As part of my tour with Bewitching Book Tours, I did an interview with Deal Sharing Aunt.
As she has not yet posted it, I thought I would take the opportunity to share it with all of you.
Enjoy!
What literary pilgrimages have you gone on? I try to visit all the places that I discuss in my novels. My first novel, THWARTED QUEEN is set in Northern England, so I went there on a visit in 2007 with my husband. I was lucky enough to be given my own private tour of Raby Castle, where my protagonist Cecylee Neville lived as a girl. Subsequently, we visited Middleham castle (home of Cecylee’s nephew Warwick The Kingmaker). And we even went over to Rouen to try and find what little we could of Cecylee there. (She lived at Rouen Castle from 1441 to 1445 while husband Richard was governing English France.)
The next pilgrimage I went on was to Sicily, the setting of MAIDEN TOMB (the first volume of my TWELVE CURSED MAIDENS series and our featured book). As MAIDEN TOMB is partly a fantasy, I decided to refer to Sicily as Sikelia, giving a nod to the original Celtic inhabitants of that island, the Sikels. Sicily was a magical place, so beautiful, and crammed with amazing ruins from its time as a colony of Ancient Greece.
Then I visited Berlin, Germany to try and find the houses which my characters inhabited in SIN CITY, AN UNSUITABLE SUITOR and FAREWELL MY LIFE (the second, third and fourth volumes of my HIDDEN MURDERER series.) People were so kind to me when I told them I was a writer. And I spent many glorious days walking around Berlin and its suburbs to get a clear sense of the geography of the place.
Lastly, as I live only half a mile away, I spent a great deal of time getting to know the charming village of Georgetown, Washington DC, which is the setting for THE LOST MOTHER, the first volume of the HIDDEN MURDERER series.
The only place I’ve written about and haven’t visited is Mongolia, the setting of MAIDEN FORGOTTEN, the forthcoming second volume of my TWELVE CURSED MAIDENS series. So I was forced to imagine what it must be like to inhabit that high prairie of a land, as well as how difficult a journey across the harsh Gobi desert must be.
What is the first book that made you cry? I’m not a woman who cries, so I will confine myself to talking about a book that moved me a great deal. I give that credit to Elizabeth Goudge’s THE CHILD FROM THE SEA, an historical novel about the star-crossed love between Charles II (before he became King of England) and his first mistress Lucy Walter. However, what caught my attention was not that relationship, but rather the tangled family dynamics of Lucy Walter’s family of origin. For, it seemed that Lucy’s parents did not get on and were estranged from each other. So Lucy had the painful experience of trying to function in a broken family. This moved me greatly as I come from a broken home myself.
Does writing energize or exhaust you? It energizes me.
What is your writing Kryptonite? I don’t know what my writing Kryptonite is. But if I were asked about my writing superpower, or what I am good at, I would say dialogue. That is because I’ve been having conversations with various fictional characters in my head since I was a child.
Did you ever consider writing under a pseudonym? Yes. And decided not to do it as it would be too much trouble. It’s bad enough having to do all the marketing myself for my real self, as an Indie author, without dealing with multiple clones of myself!
What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer? I have met many authors at writing conferences, whom I’ve stayed in touch with over the years. But for me, writing is a solitary experience. Which means that other authors help me most via their work.
Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections between each book? I’m going to rephrase that question because nowadays I don’t write long books, as most people don’t have the attention (or willingness) to read a 500-page tome, like my first novel. So what I’ve done instead is write much shorter works that can be classified either as novellas (30,000 to 40,000 words) or short novels. These shorter works are grouped together in series.
I first did that with my second novel which was originally titled FAREWELL MY LIFE. It was more than 500 pages long and I got quite a few comments from people who thought it too long. So I divided it up into four and it is now the HIDDEN MURDERER series.
Now I am embarked on my second series, TWELVE CURSED MAIDENS, but this time I am actually writing it as a series.
But to answer your question about whether my books stand on their own or not, (or whether my series stand on their own or not) I guess the thread that runs through all of them is that they are about highly intelligent women who are forced to be second-class citizens in a man’s world. In my work, I try to show the reader just how they navigate and learn to function in such a world. And all the tragedy and heartbreak that comes with it.
What authors did you dislike at first but grew into? I really was too young when I picked up Jane Austen’s PRIDE & PREJUDICE. Even then, I appreciated her elegant style. But I really couldn’t understand what people were talking about. Of course, when I grew up, I realized how marvelous her observations were. But they were quite lost on an 8-year-old girl!
What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? THE MASQUERADERS by Georgette Heyer. Published in 1928, it is one of her first novels. Delightfully entertaining, it has three razor-smart protagonists who have to get themselves out of a potentially dangerous situation.
As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal? The Goddess Athena. I love that she is a warrior woman, and that she has an owl as her companion. So she is both wise and fierce. To me, that is a winning combination for a woman, especially these days.
How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have? Actually I don’t. (It must be due to my OCD!)
What did you edit out of this book? That is an interesting question, because I don’t think I actually edited anything out of MAIDEN TOMB. Instead, what I actually did was add things in.
You see, MAIDEN TOMB is a retelling of The Twelve Dancing Princesses folktale. But, it seemed to me that even the Brothers Grimm had left out all the scary parts of this tale, which in my opinion, has nothing to do with dancing, and instead is all about death. So, when I came to do my version, I added in spiders, snakes and every scuttling creature you can think of when they finally journey down the tunnel. I added in Charon, the boatman from Greek Mythology who rows the souls of the newly dead across the River Styx. I added in mythology from Ancient Egypt about that scarf of blazing stars we call The Milky Way in the English-speaking world. The Grimm brothers tell us that all of the suitors who fail to find out where the princesses have gone are executed. But they don’t give any details. I put those details back in. And at least half of the princesses die during the story. So this is a very dark version that I think resonates much more with the roots of this ancient tale, which seems to stretch all the way back to the Sumerian Empire of 6,000 BCE.
If you didn’t write, what would you do for work? It would have to be something creative, so maybe I would take up painting instead.
Do you hide any secrets in your books that only a few people will find? No.
What is your favorite childhood book? Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter.
To find out more about Cynthia Sally’s novels and novellas, click here for Amazon, or here for her website.
