| A Conversation With James Hetley | |||||||||
| An interview with Alisa McCune | |||||||||
| November 2004 | |||||||||
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The series focuses on Maureen and Jo -- sisters and witches. The sisters are of a world known as the Summer Country -- the world of Merlin, Arthur, and all different kinds of beasts and powers. This world is not very hospitable and the sisters are targets for those who wish to use them for their powers. James Hetley has kindly submitted to my questions from his home in the wilds of Maine. What is your background? How does it impact on your writing? 
I've lived fairly long times in a number of different places -- Illinois and Georgia and Michigan and New Jersey and now
Maine. Moving around and then staying for a while has made me learn new people and places. Even now, after thirty years in
Maine, I still am something of an observer and outsider. I think that you see things differently that way, that people and
settings become more vivid to an outsider than to someone who is so immersed in a place and a culture that he doesn't notice it.
Well, the "vet" part and the "electronics instructor" part coincided, and I was drafted. To be precise, I am
a "Vietnam Era Vet." I never served in Vietnam, just was in the army during the war. A couple of the other items on
the list were summer jobs. I still work as an architect, self-employed. Karate served as exercise and meditation,
until I got tired of sparring with testosterone-hyped boys younger than my own sons.
My architecture career rates as undistinguished, deliberately so. I prefer to work on small projects in small
offices, allowing me to stick my fingers into every phase of a design and construction job. A lot of my current work
involves renovation of older buildings, 1850s to 1940s, complex problem-solving that sometimes becomes almost as much
archaeology as architecture. I work a lot with non-profit clients, mainly social service agencies.
They have given me broad experience, meeting a lot of different kinds of people in a lot of different
situations. I think some writers make a mistake in trying to tell stories before they have lived long enough
to have stories to tell.
I enjoy reading stories, telling stories, making up people and situations. And I've always found that words come easily.
I'm about a quarter to a third into the first draft of Ghost Point, another semi-contemporary fantasy (70s) that
I describe as "Beowulf meets The Taming of the Shrew." It also uses a Maine coastal setting.
Dragon's Eye and Dragon's Teeth run parallel to The Summer Country and The Winter Oak, with
a different location and cast of characters but set in the same fictional Maine at about the same time. Think of the
second two books as the result of alternate history, with Welsh refugees landing on the Maine coast in the era of Edward
I and forming an alliance with the local tribes. Then toss in a line of matriarch witches and a town run by generations
of pirates and bring the whole mix down to current times.
Not immediately. I have the rough form of Pendragon Autumn in my head, which will be Brian's story
and sorting out the mess he has found in the Pendragons, and the "spring" story will resolve the problem of Khe'sha
and the dragon hatchlings. Both of these wait several years down the road.
In spite of the obvious fantasy elements, I try to write "realistic" stories. Life doesn't provide happy
endings. Happy points, yes, even long happy stretches of time. That's probably the most you can expect for
any of my characters. You have to remember that for a writer, "happy" often equals "dull." Stories need conflict.
Not really. Maureen walked up to me and told me I was going to write her story.
Very little actual research. A lot of the background represents settings, people, and events I've seen around
me. I read up on Celtic myth, but even there a lot of it comes from osmosis -- one of the few benefits of middle
age is that I've encountered a lot of people, places, and things in over fifty years, and read a lot of books. I
had to look up the various bits of Gaelic and Irish that I've used, as well as specifics on Ogham runes and similar esoterica.
This will sound faintly psychotic, but the characters took care of that. I just had to listen to them.
Through the years, I have known or read about a lot of people in those situations. I've seen the way they
react to the world. From there, moving to "why" is fairly easy. I'm afraid that real-life horror stories are common.
Winter and spring can be beautiful around here, but they can be deadly as well. Even this early in the autumn,
we have already had several "exposure" deaths in the woods, elderly people who became lost and died before the search teams found them.
No! All the characters are composites, and I don't want to be sued!
The Summer Country was my sixth completed novel manuscript. Obviously, that takes a lot of
time and sweat, and involves receiving a lot of rejection notices. Even The Summer Country was
rejected once, although my first submission was to a contest.
Right now, I'm reading Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss -- not because I'm worried about semi-colons
and a zero-tolerance approach to the apostrophe, but because it is fun. Just finished Jasper Fforde's
Something Rotten, also fun. If a book doesn't entertain me or give me characters I care about,
I usually put it down.
Finding out what happens next. When I start one of these stories, I don't know how it will come out.
I'm a member of an email writing group. We exchange short stories and sections of novel-length work, offering
critiques that range from detailed line-edits to more general "Why'd she do this?" questions. I also read a
number of the authors' newsgroups at sff.net to make connections and talk about writerly stuff.
I've read the genre since I was maybe seven or eight or nine, grade school anyway, a long time ago in a
far-away land. I like the imagination, and particularly the "what-ifs." Favorites have always been the
ones with intriguing characters, Robert A. Heinlein and Terry Pratchett and Roger Zelazny and Spider Robinson.
I've never been to a Con. I may ease into them, gently, starting small, but I'm not
terribly comfortable in crowds and meeting strangers.
I read, I like to bicycle in warm weather or ski cross-country in the winter if the snow obliges, I
listen to music. I spend too much time playing computer games. I haven't given up the day job yet.
I don't watch many movies. They tend to be predictable.
I don't know of any offers for movie rights or audio books. The Science Fiction Book Club brought out an
edition of The Summer Country and has purchased rights for The Winter Oak. The Summer Country
is also available in electronic form, so probably The Winter Oak will follow. There's a French-language edition
of The Summer Country due out in mid-November; the publisher is Editions Mnemos of Paris.
Alisa discovered science fiction at the tender age of eight. She devoured The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis and never looked back. She lives in Chicago with her husband, cat, and 5000 books. For more information please visit her web site at alisaandmike.com. |
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