Marian L Thorpe

Southern Ontario, Canada. The location had almost no impact on my writing, as my books are set in a version of 7 th C Europe.

The first story I remember writing was a play about an astronaut finding water on the moon. I read it to my parents, I think.

My parents were British immigrants, and Britain was always ‘home’; in addition, my father was a keen amateur historian of the Plantagenet and Tudor ages, so we had lots of history books. As for why Romano-British and post Roman history became my focus, I don’t really know. It just captured my interest.

Speculative fiction allows a writer to examine societal norms and suggest alternatives in a non- threatening manner; it also can help readers see that human desires and conflicts and needs are universal.

I started with an image: a fishing village, a young woman, and just wrote. The first book was completely discovery writing – it just emerged under my fingers. After that, I understood my setting and its social structures, and stories developed around conflicts and action, and the related personal development of my characters.

I was. All of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne series; all of Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons books; almost anything I could put my hands on, really.

Empire’s Reckoning, both structurally and thematically. It has a two time-line structure, which is a challenge to balance as there needs to be some relationship between the present and the past storylines, and the interweaving of the personal and political stories, which mirror each other to some extent, also stretched my abilities as a writer.

No one person, really. I play a little with traditional ‘fantasy’ tropes, even though my books aren’t technically fantasy, as there is no magic. But there is almost always a bard. So Sorley got that role. He wasn’t supposed to be a main character, though: when he reappeared in Empire’s Exile, it was a bit of a surprise even to me. His music – the quality of his songwriting and his voice – is based on the late Canadian singer-songwriter, Stan Rogers.

Everything we know and imagine, envision and dream, comes from stories.

Oraiáphon is my world’s equivalent of Orpheus, from Greek myth. Orpheus was a musician of great skill, who took his music to the underworld to plead for the life of his love. In Oraiáphon, Sorley symbolically does the same.

The stories now seem to create themselves, from the politics of the times and the characters’ personalities. They’re following a possible progression of a rapidly changing society – basically it’s a matter of saying ‘What if?’ within my created world, and finding out what the answer is. To get the creative juices going, I generally reread my previous writing.

What I’m writing is a sub-genre of Historical Fiction that I haven’t got a name for: it’s not really alternative history, because there’s no point of separation from real history; it’s not quite fantasy, because there is no magic. It’s a world based heavily on our own, but slightly different. I’d like to see more of this, people dealing with recognizable, real-life conflicts and constraints, without the assistance of magic or limited to historical solutions.

By being very disciplined about writing time and other writing-related activities. Because this is my full-time work, all that’s really changed is that I work entirely from home now, instead of using my university’s library and coffee shops, both of which I love to write in.

I’ve appreciated the graphics, and the Twitter promotions. I probably haven’t used it as much, or as well, as I should have as Empire’s Reckoning took up more of my time and attention than I’d planned in the last two years.