Author Interview: STOLEN LUCK by Shawna Reppert

Note from Shawna: This interview was originally posted at the interviewer’s own author website  http://www.maggie-secara.com .  Maggie is such a fabulous interviewer that I asked her permission to share over here at Here Be Magic.  Enjoy!

MSW: Hi, Shawna! What's the story about your new book? 

Shawna Reppert: How far will even a good man go to save the home and the people he loves? In The Stolen Luck, Lord James Dupree has to answer that very question when he embarks on a perilous journey with an elven slave. 

The ancient elven talisman known as the Dupree Luck once made the Dupree wine prized above all else, and that wine made the family’s fortune. Bur James’s father has been murdered and the Luck stolen, and both the thief and the Luck have disappeared into the Lands Between. The vineyard is failing and creditors are closing in; James’ only hope to recover the Luck is Loren, an elven slave he risked much to win in a card game.

Despite his abhorrence of slavery, James cannot free Loren until the elf has helped him cross over to the elven lands to recover the Luck, and so James violates ancestor’s beliefs and traditions in an attempt to save his ancestral home. But James finds owning another person changes him in subtle ways. A friendship grows between Loren during the desperate journey that may kill them both before they can reclaim the Luck. James need to command Loren is at odds with that friendship. Worse, James finds himself falling for Loren. The crisis of conscience escalates when a hidden enemy moves against them. James must choose between the Luck he needs and the elf he has come to love. He was prepared to gamble his honor for the Luck, but his heart and his soul are really what’s at stake.

MSW: What would you say inspired you the most when you were developing this story line? What kept you going?

Shawna Reppert: It all started with a comment a friend of mine had made. I can’t even remember the context, but she said that the tragedy of imbalance of power is not just what it does to the powerless, but also what it does to the soul of the one in power. I tucked it away in the back of my mind as a theme I wanted to explore in fiction.

Shortly after, I got to talking with another friend about tropes that are too often badly handled in fiction. We both agreed that the master/slave relationship came near the top of the list of badly done plot devices. If someone is a slave owner raised in a culture where slavery is the norm, that person is unlikely to have moral qualms about treating another person as property. Someone who doesn’t believe in slavery is unlikely to have a slave. Of course, being a writer, I instantly challenged myself to find a way to make the trope work as realistic and interesting fiction. I realized I could take a character adamantly opposed to slavery and give him a compelling reason to acquire and keep a slave. The moral stakes that drive him have to be high enough to equal the immorality of owning another person.

The obvious question is why? And what does the character in this dilemma do? And what effect does the decision have on them?

The earlier comment about imbalance of power came to mind. At this point, the whole thing remained an intellectual exercise.

But a few months later, I was stuck in a hotel room because the pipes had frozen in my home. There was about six inches of layered snow and ice on the roads with more falling, and I couldn’t get back to check on my house. Daytime television couldn’t keep my mind off the possibility of disaster.

I was working on another novel at the time, but kept getting blocked. So I dug the idea about slavery and imbalance of power out of the dusty recesses of my mind and started writing.

I soon found myself absolutely hooked on the characters and world I had created. There was no turning back.

MSW: The motif of slavery is a very chancy one and likely to make many readers uncomfortable. Can you talk a little about that? Your choices, decisions, intentions, and so on?

Shawna Reppert: I realized from the beginning that the book was going to be a tough sell because of the slavery motif. Not that I had any qualms about my approach as described above, but I was afraid editors and readers would find the topic so unsettling that they wouldn’t see past the word ‘slave’ to look at how I was exploring the theme. It’s absolutely not your typical master-slave trope story, but rather the antidote. Unfortunately, when you try to turn a trope inside out, it’s hard to pitch it without everyone seeing the original trope.

I actually abandoned the novel several times because I was so uncomfortable with the idea of taking it through the pitch process once it was complete, but the novel kept riding me and demanding to be written.

I still get raised eyebrows when I try to tell people about the novel, and I find myself talking fast to convince my audience that no, it’s not one of those novels. One of the few bad reviews I got on Goodreads was from someone who was looking for BDSM and didn’t find any (what my one friend called ‘a bad review that’s actually a good review’)

MSW:      The Stolen Luck is essentially an adventure, which is also a love story not only between two men, but between master and slave. Was that part of your original intention, or did the characters surprise you?

Shawna Reppert: That was very much not part of the original plan. When the story started moving that way, I knew it was going to make the dynamic even more uncomfortable for everyone, including myself. But at the end of the day, the best books are the ones that aren’t ‘safe’ but take us beyond our comfort zone and make us think.

The attraction between James and Loren arises very organically out of who the characters are. I actually fought writing it at first, nearly as hard as the characters fought the attraction itself, but in the end the story not only demanded to be written, it demanded to be written in a certain way.

And from the rules-of-writing standpoint, the attraction between them is a very powerful dynamic. As a writer, you always ask yourself how you can make your protagonist’s situation even worse. James is honorable down to the core. He tells Loren that he would take no one against their will, not elf nor maid nor mortal man, and a slave cannot consent because a slave cannot refuse. He means what he says, and when he finds himself more and more in love with Loren, his heart is breaking with the things he cannot, in conscience, express, and his original dilemma takes on even more depth.

For Loren, it’s hard enough to come to terms with the fact that he has learned to like and respect his new master. He senses James’s feelings before he acknowledges his own, and his fondness for the man makes him hurt for his heartache.

When he finally realizes his own feelings, he knows he must keep them hidden. In his view, no good can come between love between a slave and his master, nor between an elf and a mortal man.

I realized I had set up the ultimate impossible love, and though I consider myself a fantasy writer, not a romance writer, it was just too good to pass up.
MSW: When I’m writing, I sometimes enjoy the research even more than the writing, and sometimes stumble over amazingly useful details quite by accident. Did you have to do any research for this book? If so, what kind of topics did you pursue and what sort of places did they take you?

Shawna Reppert: Oh, I had a lot of fun researching this book. I live in the heart of Oregon’s wine country, probably the reason my subconscious gave me a vintner protagonist. The year I started the first draft, local wineries had gotten together and offered Wineology 101, a self-guided wine tour with tastings and lectures on various topics about wine and winemaking at each stop.

Usually when a writer goes out to research, she comes home with an armload of books, not half a case of wine.

 More important, I learned about the risky nature of the vintner’s life, which gave me a nice thematic pairing with James’s skill with cards. I learned how to talk about wines, and sampled a port that was pure ambrosia and became the inspiration for the fortified wine James shares with Loren on their first night at Dupree Manor. I learned about some of the technical growing decisions that made the basis for James’s conversations with elven vintners in the Lands Between. I learned about the importance of timing the harvest (‘the crush’ as winemakers call it), which gave me a ticking clock where I needed one to ratchet up the tension.

And I saw and heard firsthand the passion of vintners for their wines and for their vineyards, which allowed me to imbue James with that very passion.

MSW: What can we look for from you in future books?

Shawna Reppert: I am preparing to indie-publish an urban fantasy, Ravensblood, set in a parallel-universe version of Portland, Oregon. It’s a world of impossible choices, where sometimes death magic is the lesser of the evils and a dark mage struggles to save the Three Communities and his own soul. 

Corwyn Ravenscroft, last scion of a family of dark mages, struggles to save the Three Communities and his own soul. He turns spy against his master, who would overturn the democratically elected Council in favor of the ancient system where the most powerful mage ruled. His contact with the Council is Cassandra, a former apprentice and former lover, whom he once betrayed. Cass is a Guardian now, trying to live down her dark past until that past

came to her door, begging for help.

Ravensblood has gotten rave reviews from all my preliminary readers, including a woman from France who liked it so much that she came out to the Pacific Northwest on vacation so I could take her on the Ravensblood tour of Portland and surrounding areas.

Hopefully that will keep readers satisfied while I finish and market my newest work-in-progress, a steampunk/Victorian detective novel. Sort of like Sherlock Holmes if Holmes was a reluctantly-involved werewolf, Watson was a woman alchemist with attitude and Lestrade wasn’t and idiot.

There’s also a medieval fantasy making the marketing rounds and trying to find a home with traditional publishers, a sequel to Ravensblood outlined and awaiting my attention, and plans for a series of novels to follow the steampunk/Victorian detective novel.

Why Even A Fantasy World Needs Research - by Shawna Reppert

Today's Here Be Magic blog post is from Shawna Reppert, whose upcoming book THE STOLEN LUCK releases May 6:

Many writers new to fantasy don’t fully understand the need for research in their writing. After all, it’s their own, made-up world, right? If they are writing about blobs of ether that live on rainbows and don’t follow the rules of the physical world, they may be right. But such a book would be unlikely to find a wide readership. Why? Because readers want to be able to relate to the characters and their struggles. They want the book to feel real, even if the protagonist is an elf and the villain a dragon. The world needs to make sense. Even in an imaginary world, the history needs to be logical. There’s a reason that broadswords came before sabers, and if you have a character trained to broadsword comes across a rare antique fencing blade from a previous age, you’d better have a really good explanation in your worldbuilding.

That’s where research comes in. Readers can accept the fantastic elements of story as real— at least for the span of the tale— so long as the realistic elements in the tale are just that. Realistic. Nothing jolts a reader out of a tale faster than a tooth-on-tinfoil anachronism or an animal acting against its nature or, worse, its physical capabilities. The newbie writer might ask if it really matters. After all, what are the odds that the reader is an expert at archery or horsemanship? But remember, readers of fantasy are attracted to the milieu as well as the story. Many of them take their interest into real-world activities such as riding, shooting (both bow and, for the pirate crowd, black powder) and historical reenactment. If nothing else, a large percentage of the population has had enough summer horse camp experience to know why you can’t gallop a horse for miles and then let it drink its fill from an icy mountain stream unless you want to be walking the rest of your journey (to use an example from a published author who really should have known better).

Moreover, even when the reader doesn’t know his or her stuff, the reader can tell when the writer does. There’s something about rich, correct detail that makes things feel real. When you read George R. R. Martin’s Fevre Dream, you may not know about steamboats, but you can tell that the author does. (He does a less stellar job with the horses in some of his other works, but that’s a rant for another blog.) Likewise, Laurie R. King’s highly successful Holmes and Russell books brings the post-WWI world alive for the reader in a way that would not be possible without extensive research. (The latter is not fantasy, I know. Allow me my latest obsession.)

Now that I’ve (hopefully) convinced you of the whys of research, let’s move on to the how’s. There are, of course, scholarly books written on just about every subject you can imagine, and they’re not a bad place to start. They can be dry reading, though, are often expensive, and of limited usefulness when you are just starting out and don’t even know what you don’t know. If you are writing in a time period in which you can obtain surviving original-source material (journals, newspapers, books written during that period) I highly recommend you treat yourself to a thorough immersion. For example, there are many Victorian-era memoirs and anthologies of news and articles of the day, as well as fiction written in that era, and these can give you not only the details you need but also the flavor of the thoughts, values, and speech patterns of the era. When I moved from a medieval fantasy to a steampunk project, I felt absolutely spoiled by the wealth of material, much of it in the public domain and therefore available ridiculously cheap on Kindle.

The internet is a great source of free information, much of it wrong. Cross-check your facts, know your sources, and let the researcher beware. I’ve found Wikipedia mostly useful for quick checks of small but important facts, like whether there are ravens in Australia (there are) or black swans in North America (Though they are native to Australia, they have naturalized in places in the UK, so there’s no reason that an urban fantasy in the Pacific NW can’t have black swans with a little back story about a wealthy ancestor’s menagerie.)

I strongly suggest that you also step outside the box and the book in your research. When I first started working on The Stolen Luck and realized my protagonist was a vintner, I signed up for Wineology 101, a weekend-long self-guided wine tour combined with classes on wine-related topics. Not only did I pick up facts on wine, winemaking and viniculture, I got the feel for what it was like to be out among the rows of vines. I heard the passion for the wine and the vineyards in the vintner’s voices, and this experience helped me bring James Dupree alive.

There are tons of people out there who know what you need to know on any subject, and the most magical words in the English language are “I’m a writer, and I’m researching a book.” A friend of a friend on Facebook took a question I had on tracking dogs to someone she knew who handled dogs for the FBI, and I got a very thorough answer. For my (yet unpublished) medieval fantasy, I asked a couple of archers I knew if they’d like the chance to fix all the annoying things an author gets wrong before the book appeared in print. I thought it was going to be a quick Q&A. They had me over to their house, fed me dinner, and spent four hours telling me all the things about archery I didn’t know enough to ask. They used photographs of deer to show me the ideal shots a hunter would go for, let me handle the different points that would be used for hunting versus shooting through mail in period, talked about the stench of gutting a deer and how even seasoned hunters sometimes lose their lunch. They even loaned me a longbow at the next archery practice so I could get a feel for how it was different from the cheap hobbyist recurve I usually shoot.

Be respectful of people’s time, of course, and always take ‘no’ for an answer, but you’ll be surprised by who will take time out of their day to answer your questions far more fully than you expected.

Be creative and resourceful. When I needed to set a few chapters of an urban fantasy in progress in Australia, a continent I’ve never set foot on, I was stumped until I remembered a previous internet flirtation with a gentleman from Tasmania. I dropped him a line, and though we had been out of contact for months, he was more than happy to oblige.

Other writers can often be a great resource, and you may be able to trade expertise, for example, your knowledge of exotic poisons for their knowledge of 19th century sailing ships.

I belong to a Yahoo group for writers called Joys of Research. It’s open membership, and members post questions in hopes that it will fall into someone’s area of expertise. So far I haven’t seen a single question go unanswered. Past topics have included early-period plant poisons, talismans in early Judeo-Christian lore, the etymology of the word ‘creditor’, the rates of decomposition of corpses under various conditions, and whether cops on duty but undercover at a bar will drink alcohol to keep their cover.

Research is necessary to build a fantasy world that feels real to your readers. Approach it with a sense of fun and adventure, and you may find you enjoy it. You might even discover new plot possibilities and make a few friends along the way.