truepenny | Q&A 5

First, although no one has actually asked this in the form of a question yet: if you think you spot an allusion, you're probably right. Poe, Lovecraft, Eliot, Samuel Daniel, Shakespeare, The Cat Came Back, Coppélia, Sayers, Milton, Dickens, Tolkien, various Brontës--basically, anything I've read or seen or heard has been treated as fair game if I could warp it into the appropriate shape.

Here's another question that's been asked more than once:

Q: Is there any way possible we could hope (possibly years from now) for more to the story, either a precursor dealing with younger versions of Felix & Mildmay or post-Corambis incarnations?

A: Anything's possible. By which I mean, if I get an idea for another story about Felix and Mildmay (or Mehitabel or Kay or anybody else), I'll write it. But I don't promise that I'll ever get more story ideas for them.

Q: Was there ever a time you intended to have Felix and Mildmay go any further than the tension you'd drawn out so delightfully?

A: No. Mildmay is straight, and he understands the difference between love and sex.

Q: How did you develop the Corambin/Caloxan way of speaking? Does it adhere to some other set of speech patterns (Jacobean, Elizabethan, something else) or was there more invention there?

A: The Caloxan dialect is--obviously--based on Early Modern English (i.e., Shakespeare's English). However, I realized very early on that if I actually wrote Kay's narrative in EME, very few modern readers would have the patience to wade through it. (EME prose is, um, stately at best. Also convoluted. And just plain difficult for modern readers to parse.) So I cast about for other ways to make Kay's voice sound strikingly different from Felix and Mildmay, and also archaic. The inverse-contraction thing (where he and other Caloxans drop subjects instead of contracting the verb) is an occasional feature of EME; I just extrapolated it out into a dialectical principle. So, yes, Caloxan is mostly EME, modified to suit my purposes.

Q: How much of the eventual plot twists, turns, and results in Corambis were already planned while you were writing the earlier novels? For instance, when you mention Mildmay's weakness to illness in Melusine, is that a deliberate setup for him to become very very sick later on?

A: One of the very very early things I knew about Felix's story arc was that he'd eventually turn back to prostitution in order to help somebody he loved, and I almost as quickly knew it would be for the money to pay a doctor. So, yes, I built that flaw into Mildmay on purpose.

Q: Is the lighthouse symbolic? I have strong emotional reactions to lighthouses in general, so I was wondering if I was projecting or if something is really there.

A: All the architecture is symbolic. So, yes. The lighthouse is symbolic. (It's also just too freaking cool not to use.)

Q: Why not bring Gideon back? I think the reason Felix gave - that he wouldn't be Gideon - was excellent & for the rest of book covered it in my mind. But then I started wondering why you didn't work that out. I probably miss Gideon more than Felix!

A: Because Gideon is dead.

I'm sorry; I just don't have a better answer than that. Gideon is dead, and there's no magic Felix can work that can change that. And Felix is at least smart enough to know that anything else would be a miserable, bitter sham.

Q: And why not Kay, or why no love interest at all for Felix (or Mildmay)? Was it just that you felt like he needed to show that he's not at a point in his life where he needs to be that involved with someone - for a change portraying Felix as trying to be an adult? Or was it just that you thought he needed a time of grieving for Gideon?

A: The wretchedly awful submission draft of Corambis did, in fact, have a romance between Felix and Kay. It was wrong. Believe me, it was completely, painfully, utterly, embarrassingly wrong. It was me thinking with my genre conventions, not paying attention to the characters: who they are and what they need to do. Felix needs time to grieve, and after the string of train-wrecks that has been his love life, he needs some time to figure out how not to be that person anymore before he tries again. And Kay's not even remotely ready to have a male lover anyway.

Q: In one of the previous Q&A's you talked extensively about accents and, in particular, Mildmay's. I've never had any trouble "hearing" him, but Felix eludes me despite your descriptions. Is there anyone his inflection is modeled after, or could you possibly point me in the direction of someone whose voice I could use as a jumping-off point to get the gist of how he sounds?

A: My two best models for Felix--David Bowie and Jeremy Brett--happen to be English, and I suspect it's very easy (especially for Americans?) to hear Felix with a British accent, because we associate that with snotty upper-class intellectualism of the kind Felix specializes in. But he doesn't sound British. None of them sound British. If you've listened to my podcasts, in them I'm "doing" Felix as best I can, given that my voice is the wrong register. So if you can imagine Jeremy Brett doing an American accent--American as spoken by the dominant culture in the Midwestern states, with occasional undertones of the mid-South--that's what Felix sounds like.

And one more, because it's connected to an earlier question in this post:

Q: If you recall this post, in #3, you mention a scene which is psychologically true, and so on. I was intensely curious about this at the time, and now, having read the book, I still am. Does this scene still exist? What /is/ it? (I suspect, if it still exists, that I know which scene it is, but I'm often wrong.)

A: The scene I'm referring to there is the gang rape. As I said in response to that earlier question, I knew from very early on that Felix was going to turn back to prostitution to get the money for a doctor for someone he loved (I knew this was going to happen before I knew Mildmay existed), and I knew that he was going to end up in a situation that was completely out of his control and that hurt him badly. Because Felix is reckless and self-destructive and because under all his vanity, he doesn't think he's worth protecting. And because it is a kind of answering horror to his being raped by Malkar at the beginning of Mélusine. And because he needed something that would force him to confront these issues--force him to see that he doesn't deserve to be abused--and it had to be something superlatively unbearable if it was going to get through to him, because Felix has way too much experience at ignoring his own pain.

But knowing all that, knowing that it had to happen, did not in fact make it any easier to work into the structure of the novel.

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