I’m thrilled to welcome Tiffany Trent to the Inkpot today to
talk about her fabulous new YA steampunk fantasy, The Unnaturalists.
The
author of the Hallowmere series, Tiffany already has many fans, but The Unnaturalists is sure to win her even more. Here’s the quick summary:
Vespa Nyx wants
nothing more than to spend the rest of her life cataloging Unnatural creatures
in her father’s museum, but as she gets older, the requirement to become a lady
and find a husband is looming large. Syrus Reed’s Tinker family has always
served and revered the Unnaturals from afar, but when his family is captured to
be refinery slaves, he finds that his fate may be bound up with Vespa’s—and
with the Unnaturals.
As the danger grows, Vespa and Syrus
find themselves in a tightening web of deception and intrigue. At stake may be
the fate of New London—and the world.
Welcome to the Inkpot, Tiffany! What
draws you to writing YA fantasy? Can you tell us about your
journey from the Hallowmere series to The Unnaturalists?
It
took writing an entire adult epic fantasy (unpublished) to realize that the books
I’d always loved, the books I kept returning to, were considered young adult
(juvenile) in my day. The realization
was a relief. I wrote Hallowmere with that knowledge. And I
wrote The Unnaturalists with an even
deeper knowledge of what I loved and what I valued. For instance, I cannot seem
to shake my love of complex and thorough world-building. While it may not
matter to many, I’m nearly always thrown out of a story with shoddy
world-building. Which leads us to…
·
The
Unnaturalists
is set in a wonderfully imagined world where science is
harnessing the power of myth. The Litany of Evolution, the Night
Emporium, a jam-eating sylphid, the “kobold on display at Miss Marmalade’s
Seminary for Young Ladies of Quality” – there’s so much to relish here!
Can you tell us more about your process of world-building? How much do
you work out up front, and how much comes through the writing itself? Are
there any rules or principles you try to adhere to?
When
I began writing The Unnaturalists, I knew it needed to be like nothing I’d ever
written before. I spend a lot of time on my world-building; it’s really one of
the most important and fun things about writing fantasy to me. I strive for
rich, complex worlds that linger with the reader long after the book is closed.
The world is always just as much a character to me as any person.
Much of the world-building is discovered in
the first draft. After that, I build the rules and decide how I’ll continue to
shape things. Sometimes I’ll write little side stories or vignettes about
various aspects of the world to help solidify those things in my mind. My
biggest principle comes from Rod Serling: “Fantasy
is the impossible made probable.” It’s my job to make you believe, even if only for a moment,
that a city such as New London could exist. I do everything I can—from
jam-eating sylphids to the Night Emporium—to help readers believe.
Your heroine, Vespa Nyx, has a
delicious name and an unusual goal: She wants to be the first
female Pedant, so that she can catalog and study the Unnaturals just as men
do. Did anything in your own background influence that side
of the story?
A
love of learning is one of the areas Vespa and I share. And I do have a deep
and sublime love for museums; they’re beautiful, poignant, and terrifying all
at once. I also feel that women can be
more than wives, if they so choose, and I like the Vespa embraces that in a
time and place where such thinking really is dangerous and different.
How
would you define the term “steampunk”? In what ways would you like to see
the genre develop?
Steampunk
for me is very much about a past that never was and a future that might have
been. I see it developing already into a rich, varied subgenre that stretches
the boundaries set for it by writers like Jules Verne or H.G. Wells. While I’ve
seen some writers say that it really has no future because it focuses so
strongly on the past, I think the continued and growing interest in it suggests
otherwise.
I
really enjoyed reading about Syrus’s people, the Tinkers, and their
relationship with the natural (and unnatural) world – and I was fascinated to
learn that your time in the Sichuan highlands of China had a lot to do with
that strand of the story. Could you tell us more about your
experiences there and how they influenced you?
I
went to live in Sichuan with my husband in the summer of 2005 in Tangjiahe
Giant Panda Reserve. While there, we visited Wanglang Reserve at the edge of
the Tibetan plateau, which is the ancestral home of the Baima people (aka the
Duobo). They have many beautiful customs, among them patchwork dresses and clan
belts woven on foot looms by the women. All the matrons wear a flat-topped hat
with a chicken feather to commemorate the white rooster who woke them at dawn
and saved them from an ambush by the Han Chinese centuries ago. They give songs as welcome gifts; I still
remember the song they sang for me about the green mountains of home when they
learned that I came from beautiful mountains, too.
I met with a shaman who was
the last person able to read their sacred language and perform their
rituals—that made me unutterably sad, that such a rich tradition will probably
be forgotten by the current generation.
The land there was also wild and beautiful—steaming streams winding
through fields of electric flowers on the glacial plateau, the whisper of
pandas passing through bamboo cloud forests, mineral pools so brilliant blue
and green you’d think they were made of gems rather than water. I could well imagine the door to another
world in a place like that. The Tinkers were definitely a result of that all
too brief visit.
You
won the 2008 SCBWI Work-in-Progress Travel Grant and used it to travel to
England. How did that trip help shape the book?
I
was actually researching a different book about Darwin then, though I’d already
written The Unnaturalists the previous year, had gotten a new agent, and had
received my first round of rejections by the trip. I decided that maybe the trip could serve as
double-duty for both books, since they seemed closely aligned in many
ways. Very glad I was right! I spent lots of time in the British Museum of
Natural History and also visited Down House, where Darwin and his wife Emma
settled after their marriage. It also
helped to visit the Victoria and Albert Museum, because while I knew I wanted
many Victorian elements, I certainly also wanted Baroque. Walking into a
fully-appointed Baroque-era room was such perfect inspiration!
It sounds like that Travel Grant went to just the right person. Congratulations! Now for a more general question: What
do you love best – writing the first draft or revising? Any tips on
either one?
Honestly,
I waffle between these two a great deal. I love it when I’m really in the story
and the words just fly out during first drafting. That used to be my favorite part and I really
used to hate revising. On the other hand, there is nothing worse than trying to
craft the perfect opening for months and feeling like nothing is coming. These days, I think I enjoy revising more,
because I like having the raw lump of clay of the first or second (or third or
fourth) draft and seeing it take shape.
The
Unnaturalists works beautifully as a stand-alone novel, but it’s thrilling to
hear there’s going to be a sequel! What can you tell us about it?
The
second book (which is still untitled) has Syrus and Vespa as its main
characters, but focuses on Syrus. That isn’t to say Vespa’s journey here won’t
be important, but Syrus is in the foreground. And we’ll learn a bit more about
Bayne’s family, too. And Olivia’s. J
So many secrets I can’t tell!!
That sounds exciting! Thanks so much for stopping by, Tiffany.
***
Amy Butler Greenfield was a grad student in history when she
gave into temptation and became a novelist. She loves music, romantic
adventure, strange science, alternate history, and twisty plots, which explains
how she came to write her first YA novel, Chantress, due out from Simon
& Schuster in 2013. You can visit her at www.amybutlergreenfield.com.
