Midnight Moon Cafe

MMC: Who influenced you the most in your writing? 

SW: My parents introduced me to a love of reading and language, and gave me a great, well-rounded liberal arts background. My Russian ballet teacher taught me self-discipline, or rather I taught myself to be disciplined in self-defense relative to her. A college friend raised by hippies strongly influenced my world-view, and a maniacal English professor exposed me to a kind of intellectual literary passion that was so fierce it was almost erotic. Countless writers from Marion Zimmer Bradley to Tom Robbins to Diana Gabaldon to Barbara Kingsolver to Neil Gaiman have influenced how and what I write. My husband and my children have shaped who I am. I couldn’t pick one thread out and say it was most influential.

MMC: What attracted you to write paranormal characters?

SW: I’m such a sucker for symbolism, and paranormal characters lend themselves to that so easily. Writers play a “what does it mean” game with readers, and the ability to tip into the supernatural allows me to layer every character, not only with gender and physical description, but with myth and make-believe. It means I can give the reader more to interpret, more to play with, and although my job is primarily to tell a good and engaging story, I really enjoy the complexity you can access with paranormal characters.

MMC: Can you talk about what sparked the genesis of and Falling, Fly?

SW: and Falling, Fly began with Olivia (the heroine) and her sister Sylvia. I wrote a short story quite a while ago to explore the idea of what the Ethical Consumerism movement would mean for vampires. That story led to Sylvia’s “Quarry” initiative, which hires willing “victims” for vampires to hunt, screens them for blood-borne disease or drugs, and displays them naked in a big, one-way glass tank for the vampires to pick from. There’s a fee to the vampire, who must also accept limits on punctures made and blood consumed, but who gets to hunt without fear of being caught by modern forensics or a guilty conscience.

Olivia is a mutation of that character and another which came out of some work a group of my friends and I were doing in an online creative forum, discussing and playing with the ideas from Lynda Barry’s book One! Hundred! Demons!. We were each contributing personal demons, and Olivia (and Alyx too, to a lesser extent) evolved from a devil of mine who’s called Too Much is Not Enough – a personification of a dangerous attraction I have to excess.

MMC: When you began writing your book, did you make a conscious decision to write in first-person, or did the story itself dictate?

SW: Olivia’s voice came very easily in first person. I like writing that way. It feels very immediate and real to me, like I’m insider her skin looking out. I wrote her in first-person present-tense, and Dominic in third-person past. Then I learned that “One Cannot Do That.” So I moved the entire more-than-half of the novel that’s in Olivia’s voice into third person. Now that’s a boring job!

And it didn’t work. I hated it. It sounded stilted and weird, and the moves between the Olivia and Dominic sections weren’t clear enough. It was easy to lose who was talking. So I moved Olivia’s scenes back to first-person present. And I did actually move it back rather than reverting, it because the switching process had created some positive changes I wanted to keep.

I moved it back and decided to let it sink or swim as it was – half in first-person, half in third. It was just one more reason why I was sure and Falling, Fly would never cut it as a debut novel. It was going to be the one I wrote and never sold. It was weird and edgy and experimental and “out there” and no agent was going to touch it. Then one did.

I still feel incredibly fortunate that Holly Root was willing to take me on and that my editor Leis Pederson at Berkley was up for the gamble. Trying to get agented and sold is always a long shot. It just seemed it might be even more so for and Falling, Fly. Still, I knew what I wanted to do and felt then – and truthfully, still feel now – that the whole thing, from writing to selling to promoting, is a huge gamble. This is the way I want to write. That’s up to me. Whether or not I get to keep doing it is largely up to readers.

MMC: How much time did you dedicate to research for your story?

SW: I could be clever and say “all my life,” because I actually believe all the reading I did of Greek and Christian mythology when I was a kid and throughout my education fed directly into and Falling, Fly, but I’ll stick with a more conventional definition of research. I had taken a trip to Ireland two years before I started writing, and I ended up going back into my trip notes and photos for research once I decided to set the second portion of the book in Ireland. I re-read Milton and Dante, and I learned a lot about neuroscience for the book, but most of the real research was done as I wrote to fill in gaps.

MMC: It's been said your book is the antithesis of Twilight. Can you explain?

SW: I should explain I didn’t write it to oppose Twilight, but reading Twilight after finishing and Falling, Fly, I was struck by how diametrically opposed our heroines are. Bella seems content to trader her eponymous beauty for the love of a powerful vampire. Olivia is a vampire and deeply unhappy with the effect her beauty has on mortals, despite needing their desire to feed on. Bella needs constant rescue and protection from supernatural forces. Olivia is a supernatural force in her own right. Finally, Bella inspires a desire in Edward which he must war against and resist, and for which he feels ashamed. Olivia’s struggle is almost the complete inverse. She wants to feel. She wants to wake up to her own desires, not resist them, and the human body with its hungers are signs of redemption, not sources of shame.

MMC: One of the settings in your book is a subterranean/steampunk-ish Ireland. Could you tell our readers more about that "world" within our own?

SW: The Hotel of the Damned is situated under the Rock of Cashel in Ireland, but it occupies a space in a parallel or nested reality where those things that are figurative above ground are literal. It’s kind of difficult to talk about without going way down a philosophical rabbit-hole, but what I’m interested in is playing in the space between what’s true and what’s real. The Hotel is Hell, and Hell has no power of its own. It requires human action to drive it. The “steampunk” elements are all energy-capture mechanisms that take the force created by opening a door or closing a window and shunts it back into the system. It’s human engagement that fuels the system.

MMC: Some writers incorporate pieces of themselves in their protagonist. Did any bits of you work their way into your anti-heroine, Olivia?

SW: Absolutely. She’s very much a part of me, or I am of her. I’m not as bitter as she is, and I’m less confident of my own world-view, but many of her struggles are hers because they are mine.

MMC: What are you working on now?

SW: At the moment, I’m working on a children’s book. Both my first and second full-length adult novels come out this year, and I didn’t feel I could tackle writing a third while all that was going on. I’m taking notes for number three in The Harrowing universe, and I already know who the leads are, but I’m not trying to do any real work on it until 2011.

MMC: When will your second book in The Harrowing 'series' be available?

SW: In Dreams Begin comes out in December. It’s about the Irish poet WB Yeats and a time-traveling modern girl who, on her wedding night, wakes up in the body of Maud Gonne, the six-foot tall, red-headed, possibly part-faerie political revolutionary. It allows me to play with the Victorian occult, modern romance, body image, possession and the fae all in the context of remarkably co-operative real historical people and events. Yeats really was involved in the occult. He and Maud Gonne really did have a marriage “on the spiritual plane,” and Maud was, at the time, in the Irish countryside, widely considered to be of the Sidhe, a kind of faerie known for spiriting away the souls of wives on their wedding nights. 

MMC: I used the term 'series' but they aren't a true series with linked characters from book to book, correct? So, what made you decide to not write an on-going series with a single hero/heroine? Was it easier or harder than you imagined?

SW: Mostly correct. There are one or two linked characters, but none of the leads overlap. I didn’t want to write a series with a single hero/heroine because Olivia’s story feels pretty settled for me at the end of and Falling, Fly. The story world, particularly the hotel and some of its citizens, didn’t feel finished, which is why The Harrowing goes on.

MMC: Can you tell our readers about your 'tattoos of the damned' gallery?

SW: Sure! and Falling, Fly opens in a tattoo parlor (you can read the scene here), where the fallen angel of desire is getting – or trying to get – a tattoo. The power to mark her skin, or change her body to please herself, (as opposed to the way it naturally morphs to suit the tastes of those who want her) is important to the story. I thought it’d be fun to see how readers personally interpret Olivia’s gesture. I’m interested in how they might make it their own.

The gallery is a webpage for readers to send photos of themselves of the associated story of either the changes they’ve made to their own bodies, or their placement of a temporary version of Olivia’s tattoo. We’ve made up a bunch of free, temporary tattoos and are giving them out to anyone who wants to play along. Eventually, once the book’s out, there’ll be prizes! The gallery is just getting started, but you can find it here:

http://www.skylerwhite.com/how-art-thou-damned

MMC: Do you have a newsletter, blog, or website where fans can read about you and your books?

SW: My website is http://www.SkylerWhite.com, which includes my blog, to which you can subscribe; an email newsletter you can sign  up for; and links to all my social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, MySpace, etc.) There’s also a form for mailing me, and I’d love to take this opportunity to encourage people to write me. I love hearing from readers and really look forward to being able to learn more from them.

Skyler White is author of dark fantasy novels and Falling, Fly (Berkley, March 2010) and In Dreams Begin (Berkley, December 2010).