What inspired your novel?
(I love telling this story.) It started when afriend of mine told me about a dream she’d had, in which a package arrived in the mail for her then-infant son. Inside the package addressed to him was a package addressed to me (how odd, she thought) and inside that was a velvet bag containing a pocket watch. Opening the pocket watch, my friend discovered the period casing contained a futuristic-looking screen cycling through images of different historical times and places. “I think I had your dream, Heather.”
I tried to write a story about her son and me and the pocket watch, including a reason for the nested packages, but I couldn’t get it to gel. A pocket watch seemed to belong to an older era anyway…so maybe this wanted to be a Victorian time travel story. Maybe steampunk—huge mechanical monsters stomping down a gaslit street? Yeah. Stomping after what? What would mechanical Victorian monsters hunt? Something natural run amuck, of course. The Victorians would totally build monstrous scientific artificial things to constrain monstrous natural things.
Okay, so where did the run-amuck natural things come from? And when? It would have to be long enough before the Victorian era for the organic monsters to become a problem, for a solution to be generated, and for the solution to become its own problem. Seventy to eighty years, say? The “Victorian era” spanned a long time, of course, but I meant the Sherlock Holmes / Jack the Ripper / Dracula / H.G. Wells part of it—so call it 1880 to 1895. What was going on in England seventy to eighty years before, say, 1885?
Five seconds later, I was scrambling for Wikipedia to look up the dates of the Battles of Trafalgar and Waterloo. Five seconds after that, I knew exactly what the story was about.
What was your favorite part of writing the Keeping Time trilogy?
My favorite type of reading experience is the one in which I suddenly realize the story I thought I was reading is not the story I am actually reading—the moment when the addition of a perspective or a backstory changes the context entirely. So it’s not entirely true that I wrote the first two books just so I could rewrite the scenes from a different character’s perspective in the third…but it was my favorite part of writing the third. Other people were in the middle of their lives when Elizabeth’s exuberant bildungsroman intersected with them, after all, and their stories have a different shape than hers…
What’s the most memorable fan mail you’ve ever received?
No question, it was the piece of original music composed by Vikki Ford, entitled “Constructs In Fog.” She sent it to me out of the clear blue sky when the first electronic edition of Timepiece was published, and when I set up the Kickstarter to fund the paper versions, Vikki kindly allowed me to use the composition in the project video.
What advice would you give an aspiring writer?
The same advice I give to aspiring game designers: Just make games.
Just write. Write now. Don’t wait to get your degree. Don’t wait for more experience. Don’t try to align with market trends. Don’t wait for permission. You don’t need anyone’s permission.
Write the stories you want to write. The first several will suck; this is okay. Write them anyway. The next several will suck less.
I think it’s very common for those of us who want to create art professionally to hamstring ourselves by listening to all the contradictory advice given by all the experts and all the classes until we are paralyzed by it. By all means take classes. Join crit groups. Read online forums. But don’t wait until you’ve absorbed all the wisdom to start creating your own stuff. You’ll never absorb all of it anyway. Write your stuff while in the process of absorbing. That’s how you generate your own wisdom.
And to the extent possible, draw on your real-world experiences. I don’t mean “write what you know,” exactly, because I’ve always disliked that phrasing, but use what you know. At one point while Timepiece was underway I visited a Civil War re-enactment at which real cannon were used, and found to my surprise that the explosions resonated in my sternum. Which is why, in the first line of Timepiece, John Freemantle feels every burst from the cannon as a jolt through his breastbone.
What have you written recently? What lies ahead?
Well, I’ve got the first chapter of a fourth book in the Keeping Time universe (this one focused on different characters, and exploring the fascinating historical and literary personas of the Marquess of Montrose ). I also have ideas for a novel about a city that changes its shape in response to the desires of the ruling family (inspired by a visit to Andalucía, where the layered architecture reflects the values and aesthetics of the culture currently in power, as the holder of that position swapped between the European Spanish and the Moors) and a near future SF novel about augmented reality (inspired by work I’m currently doing in the augmented reality field).
At the moment, though, most of my creative energy is going toward making games. If you enjoyed my traditional fiction, you may also enjoy my interactive fiction. If you liked the steampunk part of Timepiece (and especially if you enjoyed that but didn’t care for the time travel J ), you might want to check out A Study In Steampunk, a Sherlock-Holmes-inspired steampunk interactive novel published by Choice of Games.
Heather Albano divides her time between writing traditional fiction and creating interactive fiction, and finds the line between the two growing fuzzier all the time.
On the game design side, she has co-authored six titles released by Choice of Games, including the award-winning Choice of Broadsides and Choice of Zombies. She worked on the critically-acclaimed interactive radio dramas Codename Cygnus and Jurassic World Revealed, released by EarPlay and now available on the Amazon Echo, and on the educational game Vixi, created in partnership with Suffolk University. She has presented on game design at GDC 2015, at the East Coast Game Conference, at the Boston Festival of Indie Games, at Women in Games Boston, and at MIT. She is currently serving as narrative adviser for the Rochester Institute of Technology Steampunk Rochester augmented reality project and as Lead Writer for the procedurally-generated RPG Wildermyth.
On the traditional fiction side, she is the author of the novel Timepiece (a steampunk time travel adventure about a girl, a pocket watch, Frankenstein’s monster, the Battle of Waterloo, and giant clockwork robots taking over London), and its sequel Timekeeper and Timebound. Her short fiction has appeared in Electric Velocipede, Aoife’s Kiss, the More Scary Kisses anthology from Ticonderoga Publications, and others.
She is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, the Writers Guild of America, the Indie Game Developers Association, Women in Games International, Women in Games Boston, Broad Universe, and the Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop.
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