30 Day Book Challenge: Day Twenty-Seven

Day Twenty-Seven: A book you would write if you had all the resources.

Dadewalker by Lissa Bilyk.

What more resources do I need other than time, effort, imagination, and a way to store what I’ve written?

BTW - this is the actual cover we're using.

I first started what would eventually turn into Book 1 of a five-part series in 2002, when I was sixteen years old. The character Innocence Frostcaller came to me from nowhere, and was originally an elf with sharp, pointed teeth. At first, I couldn’t figure out the relationship between her and her shapeshifting sidekick Tagodan because it was at once a kind of guardian older-brother role, and advisor, protector, and confidant, and at the same time with a love so deep it could never be shattered. Later, as I delved more into Paracelsus‘ elemental theories and changed Innocence’s race a few times, I realised they were two sides of the same person. They were never, ever love interests. That’s just gross.

Rome was originally two characters (and after he was combined, his name was Lake). Laysa, Danu and Tai were inspired by my own friends at the time. It wasn’t until I realised Rome had to be just one character that I realised Innocence needed a romantic love interest: that’s where Prince Garuth came from. He sprang fully-formed into my head and in two weeks when I was supposed to be writing four essays for Uni, I wrote 15K words detailing some of their experiences as love interests.

A lot of the series has changed since I first conceived my heroine. I’ve been through several plots, added characters, deleted others, changed a few more. As I grew older and read more books, I realised that I could afford to make things more grown-up with darker themes, and not just write an adventure book full of fluff where no one ever got hurt. My four years at University helped me understand and develop the world.

I didn’t want vampires, werewolves, fairies, dragons, or wise old wizards in pointy hats, even though it’s a high fantasy with paranormal elements. Sure, the banshees are vampiric, Tagodan’s shapeshifts into a wolf, Fury was originally part sylph and had a dragon totem, Laysa and Rome are sorcerers, and the six Fae races are somewhat inspired by fairy tales, I knew I needed to write something much more original. I didn’t create any of the six Fae races, I simply took a basic idea and moulded them into what I needed in this world.

I finished Dadewalker in 2010, thinking it was a 122K word book. Then I thought harder about what I was trying to achieve: get people reading paranormal and fantasy that’s not run of the mill vampire crap or male-led quest stories. To write fantasy that’s more approachable for women fantasy lovers. So I split Dadewalker into two and re-wrote huge chunks of it. I’m still working on Darkwalker, Book 2. Both books will be put on sale this year, along with some other things I’ve written, while I work on writing the rest of the series.

I hope this makes other people realise that to write a novel all you really need to do is WRITE IT.

30 Day Book Challenge: Day Twenty-Six

Day Twenty-Six: A book you wish would be written

Deathwalker by Lissa Bilyk.

Indulge me. Deathwalker is Book 5 of the series I’m working on. Currently Book 1 and 2 are in editing stages, Book 3 is being written, and Books 4 and 5 are being planned and outlined.

I wish Deathwalker were written because I’m working linearly and that means that the whole series would be complete (minus the spin-offs).

While writing the books sure are a lot of fun and I know the characters pretty well because they’ve been in my head for so long, it’s also a lot of hard work weaving the entire narrative over five books (and spin-offs). How do you keep the story fresh and interesting, how do you write characters that people care about, how does it compare to other YA/high fantasy books on the market?

Will anyone like it if it’s self-published, and am I making the right choice when literary agents are looking for new and interesting books and mine might be one of them? Will anyone like it when it doesn’t fit into the normal YA subgenres: angels, vampires, werewolves, fairies, mermaids, paranormal romance, steampunk and so forth? Is my less common take on fantasy the Next Big Thing? (I’d like to think so!)

I have no idea when Deathwalker is going to go on sale. I’m not making any promises: after all, I know I’ll be moving to Australia, finding a new job, getting a new house, planning a wedding and so on before it’s written.
This cover is just a mock-up. It’s not the cover I’ll be using.

30 Day Book Challenge: Day Twenty-Five

Day Twenty-Five: Your favourite autobiographical or biographical book

Keep Smiling by Charlotte Church

I enjoyed this autobiography a lot more than Charlotte’s first one, Voice of an Angel: My Life (So Far). Basically because Voice of an Angel: My Life (So Far) only really told me things I already knew about. It was written when Charlotte was fifteen or so, after her Christmas album Dream a Dream had been released, but before they decided to record Enchantment.
This autobiography is more grown up. It really tells more behind-the-scenes stuff such as the reality behind her relationship with her ex-manager, her relationship with her parents, and Gavin (who at the time, was the father of Ruby but Dexter wasn’t born yet, they hadn’t been engaged and therefore hadn’t split up).

Yes, some of the tales told are re-tellings of tales we’ve heard a million times before – how she was discovered, her relationship with her aunt, her singing lessons with Lulu etc. But once you get past all the stuff we’ve already covered (with little insights such as a more mature look back on her childhood) you get into the really interesting stuff. The ex-boyfriends before Gavin seem to be largely ignored as far as I can remember – I don’t recall much mention of them – after all, they both sold their stories to tabloids.

30 Day Book Challenge: Day Twenty-Four

Day Twenty-Four: A book you later found out the author lied about

Forbidden Love/Honour Lost by Norma Khouri

Forbidden Love was first published in 2003 and placed in the autobiography section of the bookshops.

In the book (which I have not read), Khouri (a pen name) claimed that she grew up in Jordan, and that a close Muslim friend of her was murdered in an honour killing for falling in love with Christian soldier.

From the Wikipedia article: “Sydney Morning Herald journalist Malcolm Knox uncovered Khouri as a fraud in 2004, a year after the book’s release, exposing that she fabricated the story and sold it untruthfully as a memoir. She had lived in Chicago for most of her life and was married with two children. As a result, publisher Random House pulled the book off the shelves in Australia and England indefinitely.”
Forbidden Lie$ is a documentary made to discover whether or not Khouri lied, or as she claimed, took ‘artistic license’ with the book. The documentary discovered that Khouri could not substantiate any claims she made, no one could find any evidence of the friend that was supposedly murdered, and that Khouri had actually committed other frauds on her elderly neighbour before the book was written.

All in all, this was a pretty rotten trick by someone claiming something fantastic as autobiography. If it was simply submitted as a fiction novel, it probably wouldn’t have even made it to a publisher. As it was, promoting the story as real-life and autobiographical made it more interesting and intense. It’s a pity the background research wasn’t done before it was published, but I guess this goes to show that even criminals can slip through the cracks.

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30 Day Book Challenge: Day Twenty-Three

Day Twenty-Three: Your favourite romance novel

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.

Technically, Jane Eyre is not a romance but a bildungsroman, a tale of moral growth from child to adulthood and overcoming the odds. But there is a fair amount of romance in it, in much the same way Pride and Prejudice is a comedy of manners, not a romance. So in the spirit of romance (because I’ve only ever read two romance genre novels and they were freaking awful) I’m choosing Jane Eyre as my favourite romance novel.

Why?

The main reason I love this book so much: the romance isn’t about two incredibly beautiful people falling in ‘love’ and finding minor obstacles to overcome. It isn’t a tale of two beauties: Jane is exceedingly plain and Rochester is in fact kind of ugly. Too many aspects of romance have people immediately attracted to impossible to resist mates, they’re positioned to be the most attractive people on the planet: where is the challenge in that? Where is the drama?

So looking past the physical aspects of their relationship, they delve into personality, which I personally believe is the most important aspect of a relationship. Their relationship woes are pretty major: a previous marriage, Jane’s lack of money and standing, Jane leaving Rochester’s employment and finding other suitors etc.

Jane is such a great character. She’s so totally independent and strong. I mean, she totally loves Rochester but because of her morals, she won’t marry him while he’s still married to the crazy woman in the attic (a recurring Gothic theme). She leaves even though she has nothing, and then it turns out she inherits a great deal of moolah, so she goes back to find Rochester and finds him disabled and destitute, but still loves him anyway and wants to be with him. My favourite quote from any book comes from this novel:

“Reader, I married him.”

Damn right, she did!