{"id":1446,"date":"2016-09-07T18:16:27","date_gmt":"2016-09-07T23:16:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/marissalingen.com\/blog\/?p=1446"},"modified":"2016-09-07T18:16:27","modified_gmt":"2016-09-07T23:16:27","slug":"interview-with-blake-charlton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marissalingen.com\/blog\/?p=1446","title":{"rendered":"Interview with Blake Charlton"},"content":{"rendered":"

Blake Charlton’s Spellbreaker<\/em> came out last month, but the life of a doctor-and-writer is a busy one, so we just caught up with each other now! Here’s a Q&A with Blake.<\/p>\n

1) Most classic\u00a0fantasy\u00a0is centered on an external conflict. Many of the best authors add\u00a0an internal conflict. For triple backflip, you\u2019ve added autoimmune to the other two layers\u00a0of conflict in\u00a0Spellbreaker<\/em>. Is there any farther down the rabbit hole you can go? Can\u00a0you talk about some of the difficulties of dramatizing conflict that isn\u2019t just character vs.\u00a0themself but character vs. their own body?<\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s intensely gratifying when a reader picks up on a personally important theme as you just did. So thank you kindly for this question.<\/p>\n

Although the charters of\u00a0Spellbreaker<\/em>\u00a0wouldn\u2019t recognize the term \u2018autoimmunity,\u2019 they would recognize the disease that the protagonist, Leandra, contends with as one of the parts of her heritage at war with each other. They would also recognize the themes of self-hatred and self-attack as important to their lives and the story unfolding around them. Casual perusal of the internet suggests one of the more popular scenes in the\u00a0book\u00a0is Francesca\u2019s emphatic, hopefully humorous declamation on why there is no hatred worse than self-hatred–which you can read here <http:\/\/darkfaerietales.com\/review-spellbreaker-blake-charlton.html<\/a>>.<\/p>\n

My interest in these themes comes from my own struggle with my disability. I was often frustrated by my limitations, would often disparage the part of me that made me different. When I was younger, this lead to flares of hating and attacking myself or hating and attacking \u2018normal\u2019 people and the insensitive society they created. Escaping these flares was central to my struggle to become an adult. Anecdotally, I have noticed other friends and patients with disability get caught within or escape such flares. So you see, the conflict between a person and their own body or brain and the resultant secondary conflict with a society built by convenience around the\u00a0fiction\u00a0of \u2018normalcy\u2019 has been dramatized throughout my life.<\/p>\n

For those interested in such things, the different characters in this series explore different aspects of this theme. In the first two\u00a0books, Nicodemus was struggling with his doubt and self-hatred. The danger he faces is that of becoming the bitter and angry disabled person, who lashed out at the world. His nemesis in those\u00a0books, James Berr, represents a shadowy reflection of who Nicodemus has the potential to become. Francesca, on the other hand, is a character who in the second and third\u00a0books\u00a0contends with regret. She has had to make difficult decisions–many of them the right ones, some of them wrong. She is haunted by her past, though she is not completely aware of her past. In the third\u00a0book, her relationship with her daughter, Leandra, is fraught with regret; mother and daughter find themselves in cyclic flares of blaming themselves and then blaming each other. Trying to find a way out of that cycle, if there is one, is the central issue of their development in the\u00a0book. Finally, Leandra has the most immediate and visceral relationship with the theme since she has a chronic disease that induces periodic, unpredictable, and agonizing flares. She has grown up with the sense that her own body has betrayed her, expecting that she will die young. There is a strong anti-heroic streak in Leandra, and the capriciousness and injustice of the world weighs heavily on her, makes her ruthless. Her overarching passion is to effect justice in a chaotic and prejudiced world. It gets her into trouble. Big trouble.
\n2) Many doctors get accused of having a God complex. You have several. Were there\u00a0any divine complexes that got left out in the editing stages? Any fun combos of gods\u00a0you’d have loved to include?
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

Wow. This question is amazing. I should get my answers out of the way of your questions. Yes, several god complexes. No, no developed complex was left on the cutting room floor. But I did toy with the idea of showing the creation of a new divinity complex. Perhaps, I thought, it would be fun to show the southern war gods–who show up as reinforcements toward the end of the\u00a0book–on \u2018shore leave\u2019 as it were in Chandralu. Deities from different cultures intermingling.\u00a0\u00a0I had some vague idea of dramatizing a kinda paper-rock-scissors love-triangle between deities of incompatible elements and ideologies: Something like an angel of light falls for, but would erase, a goddess of shadow who\u2019s obsessed with, but useless to, a demon of prisms, glass, and illusion, who would of course perforce be enamored with the angel of light. But that was going to be too involved, and the\u00a0book\u00a0was already too long. So I put it in my back pocket, where it will likely stay.
\n3) Lupus, teratomas, and instant cancer curses: there’s a lot of medicine in this\u00a0book\u00a0compared to most\u00a0fantasy. How much does your own practice inspire your work? How\u00a0hard is it to keep the lines in the right places?
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

Medicine is the lens though which I see the world. As a physician in training, I don\u2019t think I can escape it. When riding the muni around San Francisco, I can\u2019t help but try to diagnose fellow passengers. When listening to the news, my mind jumps automatically to the implications on global or national health. And when I think about adventure,\u00a0fantasy, magic that same lens stays with me. It may seem like a stretch to some. It certainly isn\u2019t similar to the typical\u00a0fantasy\u00a0lens, which focuses on chainmail and horses and catapults and Feudal politics. I don\u2019t know anything about chainmail. But maybe that\u2019s okay. I think much of the innate human conception of health and sickness is connected to the spiritual and the magical. I would guess that many, if not most, of human prayers and rituals center around health and healing. So if magic were real and tied to manifestations of divinity, then maybe it isn\u2019t so far a stretch to say that the world that created would be as much or more obsessed with medicine as with chainmail. I have wonderful beta-readers and editors who are good at slapping my hand when my medical speculations or technical language gets too far afield.<\/p>\n

4) The islands involved in this\u00a0book\u00a0mean that sailing, kayaking, and other water\u00a0transport take a major role in thisbook. What’s your favorite form of water transport, and\u00a0do you get to take part in it, or is this all theory for you? What’s your personal favorite? (I\u00a0have an ongoing love affair with Lake Superior and a recent fling with the Kemijoki in\u00a0northern Finland, so I probably get more emotionally involved with water than most.)
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

Maybe it\u2019s a little silly but each of the\u00a0books\u00a0in the\u00a0Spellwright\u00a0<\/em>series are associated with an element, a phase of life, and a direction.\u00a0Spellwright<\/em>\u00a0is a\u00a0book\u00a0rooted in the earth. It\u2019s about digging down into one\u2019s past, discovering all the things about one\u2019s family and what lies underneath. The ghostly chthonic people are the best example of this. My hope was to convey a sense of mystery and exploration, something like discovering a magical cave. Its physical inspiration was all the pseudo-gothic buildings and libraries of Yale University, where I was a student when I first conceived of the idea for the series.<\/p>\n

Spellbound<\/em>\u00a0is a\u00a0book\u00a0that\u2019s oriented upwards, into the sky and air. The theme is romance and fluidity. This was, hopefully, manifested in all the airships and the mercurial evolution of Francesca\u2019s understanding of herself and her feelings toward Nicodemus. It was a\u00a0book\u00a0that was supposed to capture a feeling of weightlessness, flight, possibility. Its physical inspiration were the windy mountains of savannahs of my native California with a splash of the majestic ridges and jewel-like cities of Morocco\u2019s Atlas Mountains–where I was fortunate enough to travel as a young man.<\/p>\n

Spellbreaker\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0element is water; its direction neither up or down, but all the innumerable points of the compass that the horizon represents to the sailor. The physical inspiration for Ixos is the leaward side of Kaui and my current home of San Francisco Bay. During my intern year, the America\u2019s Cup came to San Francisco and during some of the rare days off, I would go down to watch the catamarans sailing out on the bay; the way the sail caught the wind, jumped up on to their hydrofoils, seems so magical to me I couldn\u2019t help writing it in to\u00a0Spellbreaker<\/em>. I\u2019m sure I made many, many nautical mistakes when writing the\u00a0books, and I\u2019d like to beg for forgiveness from any sailors who read the\u00a0books.<\/p>\n

To answer your question, I would have to say I\u2019m partial to the traditional American \u2018holiday on a lake\u2019 activities of swimming, fishing, waterskiing. My grandparents had a humble cabin on Lake Nacimiento in the Central Coast region of California, and I group up splashing around in its green waters and then reading 1990s classic\u00a0fantasy\u00a0in the cabin at night. I am, however, very jealous of your access to Lake Superior, and after googling \u201cKemijoki\u201d I might have to add \u201cfloat down a Finish river\u201d to my wanderlust bucket list.
\n5) It says that\u00a0Spellbreaker<\/em>\u00a0is the final installment in this trilogy. Can we expect more in\u00a0this world that’s separate from this trilogy, or will your future work be something\u00a0completely different?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The next\u00a0book\u00a0will be something wholly different, something placed in this world but still a\u00a0fantasy, heavily influenced by my medical training. The elevator pitch so far is \u201cNeil Gaiman\u2019s\u00a0American Gods<\/em>\u00a0goes to Medical School.\u201d But it\u2019s a work in progress so we\u2019ll see. There may well be a return to the world of\u00a0Spellwright<\/em>. I tried to plan a few seeds at the end of\u00a0Spellbreaker<\/em>; I\u2019ll have to wait to see if they grow into anything.<\/p>\n

Thanks for joining us, Blake!<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Blake Charlton’s Spellbreaker came out last month, but the life of a doctor-and-writer is a busy one, so we just caught up with each other now! Here’s a Q&A with Blake. 1) Most classic\u00a0fantasy\u00a0is centered on an external conflict. Many of the best authors add\u00a0an internal conflict. For triple backflip, you\u2019ve added autoimmune to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[7],"class_list":["post-1446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bookses-precious"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marissalingen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marissalingen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marissalingen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marissalingen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marissalingen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1446"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/marissalingen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1446\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1447,"href":"https:\/\/marissalingen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1446\/revisions\/1447"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marissalingen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marissalingen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marissalingen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}