Latest / Mythmakers / Set sail with Rose Black and her Fantasy Pirate Adventure: Fated Winds and Promising Seas

Transcript

Set sail with Rose Black and her Fantasy Pirate Adventure: Fated Winds and Promising Seas · Mythmakers

• 0:00
  Hello and welcome to MythMakers. MythMakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy
• 0:11
  created, bought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Golding and
• 0:18
  today I have the great pleasure of being joined by another author. Her name is Rose
• 0:26
  Black and she has just produced, I get this right, so you can see it if you're watching
• 0:32
  the YouTube version, a book called Fated Winds and Promising Seas. So welcome to Rose.
• 0:39
  Rose, is this your debut title or a... No, this is my second book. Second book. Oh, we must
• 0:45
  ask you a little bit later on about the problem of the second novel. And that rose, people
• 0:50
  were here from your accent that you live in the UK. But more specifically, you're living
• 0:56
  quite a fantastical city, you live in Bath. I do, I'm very lucky, I live in Bath. And you
• 1:02
  also describe yourself as a mother to a wiggly child. So I want you to cast your mind back
• 1:11
  to the life when the young Rose herself was a wiggly child. What was the kind of thing
• 1:21
  that you were reading on your journey to being an author? Which were the books that the excitement
• 1:27
  in your mind for words? Yeah, so when I was very young, it was my dad used to read to me
• 1:36
  a lot. And he had these books about a boy's boarding school and the hijinks. So that was
• 1:43
  like when I was very young. And then things like the worst witch books, I could relate
• 1:50
  to Mildred quite a lot. She was a bit of a clumsy, she was a bit of an alcohol, she didn't
• 1:55
  quite do things right. So she was very relatable. The animals are farming wood. Love those
• 2:02
  things. So these are actually all fantasy titles, aren't they? Yeah, yeah, a lot of them.
• 2:09
  Yeah. What else did I like? I can't remember anything about it, but binocular. It's like
• 2:17
  the title and the vampire bunny just stuck in my head. So I don't know anything about
• 2:21
  the plot, but the vampire bunny is stuck in me. And I think the celery stalks at midnight
• 2:26
  is one of my favourite titles of the book ever. Yeah, so you're obviously drawn to books
• 2:30
  to have like a quirky approach. So yeah, celery stalks at midnight. Yeah, you're fighting
• 2:36
  a duel with celery stalks. That sounds great. I really like that. So scrolling forward
• 2:44
  a few years, that reader became a writer. Were you writing as a child? You like me, the
• 2:50
  sort of person who heard hundreds of stories in exercise. Yeah, yeah, I had them, they
• 2:55
  weren't very good, but yeah, I was writing. Certainly as a teen. I had various things written
• 3:01
  in notebooks. So once you were doing as a teenager, would you say there were more in the fan
• 3:07
  fiction area? Oh, were you doing? No, they were. They were probably more urban fantasy.
• 3:13
  I remember, or sci-fi, they did. As a teen, I read quite a lot of sci-fi, but it co-dipped
• 3:20
  and Ray Bradbury and that sort of thing and Star Trek books. So I think I moved away from
• 3:26
  fantasy as a teen and then came back to it as an adult. One of the things I noticed when
• 3:33
  I look at the stuff I was writing as a child was I would try out different genres, very
• 3:41
  heavily influenced by what I was actually reading at the time. Yeah, same story. So something
• 3:46
  that might be a time-slip story like children of green no would suddenly go into outer space
• 3:54
  because I'd watch Blake seven. It is wonderful and anarchy to it. We are kind of free expression
• 4:02
  at the same time, or were you more organized than me? I think the story was its own thing. It
• 4:07
  wasn't so much that I'd go, the story itself would go off in places, but I did, you know,
• 4:13
  I'd have a superhero story and I had a one set on Mars and I did have a fantasy one as well.
• 4:22
  So anyone who's listening who's got in their household, some young person who's trying out
• 4:27
  all these things, don't try and tidy up their writing too soon. I think it's important to let a child
• 4:32
  just go through wardrobes and out to space and back in time without worrying too much if it
• 4:38
  makes much sense. I think it's great just to have that freedom, you know, not like schoolwork
• 4:43
  which gets marked, you know, it's a different thing. So Rose, talking about fated wins and promising
• 4:50
  seas, I think loosely I would call it a pirate story. Yeah, pirate seems to be the term that
• 4:57
  comes up. I guess they're kind of our pirates and they're anti-authority. Yeah, so they're not
• 5:06
  raiding ships, but they do have that kind of sense to them. So I dare anybody to try this novel
• 5:13
  and not want to carry on reading because you have the most wonderful opening set piece, which
• 5:19
  I'm a bit of a sucker for stories which start with the main character in the lowest point,
• 5:25
  stuck in jail. No possibility of escape. Several, I can think of a bit like that which I absolutely
• 5:32
  adore. And so I was thrilled when I opened your novel to find that lucky our main character is in
• 5:39
  jail. And he's clearly more than that. He's clearly a very damaged young man. He's very,
• 5:46
  I suppose he's had what his social connections pruned off him, so he's very damaged.
• 5:51
  And the story is one that follows his self-discovery and the blooming of his friendships and in many
• 5:57
  ways is healing. I don't think that's giving too much away. No, I don't think that's no.
• 6:01
  Do you want to tell us a little bit about the book, how it's first, you know, the sprang to life
• 6:07
  in your life and then... Yeah, I think it. So with other stories, I can think of things that have
• 6:14
  sort of triggered them. I can think that my first book, there was a little tumbler post,
• 6:20
  and that kind of ended up sparking the story, but this one, I genuinely don't want to start it.
• 6:26
  I just sat down. It was a first day in October and I just started writing about this guy in
• 6:32
  prison who'd been there for 10 years and didn't know who he was anymore. And I think I had about
• 6:39
  10k written in a week. The story kind of possessed me. I had to get this story about this guy down.
• 6:48
  So I don't know what caused it, but yeah, it took over me for the next couple of months.
• 6:56
  I was writing, this was my life, this story. I had to get it down. I had to find out what was
• 7:04
  happening because I didn't really have an outline. I didn't really have a plan. It kind of came out
• 7:09
  and I was exploring what was going on as I was writing it. So that's not always your writing
• 7:17
  process then. You sometimes have more of a plan, do you? Yeah, I often have more of an idea
• 7:23
  where things are going and what's going on and more of a, there's usually something that sets it
• 7:28
  off. Or I can say, it's these two things and I wanted to explore that aspect of it.
• 7:36
  But yeah, I think this one was very much, it just kind of hit me.
• 7:42
  So tell us a little bit about the actual story, the plot,
• 7:48
  sort of tease people into wanting to read it. Okay, so it's about lucky who's been
• 7:55
  in prison for 10 years for killing his mother and he doesn't think that he did it, but he can't
• 8:01
  really remember what happened on that day. He's got this vague image of a girl with white hair,
• 8:08
  but nobody seems to know who she was. And while he's in prison, a Leviathan with a giant sea
• 8:16
  serpent which is living in the sea around the area knocks into the prison and he's accidentally
• 8:23
  freed into the water and he gets picked up by a ship and the sailors on the ship
• 8:30
  and they take him on board this damaged guy and say, okay, well, you can stay here
• 8:36
  and he makes friends with one of the sailors as young man called Gabriel. And the book is about
• 8:41
  the two of them trying to uncover what happened with Lucky's mother and why Gabriel is so familiar to
• 8:48
  Lucky. Lucky seems to think he knows Gabriel from somewhere, but he doesn't remember and Gabriel
• 8:54
  doesn't remember him. So the book is about them uncovering what happened in the past how they're
• 9:01
  connected and also trying to put a stop to the church who are very much empty, the Leviathan's
• 9:10
  the magic users and trying to protect their home from the church. Yeah, so the church is in a sense
• 9:22
  worships, now I'm going to get this right, does it worship fate? Yeah, but the church worships
• 9:28
  fate and the magic users are more to do with the sort of serendiquity and freedom.
• 9:34
  Yes, yeah, so that the fate is about predestination about this is what's going to happen
• 9:43
  and it's very much a way this is what we can be safe because we know what's going to happen,
• 9:48
  we know the way things should be, but obviously not everybody wants to live with the way things
• 9:53
  should be, the way things should be for others isn't always what should be for them as individuals.
• 9:59
  Yes, so some ways to me, the story seemed like an example of, well, it was held together
• 10:06
  by the idea of falling into good and bad crowds, there were those who make you become what you
• 10:13
  need to be and should be and those who want to squeeze you into what they think you should be for,
• 10:20
  I mean, they have a good reason in their own mind for doing that, it's not evil in the sense of
• 10:26
  malevolence, it's more fear of freedom, I suppose. Yeah, would you say that's the right
• 10:34
  way of understanding? I think so, yeah, and I think that there is a lot of that in the world,
• 10:38
  people think, you know, they think it should be like this, but they haven't considered,
• 10:42
  you know, the point might be quite narrow or they're focused on things that matter to them,
• 10:48
  so it's about people who make you conform versus people who give you the freedom to
• 10:53
  make up the shape you want to be. Yeah, one of the things which I thought was very interesting
• 10:57
  in the way you had characterized the side of freedom and magic is that magic costs, literally
• 11:05
  costs in the world of your novel. Can you tell us a bit about your magic system and how you came
• 11:11
  up with that? Yeah, so the magic users are, they're able to manipulate water and there's a shrine
• 11:19
  on an island that they go to and they promise something and something will happen in the future
• 11:25
  and that's what they've promised will be given up in return for their magic powers
• 11:32
  and it's always something negative and it's always something you can't cheat
• 11:38
  because a couple of characters have tried it and it doesn't work.
• 11:43
  It's a bit like the fairy tale trope of having to give something that matters to you in
• 11:49
  exchange for some sort of blessing. Yeah, the fairy tale idea of the first thing that comes to
• 11:56
  eat the breetshoe and you think it's going to be the dog and it turns out to be the daughters
• 12:00
  that the price is often a lot higher than you realise it's going to be. Indeed.
• 12:06
  Yeah, so I think that's important because sometimes if you get magic on tap, like magic that doesn't
• 12:12
  have any limits or resource, it seems as though why don't you just solve all the world's problems
• 12:18
  with it? Yeah, yeah. I prefer a magic that's a bit more, it either has a cost or a constraint or
• 12:26
  otherwise it can get too powerful. Yes, yeah, I've often wondered, for example, the most famous
• 12:33
  sort of magic systems, of course, are things like Harry Potter. Doesn't seem to be a limit on the
• 12:37
  magic in Harry Potter other than your magical you're not and I've just wondered why don't they just
• 12:41
  yeah, I don't know if it's okay, I've been just seem to talk about those who know more about
• 12:46
  Harry Potter if that actually is true. And anyway, so going back to your book, you describe yourself
• 12:52
  as in the sort of backflap, so this isn't private, you describe yourself as as bisexual and the story
• 12:59
  features a gay central relationship between lucky and Gabriel. So I should say to anyone,
• 13:06
  is this thing, it's definitely PG or I can't remember what the American, but basically nothing
• 13:11
  the shock in there, it's in fact very sweet, the relationship. Can you tell us your thoughts on the
• 13:18
  need for representation in fantasy or all stories, but particularly in fantasy stories? I think
• 13:24
  representation in fantasy is very important. As friends, he's often used as an allegory or a metaphor
• 13:29
  for things and I think the best ones come out from people who have experienced what they're
• 13:35
  describing or they are aware of the aspects of it. So they are coming from a place where it is
• 13:46
  part of them and for me writing allows me to explore parts of myself that I can't do
• 13:53
  in real life, parts of identity and playing with aspects of myself and gender and things.
• 14:03
  So I think it is important to come from things, taking your identities and your characters
• 14:09
  as real people and real people are going to be reading it rather than I want to do this because
• 14:15
  I think it's popular or I think this is a good aesthetic. I think representation
• 14:22
  is important but I think it's also important that we don't pressure people into being up front
• 14:29
  about their identities because a lot of people can't, a lot of people can't, don't know the right
• 14:34
  words to explain how they are or how they see themselves. So I think that's also an important
• 14:43
  side of it. Yes, I think that there's a tension isn't there between the desire of us as authors
• 14:52
  to have a diverse series of characters in our books, which will obviously mean they won't all be
• 14:59
  yeah, answer our own experience because that would be credibly limiting. Whilst also being
• 15:05
  authentic to the experience of somebody who reflects that identity, whatever it is. So did you have a
• 15:14
  think about that because you're choosing to young men as you're? Yeah, I mean my identity, my
• 15:22
  how I see myself as it has come, how I've changed how I see myself has come out from my writing
• 15:30
  and I think that is one of the good things that even, even if I can't always explain it or I can't
• 15:37
  put on the right base, I know myself better that way. I think there's quite a lot of fear out there
• 15:45
  of being told you've done the wrong thing. Yeah, I think there is and I think there is the risk
• 15:52
  that you force people to come out when they're not ready or they're not safe. So I think it's important
• 15:58
  that writers question themselves rather than, you know, editors or publishing or even readers,
• 16:06
  I think it's important that it's the writer who goes, yes, this is something I feel I can write
• 16:13
  about rather than, oh, it's okay, I can write about it, I'll just get a sensitivity reader to cover
• 16:17
  it, that's fine. So I think it's important to do something that gets questioned internally.
• 16:24
  Yes, I mean, I think I should probably do a podcast about sensitivity readers because that's
• 16:29
  in itself is fraught. We have a different set of sort of judgments and morality and what have
• 16:37
  you coming in to a world which was the author's own. I think it's, we're in a difficult patch at
• 16:43
  the moment, but maybe we'll just get more at ease with it in a few more years time. Yeah,
• 16:47
  but I think honesty and approaching things are my, you know, I want to do this right, but I want
• 16:56
  and also I want to do, I want to give space to other people as well and I don't want to, you know,
• 17:00
  take up places from people who can't, you know, who have traditionally been not as easy to get
• 17:07
  into publishing as well as important. Yeah, that's the issue, isn't it? But that also suggests that
• 17:14
  there is like a limited number of places in the lifeboat of publishing and the decisions about
• 17:21
  the lifeboat places are given, are made by publishers not by the writers. Yeah, yeah, I think
• 17:26
  we as writers are sort of being told to imagine how many places there are on the lifeboat and only
• 17:32
  do what, you know, yeah, and whereas actually it's to do with publishing and to read as buying
• 17:37
  that is where the results are. Yeah, yeah, that's, that's the other thing is you've got to get these
• 17:42
  books out and you've got to, you probably should have to make people want to read them as well.
• 17:46
  Yeah. Okay, so away from that rather contentious area, I don't think you've said
• 17:51
  I think we'll get ourselves cancelled, but hopefully not. Should we joke about that? Pirates.
• 18:00
  Good and bad. So what are your favourite pirate yarns and which ones are fed into your
• 18:06
  particular take on pirates for this? Yeah, so my favourite bit of pirate media has to be
• 18:12
  Arthur Lackamine's death, which is a comedy series with Tiger Wahiti and Ristavis. All right,
• 18:20
  about Steve Bonnet, who was the landed gentleman who decided he was going to run away from home and
• 18:27
  become a pirate. I don't know this one, but I don't know Tiger Wahiti. Yeah. Is that John
• 18:34
  you're talking about? So it's comedy. It's very loosely historical comedy.
• 18:42
  Arthur Lackamine's still on BBC Iplayer. And what I really liked about that was because it's
• 18:53
  it's very sweet, it's very funny, and it's a very weird group of people coming together. It's
• 18:58
  a big found family thing set around a comedy and pirates, and it's that kind of aspect that I
• 19:04
  really liked. So your own pirates tell the listener a little bit about what's going on
• 19:11
  towards your pirate ship? Okay, so the ship is the dreamer, and it's run by a woman called
• 19:19
  Mill Haven, and her wife is the first mate, and they also gave real adopted mothers. So there's
• 19:28
  some lipped raw found family, and then there's some sort of fancy standard metaphorical found
• 19:35
  family. And the ship, the purpose of the ship is largely to work with the Leviathan's or giant
• 19:44
  sea creatures in the sea, and cause a major shipping hazard. So they're there to sort of guide
• 19:52
  the Leviathan's out of the way of passing ships so that they don't cause trouble.
• 19:58
  And that's that's mostly what the ship does. So the word dreamer obviously has a context in
• 20:04
  America about people who wish to become naturalised citizens, and there is and don't know if that
• 20:10
  was in your mind, but there is an element of these are refugees from ordinary society. Yeah,
• 20:17
  finding their place. Yeah, I didn't I didn't make that the association with the American term,
• 20:23
  which when I was writing it, but yes, it is it is people who are dreaming of a better life,
• 20:29
  a different life or somewhere where they belong, and that is a big part of it. The various characters
• 20:35
  talk about, you know, how they've they've left their previous life, and this is this is their home
• 20:41
  now, and this is where they feel they belong, and they can be themselves. So you've just met
• 20:47
  touched on the fact that there is a theme running through this about caring for nature and in the
• 20:52
  body of the Leviathan's, and there's quite a distressing episode later on, which I went spoil
• 20:58
  where humans are not caring for these Leviathan's leave it at that. And it's something I sort of
• 21:07
  come to the view that almost everything we write must have an element of an environmental story
• 21:12
  at the moment, because it is the story of our time. Yeah, that's what you feel.
• 21:17
  Yeah, I mean, I want you to I'm a lot of fantasy you have sort of sentient creatures in little
• 21:22
  dragons and things, and I wanted to do something that, you know, you couldn't reason with,
• 21:27
  you couldn't explain the situation to it, you didn't have that kind of intelligence.
• 21:32
  I think learning to live with things are dangerous, things that you can't reason with,
• 21:39
  is I think an important topic and how we how we do that and how we
• 21:45
  meet conflicting needs is a very topical thing.
• 21:50
  Yes, even just in Europe, I was looking at the reintroduction of wolves and bears, and then
• 21:55
  something already saying that's too much, you know, they're already carrying off the livestock.
• 21:59
  So when does the pushback come? It seems to be we're in a continual battle, saying nature to be
• 22:05
  natural, but when it turns out to be very natural and destructive to what we do, it becomes a problem.
• 22:11
  It's very hard. Yeah. So I was given the little hint that you might have another fantasy
• 22:19
  interest that does influence your writing, which is that you are somewhat in the world of
• 22:25
  dungeons and dragons. Is this right? Yes. Yes, I think that you and dungeons and dragons.
• 22:30
  So I haven't a last time I played dungeon dragons was a comic con last year.
• 22:36
  We had a little session with a group of authors and we ran a little
• 22:40
  little session where we were our characters in a, you know, all working together in a fantasy
• 22:46
  setting, but my longest running campaign was based on the first book, not the first book I publish,
• 22:53
  but the first book I finished and we're setting that world and that round for several years.
• 23:00
  So I was I was a GM in that one, but I've also played in various settings.
• 23:07
  So what does the experience of playing in a dungeon and dragons narrative, which you're
• 23:12
  sharing with others and presumably open to their decisions, which ones that you may not have
• 23:17
  take yourself? What does that come to you as someone who's plotting and writing a book?
• 23:24
  Yeah, I mean, it does it does teach you that everybody's got their own sort of agendas and
• 23:29
  thoughts and does show you how different characters with different ideas of how to approach something
• 23:35
  can can come out and make that feel right in the world. So you don't want your characters to feel
• 23:41
  like they're railroaded. You want their decisions to feel organic and I think being in a group and
• 23:47
  having different people approaching things in different ways can give you an idea of how that
• 23:52
  that works. And so when you're writing fantasy, do you find yourself naturally tending towards the
• 23:58
  I don't know, I wouldn't come stop characters, but character types that
• 24:03
  dungeon and dragons encourage us you to invent. I think my first book did because it was kind of
• 24:10
  Dean, it was, it gives sort of D&D feelings so that you have got the classic fighter, you've got
• 24:16
  your bard, you've got the necromancer. I don't think Fated Winds is quite the same.
• 24:24
  There's not not quite so D&D by standards, but the first book definitely that that was
• 24:31
  one of the things I wanted it to have. What was the name of the first book? So we can just say
• 24:35
  the first book is called Till Death Do Us Bard? Oh yes, I think I saw that in the notes.
• 24:40
  Great title. So you've written this book. What is the plan going forward? Is there another book on
• 24:48
  the stocks happening at the moment, Rose? We're hoping to sell another book which again is
• 24:54
  another standalone and it's another one featuring sailing ships, but these ones fly.
• 25:00
  And it's the story of the last job. So it's a captain who's just lost his wife and his crew
• 25:07
  have convinced him to take on one last job and the job turns out to be looking for his missing ex
• 25:14
  who he left sort of 30 years ago on not terribly good terms and the the hunt for this guy leads
• 25:22
  them to a forgotten city of amorphous in the desert and a cult that's trying to raise a dead god.
• 25:28
  So it's got an element of romance in it? It's, I've called it a post romance because it's the
• 25:36
  both the romantic relationships both with the wife and with the ex of both over. So there's not
• 25:42
  there's not going to be a sort of happily ever after the characters getting together, but it's
• 25:47
  for exploring what happens with people who have had a relationship, but now that's over and how
• 25:54
  they have to overcome their feelings and work together in a difficult situation.
• 26:01
  Well, I don't think that is an interesting idea in the romance world. I wonder if you'll be
• 26:08
  pressured to get them together at the end. Well, I'll have to see. Yeah, I mean,
• 26:12
  it's very clear if they don't, then it won't be a romance because I know that if you don't have
• 26:18
  your happily ever after and you call it a romance, then that's not right. But hopefully, though,
• 26:23
  I'll be able to know that it's not a romance like the other two. This one's a bit different.
• 26:29
  Right. So thank you, Rose, for talking to us. We always end with our guests with just imagining
• 26:37
  our way around all the fantasy worlds. It could be from film or television series or from books
• 26:44
  or plays. It doesn't matter. And we imagine where's the best place for something. So in previous
• 26:52
  episodes, we've talked about where's the best place to go for a drink, you know, or best place
• 26:56
  to be a singer-songwriter, that kind of thing. But I thought, in your case, I sort of could have
• 27:02
  done where's the best place to be in prison, but no, I'm not saying that. There isn't many good places.
• 27:08
  Where's the best place to be rescued by pirates? And you can actually define your pirates.
• 27:13
  You don't have to keep them on sea, you can. Yeah, you know, I was thinking, I was thinking
• 27:18
  sea pirates. I was actually thinking the Robin Hoods brainwilds might be quite a good place
• 27:24
  because you don't want to be in the water there very long. But going around that area on a ship
• 27:29
  and seeing things from a distance might be quite interesting, because it's tropical forests
• 27:35
  and there'll be lots of wildlife. That might be quite nice. Yes, definitely not saying the sea
• 27:40
  very long. I was thinking that actually in a way Han Solo from Star Wars is a pirate. Yes,
• 27:50
  I wouldn't mind being rescued by him from some sort of, you know,
• 27:54
  back to my childhood self remembering the first Star Wars film. So I think maybe I'd like to be
• 28:00
  rescued by pirates in the world of Star Wars. So thank you so much for today's and all the best
• 28:07
  with this book, as it is launched off, you know, you're hoisting the blue Peter and off you go.
• 28:15
  Thank you very much. Thank you.
• 28:45
  Wherever you find your favorite podcasts worldwide.