Notes from the Return of the Thief launch party Q&A with MWT!
• It took 20 minutes into the event to get the first Not Telling, and everyone was astonished it wasn't sooner.
• (I meant to keep a Not Telling tally but I got distracted by all the good words Megan put together.)
• She referenced the Not Telling shirt made for her by @queensandkingsofattolia ! She wasn't wearing it, but she did have her Not Telling socks, which she would put on her hands and hold up to the camera.
• She talked about how she doesn't like suspense as a reader. She always wants the stories to get to the point instead of dragging on, so in writing, she puts light scenes in to break up the suspense. She doesn't always know what those scenes will be, she just has a feel for what's needed there. One example is when Sophos and the magus are traveling to Attolia in aCoK, when they eat the chicken. "We eat the chicken now!" was a scene that made her happy while she wrote it.
• She was asked to explain the gods and how the different pantheons work with each other, and said she never wants to explain the gods. She doesn't want them to be cut-and-dry or understandable.
• Asked about writing such complex, ruthless characters and making them likeable.
Alex (mod): Do you think [the POV characters] good? Megan: *silently presents Not Telling socks*
• Said that if you're going to spend so much time in a characters head, there has to be some part of them that you and the readers will like. And there are some people whose heads she didn't want to be in. Even the ruthless ones making terrible decisions, she does like. "Nahuseresh? Not so much."
Alex: *says something about how they've never encountered books with more poker face than QT* Megan: *big ol' grin*
• Talking about how these books have so many layers and so much suspense, Megan said a lot of that is owing to the fact it's a series and she needed to be consistent, she couldn't switch the style of it or tone halfway through. When she writes the next thing, it might be a whole different kind of book. She'll have to see whether that was just sonething distinctive to QT, or that's what she naturally gravitates towards writing.
• She mentioned that she isn't fond of 1st person narrative, and the chat collective raised a single eyebrows at the irony.
• In fact, TaT was written in 3rd person at first. But she realized that wasn't working so she scrapped that and rewrote the whole thing, bc it needed to be Kamet who was telling us the story.
• She pronounced Kamet as "Kam-et".
• When talking about the details in her books and how they go into logistics, she brought a book onto camera called Alexander the Great and the Legacies of the Macedonian Army (couldn't catch the author name). It heavily influenced the way she wrote about war and the politics thereof in QT.
• The Thief was partly inspire by a conversation she had with a young relative back during the Bush administration when Kuwait was invaded. The young relative didn't understand what the U.S. was doing in the middle east when we had so many problems to focus in our own country, and Megan explained that we weren't involved in that conflict out of the goodness of our hearts, but bc they had resources we wanted. (The way she phrased it, you could hear the magus talking to the boys in The Thief, and it gave me shivers.) And she realized, kids don't see that side of war in stories. Armies are always fighting Sauron and the forces of evil, and acting out if their own self-interests against people who might not be all bad.
• And thus, The Queen's Thief spiraled jnto existence.
• Why does she choose to write about disability and illness the way she does? Rosemary Sutcliff. Sutcliff was disabled for most of her life, and this reflected in the stories she told. Megan recalls Warrior Scarlet as the first book that challenged her as a kid to think about disability and illness as a natural part of life, and to question who gets to be at the center of the story. Who gets to be the hero? Who gets to be the hero of an adventure story? Why shouldn't characters dealing with illness or disability be those heros?
• TaT was a direct response to Sutcliff's novel Eagle of the Ninth, where an earnest young Roman soldier has these great plans for his life that get toppled when he is injured in his first battle and can no longer serve.
Megan: Costis checks every box for earnest young guy!
• In Eagle, there is a slave who travels with the protagonist and is freed by him at the end as part of the protagonist's journey. It was important to tell TaT from Kamet's point of view so that it was about him. "He is never an object of a quest, always a person."
• Megan has never read The Aeneid.
• She recommends Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin, which tells The Aeneid from a different POV.
• On writing process: She doesn't outline. When she has a book idea, she first tells it as a story by cornering her husband and telling him the whole thing with plenty of hand gestures. After that, she does a "sketch". She writes down the shape of the story, plotlines and characters, which is usually half the length of the finished book. Then she fleshes it out, and cuts and adds and cuts snd adds until she has pretty much a whole book, and then she edits again to cut everything that doesn't absolutely need to be there.
• She says it's important to remember you can't fix everything in one draft. You just need to focus on 20 or so things at a time, and then on the next pass you can focus on 20 other things.
• On keeping characters straight: "It's very crowded in my head." She doesn't focus so much on remembering exactly what she has written about a character before, but knowing who the character is so that she knows how they would react in whatever new situation she is writing them in.
Megan: Okay, Costis. I know this guy, I know what he's going to do. He's going to punch that guy in the face and it will be very embarrassing.
• A lot of people asked about the vampires referenced in The Thief and if they were real. She's not telling.
• Someone *cough*me*cough* Asked if she was planning a spin-off series about Eddisian vampires falling in love. "Never say never, but it's probably unlikely."
Alex: What happened to Ornon's sheep? Megan: Guys....guys......I have to put on another sock, come on, guys! *digs for her Not Telling socks and holds them up*
• On worldbuilding: You have to break with reality. It's great to research the process of how to retin pans! Adding details like that can enrich your story, but you can also add things that wouldn't have been possible in the real world. Like, pocket watches and window glass and printing presses all at the same time. The made up details also make your story richer.
Megan: Cut the research and tell a good story!
• On myths: She never writes the myths first. When she was writing The Thief, she would make a new line and type "[Myth Here]" and then go on with the rest of the story and cone back to that later.
• She recommends Ancient Near East Texts by James B. Pritchard for some good myths!
• What she likes best about DWJ: The Audacity(tm). DWJ would write about the most bizarre things very casually.
Megan: Her stories had a "hold my beer" quality.
• She told the story about hiw DWJ got her published (Alex: "She had good taste") and trying to send DWJ the advanced copy of aCoK before she died, but those stories have been retold elsewhere before so I won't bother with them now.
• Megan wore lovely, lovely earrings! And at the beseechment of the chat, she showed them to the camera and told us they were made by @freenarnian
• Finally, the winner of the trivia party was granted the honor of asking a question on camera, and Megan benevolently said she would not cry Not Telling on whatever was asked.
• Margaux, the winner, asked what the age difference was between Dite and Irene, and if they had grown up together.
• After a REAL long pause, Megan said that she didn't think they had grown up together. Irene is younger than Dite, and she was too busy, and I quote, "killing people." Her childhood ended early and she didn't have time to be a kid. Besides that, they wouldn't have been allowed to hang out in Attolian society, bc she was a girl and he was a boy. They were probably introduced to each other atvevents, but that was it.
• Also: Dite is pronounced "Die-tee".
• She has more events like this planned in the future!!!!! Keep an eye on her tumblr!!!!!
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