Interview with Skyler White Author of In Dreams Begin

Today we have an interview with Skyler White author of and Falling, fly and the new book In Dreams Begin.

Q: In and Falling, Fly you introduced us to a lush world filled with mythology, philosophy and so much more- it was book that made readers think. What will In Dreams Begin make readers think about?

A: In Dreams Begin imagines a modern girl whose awareness wakes up in the body of a Victorian woman, so it probably won’t come as a shock to hear I was thinking about the contrasts and similarities between women’s lives and bodies, their freedoms and concerns in the past and now. I was interested in the many different meanings of “dream,” and in possession, so all of that is there, under the surface of the story.

Q: Can you give us a brief description of In Dreams Begin?

A: Sure! In Dreams Begin is a secret history/time travel that begins when the consciousness of a modern woman is stolen on her wedding night and channeled into the body of Maud Gonne, a beautiful Irish revolutionary who believed herself to be part faery. Reeling from the change of body and frightened by the change in time, Laura meets the poet W.B. Yeats and finds in him the wild romanticism she longs for, but has carefully avoided, in her contemporary life. Yeats, meeting Maud for the first time, is fascinated by the modern soul he sees in her. As Laura tries to negotiate the present with the man she married and the man she’s falling in love with in the past, Yeats summons all the power of the Victorian occult to establish who or what he found in Maud the first night, drawing on the help of Ida Jameson, a woman dangerously distorted by the rigidities of Victorian womanhood.

Q: Do any of the characters from and Falling, Fly appear in this story?

A: Yes, but really only as Easter eggs, not in a way that’s integral to either book. Both overlaps are basically “spot the bunny” games, so I’ll tell you who and where, but I’m going to do it in white, since they’re spoilers. Highlight to read: Olivia (from Falling ) and Laura (from Dreams) are seatmates on the plane to Ireland. Their meeting is brief, but it’s in both books. In Dreams Begin is the origin of Hell and Gaehod. Both the place and the person from Falling are created in this book, the place in Ida’s parroting of Yeats’s vision for “an Irish Eleusis” and Gaehod when the ghost that has been sleeping takes possession of the body of MacGregor Mathers.

Q: Tell us a little about your main characters, what’s going on with them in this book?

A: Laura, moving back and forth between time periods and men, is grappling with what love and fidelity, body and soul have to do with each other.

Will Yeats, passionate in his politics, love and poetry, is pursuing the spirit he only occasionally finds embodied in one of the most famously beautiful women of his generation.

And Ida Jameson, enamored of Maud, but thwarted by a life of rejection and repression, is working to manipulate Yeats and both women through Laura’s possession of Maud, and by the soul of possession itself (or himself).

Q: Time travel, the occult, possession, historical settings and figures…it’s a complex world you’ve created in this novel. Do you think it may be too much for fans of the genre?

A: Probably for some of them. But that’s okay. There are plenty of things written for folks who like a quick read. And I’m glad, because I’m one of them. But I also like complex worlds full of strange action where the ground shifts and the ideas swim around. And there’s not quite so much of that available. So I write for those of us who want to play in that kind of sandbox from time to time. It’ll probably never put me on any major best seller lists, but I have met the most amazing people in this space – other writers and readers at cons or who email me. It’s a smaller world, but I love the aliens too much to come back. Which isn’t to say that I want to be obscure or difficult. My personal task as a writer is to keep getting clearer and cleaner without losing any of the complexity, nuance or layers of meaning.

Q: The details of the occult practices along with the rich historical settings are so vivid you must have put in a lot of research time. How long did you work on this book and how extensive was your research?

A: Dreams took me almost two years to write, the first six months of which were just research. I read both Yeats’s autobiographies and several biographies. I read Maud’s autobiography and two very good biographies of her. I read all the letters they wrote each other. And I read some specifically Irish history.

After I got the timelines sketched in, I did location research and wrote a first draft. The writing itself turned up racks of additional questions though, so I did another round of research between the second and third draft. And the whole time I was writing, I was reading Yeats. In the course of the time it took me to write Dreams, I read all of his poetry, and collected the lines and little snippets that preface each chapter.

Finally, with a pretty evolved draft finished, I went to Ireland, London and Paris for two weeks and visited every location (or the closest thing still around) where I had a scene set. I have a tiny little netbook computer, so I was able to actually re-write scenes in the places where they were set. Which was wonderful. There are some pictures from that trip on my website here.

Q: What books are currently in your to-read pile?

A: It’s actually more of a tower. On the teetering top: the Stacia Kane sequel to “Unholy Ghosts,” which I loved, “The Hemlock Cup” by Bettany Hughes, and “Sandman Slim” by Richard Kadrey

Q: What authors have influenced your work?

A: That’s such a hard question, because I can’t imagine any I’ve read who haven’t. But the Greatest Hits list would have to include: the D’Auliers, Rosemary Sutcliff, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Anne Rice, Tom Robbins, Neil Gaiman, Emma Bull and Margret Atwood.

Q: So what’s next? Are there more books coming in this darkly intellectual series?

A: Oooh, I like that “darkly intellectual!” Lovely combination of words. See? Writers. We’re good like that.

Yes, there are more books coming, no I don’t know what next. I have a very expressionistic erotic novella and a three-book contemporary detective series on submission right now. They both belong to the same story universe as Falling and Dreams, but they go very different places.

Feel free to share an excerpt if you wish.

I’d love to! This is from Chapter 5:

As children, Maud and Ida had walked thus, deliberate and slow, down Donnybrook Road, both of them shaking, although only Maud with fear. Arm in trembling arm again now, through the dark October graves, toward Georges’s tomb, Ida still needed to caution herself against skipping in her first giddy moment since arriving in France almost a month ago. The country irritated her, the rigorous attention the nation paid to beauty, the constant wine in small glasses, and how at home Maud was within it.

Ever the hostess—ever the French hostess, for all her Irish color—Maud had brought red wine and flowers to the crypt. Ida, always more practical, carried candles, blankets, and lap rugs. Maud unlocked the metal doors of Georges’s little memorial chapel, and Ida stepped into its dark of underground smells and windless cold.

Ida dropped the furs in a corner while Maud cursed benignly, burning matches, unable to make the flame stick to the candle wicks. If they lived together and entertained, they would bustle about thus, in friendly silence, preparing for their guests. But tonight only Lucien was expected, he and whatever spirits came, invited or otherwise. Ida tore the bloom from one of Maud’s flowers and scattered the petals over the altar. “Why don’t you let me light the candles, darling?” she suggested.

Maud leaned her back against the cold and unadorned stone wall. “Ida . . .”

“I know.” Ida kept her smile sympathetic, and took the matches from Maud’s ghost-white fingers. “Pour the wine.”

“Ida, I don’t think I can do what I . . .”

“Go ahead and have yourself a glassful, dear. We have more than enough for our communion.”

Maud took glasses from the wooden crate they had provisioned over several trips to the little mausoleum. Ida lit the candles, humming to herself. Maud already had a reputation for pleasant evening gatherings, but Ida would raise the tone of the soirées. She and Maud would talk Art and God with their guests, not only politics. The tomb’s rich, under-earth smell of graveworms and mushrooms crept over Ida. Maud had been too frightened of tonight to eat, but when they entertained together, Cook would serve duck in whiskey sauce, or salmon with morels.

The candles blazed like a birthday cake, dancing in the drafts admitted through the glassless windows and the open grate in the door. Possibly too from the colder metal doors in the cold stone floor. Maud sat on the provisions box, wordlessly taking her wine like the poison or medicine it was. “Did you want some, Ida?”

“No.”

“He will be here soon.”

“Yes, I should think so.” Ida stood over Maud, strong and unafraid, behind Maud’s sloping, robed shoulders. In Paris, Halloween festivities would be mocking the rites and devils Ida and Maud hoped to make real tonight, in the little village of Samois. Through the provincial streets to its tiny cemetery, Maud had walked, a priestess or a secret witch cloaked and hooded with Ida, her familiar bird, wing-in-elbow beside her. But inside Georges’s little burial chapel, Maud shrunk to an Irish crone, her ritual robes a weathered shawl wrapped over curling shoulders and the hollowed-out hole where her heart had been, and Ida, her carrion bird behind her.

She plucked the pins from Maud’s hair. “Let’s prepare you,” she whispered.

Maud did not move while Ida’s pecking fingers unwound the braided skeins of rust and shadow. It slithered free over Maud’s shoulders, and she absently pushed back the strands snaking into her face. She caught Ida’s hand in an icy grip. “Ida, I’m frightened.”

Maud choked on the blood-scraped whisper, but Ida had heard, and her smile broke like a towering thundercloud. Maud’s deathbed promise to her father broken—to never be afraid of anything, not even death—and Ida here beside her. She sank down beside Maud’s shuddering shoulders and wrapped her robe-winged arms around them. “Shhh,” she murmured, cheek in flowing hair, lips to sunken throat. “You must master your fear. There is no other way.”

Thank you so much for joining us today at Fang-tastic Books.

Thank you for having me! It’s always a pleasure.

Skyler White is the nationally bestselling author of dark fantasy novels ‘and Falling, Fly’ (Berkley, March 2010) and ‘In Dreams Begin’ (Berkley, November 2010). She lives in Austin, TX. Visit her on the web at http://www.skylerwhite.com.

A Review of In Dreams Begin

.25
4.25 Fangs for In Dreams Begin by Skyler White

Book Blurb:

From a Victorian Ireland of magic, poetry and rebellion, Ida Jameson, an amateur occultist, reaches out for power, but captures Laura Armstrong, a modern-day graphic artist instead. Now, for the man or demon she loves, each woman must span a bridge through Hell and across history . . . or destroy it.

“Every passionate man is linked with another age, historical or imaginary, where alone he finds images that rouse his energy.” W. B. Yeats

Anchored in fact on both sides of history, Laura and Ida, modern rationalist and fin de siècle occultist, are linked from the moment Ida channels Laura into the body of celebrated beauty and Irish freedom-fighter Maud Gonne. When Laura falls—from an ocean and a hundred years away—passionately, Victorianly in love with the young poet W. B. Yeats, their love affair entwines with Irish history and weaves through Yeats’s poetry until Ida discovers something she wants more than magic in the subterranean spaces in between.

With her Irish past threatening her orderly present and the man she loves in it, Laura and Yeats—the practical materialist and the poet magus—must find a way to make love last over time, in changing bodies, through modern damnation, and into the mythic past to link their pilgrim souls . . . or lose them forever.

In Dreams Begin is an entrancing surreal escape into dreams and the past. A dance of feelings will surround you throughout this thought provoking, complex and completely engrossing read.

From the moment I started reading I was thrown into this sensual, complicated and trippy dream scape as confused and entranced as the main character Laura but just like her, I wasn't quick to leave. I didn't want to put the book down, I had to know what was going on.

This book is by no means an easy read but it is well worth the effort.

On her wedding night modern day Laura is pulled into the past and into the body of Maud by Ida, an occultist in love with Maud, who accidentally channeled Laura into Maud's body.

For weeks Laura is pulled into the past when she should be drifting into dreamland, all the while her new husband Amit sleeps beside her never knowing his wife has gone into the past to Victorian England and Ireland meeting people that lived long ago, loving people that lived long ago.

I love how actual historical figures like W.B. Yeats are thrown into the story and become so real and so alive for both Laura and the reader.

The addition of Yeats poetry to the beautiful dream scape of the story added an unexpected element that really completed this book. You are left wondering "what if" and "how".

White's research must have been extensive to add such realistic descriptions of history and the settings to make you feel as if you are there.

The backdrop was as real as the characters who were complete with all their feelings and flaws. I think Ida was one of the most complicated characters I've read. She is someone you can relate to, sometimes, then hate at other times. Her motivations pushed her to obsession turning her into a dark character but an interesting one.

In Dreams Begin is a lush, sensual tale that will make you question feelings, thoughts and love. You'll start wondering how strong is love, can love surpass boundaries such as time, do soul mates really exist, and is a metaphysical affair really cheating?

The compelling story blends with history, mythology, folklore and poetry. White's artistic writing style may appear chaotic to some but her poetic thoughts add intensity to the prose which make her books rich reading experiences.

Interested in learning more? Read an excerpt here.

And visit the author at http://www.skylerwhite.com/

Interview with Skyler White & Giveaway of and Falling, Fly

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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Monday Musings March 8, 2010

How was every one's weekend?

Mine was kinda lazy. I finished reading Black Magic Sanction by Kim Harrison (review coming soon) and watched a movie or two. Nothing exciting.

BTW, the new Fame movie totally sucked.

I did a little bit of writing but mostly worked on stuff for my daughter who just rejoined girl scouts and for my oldest son. I am busy working with him and planning the rest of his senior year- prom, open house, etc. I had to dig through albums to find baby photos of him for his yearbook which he will probably hate. That's OK he'll appreciate the gesture later in life. As a teenager he appreciates nothing. I am sure I didn't either. OK as I think about it not true, I definitely appreciated things more than he does but I was still an arrogant, selfish kid too.

I also did a lot of cooking. Nothing fancy. Normally on weekends I usually make hubby cook but he had to work.

So not much else to chat about right now. I have to go write and make up for all the writing I didn't do this weekend.

This week at Fang-tastic Books I have a couple authors scheduled for interviews and guest blogs: Tuesday is Eliza Gayle, Wednesday is an interview with Skyler White author of and Falling, Fly, Thursday is an interview and giveaway with Denise Verrico author of the vampire novel Cara Mia, and Friday I'll be giving away a copy of Angelology. Saturday Shadowfae author Erica Hayes will be dropping by for a guest blog about her newest book.

Be sure to enter all of last week's contests before tonight at midnight EST.

A Review of and Falling Fly by Skyler White

.5


and Falling, fly by Skyler White is an intellectual playground of paranormal romance and urban fantasy like nothing you've ever read before. It blends elements of mythology, psychology, neuroscience...it's a wild ride full of riddles, love, desire and read between the lines meaning.

I was hooked from page one.

and Falling, fly is a literary roller coater ride in an alternate world where Hell is a steampunk hotel underground in Ireland and vampires are angels of desire, sexual without the ability for intercourse and the truth is spoken in riddles by a serpent. The damned, lost and reborn or in White's words "the damned, cursed and misbegotten" walk among us humans, always feeling different and left out- but can find their place in L'Otel Mathillide.

Blurb:

In a dark and seedy underground of burned-out rock stars and angels-turned- vampires, a revolutionary neuroscientist and a fallen angel must put medicine against mythology in an attempt to erase their tortured pasts...but at what price?

Olivia, vampire and fallen angel of desire, is hopeless...and damned. Since the fall from Eden, she has hungered for love, but fed only on desire. Dominic O'Shaughnessy is a neuroscientist plagued by impossible visions. When his research and her despair collide at L'Otel Mathillide-a subterranean hell of beauty, demons, and dreams-rationalist and angel unite in a clash of desire and damnation that threatens to destroy them both.

In this fractured Hotel of the Damned, Olivia and Dominic discover the only force consistent in their opposing realities is the deep, erotic gravity between them. Bound to each other finally in a knot of interwoven freedoms, Dominic and Olivia-the vision-touched scientist and the earth-bound angel, reborn and undead-encounter the mystery of love and find it is both fall...and flight.

This visual masterpiece has the qualities of a cult favorite, a book that the intellectual will love because of its visual qualities, its deep meanings both hidden between the lines and in the riddles of the words all encased in a story that is is so dynamic. It questions love, desire, myth, heaven and hell...

This book really made my brain work and even after I finished the book I kept questioning what I had read. I like books that do that- that make me think.

Some of my favorite quotes come from the serpent:


from page 226

"Push man into woman and find oneness once more," it whispered. "Lose yourself in another, and find yourself in love."

from page 230

"You get pretty close don't you?" The serpent's sibilant voice whispered in Dominic's mind as much as in his bleeding ear. "Touching heaven and gutter, orgasm-blind seeing self and other? Your recreational re-creating of creation procreates. Sex apes God, and creates life."

"And pushes us into duality again." Dominic whispered.

The whole book is a dark and unique look at desire, love, self worth and the damage that lives inside us all. The things we have to overcome to love, to accept, to be what we were meant to be. Completely intriguing.

I can honestly say this probably isn't a book for everyone.

If you want a simple uncomplicated read that is purely escapism this is not the book for you but if you are interested in an intellectual read that combines PNR and UF in ways you've never expected then you might enjoy this book. You'll have to keep your mind open and be ready to expreience a trippy alternate universe.

I look forward to reading more from Skylar White.

If you'd like to learn more about Skyler please drop by for her interview here at Fang-tastic Books on March 10. Until then you can visit http://www.skylerwhite.com/