This is the view from my verandah on Saturday morning…

And in other news, there’s an interview of me up here, about my writing and life.

No blog post today. Instead you have to hurry on over to the murky underbelly of geekdom, Geek Syndicate and read my interview with the fabulous Liz…about women in genre fiction.

The lovely Satima has interviewed moi here, on Specusphere.

And in the meantime, here’s progress on Book Two (Stormshifter) of The Time of Random Rain trilogy. Zinging along now, with over 1,500 new words of immortal prose a day…

And here’s another photo from Como. Because I can.

[This is a continuation from the post below.]

It’s interesting to see how you create your worlds; do you have a method of managing them? Do you lay out the world and story-arc before you start writing or is it more of an organic process?

The story-arc begins first and the world develops alongside it.

I start by doing a great deal of thinking. My favourite time for this is while driving or doing housework. I rarely write much of this down, because I end up knowing my world – the part I am writing about anyway – just as well as I know this one. I know without looking it up in my notes that the fishing boats of my invented land put out to sea in the morning and return to port before nightfall, just as I know, without doing a Google search, that our refrigerated boats here on Earth don’t have to do that.

I like to have the larger picture in place before I begin – the politics, the commerce, the religion, the landscape, the climate. Much of the detail, however, is only conceived while I am writing the story. I try to integrate these details as the story unfolds (rather than throw them in huge chunks at the reader), much the same way we learn the details of our new surroundings when we move to another country. I’m an expert on the real thing – I’ve lived on four different continents!

I do start with a map, though. It may, however, be altered to suit the story as I write. If a river is in the way of characters on a journey, I will re-route the whole valley!

The story-arc remains flexible until I write the last word, but when I start on the first chapter I must have a clear idea of the beginning, the end and the highlights – the key scenes. The rest is a bit fuzzy, like looking through a fog which won’t clear until I get there.

Can you tell us a bit about where the idea for The Mirage Makers came from?

As a young mother, I was horrified by two real life stories emerging from two countries. One was an Australian tragedy of almost incomprehensible hubris, where many Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their parents, supposedly for the benefit of the children. They were often raised with no knowledge of their own culture or families, sometimes even taught to denigrate their heritage. The second story was the tragedy of the “Disappeared Ones” of Argentina. During this time, pregnant women caught up in the political brutality had their babies taken away at birth, to be raised by the families of their captors, while they themselves were murdered.

These events moved me. How terrible it must have been not only to lose your child, but to know they would be raised by people with different values, possibly values you despised.

A little later we moved to Vienna, Austria. One evening, I watched a TV historical drama (in Italian, which I don’t speak) sub-titled in German (which I can read, but too slowly to keep up with sub-titling). It was about an Imperial investigator being sent by Rome to Jerusalem to find out why people believed that a man had survived his crucifixion a year or two earlier. The investigator scorns the story as pure fantasy… About then, it became too complicated for me to follow, but it didn’t matter. My own imagination was already hard at work.

All those things came together to form the basis of the plot for Heart of the Mirage. I didn’t do anything about it at the time because I was writing The Isles of Glory, but a year or two later my husband transferred to Tunisia, and I could see the ruins of Roman Carthage from my study window and we had the base of a Roman pillar in our rose garden. When southerly winds blew, Saharan dust piled up at my front door, desert on the move…

That was when I had to start writing the Mirage Makers trilogy.

Ligea is such a strong and interesting female character and it was wonderful to see how she grew over the trilogy. Do you have any favourites among your characters?

Part of me loves all my characters, even the villains. I do like Ligea, not because she’s a lovely person − she’s definitely not that – but because I feel for her. She’s a woman who would probably have been kind and loving and nurturing, if she had not been raised to kill ruthlessly in the service of her Emperor and her manipulative mentor. She’s the child removed from her culture and her family, to be raised by her enemies to despise both. She does not have much of a chance, yet she manages to rise above her beginnings and develop as a human being. She can never entirely leave her past behind, but in the end, she does her best.

The character whose life history tore me up most when I was chronicling it, however, was Arrant. So many awful things happened to him, none of which he deserved, and sometimes I almost wept as I wrote about them. It was heartbreaking.

One of the nice things Orbit UK did when they published Song of the Shiver Barrens was to include an interview with me at the back. (The other nice thing for you readers – they included the first chapter of Karen Miller’s new book in the UK “Empress”!)

Here’s the first part of that interview:

Can you tell us a bit about your background? How did you get into writing fantasy?

I grew up on a small farm in Western Australia. Playmates were few and far between, which is probably why I developed both an excessively inventive imagination and a love of all things outdoors. As a child, I read everything I could lay my hands on, including old National Geographics, and for as long as I can remember I wanted to write and to travel. I was writing fully fledged stories by the time I was eight, and as soon as I was old enough to work in my school holidays, I was saving money to travel.

I’ve been writing and travelling ever since. As well as Australia, I have lived in North Africa, continental Europe and Asia – both on the mainland and the island of Borneo. My first published works were non-fiction travel articles!

You were a teacher for many years. How do you think that affects your approach to storytelling?

Well, I was telling tales long before I was a teacher. I seem to remember enthralling my classmates back in the playground of a country elementary school on a regular basis by reading my stories to them. Perhaps the teaching that helped me most as a writer was when I taught English as a foreign language (in Malaysia, Austria and Tunisia) and gained a depth of understanding about the structure of my own language as a result.

A bit of a logistical question, but just how do you find the time to write with another career and family to visit all around the world?

I can – and do – write anywhere. Without that ability, I would never be able to submit a book on time to meet a deadline.

I now work as an environmentalist, not a teacher, and much of my work takes me into the field. I have read first proofs in a tent in the middle of the rainforest. I have dealt with copy edits while sweltering by a roadside waiting for transport. I have plugged my computer into the wall in airports, coffee shops and waiting rooms, or I’ve hooked it up to generators in muddy logging huts or rainforest research camps. I’ve used my laptop as long as the battery would last on buses and beaches and coral atolls, in peat swamps and on fishing boats chugging through mangrove inlets. I’ve typed while perched on gunny sacks full of coffee beans on a wharf, or on tree stumps and fallen logs in the forest, or crammed into an airplane seat for a twelve hour international flight. I’ve written by candlelight, lamplight, moonlight, torchlight, firelight, streetlights, and even headlights (waiting to be rescued from a bogged car in the middle of nowhere.) The most challenging of all, though, is to find time to write while looking after a three-year-old grandson…

How much of an influence has being a conservationist and studying the natural world been on your writing and your world building? Do you often draw inspiration from your experiences or does it make it much harder to create something new and different?

An understanding of the natural world includes seeing how everything fits together, the larger picture. A logging operation means more exposed soil upstream. Run-off means the river is brown with mud. How does a riverine kingfisher see the fish it must catch to live? It’s all about connections. What happens in a neighbouring country can affect what happens to the birds in your own.

World building is like that. You don’t create just a house and a street. You are creating a world, and it is all interconnected. You can’t have your pre-industrial townsfolk eating fresh tuna if your town is miles from the ocean. Your musician needs strings for his lute (what are they made of?), your swordsman won’t be an expert if he never practises. In a desert, no one burns firewood in their fireplaces. Of course, you don’t put everything you know about your world into your book! But you have to know it and understand how it all fits together. Only if you do, will your reader feel that when he has opened the page, he has stepped into another real place.

Because I have lived as a local within a number of different societies, I know more than the average traveller about what goes into making a culture. That gives me an edge, I feel, in creating the people and the social rules they live by within their imaginary world.

I have been beta reading Book 2 of Karen Miller’s Godspeaker trilogy. [The first book was Empress of Mijak – it is already out in Australia – and this second one is called The Riven Kingdom.]

Unfortunately the wretched woman only gave me two thirds of The Riven Kingdom and I am left biting my nails waiting for the third segment. Talk about torture. I am so involved with the characters I just don’t want to wait. Beta reading? Forget it. I just want to know how it is all going to turn out… It’s just as well for Karen that she lives in Sydney and I’m in Kuala Lumpur.

Anyway, maybe to placate my ire at being left dangling, the lovely Karen has said some rather nice things, and put up an interview she did with me, on her blog. You can find it through her website here

Better still, she is also going to be interviewing some other fabulous writers, such as Rachel Caine, in the future. So, if you want to know more about me, hop over there. And if you want to be kept on the edge of your seat, try reading her Godspeaker trilogy.