An interview with author Francesca Forrest.
Hi!
Welcome to Zigzag Timeline. Can you tell us about your background as an author?
Thank you very much! It’s a pleasure to
be here. I’ve been enjoying checking out this blog and your website. As for my
background, I’m a pretty low-key writer, by which I mean, I’m not hugely
prolific and I’m not widely known, but I’ve been fortunate in that the people
who *have* discovered me have been very supportive. I’ve had short stories in
science fiction and fantasy zines like Strange
Horizons, GigaNotoSaurus, and The
Future Fire, and I self-published a novel, Pen Pal.
What
got you into writing?
My father is a writer, so I knew it was
a thing that people can be. And I always had stories in my head. I used to tell
myself stories as I walked to school—it was a mile walk; I loved that time.
What was the first
idea you had for your book, and how did the story grow from there?
This I remember very clearly: I was
inspired by a 2013
blog post by Sonya Taaffe in which she talked
about the Roman term exauguratio, for
the removal of a god from its temple or other sacred ground. She wrote, “Legendarily,
when Tarquin the fifth king of Rome built the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus
on the Capitoline, the ancient gods Terminus and Juventas refused to be
displaced by exauguratio and were incorporated into the new
site.”
I was enchanted by that idea, but it
was several years before I took it up in a story—and I’m not sure I’m done yet.
One day I may write more.
Among
your characters, who's your favorite? Could you please describe him/her?
That’s hard! I guess I love Ohin, the
titular inconvenient god, a lot, because he’s so many things—provocative,
dangerous, and bereft. But I also like Mr. Haksola, the university
administrator, a lot too. He’s so nervous! He has so much to hide! And he keeps
on having to reveal more and more.
What's your favorite scene from your
novelette? Could you please describe it?
I like all the scene that have deities
in them—I hope readers enjoy those too. The novelette’s so short I don’t want
to give anything away, but I hope readers will find some of them funny and some
of them moving. I’m hoping readers feel the presence of the gods and goddesses
very intensely.
What's
your favorite part of writing? Plotting? Describing scenes? Dialogue?
I like the part where I’m inventing it
in my head! The writing part is hard work—trying to make what’s in there come
alive on the page in a way that will conjure up similar sights and sounds and
feelings in readers’ minds. It’s satisfying work, though.
I like revision, too—the feeling of
“phew, much better,” that you get when you’ve fixed something.
How
long does it take you to write a book? Do you have a writing process, or do you
wing it?
It takes me a **long** time. I’m the
opposite of a well-oiled machine—I’m a squeaky, rusty machine. I write mostly
on computer, but if I wrote with a pen and paper, you’d see me mostly with the
pen poised a few millimeters above the paper, running through different ways of
saying something in my mind without actually committing to any of them. But I
get there eventually!
So far, I’ve always started at the
beginning of a story and then worked straight through to the end, rather than
jumping around and writing a scene here and a scene there—though of course
sometimes what you originally think will be the beginning doesn’t end up being
the beginning by the time you finish writing. I have an overall sense of where
the story’s going but not a detailed sense—that gives the story room to breathe
and evolve as I write.
What is it about the
genre you chose that appeals to you?
The sorts of ideas I get just happen to
be fantasy and science fiction—I don’t know why that is. What makes me love a
book is some mind-exploding quality about it—maybe it’s the insights, maybe
it’s the vividness of the characters, maybe it’s gorgeous writing, maybe the
flights of imagination. For me, it’s just easier to strive for that via fantasy
and science fiction—at least, so far.
Are
there any books or writers that have had particular influence on you?
Well, there are writers who made me the
person I am today—they definitely influenced me. Those would be people like CS
Lewis and Madeleine L’Engle and Lloyd Alexander. I feel like they were
co-parents with my real parents. Then there are writers or novels that
influenced me in the sense of broadening my horizons or my understanding of the
human condition—The Grapes of Wrath did
that, for example. And then there are
writers or novels that teach me stuff about the craft of writing—about
characterization, or pacing, or storytelling techniques. In genre fiction, a sci-fi
YA novel that I both really enjoyed as a story and that I learned from was Paolo
Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker. Both his
characters and his post-apocalyptic landscape really came alive for me in a way
I want my own writing to come alive for other people, so I paid attention to
how he did it, the sorts of sensory details he put in, the types of scenes he
had.
Did you ever surprise
yourself when you were writing your novelette? Characters who took on lives of
their own? Plot elements that took unexpected turns?
Yes! I had no idea what Ohin’s ultimate
fate was going to be when the story started—I felt like that was gradually
revealed to me as the characters and the situation took on depth.
Thanks for stopping
by!
Thank *you* very much for the opportunity!
ABOUT THE BOOK
What happens when you try to retire a god who is not ready to leave?
An official from the Ministry of Divinity arrives at a university to decommission a local god. She is expecting an easy decommissioning of a waning god of mischief but finds instead an active god not interested in retiring and university administrators who have not told her the full story about the god. Can the Decommisioner discover the true story of this god in time to prevent his most destructive round of mischief yet?
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Francesca Forrest is the author of Pen Pal (2013), a hard-to-classify novel from the margins, as well as short stories that have appeared in Not One of Us, Strange Horizons, and other online and print venues. She’s currently working on a post-apocalypse novel that focuses on the hope rather than the horror.
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