Today I'm excited to welcome to The Reading Frenzy Michelle Sagara as she chats about her newest novel Cast In Sorrow 9th in her Chronicles of Elantra series. When I asked her why she also wrote under the pen name Michelle West she explains ––"The West novels are also much more like an -ology than the Sagara Cast novels...––So: I wanted people to know that the two books were very tonally different."
Learn more about the author and her works below!
- ISBN-13: 9780373803569
- Publisher: Harlequin
- Publication date: 8/27/2013
- Series: Chronicles of Elantra Series , #9
- Edition description: Original
- Pages: 480
Overview:
THE END OF HER JOURNEY IS ONLY THE BEGINNING The Barrani would be happy to see her die. So Kaylin Neya is a bit surprised by her safe arrival in the West March. Especially when enemies new and old surround her and those she would call friends are equally dangerous. And then the real trouble starts. Kaylin's assignment is to be a "harmoniste"—one who helps tell the truth behind a Barrani Recitation.
Praise for Michelle’s
Novels:
"First-rate fantasy.
Sagara's complex characterizations and rich world-building lift her above the
crowd." —New York Times bestselling author Kelley Armstrong
"No one
provides an emotional payoff like Michelle Sagara. Combine that with a
fast-paced police procedural, deadly magics, five very different races and a
wickedly dry sense of humor-well, it doesn't get any better than this."
-Bestselling author Tanya Huff on The Chronicles of Elantra series
"The
impressively detailed setting and the book's spirited heroine are sure to charm
romance readers as well as fantasy fans who like some mystery with their
magic."
-Publishers Weekly on Cast in Secret
"With
prose that is elegantly descriptive, Sagara answers some longstanding questions
and adds another layer of mystery. Each visit to this amazing world, with its
richness of place and character, is one to relish."
-RT Book Reviews (4 ½ stars) on Cast in Silence
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Please welcome Michelle Sagara to The Reading Frenzy
Michelle, tell us a
little about Cast In Sorrow
Cast in Sorrow is
the first novel in the series to take place entirely outside of the city of
Elantra, where Kaylin makes her home and does the job she (mostly) loves. It
picks up directly after Cast in Peril,
and follows Kaylin to the West March, where she discovers more about Teela’s
history than it’s strictly safe to know.
This is the 9th
novel in your Chronicles of Elantra series.
Is there a planned number for the series?
When I started this series, I envisioned the plot structure
of a television show, with many corners for me to explore and develop in future
books. I wanted a continuing cast of characters, but I wanted to write books
that stood alone, in the hope that readers could pick up any book set in
Elantra.
I’m not sure I did a great job with that last part...
I intend to write CAST novels until I run out of stories I
want to tell in that universe. At the moment, I keep tripping over new ones to
add to the list; I do write some of
the books on that list, so it’s holding steady.
Michelle you also
write under the name Michelle West.
Why?
The West novels are--to me--very different in tone. Some
readers don’t find that true; some readers have said that if they hadn’t come
to my web-site, they would have had no idea that Michelle West and Michelle
Sagara were the same author.
Because I’ve spent over half of my life working in
bookstores, and spent the better part of that time recommending books to
readers, I’ve developed a dread of giving a reader a type of book she doesn’t
want. I realize that no book, no matter how brilliant, will speak to all
readers, and that sometimes we pick up books that we don’t consider good. But
that’s a matter of preferred execution, not genre. I don’t recommend Ilona
Andrews to someone who comes in asking for books like Joe Abercrombie’s. Or
vice versa.
The West novels are also much more like an -ology than the Sagara Cast novels. They start, and the story continues throughout the series; while each book has an arc and a structural movement, they tell part of one story.
So: I wanted people to know that the two books were very tonally different.
Some people prefer the West novels ; some, the Sagara
novels.
Michelle according to
your bio we have the same problem. No matter how many bookshelves we buy
there’s never enough.
When did your love of literature start and who was an early favorite author of
yours?
I honestly can’t remember the first book I read. My
father--and mother--read to us when
we were children, and we picked up whole-word recognition from them. I remember
Oscar the Otter (picture book).
None of the early picture books were books I chose myself, though.
I started to read - with a great deal of pride - non-picture
books, which made my six year old self feel so
mature and grown up. I read all of the Nancy Drew books I could get my hands
on, and then all of the Hardy Boys books (because my cousin had both), and then
all of Enid Blyton’s middle-readers, and then... C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books.
Alan Garner’s Weirdstone of Brisingamen,
and its sequel (check: Red Moon of
Gomrath). The Hobbit.
These books were magic, to me. I had strengthened my
technical reading skills on books whose plots were predictable, and whose
characters did not undergo alarming - or any - changes. And I think that was a
necessary part of learning to read, again for me. But when I opened up the
covers of these other, non-series books, things lost predictability. They lost
a certain sense of safety, they rode off the rails.
I loved The Hobbit.
But when I opened Lord of the Rings,
I was quite put out at the introduction of this new hobbit, Frodo. I mean, yes,
Bilbo was there - but the book wasn’t
about him. In my disappointment, I set LOTR aside for two years.
When I came back to it, at eleven, I loved it. I read it back-to-back four times in a row. It was mythic and it was elegaic; it was about duty, friendship, hope and also sacrifice. I think it was the loss of the elves that moved me most, because they knew what the war meant, and they were willing to give up everything that they had made or built in middle earth in order to end Sauron’s reign. In the elves--and the dwarves--the sense of profound loss, the sense of farewell, carried with it the sense of the ancient, the wild, the glimpses of things almost, but not quite, lost to history.
It’s funny, another SF author I know said he read it first
as an adventure story, in which the fellowship & the battles figured most
prominently; it wasn’t until he was reading LOTR to his son that he could see the elegy and the echoes of loss and grief in
it.
But I think it’s all there, and we gain different things
when we approach it at different stages of our reading lives.
What is it about
Fantasy fiction that most intrigues you?
I like the endless possibilities. It’s not that life isn’t
full of endless possibilities, but the scope is often narrower, the focus more
internal. Fantasy--or Science Fiction--allows me to create a world, a universe.
When I first open the door into that universe, it’s exciting
because anything can happen. I think out and plan out the world itself, but it’s flat on paper; it’s an intellectual exercise. Only when I start to write novel words does it come to life. It’s messier, because things change as I write. I have to go back and revise things, or deepen them.
This doesn’t mean that there’s no sense or no causality in a
fantasy environment; there is, and there has to be. If there are no underlying
rules that govern your characters’ abilities and actions, nothing makes sense.
But the rules of the world are defined in different ways; they allow for things
you won’t see here: magic, non-humans, buildings that wouldn’t pass
architectural muster in the real world.
They allow you to build crucibles which both test and reveal
your characters’ strengths and limitations. They put characters into situations
that feel realistic, but which would never happen in the exact same way in the
world we live in.
For instance, they allow for ghosts. Ghosts, for me, are a
different expression of grief and loss.
What do you most love
about being an author?
I love sitting down to write. Writing isn’t always easy; sometimes it’s difficult because
that great idea that I had, which worked so well on paper, utterly falls flat
on its face when I try to bring it to life. But I love the creative process; I
love opening up both the characters and the world they inhabit. I love it when
a book turns left instead of taking the straight road, even when I’m
simultaneously pulling out all my hair and shrieking in protest at my computer
screen. (This makes my mother worry about me, but...writers are often a bit
strange.)
And I love reaching readers.
Reading was a huge, formative part of my childhood. It was a huge and formative part of my adolescence. It is still a large part of my life now. Books spoke to me in ways people couldn’t -- possibly because I was too prickly to listen >.>. They moved me in ways people didn’t, because they were more intense, and more focused, and the view they offered was different enough that I could immerse myself in it.
There was pretty much nothing I loved the way I loved books.
And I wanted that. I mean, I wanted to write something that
would move readers in the same way that I myself had been moved. When I find
that my books are someone’s comfort reading, or that they got them through
chemotherapy, it makes my day. It makes my week.
Michelle, you’ve just
turned in your latest manuscript and are packing your bags for a personal
vacation.
Where in this world would you be traveling?
Australia. But this time, I would visit Sydney as well and
see a little bit more of the country than I did in August. I’m not much of a
traveler; for one, I hate planes. It takes me a few days to recover from the
flight if it’s longer than about six hours. I also tend to live a little bit
too much in my own head; I start to think, I focus inward, and I kind of shut
out the world -- no matter where I am.
I don’t do this deliberately; a stray thought will kind of knock me into internal loops while I poke at it. But...I’ve once walked into a moving car because I was thinking through something and I didn’t actually notice that the light was red when I started to walk across the street. I try very hard not to do this, for obvious reasons (and the poor driver was grey-green when she pulled over--I felt so guilty >.<).
It means, though, that I tend to pick up a new book by an
author I adore with the same enthusiasm some people save for visiting strange,
new places.
And when I’m reading, the world disappears. Except it
doesn’t. So then I want to be in the comfort of my cave with these new words
and these new thoughts.
If you could choose
to travel to only one of your fantasy worlds which one would it be and why?
I’m not sure I would ever willingly visit one of my fantasy
worlds >.>. So much of the stories I write are set in periods of conflict
and instability. It’s not that life in reality is free of conflict or
instability--but demons are not going to reduce me to screaming insanity, and
my house is not going to half-melt out beneath my feet, and people who have
greater wealth and power aren’t going to randomly kill me on a lark.
I’m a pretty average person. Married, mortgaged, with two
children and an old car. I’m not young, and not physically at the top of my
form. I have zero illusions of what my life would actually be like if I paid a
visit to most of the places I write about: short and probably over quickly.
So understand that if I had to choose only one, I would be
choosing the one in which I think I’d have the best chance of leaving a
reasonably comfortable working life.
That would probably be Elantra.
Michelle when you’re in the writing zone do you forget about everything else or are you an uber-organized person and nothing suffers?
I am very much the former (I think you kind of have to be to
realize, in the middle of a Washington D.C. intersection, that the light was
actually red and you are crossing against traffic). I have daydreams of being an uber-organized person. One of my small compulsions is to buy To-do apps for my iPad. Or project management apps. The hope is that I will find one that is so intuitive to my thought processes that I will instantly become an organized person.
So far, this has failed to happen. I start to enter things,
and then get overwhelmed by all of the things on the to do list, until making
the list itself seems like a herculean task and I back away.
So I have the mounting pile of emergencies, and the smaller
pile of things that will become emergencies if I don’t deal with them Right
Now.
Michelle thanks so
much for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk to us today. Will there
be an author/signing event(s) where fans could meet you in person?
I work in a bookstore in Toronto, BakkaPhoenix
books, two days a week, and I’m happy to sign books or say hello in person
there.
FRANKIE Y. BAILEY is an associate professor in the School of Criminal Justice, University at Albany (SUNY). Bailey is the author of mysteries as well as non-fiction titles that explore the intersections of crime, history, and popular culture. Bailey is a Macavity Award-winner and has been nominated for Edgar, Anthony, and Agatha awards. A past executive vice president of Mystery Writers of America and a past president of Sisters in Crime, she is on the Albany Bouchercon 2013 planning committee.
