Lace and Blade 5 Author Interview: Shariann Lewitt

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/2PBzyj6ePub: https://www.books2read.com/u/bwYJwP


I met Shariann Lewitt at LaunchPad Astronomy Workshop in 2011, and what a delight our friendship has been. She's also a heck of a good writer.

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

Shariann Lewitt: I can’t think of when I thought I wasn’t going to be a writer!  But I loved too many different things, and I realized that I wasn’t going to earn a full time living writing fiction, so I planned to go to grad school in something Radically Different.  I only applied to one graduate writing program—Yale School of Drama.  I only knew of one other that carried that level of prestige in the country, and that was Iowa, and, being a born and raised Manhattanite, I had no idea where Iowa was (is?) or how I would get there.  Really, I only applied because I expected to be turned down, so I could go on with other things knowing that I didn’t have enough serious talent to pursue professional writing.  To the great shock and horror of all my relatives, I got in.  The graduate degree didn’t make me a writer, but it did make me employable as a teacher, which does pay an extremely modest rent.  Grad school was traumatic and genre fiction was my drug of choice to get through it.  In my final year I wrote my first novel as an escape project—and it got published.

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

SL: My father lived in Japan for several years when he was quite young, before he married my mother.  Since I was too young to remember I’d heard about how wonderful Japan is.  My father would take out his special box of treasures with his water colored picture of Fuji-san and curling white waves, his dark oiled wood chopsticks, his long silk tassel and little laughing Buddha.  He taught me Japanese children’s songs, to eat with chopsticks (as a very young child—my mother hated seeing me eat Lucky Charms with chopsticks and refuse to use a spoon.)  And of course, as I got older, I became fascinated with Japanese culture and history.

The basic idea for the story (which I won’t tell because it would be a spoiler) has been with me for a long time.  I wrote it once in the very beginning of my career as a short story and then abandoned it because short stories were very hard for me then.

Deborah’s invitation for this anthology came a few weeks after I had returned from a trip to Kyoto with an idea for a novel and a large package of research books on the Meiji rebellion.  Before this particular trip I had been more interested in the more distant past; the nineteenth century seemed far too modern for my taste.  And yet on that trip I learned a great deal that I had skipped over before because I had thought it too modern and was swimming in research on the particulars of the men—and women!—involved in breaking the Shogun’s death grip on the government.  The moment I read that invitation I knew I had to write this story.  I already knew Toshiro, who had been in my story decades earlier.

And then the whole story just revealed itself to me.  I wrote long form; short fiction is hard for me.  But this story came whole as a story, with the characters fully realized and the concept perfectly alive from the moment I began.  I have never had an experience writing a story like this one.  I was all the reasons I love to write, all the joy and wonder, and for two days I sat and wrote and pretty much ignored everything else in the world.

DJR: What authors have most influenced your writing?

SL: Oh my goodness, so so many.  Possibly Sophocles above all.  No, really, check him out!  Greek classical literature has it all.  Blood, guts, conspiracy, love, misery, and conflict.  On the conflict, the inner conflict, and the pain.  If you think it’s all boring people declaiming in long white robes, read the real stuff.  Yowah!

More modern writers include Philip K. Dick and Samuel R. Delaney, Shirley Jackson, Yukio Mishima, Alice Walker, Federico Garcia Lorca, William Butler Yeats, Sylvia Plath, Kate Wilhelm—how long can I go on?  So many many wonderful writers!

DJR: How does your writing process work?

SL: I’m what people call a “pantser” which means that I write by the seat of my pants.  Outlines don’t work.  I get hold of a character and a situation, find a conflict, and “write for discovery.”  Which is to say, I don’t know what the thing is about until I write a first draft.  Then I go back and rewrite extensively when I know what really happens in the story.  Maybe not the most efficient way, but if I try to figure it out before I start to write, it will all change once I start writing anyway.

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

SL: I’ve been doing a lot of short stories of late.  I’m working on a couple of novels.  The kind of hard SF I used to write isn’t popular right now, so I’m moving back into one of my earlier loves, fantasy and historical fiction.  I’m currently working on a book set in the late Victorian era with the Order of the Golden Dawn.  They were a real magical Order in that time, and William Butler Yeats was a member, so there’s plenty of room for real history to intertwine with magic and actual historical characters to interact with fictional characters. 

DJR: What advice would you give an aspiring writer?

SL: Don’t give up.  Everyone gets lots of rejections; that’s the nature of the trade.  You have to pick yourself up and keep going.  I give my students the “twenty-four hour rule.”  You get to feel sorry for yourself and sensitive and have all the comfort and self pity you want for twenty four hours.  And that’s it.  Send that story back out again.  Back to the keyboard.  Keep going.  Look up how many rejections Stephen King got.  How many publishers rejected Harry Potter.

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

SL: Oh no!  I love these stories!  They’re just so much fun.  All the reasons that I love to read fantasy—all the honor and love and twists and turns and just everything I want in a fantasy story!  Is there any bribe you could suggest?...

Shariann Lewitt fell in love with all things Japanese as a young girl, the result of her father being stationed in Okinawa during his Army enlistment.  She had been mainly fascinated by my earlier and more mythic eras in Japanese history until her most recent visit to Kyoto, when she saw the plaque marking the geisha house that hid several officers of the Meiji Rebellion.  That period, being both foundational to Japanese history and modern, is extremely well documented, so she has barely begun research on the subject and has probably gotten a lot wrong.  When not consumed with historical research or writing, she teaches at MIT, lives in the greater Boston area, and tries not to drive like a native most of the time.