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truepennyThank you to the other person who commented with a link to your review!
More than one person has asked about the possibility of more podcasts. To which I say, I don't know. Maybe?
Q: What was the most difficult writing problem you faced with Corambis?
A: My own dreadful tendency to think with my genre conventions. I had to rip half the book out and try again because of that.
Q: I really enjoyed the way that you articulated class issues in Melusine and The Virtu, but I was surprised by the way you handled them in The Mirador. Specifically, in the first two books we learn from Mildmay about how often the decisions of the Mirador's inhabitants have caused pain, fear, and death for the denizens of the lower city. But Mildmay seems disinclined in The Mirador to connect these injustices with their authors. It's not that I'd expect him to stand up and accuse the Lord Protector before Court and Curia, but I had thought he'd at least be angrier in his own head with the representatives of the ruling class he'd met. Why did you go in this direction?
A: Okay. Complicated question, and I'm not sure I can give you a really satisfactory answer, but here are some reasons:
1. Mildmay has SO MUCH other crap to deal with that I don't think he has the energy to campaign against social injustice.
2. He doesn't believe that complaining will change anything.
3. And if you can't change anything, it's a waste of time and energy to be angry.
4. Alternatively, I could point out that he is angry, but his anger is all aimed (sometimes displaced and sometimes really not) at Felix.
5. And, really, for Mildmay, this is just The Way Things Are. It's not fatalism, exactly, but it is definitely a kind of despair. You don't get angry about things unless you can imagine them being different.
Q: Why did Felix not evince more concern about leaving the Clock of Eclipses running?
A: Um. No idea how to stop it? A metric fuckton of his own problems to deal with? The knowledge that the Corambin magicians were ALL OVER the problem? Good old-fashioned avoidance?
Q: I just got to the bit with the Titan Clock in Corambis, so I wondered if it was just me -- Titan Clocks: related to the red velvet and clockwork room in House on the Rock at all?
A: I didn't visit the House on the Rock until well after I'd come up with the idea of Titan Clocks, but yeah, there is a kind of EXTREMELY CREEPY convergence there.
Q: I thought for sure the Corambins were going to have an explanation for Mildmay's uncanny abilities (with labyrinths, with spell casting, etc.) and why magicians were able to use something of his in their spells when Xanthippe for one said they should not have been able to. I was sure that Felix/Mildmay and Thamuris/Mildmay formed some kind of closed magical circuit in the spell castings--noirant wizard and clairant complement or channel type of thing; Mildmay a yin to Felix's yang or some such--and I was so looking forward to Mildmay's mortification when that came out and Felix having to rethink their relationship based on that. You never really point out a magician in the series and say, here is a clairant, so other than metioning lightness and darkness I had supposed that clairant was more of a materially based gift (Mildmay all over) while noirance was more to the manar. So how does it work in your mind? How exactly does Mildmay complement Felix and Thamuris' magics? What is Mildmay's magic? He certainly had something more than simply non-magic annemer--or didn't he rate an explanation? Kidding.
A: First of all, Mildmay has no magical abilities. (This is a case of "Because I'm the author and I said so." Mildmay as I wrote him has no magical abilities.) His sense of direction is exceptional, but that's not the same as being magical. Secondly, I'm not sure what you're referring to with this: "magicians were able to use something of his in their spells when Xanthippe for one said they should not have been able to." Xanthippe says Thamuris shouldn't have used Mildmay in his Pythian casting, but that's not the same thing as saying he shouldn't have been able to.
Your theory is very interesting, but it's not about the books I wrote.
Q: Did this conversation make it through revisions? Do you mind telling us?
I think that was the conversation about life on other planets, which did make it into the book.
Either that, or it was this conversation about Chattan d'Islay, which had to be cut for space:
Felix had told me about the guy who wrote the book because he said it was important, that you didn't want to go letting people persuade you of things when you didn't know who they were. The philosopher's name was Chattan d'Islay. Midlander name, but he'd grown up in St. Millefleur and gone to Vusantine to study. And stayed there, writing his books in a cubby in the Library of Arx and getting paid by the High King to do it.
"Boy," I'd said. "Nice work if you can get it."
"Exactly," said Felix. "His family was poor--refugees, if I'm remembering right--but he got noticed young. D'Islay was never wealthy, but he had a steady income for most of his life."
Considering how unsteady our income was currently . . . well, yeah, I saw what Felix meant and said so.
"Don't hate him for the things he doesn't know," Felix had said, handing me the book. "Wait and let him explain the things he does."
Of course, at the rate I was reading, we were never going to get to what Chattan d'Islay did know. Powers and saints, I was slow. And stupid with it. Seemed like I got fucking lost in any word that had more than five letters.
Felix was really good about it though. He'd promised he wouldn't make fun of me, and he didn't. He didn't even seem to mind. He just waited and let me wallow through it like a short-legged dog in a mud puddle, and then if he needed to he'd tell me how to say it. And if he needed to, he'd tell me what it meant. And he didn't make fun of me about that, either. He had me stop at the end of every paragraph--and, you know, it's dumb, but I really did like knowing what a paragraph was and what it meant. So we'd stop and we'd talk about what the paragraph said, and sometimes he made me read it again. He wasn't in no kind of hurry, and I was starting to get what he meant about that, too.
I'd been worried at first that A Treatise upon Spirit would turn out to be more hocus-stuff, the stuff that Felix talked about all the time--dreams and ghosts and noirant this and clairant that. But it wasn't. It was about bravery.
But first off, what it was about was about what bravery wasn't, and it was a good thing Felix had warned me, because Mr. d'Islay had some pretty funny ideas about what he was and wasn't going to let in the door. He'd started by saying animals couldn't be brave, that that was only for people, because only people could imagine their deaths, and then he'd gone on to say that women couldn't be brave because they were slaves to their animal minds and acted only out of instinct, and I'd put the book down and asked Felix, "Is he kidding?"
"No," Felix had said, grinning, "he's perfectly serious."
"Powers. What were the women in Vusantine like?"
"Women aren't allowed in the Library of Arx."
"For real?"
"For true," he'd said, the way kids said in the Lower City.
"Because they'll, what? Touch the books or something?"
"I don't know. They probably wouldn't let either of us in, as far as that goes."
"I wouldn't let us in," I'd said, and that'd made him laugh.
So no animals, no women, and we were in the part where he was explaining how peasants couldn't be brave either.
"Peasants?" I said, after Felix had got me not to pronounce it pee-ah-sants, the way it was spelled. "What does he mean?"
"Poor people," Felix said.
"You said his parents were refugees."
"You can't imagine I'm the first person ever to learn how to pretend to be something I'm not." Which was a roundabout way of saying Malkar had taught him to pass for flash, but it was closer than he usually got to talking about that part of his life.
"So he's not writing what he thinks? He's lying?"
"Nothing that simple," Felix said, and made a face. "He's writing what he believes. But he's also lying."
"You lost me."
"Not deliberately lying, any more than he was deliberately lying about women lacking the capacity for bravery."
"He's lying to himself."
"In a way. He's--" He made a frustrated gesture. "He's writing what he's been told instead of going out and talking to a woman, or to a 'peasant.'"
"Oh," I said. "That's, um, not very brave."
The look he gave me just about deboned me. "That's what Gideon said."
We just sat there for a moment, while he decided what he was going to do about it. Finish flaying me or leave or cry or tell me to keep reading. I was kind of holding my breath. I for sure wasn't saying nothing. Because I'd learned the hard way, a septad times, that there wasn't a single thing in the world I could say that wouldn't be the wrong fucking thing.
Finally Felix let out a breath, a little shaky, not quite a sigh. "Keep reading. Watch out for the peasants."
"Fuck you," I said, no heat because there hadn't been heat in what he said. It was a shared joke, not just him laughing at me, and I knew it because of the funny little quirk in his eyebrows when he looked at me, like he wasn't sure it was okay to make jokes with me. Like he wasn't sure it was safe.
So I kept reading. Got through that paragraph, even, and when Felix said, "Well?" I said, "He's full of shit, right?"
"How do you mean?"
"All this stuff about how there's no true bravery in people who, what is it, 'labor for wages.' I mean, c'mon. Does he really think they ain't thinking about it?"
"Aren't thinking about what?"
"What would happen if they got fired," I said. "What would happen if they cut and run. Or if they went and talked to their cousin's husband's friend who works for a spider and maybe knows where there's some extra muscle needed. D'you think the women in Lornless's don't know they're dying?"
"This isn't about what I think."
"Well, I can't fucking ask Chattan d'Islay, now can I?"
Felix blinked at me. I realized the light was almost gone. "Are you asking what I think? Or what I think he thought?"
"I dunno. Both."
"I think that what Chattan d'Islay knew about the world, he learned from books. And his books told him that only the gently born could be courageous. Likewise that only the gently born could have honor. And I think that he hated his own origins, that he spent his entire life trying to become that which he pretended he was." He sighed, ran his hands through his hair. "Or maybe that's me."
"But you don't agree with him."
"No." He shook his head, sharp and firm and meaning it. "I don't agree with him."
"Okay, then."
His head tilted, like a cat realizing something is prey. "What if I did?"
"Sorry?"
"What if I did agree with him?"
I wasn't sure what he wanted. "Well, you don't."
"But what would you have done? If I'd said he was right?"
Now I knew what he wanted. "I'd tell you what I'm telling you right now. Stop yanking my leash."
He didn't flinch, exactly. But his hands came up, fingers spread, and I saw the way his head jerked back, like I was the cat, and I'd taken a swipe at him.
"I told you I wasn't gonna put up with it," I said mildly.
He'd folded in on himself, and with his hands in his hair, his forearms were mostly blocking his face. "Right," he said, kind of muffled. He didn't say sorry, because he never did, but that was okay, because I wasn't mad.
"C'mon," I said. "Let's go have dinner."
And it was all worth it just for the way he stared at me, eyes big as bell-wheels, like nobody'd ever let him off the hook before in his life.
Q: As best I can remember, we're shown only one fully-successful present-day "love match", the Kalliphorne and her husband. (I'm not sure there are any past fully-etc. either.) Was this intentional?
(Oops. I forgot Oliver and Ambrose, but since they have about six lines total and are not actually shown _together_ . . . I still should've remembered them because they are an object lesson to Kay.)
A: Ouch. Good question.
No, it wasn't fully intentional, because I hadn't realized the extent of it until you pointed it out. Certainly, I am very dubious about "romantic love," especially as a teleology for a character arc. (Although it's very instructive in this regard that I had to rewrite both The Mirador and Corambis to get the conventional love story OUT OUT OUT.) And it was very important that both Mildmay and Felix learn not to use romantic love as a crutch or as a way to hide from their problems. But I did not intentionally deprive my characters of possible role models for positive and functional relationships in which love and sex both played equal roles.
Q: Did Corbie show up with her name or did you give it to her? (Foxes, ravens . . . )
A: She brought her name with her. And was utterly and definitively her name from the get-go.
Q: My question is, did you have a reason for the parade of horrible mothers in the series, or was this simply the way the story developed given the lives and backgrounds of most of your characters? The only one I can think of who was protrayed as a reasonably "good" mother was Stephen's, and if I remeber correctly she inexplicably commits suicide.
A: (There is a reason for Stephen's mother's suicide.)
Yes, there are a lot of bad parents in the Doctrine of Labyrinths, fathers (e.g., Philip Lemerius) as well as mothers. This correlates with the fact that most of the people in the Doctrine of Labyrinths aren't very good people.
Many of the women who are bad mothers (I think) are bad mothers because the circumstances of their lives make them that way. Methony, for instance. We don't know what kind of mother she would have been if she hadn't been trapped in a prostitute's life. (Given her strong resemblance to Felix, you are welcome to be dubious about her nurturing potential, but my point is, we don't know.)
Q: Was Mildmay's injury and consequent disability part of your original conception of the story? It so drastically changes the way he is in the world, and his ability to support himself (in more ways than one) that I wonder if depriving him of his "panther-like" grace (doesn't Felix call it that in the Virtu?) had consequences for the story that you didn't anticipate?
In other words, why did you do that to a cat burglar?
A: I did that to Mildmay because I had to have a reason it was impossible for him to go back to his life in the Lower City. (Also because I was 19 and wallowing in angst.) And, yes, his lameness has been frustrating for me as well as for him.
Q: What does Melusine's money look like? Does it all have Stephen Teverius stamped on it or something? (Or perhaps a stylized gorgon, hence the name? )
And, related, what is the relative purchasing power of a gorgon?
Gorgon on the face of the gorgons, yes. I don't know about the centimes. Not Stephen, though. I think I said somewhere that the obverse is a wheel, but I may be making that up (in the delusional rather than creative sense).
I went to a lot of trouble not to have to work out the relative purchasing power of a gorgon, in the same way I went to a lot of trouble not to have to work out any actual distances.
Q: So the hours of the day are either in the 24 hour system, or associated with flowers, the weekdays are, I'm guessing, French inspired?, years are indictions, and what are wheels? And what are the Corambin specifications like "in the Seventh of the oOne Hundred Forty-seventh" for instance, refering to?
The days of the week are actually Italian inspired (Marathine days of the week are French).
Wheels are what Mildmay calls septads: groupings of seven indictions.
So the Seventh of the One Hundred Forty-seventh is the seventh indiction of the one hundred forty-seventh wheel since whatever date the Corambins count their calendar from. (I think that's from the founding of Cassander, the first Cymellunar Corambin city, but I don't remember for sure, and although I know I've got it written down somewhere, I don't know where.)
[Ask your question(s) here.]
More than one person has asked about the possibility of more podcasts. To which I say, I don't know. Maybe?
Q: What was the most difficult writing problem you faced with Corambis?
A: My own dreadful tendency to think with my genre conventions. I had to rip half the book out and try again because of that.
Q: I really enjoyed the way that you articulated class issues in Melusine and The Virtu, but I was surprised by the way you handled them in The Mirador. Specifically, in the first two books we learn from Mildmay about how often the decisions of the Mirador's inhabitants have caused pain, fear, and death for the denizens of the lower city. But Mildmay seems disinclined in The Mirador to connect these injustices with their authors. It's not that I'd expect him to stand up and accuse the Lord Protector before Court and Curia, but I had thought he'd at least be angrier in his own head with the representatives of the ruling class he'd met. Why did you go in this direction?
A: Okay. Complicated question, and I'm not sure I can give you a really satisfactory answer, but here are some reasons:
1. Mildmay has SO MUCH other crap to deal with that I don't think he has the energy to campaign against social injustice.
2. He doesn't believe that complaining will change anything.
3. And if you can't change anything, it's a waste of time and energy to be angry.
4. Alternatively, I could point out that he is angry, but his anger is all aimed (sometimes displaced and sometimes really not) at Felix.
5. And, really, for Mildmay, this is just The Way Things Are. It's not fatalism, exactly, but it is definitely a kind of despair. You don't get angry about things unless you can imagine them being different.
Q: Why did Felix not evince more concern about leaving the Clock of Eclipses running?
A: Um. No idea how to stop it? A metric fuckton of his own problems to deal with? The knowledge that the Corambin magicians were ALL OVER the problem? Good old-fashioned avoidance?
Q: I just got to the bit with the Titan Clock in Corambis, so I wondered if it was just me -- Titan Clocks: related to the red velvet and clockwork room in House on the Rock at all?
A: I didn't visit the House on the Rock until well after I'd come up with the idea of Titan Clocks, but yeah, there is a kind of EXTREMELY CREEPY convergence there.
Q: I thought for sure the Corambins were going to have an explanation for Mildmay's uncanny abilities (with labyrinths, with spell casting, etc.) and why magicians were able to use something of his in their spells when Xanthippe for one said they should not have been able to. I was sure that Felix/Mildmay and Thamuris/Mildmay formed some kind of closed magical circuit in the spell castings--noirant wizard and clairant complement or channel type of thing; Mildmay a yin to Felix's yang or some such--and I was so looking forward to Mildmay's mortification when that came out and Felix having to rethink their relationship based on that. You never really point out a magician in the series and say, here is a clairant, so other than metioning lightness and darkness I had supposed that clairant was more of a materially based gift (Mildmay all over) while noirance was more to the manar. So how does it work in your mind? How exactly does Mildmay complement Felix and Thamuris' magics? What is Mildmay's magic? He certainly had something more than simply non-magic annemer--or didn't he rate an explanation? Kidding.
A: First of all, Mildmay has no magical abilities. (This is a case of "Because I'm the author and I said so." Mildmay as I wrote him has no magical abilities.) His sense of direction is exceptional, but that's not the same as being magical. Secondly, I'm not sure what you're referring to with this: "magicians were able to use something of his in their spells when Xanthippe for one said they should not have been able to." Xanthippe says Thamuris shouldn't have used Mildmay in his Pythian casting, but that's not the same thing as saying he shouldn't have been able to.
Your theory is very interesting, but it's not about the books I wrote.
Q: Did this conversation make it through revisions? Do you mind telling us?
I think that was the conversation about life on other planets, which did make it into the book.
Either that, or it was this conversation about Chattan d'Islay, which had to be cut for space:
Felix had told me about the guy who wrote the book because he said it was important, that you didn't want to go letting people persuade you of things when you didn't know who they were. The philosopher's name was Chattan d'Islay. Midlander name, but he'd grown up in St. Millefleur and gone to Vusantine to study. And stayed there, writing his books in a cubby in the Library of Arx and getting paid by the High King to do it.
"Boy," I'd said. "Nice work if you can get it."
"Exactly," said Felix. "His family was poor--refugees, if I'm remembering right--but he got noticed young. D'Islay was never wealthy, but he had a steady income for most of his life."
Considering how unsteady our income was currently . . . well, yeah, I saw what Felix meant and said so.
"Don't hate him for the things he doesn't know," Felix had said, handing me the book. "Wait and let him explain the things he does."
Of course, at the rate I was reading, we were never going to get to what Chattan d'Islay did know. Powers and saints, I was slow. And stupid with it. Seemed like I got fucking lost in any word that had more than five letters.
Felix was really good about it though. He'd promised he wouldn't make fun of me, and he didn't. He didn't even seem to mind. He just waited and let me wallow through it like a short-legged dog in a mud puddle, and then if he needed to he'd tell me how to say it. And if he needed to, he'd tell me what it meant. And he didn't make fun of me about that, either. He had me stop at the end of every paragraph--and, you know, it's dumb, but I really did like knowing what a paragraph was and what it meant. So we'd stop and we'd talk about what the paragraph said, and sometimes he made me read it again. He wasn't in no kind of hurry, and I was starting to get what he meant about that, too.
I'd been worried at first that A Treatise upon Spirit would turn out to be more hocus-stuff, the stuff that Felix talked about all the time--dreams and ghosts and noirant this and clairant that. But it wasn't. It was about bravery.
But first off, what it was about was about what bravery wasn't, and it was a good thing Felix had warned me, because Mr. d'Islay had some pretty funny ideas about what he was and wasn't going to let in the door. He'd started by saying animals couldn't be brave, that that was only for people, because only people could imagine their deaths, and then he'd gone on to say that women couldn't be brave because they were slaves to their animal minds and acted only out of instinct, and I'd put the book down and asked Felix, "Is he kidding?"
"No," Felix had said, grinning, "he's perfectly serious."
"Powers. What were the women in Vusantine like?"
"Women aren't allowed in the Library of Arx."
"For real?"
"For true," he'd said, the way kids said in the Lower City.
"Because they'll, what? Touch the books or something?"
"I don't know. They probably wouldn't let either of us in, as far as that goes."
"I wouldn't let us in," I'd said, and that'd made him laugh.
So no animals, no women, and we were in the part where he was explaining how peasants couldn't be brave either.
"Peasants?" I said, after Felix had got me not to pronounce it pee-ah-sants, the way it was spelled. "What does he mean?"
"Poor people," Felix said.
"You said his parents were refugees."
"You can't imagine I'm the first person ever to learn how to pretend to be something I'm not." Which was a roundabout way of saying Malkar had taught him to pass for flash, but it was closer than he usually got to talking about that part of his life.
"So he's not writing what he thinks? He's lying?"
"Nothing that simple," Felix said, and made a face. "He's writing what he believes. But he's also lying."
"You lost me."
"Not deliberately lying, any more than he was deliberately lying about women lacking the capacity for bravery."
"He's lying to himself."
"In a way. He's--" He made a frustrated gesture. "He's writing what he's been told instead of going out and talking to a woman, or to a 'peasant.'"
"Oh," I said. "That's, um, not very brave."
The look he gave me just about deboned me. "That's what Gideon said."
We just sat there for a moment, while he decided what he was going to do about it. Finish flaying me or leave or cry or tell me to keep reading. I was kind of holding my breath. I for sure wasn't saying nothing. Because I'd learned the hard way, a septad times, that there wasn't a single thing in the world I could say that wouldn't be the wrong fucking thing.
Finally Felix let out a breath, a little shaky, not quite a sigh. "Keep reading. Watch out for the peasants."
"Fuck you," I said, no heat because there hadn't been heat in what he said. It was a shared joke, not just him laughing at me, and I knew it because of the funny little quirk in his eyebrows when he looked at me, like he wasn't sure it was okay to make jokes with me. Like he wasn't sure it was safe.
So I kept reading. Got through that paragraph, even, and when Felix said, "Well?" I said, "He's full of shit, right?"
"How do you mean?"
"All this stuff about how there's no true bravery in people who, what is it, 'labor for wages.' I mean, c'mon. Does he really think they ain't thinking about it?"
"Aren't thinking about what?"
"What would happen if they got fired," I said. "What would happen if they cut and run. Or if they went and talked to their cousin's husband's friend who works for a spider and maybe knows where there's some extra muscle needed. D'you think the women in Lornless's don't know they're dying?"
"This isn't about what I think."
"Well, I can't fucking ask Chattan d'Islay, now can I?"
Felix blinked at me. I realized the light was almost gone. "Are you asking what I think? Or what I think he thought?"
"I dunno. Both."
"I think that what Chattan d'Islay knew about the world, he learned from books. And his books told him that only the gently born could be courageous. Likewise that only the gently born could have honor. And I think that he hated his own origins, that he spent his entire life trying to become that which he pretended he was." He sighed, ran his hands through his hair. "Or maybe that's me."
"But you don't agree with him."
"No." He shook his head, sharp and firm and meaning it. "I don't agree with him."
"Okay, then."
His head tilted, like a cat realizing something is prey. "What if I did?"
"Sorry?"
"What if I did agree with him?"
I wasn't sure what he wanted. "Well, you don't."
"But what would you have done? If I'd said he was right?"
Now I knew what he wanted. "I'd tell you what I'm telling you right now. Stop yanking my leash."
He didn't flinch, exactly. But his hands came up, fingers spread, and I saw the way his head jerked back, like I was the cat, and I'd taken a swipe at him.
"I told you I wasn't gonna put up with it," I said mildly.
He'd folded in on himself, and with his hands in his hair, his forearms were mostly blocking his face. "Right," he said, kind of muffled. He didn't say sorry, because he never did, but that was okay, because I wasn't mad.
"C'mon," I said. "Let's go have dinner."
And it was all worth it just for the way he stared at me, eyes big as bell-wheels, like nobody'd ever let him off the hook before in his life.
Q: As best I can remember, we're shown only one fully-successful present-day "love match", the Kalliphorne and her husband. (I'm not sure there are any past fully-etc. either.) Was this intentional?
(Oops. I forgot Oliver and Ambrose, but since they have about six lines total and are not actually shown _together_ . . . I still should've remembered them because they are an object lesson to Kay.)
A: Ouch. Good question.
No, it wasn't fully intentional, because I hadn't realized the extent of it until you pointed it out. Certainly, I am very dubious about "romantic love," especially as a teleology for a character arc. (Although it's very instructive in this regard that I had to rewrite both The Mirador and Corambis to get the conventional love story OUT OUT OUT.) And it was very important that both Mildmay and Felix learn not to use romantic love as a crutch or as a way to hide from their problems. But I did not intentionally deprive my characters of possible role models for positive and functional relationships in which love and sex both played equal roles.
Q: Did Corbie show up with her name or did you give it to her? (Foxes, ravens . . . )
A: She brought her name with her. And was utterly and definitively her name from the get-go.
Q: My question is, did you have a reason for the parade of horrible mothers in the series, or was this simply the way the story developed given the lives and backgrounds of most of your characters? The only one I can think of who was protrayed as a reasonably "good" mother was Stephen's, and if I remeber correctly she inexplicably commits suicide.
A: (There is a reason for Stephen's mother's suicide.)
Yes, there are a lot of bad parents in the Doctrine of Labyrinths, fathers (e.g., Philip Lemerius) as well as mothers. This correlates with the fact that most of the people in the Doctrine of Labyrinths aren't very good people.
Many of the women who are bad mothers (I think) are bad mothers because the circumstances of their lives make them that way. Methony, for instance. We don't know what kind of mother she would have been if she hadn't been trapped in a prostitute's life. (Given her strong resemblance to Felix, you are welcome to be dubious about her nurturing potential, but my point is, we don't know.)
Q: Was Mildmay's injury and consequent disability part of your original conception of the story? It so drastically changes the way he is in the world, and his ability to support himself (in more ways than one) that I wonder if depriving him of his "panther-like" grace (doesn't Felix call it that in the Virtu?) had consequences for the story that you didn't anticipate?
In other words, why did you do that to a cat burglar?
A: I did that to Mildmay because I had to have a reason it was impossible for him to go back to his life in the Lower City. (Also because I was 19 and wallowing in angst.) And, yes, his lameness has been frustrating for me as well as for him.
Q: What does Melusine's money look like? Does it all have Stephen Teverius stamped on it or something? (Or perhaps a stylized gorgon, hence the name? )
And, related, what is the relative purchasing power of a gorgon?
Gorgon on the face of the gorgons, yes. I don't know about the centimes. Not Stephen, though. I think I said somewhere that the obverse is a wheel, but I may be making that up (in the delusional rather than creative sense).
I went to a lot of trouble not to have to work out the relative purchasing power of a gorgon, in the same way I went to a lot of trouble not to have to work out any actual distances.
Q: So the hours of the day are either in the 24 hour system, or associated with flowers, the weekdays are, I'm guessing, French inspired?, years are indictions, and what are wheels? And what are the Corambin specifications like "in the Seventh of the oOne Hundred Forty-seventh" for instance, refering to?
The days of the week are actually Italian inspired (Marathine days of the week are French).
Wheels are what Mildmay calls septads: groupings of seven indictions.
So the Seventh of the One Hundred Forty-seventh is the seventh indiction of the one hundred forty-seventh wheel since whatever date the Corambins count their calendar from. (I think that's from the founding of Cassander, the first Cymellunar Corambin city, but I don't remember for sure, and although I know I've got it written down somewhere, I don't know where.)
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