From New York Times bestselling author Maya Kaathryn
Bohnhoff, a new private detective series featuring Gina “Tinkerbell”
Miyoko, who goes undercover in the Mexican jungle to hunt down a ring of thieves
responsible for looting pre-Columbian archaeology sites. Here I chat with Maya about her latest book.
Deborah J. Ross: How
did you come up with Gina S. Miyoko?
Maya Kaathryn
Bohnhoff: I honestly don’t remember except that she arose from a dream I had,
the plot of which (yes, my dreams often have plots) I don’t remember. I knew I
wanted to write her as the protagonist of a mystery novel, and I knew I wanted
her to be different from the female P.I.s I’d read. I love mystery and crime
fiction but I noticed that all the female protagonists were alienated and
broken and party to dysfunctional relationships. I wanted Gina to be flawed and
have enough pain in her life to be relatable, but I also wanted her to be part
of a very functional, if quirky family and support network. Among the Japanese
names I was considering, Gina Suzu Miyoko meant, “Silver Bell Temple;” Tinkerbell
became an inevitable nickname. And her personality just grew out of that.
DR: And Russian
Orthodox witches?
MKB: Around the time
I was developing Gina and the characters that would surround her, I was reading
a book entitled THE BATHHOUSE AT MIDNIGHT: An Historical Survey of Magic and
Divination in Russia (WF Ryan). I was reading it because the novel I
was working on at the time (MAGIC TIME: ANGELFIRE, from Harper-Voyager) had a
Russian ex-pat as one of the central characters. Okay, and also I’m
Russian-Polish on my father’s side and have been fascinated with the folklore
and history of Slavic culture since I was a child. Probably more so because my
grandmother was so adamant that I not be taught anything about the Old Country
but be brought up thoroughly American. In any event, the book sparked the idea
that I wanted Gina’s mother to be Russian and fascinated by arcana. She was
originally going to be a psychologist, but by the time I started writing the
book that became THE ANTIQUITIES HUNTER, she had morphed into a cultural
anthropologist and folklorist.
As tends to happen
with these things, as I began to write the characters, they essentially told me
who they were. I’m sure you know the
feeling—as if the character is inside your head whispering sweet somethings to your
Muse.
DR: Did you research
PI procedures like the post-it notes and Who/What/When etc?
MKB: I have to laugh.
The post-it note method is something I’ve used to plot novels for years. It
seemed to me that my post-it process would be as ideal for working out the
nuances of a real world mystery as it is for plotting a novel. My editor
suggested editing the scene in which you first see Gina use the post-its so
that she just wrote on the white board. I declined and explained the beauty of
post-its to her by having Gina demonstrate it for the reader.
DR: How did you
become interested in the problem of looting of antiquities? Why the Southwest?
MKB: I have loved
archaeology for as long as I can remember. I subscribed for years to Archeology
magazine, and KMT (Kemet - which is the old Egyptian name for
Egypt). I happened to read an article about a female undercover agent for the
National Park Service and the sort of work she and her teammates did, chiefly
in the Southwest where there are a lot of vulnerable caches of artifacts,
mostly on First Nations land. But I’d also been following several international
cases at the time—the Elgin Marbles that the British Museum had to return to
Greece and the black market cases that big US auction houses and museums alike
had been implicated in. I was also following the rediscovery of the Rosalila
(an utterly fantastic nested temple at Copán in the Honduras) and some amazing
finds at Bonampak, which is in Chiapas, Mexico.
It was that last item
that gave me the location for some of the action in the book. I sort of let all
of that percolate and it seemed natural to have my protagonist have the
experience I’d dreamed of having—seeing those antiquities first hand. More than
that, I wanted her to have a hand in saving some of them. The lack of funding
for preserving these sites is a real and persistent problem in the world of
archaeology.
DR: These days
cultural appropriation is a sensitive topic. How did you go about portraying
Hispanic, Asian, and Native characters in a respectful manner?
MKB: I suppose every
writer has their own approach; mine is to love the people I write about and to
recognize that they’re people first, not representatives or symbols or
archetypes of a particular culture. But, in writing them, I have to recognize
that their cultural framework will condition their responses to things. So, to
Rose Delgado, though she’s married to a non-Hopi, living in Sausalito and
working all over the country, she’s still Hopi. That means that Hopi lands are
still sacred to her and that she takes the theft of native artifacts
personally. Her job is more than just a job because of her cultural background
and her investment in it is different than the other members of her team.
To me, Gina’s tattoo
is exemplary of the cultural intersectionality I’m portraying. It’s a Russian
Orthodox True Believer cross with a Buddha seated at the nexus in a lotus
blossom. The cross is for her mom, the Buddha for her dad. Gina calls herself a
Russian Orthodox Buddhist, which is an echo of what I told people who asked
about my religion before I became a Baha’i. I’d say I was a
Hindu-Buddhist-Christian. So, what I was trying to capture in Gina was a
character who was an intersection of three cultures—Japanese, Russian and
American.
I’ve been privileged
to have been surrounded by people from diverse cultures all my life and I think
that if you approach characters of any culture with curiosity, love and an
attitude of learning, you’ll strive to portray them as complete,
three-dimensional human beings.
DR: Is there such a
thing as SASH (Society for the Appreciation of Sherlock Holmes), and would you
join?
MKB: There’s a
Sherlock Holmes Society of London, but as far as I know, there’s none in the
Bay Area—at least not like the one Gina’s dad, Edmund, is part of. I made it
up. Or maybe Edmund did. I would totally join SASH if there was one around. I love
Sherlock Holmes—in fact, I have a Sherlock Holmes pastiche idea I’d love to
write.
DR: What have you
written recently?
MKB: I’ve been doing
a lot ghostwrites lately. And they have been diverse and interesting. I just
finished up a YA set in Seattle, and am still working on one that also makes
use of my deep love of archaeology. Beyond that, my dear agent is shopping a
crazy range of novels I tossed at him, including an SF novel with a peculiar
genesis that I’d love to see be the first of a trilogy, a YA
paranormal/contemporary fantasy featuring a 14 year-old-protagonist who
discovers she's a witch from a long line of witches, a magical realism yarn
that is my take on the old Russian fairytale, Frog Princess, and a paranormal
romance that I collaborated on with a couple of show runners from LA.
DR: What lies ahead?
What lies ahead for Gina Miyoko – are new novels in the works?
MKB: I’ve been
working on what I hope will be the next book in the Gina Miyoko series—working
title, THE FORGETFUL FOLKLORIST. I’ve got about eight or nine novels sketched
out and more ideas popping into my head all the time. I’ve also been outlining
a steampunk novel I’d like to write, involving yet more artifacts. (I got the
idea from a book cover someone asked me to design, then didn’t want.)
DR: How does The
Antiquities Hunter fit into your repertoire of published works?
MKB: It’s a real
outlier among outliers. I started out writing science fiction. In fact, I’d
published a bunch of stories in Analog before I shifted gears and wrote
four epic fantasy novels all based on dreams. Then I discovered magical realism
and fell madly in love with it. That caused my writing to take a weird turn
that peaked with “The White Dog” (Interzone).
In moving over to crime fiction, I’m really pursuing something that’s
fascinated me as a reader for years. I’ve been in love with mysteries and detective
fiction forever. So, even though THE ANTIQUITIES HUNTER looks like a departure
from the outside, from where I sit, I’m just writing what I’ve always read. I
also realized, when I looked at the fiction I’ve written, that most of my
stories have a mystery embedded at the core—sometimes blatantly, as in “The
Secret Life of Gods” and “Distance"(Analog),
or in a veiled way as in my novels THE SPIRIT GATE (originally from Baen, in
reprint from Book View Cafe) and STAR WARS LEGENDS: SHADOW GAMES (Del Rey/Lucas
Books).
DR: What authors have
most influenced your writing? What about them do you find inspiring?
MKB: My greatest
prose heroes are Ray Bradbury, W.P. Kinsella (whom I cast in DISTANCE with his
permission), and Tim Powers. These are the writers whose use of language,
storytelling chops, and sheer imagination made me hungry to write. Bradbury and
Kinsella have written some of the most beautiful and evocative prose in the
English language and Powers has given me epiphanies about the many ways reality
can collide with the fantastic.
I admire Dean Koontz,
JK Rowling and Sue Grafton as well, especially for their character development
chops and the uncanny way they connect the reader to their characters from page
one. I also have to credit Harry Turtledove (who’s written some of my favorite
Analog stories) with making me stray into alternate history, with my novelette
“O, Pioneer” (Paradox) which takes an
upside down and backwards look at Christopher Columbus’ ”discovery” of the
Americas.
DR: Why do you write
what you do, and how does your work differ from others in your genre?
MKB: I write what I
do because either a character demands to be written about (Gina Miyoko being a
case in point) or an idea demands to be explored. I thrive on exploration. It’s
why I love road trips (What’s around that next curve?), research, archaeology
(What is that thing I just dug up?), first contact stories, and
mysteries of every kind. Writing is exploration I undertake to satisfy my
insatiable curiosity about what if.
I’ve been told that I
write fantasy with rivets, meaning that my fantasy work tends to take a very
pragmatic approach to the fantastic. It works the other way, as well. My Gina
Miyoko stories have an undercurrent of the supernatural to them if the
reader chooses to read the pragmatic references to obereg (the good luck
charms her mom is forever sneaking into her pockets), Holy Water, and spells as
being more than just a concession to Nadia Miyoko’s avocation. This means that
my fiction often falls through the cracks. When I sent “The White Dog” to Interzone, the editor wrote back and
said essentially, ”I loved it, but where’s the fantasy element?” I responded, “In
the eye of the reader.” He bought the story and it was a finalist for the
British Science Fiction Award.
DR: How does your
writing process work?
MKB: Mileage varies …
a lot. With short fiction, I’ll sometimes scribble a handful of questions that
become notes and when I see a beginning and end, I start writing. With novels,
I sometimes get out the sticky notes. I had a great little flow chart app I
used for a while, but they stopped making it. I use Evernote to toss bits and
pieces into, as well. The sticky note brainstorming is still the best method
I’ve found of plotting a novel because it allows me to visualize relationships
between characters, their motivations and other plot elements.
Once I’ve charted
something that way, I write a synopsis that becomes a living document that I
can add to as I work. At some point the characters start yakking and doing
things and I have to start writing. I used to have to write everything in #2
pencil on lined paper first, then edit as I committed it to the computer. Then
I’d do that until roughly the last third of the book when the boulder started
rolling downhill. But for some time now, while I still love writing notes long
hand, I do all my writing at the keyboard. I’ve only ever had a laptop, because
I feel the need to be portable. Sometimes a silent house is the best place to
write, and sometimes a noisy coffee shop is best. I’ve also learned to give
myself permission to do what I heard one writer refer to as “moodling”. It
looks (and feels) like I’m not doing anything, but my mind is hard at work
looking for connections. And when enough connections are made between elements
and characters, the writing happens.
Whenever I sit down
to write, I always read back what I did previously. I tried Hemingway’s
stopping in mid sentence and it only led to frustration.
DR: What advice would
you give to an aspiring writer?
MKB: First, write
without editing. Ray Bradbury famously said of writing, “Don’t think.” He
advised hiding your editor hat and just getting the bones of a story or a scene
down without worrying about whether you found the right word. THEN, put on your
editor hat and edit. This can make the difference between a story ending up
attached to an email on its way to an editor’s inbox or ending up in an obscure
file folder.
Second, learn your
tools—words. Know what they mean, what they imply, how they taste, how they
sound. Read your prose out loud before you submit it. Here, I find Mark Twain’s
advice sage: “Use the right word, not its second cousin.”
Third, be flexible.
The method you used to write one story may not work for the next one. That’s
okay. It doesn’t mean you’re broken or
that your process is broken. It just means it’s different this time. This was a
hard-learned lesson for me. It took reading Lawrence Block’s learning
experience with regard to flexibility (in one of this Writer’s Digest columns),
to understand that I wasn’t losing “it”; “it” had just morphed a bit.
I’ve learned a lot
from the experiences of other writers and from their prose. One of the most
valuable learning experiences for me is to read other writers’ prose with an
awareness of my own responses to it and analyze why it makes me feel how I
feel. Then I try to apply that in my own work.
Oh, and when you’ve
written that story and read it out loud, making sure that (as Twain said)
you’ve used the right word, not its second cousin, send it to the magazine or
agent or publisher you really want to see it with, not something less.
When I sent my first story to Stan Schmidt at Analog, the wisdom in all the writing magazines I’d read was that I
should send it to a small non-pro market first and work my way up. And I should
send something short that stood a better chance of being accepted. I went
against that advice and sent a 19,500 word novella to my favorite magazine and
got accepted.
Short form: Always
shoot for the moon.
Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff is the award-winning author of short fiction
that has appeared in publications such
as Analog and Interzone. She has authored a number of Star
Wars novels, including the New York Times bestseller The
Last Jedi. Maya lives in San Jose, California.
Buy links for all
online sources are on the Pegasus page: http://pegasusbooks.com/books/the-antiquities-hunter-9781681778570-hardcovera
Or:
Print: IndieBound, Barnes & Noble, Amazon
eBook: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple
No comments:
Post a Comment