Author Interview: Katherine Roberts Q6

The countdown : 4 days to go!

Every day from now until Song Quest by Katherine Roberts is back in print and her new novel the Sword of Light is released, I'll be sharing with you a question posed by me and answered by Katherine. The most in depth answers ever offered by an author in bitesize daily doses. Enjoy! And my thanks to Katherine for taking part.

If you haven't read my review of Sword of Light, follow this LINK.

More information about the Song Quest Campaign can be found HERE.

Question 6

Let's talk about villains. How do you go about writing a believable fantasy villain? I once read that you can have characters in fantasy novels that are just evil without giving any back story about how they came to be that way. Do you think that's true or do you think that even fantasy villains need a source from which their evil develops?

Ah, yes - every book needs a good villain! And fantasy villains are great fun to write. I do have trouble making mine totally evil, in the same way my heroes and heroines are not totally good, because in my experience people are just not like that... but while adults and older readers appreciate shades of grey in characters, younger readers tend to prefer things to be more clear cut.

I think as you go down the age range, you need to make your villains darker and your heroes brighter, so in my new Pendragon Legacy series I have gone for a dark villain in the shape of Prince Mordred, crippled in battle and out for revenge. In contrast, my heroine Rhianna, King Arthur’s daughter, is more feisty than I usually write. But she does have her faults... she's human, after all!

I would not write (or enjoy reading) a fantasy book, even for younger children, that did not have some back story for the main characters, including the villain. Just because a story is set in a fantasy world does not mean that the people in it are not real to that world. In fact, you probably have to work a bit harder at making them seem real than you would if they lived in our "real" world… if that makes sense!

Katherine Roberts

That makes perfect sense! The good characters need flaws in order for us to relate to them. The bad characters need a human side in order to make their evil deeds convincing.

You can visit Katherine's website:

www.katherineroberts.co.uk

Rhianna Pendragon, heroine of Sword of Light, is on Twitter. Follow her here: www.twitter.com/PendragonGirl

Tomorrow, Question 7!

Author Interview: Katherine Roberts Q5

The countdown : 5 days to go!

Every day from now until Song Quest by Katherine Roberts is back in print and her new novel the Sword of Light is released, I'll be sharing with you a question posed by me and answered by Katherine. The most in depth answers ever offered by an author in bitesize daily doses. Enjoy! And my thanks to Katherine for taking part.

If you haven't read my review of Sword of Light, follow this LINK.

More information about the Song Quest Campaign can be found HERE.

Question 5

You mentioned that the idea for Song Quest came as a what if scenario. Is that how you usually find an idea you want to explore further? You seem like you have lots of ideas, so how do you decide which ones to spend the time working on?

Finding ideas has never been a problem for me, and "what if" never fails to spark off a story! This can be quite a small thing, such as "what if I walk down the end of my road and meet a rabid dog?" or a bigger thing like "what if the polarity of the earth reverses tonight?" I keep a notebook where I scribble down the most persistent ideas in case I want to use them one day. I'll never have time to develop them all into stories, though, so the real problem for a writer is deciding which of their ideas might be worth developing further.

Books happen in several ways:

Passion: An idea will not go away, and I am really interested in the subject matter or feel a need to explore it further. I start writing in a blaze of passion, and out comes a story. "Song Quest" was written like this, since it was my first novel and I didn't have any idea what publishers wanted so I just wrote what inspired me most at the time. Once you get published, you never really regain that absolute freedom of the first novel, because you start worrying about what publishers want, and what sort of book might sell enough copies to pay the mortgage and so allow you to continue writing. "I am the Great Horse" is another example of a passionate book, and that one got written because I had a dream contract from Chicken House that simply said “new novel” - but I think that level of author freedom is (sadly) rare these days.

Market: Some ideas are obviously more marketable than others. I am constantly coming up with outlines for series and developing characters and plots, only to find that once I start writing, everything goes dead on me! The trick is finding something marketable that also feels worth a year or more of my life, and sometimes I cannot tell that until I have written at least part of the book. Many of these ideas fizzle out after a few weeks' work and are stored away in various files awaiting a spark of inspiration that might bring them to life. I think the main problem with aiming for the market is that the most obvious ideas have already been used up and wrung dry. Also, fashions change. An initial idea might take years to develop into a book/series and reach the shelves, and by that time the bandwagon you were aiming to hitch a ride on will probably be vanishing over the horizon…

Work for hire: Sometimes a publisher will come up with an idea and need a writer to write the "book words". There are different levels of this, from projects where the publisher (or a third party such as Working Partners) provides a detailed storyline and the writer just joins the dots, to other projects where the writer is expected to plot and develop the characters working from the publisher's brief. Since it removes the most joyful part of the process for me, this is the kind of thing I will only take on when the bailiffs are at the door. So far I have done one: "Magical Horses" (for Carlton).

Writing any kind of book is hard work, so it's important to have something driving you quite hard in order to finish it – whether this is passion, some sort of challenge, money, or a fan with a sledgehammer threatening to break your ankles!

Katherine Roberts

Thank you Katherine. I found that such an interesting insight into the reasons you might write a story beyond your own passion for an idea. But I can see that writing about something that has a really personal meaning for  you would be more inspiring.

You can visit Katherine's website:

www.katherineroberts.co.uk

Rhianna Pendragon, heroine of Sword of Light, is on Twitter. Follow her here: www.twitter.com/PendragonGirl

Tomorrow, Question 6!

Author Interview: Katherine Roberts Q4

The countdown : 6 days to go!

Every day from now until Song Quest by Katherine Roberts is back in print and her new novel the Sword of Light is released, I'll be sharing with you a question posed by me and answered by Katherine. The most in depth answers ever offered by an author in bitesize daily doses. Enjoy! And my thanks to Katherine for taking part.

If you haven't read my review of Sword of Light, follow this LINK.

More information about the Song Quest Campaign can be found HERE.

Question 4

Song Quest features magical creatures which, I believe, are partly based on mythology. Do you particularly enjoy writing about magical or otherwordly beings? What is it about fantasy writing that you really enjoy?

Yes, the Song Quest trilogy features several half-creatures: mermaids (which I call merlee because there are male ones as well), half horse half human centaurs, and half bird half human quetzal. I love writing about mythical creatures, and you'll find several strange ones in my Seven Fabulous Wonders series too, such as the fire-breathing chimera. There are even some telepathic fairy horses in my new Pendragon Legacy books. And, of course, my muse is a unicorn...

What do I enjoy about fantasy writing? Hmm, possibly the escapism… but also the freedom. If I wrote about real world children being kidnapped and riding off into the mountains on dangerous quests without adult supervision, or wrote about sailors slaughtering real world sea creatures, there would be an outcry. But in a fantasy world, you can address difficult themes from a safe distance. A fantasy story might seem to be about magic and heroic battles and elves, but in reality it is about power and war and different races trying to work together. If I try writing a book with no magic in it, the story always feels unfinished. Fantasy creatures such as mermaids and unicorns might not exist in our world, but out there somewhere in the universe... who knows? I absolutely believe in ghosts and spirits and things we cannot see or explain. Science has not discovered everything yet.

Katherine Roberts

You can visit Katherine's website:

www.katherineroberts.co.uk

Rhianna Pendragon, heroine of Sword of Light, is on Twitter. Follow her here: www.twitter.com/PendragonGirl

Tomorrow, Question 5!

Author Interview: Katherine Roberts Q3

The countdown : 7 days to go!

Every day from now until Song Quest by Katherine Roberts is back in print and her new novel the Sword of Light is released, I'll be sharing with you a question posed by me and answered by Katherine. The most in depth answers ever offered by an author in bitesize daily doses. Enjoy! And my thanks to Katherine for taking part.

If you haven't read my review of Sword of Light, follow this LINK.

More information about the Song Quest Campaign can be found HERE.

Question 3

What made you take the leap into e-books? How are you finding this new venture into Kindle publishing?

I feel I was pushed rather than leapt of my own accord! After my agent died, I had a five year break in contracts, which meant a creative backlog coupled with time on my hands and disappearing income. I knew I had to do something. Amazon had just opened the door to independent publishers, and at the same time my older books started going out of print and my publishers showed no sign of bringing them back to the shelves. So I began the painful process of reverting the rights, and meanwhile taught myself how to format a book for Kindle with the idea of republishing my backlist as e-books. I finally got Spellfall up for sale with amazon.co.uk in January, and with amazon.com later in the year when the sublicense with Scholastic expired. Since then I have republished all of my Seven Fabulous Wonders series as ebooks as well, though so far I’ve not had time to do much publicity for them.

One of the good things about authors republishing their backlists independently in this way is that they can price them competitively. You can find more ebooks by UK authors at the group blog www.authorselectric.co.uk

Katherine Roberts
www.katherineroberts.co.uk

Rhianna Pendragon, heroine of The Sword of Light, is on Twitter at www.twitter.com/PendragonGirl

Tomorrow, Question 3!

Author Interview Katherine Roberts Q2

The countdown : 8 days to go!

Every day from now until Song Quest by Katherine Roberts is back in print and her new novel the Sword of Light is released, I'll be sharing with you a question posed by me and answered by Katherine. The most in depth answers ever offered by an author in bitesize daily doses. Enjoy! And my thanks to Katherine for taking part.

If you haven't read my review of Sword of Light, follow this LINK.

More information about the Song Quest Campaign can be found HERE.

Question 2

Can you tell us a bit about the process of Song Quest being taken on by Catnip? Are there any different steps in the process for a book that has been with a previous publisher? Is it a different experience second time around?

The publishing process picks up later, at proof stage, missing out all the detailed editing and rewriting that happened the first time round. This makes sense, since that part of the work on the book has already been done. There are still proofs to check, though, because the layout of a book is copyrighted to the original publisher. In this case, I believe Catnip bought a copy of the Chicken House edition and retyped it, then reset the story for printing with fresh illustrations. They also commissioned a new cover image, which they put to a vote for the final colour decision – black or gold – and readers voted for gold. So the finished book looks a bit different, but I resisted rewriting the story so the words are the same. In this age of e-books, I’m delighted that “Song Quest” will soon be back in print as a proper book.

The experience of being published this time around is different because I have moved on to new projects. Song Quest’s first publication ten years ago was very exciting for me, since it was my first published novel and represented a personal achievement after five years of rejection from publishers and agents. My first editor Barry Cunningham visited me at home to make the offer, and then worked closely with me throughout the editing process, bringing the book out in hardcover with Element Books, where he had moved to set up a children's list after signing JK Rowling for Bloomsbury.

"Song Quest" could easily have sunk without trace, as many debut books do, except Waterstones in Piccadilly ordered 150 copies and displayed them around their foyer, and soon after that I got a phone call to tell me the book had won the Branford Boase Award, and would I be coming to the ceremony? Since I had no agent at the time to tell me what to expect, I thought this was all quite normal for a first novel! Then Disney asked to read it and things got even more exciting, but in the end they decided not to make the film, which was probably just as well because any money from such a deal would have been lost when Element went into receivership a year later... publishing is full of such ups and downs!

Anyway, after noticing your wonderful campaign to get the book back into print (THANK YOU!) Catnip must have visited my website and seen that the rights had reverted to me… and so a new edition was born, making Song Quest my longest surviving book in paper format with three UK editions so far – Element, Chicken House, and now Catnip.

Katherine Roberts

Three UK editions! And in just eight days, I will own them all. I am so excited! I can't wait to see the cover in the flesh (well, paper).

You can visit Katherine's website:

www.katherineroberts.co.uk

Rhianna Pendragon, heroine of Sword of Light, is on Twitter. Follow her here: www.twitter.com/PendragonGirl

Tomorrow, Question 3!