With the second book of her Worldweavers series, Spellspam, set for release on Tuesday, Alma Alexander has embarked on a Virtual Blog Tour. Today, she’s visiting at Dichroic Reflections (and probably lots of other places – one major advantage of a virtual tour!) to answer a few questions:
1. You’ve had a widely varied life – more so, maybe, that most of your readers. Do you think that background means you can open more doors for them? Does it give you an advantage in opening up new possibilities, especially to your younger readers?
The world really IS an oyster. Yes, I think that my travels did open me up to new knowledge and new experiences, and new ways of looking at things.
Looking back on my life, I realise that the longest I’ve ever lived in one place is thirteen consecutive years in Cape Town – but that by the time I came there I was already adept at not growing my roots too deep and although I loved it I have never considered it a permanent “home”. I pass through; I do not linger. Knowing that my time in a place is limited, I tend to experience it all the more intensely, embracing it with all the senses, remembering what it smelled like after the rains or what kind of weird taste some local concoction had long after the experience is gone and I am somewhere else entirely. In a way my itinerant travelling lifestyle – in a bio somewhere I called myself a professional tumbleweed – has trained me to be a far more acute observer of people and of places than I might otherwise have been if I had been lulled into complacency and comparative long-term security of having lived all my life in the same house, in the same town, in the same province or country in which I was born.
Travelling, meeting new people and looking at the world (however briefly) from their perspective and their eyes, is a gift beyond compare. I would seriously advise any young person to plan on at least one journey that stretches their mind and their heart, if that is at all possible. The best way to grow is to learn something, and the best way to learn something is by reaching out and touching it with your own hand.
2. I think I remember you saying that you were always a storyteller. Did your very early publication experience give you added confidence in the journey to becoming an author?
Confidence is such a strange word. In one sense, yes, there is a sort of confidence there – when in company of other professionals, other writers, I no longer feel like a total newb who doesn’t quite belong there and who must have been admitted by mistake – with the third book in the Worldweavers trilogy, due out in 2009, I will have published my tenth book, and that does give you a certain degree of confidence that yes, you’re here, you’re doing the thing you love and that you might apparently just be GOOD at, and you’re living the life you always wanted.
The flip side of that is the confidence crises that happen mid-book, every book, when every writer in the Universe looks back over a half-chewed, half-digested piece of work and panics that it will NEVER be any good, that even if you finish it at all (which at that point doesn’t even seem remotely possible) it will never work properly or be publishable or even if publishable that it will never sell – the kind of “NOBODY WANTS MY BOOK!” cry that comes at the lowest point of every book ever written. I have a very good friend back in New Zealand, an award-winning author, who is completely unable to read her work out loud in public because she will suddenly notice every typo, every misplaced comma, every infelicitous turn of phrase, and she will be utterly appalled that she has allowed that “drivel” to be turned loose on the unsuspecting world.
Confidence? Writers the world over would love to know where that beast is hiding. We’d hunt it. We’d hunt it HARD.
The trouble is that it doesn’t survive all that well in cages or in zoos. True confidence is always a wild thing and has to be caught anew with every new project you begin. No matter how many stories you may have told before.
3. On the surface, your newest books are very different from the Jin
Shei series and Letters From the Fire. Would you say they have themes in common?
Courage under fire, the ability to make hard choices in an often nforgiving world, a development of self knowledge and an insight into what makes both yourself and other people grow and change. And that sometimes the things that change you may not change you in ways that you like.
Strength. A strength of character, and the ability to face up to your choices and accept the consequences. That’s something that all my protagonists share, I think, in their own very different ways. And it is something that I would like my readers – be they 15 or 95 – to take with them when they close the covers of my books. The knowledge that it’s possible to be strong.
4. Relating to question 1, as you have experienced changes in your life (moving, publication, marriage) how have they changed the stories you have to tell?
Every new environment brings new things. It was no accident, probably, that “The Secrets of Jin Shei” starts with the sentence, “it had been the hottest summer in living memory.” I wrote the book in Florida, the part of the United States where it is arguably “the hottest summer in living memory” year-round. It was also no accident that I placed Thea Winthrop’s home out here in the Pacific Northwest, where I live now, and that these books are partly a love letter to a part of the world which I have grown to love.
This ties back to your first question, in a way – because I carry ALL of my worlds within me, always. All the wondrous kaleidoscope brightnesses that have been part of my life so far, all of it mixes and matches in strange and unexpected ways on the blank canvas of an unwritten page. Every moment I have lived is a little bit of condiment to the soup of story that’s always bubbling in the back of my mind, and I honestly don’t know from one story to the next what will come out of that cauldron and what parts of my life’s experience will have attached itself to it. I live my life as it happens, and it brings me miracles almost every day – the miracle of loving and being loved in a happy and stable marriage, the miracle of holding a new book in my hands, the miracle of stepping off an airplane onto soil that I have never walked before – those are just the bigger ones, the more obvious ones. But I find small miracles hiding in places where I least expect them. Snowdrops lifting their heads from underneath vanishing snow, the flash of bright colour from the underside of a drab bird’s wing, the small and unexpectedly cat-like mewling sounds that a baby deer makes, the rasp of an affectionate cat’s tongue against my hand, the sparkle of a rampant snowmelt-fed waterfall in the spring sunshine, the salt-spray scent of ocean. It is impossible to be the same person two days in a row – everything you do, everything you see, will change you a little. It’s called living.
5. What are some of the books or stories that have been the bedrock of your life, or that have inspired you?
My bookshelves are full to overflowing, and eclectic. I read a lot, and have done so for many years. It is a rare book that doesn’t inspire me in some way or another (even if it is just to a feeling of helpless frustration – but that just spurs a “I can do better” reaction, so it’s probably all good…) From my Grandfather’s seven books of poetry to people like Tolkien and Le Guin, they are all a part of my universe, all a part of that bedrock on which I build my own worlds.
READING is my inspiration. Not individual books.