Interview Danielle L. Parker

Danielle L. Parker is the author of The Infiinite Instant, book one of the Usurpers, soon to be published with Mercury Retrograde Press. Here she answers several questions for Darkcargo, the first few questions are about the novel she is currently working on, Galen the Deathless, available in Fall 2012.

The gladiators who fight for the entertainment of the Imperator and the Three Worlds are revenants, brought back to die again and again by the fragile orfusites and their alien reincarnation technology. All except Galen, the Imperator’s elite gladiator, who outlives them all. When Galen is brought down by a poisoned knife in his last fight, his final defiance of Caesar is seen by millions of people.

Now the Imperator’s rebellious nephew and an outcast orfusite revive Galen, too–for reasons no one else suspects. The civil war Galen sparks is only the beginning of plots and counter-plots whose players and ultimate purpose lie far beyond the human realm.

Galen the Deathless is a crazy cool hodgepodge of reanimated Roman gladiators and aliens. I like its melancholy air. I really enjoyed reading the prologue and first chapter, and am looking forward to reading more when it is released by Mercury Retrograde Press in 2012. Two things impressed me most.
“Galen the Deathless” does have a strong sense of mood.  I wrote it at a difficult time for me in my personal life.  Emotions play a great part in my writing.  The rare times I’ve faced “writers block” occur when I am not emotionally invested in the story.

1. You make these juxtaposed ideas work together to make a whole New– how did you come up with the Galen universe/world?

The character Galen sprang full-born out of my head from who knows where.  He was just “there”.  I wrote the prologue as a stand-alone short story many years before I picked up the threads of the novel, but I always had the the novel in mind.  Working from that initial sense of the character, an undying gladiator trapped in a brutal cycle of death he can’t escape, I developed the threads of the novel.  I had 20 pages of hand-written notes before I started the novel.  Not really a plot outline: themes more than anything else.

Some of the ideas came out of questions I asked myself: what if we had a society where the rich and powerful could not be killed? Doesn’t social change, historically, come about through death and violence? What if a Caesar, a Napoleon, a Hitler, could not be killed?
2. Your Roman-era terms are not thrown around lightly. Are you much of a history buff?
I am indeed a tremendous history buff, and something that has always struck me is how later empires return again and again to that seminal progenitor, the Roman empire and its absolute ruler as god-on-earth.  Hitler consciously modeled his Third Reich on Rome. Those banners carried aloft at the Nuremberg rallies were straight out of Rome.  The architecture of Imperial Berlin was consciously modeled on Rome, something very important to Hitler.  I could go on.

Perhaps the Third Reich is the most infamous example, but almost every Western ruler or empire since has tried hard to wrap itself in the Roman banner.  We have “The Holy Roman Empire” of Charlemagne and his successors; we have Napoleon crowning himself with the imperial laurel and calling himself emporer; we have Moscow titling itself “The Third Rome”.  And on it goes.  The allure of that position of absolute power has never dimmed.  It’s almost as if only Rome gives legitimacy to these dreams of power.

And so the Primogenitors, fleeing Old Earth to found the far future society of the Three Worlds referred to in the Artoria series, succumb to the same temptation.  What every would-be dictator wants to be is Caesar: the original, the absolute.  Food for thought, there.

I also looked at how currents and ideas of the past would reflect in this far future society which retains dim and mythic memories of its past.  The Penitents have obvious antecedents in our own time (and in Roman Christian times).  The alien orfusites echo the resurrection myths of Orpheus as psychopomp, escort of the souls of the dead.  In addition, there’s a science fiction spin on the orfusites, from our own time… but I’ll leave the reader to discover that.

Overall, the work draws from myriad sources, Greco-Roman to Gnostic to Lovecraft to others, time-travel (not physical) to genetic super soldiers (Wylie’s early Gladiator story is one of the literary influences I cite).  But really, what drove the story for me when I wrote, most of all, was the character of Galen.

Which of your characters is your favorite?

I have so many favorites from the story, but what I enjoyed writing the most is, I suppose, the interactions between Galen and the mysterious Aristarchus, Caesar’s chief necromancer and “power behind the throne”.  The characteristic that defines necromancers in this story is the ability to “see through Time”… to see the dead, in that sense.  Aristarchus is Galen’s equal, and the two play off each other in the story.  Only equals, who may be either saviors or killers, can generate that kind of tension.

Galen himself struggles with the great temptation of his own dark side: the allure of pure force, pure power, pure dominance, as symbolized by the monstrous octoman, the giant alien of the deep, whom he takes as his spiritual father.  Mid-way through the story he meets a wise old man who points this out to him:

“I see.” The old man nodded. “I saw you kneel before your father, Galen, with tens of thousands of soldiers. A river of blood ran down from your hair to your hands.  The river made a red sea, and you and your soldiers and the monster swam in it. Have you not made might your father, Galen, and chosen force as your son?”

And which character is your favorite from another author’s realm?
I am such a greedy reader and love so many books this is impossible to answer.  I’ll give a few of many, many favorites.  I find the Silk character from the Gene Wolfe Long Sun/Short Sun series fascinating, if (like all Wolfe’s characters) disturbing.   The Quiller character from the Adam Hall books heavily influenced the chip-on-her-shoulder, cracking-from-within action heroine from my Minuet James series, “The Usurpers”.  I love early horror works such as William Hope Hodgson’s Night Land.  Lovecraft, Poe, the great Golden Era greats like Roger Zelazny, Andre Norton and Fred Saberhagen, as well as modern successors such as John C. Wright.  I could go on endlessly.

I read just about everything, in fact: non-fiction of all sorts, mystery, thriller, horror, fantasy, science fiction, literary and more.  I am particularly fond of eye-witness histories and travel autobiographies (Paul Theroux and Harry C. Franck are among my favorites).

Best answer: check out Bewildering Stories or my Goodreads page for some of my book reviews. I am a regular book reviewer for BWS.

When and where does your best writing and story-crafting occur?

Other writers probably have healthier writing habits.  I write a “hook” for the story, probably the first 30 to 50 pages, and then go away and leave it for months, even years, while the subconscious ruminates and the plot works out in my head. When I pick up the story again, it’s burning, bursting to be told, and I write in a non-stop fever until it’s done.  I usually have to be pulled away from the computer to eat and take a bath when that happens and I feverishly re-hash it when I go to sleep.  As Barbara Ish, my editor, will tell you, I pour out a chapter a day most of the time.  A siren could go off when I’m in the throes and I would probably tune it out. I do regularly tune out people speaking to me.

When it’s done I’m exhausted and emotionally wrung out.  I have to vegetate for weeks after the non-stop writing binge.  Feels like postpartum depression.  I guess that’s not healthy, but that’s the way it works, for the novels I write.
What other novels have you got in the works?
Mercury Retrograde will be bringing out my first works, the urban science fiction Usurpers series, beginning in late summer or fall of this year.  The first novel in the series, The Infinite Instant, was published by a small Canadian press that does not now focus on speculative fiction.  It won the 2009 Eppie Award when I entered it for Best Science Fiction.  I’m so glad that the work has at last found a good home.  The second in the series, The Nihilistic Mirror, is finished too, and will follow as soon as MRP can get it out.  I am now at work on the third in that series, Knight of Faith.

I am also doing background reading for a planned historical mystery/thriller set in 1905/1906 San Francisco.  Those were years where the world as we now know it first came into focus: Freud and Einstein both published, cars coming into widespread use, etc.  And San Francisco has always fascinated me.  A great and doomed city.  That era was very interested in the occult, too, and that will feature in the story.

(Editor’s note: Check out these videos from the Library of Congress.)

Future plans include the next in the Artoria series to follow “Galen the Deathless”.  I have a young adult fantasy novel finished and sitting around waiting to be marketed.  Marketing is a dread and horrible business for a writer.  I absolutely loathe it.  Future vague plans include a series of (modern day) novels set in Guatemala. I’ve always been fascinated by Central/South America and am reading a lot about Brazil right now, in fact, for the third Minuet James novel, Knight of Faith, which takes place in Brazil.
What do you enjoy best about working for a small press?
Just the fact I get timely responses ranks high.  I did what many advise a new writer first: I submitted my works to the traditional big publishers and tried to interest an agent.  What a waste of time.  I won’t mention specifics, but “Galen” went twice (on my assumption they must have lost the first submission) to one famous sci fi publisher. I never heard back from them on either the original or the re-submission, and when apprised, the editor blamed the Post Office but had no interest in looking at a third try.  The second famous sci fi publisher held the book for years under “we’re considering it”, but was decent enough to say “Good luck!” when I pulled it.  One at least got back fairly promptly, three months in NYC publisher terms being fast, having read the prologue and first chapter.  He complained he couldn’t tell when the character was awake or dreaming.  And another rejected my story twice.  I guess the right hand did not know what the left was doing.

I could go on, but you get the picture.  I wasted at least two years waiting for Big Publishers.  I’d still be waiting if I hadn’t reached my Explode and Forget It stage. And agents? Don’t get me started.  Out of hundreds of queries sent, the majority were non-replies, the remainder but three impersonal form email refusals.  Only one agent (in Britain) agreed to check out a sample.  Only one US agent agreed to look at a sample. The British agent responded “too introspective” and the US agent “not for me”.  And I write queries as well as the rest of us, to those happily connected fellow authors who love to insinuate the Fault Must Be Mine–which has happened several times.  I don’t know what the magic trick is.  But clearly they were not interested in a new author, or at least, this one.

So the simple fact I can email Barbara and get a timely and pertinent response ranks high on the satisfaction list.  Barbara patiently read every chapter of my latest work, The Nihilistic Mirror, as it was pouring raw from my head.  I must have bothered her every day for a couple months but she stuck with it.  She’s no doubt sincerely glad I’m taking a break and the email traffic has died: but having my editor reading the work on the fly with me was tremendously encouraging.  There’s that “responsiveness” again…

And of course, MRP does what it says: it considers works that don’t necessarily fit the junk-food diet of urban fantasy, military porn, or Tolkien re-hashes Big Publishers (in the US: the best current science fiction is coming out of Britain, I’m afraid) have such an insatiable appetite for.  MRP takes chances.  Barbara loved my stories, from her enthusiastic emails, from the first.  And you know what? She was the only editor, and I mean only, who actually read the works, so far as I know (I can’t speak for the one who held on to Galen the Deathless for years “considering”).

It really is nearly impossible for a new author to break into the traditional big publishers, at least in science fiction, without a well-connected agent; and you don’t get a well-connected agent when you’re an unknown with no revenue stream, either.  At least from my personal experience, which is not, of course, everyone’s.  I’m sure some have happier experiences.
What are you reading now?

I just reviewed The Lost City of Z for Bewildering Stories.  What a fascinating (and true) story of obsession and death in the Amazon jungle.  I’m struggling with Mario Vargas Llosa’s The War of the End of the World right now.  I’m not sure a North American can really get that story.  Light entertainment it is not.