My very first New Zealand author interview of 2020 is AJ Lancaster. She writes romantic gaslamp fantasy books about fae, magic, and complicated families. She has just published the third book in her quartet series.
What is an early book or author that inspired you to write? What are you reading now?
Fantasy is the genre that swept me up in its dragon’s claws at a young age and has never really let go.
When I look back at my early attempts at writing, they are dreadfully earnest and shamelessly derivative mash-ups of whatever fantasy books I was reading at the time: Raymond Feist, David Eddings, Tamora Pierce, Philip Pullman, Anne McCaffrey.
Thirteen-year-old me built, with no sense of cliché, an emerald-eyed elven archer sorcerer princess complete with a soul-bonded dragon and sent her off to save the world from the dark one. Fortunately, I soon after encountered the down-to-earth humour of Terry Pratchett’s work, and my levels of self-awareness increased somewhat.
Now when I write it’s about trying to ground the electrifying magical wonder that fantasy can invoke. If you get too distracted by the coolness of magic, it’s easy to forget to write about people – and people are ultimately what makes a good story. What am I reading? I’ve just started reading The Hanged Man, the second in K. D. Edward’s Tarot-inspired urban fantasy series. It’s fun and tropey, and you can feel the author’s love of fantasy geekery leaping off the page.
What are your writing challenges and how do you overcome them?
Finding time and energy to write around the Day Job and general detritus of life administration is an ongoing challenge that I think afflicts a lot of creatives. I currently cram the writing into the bits and pieces of time I can scavenge around the edges, but it’s not ideal and I fear something will have to give, sooner or later.
Distraction is my other big challenge. In this age of continuous electronic connection, it’s hard to escape the noise. Funny cat video! Interesting article link! Anxiety-inducing headline! Active discussion thread! Look at me, look at me, LOOK AT ME! It’s relentless and addicting and totally antithetical to my ability to focus. My current tactic for overcoming this is to turn my phone off and bring my laptop to a café that doesn’t have wifi. Mustering the willpower to do this is the tricky bit.
What are you most proud of?
Finishing and publishing The Lord of Stariel. It wasn’t the first novel I wrote, by a long shot (that honour belongs to the emerald-eyed elven archer sorcerer princess mentioned earlier), but it was the first novel I wrote as an adult, at a time when I half-believed I wasn’t capable of such a thing.
Having written furiously as a teen, I took a long break from writing during my university years and into my first few jobs. Every now and then I’d return to my old teenage manuscripts and pick at them, but I never wrote anything new. In my late twenties, I decided I wanted to try writing a novel again from scratch. I feared I’d lost the knack – that all my creativity had already been used up, that the fact that I hadn’t written for a decade was a sign I wasn’t meant to be a writer. The Lord of Stariel was deeply reassuring proof that the creative side I’d neglected for so long was still there.
I levelled up so much as a writer during the process of taking The Lord of Stariel from first draft to published novel. I continue to level up my craft, of course, but I think that book will always represent the steepest segment on my personal graph of Skill vs Time Spent.
What do you hope people get out of reading your work?
Enjoyment, mainly. I write optimistic, light-hearted romantic fantasy, and I hope my readers have as much fun reading it as I have writing it. If I also manage to convey any of my own feminist values successfully, that’s a bonus, but I hope a subtle rather than sledgehammer-y one. I dislike fiction that sets out to lecture, even when I agree with the subject of the lecture in question!
If you could tell your younger writing self anything, what would it be?
You think writing is a mystical art you’re either good at or not, and there’s nothing you can do about your own lack of talent for it. Good news – that’s a lie! Talent, if such a thing even exists, has very little to do with skill. Bad news – skill isn’t something you develop overnight. Skill is earned, a function of time, practice, and effort, but good news again, because this means you can learn to write if you want to (and you do)! It doesn’t matter that you suck at writing right now. Everyone starts off sucking when they learn a new skill. Embrace the suck!
From a technical perspective, writing can also be broken down into small, learnable units, from where the commas should go to how to make a paragraph interesting to read. You don’t have to simply ~feel~ intuitively in your soul how to do this. Help (and actual rules, in the case of grammar) is out there – go find it!
K: Thank you for your insightful answers, AJ.
The Book
The Bio
Growing up in rural New Zealand, AJ Lancaster escaped chores by hiding up trees reading books. She wrote in the same way she breathed—constantly and without thinking much of it—so it took many years and accumulating a pile of manuscripts for her to realise that she might want to be a writer and, in fact, already was. On the way to this realisation she collected a degree in science, worked in environmental planning, and became an editor.
Now she lives in the windy coastal city of Wellington and writes romantic, whimsical fantasy books about fae, magic, and complicated families. The Lord of Stariel is the first novel in her Stariel Quartet.
Blog: https://ajlancaster.com/