Murder by the Blog, the wonderful blog run by the staff of the Housten bookstore, Murder by the Book, has a fun interview with Gail Carriger, talking about her popular Parasol Protectorate series:
High Tea with Gail Carriger
by John Kwiatkowski, Murder by the Book Employee
With Martin Cruz Smith and Jeff Lindsay coming in the fall for Luncheon events, the staff at Murder by the Book has been thinking about characters they’d like to each lunch with, and picked their top five for our last blog entry. We also thought it would be fun to interview some authors and ask which characters they would like to dine with.
Gail Carriger is the author the Parasol Protectorate series. Soulless and Changeless, the first two books in the series, are staff favorites (John picked Lord Akeldama from the series as one of his five characters) and two of our store’s bestselling books so far this year.
Blameless, the third book in the series, will be out September 1, 2010, and Gail will have a story in the collection The Mammoth Book of Paranormal Romance 2, out October 05, 2010.
John: Do you have a complete plan for an overarching theme for your series, including a likely number of books, or are you more a seat-of-the-pants writer?
Gail: I’m pretty confident that I will be stopping at five books. I’d rather play in my world like Mercedes Lackey than Laurell K. Hamilton. Which is to say, I prefer the idea of different clumps of books all set in the same world involving different generations, places, and times, rather then one long seemingly endless series following the same characters. I’m a tea party kind-of-girl: the tea is always there, but there’s so many different foods to nibble on rather than, no matter how good, just eating the same cake.
John: Congrats on having the series picked up for 2 more books! Did that change the way you’ve been working on the series?
Gail: Thank you. I’ve been approaching everything differently since I knew Soulless wasn’t going to stand alone. Soulless is essentially a spoof of a Victorian melodrama romance, but I do like to nibble at different taste sensations (see above). So I move on to spoofing gothic mysteries, boy’s adventures, Sherlock Homes style investigations, and exotic travel journals in the successive books. I had a good handle on plot all the way up through book five, Timeless, and then stalled out. Timeless required taking two secret advisors out for Chinese food. By the time the mu shu arrived we had a plot and by the time we cracked the fortune cookie (“you will do great things . . . with a duck”) we had a really fun twist ending for the whole series. I can’t wait to write it.
John: Madame Lefoux was a great addition to your world, will we see her in any future books?
Gail: ‘Ze lovely French inventor has a very large part to play in Blameless, Book the Third, and a pivotal role in Heartless, Book the Forth. I don’t know yet about the last book, some characters don’t weasel their way in until I’m actually writing the story.
John: You’ve got an upcoming story in The Mammoth Book of Paranormal Romance 2, how does the story differ from the Parasol Protectorate books?
Gail: Oh, it was such fun to write, and so easy. “Marine Biology” has my usual dose of frivolous humor but it’s set in the modern day and it was so nice not to have to pause constantly for research. It involves a werewolf, some merfolk private investigators, the Irish mafia, and sushi.
John: The books feature a lot of steampunk technology in them, how much of that is based on existing technology, and how much of it is your own creation?
Gail: I’d say it’s about 50/50. I like to sneak in crazy Victorian gadgets that actually existed whenever I can, or modify them to suit my needs. Some of the technologies in my books are built out of flawed Victorian scientific theory that I made real. Some are more modern. There’s a cable transport in Blameless based off experimental military research from the Korean War. But the rest of the time I just make things up, or go running to some of my techy or RPG friends with a plot problem that needs a steampunk solution.
John: If you could choose 5 fictional characters from books to eat lunch with, who would they be, and why?
Gail: Well, this is me, so I’d like to make a motion to upgrade from lunch to high tea. But then I am in a quandary. Many of my favorite characters, while great in a fight, might be a little challenging over a civilized meal (like Tamora Pierce’s Alanna or Tanya Huff’s Staff Sergeant Kerr) so I’m going to choose more civilized characters. P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster (with Jeeves hovering in the background, of course), Mara from Feist and Wurt’s Servant of the Empire series, Terry Prachett’s Death, Douglas Adam’s Ford Prefect, and Jasper Fforde’s Tuesday Next. That ought to be quite the merry little gathering. If I could have some of my own characters I’d chuck Alexia and Lord Akeldama into the mix and have Professor Lyall and Floote organize it all.
Originally Posted by MurderBooks at July 13, 2010 05:05 PM
http://blogs.chron.com/murderblog/2010/07/high_tea_with_gail_carriger.html
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