Outer Alliance Spotlight #12: Angela Korra’ti December 4, 2009
Posted by juliarios in : interviews , trackbackWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #12. Each Friday the Spotlight features an ally who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. Our guest this week is Angela Korra’ti, author of the urban fantasy novel, Faerie Blood.
Angela’s first urban fantasy novel, Faerie Blood was released in May of 2009 through Drollerie Press, and she is currently at work on the sequel, Bone Walker. Another story set in the same world (but in a different time period) came out in November, 2009 as part of the Civil War fantasy anthology, Defiance.
As a bisexual writer, Angela feels that promoting queer speculative fiction as part of a larger group is a powerful and necessary thing. While she believes that queer SF/F is gaining more mainstream acceptance, she knows that there’s still a long road ahead. She hopes that her contributions will help foster acceptance in and out of the genre by demonstrating that LGBTQI people are indeed people.
Angela lives with her partner in Kenmore, Washington, and works in downtown Seattle as a web page tester for Big Fish Games. She plays several instruments including the flute, piccolo, guitar, mandolin, and bouzouki, and she is particularly interested in Atlantic Canadian Folk music. In addition to blogging and holding drawings for free things on her official site, she is on Twitter as annathepiper, and she keeps a personal journal at annathepiper.org.
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For the first Outer Alliance Pride Day, you posted a short story about a queer princess. Do you have any plans to tell more stories about her?
“The Disenchanting of Princess Cerridwen” came to life from two different directions: one, because I wanted to tell the story of a woman turned into a man, but whose true form is beloved of another woman, and so she has to fight to regain her true form. Several people close to me in my life are transgendered, and I wanted to try to capture a bit of that experience in this story. And two, the young witch that causes the havoc in the story is a very, very young version of the antagonist of a currently unpublished novel I’m trying to shop around, and the story is set much, much earlier than the novel.
I’ve worked out quite a bit of history for that world, though, and at the point in its timeline where Cerridwen and Damhnait appear, there’s definitely room for more stories to be told about them. I’m fairly certain that they wind up as influential figures, along with the young girl who’s a side character in the short story.
One of the striking things about Faerie Blood is the richness of its Seattle setting. What are some of your favorite things about Seattle? Where would you direct a first time visitor?
I’m thrilled to hear that my conveying of Seattle comes across well!
The Burke-Gilman trail is definitely one of my favorite things about the city. It winds through much of it, and if you follow it northward, it goes on around Lake Washington and hooks up with other trail networks; eventually, you can follow the trails all the way around the lake to the communities on the east side. There’s some lovely terrain to be found along those trails, and once or twice I even commuted to work along them.
The terrain of the Seattle in general, really, is something I love immensely. Seattle is called the Emerald City for a reason, and that’s because we’ve got quite a few areas of the city that are lush and green; that’s a great side benefit to all the rain we get up here. Plus, having mountains on the horizon to both the east and the west, especially the mighty Mount Rainier, makes for achingly beautiful views on clear days.
For a visitor to the city, I’d highly recommend Pike Place Market in no small part because the fish-throwing fish sellers are a longstanding market tradition. I mention the Science Fiction Museum and the Experience Music Project in the book, and they’re great places to visit, too. In general the Seattle Center is fun, especially if you’re visiting it during either Folklife or Bumbershoot, the two huge music festivals hosted there during the summer. And the Space Needle’s worth a visit just to go up to the top and see the astounding view from up there.
For the record, though, since I’ve been asked this a couple of times already: the Electric Penguin, the geek bar I mention in Faerie Blood, does not actually exist. But if I ever win the lottery, I am totally building it.
You have a background in online role playing. How did that affect your writing? Do you still consider yourself a gamer?
My gaming experience played a lot into developing my writing, yeah. The particular types of games I played on were called MUSHes, which was generally understood to stand for “Multi-User Shared Hallucination”, and the thing about them is that they were real-time, interactive games you could connect to and play out scenarios with other players. It was also all text, so the strength of the experience depended upon the strength of the players’ ability to portray their characters in writing.
I’d been wanting to be a writer even before I got into MUSHing, but once I did start with the games, it gave me a whole lot of practice in both character development and learning how to craft a decent plotline. Several of the games I played on required you to create extensive histories with characters who had special positions or abilities, and others let you play “feature characters”, which were the characters who actually appeared in the canon material those games were using for inspiration. I played Han Solo for two and a half years on Star Wars MUSH as well as two of the characters from the Elfquest comic books on Two Moons MUSH, and this gave me a lot of practice with character continuity as I had to learn how to pick up where previous players left off–and also how to prepare a successor coming into the same roles to do the same with where I was going to leave off when handing off the characters.
It was also on a Star Wars MUSH where I started regular logging of activities of my characters and writing prose introductions to lead into every roleplay log, so as to try to establish a good running history for what I was doing. I was eventually told that this helped my logs read a lot like miniature stories, and this in turn fed into my interest in developing actual story arcs for the characters in question.
These days I’m no longer playing in any online games, partly due to lack of time, but also because I discovered that the gaming I was doing was just different enough from writing stories that I couldn’t comfortably do both at once. It was like trying to wear two clashing shades of the same color, as far as my brain was concerned. And writing my own stories won out. Also, I was strongly inspired by a good friend of mine who left MUSHing before I did to pursue her own writing career, and I pretty much looked at what she was doing and thought, “Why am I not doing that?”
I do still miss it, though! Especially given that several of the characters now appearing in my prose are heavily adapted versions of characters I used to play.
You’ve been published exclusively in e-book format so far, and that’s something that’s getting more common these days, especially in the small press world. Do you read a lot of e-books yourself? Do favor a particular type of e-reader?
Oh yes, I am devouring e-books now that I have the ability to read them. I’d been interested in doing so for a while, but it only really took off for me this year when I finally got an iPhone, and with it the ability to read e-books in all sorts of different formats. Like all voracious readers, I suffer the perennial problem of lack of shelf space, and reading in electronic form solves this problem for me nicely. There are a small number of authors that I will keep purchasing in print, just because they are the ones whose names come up when I ask myself, “So if the power went out or my iPhone got run over by a bus, whose books would I miss not having?” But going forward, I expect the majority of my book purchases will be electronic.
Right now I’m doing all my e-book reading on the iPhone, with occasional reading on my laptop. I expect to keep doing that for a while–although I have to admit that I’m severely tempted by the Nook, the first reader that’s come along that solves most of the issues I’ve had with buying a dedicated reading device up till now.
What can you tell us about upcoming projects? Will there be more things set in the same world as “The Blood of the Land” and Faerie Blood, or are you building new and different worlds for us to look forward to?
Both, actually! As mentioned above, I am writing Faerie Blood‘s first sequel as we speak, and right now the plan there is to do a three-book story arc. The short story I’ll be contributing to the anthology duo I mentioned will also be in the Faerie Blood universe, and in fact, I’m planning on writing more short pieces that will visit various places and points in time to touch upon the stories of different Warders.
Further out, it’s distinctly likely that I’ll be doing a novel to tell the origin story of Millicent Merriweather, just because I’m looking highly forward to doing a fantasy novel set in 1953 Seattle.
While all this is going on, though, I do have completely unrelated work in progress as well. The novel I’m shopping around to agents right now, Lament of the Dove, is Book 1 of an epic fantasy trilogy. Another urban fantasy I’ve completed, Queen of Souls, is unrelated to Faerie Blood despite the fact that it’s also set in the Seattle area; that’s sort of a sequel to the Hades and Persephone myth, and tells the story of what happens when Demeter tries to take matters into her own hands and rescue her daughter from Hades–by turning her into a mortal woman. Lastly, I’ve a couple of soft SF novels brewing as well.
Anyone interested is welcome to check out my page on my works in progress.
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Thanks, Angela! Join us next Friday for another Outer Alliance Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out Defiance and Faerie Blood!
Comments»
Fascinating! I hope you win the lottery and build the Electric Penguin.
One thing that’s really great about Drollerie Press’s books are the covers–they sure gave you a beautiful one for your book(s)!
Great interview, Julia and Angela!
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