Medea - priestess, warrior princess, sorceress, adventurer

I am quite possibly the luckiest writer-publisher type person in the world at the moment.

     I am publisher of the House that has Medea.

     Medea the woman was many things. Medea the book is the first book in The Delphic Women trilogy by Kerry Greenwood.

     And Clan Destine Press is thrilled to announce that Medea will be released in August 2011.

     Medea  is an extraordinary tale of love, lust, friendship, bravery, cowardice, betrayal, murder, mythical creatures, heroic heroes, brave heroines, gods, goddesses, legendary ships, and giant snakes. Oh, and giants.

     Kerry Greenwood’s retelling of the story of Medea – sorceress, Priestess of Hekate, Princess of Colchis, securer of the Golden Fleece – is exhilarating, page-turning, beautiful, and utterly believable.  It also sets the record straight – about who really killed her children.

 

Medea: her very name is a byword for infamy. Legend has it that she murdered her own children for revenge.
But love in Ancient Greece was often a dangerous game; and legends are not always what they seem.

     Medea, devoted wife of Jason, was also a loving mother, a loyal friend of Herakles, and a brave adventurer with the Argonauts.

For anyone who's been living in a cave or a far-distant planet, Kerry Greenwood – Australia's Queen of Crime – is best known for her Phryne Fisher mysteries and Corinna Chapman crime novels [published by someone else! (ok Allen & Unwin)] but, of course, is also the author of CDP's first historical novel – Out of the Black Land.

     Kerry’s detailed research and investigative skills into the ancient world – through ancient and secondary sources, and her personal travels throughout Greece and Egypt – means she puts her own stamp on the stories of these long-ago worlds. Her historical fiction lives and breathes authenticity.

     The beautiful cover art for Medea is by the renowned – and totally amazing! – American artist, Ran Valerhon; whom we ‘found’ through mutual Facebook friends.

     

Over the next couple of weeks we at Clan Destine Press will be making a bit of noise – not only about Medea and it's forthcomingness – but also about the other four paperbacks and 14 eBooks we'll be flinging out into the wild for your reading pleasure... between now and October. 

  So stayed tuned for: 

• what is coming out, and when
• the lowdown on just who has written all those eBooks
• previews of our absolutely fabulous new covers
• spotlights on new authors
• intros to new affiliated author website
• a marauding horde of sawtooth bunnies!
  
       
  In the meantime you can pre-order your copy of Medea from the Clan Destine Press website now!
       So, what are you waiting for?
   
  

    

    

 

The Debutante and Her Granddaughter

This week my very special guest – doing the rounds on the Bywater Books blog tour – is the 'newbie' author Sally Bellerose, who talks about her debut novel and some other good stuff; in an interview she conducted on herself.

Sally Bellerose’s book The Girls Club won the Bywater Prize and is forthcoming from Bywater Books in September this year.

     Sally was awarded a Fellowship in Literature from the National Endowment for the Arts based on an excerpt from this book. The first chapter won first place in fiction from Writers at Work. Excerpts from the novel have been anthologised and featured in literary journals including Love Shook My Heart, Sinister Wisdom, The Sun, The Best of Writers at Work, Cutthroat, and Quarterly West.

      The manuscript was a finalist for the James Jones Fellowship, the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, The Backspace Scholarship, and the Bellwether Endowment.  Robert Olen Butler chose Chapter Two as first place winner for the Rick DeMarinis Short Story Award. 

       Sally lives in Northampton, Massachusetts. In the USA.

Question to Self

Your soon to be published novel The Girls Club is loosely based on certain milestones in your life i.e.:  you married a man, had a baby, lost most of your digestive track to disease and surgery, left your husband, came out, became an RN.  The family portrayed in the book is of French Canadian descent and lives in a town much like the one you grew up in.  How do you plan to convince family members that the characters in this book are fictional?

Answer

The broad shape of the plot points and the societal and cultural similarities to my actual family do mirror my life.  However, the scene by scene action, events that happen within the social/cultural milieu and nuances of the story are totally fictionalized.   Most scenes are 100% fiction.  As in the story, I do have two sisters, but the personalities, physical attributes and circumstances of the story’s sisters don’t even resemble my sisters.

      I have drawn heavily from what I know about illness, coming out as the lesbian mother of a son, and working class family life in a small town New England in the ‘70’s, but the novel and all the characters are fiction.  Even the protagonist, Cora Rose, who might be mistaken as an autobiographical character, is not a self portrait.

      The grandmother, called Memere by her grandchildren (in the story and in “real” life), is closest to a portrait of an actual person, but even Memere is a fictionalized version of my beloved grandmother.

      Some members of my family have read parts of the book and love it.  Some really want to read the novel.  At least one has vowed not to go near The Girls Club with a ten foot pole.  I applaud them all.

      If my brother complains that there is no brother in the book I will repeat my mantra – this book is fiction.

 Question to Self

You are old.  How many more books do you think you have in you?

Answer

I’ll soon be sixty.  Is that old?  Sweet Jesus, sixty.   No need for panic.  Writers and chess players often make their best moves later in life.  

At the moment I am working on a book of linked short stories called Fishwives.  The title story of this would-be collection won first place in Saints and Sinners Fiction contest.  The stories orbit around a poor elderly lesbian couple – a novel about the exploits of a jaded RN who is trying to stay sane while working in a state run institution, taking care of her elderly parents and having an affair with a married co-worker.   This one features two queer teens, tattoos, and as ever, squabbling sisters – and always poetry and essays.

      Also I have many published pieces about my mom and dad that I should put together as a collection.  And probably a book’s worth of published erotica.

Question to Self

How does it feel to finally be a debut novelist?  Do you consider yourself a debutante?

Answer

I’m thrilled to be a debut novelist.  I can’t wait to hold the actual finished, signed sealed delivered copy of The Girls Club in my hands.  I love my publishers at Bywater Books, Kelly Smith Marianne K Martin, and Val McDermid because they are lovable and because they published my book.

      And, yes, although at no point in my life could I be called ‘an upper-class woman making a formal debut into society’ I do consider myself a debutante.  I plan to hijack this word, flaunt the fact that I have a debut coming-out novel about working class sisters and queers, buy myself large sparkly hoop earrings and strappy shoes, and call myself a debutante at every opportunity.

Question to Self

How do plan to find a way to brag about your granddaughter as part of the publishing process?

Answer

Pictures, anecdotes, short stories, slide projections, poems, essays. 

 

Sally's blog: http://sallybellerose.wordpress.com

Bywater Books: http://www.bywaterbooks.com

Theodora: Courtesan, Whore, Empress

 My special guest blogger this week is the utterly charming Stella Duffy. 
   Stella and met a few years ago when she was in Melbourne on an author tour from the UK to New Zealand and Australia. 
   This time the author tour is virtual but just as welcome.

Stella Duffy has written twelve novels. Theodora, Actress, Empress, Whore, published by Virago (UK) in 2010 and by Viking Penguin (US) in 2011, is her first historical novel. The Room of Lost Things and State of Happiness were both longlisted for the Orange Prize, and she has twice won Stonewall Writer of the Year. She has written over forty short stories, including several for BBC Radio 4, and won the 2002 CWA Short Story Dagger for Martha Grace. She is currently working on the sequel to Theodora as well as several film and theatre projects. Stella is also a theatre-maker, has written eight plays, and directs for Shaky Isles, a NZ theatre company based in London. She was born in London, grew up in New Zealand, and has lived in the UK since 1986. She is married to the writer Shelley Silas.

Lindy and I are both published by Bywater Books in the US where the lesbian fiction market seems much more prominent than in the UK. While many successful lesbian writers in the UK sell very successfully in the mainstream as well as to readers who are gay (which is a great thing in itself), there doesn’t seem to be as obvious a UK market for publishers targeting specifically lesbian readers, in the way there is in the US. 

   Bywater have recently published my Parallel Lies (picking up some nice nods from award-givers in the US) which means I’m in the odd position of doing this Bywater Books blog tour – to  Australia now, thanks to Lindy – but Parallel Lies actually came out in Australia and NZ some years ago, under the Virago imprint.
    So – while mentioning Bywater yet again! – I’m going to tell you about a new novel you can get hold of in Australia and New Zealand, and while it’s not specifically gay in premise, it certainly does have some lesbian content – promise!

    In September 2006 I’d never heard of the Empress Theodora, the Emperor Justinian, or the Ravenna mosaics, which the Italians considered the eighth wonder of the world for some time. In my defence I’d claim a lack of Euro-centricity rather than sheer ignorance. I grew up in Tokoroa in New Zealand, not so very far away we had the memory of the Pink and White Terraces as our eighth wonder. I’m guessing not many Italians have heard of them either! The organisers of the festival were horrified and arranged a trip to see the mosaics.

A near-empty church, a few tourists, and an astonishing, vibrant, 1500-year-old mosaic of Theodora. I figured she had to matter. In the gift shop, I bought a bunch of postcards and the booklet about Theodora. One of those postcards has been on my noticeboard for coming up four years now. The booklet took maybe five minutes to read and, combined with the mosaics, lead to three years of work, with at least another six months to go on the edit for the sequel.

Theodora’s life is astonishingly rich. Born to the bear-keeper of the Constantinople Hippodrome in about 500 AD, her father died when she was five. She became an actress, a dancer, a mime, a comedian – none of our modern terms fully cover what her work would have been in those days. A physically-trained comedy improviser is perhaps closest, and by the age of 15 she was the star of the Hippodrome. She was also, as almost all actresses were at the time, very likely a child prostitute.

I started my working life in theatre, and while my main job is writing, I have not stopped making theatre – and I have never called myself an actress. Plenty of theatre makers use ‘actor’ for both men and women, and have done since the late 70’s. It’s long been recognised that the word actress can have a derogatory aspect to it, and the truth is that as soon as women were allowed on stage it very quickly also became a term that meant courtesan, whore, prostitute – which, in the case of Theodora and very many young women like her, was exactly what they were. 


Theodora walked away from her amazing career at 18, leaving Constantinople to be mistress of the man newly-appointed Governor of (modern day) Libya. When he dumped her, soon after, she  joined a religious community in the desert near Alexandria, experiencing a religious conversion. Theodora travelled on to Antioch where there are suggestions that she worked with Macedonia, a dancer and a spy for the Roman government. 

At 21 she returned to Constantinople, met Justinian, who was yet to become Emperor, and they became a couple. Justinian had one law changed to raise her status to patrician, and another created to allow her to marry – ex-actresses could not legally do so at the time. When his uncle died and Justinian became Emperor, ‘Theodora-from-the-Brothel’ became Empress of Rome.

It’s a powerful rags to riches story, made richer still by Theodora’s achievements in power. As Empress she worked on the paper On Pimps, an attempt to stop pimps making their money from prostitutes. Well aware of the impossibility of marriage and a future for women who wanted to give up working in prostitution, she set up a house where they could live in safety. 
Once Empress, Theodora worked for women’s marriage and dowry rights, anti-rape legislation, and continued working for the many young girls sold into sexual slavery, often for the price of a pair of sandals. It’s tempting to consider her an early feminist, but the story is more complicated that that. There are many hints of nastiness from poisoning to torture, forced marriage to religious fanaticism, and like so many women in power there are reports of her attacking other women who might threaten her position – and it’s these complications that made me want to write about her. 
Hers is a time of huge change in the Church, there was also massive unrest – as there is today – in the eastern Roman regions. People in Syria, the Levant, and Egypt were clamouring to use their own languages both in faith and in their calls for self-determination. This was the world into which the prophet Mohammed would be born, just 20 years after Theodora’s death. 
In more modern academic works she is often presented as, if not entirely an abject money-grubbing power-monger, then certainly not the nicest of women. The contemporary view of her seems to have been somewhere between Victoria Beckham/Yoko Ono on a bad day, and Princess Diana on a good one.

All of which made her a joy to write – while there’s loads of history written about the time, there’s comparatively little about Theodora. Graves has her in Count Belisarius, and in The Secret History Procopius makes her his Mrs Machiavelli, but Theodora herself has remained largely hidden. Yet there was enough in her life that I do know, from theatre and comedy, to society’s disapproval of non-conformist desire, to feeling like (and being) an outsider, to make some informed guesses about her character. So that’s what I’ve written, a character in a story. And I’ve had a great time doing so, because I’ve spent the past three years writing about the juiciest woman character this side of Lady Macbeth. Theodora is the kind of hero you couldn’t make up without being accused of over-doing it, and yet can’t tell her story without making a lot of it up. A perfect balance for fiction.

http://www.stelladuffy.wordpress.com/

–

Time & Place

Bywater Books author Bett Norris drops by to talk about 'writing the South'.

Born and raised in Alabama a few short miles from the place where Harper Lee did the same, Bett followed in the footsteps of her idol and inspiration by attending the University of Alabama, somehow managing to graduate with a degree in history and a burning desire to write.
   Real life intruded, until many years later her first novel, Miss McGhee, a runnerup for the first annual Bywater prize for fiction, was published. It's a story set in the south during the decades of the civil rights movement. She dutifully set her second novel, What's Best for Jane, in the South as well, certain that the well of rich material to be found there will never run dry.

   Bett continues to write using the South as source material and setting. “Almost everybody’s got a story about crazy relatives, mad dogs, good trucks, fishing, deer hunting, drinking, cussing, fighting, football, running around barefoot in the summers, better times in the past, and where the bootleggers live.”

   She now lives in Florida with her partner Sandy Moore, an artist. Bett gets up every morning at an insanely early hour to write. 

   Find out more on the author’s web site: www.bettnorris.wordpress.com

Must Love Books

You’ve read the bio, I hope. Now here are the facts. The real facts, not the kind of' 'facts' one might find on say, a Fox News broadcast.

   I was born the fourth of nine children. That’s a baseball team of siblings, a house full, that’s tons of laundry, that’s three meals a day for nine hungry mouths. That means assigned seating at the table, in the car. That’s nine pairs of shoes to start school. That means we were poor.

   I was the first but not the last to make it through college. I am extremely, fiercely proud of all my brothers and sisters, proud that we all made it to adulthood as responsible, dependable parents, friends, as working contributors to the community.

   It is true that I grew up just forty miles from Harper Lee’s birthplace and home, Monroeville, Alabama. If you go there, you will see an historical plaque acclaiming the spot where Truman Capote, Lee’s childhood friend, once lived. You will not see any such declamation about Miss Lee, because as she would point out to you, she’s not dead yet.

   Yes, I read To Kill a Mockingbird again every year or two. It had a tremendous impact on me, from the first time I read it as a child (and wished that I was Scout, that Atticus was my real father) and through my beginning efforts as a writer. 

  “There’s no truth in the Delafields” and “Don’t you say hey to me, you ugly girl! You say good afternoon, Mrs. Dubose” and other quotes are part of me, part of my life, as much as anything any friend ever said to me.

   My editor, Kelly Smith, famous for pulling things out of the air, once told me my manuscript needed something, a scene as moving and dramatic as the final court scene in To Kill a Mockingbird, when the preacher says, “Stand up, Miss Jean Louise. Your father’s passing.” 

   I spent months writing the required chapter, sweated and fretted, had other people read it for me, and when we got around to the editing process, Kelly Smith mentioned that she thought this scene was unnecessary and it was cut. She claims not to remember ordering up the now unnecessary scene. 

   Through that process, I got a glimmer of understanding why Miss Lee never wrote another novel. Some things are perfect, some things become part of our culture, part of us, and there is no improving on it. As Miss Lee herself said about her book: “To Kill a Mockingbird still says what it has to say; it has managed to survive the years without preamble.” And without imitations.

    There were a few driving forces behind my writing both Miss McGhee and the sequel, What’s Best for Jane. I knew I wanted to write about the South. I knew I wanted to explore what it must have been like to be a lesbian in the South in past decades. I knew that I also wanted to write about the particular difficulties of being a single lady who works in those times, and I knew I wanted to write about the impact of the civil rights movement not only on the small towns like where I grew up, but also its effect on women, and the impact women, white and black, had on the movement. 

   I found that my research took me to places and to women I had not known about, or had not known enough about; from Virginia Durr, white Southern aristocracy, to Fannie Lou Hamer, uneducated, to Joann Robinson, an English professor, to Rosa Parks, to Lillian Smith, to the fiery teenager Barbara Johns. There were so many of them, the women who stepped forward, stepped out front, the women who worked, and who walked and who got beaten, like Amelia Boynton.

   Research found me standing in the National Voting Rights museum in Selma, Alabama, and staring at the 'I Was There' wall, filled with hand-written notes from participants of the Selma to Montgomery march, and being so moved that I could not take it all in. 

   Researching history so recent as to have still-living participants is an inclusive activity, one that affects the researcher personally. The host of the museum that day casually explained to me who she was, Joann Brand, and that she had been eleven years old when 'all that' happened, and proceeded to tell me her own eyewitness account. That kind of research left me standing beside US highway 80, twenty miles outside Selma, staring at the monument erected to Viola Liuzzo on the spot of her murder.

   Research for these two books also led me to questioning my own mother, a woman who worked and raised us during those times, who learned to respect the black nurses she worked beside, a woman who often walked to her shift and walked home after it to a house full of hungry, demanding children. My mother told me stories about lumber mills, and about people, and about what it was like to walk home from her shift when the black people were 'agitating'; and she told me what a planer mill was; and she told me about company stores, and lots of things. Sometimes she knew I was interviewing her, I sat with a pen and notebook in my lap; but most times I was simply prodding her to talk about old times. I also found myself interviewing my sister Angie Woodham and my sister-in-law Tammy Norris about working in a shirt factory.

   I researched the Nehi Cola Company; Zippo lighters; innumerable makes and models of cars; the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church; The KKK; George Wallace; ladies’ fashions; hotels in Atlanta during the nineteen fifties; Scotch Lumber. 

   I paid an outrageous sum for a shelf full of books on:  civil rights, Montgomery, Juliette Hampton Morgan, the Mitchum Beat war, and the three-volume work of Taylor Brand on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., which alone almost bankrupted me; as well as works by Dan T Carter, and some that might put me on an FBI  watchlist, like The Fiery Cross, by Wyn Craig Wade and Hooded Americanism by David T Chalmers.

   I took pictures, of me standing by the monument erected on the site of Viola Liuzzo’s murder, of Selma; of the civil rights memorial in front of the SPLC in Montgomery.

   I did not have to interview anyone to create the character of Jane, because I knew all about growing up in a crowded household with a mother who worked, a mostly-absent father, and being different. I did not do research about the character of Mary McGhee, because I knew women like her, and wondered about them, all my life. Women so tough and strong that their backs don’t bend.

   Writing is an organic, visceral process for me. My only advice to beginning writers is to write; and to write from that place that stirs you, that moves you. Apart from that, you must read. You must love books. You must know, as I certainly do, that books often make better friends than people, because books, good ones, stay with you, and teach you, and affect your life, your outlook, your soul, and books can change you. They can entertain, and they can help create a community where there is none to sustain.

   In closing, I want to say a little bit about Bywater Books. From its creation in 2004, this company has consistently sought out writers, new and established, who write good, quality fiction about and for lesbians who enjoy reading well-written books. They have sought out new writers through their annual fiction contest, and through that process have found such writers as Marcia Finical, Jill Malone, Sally Bellerose and Mari SanGiovanni, who have all provided us with some great books and fresh voices. I am happy to be a part of Bywater. I encourage all new writers to look for a publisher as passionate about your work as you are, who publishes the kind of books you want to read, who has a vigorous editing process.

A Bywater Visitor

 It's time for a touchdown from another fabulous Bywater author.
This time Jill Malone is dropping in to chat about... goats

Jill Malone grew up in a military family, went to German kindergarten, and lived across from a bakery where they put small toys, like train engines, into chocolate, and the gummi bears were the size of mice.

   In the South, she caught tree frogs, and played kickball. She has lived on the East Coast, and in Hawaii, and for the last 15 years in Spokane with her son, two old dogs, and a lot of outdoor gear. She looks for any excuse to play guitar.

   She took Latin from a hot professor at the University of Hawaii, and had this idea for a novel. Like most writers, she has a sketchy career path.

   Red Audrey and the Roping, her first novel, was a Lambda finalist, and won the third annual Bywater Prize for Fiction.

   Her second novel, A Field Guide to Deception, was finalist for the 2010 Ferro-Grumley, and won the Lambda Literary award.

   At present, Giraffe People, her third novel, is awaiting editorial notes. Or something. If you’re curious, visit Jill's website and read her blog.

http://www.jillmalone.com/

Homestead 

A word about goats. I'd like a pair of them - pygmy goats - for milking and general happiness. Have you ever seen them play? They like slides and climbing. They leap around. There's a youtube clip of pygmy goats frolicking to Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit. I'd like those, please. 

   As an urban girl, I'm mildly horrified to find myself living in the pseudo-country. Four minutes from downtown Spokane, nevertheless, my neighbors keep chickens and a rooster. Also, a pen of black ducks. A porcupine trundles across the road two blocks over, and just at the bend, I see deer most evenings. 

   I live in this valley, beneath the train, and a creek shimmies through, fished by heron and osprey. The beds beyond my porch are filled with tulips. This is the kind of place I imagined sitting at a knot in a tree, and writing something immortal. It was always vaguely immortal, this novel, in my head when I was a child.
   That's when you believe art will be a livelihood. You'll be one of those people who frequents cafes with your cigarettes and your sipping espresso and your casual ennui. 

   Most of us don't live by our fiction. We write because we have stories, and those stories own us. I sit at my computer and the story unravels in this way that I never can explain properly. I'm sitting there, typing, and people speak. I know them. I can hear their various voices. For months, I'll hang with them and experience what they experience. 

   A teacher, years ago, told me she didn't really know her characters until she could go to a restaurant and order a meal they would eat.

   Maybe we just parachute in. Find ourselves in some unknown place, among some unknown people, and have to puzzle it out. 

   Like moving into this house in December, and finding the Japanese travel god the previous occupant left in the closet. Or his paint bucket of coins - foreign and domestic; several water bladders and a coil of climbing rope. An adventuring teacher? A climber who loved World Market? A really thirsty coin collector? Who the hell was this guy, and why did he leave this haven?

Authors Galorious

I'm home from a wonderful three weeks in Bali and almost back into the writing & publishing swing of things.
   In the meantime I have treat for my blog followers.
   Bywater Books – the publishers of my three-book Kit O'Malley private investigator series – have an incredible 'stable' of authors.
   Bywater itself is a bi-national entity (because LOVE prompted one publisher to move countries!) run by a few amazing women in the US and the UK; and their authors come from America, the UK and Australia (the latter would be me!).
   To celebrate all things Bywater – and the fabulous lesbian fiction they are dedicated to publishing – we, the authors, are going on a blog tour.

This month my blog will feature guest appearances from Marianne K Martin and Jill Malone.
In May I'll be visited by Bett Norris and Cynn Chadwick.
June will see Stella Duffy here - while I'm off visiting everyone else's blogs.
And in July, Sally Bellerose and Lisa Gitlin will be dropping in.
   If you don't already know the works of these great writers I suggest you drop by the Bywater Books website and check us all out and you can follow us on facebook.


Right now, I'd like to introduce Marianne K Martin who, apart from being the author of nine novels, is also a co-owner of Bywater Books.

A graduate of Eastern Michigan University, Marianne taught in the Michigan public school system for 25 years, has worked as a photo-journalist, a photographer, and coached both high school and collegiate teams as well as amateur ASA teams. Her coaching career produced many Tri-County and MHSAA championship basketball and softball teams and championship ASA softball teams. She was founder of the Michigan Woman's Major Fastpitch Assoc. and its president for 10 years. In 1973 she won the precedent-setting case in a Michigan court establishing equal pay for women coaches.

Marianne is the best-selling author of Legacy of Love, Love in the Balance, Never Ending, Dawn of the Dance, Dance in the Key of Love, and three Lambda Literary Award finalists, Mirrors, Under the Witness Tree, and For Now, For Always.  

Her next book, The Indelible Heart, is scheduled for release in May 2011.

Her short stories have been included in a number of anthologies. Her most recent, Fire and Ice, appears in the second edition of the on-line issue of Read These Lips.

What made you decide to write lesbian fiction?

It’s affordable therapy. Seriously. I taught in the public school system for 25 years, as closed and closeted a profession as you can find, except maybe the religious sector. Expressing and exploring who I was as an individual, as a whole person, had to be done secretly and during those few hours that I wasn’t teaching, coaching, or losing my mind. It is the need to express the beliefs and thoughts and feelings that had been suppressed for so long.

So what makes a story lesbian?

There was a time when there were so few clearly lesbian books, in which the relationship between two women was clearly a sexual one, that the reader had to ‘make’ the story lesbian. They made the story their own, relatable, by changing the gender, the name, the characteristics of male characters to female. They wrote fan fiction where they changed the intent of the story, the dynamics and the relationships between the characters to fill their need for lesbian story-lines. 
   Readers did this because they longed for their lives to be validated, to be able to recognize themselves in books and movies and TV shows, just as other minorities have longed for the same thing. These were lesbian stories because the readers made them so.

   Now, though, there are many writers, writing stories where the reader sees the world through the eyes of a clearly lesbian character. Every experience, every relationship, every thought that the character has comes from that unique place of how and where she fits into the world. The choices that she makes in finding that fit, whether we like it or not, are affected by her sexuality. Some affected in a good way, some bad, and some in ways that are barely noticeable. But it is what makes the character who she is and what

makes the story uniquely lesbian. In so many stories now, a reader can find bits of herself and parts of her life recognizable in the pages of a book.

I love the cultural and political themes in your novels and was especially impressed by the pioneering work that exposed bullying and adult responsibility in Mirrors. Art and politics are sometimes at odds with each other. How do you happily 'marry' the two in narrative?

You know, it just seems to be a natural fit. Even if we try to ignore it, our lives, careers and relationships are affected by society’s political and cultural climate. As gays and lesbians we face struggles unique to our sexuality, and decisions that involve risks of losing jobs, or family and friends, and physical and emotional harm. When do we come out, when do we lie? 

   Yet whatever our individual decision, at the core of it our needs are universal – we want to be happy, to love and be loved. 
   How we find that, how we sustain it, what we will risk for it, are at the heart of my stories. For me it is all interrelated. I love exploring the ‘in spite of’, the ‘against the odds’ battle for love and happiness and justice. They are real, they happen everyday, and when they are won, they empower us all.

What is your writing process like? Do you write different scenes and put them all together or do you just go from point A to point B?

I never know how a new project will start. More accurately, I never know what will start it. Something eventually becomes the concept for a new story, sometimes it is a vision of a character, at other times it’s a news story or a scene or a phrase that plays over and over in my head. Whatever starts it begins to develop and I start imagining what the next day in the scenario would be like or what must have happened in the past for this character or event to be where it is. 
   I write everything down – an idea, a sentence, a scene. And when

the story takes on a rough development in my head, I put it down in a rough outline form. I don’t stick strictly to the outline, it usually changes. But it helps me start collecting and organizing my notes, many of them written on whatever was handy at the time, and

putting them into chapters. 
   One time I was shingling my dad’s roof, listening to the cows

all lined up at the fence across the road, and something kept developing in my head that I had to write down, so I wrote it on the scrap of wood that I was cutting the shingles on.

If you could have an afternoon with any one of your characters, who would it be and why?

Probably Nessie Tinker. She’s the tiny 90-plus black woman from Under The Witness Tree. Her family ‘breathed the smoke of Sherman’s march’ and with all that she would have experienced in her life she has the most to teach me. I am so enthralled with Nessie, and her voice is so distinct, that I want to know all I can about her earlier life. She will have a book of her own.

Do you have a favorite among your stories?

Each story has things about it that make it special to me. The first, Legacy of Love, for obvious reasons. Love in the Balance because of the emotional connection with my mother; Mirrors and Dawn of the Dance because I taught through those situations; Under the Witness Tree because I learned so much about a part of our history only touched upon in our schools. And so on. So, I don’t think that I could pick out a favorite.

What do you find hardest about writing?

Usually, beginning a new book, staring at that first blank page.
   Katherine Forrest once told me that beginning a new book felt like Atlas carrying the world uphill. And it is tough, we are virtually creating a world and everything in it. Where do you begin?
   What I have found most helpful are those snippets written on all those scraps of paper, and wood, and whatever. Somewhere in that collection is a beginning. It doesn’t always survive long as the beginning of the book, however. A version of it may end up in some other place in the book, or not survive rewrites at all, but it served to kick start me.

   Running a close second in difficulty is getting others to respect time thinking as work time. Sitting for an hour staring into space just doesn’t look productive, but if it isn’t imagined it can’t be written. And it is very easy for others to interrupt a process they can’t see.

What’s your favorite thing about being a writer? What, for you, totally sucks about it?

I love the creative freedom of writing. It is exploratory and introspective. Through my characters I can go anywhere my mind wants to go. I can be who I am and everything I am not. I can love and hate, deceive and forgive. I can be Asian, or white, or black. I can believe in God or blame God, trust in love or not. 
   What sucks is knowing where you want your story to go and drawing a blank on how to get it there. ‘Writer’s block’, an altogether irritating and appropriate term, makes me anxious and frustrated. The first time I experienced it, with a deadline looming, I asked for advice from someone I respect immensely, Katherine Forrest. She told me to walk away from it for a while and do something enjoyable and relaxing. For me that’s doing something constructive with my hands – yard work, working on the house, etc.
   She also said not to be afraid to ask for an extension to my deadline. As long as this is not overused, asking for an extension is helpful to both the writer and the publisher. Rather than send in a sub-par manuscript or just not meet the deadline, an extension can allow the writer the time they need to get past the block; and the publisher can move up other matters to fill the delay time. It’s important to remember, however, that there is a significant amount of pre-publicity that is done for each book and meeting deadlines is

essential for that. A certain amount of time is built into the schedule to allow for delays along the way, but a book only gets out on time when the writer and publisher work honestly and closely on the timeline. All this having been said, blocking still sucks.

If you couldn’t write, what would you do?

I would be creating something in some other medium. I have an art minor, so I would probably be working in charcoal or pastels (which I don’t have enough time to do much anymore). And if I couldn’t do that, I’d be building or designing something.

On a more personal note, do you have a favorite childhood memory?

I was blessed with some wonderful childhood memories. I can’t really pick a favorite, but here are a few that come to mind. My dad taught me how to whittle and to carve animals out of bars of Ivory soap. And he would drop his lunch bucket as soon as he stepped out of his truck from work and played catch with me. On special weekends, my mom would fix fried chicken and potato salad, make up a bed in the back of the station wagon, and we’d get to the drive-in theater before dark so that we could eat our picnic and play on the swings below the big screen. We kids usually made it through the cartoon and part of the first feature before we dozed off in the back of the car. 

   And I absolutely loved riding the bus downtown with my Aunt Mary to have cherry cokes at the Kresge soda counter.

Sometimes writers work internal issues out through their narratives. Have you ever written a scene or character that “hit too close to home” for you? How did you handle that?

I’ve written a number of scenes that I lived through personally – my mother’s death (Love in the Balance); bullying and the loss of a student to suicide (Mirrors); my grandmother’s death (Legacy of Love) – and I handle them the same way I did when they occurred, I cry. For that reason, I never use those scenes at any of my readings. 

   I’ve had a particularly difficult time working through and finishing my latest book, The Indelible Heart. During the past year, in the middle of writing this book that deals with loss and recovery, I lost some important people in my life. It was hard to take my character to emotional places that I was trying to get through myself.

Tell us more about this next book. Is it a sequel to Love in the Balance?

There’s been a lot of reader interest over the years to revisit the characters of Balance, to know where their fictitious lives have taken them. Sequels, though, are difficult, especially a sequel to a love story or romance. 
   What appealed to the readers in the first book is usually the attraction, the thrill of first love between the characters. A sequel is not going to offer that. So, even though readers say they want to know what happens down the road, unconsciously they want to ‘feel’ what the first book made them feel.

   So, I hesitate to call The Indelible Heart a sequel in that sense. What I hope to do is show what ten years of ‘life’ has done to the dynamics of the group of friends and their relationships following the devastating murders depicted in Balance. Not all of the relationships have survived, and each have had to deal with the loss in their own way. But, now they are faced with the possibility that the man who murdered their friends may be granted an early release from prison.
   Sharon Davis becomes the main character in this book. She is irreverent, strong-willed, and passionate. The loss of so many loved ones in her life has left her emotionally vulnerable, hurt, and angry. The precarious balance she has maintained in recent years is now challenged by the possible early release, and by the sighting of a lost love. 

   And a lot has changed over the years – the growth of LGBT organizations, their political voice, the economy – and this group of friends is forced to examine their own beliefs as they struggle to help Sharon.

The Indelible Heart

Twelve years ago, Charlie Crawford shot dead his two lesbian neighbors. Now he’s terminally ill and requesting early compassionate release from prison.

   Back then, Sharon and her friends fought to bring him to justice. Now she has to find the strength to fight again. But the man who killed her friends also took her sobriety. And with it he took her partner, Laura.

   Sober again, all she’s left is a life lived at arms length. She’ll do what she can to keep Charlie in jail. But it’s hard – really hard – to cope with the news that Laura’s back in town.
   Hate has spoiled Sharon’s world. There just doesn’t seem any place for love. But she’s forgotten just how powerful friendship can be. She’ll soon remember.

   Available in paperback and eBook Indelible Heart is the inspiring sequel to the best selling Love in the Balance.

Thanks for dropping by Marianne

More info on Marianne can be found on her own blog. 

And of course she, and the other Bywater authors, can be found on the Bywater Books site.

www.bywaterbooks.com

http://www.redroom.com/author/marianne-k-martin/bio

 

Happy Dancing

One of the many joys of being a publisher - yay! that's me, now - is finding and snaffling incredibly talented people. And I'm not just talking writers - who are especially useful to a new publishing house; but also those other creative types who help make amazing books stand out on every shelf.
   You see, there's no denying that sometimes you can judge a book by its cover. Too often, however, the artistic talent behind even a truly-remarkable cover illustration goes unnamed; or just written in really little type on the imprint page.
   Well not at my joint. At Clan Destine Press everyone will get a mention; maybe even the editors. Woo, now there's a thing!
    Our cover illustrator will definitely be named and celebrated. Why? Because it's so rare that an author and their editor and their publisher is so excited by a cover illo... that no changes, at all, whatsover are necessary.
   The artworks - for this is what they are - for Out of the Black Land and Redback were done by one Ran Valerhon.
   Ran is awesome. Ok, so he might be American - one who actually lives in America, I mean - which might be odd for an Australian genre fiction specialist, but ppfftt.
   It was kismet that led me to Ran Valerhon... Okay, it was actually facebook serendipity; but find him I did.
   And now I am thrilled right down to my little cotton socks to offer a preview of Ran's next illustration for Clan Destine Press.
   It's just a sneaky look, just a section, just a hint of the cover for Medea, the first in the Delphic Women trilogy by Kerry Greenwood. Enjoy!