Mythmakers Season 2 Finale - Seasonal Round-Up

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 the director of the Centre and also an author. So we'd come to the end of the second season of MythMakers and I thought it would be a good chance to have a seasonal look back over where we've been with our podcast since May. It seems a long time ago now but we started off with a review of the Fantastic Beasts, Secrets of Dumbledore. I note that that's now coming to be on streaming platforms so maybe some of you will be watching it at Christmas. My review you can hear if you tune into that episode, I don't want to give you any spoilers. It was kind of mixed. I want to love it more than I do. I don't know if any of you feel like that. Here's a little taste of that now. Let's start with a review of the most recent film. This is the third in the Fantastic Beasts and where to find them series called The Secrets of Dumbledore and it comes after two other installments. The very first one is called Fantastic Beasts and where to find them. The second one is the Crimes of Grindelwald and now this one. Now I think it's fair to say that these films are not loved as much as the Harry Potter films. So I'm going to first of all talk about this film on its own merits and how it fits in this series and then compare it to what's going on when you compare it to the Harry Potter sequence. Now I would say that if you haven't yet gone see the film that this particular installment, the third, is not bad. For one thing the plot is more coherent. The second film, the Crimes of Grindelwald, I think struggled under the weight of so many different storylines coming in. It really got quite knotted and was hard to follow and lost a lot of its charm as a result. This one does have a storyline, particularly in the second half of the film where it becomes quite an exciting kind of heist with something they need to achieve and a little bit like an ocean's 11 style thing of how they're going to achieve it but set in a wizarding world. So I appreciated that but I think one of the things about these films which I struggle with is, comes down really to the colour palette. It is all quite dark and the actors are all adults. So you're looking at quite a unmagical visual landscape except for the moments when they dip into Hogwarts or they have some wonderful beasts to enjoy. I think the first film in a sense was the most successful of this franchise because their underlying everything else was the plot line of there's this wonderful suitcase that falls open and then beasts are released in New York and that had so much fun and humour and just had lots of great moments. The second one as I've mentioned the strongest part of that for me was the thought of this macabre circus in Paris so there was elements in that work but this one it stays pretty dark it starts in a sort of Berlin and the themes are dark that fits the themes and the most brightest moment comes towards the end when you get this shift to Bhutan the quite sort of you know out of left field moment and when you're watching it I suppose I'm asking myself is this am I watching it because I've watched the Potter films a sense of loyalty or does it stand up on its own right? Some things are worth the ticket price so I do enjoy sort of knowing more about Dumbledore I think it you know Jude Law as Dumbledore is a great choice he gives it that sort of mischief and gravitas he's very watchable and of course the the film hangs on him really and the new Gellert Grindelwald mad smickelson I think is better than Johnny Depp's he looks as though he's someone that Professor Dumbledore might well have had a younger man's and fling with and he has a sort of wonderful aesthetic face I don't know the the cheekbones maybe but in and demeanor he does seem convincingly as though he's a man with a mission that has turned evil so yeah that works for me Eddie Redmayne is cute but underused I think in these films he has sort of one sort of note that he strikes which is that awkwardness a bit of a shuffle this is the guy of an Oscar you think you know maybe there's more that could be done with him and the other supporting cast well the favorite character I think for many people is Dan Fogler's Jacob Kowalski the the muggle amongst the the wizards and I think he's great fun they clear up the credence figure the Ezra Miller character I'm aware there've been issues about some cast members you know obviously Johnny Depp has stepped out and Ezra Miller has had his brushes with the lore recently so there probably was an external pressure to clear up that character but if you want to find out what happens to that character's storyline it does sort itself out which is quite a relief because it that was part of the what was getting very tangled in the second film and also I think we're very surprising sort of new relationship which I really enjoyed is seeing more of the amphesius the brother to Newt Calum Turner that was some of the funniest moments in fact come with the two brothers together so again there are positive things in this film and I did enjoy I did sit in the cinema enjoying it but there is a bout here what is it that is less attractive about the fantastic beasts to the Harry Potter films and I'm obviously going to be looking at this from a script writing point of view I had Mar-JK Rowling's plotting immensely she's very good at working out long overarching plots and I feel that this is happening in these films but not as successfully as it did in the Harry Potter one of the problems of course is that we already know the end right at the beginning of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone when they're having the the cards in the chocolate frogs we know that it's going to come to a battle with Dumbledore defeating Grindelwald so we know that's where we're going as you know the plot spoiler happened many years ago so that removes some of the jeopardy but there are ways around that because you can sort of forget that whilst you're watching I think it comes down to the fact that it has lost some of the charm which having a younger person growing up and coming into the world provides almost all the characters except for Jacob are already part of the wizarding world so for them magic is normal I think the magic of Harry Potter is discovering that actually outside the boring world of suburbia the dursity world you can then enter into this fantastic world and it's that journey that Harry goes on and we go with him that's not available so you're supposed to be already sold on the idea of wizards when you reach fantastic beasts which of course most of the audience is but it loses that feeling of gosh how marvelous how spectacular which is really at the heart of the charm of the Harry Potter series and of course there is the vulnerable character Harry himself there isn't the same character with the same vulnerabilities in the fantastic beasts that you do get people who are exposed and abused in some ways that's certainly the case with the Ezra Miller character but they're not the beating heart and I think for me this is why I would turn back to Harry Potter to enjoy in the way that I don't rewatch the fantastic beast films and the locations don't work as well either so with Hogwarts you get in some ways when you think of the you know the economics of the wizarding world which my family and I have discussed a great length during the 2000s you know when these books were coming out I had small children and that's we were enjoying them step by step it was hugely exciting but we did sort of wonder about how the economy works because the way wizards plug into the real world didn't feel quite right somehow but anyway it's fantasy let's not worry too much about that you sort of forgave it the fact that the most strategic place in the world was this school in Scotland that didn't matter we all agreed because we all loved Hogwarts that's fine in this one the the stakes are bigger it feels more like a Nazi takeover of the world so the scale is appropriate but somehow in fantastic beasts we lose our connection because we're not sure what's a stake it's not the teachers we know who are having to man the walls or the pupils manning up to go and you know protect the bridge like Neville does in the the last instalment so it it becomes a drift in a sense a drift so I think in terms of problems for keeping an audience I'm not sure who they're appealing to I wonder if we started with fantastic beasts if I as a parent would feel oh yeah here you are kids here's a really exciting wizarding story I think I probably wouldn't and then if it wasn't meant for kids but for older people the sort of YA audience upwards then is it really is it touching on the themes that fill adult I don't know I have a sort of I don't look forward to these films in the way I really remember looking forward to the Harry Potter films I think there was the aspect in the Harry Potter films of wanting to see the children growing up and flourish whereas this I don't know who I'm who I'm backing yeah I'm less secure as someone watching it but also this season I've had a fantastic time meeting writers so I started off with AJ Lancaster who writes independently her books Lord of Starriel are well worth checking out and for a second bite of our Christmas pudding here is AJ now about Middle-earth basically becoming synonymous with New Zealand I'm basically expecting you to be a cousin of Peter Jackson or something is this true oh yes obviously we're all we're all related to him yeah is just like every New Zealander owns ten sheep yeah that's this and we're all hobbits um and it's one of those those strange things that gets associated with New Zealand when you when you're overseas are you talking to someone from overseas is Lord of the Rings Lord of the Rings sheep rugby one of those three depending on your audience so for me I I'm gonna I'm gonna commit sacrilege and say I actually like the movies better than the books yeah you can you can take that I think it's I'd like I honor what Tolkien did for the genre but it's not my it's not my preferred style I guess I like a slightly more modern slightly faster paste thing whilst admiring all the work he does inventing languages and all the kind of myth kind of level in terms of New Zealand it's a very strange thing because New Zealand is really beautiful and I feel like the the movies really captured that and a lot of it does look like that but Lord of the Rings you know places like the Shire I the land that Tolkien was imagining is is clearly more England yeah it needs to do some odd disconnect isn't it because I I think I live somewhere much more like the Shire than than the Hobbiton that was created which felt have you have you ever been to New Zealand no I'd love to come I I suppose what I was thinking about was more um it's it's quite obviously it's a film set so it's relatively small and it doesn't have the network of villages that the Shire actually is and the pubs and the sense of rival communities and Buckland and all the rest of it which is absolutely necessary for a film set whereas places I live near are very like that and I think you don't have to worry about being identified as a Hobbit because you know there's thank you over here too anyway um so I was wondering if you felt that the use of the middle earth landscapes as being synonymous with New Zealand kind of getting the way of your own fantasy creative rate you know your imagination because you feel it's already been used in that way um and no not really because although the the sort of movie has that sort of very iconic landscape it doesn't feel like New Zealand if it makes sense like oh all right now that that would be an interesting challenge if I came and visited it would I think would I be walking around entirely the wrong wrong lens I think I might be I reckon a lot of these package tours might you would say a bit or like like you say like you go you would go to the you know the tourists set at Matamata which is Hobbiton this when they voted um but uh something you said about the you know like New Zealand doesn't have the the little connections of villages or to other villages is that kind of weight of human history like um obviously New Zealand does have its own history and we have our own indigenous people but in terms of the length of human occupation like like in England there are pubs that are 500 years old and it's not that unusual but that is not the case in New Zealand you know we don't have uh you know it's debatable when when Māori first came to New Zealand but say roughly a thousand years ago also um but then if you go back much further than that you know two thousand years ago there were there were people in England building things but there were birds here and so I'm getting off point um but in terms of like you know like the flora and fauna they sort of that's not so much in the movies I guess because it wouldn't fit with the kind of tokeness see all out all our kind of bird life and like a little bit of the bush but the the spots they chose they chose particularly to more represent kind of very english in european flora flora and trees and things um so when I kind of watch the movies although I can pick out particular landscapes it's not it doesn't kind of evoke kind of that feeling of walking through the New Zealand bush because it doesn't really look so much like they're there has a very different lock um well that's reassuring to know that they haven't edged out the fantasy potential for for yourself as a writer but let's come my my neighborhood as it were because um you told me that you wrote the first draft of the first book in your series the Lord of Starriel while living in Oxford um so did you find the city itself as a source of inspiration I mean there's a lot of Oxford and Cambridge I think in your other city in your book well one of your other cities called Knoxbridge um yes I'm it comingly disguised this no one will ever guess uh uh yes I approached I wrote the first draft I had just moved to Oxford um I'd moved to Oxford in October and I think around 2014 uh and I was starting a new job in uh in november and I needed a way I needed a way to meet people so I thought oh I'll write a novel for um natural novel writing month which is november uh and so that's that's sort of where Starriel came from and it was very influenced by uh living in England um by the kind of uh november it's kind of the weather's getting kind of colder so all the kind of like particularly like the lamps it like the they kind of old old style architecture that is so much of around there in the beautiful buildings um and I'd also recently been up to uh done a little bit of traveling up in Scotland um uh it's thanks the Lord and the North idea yeah yeah well and I'd I'd I'd been rewatching an old um series for a little while ago called Monica of the Glen I don't know if you heard of it yeah yeah yeah so which has uh as a sort of initial it's a sort of set in modern times but the sort of the kickoff of the TV show is that the sort of black sheep with a family gets a call but his his father's dead and goes back to the crumbling older state in Scotland um and so I sort of had that in my head uh and this sort of season of the the turn of seasons um and I thought oh but it would be much cooler if it was magical and set further a go and lift the main character as a woman um I think 18th is great in that way that our thought of magpie tango is why should we use like you watch something like Monica the Glen which is entirely entirely different um yes but you take the thing which sparks your imagination and turn that into your opener because you've got your wonderful main character Heter who was living a life of relative freedom down in the main city as a illusionist on in a stage company um answering the call to go back to the ancestral home to find out which of um her family uh the valstars is that right yes it's um it's going to be picked as the next lord of sterile and then one of my great favorites ta white uh who's written many series but she has an absolutely fascinating backstory of her own so you can uh listen to a little bit of that here it's a very difficult genre to describe because I didn't really obey genre norms but it's kind of like fantasy with sci-fi elements um or sci-fi with fantasy elements depending on who you ask um so that was where I started and I just went off of a dream and it was a very sci-fi-esque dream like chapter one went to a different direction um which was much more fantasy uh so that's where I started and then because I can't think easy on myself I kind of transitioned to like high fantasy with my pathfinders or the broken land series and then from there I went to urban fantasy to sci-fi like straight sci-fi so it's it's I kind of just write what I want my funny uh the urban the urban fantasy series is that the i-lean travels series yes i-lean travels is that urban fantasy and then the firebird chronicles is more of my sci-fi um with a couple of fantastical elements to it yeah so I mean I suppose an interesting question for anyone who's got their hands on an author to ask them is is there a sort of particular thing that started you off as a fantasy writer I was noticing that you talked on your website about starting writing very young uh with the partner who then threw her biscuits at you he's just right just true what happened there uh so I was like that would have been when we lived in North Carolina but I was like in second first grade and I couldn't I had a little I struggled to learn to read which meant I struggled to learn to write and so at that age like I really wanted to write a ghost story um and I had to partner up with somebody who was a little bit older like a year or two older than me because I couldn't do it for myself and like we did it for a day and a half and then they were like I'm bored with this I don't want to do it and I got really mad and I maybe threw a cookie at her head I was pretty young okay that way rap and it was there a particular book once you did get into reading was there a particular book where you inspired you to follow your path yeah it's kind of funny because I started wanting to write before I could actually really like before I started liking to read um and then Nancy drew in third grade the second time around was the book that got me into reading um but the book that got me into fantasy was Tamera Puris the woman who walks like a man um it's the third in the series but I was living in in Okinawa because my dad was stationed there and they didn't have the first two books in the series at that library so I started with the third and it just kind of it was the first time I realized that fantasy could be like this really fun genre that's about real things but told in a different way and that you can have real life problems but with magic and other things mixed in with it to just make it a little bit more interesting is that the Alana series the Alana Chronicles have you read the Kel ones I have Caladri oh she's my favorite the protector of the small I actually think I like her a little bit more than a Atlanta because Atlanta had like magic to fall back on and she had the goddess like she was like kind of a chosen one but you don't find that out till like the second book I think whereas Caladri or Kel she was she's just a normal person who went after their dream and had to work very very hard to make that happen and I really like stories where you have to like it's not just given to you when you're not just special you you have to actually work to be the person you want and to achieve your dream so that's that's like my favorite of her series yeah and I absolutely love that one of the books is all about how to manage a refugee camp for internally displaced people right yeah it's right up my street as a former development aid worker and also it's just such a breath of fresh air after all these big battles things what happens to the civilians you know very very poignant and their great book so another book recommendation for listeners is to go and explore the tomorrow's back library and so what was your journey to being an actual published author after the biscuit throwing episode well it was kind of like a long circuitous journey like I in high school there was this we had where I went to high school you had a senior thesis project that you had to do to graduate and it had to have it written in elements so I decided to write a book and that's the book that nobody will ever see so I wrote that book and then I went to college for journalism at the Ohio University script school journalism because I figured I could work on my craft while having a full-time job and then I graduated and nobody was hiring so my mom told me to join the military which I did and to do public affairs for them which I did so the first time after that was I was in Afghanistan and it's kind of a situation where you're in a very small area and you can't go anywhere except for our missions which I did but you're stuck in a one place and you don't have the distractions of being in like the United States to take away from your creativity and there is a point where you don't want to read anymore books and you don't want to watch anymore TV shows and it had always been my dream to be a writer so I figured hey I'm here for a year why not write a book and that's what I did and that's where Dragonridden Chronicles came and Pathfinder a little bit I had the idea for Pathfinder while I was there and actually that probably sparked a lot of the ideas in Pathfinder so that was kind of when I started and it took me like a year and a half two years to get that book like done and edited and to the point where I felt comfortable releasing it to the public that is absolutely fascinating that's a brilliant story in itself and it also explains the Aileen Travis backstory yeah those three years were very instrumental in forming me as a person so a lot of my books draws from that as like the creative incentive because you went you go through a lot in a very short period of time and you kind of find out who you are and then when you have to write these other things that draw on the military it's just a little bit easier so yeah Aileen Aileen is like a product of me coming home and some of the anger and upset that I had and how disconnected I felt to being home like some of the conversations she has with her mom are things that I've talked with about other people coming home as a soldier and how people think you have PTSD and everybody's the same so yeah that was a big part of that character and why I wrote her because it was kind of cathartic yeah and her her experience in the military is brilliantly specific being the sort of the camera person who goes along with the the guys on patrol and I did the thing oh this is this is really well researched and now I know why you know yeah I did I didn't do her job I was more but I knew the guys who did her job like I was public affairs I did go on the mission but it wasn't just to take photos like I took photos but it was also to get the story and so the combat cameras I had a couple of friends who work combat camera that was really fun to talk to them and figure out how that job differed from mine yeah I think what's really interesting about that experience is but most I would say that all of your heroines have a problem with authority and it's out there and there's a particular thing with is it you call her alien island alien alien but I think it's supposed to be okay um she she's well it's not not a plot spoiler that she's a baby vampire a young vampire so she has had this past where she already probably was in an authority structure which she had thought she left finding herself plunged into this one where you have to be a hundred years before you're given you know you're a chance to go out on your own at all so it makes it makes sense now totally makes sense I also met with the lovely Michelle Diner who writes a kind of space opera style books I'm gradually reading my way through her fantasy series I started with the one that was called Dark Horse partly because it was a free audio at that time and that got me into the rest of the series I don't know about you but I absolutely love listening to fantasy not only reading it I started out as a historical fiction writer my first publishing contract was with Simon and Schuster's gallery books and I wrote three books series for them set around the court of Henry the eighth I think at the time Simon Schuster was owned by CBS and they had the tutors on that television series and so they were very keen on buying books that were set in the in the Tudor era and yeah so and then I wrote a Regency set series for for them but in between those historical books I ended up writing quite a lot of fantasy just because it was a really great break for me I found the historicals very self evidently a very research heavy and I'm quite a perfectionist so I was quite stressed by getting every little detail right and fantasy was a really great escape for me kind of a pressure valve and yeah so that's why I started writing more fancy and then I had the idea for the first book in my class five series Dark Horse and I kind of never looked back I didn't I haven't written any historicals then so I've got the series title wrong so it's not dark class it's class five yes and there are five of them now yes which is wonderful news for readers just cycling back to what you said about writing historical I've written historical fiction under well under various pen names but particularly as writing for Eve Edwards I did a tutors series with Penguin and I remember feeling that same pressure that you talked about so the way I cope with it was focusing down on a year and sort of saying right I'm going to understand this year be it 1580 or whatever it was and it was even worse when I wrote about the second world the first world war because there is so much information available and I was writing about the trenches so I did there is I thought right I'm going to find an account from somebody in that in the trenches I'm going to see the day that I'm talking about from their point of view so I've had diary and thought right I'm just going to know it from that perspective because there was so much you're right you just get overwhelmed so did you did you do that so I mean I did well with my tutorset books the heroine is Suzanne her own boat who was a real person so there wasn't a lot written about her but I did know around about when she was when she arrived in London who she married what she did while she was there she was an artist in Henry Henry VIII's court and one of the few women artists that was kind of recognized at that level so that helps and in my regency series I chose a specific historical event event sorry I keep hearing myself yeah yeah yeah yeah so that helps as well to choose as you say a specific year or a specific event but in my tutor stuff I mean I found myself looking up the tide tables for the Thames and working out what day was high tide for the day in my story and the color of the mud in the fields and things like that and I realize I have a problem with just getting things super cool I don't know I think I think those sort of details really help I mean we might talk about this a bit later on but having a sense of a real time real place really helps carry over into fantasy and one of the things I learned recently which I really enjoyed was finding out about how Tolkien um because he was during the Second World War a firewalls and which meant going up on the roofs of buildings to watch in case fire has broken out in any of the historic buildings due to bombing um he he tracked the moon cycle the moon phases and he used what he was seeing through a lot of the rings and the journey not in the rings through his own actual observations and I think that kind of thing if people are writing fantasy it really helps give a sense of so that you know you don't have a full moon one day and a crescent moon the next exactly yeah because when people will stop having any faith in your world unless you've got a very fast moon cycle in for whatever reason in your you know it's one of different planets I mean let's that would be possible um fantastic so it's helping with your plot I think because in in the second book in my Tudor series I wrote about the um the boats the boats that kind of rode through the archers of London bridge and high tide yeah and those kind of things really add to the story and it actually ended up being part of the crescendo at the end and maybe I would not have known that much about it hadn't had I not gone into all the tide related information so yeah and just so people people know it's not the current London bridge it's the one with all the houses on I wrote a book set people looking on the bridge so I also did that and it was really dangerous because they had very narrow apertures and so the themes is quite strong tide so it was like shooting a kind of ramparts not helped by the fact it was actually called to some of the bridge yeah yeah so exciting I love that book out I don't just read fantasy I do I do now myself to read historical so I look forward to reading that too and then one of you listeners wrote in and suggested I talked to Victoria Goddard thank you so much for that recommendation it introduced me to a really original voice I would highly recommend you listening to that podcast because in fact we split it in two because there was so many fantastic um things that Victoria said I found two things about her particularly memorable one is that she came up with a really original plot in her book hands of the emperor I was reminded of this because one of our writers on one of our creative courses were saying don't we find that a lot of fantasy has got formulaic now I know what he meant by that sometimes there is actually a pleasure in seeing a formula revisited and done in a new way you know like a romance or something like that where the couple get together at the end so you don't always need to break in new ground but I really do think that Victoria has found something quite original she was focusing in her fantasy world on someone thinking about retirement it's much that maybe doesn't sound the most probably not on the back of the book is it but actually I fell in love with her character and thought that was a brilliant theme because it was about how do you pass on power yeah it's a duo kind of friendly a little a little bit of a cozy mystery sort of underlying it there and a bit of an adventure and whereas the hands of the emperor is you know it's about a and among many things it's about a bureaucrat on the edge of retirement kind of thing and so so I suppose in terms of genre I just kind of say well I'm I'm right in the middle of fantasy but I tend to write these sort of slightly off of culture towards genre conventions yeah and I think that's what is so wonderful about your writing Victoria is that you feel really original and that's there's something wrong with reading something which fits in a genre so if you read a romance or a detective story you know how it's going to turn out or a western yeah you you know before you start what's going to happen more or less but you don't know what the journey is whereas when I started reading hands of the emperor I had no idea what the journey was going to be and it was a pure delight it's a longer book it's not a sort of thing you can knock out in a but I have thoroughly enjoyed my week spent with your main character Cleifer so but before we come to him I'm just thinking about the influence and place on your stories because the women and darts series feels quite like a sort of 18th century feel I mean people are sort of small small village-y town type society there feels like that whereas the the world of the hands of the emperor is very much a much bigger scale it's got a sense of or mixture of the sort of Chinese bureaucracy and the exams that you still have to do to be part of the Chinese bureaucracy but also island culture that could be from I don't know Maori or Pacific islands I mean you're creating your own world but I felt that there was a sample of different elements that you were going for so as a writer have you travelled first and gone around squirreling away or these ideas or is it something that you think oh I want to do this and then go and have a look at it it's a little bit of both as I said my family's British and I've spent a number of visits and some quite some time visiting family members in various parts of England and Wales particularly and I did the year abroad in Scotland when I was in undergrad and and so for me I've always really enjoyed that kind of yes the 19th century sort of the Jane Austen or early late 18th early 19th century that kind of period of the early novels and then and the sort of early regency stuff and then also just sort of the kind of idealized vision that people have of Oxford and Cambridge and things like that and I enjoyed playing with that and thinking about I have an academic background and so I enjoyed thinking about you know what the good parts of that and also the bad parts of that in some ways we haven't seen that much of the university experience but I enjoy thinking about it and so for me kind of travel I once spent about six months walking down the length of England and staying with various relatives and friends along the way and so that kind of sense of the landscape was a great resource for me otherwise I've lived around quite I've moved quite a lot around Canada growing up lived in 14 places across the country and my parents spent 10 years in Papua New Guinea to north of Australia and so I had a lot of stories about Papua New Guinea in Australia growing up and I think that really comes out strongly in the hands of the emperor with the white seas islander culture which is quite strongly based on sort of Polynesian historic Polynesian culture but there's quite a lot of Papua New Guinea in elements in there too from the Trobrand islands and the Highlands which is where my parents lived and so I had lots of stories in like the material culture of that that white parents had various elements of it and friends of theirs who come to visit us or we visited them I've only been there once but that I remember I was there when I was very as a baby but as an adult I've only been there once and so it was a very rich experience even being a quite short trip so I enjoy that combination I feel like it's important to be very respectful of other cultures and I try really hard to not to appropriate cultural elements especially for ones that have been historically colonized but at the same time I also think it's very important to try and broaden the base that you're building off of so the Green Wing and Darts series is quite largely based off of kind of the English country tradition and country like country house stories too right like that kind of the mysteries that you get out over and that tradition there but the hands of the emperor and the world that that's set in which is Zuni I deliberately wanted it to be a non-Western European base society I was I really wanted to to get away from that so I the different parts of Zuni that are drawn from different non-Western cultures as a conscious choice there and what the person who wrote in said is I something along the lines of I defy you not to fall in love with Cleopher now Cleopher is the main character of the hands of the emperor he is the hands of the emperor you could describe him very boringly as bureaucrat but actually he is just the most wonderful wonderful character I was saying to you just before we started recording that he reminds me very much of the Count Rostov who is the lead figure in the fantastic novel gentleman in Moscow by Amortals which is a historical novel I think being filmed at the moment but the how that story works is that you just love spending time with that character and I felt absolutely the same about Cleopher and as you were just saying what you're thinking about in this book are things which don't make it into fantasy it's the stuff that's not around the battle it's how do you hand on power how do you retire and there's also a really strong theme about what do the people back home think of those who have gone into another walk of life and got success elsewhere which doesn't translate into the local context at all they completely misunderstand him in sad ways so when you started this book did you start with the character and just see where it went or did you already have those themes in mind and then you know built him to fit the plot no it was a very character driven um different book so my my kind of general project as I said I tend to I write these sort of it's a sprawling interconnected stories in my in my narrative universe here and they there's sort of two parallel core um to that that project one of them there's this empire called the empire of a standalone as which has this catastrophic cataclysmic magical collapse that happens and so I it's sort of one of my projects is the lead up to to that collapse and then what happens afterwards I'm not really a dystopian kind of writer I'm really much more interested in how do you rebuild um what happens afterwards but that that kind of shadow that falls across the entire tire cultures and individuals is something that I find a very interesting to think about and I think this connects back to something like Tolkien and the shadow of worldward one that's always behind um all those authors of the first half of the 20th century and I've always found that interwar period quite interesting for that with with people not always talking directly about it but it's always there and so in my novels that kind of the fall of a standalone is is that that culture-wide devastation that people don't always talk about but is always there so that's one part of the project and then the second part of the project is this figure of um of one character um and who is um called Fitzrangerson he's a mean character in various books and referred to in other ones he's this poet and so as part of that one thing I was interested in with the fall of a standalone as in the effects of it was the character of the last emperor of a standalone who survives the this destruction and ends up having to kind of rebuild on a personal level and so I started off writing this what was going to be a short vignette uh about the last emperor and what he was like in the period after things had sort of settled down after the fall and I thought oh his secretary's probably a good window onto what he's like as a person and so I started writing about his secretary and it was really only intended to be a couple of scenes or maybe one scene like that was all I was doing and by the end of the scene I had fallen in love with clear for as a character he was just so interesting and he just kind of kept growing and and that was the story was was was an unusual one to write because I usually have more of a sense of what the story is to start with or at least like I often know what the emotional tone I want to end with is or like the the very the denumer I don't always know what the climax is but I usually know what the denumer is and where the characters end up and so for that one I had no sense of what the arc was at first I just kind of kept but I kept being drawn to writing scenes and I just kept imagining them like I'd be driving or I'd be you know taking the dogs for a walk or something and the scene would come into mind and I I just have to go write it and so for I don't know a year a year and a half maybe two years I just kind of kept going back to it and picking away at it and I was enjoying writing it so much like I just love spending time with Cleopher and eventually I was like okay you know what I'm not getting any other books done I'm just going to focus on this one and see where it takes me and eventually at that point I realized that the reason I had had so much trouble seeing what the arc was was because it was an incredibly long book and so I'd written you know 80,000 words which is normally coming towards the end of a novel that I usually write but that's really I mean not even a third of the way through this one so the the kind of character arc was just really getting going and then I was also really privileged to meet Lisa Edmunds another writer who I spend a lot of time listening to her Alice Worth books these are brilliant if you haven't met them yet they're also very well read as an audio version of it very exciting story about a mage but actually in many ways it's a kind of escaped person from a gang theme that's what I really enjoy about urban fantasies that you see themes that you're used to in detective stories or or police procedures being reinvented with magic and dragons and things like that what's not to like so if you want to hear a little bit from Lisa here is an excerpt now well and I also really like the Scandinavian sort of psychological thriller mysteries as well like the Heningmankel series and oh gosh the Kenneth break they turn it into a TV series Kenneth Branagh and a bunch about like the there's just nobody that does that dark psychological really twisted mysteries like norwegian and Swedish and Danish authors so I feel like my series is like an amalgamation of all of that Alice is a little a little bit Kinsey Millhone who is Su Grafton's PI and a little bit via Worshawski but then also influenced by all the fantasy and all of the mysteries and you know sort of across all the subgenres sort of all put together in one body yeah talking had this thing he wrote about the Cauldron of stories the idea that all these other elements from everything you've read and the traditions have go into this and then you ladle out your own version of it and then of course I would say Alice is definitely her own character you know she may have had these seeds in her origins but I love her as the the character she's grown to be so looking at the Aliceworth series for those who haven't yet read it and I'm stressing the yet it's in the urban fantasy genre would you like to give us a little kind of taste of what they will find if they start reading the series sure um you know my particular world is sort of it's it's very similar Alice's world is very similar to our own with the addition of you know supernatural and paranormal creatures and beings so there are shifters and vampires and ghouls and things like that and so I like my preference on urban fantasy is like our like our world but with these interesting twists excuse me I also enjoy urban fantasy that steps much farther away from our own world like ambitious the others series which is very very different um so I sort of imagined what would have to change in our world if we suddenly you know had these creatures walking among us and so I envision like well they would have to be like a federal agency dedicated to sort of tracking monitoring and serving as law enforcement um who are set up for interactions with creatures that aren't human don't think like humans and aren't vulnerable to the same things that we are um and then sort of just sort of grew from there um so Alice herself is a mage so she has magic she has what I call natural magic so um air and earth magic um as well as a few other abilities that kind of develop throughout the series um and she is a private investigator in my world a mage private investigator sort of specializes in supernatural and paranormal type mysteries and almost all of her cases involve solving a supernatural related mystery um she has a ghost sidekick um his name is Malcolm right his name is Malcolm um he is I mean he calls it he calls himself the comic relief in the partnership um you know he's a lot of fun um he tends to be a crowd favorite um and in some ways he's her anchor like he's the one who very much sort of the conscience in some cases isn't he he correct uh he's doing because Alice had had a really not to spoil anything but she had a very difficult and traumatic childhood and upbringing and so there are a lot of times where her reactions are very much shaped by her past and Malcolm in some time and a few other characters come in as like her chimney cricket and I was sort of like Alice you know think about this a little bit um and you see her changing over the course of the books um and adjusting and you know becoming a little bit more while she calls it a little bit more human um you're learning how to interact with others and how to love how to love others and care for others and how to let them care and love her um which is a difficult journey for her you know considering she didn't really have that growing up um so each book they're not they're not designed to be read um as standalones each book contains its own story its own mystery but there are overarching stories there's a there's a major antagonist that everything is sort of building up to her dealing with their storylines that run throughout each book so although each book has a self-contained mystery for her to solve because she's a PI um you would want to start with one and then uh go forward it's not you know not really designed to be read out of order and she's also in I wouldn't call it a love triangle that's the wrong word because there's another side to it but she's sort of in the middle of pools between a shifter um friend a very close friend um lover but also somebody within the vampire community who's very interested in her but also the mage community so like there's three points it's not really right in the federal agency you know a federal agent as well oh there we go it's you know there's there's definitely a romance angle to it as there is with a lot of urban fantasy but I you know I definitely wanted I didn't want to get into the love triangle thing um uh too much but there definitely is a little bit of uh what's the word like there there's a like she's trying to find the person who like uh you know who completes her who supports her who compliments her that's the word I was like if I were who compliments are the best um and you know there's a lot of power plays going on too as you know as you would expect with any any time that you have um you know you have a like the vampires they've been they have hundreds of years old they they're all about the power they're all about the what can somebody do for me what benefits me um and that's not necessarily the type of partnership relationship uh that someone like Alice would be interested in so I think what I was most interested in is exploring power dynamics in personal relationships and you know letting Alice sort of figure out what's the healthiest type of relationship to be yeah um one trope in urban fantasy and paranormal romance that I'm less of a fan of is the ones where you have a um a real like difference in power and you have one partner asserting that dominance over the other um I mean I think there's room in any genre for all kinds of you know types of relationships but I definitely wanted to focus on a more a healthier type of relationship so I think that is an exploration of what's a healthy relationship what's going to be mutually beneficial um what love really is um as opposed to what can this person do for me how can they advance my my goals you know which isn't to me a healthy relationship yeah and because you've got a long series that you're working on that the for example the main central relationship with Sean does become more and more important to the readers you go on and I I found it really gutting in I think it's um shadows uh where uh she loses I think it's not too much for spoiler say that she's cousin loses her memory I think it's in the blurb so I'm allowed to say that yeah so it's a reset of her relationship with Sean but it's it's absolutely it's just terrible to see oh no you can't forget all these things you've had you know that the reader is really involved in that I thought that was a very good thing to do to a relationship if from a craft point of view in the middle of what I my otherwise be and they lived happily ever after you know right keep putting the grit in the relationship so that it can move on and become actually even deeper as a result yeah and they um you know they have a lot of ups and downs um you know as they both kind of adjust to the relationship and you know Sean always wanted um and you know him very much did believe and does believe he wanted an equal he's not wanting what the rest of the pack wants him to have which is a very submissive um uh mate partner you know who's going to just follow orders he wanted someone to stand beside him um but that's all well and good in theory until he does get someone who wants to either stand in front of him or stand beside him or stand in front of him um and then he's got to try to figure out well you know exactly what that means um you know an Alice isn't ever going to be anybody's um you know he's not gonna be bossed around uh too so there's a lot of dynamics there uh so you have to put your relate you know your your relationship through some ups and downs and and uh because I think that's realistic you know I don't know any relationship that's all sunshine and roses you know from day one you're gonna run into problems you're gonna run into differences of opinion um especially when you have two people who have you know or so kind of set in their ways you know so above all I wanted it to be a realistic series you know I want my heroin to be relatable um and um realistic I want the relationships the the mysteries the drama it all to feel like all things that make sense all things that are relatable even though it's you know there's magic and all sorts of other creatures around like I still want people to read it to read it and feel like yeah this is something that would really happen and then most recently I met with Catherine Tordassi who is a German author whose book Bramble Fox has just been translated into English this is a children's book this is a reminder of course that many of the great fantasy stories actually are classed as children's books though adults get a lot from them and my conversation with Catherine took us into a whole world of German fantasy writing which was very enjoyable for me so the first question I have is you're sitting in Berlin what made you want to write a story set in Wales oh yeah um oh well first of all a big big shout out to Catherine the two wrote a really excellent translation I really it was such an amazing experience to to read a story that I've written translated into another language and she did this really beautifully um I already told her via email but if she's listening to this thank you Catherine once again why did I choose to have this story and have Wales as a setting yeah I've been I lived in Wales in North Wales in Banger for about a year and I really loved it there so it was it was a great time for me it was a very formative year as well so towards the end of my studies and I loved the landscape it's a very um Banger is sort of situated between the sea and Snodonia National Park so you have the mountains you have the coastline I'm very big on hiking so I was outdoors a lot and I also really enjoyed the university program there so Banger University classes also got into to archery which was fun and um yeah of an archery club at that's what I did for a while and yeah when I was there I went on hikes I always had my notebook with me and started to sort of collect impressions of of the places that I would visit and the different kinds of legends and folklore elements that I came into contact with and yeah so that's have the first ideas for the Bromberfox stories got together and then I got to read um I think its childhood guest version of the Binogian which is this collection of the the Welsh Welsh mythological and and folkloristic stories that inspired a lot of the King Arthur Law for example and there came first came across a noon and and around and so that sort of lodged in there I read then more recently I came across a Welsh artist called CCJ Ellis who did a wonderful art book on Welsh monsters and creatures so there's a bit of inspiration there and yeah I also when I wrote the book the the privilege of a diski kimreig department at Banger University who who helped me with research such questions and language which checks and so on so it's yeah they're born out of a stayed her into sort of a fortif year for me in Wales yeah so we've mentioned for those of you who love your Welsh language or just love languages anyone who like talking to languages will know that it's based on Welsh or partly um is there you're using another a little list of vocab at the back you're using the Welsh language as part of the texture and feeling of the tale and also just do a sort of promo for this podcast if you go back a couple of episodes to the Welsh episode you can hear us talking to Claire Faea who's a Welsh lady who collects Welsh tale so this will lovely in 2001 after you've heard Catherine speak today so um I was also interested so there you've got Wales as one centre for the story but you then have many of the characters from Shakespeare's Amid Summer night stream night stream has an element of um existing folkloric characters and ones uh Shakespeare made up and obviously it's his play um but that's obviously he's the man from Stratford upon Avon an Englishman so how did you go along with the idea of incorporating the Welsh tradition with English to different or was your fact that you are from Germany make you could just ignore all that kind of thing but well I would call by method perhaps irreverent homage so I'm kind of I mean I studied English literature so Shakespeare was very big of course in the courses that I took and Amid Summer night was one of the plays um that fascinated a lot and um I was also always fascinated by how by by sort of the myth surrounding Shakespeare the author so these questions of where did he get his ideas did he write the plays did someone else write the plays so all these these different kinds of um yeah myths and questions and stuff so I what I did when I uh wrote Bramberfox I knew that I wanted to include fairy law for and um always appreciated or what I've been fascinated by that comes to the um the use of myth and folklore in literature is how how these myths and um and legends overlap and transfer and transform in different cultures but also in different types of literature and how they had um re-read and re-written so this kind of um pastiche or or or or recolash of different motives put together into into retellings and then slightly history stories of of other material I always liked when I when I read books that did that so I that was something that I wanted to try out and in in Wales you have the you have a lot of fairy law there they're called um or one term that is used there it till with till till with tag so the fair family um as a sort of collective term for for fairies or elves but I did for Bramber I so imagined Shakespeare as a traveler between so I thought what if he actually went through a portal like the children in the books and visited um the the the fairy world and came back with a back full of stories but um he made up two that more entertaining and there was an early friend of ox there was the scene where Titania complained about him um riding amid someone like donkey stories pure fabrication so it's just it's it's a bit of silliness to be honest um coming from an English literature student I think we're still perfectly allowed to do that because obviously here at the Oxford Central Fantasy one of our sort of other quatchstones is the Narnia stories and uh CS Lewis completely means you know a weak mythology and all sorts of after you're in legends and he just goes oh okay chuck a bit of this in bit of that he's like that he's like that chef who's around the kingdom um around the kingdom pulling everything out with the cupboards put into his kingdom um so I mean you've just touched on it but another way of describing Bramble Fox is that it's a portal fantasy which we've had while it's in folklore you know the doors in the hillside you go through to into another world and you get it in literature in Alice in Wonderland and back to Lewis again so how do you come up with your version of a portal leading into this liminal land of a land of mist that sits between our world and not many worlds but including the world of the fae yeah so um liminal space I find this the idea behind that quite fascinating so this idea that there are places where our understanding of reality dissolves like threshold places or even a space in time where we transition from one state of being to another and of course there's also the real life or metaphorical implications of that there's tons of cultural studies on the idea of liminal rituals or liminal states of being that people in basically all societies that we know have to go through in order to grow up so coming of age rituals would be one um one example where you're sort of caught between the status of a child and a grown-up and then you go through a kind of ritual and then um you sort of slip into this new identity and um I really like this idea that you have to go through a sort of in between phase and for Ben and Portia the borderlands between the human world and the fairy world they signify exactly that so they they have to go through this place in order to distance themselves from the world they know but also from their own place in the world so they they change quite a lot in this book Ben needs to find more confidence and move a little bit out of his shell um and also confront uh his his own personal grief and um Portia will discover that there's a certain wilderness her that she has to contend with so it's yeah I like this idea of the transition that you have to sort of that sort of unlocks things and that she picks up with another thread because I also interviewed several of our tutors on the novel in the year course just to introduce them to everybody out there and that also led us into talking about European fantasy not the sort of Anglo-Saxon tradition Celtic fantasy as well so with Claire O'Brien we got into a fascinating discussion about Madame d'Ornoir I hope I've said that right uh who is a forgotten writer of fairy tales who should be remembered up there with Hans Christian Anderson and the grim brothers so if you're interested in finding new places to go new fairy tales maybe you're thinking of a new screenplay something like that do listen to what Claire had to say about that forgotten French writer and also a bit nearer to home but also not the Anglo-Saxon tradition I had a discussion with Claire Faye's about Wales where she comes from and Claire's been doing something of a similar job to the other Claire finding stories that have fallen off most people's radar and bringing them to a younger audience there is that wonderful image in Tolkien of the Cauldron of stories where all the stories that have gone before are all bubbling away but some things do sink to the bottom and get forgotten where others rise to the top and keep being skimmed off and reused stories like beauty in the beast sleeping beauty little red riding hood we all know them and they keep getting reused and they can get a bit tired as a result and these writers and researchers I suppose we should call both our finding new material for us so that when we do go back to that Cauldron of story it's been enriched one of the great pleasures of setting up the Oxford Centre for Fantasy is getting to know all sorts of people who share my love for Tolkien one of whom is Jacob Renica and he's made several appearances as my my partner in podcast and we've been discussing such things as the stone giants in the Hobbit which led to discussing giants more generally in fantasy he also joined me along with Paula Calamaris to review the big Tolkien event of this season which has been the rings of power the Amazon series which if you're interested in hearing what we thought of it and also what our students on our creative courses thought of it we've got several episodes about that but because we love the Tolkien version of the rings of power in the third age most that's one of the that's the final chapter in fact in the Silmarillion we decided to accompany the arrival of that series with a more back to basics Silmarillion reader thon now how we run our reader thons has caused a bit of confusion it's not people coming along and reading out chapters because that would infringe copyright folks no what it is it's more like an online book club where each time somebody takes charge of a chapter reads it finds a favorite quote and a few reflections upon it and then shares it with everybody else as you might in a book club and giving the chance for other people to comment so if that reader thon is still up on our facebook page and on instagram if you want to see what happened this has been a really good format and brought new people to come and talk to us which we love and we're finishing off this Christmas with the 12 days of Tolkien where we're going to do the same thing with the much shorter but seasonal book the father Christmas letters actually this caused a bit of confusion in OCF headquarters because I was working off the first edition and my colleagues were working off more recent edition which has more letters so just to clear up any confusion we are using the most recent edition with the more letters and just as a reminder that we are not just about writing but also about any kind of fantasy inspired creativity I had a conversation with animator butch Hartman who's probably best known for his series The Fairly Odd Parents which I certainly remember my kids watching and we just talked about the world of animation which of course is one of the richest areas for finding fantasy being realised on the screen at the moment so I hope you've enjoyed this series and the ones that you've listened to if you do have any suggestions for writers you'd like me to reach out to do send them in because it's nothing better for an author to read than an email that comes saying that their fans want to hear from them same goes for any fantasy illustrators that you would like me to bring into the myth makers studio all that remains now is to wish you all seasonal greetings happy Christmas and if you want to really get into the Christmas mood you could perhaps listen to my pick for one the top fantasy stories you really must read because that is none other than the Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens so there's no bar humbug about Christmas here but as tiny Tim of course says God bless us everyone see you for our next season in the new year thanks for listening to myth makers podcast brought to you by the Oxford Center for Fantasy visit Oxford Center for Fantasy.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 favorite podcasts worldwide you