An Interview with Alma Hromic..

_____________________________________________________________

Portal: Tell me about your background.

Alma: Actually my educational background is science. I have a Masters degree in microbiology. I worked for a while in research and kind of went sideways, into writing about science rather than doing it. I did freelance journalism and edited a scientific journal for some years in South Africa. I came out here in �94 and I worked as an educational editor for some years and then after that things kind of developed further.

Portal: Why then, write a fantasy novel?

Alma: Because I love it. Writing about a different world, one that is yours is the most unbelievable high for me. Just the fact that every blade of grass, every stone, every bird in the sky is there because you put it there. It�s a joy doing that. I just like getting lost in that kind of thing. The first book I ever wrote (The Dolphin�s Daughter) was published in the UK in �95.  The book went into its sixth printing in 2000. It�s three fantasy stories, so I�ve always written �esoterica�. Those are very much like Oscar Wilde�s fairytales, The Nightingale and the Rose or The Happy Prince.

Portal: How did you find the writing process?

Alma: A lot of writers that I know tend to map or plot out. I had background notes, but that�s about as far as any scaffolding went. The rest of it, I didn�t know what was going to happen next either. I was sitting there in the middle of a chapter going, "Yes, but where am I going from here?" The whole thing was written as one book, but people tended to throw their arms up in despair at the manuscript, which was a quarter of a million words long. It split neatly into two books. The first one I wanted to call �The Oracle� and the second one �The Crown�. The first book tended to write itself around that oracle, which I didn�t know when I started the book. When Anghara picked up a little stone out of a stream in the place where she was fostering, I had no idea what it was going to become. It was just something that she did. I knew a lot about the background of my world before I started, except for one thing - when I started writing Kheldrin I found myself having to listen to my characters in a language I did not know, so I kept on writing down all these funny words that kept on coming out, which is why the book has a glossary. I needed one.

Portal: Do you have a linear progression when writing?

Alma: It depends on the book. This one, yes. The current one that I am writing now, I wrote the prologue for and that was great, except I couldn�t start the story. It was a perfect egg. Every time I tried to grasp it, it would shoot out the side of my hand. I couldn�t begin it; it didn�t have a good beginning anywhere. I tend to meet up with a character who has a story and I just tell it. Eventually one of the characters in the book, who happens to be from the middle of the story, came out of the white wall and said, "Oh for god�s sake come here." So I started from the middle and now I�ve written the end and I still haven�t begun it. I�m going to have to do that one backwards.

Portal: How has your background influenced your writing?

Alma: I come from a culture, which has got very deep medieval roots and that has always been an influence, because I enjoyed that kind of thing. But when I moved away from Yugoslavia and started going to school in an English environment, I discovered the Celts and King Arthur and after that the real historical Middle Ages and the Crusades. That whole part of history fascinates me. Then again, I am kind of interested in all mythologies. I have a current work in progress. I�ve always got at least five. When I get stuck on one, I go to the next. One of the ones I am busy trying to force into some sort of final shape, is actually a New Zealand fantasy, which I wrote with a friend of mine. She is Swedish, I�m Yugoslav and we wrote a New Zealand fantasy together. Go figure that one out... It�s based in Manapouri. This is a story that has four distinct mythologies involved in it, including Maori. It started out very simple, with a clear good guy and bad guy - and then we discovered that everything wasn't quite as easy as we first thought.....

Portal: In Changer of Days, you have two different environments, two different countries. I�m curious to know if your travelling has influenced your writing.

Alma: Actually three environments, but you haven�t met number three yet. Number three is Tath, which is the southern kingdom, which they have so many problems with. Tath is pure Renaissance Italy, I�m sorry, [laughing] but it just turned out that way. That particular part of the story kind of surprised me by becoming a lot stronger than I thought it was going to be. In the first book, you had the King Duerin Rashin and his son Favrin, who was being a bit of a thorn in the side. Well Favrin just decided he wanted to be a fully-fledged character in the second book. He just came out of the shadows and became absolutely wonderful. He has an aspect of a clown prince, very flippant and snappy and funny. On the surface he is very shallow, oh but he�s not. He�s a very nice character and was one of those people that I never even knew was in the book. I just knew that the King of Tath had a son and all of a sudden when I met him, I decided I liked him a lot.

Portal: The desert sequences stick in my mind, they are particularly vivid. Have you traveled to the desert at all?

Alma: Not the North African desert. I�ve never been to places like Algiers or Morocco, but I have seen the desert in South West Africa though. It�s a different kind of desert obviously. My one is all in my head. The reason the desert is so vivid, is because I lived that desert for months. That�s the part I suddenly had to find a glossary for, because I suddenly found myself with these people and they were very alive to me. The whole sequence there with Anghara�s adoption into the sisterhood and the sacrifice, which was supposedly a trap, was like a film. I just was watching this thing on a little screen in my head and writing it down. It was unfolding almost too fast for my fingers to type it. That particular section is very visual for me. Possibly that�s what comes out there, because I "painted" it rather than wrote it.

Portal: Your magic system, it seems very spiritual. How did you develop it?

Alma: Initially I think �sight� was something that used to be a lot more powerful or prevalent if you like. This was something I worked out from piecing it together from the book as I was writing it. It sounds bizarre, but I never actually know of all these things before I start writing them. I have a feeling the Dances were built by people who had that ancient power, the remains of which are now called, �sight�. These Dances served some purpose, something that currently drives people mad when they go near it, because they can sense it but not quite understand it. Over the years in Roisinan, the main kingdom, the �sight� has degenerated in to something that is kind of familiar and almost domestic. Except in places like Bresse, the sisterhood castle, which still exists to keep together, study and preserve snatches of that deeper aspect of it, which disappeared over the years. But because it has been so deep, so prevalent and so rooted, what Sif does is horrendous, because what he�s doing is ripping apart the fabric of his society. Like ai�Jihaar says at one point, "They fear him, but soon, very soon they will begin to hate him." The people have been forcefully made to renounce something they cannot renounce, because it is so much a part of them. I get the feeling that the women of Roisinan have access to a lot more than they know, but they never knew how to get at it. The reason that Anghara is so startled when she gets into Kheldrin is that she realizes that, "Yes this is the same sort of thing, but they understand it." While they use it, they control it in Kheldrin, there�s a slight difference in comprehension there. When she gets there, she finally realizes that something she knows that she�s got is not to be ridden with a rein, but to be believed into being.

Portal: You are very passionate about these characters. You seem to have a real relationship with them.

Alma: It�s amazing to me to talk about these characters like this. They�re so real to me. When I was finishing this thing at the end of the second book, for a long time I had them sitting there, three of them. They went into the mountain to find something out. And the three of them sat there on their horses, in midwinter, in the snow for some months, until a friend of mine said, "Please, just do something with them! Anything, before they all die of terminal frostbite." I was rather reluctant to do anything with them, because I was that near to the end and doing anything with them meant finishing the story and saying goodbye. I didn�t really want to do that.

Portal: What is your view on the standard fantasy cliches?

Alma: A lot of fantasy, your sword and sorcery epic kind of thing is; break a sword into three pieces and then some kid goes away and says "I�m going to find that thing and rule the world with it." I had a really awful sense that people think that fantasy is some sort of stepchild of literature, or that it�s easy. If you can�t write anything else you can write fantasy. You get a lot of this sort of thing and don�t ask me how, but it gets published. I�ll walk into a shop and I�ll read the first couple of pages and say, "Who published this? I can do better than this, I�ve done better than this, before it was published. Why can�t someone publish my work? It�s ten times better than a lot of the stuff that�s out there on the shelves" The other thing of course, is the �heir to Tolkien�. Everybody is an �heir to Tolkien�. I have "Lord of the Rings". I have two copies, in fact, one of which was given to me as a present, a nice illustrated one. The second one is pretty well thumbed. I�ve read it many times. But I�m not Tolkien. I don�t want to be Tolkien. I don�t want to be a copy of him. He did a lot for fantasy, he made fantasy what it is today. He started a lot of the planning, the depth to it, that just wasn�t there before he created Middle Earth with all its ramifications and all the languages and all the people. Half the problems that people have with Tolkien arise because he put so much into that book. Which is a valid criticism if you can�t be bothered wading through everything, but to me it is the richness that appeals and that�s part of what I think I write like, namely this �lush� business.

Portal: It comes through that you create a very rich environment for your characters.

Alma: I�ve read a lot of the people who I admire deeply, Tolkien and Guy Gavriel Kay and Judith Tarr. All of these people have got something in common, they create a world which is self-consistent, self-believable - which can exist within itself, within its own rules, which is not our world. Fairly obviously and dramatically not our world. And this is part of why I love fantasy. But it is so easy to write a bad fantasy. I wrote book reviews for years and I�ve had more than three hundred book reviews written and published. I got handed one fantasy book and I just kept on reading this and going, "Who is this guy and what is he doing?" He had a protagonist, you know how they often have, somebody plucked from our world into that world and he is now saviour/hero. Ok, I can maybe swallow that, but he was given one of those big heavy two-handed bastard swords that you have to carry on your back because it is too long to fit in the scabbard on your hip. A big heavy two-handed weapon. In the middle of the story the protagonists happened to be on a little boat in the middle of a river. Our hero not only wielded this weapon one handed, but then the boat capsizes and he swims to shore with the sword. I felt like writing the guy a letter and saying just do me a favor, go to the nearest museum, take one of these swords, try and pick it up and then go back to your story.

Portal: It has to be said that once you have used the weapons and worn the armor, it influences your reading and writing. Perhaps some authors haven�t had that experience.

Alma: Oh, but its easy to write a fantasy. You just put a sword in someone�s hand. I did fencing at university for a while. I kept on being told by frustrated instructors, "You can�t do that! We haven�t taught you that yet!" It was an instinctive kind of thing. These are very light weapons naturally, rapiers and the very thin foils. It�s not the same thing as having the kind of swords my protagonists are using, but at least it gives you an idea of the move, of the way that you are supposed to carry it or the way you are supposed to wield it.

Portal: Do you have a favorite author or series of books?

Alma: I collect authors as opposed to books. [At this point Alma directed me towards her rather extensive collection of books containing Judith Tarr, Guy Gavriel Kay, Roger Zelazny, Mary Stewart, and Katherine Kurtz among others.] I think this man is a genius, Guy Gavriel Kay. The book Tigana is the most clearly realized fantasy world I have ever read. I read this book, and it�s not short, in two days. I couldn�t let go.

Portal: The character of Sif-

Alma: [laughing] Oh he was fun.

Portal: He develops into a very dark character.

Alma: The final prophecy from the book talks about a spirit who is going to learn something that they aren�t going to like. That winds up applying to Sif. He does develop. He is a character who is not evil, he just does things he thinks are right, for all the right reasons in his mind. They all come out and fall about his ears. He�s got a big chip on his shoulder about �sight� and that�s part of his downfall. He believes that sight is what dethroned him. If his mother had happened to be sighted, he would have been king without any one raising any objections to it. But she wasn�t and Rima was and that was that. I have a very clear picture of the Sif and Anghara in a castle courtyard when they were children. I think I just alluded to that, when she was a very little girl being walked across a courtyard by her nurse and dropping a doll and Sif picking up this doll and handing it to her and just looking at her. I can see his eyes and they are full of this spite and hate and grudging admiration and he�s very torn about the whole thing. When he finally does get his hands on her he cannot bring himself to kill her. He knows he should, in fact she is dead and buried and has a grave with her name on it, but he can�t do it. He sits there and he watches her saying, " There is time, there is time, there is time," and of course time runs out. He was a fun character to write, but he is very complex and he�s not a �bad guy�. The only pure evil character in there is possibly Ansen, because he is just�bad to the bone! He�s an arrogant, spoilt little sod of a princeling. He is sort of a caricature of Sif in a way. He�s what Sif was in the beginning. Ansen thinks he is the right person at the right time. It�s all his to begin with and he can just reach out and take it, except that he never grows. It all festers and dammit, if anybody gets in the way, well it�s their problem not his. I had a response from somebody who was reading the book and when he finally met his gruesome end, she said, " You meant that I should pity him, but all I could say was, Yes!"

Portal: How long did the book take to write?

Alma: Well because it wasn�t written from the beginning to the end, quite a while. I wrote the first chapters maybe eight years ago. It had been finished for a good while before I found a publisher. It was one of those stories that I knew was good and that I believed in. I was quite happy to keep pushing it until somebody else saw the same thing. I�ve read a lot in the genre and I know who the good writers are. This is going to sound terribly arrogant, but I know this is just as good as some of those people.

Portal: Finally here it is, in print, on the bookshelf. How do you feel about the publishing process, from beginning to end?

Alma: That was something. When I first got that book it was never more than an arms length away from me for the first two days that I got it. Good book, stay there! What they did initially is they had quite a different idea for a cover, which I saw in draft form and I loved. It was one of the main scenes from the book. It was Anghara holding a dying ai�Jihaar with the lord of death hovering behind them. I thought that was wonderful. That was one of the strongest scenes, if not the strongest scene in that book. Then they decided they didn�t want that one after all. They wanted this one and it�s grown on me. I like it. I thought the other one had much more impact, for me anyway, because I knew the context of that scene. Everybody I know who has read the book has stopped at that scene. Have you ever written something, where you look at it after you finish writing it and you feel the hackles rise and you ask, "Did I just write this?" Well that scene was that writing. It was just written in a breath and it was just unbelievable. When I finished writing I was saying to myself, "She actually faced down a god? Where does she get off?" She doesn�t know who or what she is at that point, she just turns around and says, "No!" Sometimes you get moments where you write some things that are like that and then you kind of write the connecting bits to put it all into context. There are a few scenes in Changer of Days, which are just thought on the page. I�ve still got books, these big hardcover books from when I started writing novels, which was a while ago. I wrote these things laboriously; pencil in books. I�m never going to type this one up, my first one. It�s got five hundred and sixty eight handwritten, manuscript pages. When the computers arrived on the scene, I was thinking that I would probably never be able to write into a computer, because I was so used to thinking it like that and writing it like that. I took to it like a duck to water. I don�t think I�ve ever written anything longhand since, other than scribbles to remind me of stuff. That has one advantage and that is I can write as fast as I think. When you are writing it, your writing speed dictates how fast you can develop something and I am a faster typist than I am a writer. So it just sometimes goes pouring out and occasionally I get ahead of myself and I have to stop and say "Ok, where was I?"

Portal: Are we going to see the characters again in book two?

Alma: Oh yes. It�s just one book, they just split it in half. Kieran turns out to have a very big role in the whole thing. He�s emerging as a leader of a resistance to Sif�s rule. He never stops believing. It�s his faith that keeps the people believing that she will come back, she�s out there, she�s somewhere and she�s not dead. One of the characters actually points out to Anghara when she gets back, "If you were the light he held out to them, his was the hand that held the candle." Somewhat to his surprise Kieran finds himself almost adored by his troops. He leads by example. He�s always in the first row and doesn�t sit down somewhere, make strategy and send out people to die. If there is dying to be done, he is out there fighting with them. He also grows in the second book eventually snatching Anghara away from Sif, under impossible circumstances.

Portal: You mentioned you usually have a couple of things on the boil, have you got any other fantasy projects?

Alma: Four.

Portal: Four!

Alma: Like I said, I always have a couple of things on the boil. One of them is almost done, it just needs to get polished off and sent in. Another one, I�ve written bits of it and I�ve got the sort of story I want. It�s a lot harder. It�s more science fiction than fantasy, space travel and that kind of thing. It�s also somehow wound up involving the Jesuits, don�t ask me why. Not quite Jesuits, but reasonably recognizable as Jesuits in this fantastical environment. An educational monastic order who are thrown into a bit of a quandary where they go off in one of their space ships to do their thing and get thrown off course onto a world which seems to be inhabited by angels and devils. I dreamed a sequence and I woke up with a complete ecology in my head. I wrote it all down and a friend of mine wanted to know if I�d seen a therapist lately.

Portal: Are you writing full time at the moment?

Alma: Probably yes. I do a bit of editing work and teaching. Writing fantasy is something that takes over. When this thing has sorted itself out, I�ve got three other books I can start flinging at people. The thing is, you have got to have the proverbial foot in the proverbial door. I think people will take you a lot more seriously, if you can walk in to somebody�s office and say, "Here is my other book and here is my next manuscript." In other words, you have a track record. I think beginning writers have a really tough proposition getting anywhere. It�s like those Catch 22 situations, if you are looking for a job and they want experience, nobody will hire you if you don�t have experience and you can�t get experience if you can�t get a job. It�s likewise with writing. Nobody is going to publish you if you aren�t already published. It kind of gets out of hand. A lot of the big houses are no longer even considering manuscripts without an agent and getting an agent is four times as bad as getting a publisher.

Portal: Do you think people are too precious with their writing, so much so that it hasn�t been seen by another person and then they take it to an editor who comes down quite hard on their baby? How important is feedback?

Alma: I think that you need that. Writing is a very lonely occupation. It�s something that you do by yourself, in a corner on a computer or typewriter. It�s in your head, it�s yours and it nothing until somebody reads it. It�s pretty much dead paper until somebody else reacts to it. Having somebody else who isn�t obliged to like it. It�s pretty useless showing it to your grandmother who�s going to say, "That�s lovely dear." Don�t they all. They love what you do. You�re their blood, you�re their kin. Or a best friend who doesn�t want to hurt your feelings by saying, "That�s nice." �Nice�, that�s a killer word. It�s something you say to someone if you don�t want to tell them something awful, but you can�t think of anything else to say. But, you need somebody who is independent and whose ear at least is remotely educated. I think it�s pretty ridiculous trying to get an opinion of a fantasy novel from say, a romance writer. They don�t have the same gestalt happening. They might recognize good writing in terms of pure language, but in terms of plot and terms of context, they can�t tell you anything. They don�t know where that thing fits in. Like you just said about the few female characters in fantasy, they wouldn�t know about that. It just wouldn�t mean anything to them and you have to have somebody read it who is going to be and I use the word guardedly, educated enough to be able to give you some sort of reaction which you can constructively use. When I wrote book reviews I got the reputation of being too honest for my own good. If I didn�t like a book I would go and write about the fact I didn�t like it and why I didn�t like it, as opposed to "I hate it!" or "I like it!" I took on big names like Raymond Feist who wrote Magician. I got handed one of his novels and it was a big thick thing. I started going and there was this horrible destructive war going on that basically killed everybody. The main protagonist who happens to be some sort of a mage had his family wiped out by this war. It was bad, really bad. People were dying left, right and centre. Somewhere towards the last third of the book, a big battle is looming, everybody is out there whacking away and our friend the mage has decided he�s had enough of this. So he basically floats out onto the battlefield, lifts up his hand and says, "Enough!" and it all stops. At which point, I nearly threw the book against the wall. I said, " If you could do this, why didn�t you do it two hundred pages ago?" It�s one of those things, where people paint themselves into a corner and they don�t quite know how to get out of it, but he�s a mage, so he can do it. I never did that to any of my characters. If I didn�t give them something in the beginning, they don�t have it. Anghara can�t suddenly change into �Kali the world killer�. She�s not, she never was and she can�t suddenly turn into it. She may be evolving, but that�s a different proposition. I mean, this guy never evolved into something like that. He basically just said, "Enough!" when he felt like doing it.

Portal: It�s the old argument with magic isn�t it? If you have the weapon, why didn�t you use it earlier, before all the bloodshed? A lot of authors like the idea of powerful mages with fireballs and lightning bolts, but they don�t logically think through their magic system.

Alma: I think a lot of people don�t think about limitations. There have to be limitations. There has to a set of rules, a code, something. You can�t just be able to do everything, because if you were able to do everything, there wouldn�t be a story, you would just do it. The fact is that people just get themselves in a situation where they say, "Ok, I can do that." When you can�t, not unless it has been set up that way. Unless you have it or the potential for it, you can�t just turn out to be someone who has it. That�s one of the big gremlins in fantasy today I think. Like you say people don�t think it through. They create a character who seems to be useful and just throw them into things and see what happens next. For a while I was into role playing and I had a bunch of really crazy people who I played with. They were all into puns in a really bad way and so am I. When we got together it was miserable for everybody else. We had a games master who wouldn�t allow us to suddenly go off on a tangent and do something. You would have to have a very good reason for doing it. You would have to have a very good ability to do it, or be able to gain that ability through something. There was just no way that you were just able to waltz into a crowded room and kill off thirty people in one sword stroke like some people do. It was very good training for me! I remember one time I went through a portal into another world and I was faced with two large saber-toothed tigers. The game master said, "Roll the dice," so I did, even though I was dead anyway and there was this silence. I thought, I�ve done one of two things. Either I�ve disintegrated myself, or I�ve killed them both. It�s probably either very good or very bad. The game master was stunned, I killed them. There is also the fact I am interested in medieval stuff. This is the other thing that fantasy authors get involved in. I was a part of a local chapter of the S.C.A. here. That�s something else that you need to learn, background. I had a couple of friends who were into authenticity, so they would know for example, if you were wearing a particular piece of armor, how far back you could move your arm without dislocating your shoulder. It helps to get that little bit of depth, background and knowledge. I think it�s a little bit of an apprenticeship that fantasy authors go through, or need to go through.

Portal: I was given a book recently by a friend who thought it was very good, but I found it to be pulp. How do you feel about pulp fantasy?

Alma: It�s just like pastiche unless it�s done for a reason and done well. Otherwise it�s just people copying badly. One of the series I hate is the Shannara books, because they are so derivative of Tolkien. The other books I find I have never been able to get myself round to like and I find I share this with a lot of people, are the Thomas Covenant ones. He�s so whiny. You sit there and you look at him and you go, �Why don�t you just go and kill yourself and leave us all in peace." You get really upset with him after a while. If Stephen Donaldson was trying for a sympathetic character then he missed by a country mile. It was just one of those things I could never get my head around. Why would I want to depress myself into black holes by reading about this character? It�s also one of those fantasy things, that after Tolkien, anything that was called fantasy had to have an elf in it somewhere otherwise it wasn�t a fantasy. Unfortunately the kind of elves that turned up were not Tolkien�s elves, they were Peaseblossom and Elderflower from Faery Queen Titania�s entourage, complete with gossamer winds.. If you read Tolkien and went into the whole wonderful, glittering history of the thing and then you get these little winged people sitting on toadstools and you know they�re not the real thing anymore. Think up your own people. Guy Gavriel Kay did a lot of the derivative stuff when he wrote the Fionavar trilogy. Somebody described those books as the only ones who didn�t suffer the comparison with Lord of the Rings, but that was only because he used every reference to myth and legend in existence, including King Arthur. I think of those books as his training ground. Tigana was wholly original and magnificently realized and so was Song for Arbonne. Every now and again when I get stuck with something I go and reread Song for Arbonne because the characters are so well done. You have to know how these people tick. I don�t know about other authors, but I�m a people watcher. I�ll go and sit in a caf�, pick the window table because I can look outside and wonder about that guy or this girl or where they are going or what they are doing. I�ll put together things that no one else does. In Changer of Days particularly, I had two distinctive societies. I had the very Celtic Roisinan complete with gods of its own and all the mythology that is connected with that. Then Anghara crosses over to into this desert country which is utterly different. It has the elder gods and you get the hint that this was something that Roisinan used to know a lot better before they graduated to their own current relatively tame pantheon. I think I know more about that world than I do about my own.

Portal: Thank you and congratulations. I�m looking forward to book two.