Lace and Blade 5 Author Interview: Pat MacEwen

From lands distant or nearby, familiar or utterly strange, historical or imaginary, from ancient times to the Belle Époque comes a treasury of luscious, elegant, romantic fantasy. Come with us on a journey through time and across boundaries, inspired by the longings of the heart and the courage residing in even the meekest person.

The release date is Valentine's Day 2019, but you can pre-order it now:

Kindle: https://amzn.to/2PBzyj6

ePub: https://www.books2read.com/u/bwYJwP

I think I ran across Pat MacEwen at our local science fiction convention, BayCon, but didn't really get acquainted with her work until I edited two novels, Rough Magic and The Dragon's Kiss for Sky Warrior. I look forward to many more.

Deborah J. Ross: Tell us a little about yourself.  How did you come to be a writer?

Pat MacEwen: I’m told I started when I was four. I would use crayons to draw the story, and then I would tell it. Often, those stories featured my favorite toy, a rubber giraffe missing one foot the dog had chewed off. In my stories, there was always a grand adventure involved in how that happened because I knew even then that heroes wind up scarred by life, win or lose. Some of that may be genetic – my father’s people were bards and seanachies for the Campbell clan for centuries, and my mother’s people include lots of preachers and teachers. We’ve always had a tale to tell.

DJR: What inspired your story in Lace and Blade 5?

PM: The fairy queen Sathyllien came out of my first novel, Rough Magic, where she does forensic work on modern murders involving magic. She has a history stretching back over centuries, and a habit of using Elizabethan insults. I wanted to find out more about that period in her life, and her relationship with a human queen of great renown. So I started with a basic problem – a murder victim who’s been concealed by being rendered invisible. And I tied it to another fae and bits of hidden history concerning the Virgin Queen. It so happens that lots of information has survived about her 40^th birthday party, organized by the original “Nosy” Parker, then Archbishop of Canterbury, so I set it then and there.

DJR: What authors have most influenced your writing?

PM: Poul Anderson, for one. He wrote fantasy with large dollops of history, and he wrote hard science fiction as well, creating all these rich and varied cultures and characters along the way. His wife, Karen Anderson, was a scholar and historian in her own right, and always deeply involved though she was only named as an official co-author of The King of Ys. So many others - Ursula LeGuin and Marion Zimmer Bradley were also what I would call tapestry writers, weaving all sorts of disparate threads and surprising colors into an astonishing whole. I greatly admire Elizabeth Moon and Lois McMaster Bujold for similar reasons, and of course Sir Terry Pratchett. And now there’s Nora Jemisin.

DJR: What’s the most memorable fan mail you’ve ever received?

PM: I had a novella, The Lightness of the Movement, come out in F&SF – it’s an alien sex story, at its heart, about a human grad student who puts on a rubber suit and pretends to be one of the aliens she’s studying on another planet. Their reproductive patterns are not like ours. The males maintain gardens where they raise their hatchlings on fruit laced with memory RNA, and use the children’s dances as displays to attract more egg-laying females. It got panned by a couple of major critics, but I got a note from a reader who told me how much she loved it, and had subscribed to the magazine because of it, and wanted to friend me on FaceBook. That really made my day, at a point when I was feeling discouraged about the whole thing thanks to those reviews and, well, life. And then the story wound up on the Tiptree Honors List and was a finalist for the Sturgeon Award that year so (in part thanks to that one reader, who so clearly got it), I’m still writing.

DJR: How does your writing process work?

PM: It’s my habit to collect odd bits of history, science, geography and such, so I have a grab bag I can reach into and pull out something fun to work with. I’ll start with an idea, an invisible corpse, for example, and then figure out where it is, and who put it there and why, and why it needs to be invisible. Then I pull out or create a character(s) and put them to work on those very same questions. The scenes get written down as they become clear to me. Then I have to go back and fill in the gaps, and fit each piece into the story structure. Often enough, I don’t know where the heart of the story is until I’ve written most of it. So then I have to reshape this and that, and prune away as much as I can. This story included two characters from previous work – the fairy queen Sathyllien, and the young hunchback Robert Cecil, whose father was Elizabeth’s chief counsel and stalwart supporter. Once they met, things really started moving.

DJR: What have you written recently? What lies ahead?

PM: Currently working on another modern day novel concerning that fairy queen, Sathyllien, and on a new/old project involving some highly speculative genetic engineering and… televangelists. Oh, and murder. Then I’d like to come back and explore the rest of that Elizabethan mystery, the before and after of what happens here in ‘Til Death Do Us Part.

DJR: What advice would you give an aspiring writer?

PM: Read. Read everything. Fiction. Non-fiction. All genres – at least sample some of whatever they are. You might be very surprised by what grabs you, even in categories that held no appeal before that. Read the good stuff, of course, but don’t think you’re wasting your time by reading bad stuff either – look at why it doesn’t work, at least for you. That will teach you at least as much as the good stuff does. The other half of the job, of course, is to write. Do that the same way you read. Try lots of things, from poetry to journaling to nonfiction articles, from flash fiction on up to epic sagas. Put in your million words and then some. Figure out where your strengths lie, and get yourself into a good critique group, or find individual beta readers who can give you honest feedback and know their craft.

DJR: Any thoughts on the Lace and Blade series or this being its final volume?

PM: I’m going to miss it. The ‘lace’ and ‘blade’ components set the series apart from other fantasy anthologies by emphasizing a certain elegance of tone and style and content. There’s rapier wit as well as rapiers themselves, and far fewer broadswords. I have no complaints about other approaches, mind you, but the cavalier viewpoint has its own special rewards.

           

Pat MacEwen is an anthropologist. She works on bones from archaeological sites and does independent research on genocide, having worked on war crimes investigations for the International Criminal Tribunal, and done CSI work for a decade. Oddly enough, she was once a marine biologist at the Institute of Marine and Coastal Studies at USC. She has two novels out: Rough Magic, a forensic/urban fantasy, and Dragon’s Kiss, a YA fantasy about a crippled boy who finds he can talk to dragons but people? Not so much. She writes mystery, horror, science fiction, and fantasy. Her work has appeared in a Year’s Best SF anthology. It has also been a finalist for the Sturgeon Award, and made the Tiptree Honors List. Her hobbies include exploring cathedrals, alien-building via nonhuman reproductive biology, and trawling through history books for the juicy bits.