dwarves and the dragons and
[17:51] what have you that come along with the northern world, which is the Middle Earth. But were there other fantasy writers, perhaps homegrown ones from America, that were also part of your fantasy journey?
[18:04] There were. Lloyd Alexander, of course, the Black Cauldron, was an immense influence. But again, so much of that is, again, influenced from the mythic stories of Western Europe and the UK that Alexander was drawing on. Edward Eger is probably one of my favorite American fantasists, and he wrote in the 1940s.
[18:38] He wrote marvelous stories of very ordinary American children interacting with magical objects. And within his stories, he references, again, British writers. So you're cruising through your story of American children in an ordinary American town who find the magical object, and they say to each other, Why goodness, this is like a book by E. Nesbitt. I was going to say, it sounds like E. Nesbitt, yes. Yes. Yes. So I think this is a really important point that when I was growing up, almost all of my influences were Western Europe, the UK, Norwegian, Scandinavian folk tales, Diana Wynne-Jones, C.S. Lewis, Susan Cooper was an American, but again, drawing on Wells' mythology.
[19:47] And there just weren't that many other voices. And when I started to write, yes, I didn't want to imitate Tolkien. I didn't want to imitate Lewis. I wanted to draw on them.
[20:07] And one of the reasons specifically that I didn't want to imitate Tolkien had to do with Susan Cooper. I have a very dear friend who is a professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, but a great reader, and all of her life a reader. So many friends of hers that are authors and a great writing community. And I was talking about Susan Cooper and Eve, who has read everything that I've read, I swear, said, oh no, I never read. I never read the Dark is Rising series by Susan Cooper. And I said, why not? They should be, they should be exactly what you would love. And she said, well, I have this theory that you can only read three books based on Welsh mythology. Um, and then you start to feel like.
[21:01] You're repeating yourself. And everything gets to be sort of muddled. And everything seems like an imitation of something else that you read, even if you're reading them in a different order than they were written. And after that, she says, I just don't enjoy them as much as I would have if that had been the first book like that that I read. And one of the things about watching so many imitators of Tolkien when I was in my teens, is that I would hate the idea that somebody could read three imitations of Tolkien and then get to the original and say, oh, you know, elves. I've been there. I've done that. I'm not reading that book.
[21:46] So that was a large part of my reasoning for not wanting to write something, too close hewing too closely to tolkien or to c.s lewis um and i don't know i don't think it's possible to hue too closely to to diana she is such she's so far off the map in so many different directions i don't think you could you could imitate uh diana win jones if you if you spend a year trying um but uh but now i've completely lost track of the question i apologize well we started talking about other fantasy writers that you were particularly from America, but I was going to ask you as a follow-up, um, this idea of reading writers who, when even from America, who end up their influences are sort of old, the old world, shall we say, the Western old world. Um, and of course now we have many more voices entering fantasy, but in a way, don't you think that the, the diaspora, the, the, They're your stories too. I do. Because it'd be a bit awkward if you said, well, because I'm in America, I'm going to start writing Native American because of the place. And you think, well, is it my story?
[23:02] Whereas- I think that's a slightly ticklish subject. I think that it's very easy for all of us to agree that it is wonderful for people now in America, in the United States, in the publishing world To have access to stories from so many places that were unavailable before, you know.
[23:26] And, of course, all of the titles have immediately gone out of my head. But they're wonderful stories. And they're written by people who came from the culture that they're writing
[23:39] about and who have a very personal relationship to the stories that they're telling. And because they are telling all of those stories.
[23:52] They are bringing them into the world of people outside their culture. And I do think that when you read a story when you're eight years old or when you read a story when you're 14 and it grabs hold of you, that story is your story. That story is going to influence your writing no matter what. Whether whether you recognize the influence or you don't and sometimes you know i go back and i see things that i read when i was 14 and i had forgotten that i had read them but i can see the influence of having loved that book on my writing in retrospect um and i think that one of the results of all of the diversity the multiculturalism of the expansive opportunities for reading that people have today, now, means that in the future, I think that we can expect that it will be very much, it'll be very difficult to say that you can trace your influencers as easily as I can trace mine.
[25:09] So you know i think i think we have to accept that they own a reader today a 14 year old today owns every story that they read and if they grow up to be a writer they will draw on those stories because they are the stories of their youth and the stories of their youth are going to come from You know, Sri Lanka and Cambodia and the Philippines and more from Norway and all of those stories are going to meld in them.
[25:43] And influence the work they then produce. And because there are so many, yeah, I think it's going to be a lot harder for people to say, oh, these seven books were the big influence on my life. But for me, it's really, really clear what those influences were, because they are pretty much all that was available when I was reading, you know, from age 8 to 18.
[26:07] Yeah, and of course, we've got all the other i mean got the american products of marvel and star wars and star trek and so in a way we're all culturally in this huge melange and i maybe maybe what i'm trying to get at is we don't want to colonize other people's stories like say they're ours now you know because that's been happening too much but you could look at a story coming from a culture that's outside the one that you've been growing up in or is secondhand to you and say, what a great idea for a story. And you can take it sideways into fantasy. I don't see that you're offending anybody. You're honoring great stories by expanding maybe who can be a hero or might suggest new ways of talking about gods or magic or something. Thing but you know there's it increases your imagination imagination and your grasp rather than you saying okay i'm going to pretend to be something i'm not exactly exactly and i i think that um.
[27:17] That that's very true, that there's a huge difference between presenting yourself as something that you're not when you're writing a story and claiming an authority that you don't have when you're writing a story.
[27:37] There's a difference between that and having your imagination influenced by a story. And that is what I mean, that all of these stories are going to be influencing a new generation. And I think that that's going to have a tremendous effect on the stories that they then produce as they grow up to become writers. Readers and it'll be very interesting to see just just what the influences are because i think they're all going to be because they've always been tremendously individual you know you could have read exactly the same people when you were 14 that i was reading when i was 14 that in no way means that we would grow up to write similar books yeah both sit here and say how influential.
[28:35] A certain author gaze on us and people could be thinking oh really because you know you're writing uh space opera and you're writing a historical fiction and how could this one person have influence well it does and what we've really done i think for for the new generation of writers is just throw in a whole vast amount of new things to think about and new ways to spark their imagination. And there's no linear way to calculate what's going to come back out of that, but it should be wonderful.
[29:13] So before we started recording, you mentioned that you have a very interesting process in the way you first approach a book, which I've never heard of before. So would you like to mention that at this place?
[29:26] Because it is about the way you approach story at its heart. So before I start writing anything, really, when I'm working on a new story, whether it's a short story or a book, I tell the story out loud to a listener. And usually that listener is my husband, but sometimes at one memorable moment, it was my editor. And it started at lunch. And, you know, the waiters came and cleared off all the tables and started to stack the chairs in the corner. And we were still sitting there having our lunch. And I was telling the entire story of my book, The King of Atolia.
[30:17] And that's how I know when I have the plot arc and the movement and the sense of closure that I want in my story is I sit down, I have the whole thing in my head, and I tell it to somebody. And this is wonderful. It is not exactly a substitute for a first draft because there's a lot of what when you're telling a story, there's a lot of what I call hand wavium. And when you tell the story, you can say, OK, so they realize that that they've made a terrible mistake and they should have turned left instead of right. And then they go back and they start on the end. Everything that's contained in the they realize they've made a terrible mistake is something you have no idea how you're actually going to get that to work in a book. But you know that that's a thing that needs to happen. And when you're telling a story, you just do it like this. It's just the one little gesture, and then you move on to the rest of the story that you wanted to tell. But when you sit down to write the draft, of course, the hard work is figuring out the hand-waving.
[31:39] All of those places where you just waved a hand to make your plot move forward when you're telling a story out loud, now you have to actually justify that in actual words. And so when I do do my first draft, though, it's usually it's neither people talk about about pantsing or plotting. Yeah. And they have the whole plot. Do they they fly by the seat of their pants? Obviously, I have my plot because I told my story and then I write what I call a sketch. It's not an outline. It's usually about half the length of the finished work. And it's just in the same way that that somebody drawing a picture would make a rough sketch first and then go back and add the detail my first draft is just meant to be a sketch of the story and and where it's going to go and then i go back and and add in uh detail and it gets to be about three times as long and then the rest of the process is taking out as much as i can possibly possibly take out and still feel like the story I'm trying to tell is on the page.
[32:50] So as part of that process, and you mentioned it's influenced by sort of a Mediterranean culture, did you ever, whilst you were writing, go to somewhere like Greece or Italy or somewhere and sit and absorb the atmosphere to fill out your sketch into something a bit more defined? So, yes, that first trip to Greece was in 1992. 92. And, um, and as I said, the, the landscape just, um, felt perfect to me from the very first moment, um, that I, that I got on a ferry and I went from one island to the next. Uh, and yes, we went back, you know, multiple times over the last 25 years we have been to Greece and every Every time it sort of reinvigorates everything that I wanted to put into my books. But also, anybody who reads The Thief and follows up with the rest of the series, they can see the influence of Greece on these books. The books aren't set in Greece, but they're set in a world that looks not like ancient Greece, but much more like Byzantine Greece. Okay.
[34:06] And at the time that I wrote them, that was sort of an odd thing because all fantasy was supposed to be set in, you know, the medieval world. Nobody ever had, if it was a fantasy, it had to be swords and sorcerers, you know. And when I was writing the book, I didn't want to do the sword and sorcerer thing. So the sort of imaginary timeline of my books is a lot more Byzantine than it is like ancient Greece. But a lot of the books that I read to, I had read already before I started The Thief. And before I ever saw Greece, I had taken a course called Greek Thought and Literature in college. And I had read Thucydides and I had read Plato and I had read lots of Greek plays and lots of Greek dialogues. And when I took that first trip to Greece, we took 40 pounds of books because they didn't have Kindles back in those days. And if you wanted to read the history of Greece to 322 BC, which I did, it was a book.
[35:19] You know, 800 page long and it weighed, you know, 10 pounds. And so, yeah, we carted those books all over Greece. And I sat there on the shore and I looked out at the Mediterranean and I read a lot of ancient Greek history. But then I went and I wrote a book that was not set in ancient Greece, but rather more Byzantine.
[35:44] And oddly, I think today quite a lot of young people would be more familiar with that because of the popularity of things like civilization and assassin's creed which often use these kind of other historical periods which perhaps were not taught at school um i'm amazed at the knowledge when i talk to young people who play these games that they come up with all these rulers and small kingdom knowledge which is amazing so i think in a way your world is going to be more familiar. Yes. And, you know, the other thing is the internet has made a tremendous difference in what we write and what we read. And what I found is that a lot of those periods of history, um.
[36:31] People just now go down rabbit holes. Yeah. And it didn't used to be possible in 1987 that you would get a random interest about kings of Norway and you would spend the next two and a half hours on the Wikipedia page tracking back a million kings in Norway or China or, you know, the Albigensian Crusade. And suddenly you're looking up the Albigensian Crusade and you're reading through that. And so I think people just have a whole lot more random information in their heads maybe than they did 40 years ago. Unless they were actual scholars who actually did scholarly work. Yeah, proper work. I mean, like Harold Bluetooth talking about Viking Kings. You know about Harold Bluetooth?
[37:25] No. let me let me google that on wikipedia i could tell you don't worry it's the king who first united denmark and norway so when some danish inventors came to thinking up um a name for this technology that allowed you to pair devices they thought ah we will call it after harold bluetooth hence bluetooth on your phone or whatever comes from harold yeah yeah that's a a great story that's a great little bit of random knowledge um that I've got in my head so without I mean we've both been around in publishing for some years I was first published in 2006 you were first published 10 years before that so we have managed several many decades between us what would you think or would you say was your top tip for surviving and thriving in this world of publishing which is probably more knockbacks than bouquets, really, for most of us. I see I've made you think quite seriously. Well, you know, I'm not sure I feel really entitled to give anybody advice like that.
[38:39] I feel like I started publishing in an entirely different world. And I did. I wrote to Diana, and she wrote me a letter saying, and I still remember this word for word today, that I was a writer of great style, competence, and originality. And she said, I should send my stories to Susan Hirschman at Greenwillow Books.
[39:06] And so I meet people who want to recreate that. And it's not as if that's possible. It's much more important to tell people who are publishing today that they need to put their best work out. Um and that they need to persevere and that if the the first person doesn't take you you need to have the resilience to continue to send your work out to more people um and that nothing almost it never happens that you're going to send your books out and somebody's going to say why yes i would love to publish that um so it feels really hypocritical of me to say you know no, this is what I did, but you go do what I'm going to tell you, you know, don't try to do as I did, but do as I tell you, which is, you know, be resilient and work hard and send your books out to a lot of people. So I sort of hesitate to tell people how to get published today because I'm not sure I know. I was very fortunate to be published. And once you are published and once Once you've won a prize like a Newbery Honor, it means that at least somebody's going to look at my work if I send it to them. And I know exactly how fortunate I've been.
[40:35] So I don't know that I can give a great deal of advice about exactly how publishing today works for a new writer. But I can say that I do have some advice for writing, for publishing. You know, the standard advice is, I think, true.
[41:00] That you don't try to chase a trend. That you figure out what it is that you want to write. And you write it and that um the standard advice is that especially for instance in in writing for young adults which i think you do and i don't know i don't know if you have been given this advice, but i think that a lot of the advice for writing for young adults is um to always think in terms of a very large audience how you're going to grab your audience and how you're going to keep your audience's attention and how you're going to not make your sentences too long and you're you're this is the age of television and video games and you got to move along and you got to have excitement on every page and and i would say that um i question that advice very much um i think it's totally acceptable if you want to write a book for a very narrow audience these these days, if you have somebody specific in mind that you're writing for, that it is okay, to write for that audience. And I think today you could get that book published. And because of the internet and because of sort of, I guess, globalization, you can get your book to the people who really want to read it. And that was not necessarily true when my career started.
[42:26] Yeah, there were a lot more gatekeepers, weren't there? Yeah, there were a lot of gatekeepers, and everybody needed to be reaching for the mainstream.
[42:36] Everybody had to... Especially in the young adult world, try to grab their audience and hold on to them for fear that they would wander away.
[42:48] And that's always true. And if you want to be somebody who does hit the New York Times bestseller list a lot more often than I do, then yes, you have to write then to get a huge swath of people who are interested in your book. But I think that I am evidence that you can have a really rewarding career writing books that a smaller audience reads and loves. I've been honored and privileged by the people who have read my books. They started reading them in 1996, and they waited 25 years to read the last book in the series. That means that they stuck with me while they grew up, even though I write children's books or young adult books. About half of my audience is adults.
[43:49] And a lot of people read my books when they were children and continue to read each book that I brought out and reread the books over the years. And if those are the kind of readers that you're trying to reach, I think you can. I think if you're starting to write today, you should write with the confidence that your book can find its reader and that you do not have to bend your vision in order to make a book more publishable.
[44:22] And that's probably the only advice I feel qualified to give about publishing today. Thank you. No, that's very helpful. I think it's sort of also going back to
[44:34] the idea of being authentic, isn't it? So the chasing the trend thing is you can end up being inauthentic, writing something you don't actually particularly like, because you hope it will get you an audience whereas you might get an audience if you write what you like it's kind of yes around um so just as a bit of fun i want to ask you if you would actually like to live in your own world because you mentioned that you felt like you were living in middle earth um and darnia you know it was right outside my door i spent a large portion of my childhood living in Narnia, living in little. If you could enter your own world in a sort of Jasper Ford way of being able to enter a book world, perhaps take a less dangerous role in it, you know, like have a nice quiet occupation somewhere without risking your neck. Would you actually enjoy living in that world, do you think? Or is there another fantasy world at this stage in your life you'd prefer to walk into and investigate?
[45:36] Oh, that's a thought. I think that, I think if I were living in my fantasy world, yes, it probably would be very comfortable. And I think, as you said, if I got to be in a quieter existence.
[45:55] If I had a quiet existence in my world, I think it would be lovely because, I mean, I just spent, I think, 40 minutes of our talk talking about how much I like the landscape of Greece, right? So yes, you're asking me if I would like to move to Greece. Yes, that would be splendid. However, in my book, A Conspiracy of Kings, the main character is the heir of the king of Sunis. And he doesn't particularly want to be the heir of the king of Sunis. He doesn't think he's going to be very good at it. He's very much hoping that his uncle will produce a child And that that child can be the heir of Sunnis because Sophos does not want the responsibility.
[46:41] And the thing about my world is that although they are not the Greek gods, there is a pantheon of gods that are constantly meddling with people's lives. And poor Sophos is like the little mote of dust that has been moved into the sun's spotlight, whether he wants to be in that spotlight or not. Not so like sophos i i would like to be outside the spotlight in this world but man being in this world and having the gods interfering with your life i would not find comfortable at all so yeah a lot would be depend would depend upon the very quiet existence in the greek landscape yeah that reminds me of something my daughter said when she was growing up which is um she'd like to be king but she didn't want to do the paperwork yes fair enough yeah thank you so much for being with megan and i hope those of you who are in the uk and can come and see megan at the barf literary festival please do come along we'll put a connection in the show notes so you can find out where she'll be speaking otherwise bon voyage as you come over our way and thank you very much for talking to us Thank you for having me. This has been a wonderful conversation.
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