Copyright (c) 2007 / May not be reproduced without permission

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Dark fantasy author Jacqueline Carey chats with WEIRD TALES correspondent Elizabeth Genco. Find out what exactly the woman behind the bestselling Kushiel’s Dart series has to say about “smutty military cadences sung by Julius Caesar’s men.”

Jacqueline Carey’s much-ballyhooed debut novel, Kushiel’s Dart, took the fantasy world by storm with its gutsy portrayal of Phèdre, a young courtesan with masochistic tendencies bestowed on her by a demigod of pain. Unapologetic about her sexuality and her true nature, Phèdre turned the classic genre cliché of “heroine-as-victim” on its head. The Kushiel books are a great example of why it’s so vital for writers to push limits, and what can happen when they do.

Carey’s big risk paid off, winning her the 2002 Locus Award for Best First Novel and a legion of earnest, passionate fans who ink the book’s message into their own lives like — well, a tattoo (quite literally, as the galleries on Carey’s website can
attest). She treats her readers to a feast of intricately drawn worlds and some of the tightest plotting on the fantasy market today. She is hard at work finishing up the second Kushiel trilogy; its second volume, Kushiel’s Justice, is out now.

WEIRD TALES: Your world-building skills are, frankly, out of this world. How do you do it?

JACQUELINE CAREY: Research, research, research! Because I’m predominately writing alternate historical fantasy, there’s a wealth of material out there on which to draw. I always have a good idea of what my “itinerary” for a book is going to be, so I’m able to do a lot of research before I start. Once I start, I scramble along the way to fill in any gaps. I like to use the earliest source material I can find to describe a culture or a place, as it often feels more immediate and fantastic than more contemporary resources. And I have a certain amount of latitude, since I’m held to a standard of plausibility rather than accuracy.

WT: Do people ever write to complain that you got this or that detail "wrong?”

JC: Not often — maybe because I play so fast and loose with history that there wouldn’t be much point in it. I did have a reader write me to complain that Phèdre’s Boys’ marching chants was so anachronistic that it threw him out of the book. I politely informed him that there are records of smutty military cadences sung by Julius Caesar’s men.

WT: Do you have a system to keep it all together? Notebooks, flowcharts, whatever?

JC: Nope. Just a very crowded brain. . . . For me, one of the keys to good worldbuilding is finding just the right details to bring a setting to life. Too much detail can overwhelm the reader and drag down the narrative, but a few descriptive touches here and there engage the imagination. When readers’ imaginations are engaged, they tend to paint a more vivid portrait in their minds than when the writer is doing all the work for them.

WT: You worked in an art center while writing the first Kushiel book. Are you ever inspired by the visual arts?

JC: Definitely. Sometimes it’s in a very direct and specific way. I recall listening to a candidate for an art history professorship give a lecture on a Greek temple I wasn’t familiar with and feeling this “click” as the solution to a creative problem lurking in the back of my mind fell into place. The climactic scene in the Temple of Asherat in Kushiel’s Chosen was the result. Sometimes it’s in a more general sense. I recently saw an exhibition of Treasures of the Sacred Maya Kings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and stored that one away for future reference.

I think about my writing in very visual terms, and the visual arts feeds that creativity. It has a visceral impact it’s hard to capture in language. But just contemplating a piece like Goya’s “Third of May” can be a great object lesson in how to articulate a single moment of drama, horror and transcendence.

WT: I was very moved by the tattoo, art and picture galleries on your website — you seem to have some of the coolest fans around. Why do you think your work resonates with them the way it does?

JC: Yeah, my fans are awesome! I think the books resonate for all kinds of reasons – they’re hefty tomes and there’s a lot in them — but I’m guessing the primary reason, at least for the Kushiel series, is the theme of love as a redemptive force capable of effecting change in the world that runs through them. It’s a simple but powerful notion, and one I think most of us would like to believe.

Also, Phèdre, the heroine of the original trilogy, is a fairly unique character in the annals of epic fantasy. Her refusal to be victimized by her own nature and her ability to turn vulnerability into strength seems to strike a chord with a lot of readers.

WT: How many unpublished novels do you have sitting in a drawer somewhere?

JC: Like a lot of authors, I think it’s good for people, especially aspiring writers, to know what it can take to succeed in this business. I’ve got three languishing-in-a-drawer novels that will never see the light of day. I never thought I’d be grateful for the rejections, but with each one, I pushed myself to become a better writer.

WT: You're a big traveler. What are some of your favorite haunts?

JC: Well, I have to cite the south of France, since a trip there inspired the setting of Terre d’Ange! And I love the island of Crete, where I once spent a summer. I can find something to love almost anywhere.

WT: Any suggestions for travel on the cheap?

JC: My best suggestion is to do it while you’re young. In my early twenties, I traveled across Europe on a rail pass, crashing with friends or relatives whenever possible, staying at youth hostels otherwise, poring over my guidebook for the best cheap food available. The last time I went to Amsterdam, the sight of all the grungy young wanderers in the train station made me (a) glad I did it when I had the chance, and (b) glad I wasn’t doing it now! After a while, the prospect of sleeping three to a double bed just for the sake of free lodging isn’t as palatable as it used to be.

WT: Name a guilty pleasure. Or maybe two.

JC: People magazine and Breyer’s strawberry ice cream.

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Weird Tales correspondent Elizabeth Genco is a frequent contributor to the Endicott Studio’s online Journal of Mythic Arts. Over the past year she’s interviewed a host of speculative-fiction authors and comic-book creators for the website Chemistry Set, which also hosts her own original comic series Scheherezade. Her interest in the mythic and fantastic extends as well to study of the tarot, and she was a featured writer in the 2007 Tarot Reader. With her husband, artist Leland Purvis, she also produces original illustrated storytelling at www.streetfables.com.


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Original fiction by Marcie Lynn Tentchoff & Mikal Trimm
Copyright (c) 2007 / May not be reproduced without permission

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The first blister popped, bled.

The soil lay rock-like beneath the heavy frost, and his shovel worked scarcely better than a child’s toy. Still he kept digging, pausing only when his hands grew too cold to grip the handle, or when a fit of coughing took him, doubling him over to spit thickly on the ground.

His foot brushed against the gunnysack lying next to him, producing a muffled thud. Take a breath, man — don’t kill yourself in the doing.

He sat down on the small pile of fresh-dug dirt, pulling the sack closer to him. Gentle, now, his trembling hands doing their best to forget the cold, forget the strain of digging.

Who should I call? Mother or Grandmam?

The question still haunted him. Mother, her love a guidepost for her son, or the elder, the Grand — the sum of wisdom, the fount of arcane knowledge?

He stroked the outlines of their skulls through the sack. They huddled against each other in the darkness, chattering their secrets where he could not hear them.

He could not allow them their gossipy silence. He needed answers. He needed help.
He slipped a hand inside the bag’s cloth mouth, feeling cold bone and warm memories pressing up against his fingers.

Mother? He paused, listening to her soft murmur for a moment. Her voice was loving still, but tinged with sadness. Bitterness.

No. Love was the catalyst that sparked all this, but it had failed him before. And Maggie, more than anyone, would know how little love mattered in the final accounting.

He smoothed one fingertip down the length of a delicate cheekbone, then moved to stroke the other skull more harshly.

Grandmam, then. Wisdom, bleak though it might sometimes be, would have to serve.

He pulled Grandmam’s skull from the shadow of the cloth, careful to keep his fingers away from her mouth. She tended to bite when disturbed, and her old yellowed teeth could still take a finger from the unwary. Her fleshless head shone brighter than the snow at his feet. It bathed in the moonlight, sucking in the feeble rays so that everything around it fell more deeply into shadow.

The jawbone creaked in its sockets, yawning and closing with a series of arid sighs and dust-dry clicks. It spoke, finally, in a voice woven from wind and grave mold: “Ya’d have another poor soul at yar call then, Seamus? Have yar mither and I not taught ya enough?”

“Why do you blather at me so, old witch? You taught me the Arts, or have you forgotten?” Seamus held the skull at eye-level, his fingers clutching the hollows of her cheekbones.

Grandmam’s voice spat forth in gusts. “Dead-talkin’. A tool, boy, and all you seem to remember, aye!”

“Dead-talking! And no! Not all I remember.” He calmed himself, picturing Grandmam as she once was — patient and oh so wise. These days the patience was gone, and her tongue was as sharp as her teeth. “I remember you told me to always keep myself in the company of women. You said it would save me from the evil that men-folk fall into. I’ve kept to that, haven’t I? One way or another?”

The skull wheezed out a laugh, or maybe Grandmam cried — hard to tell. “Laddy mine, ya mastered so much, yet learnt so little.”

Seamus scowled. “Just be ready to call her. You know your business. Leave me to mine.”

It was even harder digging with Grandmam’s casual insults and constant nagging, but he kept at it until Maggie’s bones were exposed, still clothed in their bright, tattered wrappings. He paused a moment, looking down at the remains of the woman he’d loved.

The woman he’d lost, despite the strength of that love. First to another man, or so the rumors went, and then to the consumption.

He needed — like he needed air, water, love itself — to know if she’d loved him at the end. And, whether she had or not, he still ached for the sound of her voice, the feel of her breath against his cheek. . . .

“A pretty slave she’ll make, ya useless boy.” Grandmam’s voice cut through his thoughts, rising from where he’d placed her skull on an old stump. “And will that make ya happy, luggin’ her round like th’ other women ya say ya care for?”

Seamus stared down into the grave, shaking from more than just the frost-tinged air. She’d been pretty once, true, but not now, surely not now. A year in the selfish grip of the earth had done its work. Whatever had once been Maggie fed
the soil, leaving only the clever bones behind.

And was she his to take? Not if any truth hid in the whispered gossip of others. What would her voice sound like, years from now? Bitter? As bitingly taunting as Grandmam’s?

He shook his head, seeing Maggie’s beautiful face overlaid against her naked skull, hearing her gentle, carefree laughter in his memory. His guts twisting with a fierce cramp, he staggered back to the sack, taking his mother’s skull and placing it, with a soft kiss, beside that of his wife.

“Just call her, Grandmam. Wake her.” Then, as the old woman’s scorn grew louder and more strident, “Tell her I’m sorry.” He clenched his fists painfully hard on the shovel’s handle. Permanence. This called for permanence, or he’d likely be back someday, when the longing grew too great. “Tell her . . . she’s free.”

Seamus waited a moment for the message to be passed on, then brought the flat of the shovel down hard on the two skulls. His mother’s fractured swiftly, joyously, but Maggie’s took a bit more work.

Behind him, Grandmam cackled, her heckling tone almost completely unchanged. “So th’ fool boy’s learned! Took long enough. Thought ya’d never listen t’ me. We women know, we teach, we — ”

He turned, a smile forming on his cold, weary face as he raised the shovel high. Maybe wisdom, like virtue, could be its own reward.

Grandmam’s laughter echoed through the night, even after the blade came down.

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Marcie Lynn Tentchoff is an Aurora Award winning poet and writer from the west coast of Canada, Her work has appeared in such magazines as On Spec, Dreams and Nightmares, and Illumen, as well as in various anthologies and online publications. Mikal Trimm has sold a plethora of stories and poems to various markets in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, and Australia. He has recent or upcoming work in Polyphony 6, Postscripts, Black Gate, Electric Velocipede, and Interfictions, to name a few.
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