Why use romance to tell a story, well, there again the answer lies above. Readers like the dream, the part about adventure and mystery and maybe an amazing man thrown in. They like connecting with characters, which goes right down to the level of TV soaps. They like hearing about other people’s love affairs, the good and the bad. And “romance,” with its overtones of rose-coloured fantasy, supplies something that’s not in large supply outside the book. It gives readers an image of someone to whom exciting things happen, someone who succeeded in her (usually) personal life. It gives them, again, hope.
Have you ever created a world you really wanted to live in? And why? Or do only escapist writers do that?
Not yet. Although parts of the world in the third book of this series do go close to where I’d have liked to live. If only there wasn’t quite so much rain... (very straight face, and, no, I am not putting in spoilers by explaining any further!)
You have had two books short-listed for the Aurealis Award , the highest award given to an Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy writer. Amberlight and The Moving Water How does that feel?
I never expected The Moving Water to get an Aurealis listing, since I’d tried out Everran’s Bane, its predecessor, for every prize or contest or award in Australia, and got nowhere. I was resigned to entering my stuff just as support for the award. When I had the notice about The Moving Water you could have knocked me down with a feather. When I heard about the Amberlight listing you wdn’t have needed the feather at all.
Hey, maybe The Red Country, the third in the series after Everran's Bane will also be award. Hey, you never know. Tell me, though, writing two different series, is it easy to go from one world to another? Do you have trouble separating the themes of your different stories or are they totally unalike?
These two series are in different worlds, and they were chronologically apart as well. The Everran Books, aka the Chronicles of Rihannar, were written earlier than Amberlight, and in fact, so was a second series in that world which has yet to see the light of print. But I was “finished” imaginatively with that world before Amberlight came along.
I do have three other books, set in a contemporary analogue of our world, that intervened between Source, the third book of the Amberlight series, and Dragonfly, the fourth. That was largely, I think now, because the novum with which Source closed was just so massive a leap that it took the Black Gang — the subconscious creative part of us that creates stories — the four years or so until Dragonfly began to gel, just to get their imaginative calipers around it. However, I never had any trouble going from one of those worlds to the other while I was doing it. I just didn’t try to write novels in both at the same time, though there are writers who can do that.
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