Hi folks, I’m trying something new for the site. Let me know if you like it! Today, awesome author of horrific magnificence, Gemma Files, has graced Write-Thing with her presence. We have a chat about her book I’ve recently reviewed, A Book of Tongues, her writing life, and take a look at the upcoming sequel.

A brief note, some of Gemma’s responses could border on the spoilerish, but they’re so interesting I had to leave them in. So, my recommendation is that you go read A Book of Tongues and then come back. Now, let’s chat!

W-T: First off, I totally loved A Book of Tongues and can’t wait for the sequel.  Your Twitter feed’s hinted you’re pulling out of ‘Editing Hell’.  When should we be expecting the next book?

Gemma: The official release date for A Rope of Thorns is still May, though I believe the hardback edition will be available a bit earlier. And that’ll include the first chapter of the next book, A Tree of Bones, as well as being gorgeous and collectable.
 
W-T: Obviously your earlier work has been very well received. How’s the feedback been on Book of Tongues?
 
Gemma: Amazing. Better than I could ever have hoped for, overall. The least positive reviews either concentrated around things which, if removed, would have made it a completely different book, or highlighted actual flaws I can’t deny but also can’t do much about–so yeah, that’s still pretty good. And the most heartening thing has been the response, thus far, from the queer community; as a straight-identified woman, at the end of the day, I can really only hope to hell that I’m “doing it right”. Which is why things like the fact that A Book of Tongues made the Over the Rainbow 2010 Reading List go a long way towards convincing me that maybe I have done my part, after all.

W-T: What’s your writing process?

Gemma: My writing process is haphazard, to say the least. It begins with scribbled notes that get transcribed into a file, at which point I begin the long, arduous process of moving things around until they turn into pages, sections, chapters, parts…a book. It’s really not much different from what I still do when putting a short(er) piece together–often I get the beginning, the end and big chunks of dialogue almost immediately, then have to feel my way through the middle, discovering through writing and revision not so much what happens as why what happens has to happen.

W-T: What about indulgences?

Gemma: My writing-based indulgence is definitely metaphor/simile abuse; I tend to go long, then cut back to find the true tone of a piece, throwing away two descriptive bits for each one I keep in. Helpfully, my publishers currently find it prohibitively expensive to produce physical books that are more than 100,000 words long, which gives me a pretty good standard to shape the final draft to. Also, I genuinely like editing, unlike some writers I know–I cut 100 pages out of A Book of Tongues and 26,000 words out of A Rope of Thorns, and I don’t miss any of it. It had to go!
 
W-T: Wow. You’re a lot more ruthless than most authors I talk to! With all this heartless shredding of innocent words, what is there of left yourself in your writing? 

Gemma: Obviously, not a whole lot of the Hexslinger-‘verse’s plot elements is exactly ripped from life, in my case: I’m not a guy, not gay, not a gunslinger, not American, have never lived in the 1860s, Arizona or environs, never shot a gun, never killed anybody (by magic, or otherwise).

But like Chess Pargeter, I’ve certainly–at one time or another–been an angry, selfish person who’s made bad decisions dictated by privileging their own pain far above the pain of others; I’ve loved unwisely, and suffered for it; I’ve been betrayed, and betrayed in turn. And like Ash Rook, too, I’ve believed myself a hypocrite, unworthy of forgiveness; I’ve been arbitrarily given power over other people, and reveled in it; I’ve been afraid of death, as well as being terrified of what might (or might not) come after it.

So though some of the characters in A Book of Tongues represent things I only hope may lie somewhere inside me, all of them contain bits and pieces of things I know damn well do, from a capacity for bad temper, bad language and general bad behaviour to a not-so-sneaky liking for big guys with raspy voices and country goth-folk music… These points of similarity in the face of difference always being the only way any of us can imagine ourselves out of our own skins and into someone else’s, really.
 
W-T: So you’re an at-home mum.  Do you get to write uninterrupted?  How do you deal with distractions? 

Gemma: My son has Autism Spectrum Disorder, so when he’s around, it’s fairly difficult to get things done–he both needs and wants my attention, for which I’m very grateful. So I need to manage my time pretty strictly, and try to get things done either when he’s not here or after he goes to sleep.

Does this always work perfectly? I only wish. Nevertheless, with a good five hours of therapy or school every day, plus a solid eleven hours or so of shut-eye, I don’t have a whole lot of excuses for not producing at least 1,000 to 2,000 words a day.

W-T: Do you write with music, and if so, what’s on your playlist?

Gemma: Music is a huge influence on me. I actually compiled a Book of Tongues playlist and posted it at my “professional” site. I’m currently in the process of doing the same thing for A Rope of Thorns, as part of my usual pre-release series of interstitial essays. With allowances for various cracky songs that just appeal straight to the id (for A Book of Tongues, two prime examples of these were OneRepublic’s “Apologize” and Rob Dougan’s “Furious Angels”), the bands that seem to form a common bridge between all three phases of this story are definitely epic cowboy noir ones like 16 Horsepower, Wovenhand, the Dead Weather and Murder by Death, along with singers like Nick Cave, P.J. Harvey, Johnny Cash, Tom McRae, Thea Gilmore, and (of course) various versions of the folk song “Two Sisters”.
 
W-T: There’s a strong Aztec flavour running through A Book of Tongues.  Why did that draw you in?

Gemma: Like the Maya and Inca, the Aztecs – or Mexica, rather – continue to fascinate because they were a comparably advanced, enlightened, well-functioning and equitable society whose entire religio-political system was built on a foundation of human sacrifice…overt human sacrifice, as opposed to the kind everybody else tended to (and still tends to) practice. From their point of view, it simply made sense that the universe ran on blood, and that pain was a fair exchange for the gods’ continued protection; they gave their best and brightest so that the immensely powerful, unknowable forces inherent in the mechanics of what they saw all around them would be momentarily satisfied, the apocalypse momentarily staved off, but always understood that anything they build stood on a shaky, slippery foundation.

In a lot of ways, therefore, their psychology is about as alien to our own as you can get…but then there’s the fact that they were overtaken and eradicated by, in some ways, an even more bloodthirsty culture–one whose ethical system was also based on the idea of one person/god-avatar sacrificing himself on behalf of the rest, and whose ideals of peace and love certainly didn’t prevent them from killing and enslaving the Mexica, taking their stuff, occupying their land, burning their books, banning them from speaking their own language, etc. So it all evens out in the end, right?
 
W-T: How did Rook and Chess’s characters come about?

Gemma: For fifteen years, I was a film critic, then a film teacher/screenwriter, and what I wrote in terms of prose tended to confine itself to far shorter pieces–I published two collections of stories. Friends, editors and publishers kept telling me that I should make the leap to long-form narrative, because that was where the real money/market was, especially in terms of horror. It seemed impossibly difficult to A) get started and B) keep going until I was finished.

Then I discovered fan fiction, which is mainly written in installments and posted as each section is completed, to immediate feedback; it became a viable hobby, providing me with an outlet beyond my professional work, and while I think some of the people around me thought it was a waste of time, it really did nudge me slowly towards the idea of novel-writing.

Flash-forward to 2008, when I lost my job, then was simultaneously hit with the sucker-punch of Cal’s diagnosis. For almost a year, the bulk of my writing energy went firmly back into fan fiction, specifically for James Mangold’s 2007 re-make of 3:10 to Yuma–until, one day, I thought: “You know, if I added black magic, Aztec gods and an honest-to-whatever front-and-centre gay romance to this, then…it’d be something completely different. Sort of like Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series could be described as ‘just’ Age of Sail/Patrick O’Brian with dragons–and look how that worked out.”

All of which is a roundabout way to explain why I always see Chess Pargeter’s physical template as Ben Foster as Charlie Prince in that same movie, antihero Ben Wade (Russell Crowe)’s ambiguously gay sidekick. Like Chess, Charlie’s young, mean, odd-eyed, bearded, given to sartorial flourish, served in the War, wears his guns cavalry-style, and will do almost anything for his beloved “boss”. However, I do like to think there are enough points of difference to make Chess his own man, coincidental initials aside–and Reverend Rook is very definitely not Ben Wade, in much the same way that the Hexslinger-‘verse deviates very obviously from Mangold’s revisionist-classical Western worldview.

The biggest decision that I made about Chess was to have him be outright queer and know it–to make that a driving force behind his outlawry, but not make him bad because he was gay or gay because he was bad. At the time, I’d been reading some of Hal Duncan’s writings about queer characters in genre, and I agreed that I wanted to fashion a main character who would defeat people’s expectations–a villain-turned-antihero who would be small, pretty and absolutely bad-ass, to some degree because he’d been born queer in a macho, super-straight world.

In a lot of ways, though, Chess is still your typical Billy the Kid/Jesse James figure–he kills because it’s easier, more convenient, more practical then getting into fist-fights with guys twice his size; he robs and hooraws around because he enjoys the adrenaline rush, the liberty that the War gave him to do whatever he wanted and damn the consequences. And if the main difference in all that is who he’s drawn to dance with, then in the end, that’s not much difference at all: He also has to deal with the same ethical problems, the restless urge to ride and keep riding, the dawning knowledge that the world around him is changing and he’s going to have to change too, or die.

The Rev, on the other hand…well, I’ve always been fascinated by American Protestantism, especially in its more fire-and-brimstone incarnations, and the figure of of the faithless preacher is a compelling one. I love the idea of temptation and sin, the concept of somebody doing absolutely the wrong thing for what he tells himself is the right reason, then having to live with the consequences, after. I guess you could say it’s a fetish of mine, like so many other things that made their way into this series.

W-T: Your characters have a noticable trend of being responsible for their own destruction.   Talk to me about that!

Gemma: I used to think that good was boring, but the older I get, the less I believe that. Good is, however, incredibly difficult to portray well–mainly because people are flawed, given to self-delusion, to misinterpretation, to dreadful misunderstandings whose consequences deform far more lives than just their own–and I like opera a lot more than I do docu-drama, in general. But I think Paula Guran put it best when she said, in a review of Kissing Carrion (my first short story collection):

“Files’ wounds tend to fester rather than heal cleanly, so her stories will not be to everyone’s taste. Nor will her characters–they are drawn from the dispossessed rather than likeable gee-whiz innocents. Nobody in a Gemma Files stories puts a hand on a doorknob and open the door they shouldn’t–these folks are already in the other side. And that’s to my taste.”

 
W-T: How did the magic system you use in A Book of Tongues fall into place? 

Gemma: I liked the idea of magicians who were just ridiculously powerful, but how could that be made to work? If they could cooperate, they’d take over the world in a heartbeat…so at that point, I realized I had to make it that they couldn’t cooperate, that they were driven to parasite power from each other and therefore lived like tigers: Fighting, fucking, moving on before they killed each other. Expressed hexes would simply channel their power through whatever traditions they found most accessible.

For Songbird, Ixchel and Grandma, coming from societies which had a built-in idea of magic being real and rules and systems attached to the concept of wielding it, it would be far easier than people like Rook, who’d be left asking themselves: What is it I know best? Thus the idea of him using the Bible to power his spells, literally and figuratively. For other people, it’d be other things…a token-based methodology. And since I think of magic as mainly metaphor, this suits me fairly well.
 
W-T: Can you give us a teaser of what to expect from A Rope of Thorns?

Gemma: The biggest through-line of A Rope of Thorns is Chess’s quest for vengeance on Ash Rook, and how that becomes a journey towards maturity. In a lot of ways, Chess in A Book of Tongues is very emotionally stunted; he’s twenty-five or so, but acts like a homicidal fifteen-year-old. Now he’s been handed immense power, and we all know what that comes with…eventually. Hopefully.

So the process is peeling away the ingrained layers of learned sociopathic behaviour, and two things that really help it along are his relationship with Ed Morrow–the first actual friendship Chess has ever had, involving sex but not being absolutely based on it, and one in which Morrow provides a good role model for being a responsible adult–versus his relationship with a new character, Yancey Colder. Yancey gets caught up in Chess’s wake, suffers great losses and has her own issues to begin with, but she’s also the first woman Chess has ever met that he can’t dismiss as a bitch or a whore. This in turn opens him up to potential alliances with other women, which is good, because increasingly, those few people left on his side are mainly of the feminine persuasion.

There are also two other plot strands at work: As Ixchel’s plan advances, we see Chess-as-god making striking changes to the landscape he passes through, while the Rev is left in charge of Hex City–a strategic bi-product that Ixchel mainly ignores, but which is already becoming far more stable and self-sufficient than either of them ever thought it would. Ixchel just wanted a bunch of hexes on hand to throw into the Machine whenever it needs fuel, but some of those hexes like it here, and they want to stay; Rook sees this happening, finds it fascinating, wants to help–not least because doing so might open up fresh avenues of potential escape or rebellion for him, if the time ever comes when he and she can’t see eye to eye at all anymore.

And finally, we see old enemies return: Pinkerton, Songbird, poor Doc Asbury. Ixchel’s fellow woken god, the Smoking Mirror. And another gentleman too, someone with a very specific axe to grind against both Rook and Chess, who’s no longer so particular about what might happen to any unwitting civilians who might get in the way of his near-Biblical urge to retribution…

W-T: Awesome! Thanks so much for your time, Gemma. Needless to say, I’ve ordered a copy of the hardcover of A Rope of Thorns and will review it as soon as I can. Thanks for reading through, folks! If you haven’t already, read my review of A Book of Tongues and keep a eye out for more reviews in the not-too-distant future!

Born in England and raised in Toronto, Canada, Gemma Files won the 1999 International Horror Guild Best Short Fiction award for her story “The Emperor’s Old Bones”, and the 2006 ChiZine/Leisure Books Short Story Contest for her story “Spectral Evidence”. Five of her stories were adapted into episodes of The Hunger, an anthology TV show produced by Ridley and Tony Scott’s Scot Free Productions. She has also published two chapbooks of poetry.