Flashing Swords Press

JD What path did you take toward becoming a writer?

ME It is a family curse!-- my mother is a romance writer, and like most kids, I thought what my parents did was perfectly normal. I sold my first magazine story at around age 15, nearly 40 years ago and made my first international sale around the same time. I’ve taken occasional breaks for the purpose of actually making a living, but I have also supported myself as a newspaper reporter, a technical writer, and for several years had a movie review column that ran in a dozen papers.

JD Is it a difficult transition to go from reporter to fiction writer?

ME In the end it all comes down to words in a line. The skills involved are not exactly the same, but the ability to write good sentences arranged in coherent paragraphs that tell a story carries over. The most valuable skill involved has got to be the ability to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Many writers, especially those starting out, tend to overwork and over analyze what they write. While it is important to fix persistent mistakes, you can pretty easily suck the life out of a story through too many revisions.

JD What changes have you seen in your early writing and what you're doing now?

ME I like to think it has improved! Early on I wrote very little fiction. I discovered that in the non-fiction world you could pre-sell a story to a magazine, which was enormously appealing, especially when I could look at my mother’s experiences in the realm of fiction. Rejection is a writer’s first experience, but you can gather a lot more of that rejection experience very quickly writing fiction.
In terms of the stories I tell, there has been a considerable growth in both how I tell a story and the risks I am willing to take with characters and situations. I have a lot more in life experiences and observations to bring to the table than even ten years ago, and therefore write with a much more confident voice than I did. One of the kindest things that anyone has said about my writing was in Michael Moorcock’s foreword to The Servant of the Manthycore, where he said, “The genre story usually dodges the facts of genuine tragedy while the myth, or the story which retains the quality of myth, does not.” Even ten years ago, in many ways I was faking it. Now I am more likely to have a foundation of real truth in the tales I spin.

JD When you decide on the ‘statement’ that your story can make how deliberately do you work it in?

ME Always, the story is the thing. It has to be entertaining enough to hold the interest of the reader and to be honest, my interest as well. I am a fiction writer, not a polemicist, plus I am writing in a pretty narrow genre, with a certain expectation of action and pacing. I certainly cannot go all expository on my readers.
At the same time, the thought is always in my head of what true thing am I trying to say here. Unlike Epic Fantasy, in Sword and Sorcery our protagonists are seldom trying to save the world, so making the stakes high enough lots of times involves a moral dilemma of some sort. Just as in most of the other pulp-born genres, there is usually a poor decision made, followed by the protagonist’s struggle to rectify the mistake, whether the story is a western, hard-boiled detective, noir or S&S.

JD I've seen you refer to your stories as 'inventory'. Do you then consider writing a profession or a hobby?

ME I think that comes from my years of writing freelance non-fiction for newspapers and magazines. The only way for a freelancer to make any money is to be prolific, and treat it like a job. And in truth, most people who write with the idea that it is a hobby will tend to produce hobby-quality work. As a reader I have very little time, and I want to feel that regardless of how much I paid to read something, or how much or little the writer was paid, that what I am reading is a professional-quality story.

JD What sort of process do you follow, beginning to end, for your stories?

ME There are two things that I need to have before starting a story. One is at least one interesting idea of a scene or a character in an uncomfortable position. The other is an idea of what truth there is to be told from that situation. It sounds corny, and a little contrived, but I really think that for any story to really have an impact it must tell the reader something deeper, in some way illuminate the human condition. The process itself is pretty simple. Because I have very little time, the main obstacle is slotting in writing time. Fortunately I am a pretty fast writer, and having spent some time as a reporter I am not one to agonize. I do almost no re-writing; usually one draft and a clean-up.

JD What prompted you to select the ancient Near East as your setting for 'Servant'?

ME I became aware of the changing face of ancient history about 15 years ago, when a friend of mine gave me a subscription to Biblical Archeological Review as a birthday gift. This marvelous magazine was full of glossy color photos of artifacts and digs throughout the Near East. I was enthralled, and soon was raiding used book stores and abusing the inter-library loan program for anything on the subject I could lay hands on. The more I read, the more fascinated I became with the bronze age and the amazing civilizations that thrived there.
The first few books of the Bible are another great source, both in historical detail and in inspiration. It is hard for me to imagine a richer time and place in which to set a story. Our earliest myths and legends come from there, as well as the beginnings of law, mathematics, medicine, science and literature. The Epic of Gilgamesh was the first story we know of to be written down, and I remind everyone who will listen that it was a Sword and Sorcery tale!

JD How historically accurate do you try to be and do you consider 'Servant' to be historical fiction in any way?

ME In that I try to be as historically accurate as I can be within the framework of the fantasy story I am telling, yes, this might be considered historical fiction. I do take liberties occasionally, though, because the story is the thing. For instance, in one story chickens are mentioned, even though they were not domestically kept until a few hundred years later. But the line “You are not the man with the chickens!” delighted me. Sometimes I have changed the spellings of places or people’s names to make them more friendly to the modern eye. And in one story I moved a city to the other side of the Euphrates simply to streamline the narrative.
On the other hand, I spent a very enjoyable hour or so researching soap, none of which actually made it into the story except that a character was bathed and smelled good after. There is so much strange and wonderful stuff out there about the period, and it really has been under-utilized.

JD Do you plan on drawing anything further from the time period? Another series of stories perhaps?

ME There are a couple of minor characters that have appeared who may have their own stories to tell. Right now, though, I am buried under the novel based on the novella. It is kind of cool, because instead of working on the usual sequel, this timeline goes at right angles to the main story arc. The two additional stories (not in the book) that will appear in November in other magazines, “Stand, Stand, Shall They Cry” for Flashing Swords #8 and “Who Comes For the Mother’s Fruit” in Every Day Fiction both are following the new arc of “The Tears of Ishtar” and have a slightly different feel.

JD Where did you come up with a Manthycore for your antagonistic force? What is the legend behind it?

ME The ancient story tellers loved any sort of chimera, or beast made of the parts of different animals, like the Sphinx, Pegasus, fawns, and centaurs. I needed something that was more horrible than just getting whacked by some sword babe. The word manticore (I just used an archaic spelling for no better reason than I liked how it looked) is very old, and actually means “eater of men.” Some of the legends, which stretch in origin from Egypt to India, have the beast so ravenous that not a single trace is left of its victims other than their clothes. From there it was a short trip to making the beast a fastidious eater.

JD How did the series grow beyond the first story?

ME I honestly thought I was done. “Voice of the Spoiler” came from the single scene at the beginning, with the Servant sitting on a rock, weeping among the bodies of the slain, and a desire to tell a story about how love can sometimes make people do incredibly dreadful things. The scene was so powerful that I spent a couple of days working it out in my head how she got there, then decided to write the story in that same circular fashion.
More stories came because people liked it. It was a top ten finisher in the 2005 Preditors and Editors Poll, and a few folks emailed me and asked to see more. At first I couldn’t think of anything more I wanted to say about her, but then realized that even the slightest variations in the monotone of her pain and despair would stand out, and there might be more things that she could tell me. The funny thing is, the more I write about her, the more things I see that deserve to be told.

JD What was the process of getting the stories collected together with the new novella?

ME It was all Bill Snodgrass’s idea! (Ed. note: Bill is the founder and editor of The Sword Review.) I ended up writing five stories in an arc for The Sword Review. The second story was even better received than the first, and the next three let me build on some ideas about redemption and sacrifice that I had wanted to explore. Bill suggested that we issue them as a chapbook, which seemed like a pretty good idea, but in the months between I kept writing Servant stories, two of which are included in the book. I tweaked the shorts a little, and put one of the new stories and the novella “The Tears of Ishtar” in the middle, and added an epilogue which turned the book from a collection into an episodic novel.

JD At what point did you start thinking and writing with the entire arc in mind? How much revision needed to happen to make them flow?

ME Right after the second story, when I realized that I had a lot more to say. I realized that the Servant herself would not be able to say some of the things I wanted, and that it might be interesting to see her from another perspective. By adding the adopted daughter, it let me do a number of things, including add a glimmer of hope to the story, and work the contrast between the nine year old girl and the 600+ year old murderess. The arc pretty much created itself after that, once I decided exactly where the story needed to go. I had the foresight to leave substantial time slots for other stories, so later, when I added the novella and the new story that takes place just before the meeting of the Servant and her daughter, it was easy to plug them in. It helps that I did actually think out the time-line ahead of time. The main revisions for the book involved small continuity details and trimming some repetition in the stories that was needed as stand-alone shorts but redundant in an episodic novel.

JD How much collaboration did you have with your editors and illustrator?

ME Bill Snodgrass, the editor, has been great. I have already mentioned how this project was his idea. He also made some excellent suggestions for the novella, which he rightly saw as a chance to do what he calls “God pointing”—illustrating and conveying elements of our Christian faith without beating the reader over the head too brutally. The Servant lives and travels in Old Testament times, and is able to re-tell some of those stories in an oddly charming idiosyncratic manner. A couple of months ago I had the most amazing experience. I first envisioned the Servant over 10 years ago, with that scene of her sitting on a rock, weeping and bleeding. When Rachel Marks, who did both the cover and the interior illustrations, sent me the first drawing, I was expecting something nice, but what I got was overwhelming. There on my computer was the scene, exactly as I had pictured it years ago. I was nearly in tears.

Rachel has done a fantastic job, both with her visions of the characters and situations, and in making sure I was comfortable with what she has done. She is a careful reader, so there wasn’t much that needed to change, other than a few small historical details. She was an absolute joy to work with, and I cannot imagine more exciting illustrations than she has provided. The readers of this book are really getting something special.

Stand, Stand
Shall They Cry!

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