Interview - Seanan McGuire

Seanan is author of the completely fantastic October Daye urban fantasy series. We reviewed the first book Rosemary & Rue last year and a review of A Local Habitation (bk 2) will be coming up in the next few days.

I would tell you some bio info but have to recommend instead that you visit Seanan's site where she has awesome bio's that raise questions like, "just how many things have you been bitten by" and "why are you holding such a large knife?" See you have to go look now.

Ok, jumping straight in. In a genre known for it's kick ass heroines what do you feel makes Toby special?

I read a lot of urban fantasy -- like, a lot of urban fantasy -- and I find that most of the heroines are sort of there on purpose. They're Angelina Jolie in Wanted, they're bad-ass and they know it. And then there's Toby, who's more of a cross between Veronica Mars and Dante from Clerks. She wasn't even supposed to be here today. But if she's going to be here, she's going to do her best, because anything else wouldn't be fair. To anyone.

And you are pretty unfair on Toby, you gave her very little power or magic, killer headaches for using it and then threw her in amongst some very powerful beings. Did you set out to be so tough on her and how does that situation effect events?

I don't necessarily sit down going "okay, how can I make things harder on Toby today," but she's definitely at a disadvantage a lot of the time, because I wanted her to have to work for what she gets. If Amandine were my protagonist, I think her survival would be a lot less impressive than her daughter's.

Which brings us neatly round to Toby's relationships. Will we ever get the full story on what happened with Toby's mother and will we be seeing Toby's own child again?

Yes, and yes. Amandine's story is very integral to Toby's, and she's going to be playing a big role in books to come. As for Gillian...she's sixteen when Toby comes back, and Toby doesn't bring a good cover story with her. So she basically told Toby to go die in a fire. Maybe if she'd been a little younger, or a little older, it would have gone differently, but she wasn't, and Toby wasn't making a good case for herself. I've been sort of waiting for Gilly to cool down enough to be capable of dealing with her mom as anything other than an enemy before I go back there.

When you visited Bitten By Books you explained the naming system in the books, can I ask you to run us through it again, because it's fascinating and has a wonderful logic to it.

In Faerie, it's generally considered somewhat tacky to name children after living people, because, well, immortality means that Junior may be confusing things for centuries to come. Instead, children are named in-honor-of, following sometimes incredibly complex chains of logic. For example, Sylvester, Simon, and September are all named in honor of their mother, Sile, and September is also named for her father, Augustus. Rayseline's name means "Rose," which is a reference to Luna, and Amandine and September were very close before September passed away -- hence her adhering to the "months" naming scheme. It can take some work to figure out where a name comes from, but a lot of them fit into these chains, one way or another.

It's a wonderfully Faerie approach to logic. On a personal note, I understand you are also pretty fond of October as a month?

It's the most wonderful time of the year! Halloween is my favorite holiday, and I adore the depths of fall. It's still warm enough that you just need a sweater and some decent socks, but it's cool enough that you can hike for hours without overheating. Candy corn and pumpkin pie and apple cider and haunted corn mazes and hayrides...October is the perfect month. I love it so.

It's a gorgeous time of year so I completely understand that. So how many books are presently slated for the Toby Daye series?

Oh, that's a hard question. Um...right now, I have sold the first five. I'm actually working on the fifth book, The Brightest Fell, while I'm answering your questions. I have detailed outlines for at least the four books after this, plus a prequel. I try to make sure I could finish the story in "just one more" at any point; maybe some things wouldn't get answered, but at least you'd have an ending. As for an exact number, that's a lot more difficult, because I haven't got one. In my perfect world of sunshine and zombie puppies, I'd keep going for a long, long time.

I think Toby's fans (inc. me) would like that too. :) Zombie puppies? You have quite a bibliography outside of the Toby Daye books and you also create music, what can Toby's fans expect if they want to read more of your work or listen to your music?

Zombie puppies. I like zombies a lot, and when talking about totally wish-fulfillment things -- movie casting, or foreign rights sales, or getting some weird award -- I usually say "in my perfect world of sunshine and zombie puppies, Toby would be played in the movie by Kristen Bell." That sort of thing.

My music is...eclectic. I belong to a fannish sub-culture called "filk," which is the folk music of science fiction and fantasy, and we specialize in weird. My second and third studio albums, Stars Fall Home and Wicked Girls, are very much fairy tale-influenced folk music, and I like them a lot. My second studio album, Red Roses and Dead Things, is all mad science and horror, and can get a bit, um, raunchy. It's definitely not an album for kids. But I love it, at least in part because I got to record my seven-minute ode to the Black Death.

As for the rest of my work...I think Toby fans can find a lot to like in the "Velveteen vs." stories, which are about a somewhat hapless superheroine trying to make it outside of the corporate structure, and "Sparrow Hill Road" is about a recurring character of mine, Rose Marshall, a hitchhiking ghost with a score to settle. They're sort of my love letter to American folklore and the road. As a rule of thumb, anything published under the Mira Grant byline is going to be horror, and most of the stuff under my own name will be a little less dark--but that's not a hundred percent, as some of my short fiction will attest.

Oddly enough that's the second time today i've heard the term Filk having never come across it before. Ok you mentioned the Black Death and it also features in your survey bio as a thing you wish more people knew so tell us where the Black Death came from, because I would have said plague.

So the Black Death swept through Europe for centuries, killing everybody in its path, and is largely blamed on bubonic plague. There are a few problems with this theory, but going into all of them would take a week, so here are just a few points:

1) Bubonic plague has an animal vector -- rat fleas, carried by rats. Bubonic plague doesn't give a toss about quarantine. It's surprisingly difficult to catch from another person, and you can't quarantine a rat flea. But quarantine was successful at slowing the spread of the Black Death, which implies an airborne transmission vector.

2) Bubonic plague does have an airborne variant, pneumatic plague, which spreads person-to-person through droplet transmission. The problem here is that it's pretty rare -- very few people will actually develop this variant in any given outbreak -- and it kills you in three days. Given the population density and speed of travel in that era, a purely pneumatic plague variant would have burned itself out in months, not centuries.

3) The Black Death hit hard in Iceland, which was, at the time, in the grips of the Little Ice Age, creating a temperature way too low for rats and rat fleas to survive, much less flourish and infect. Rat fleas will bite people, but they don't like it, and we're not all that nourishing. Logically speaking, whatever killed Iceland can't have been bubonic plague.

If you want to learn more, I highly recommend the book The Return of the Black Death: The World's Greatest Serial Killer. Or you can just listen to my song. :)

Wow, great points. Ok finally, and just for fun. Dave Devereux gave us a recipe and Guy Adams breathes fire, what is your awesome superpower?

I'm secretly the escaped Disney princess of Halloweentown. Reality bends itself in my vicinity to guarantee that, while I won't be bored, I inevitably return from my adventures with lots of weird souvenirs, exciting stories, and improbable contacts, yet somehow avoid serious injury or tropical diseases. I'm like a nexus of surrealism. This makes me essentially invincible.

A truly brilliant superpower, Thank you so much for joining us on Un:Bound.