Interview with Skyler White & Giveaway!

IN DREAMS BEGIN by Sklyer White

From a Victorian Ireland of magic, poetry and rebellion, Ida Jameson, an amateur occultist, reaches out for power, but captures Laura Armstrong, a modern-day graphic artist instead. Now, for the man or demon she loves, each woman must span a bridge through Hell and across history . . . or destroy it.

"Every passionate man is linked with another age, historical or imaginary,
where alone he finds images that rouse his energy." W. B. Yeats

Anchored in fact on both sides of history, Laura and Ida, modern rationalist and fin de sicle occultist, are linked from the moment Ida channels Laura into the body of celebrated beauty and Irish freedom-fighter Maud Gonne. When Laura falls--from an ocean and a hundred years away--passionately, Victorianly in love with the young poet W. B. Yeats, their love affair entwines with Irish history and weaves through Yeats's poetry until Ida discovers something she wants more than magic in the subterranean spaces in between.

With her Irish past threatening her orderly present and the man she loves in it, Laura and Yeats--the practical materialist and the poet magus--must find a way to make love last over time, in changing bodies, through modern damnation, and into the mythic past to link their pilgrim souls . . . or lose them forever.

Hi everyone! Please join me in welcoming dark fantasy author Skyler White to Lovin' Me Some Romance!

My Interview:

Earlier this year with your debut novel, and, FALLING FLY, you wrote of vampires and damnation. IN DREAMS BEGIN also explores vast and complex concepts but with an entire different medium (pun intended). What comes first? A concept you want to explore or the vehicle with which you explore the complexities?

They mostly evolve together. “Dreams” started with wanting to write The Romantic Man. I wanted to take a stab at the hand-over-heart, down-on-one-knee, love-only-you-forever guy. And the more I tried to write him, the sillier he got. I just couldn’t find a way (and maybe this is just my bleak and twisted soul) but I couldn’t find a way to make a modern man that passionate and sincere without sounding adolescent or naïve. So, simply as research, I was reading the Romantics and rather stumbled over Yeats. I was looking at him for a model, but fell in love.

And as I started to realize it had to be Yeats, and not a man based on Yeats, the time-travel component snuck in. Because I wanted to push that romantic idealism up against modern doubt and anxiety. I wanted to play with why I couldn’t write a modern man that way. And I wanted to contrast what I was learning about Victorian love and men (and women!) with modernity. There’s a sort of sea of ideas that interest me that I’m always more-or-less adrift inside, and Yeats illuminated several, and made connections between several more. A story started to coalesce around him and a few of these thematic elements and the more I played with the history, the more gravity and cohesion I felt.

A time-travel with a modern married woman falling in love with Yeats would let me play with gender, sexuality, fidelity, body vs mind, and a number of my other pet concepts. And history kept handing me presents. Yeats had pursued the same woman for thirty years. Why? Nobody knows. It makes no sense relative to who they each were. I could make up an answer. I could have my modern woman be channeled into the other woman’s body. It would allow me to experiment with body questions Victorian vs Modern conceptions of beauty and body, and it would explain the history. Maud Gonne, the woman he pursued, believed she was part faerie. Yeats wrote essays about faeries who steal the souls of brides. Very handy. If write my modern woman as married, I can use that tidbit to drive the stealing of her modern soul, and use it to explore fidelity. If my body is never touched by another man, but I imagine someone other than my husband when we make love, am I cheating on him? So the concept and vehicle create each other.

I absolutely love how you brought the Victorian world alive from two wholly different points of view. Even more, I love your exploration of the connection between two real people. Please tell of W.B. Yeats and Maude Gonne and how they inspired you to write IN DREAM BEGINS?

Thanks! I’m so glad you enjoyed the duel viewpoints on the Victorian era. I really wanted to be able to show it from both the inside and the outside. As for the connections between real people, I’m so glad you enjoyed that as well because it was something I resisted a long time. Writing real people is hard! And it’s research-intensive. But Maud and Will were both just too fascinating not to write as themselves. She was a six-foot tall, famously beautiful, pro-violence Irish revolutionary. And everything she does in the book is true. She was haunted by the figure of a veiled lady all her life. As a teenager, she prayed to the devil for her freedom once, and when her father died of pneumonia the next day, believed for the rest of her life that she’d forfeited her soul. She and her married French lover had a child together who died while she was in Ireland visiting Will, and met one Halloween night, in the child’s crypt to make love in a bid to reincarnate the boy. And she did get pregnant that night, but had a daughter which bitterly disappointed her because how could a woman fight for Irish independence? (Although that was what she had done all her life.) When history hands you a woman like that, how can you not write her?

In connection to the question above, you've written a love triangle of sorts, perhaps you could even think of it as a square given the total amount of players, and these characters are woven together in such a way that they form almost a dance, a push and pull between one another as their stories intertwine, collapse and reshape their past and their future. Did their personalities evolve from one another as it feels in the story, or did you know them each individually long before you sat to write their stories?

I hate to keep giving the “both” answer, but it’s really the case. With Maud and Yeats, I mostly discovered their personalities because they were real people and had them before I was born. With Laura, I was interested in creating a fundamentally modern woman with modern ideas about love and commitment, initially as a contrast to Yeats’s impractical, romantic ones. But as I started writing Maud, Laura’s overlaps and differences started to inform both characters, and who she was relative to Ida became more a part of her too.

I love your covers, most especially how both your releases stand out and are radically different from one another. I remember you telling me before in a previous interview how you went to incredible lengths to convey to your art department what you wanted and, FALLING FLY to look like, how you wanted it to represent your story. Did you do the same for IN DREAMS BEGIN and did the art department create all that you had hoped for? What do you love most?

Thank you, I love them too! I did build another file of images before the cover conference for “Dreams.” It’s actually on my website here if you want to take a peek. The cover for “Dreams” is a little more steampunk than I’d pick, but I love the wall in the background, the sepia palette, and the light streaming through.

Knowing that every bit of your novels hold weight, it's a given that your titles must be very important not only to you but as a representation of your work. Who creates your titles? What does IN DREAMS BEGIN mean to you and the story beneath its sprawling script on the cover?

I write the titles. “and Falling, Fly” was the title that book always had. “In Dreams Begin” was initially titled in Latin, “Deus Inversus.” My editor was very sweet but firm in suggesting an English title. I resisted initially, but she was right, and “In Dreams Begin” is actually a much better title. It’s a line Yeats uses, “In dreams begin responsibilities”, to introduce a volume of his poetry, crediting its origin only as “from an old play.” I shortened it because I liked the rhythmic resonance In Dreams Begin created with and Falling, Fly, and because I liked the ambiguity. A lot of things in this story begin in dream, responsibility being only one of them. And the story, to an extent , is about what it means to dream. Or to be a dreamer. Or to be fully awake.

Also, as a writer, I sample other writers. With Falling it was mostly The Bible and Dante, but Dreams takes that to a whole new level, remixing history and Yeats’s life and writings very liberally. This title allowed me to play with that very overtly, first as a line Yeats himself had sampled; secondly as the title of the brilliant Delmore Schwartz short story (which I reference both explicitly and thematically); and finally as a wink to my fellow U2 fans who’ll recognize the line from a song whose lyrics also outline the same problem space I’m working in with the story.

Your writing feels very sharp and deliberate with each sentence containing weight, meaning and a distinct ring demanding that the reader delve beyond the written words and think more conceptually about their "big picture" meaning. Obviously this is more than just a tone of the novel and entirely your unique style given the fact that both your releases deliver the message similarly. How important is it to have an editor who understands, cultivates and nurtures a writing method such as your own?

It’s crucial. Leis Pederson, who edited both books, has a wonderful gift for asking exactly the right things from me. It’s interesting that you bring the voice question up though, because I’m playing with exactly that now, working on the next project. I’m struggling with wanting to create a voice that is different, but still authentic. The protagonist for the next book is neither an angel (like Falling ) nor a poet (like Dreams) and I’m trying to find a voice for her that doesn’t sacrifice the depth and care I want to write with, but doesn’t sound like poetry or mysticism. It’s giving me fits. Because yes, you’re exactly right, I am very deliberate with every sentence, trying to write for readers at a pace a little at odds with my genre so that I can layer the conceptual and symbolic with the character and plot.

Dreams? So much can be said about their meaning even within the very word itself. Delusion, fantasy, desires. Who would we be without dreams? Don't answer that but more to the point, why dreams with IN DREAMS BEGIN? Is it a conduit for a moral? A bottle to convey your message? In your previous book we were falling and now we're dreaming. Is there a correlation between the two?
Yes.

And finally, what's next for Skyler White?

Music.

::grin:: Yeah, falling and dreaming and music. I’m interested in risk – which is what Falling is about – the danger of committing to something, to throwing yourself into the deep end. Or off it. Dreams re-treads some of the questions around commitment, but is also about that moment, after you leap, what next? And yes, I’m interested in dreams in all their permutations. As ideals (follow your dreams) as delusions (dream on) as fantasy (he’s dreamy) and as ineffectual (she’s just a dreamer.) I’m interested in people who are asleep in their waking lives, or who live their dreams on the weekends. And that’s where the next book picks up. I’m working on a trilogy set in Los Angeles that centers on a girl who has a gift for connecting people to those weekend dreams.

Skyler White is the nationally bestselling author of dark fantasy novels ‘and Falling, Fly’ (Berkley, March 2010) and ‘In Dreams Begin’ (Berkley, November 2010). She lives in Austin, TX. Visit her on the web at http://www.skylerwhite.com/.

Giveaway Details:

Skyler White is giving away one SIGNED copy of IN DREAMS BEGIN. Here's how to enter:


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**Contest Open to ALL**

***Must be 18 or Older to Enter***

****Contest Closes Thursday, November 11th at Midnight U.S. Pacific Standard Time and the Winner will be Chosen Randomly and Announced Friday, November 12th****