Please welcome author Skyler White to Fang-tastic Books today!
Thanks so much for joining us, Skyler.
Q: To get started can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
You know, I’m a writer, and even I have a hard time finding the narrative thread to my life. I grew up in a very academic household – both of my parents were college professors. I was a dancer. A very, very physical person in this very heady household. So I ran away and joined the circus. Actually, I left home for a performing arts high school, but they turn out to be shockingly similar.
Later, I found a sort of mental-physical point of balance as a theater director, which was work I loved, but when I added Single Mother to the teeter-totter, it upended and I went into advertising which allowed me to be creative and paid. Looking for a place of peace between all the things I want to do and need to be led me through a couple of other careers until my husband and my best friend sat me down one night with a glass of whiskey and pointed out that writing was the one consistent thread through all my endeavors. This scared the shit out of me. So I had to take the bait. I wrote a novel. I buried it. I wrote another one that scared me even more. Now I’m here to promote it.
Q: For people who haven’t read “and Falling, Fly” can you give us a sense what it’s about?
It’s about the angel of desire. She’s a fallen angel and a vampire. She can only see herself in mirrors if someone who wants her is looking at her, and she can only feed from those who desire or fear her. When she finally concludes everyone you don’t love tastes the same, and gives up, she goes home to Ireland, to the Hotel of the Damned. The hotel is this weird, steampunk, underground refuge where she meets Dominc O’Shaunnessey. Dominic is a radical neuroscientist whose research is fueled by the secret that he suffers from these inexplicable flashbacks to things that never happened. He’s trying to cure what he thinks are seizures. He tries to enroll Olvia in his research study. She says medicine can’t cure mythology, and that his “seizures” are memories of past incarnations, which is completely unacceptable to him as a scientist, even if it would actually explain what he’s been experiencing.
Q: You’ve really turned the vampire mythos upside down with this book. Was that your intention?A: I wanted to tell a story that centered around an exploration of desire, so everything in the book radiates out from that point. Vampires as hungry, insatiable predators or parasites gave me a couple of different angles to play with that wouldn’t have been accessible with a purely human cast. It wasn’t my intention to turn their mythos upside down, but just tweak it enough to best serve the story.
Q: Turning fallen angels into vampires… That’s a unique concept; how did it come about?
A: It’s another version of the same answer, I’m afraid. Angels were appealing to me as a personification of an ideal or concept. So the Angel of Desire would be desire itself. Desire in its perfected state. But I’m not really interested in the platonic ideal of desire. I’m much more interested in the human/ideal negotiation, so my angels are all fallen. Fallen angels of other ideals wouldn’t be vampires – they’d be something else.
Q: Where do you get your ideas?
A: I wrote ‘and Falling, Fly’ because I needed to tangle with Desire – with what it means to want and not get, with what turns desire into craving or addiction, and what takes it away. Because I was interested in the difference between wanting and being wanted, Olivia can only feed on people who desire or fear her. Because I struggle with body image, she’s a shape-shifter. Because she let me wrestle with these things through her, she is an angel – even if she’s still kicking my ass.
Q: Does the world really need another vampire story? (of course here at Fang-tastic Books we certainly think it does)
A: Absolutely. The same way it needs another love story or another buddy pic. To me, the best new stories are direct confrontations with old stories, and vampires are fabulously rich symbolically. Like most powerful symbols, they can be a kind of short hand, and writers can get lazy and let them carry too much of the narrative burden. When people say they’re tired of vampires or fairies or whatever, I think that’s what they’re reacting to. But these things are rich and lasting for a reason and we always have something to learn from them, if we allow them to challenge us.
Q: This new series you are writing, are the books connected at all by settings or characters or just connected through a theme?A: They’re all set in the same story-world. There’s a little overlap in character, but it’s the world that really creates the through-line.
Q: Will Olivia or any other characters from ‘and Falling, Fly’ appear in any of your upcoming books?
A: Olivia has a cameo in the next book, and there’s at least one other character who shows up, too. I have a few ideas for minor characters in ‘and Falling, Fly’ that might get their own stories eventually as well.
Q: Your vision of hell in ‘and Falling, Fly’ is quite different than many would expect as are the ones who are considered to be damned. It really makes the reader consider the idea of good and evil, heaven and hell. What was your inspiration for the hell you described in the book?
A: It’s going to sound simplistic, but the inspiration for the hotel really came from thinking about Hell as home of the damned. The damned, cursed and misbegotten, in my little world, are people with an uneasy relationship, each for different reasons, with the divine or ideal. So where would they feel at home? The hotel is what I created as the answer. Hell isn’t a place of punishment, but a place of origin. It’s the state of being damned that’s painful, not where they live.
Q: In your world all creatures that are “Other”, like the Reborn and the Damned, they are all called to hell, but why? Can they be “fixed” or just “enlightened” to their condition?
A: It’s where they come from, so they feel more comfortable there. The surface world feels alien to them, or they feel their not-right-ness more keenly there. So, they seek out the hotel for the comfort of being among others like themselves, at home with those who are equally not-at-home with the surface.
Q: Could you tell us about your current work in progress?
A: Happily! I’m in edits for ‘In Dreams Begin’, a time-travel romance/horror which comes out in December. It’s the story of a contemporary graphic artist from Portland, Oregon who, on her wedding night, is channeled into the body of Maud Gonne, the Victorian, Irish revolutionary and famous beauty who may have been part faerie. The amateur occultist who has channeled her then introduces her to WB Yeats, and the two fall in love.
I’ve been having so much fun with this book, in large part because history has been remarkably cooperative. Yeats was heavily involved in the occult. He and Maud Gonne both left a record of their “marriage on the spiritual plane”, and Maud was widely regarded by the Irish peasants she worked among as one of the Sidhe, a race of faerie famous for stealing the souls of brides.
Q: Why are all your books set in Ireland? Have you been there?
A: I’ve been twice. Once before I started writing, as sort of a personal odyssey and once after I finished the first draft of In Dreams Begin to do research for it. And really, it’s all the books so far that have been set there. I have an idea for the next one I want to write, and it’s all in the states. I have another one that’s set, at least in part, in Germany. The thing I’m interested in is the mythic element of a person or monster or country. The Hotel of the Damned is underground in Ireland because of Ireland’s passage tombs and stories of buried kings and queens, because underground is so rich symbolically for what is unconscious, and because it’s where I’m from genetically. In Germany, the damned would have their secret home in the universities. In America, it’d down unmarked roads.
Q: What are some of your hobbies besides writing?
A: I love to cook, and I dance, but spending time with my kids, my husband and my friends occupies most of my hobby energy.
Q: Name one thing readers would be surprised to learn about you?
A: I’ve never had a creative writing class.
Skyler White is author of dark fantasy novels ‘and Falling, Fly’ (Berkley, March 2010) and ‘In Dreams Begin’ (Berkley, March 2010).She lives in Austin, TX.
http://www.skylerwhite.com
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