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An Interview with Kate Brallier

Sunday, Mar 16, 2008 at 3:14pm

By day, paranormal romance author Kate Brallier works as an editor for a major publishing house in New York. With her second novel The Boundless Deep just released, Kate was kind enough to answer some questions for our website prior to her March 22nd reading and signing at our Grant Park location.

CG: How did you get your start as a novelist? Was writing always the dream or did editing the work of others stir something in you to take up the pen?

KB: No, I've always wanted to write. I've been telling myself stories, and scribbling things down, for as long as I can remember. I started my first novel at age ten (an embarrassing SF story set in a future NYC, and featuring a glacier that moved about as fast as a freight train), and finished my second at seventeen--although it took me until I was in my late twenties to first get anything published. (Or, perhaps, write anything that was of publishable quality!)

But one thing was for certain. While I started off writing science fiction and fantasy, the heart of my stories was always about relationships, and romances, and finding your heart's desire. So I finally decided to embrace that fully, and not try to pretend I was writing anything else.

The editing was, in many ways, a natural offshoot of my love of reading. I've been in love with books my entire life. So how better to earn my daily bread than choosing great new books to bring to a wider audience, and helping good books become great? It really is the best job, ever.

CG: As an editor, do you find yourself in danger of over-analyzing your own work? Do you find it difficult to relinquish that level of control?

KB: You would think, wouldn’t you? But the truth is, I am completely unobjective about my own material, and am highly dependent on other people pointing out the flaws--at least, in the short term. If I am allowed the luxury of not reading the book for a few months once I've written it, then I can look at it with fresh eyes, and tear it apart with the best of them. (I certainly did that with The Boundless Deep; first draft and second were markedly different, especially as regards the back story.) But one does not always have the luxury of that sort of time.

An editor's job is really to be an objective, unbiased reader for their authors. And it is hard to do that for yourself when you are so invested in the characters and their fate. Plus, there are always those moments when you think you've made your point sufficiently clearly, and then find that you have, in fact, been clear as mud. I call it the Transparent Head syndrome. Authors tend to think that readers always know what they are thinking; that their heads are transparent. That is not always the case, and it often takes someone else to point it out to you.

So, much as I hope my authors appreciate me bringing an objective eye to their work, I also really appreciate the external feedback.

CG: Both of your novels, Seal Island and The Boundless Deep, share an ocean theme. Does the sea hold any special significance for you?

KB: Very much so. I was born and raised in New York City, but spent every summer from when I was two and a half to when I was about twenty-two up in Maine. For many years, my parents and I actually spent two months each summer camping out on a piece of land we own, overlooking Penobscot Bay. It was quite the contrast--ten months in the urban jungle (we lived in the heart of Manhattan, in a twelfth-floor apartment), then two months in tents in the woods. But the water just called out to me from a very early age, and I've always felt most at home living close to it. So, when I decided to turn my hand to writing paranormal romance, it just felt right to set the first on a fictionalized version of the island I spent summers on. And, from there, it was a natural leap to Nantucket.

CG: Your lead in The Boundless Deep, Liza, spends much of her time experiencing the past. With any type of historical piece research is of great importance. What type of research did you do for The Boundless Deep?

KB: I probably had more fun researching this novel than I have ever had researching anything in my life. I've always been attracted to the stories of early whaling--which seemed full of a sort of doomed romance to me--and grew up listening to sea shanties and the like. So, in preparation for the writing, I read a number of books on the subject--both first-hand accounts and journals, and also secondary sources--and traveled to Nantucket, New Bedford, and Mystic to see the places and the museums and the artifacts and the ships for myself.

As it happens, though, I wrote the first scene of the novel--featuring a dream of a doomed whale hunt--before I started any of the actual research, just to set myself a mood. It still amuses me to recall how much I got right, and how much I got totally wrong and had to go back and fix. The songs, it seems, only take you so far. But I definitely feel that my world is richer for knowing what I do now about the early whaling industry, and how it shaped our world.

CG: You did an excellent job of balancing the romanticism of a life at sea with the dangers and the damage done by early whalers. What are your thoughts on the modern whaling industry?

KB: Thank you! And it’s an abomination. The industrialization of the process thoroughly tipped the scales. What always attracted me most to the early industry was the fact that man and beast were pretty evenly matched, and the beast had as much chance of winning an encounter as the man. (Or at least, so the early whalers perceived it. They had no idea of the damage they were causing to the population levels.) But once industrialization entered the arena, the whales no longer had even a fighting chance.

Never in the modern era would you hear lines like the ones out of the Greenland Whale Fisheries--the ones that always make me shiver:

"We struck that whale, and down she went
But she gave a flourish with her tail
And the boat capsized, and four gallant men were drown'd
And we never caught that whale, brave boys
We never caught that whale
Well, the losin' of those gallant men
It grieves my heart full sore
But the losin' of a hundred-barrel whale
Well it grieves me ten times more, brave boys
It grieves me ten times more."

In many ways, I think I wrote the book in an attempt to understand the mentality that led men out into a hostile environment under such odds, and at such great risk to life and limb. Even knowing what I do now, it still fascinates me. And that song still gives me chills.

CG: The past and the present are often side by side in The Boundless Deep. Which of the two did you find more difficult to write convincingly?

KB: The past, definitely--if only because it is a world I do not inhabit every day. It's far too easy to get caught in a research spiral. You can know everything about how to catch and lance a whale, and still not know what people wore every day, or what their houses looked like, or even what they ate for their evening meal. After a while, you have to learn to hand-wave around certain areas, or it will drive you nuts, digging down and down and down.

Still, it amazes me the resources that are out there in the age of the internet. I actually found a site that listed every member of every crew of every whale ship that sailed out of New Bedford. Incredible! And whenever I wanted to choose period-appropriate names, I was never more than a click away from the Eliza Starbuck Barney genealogy record, maintained by the Nantucket Historical Society.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that modern-day elements don't require research; they do. It's just that I understand the nuances of being an early 21st century woman far better than one from 1843.

CG: Two of your characters from Seal Island sneak a cameo appearance in The Boundless Deep. Do you intend to build a cohesive world for your fiction?

KB: Absolutely! It's something I like to see as a reader of other people's fiction, and I tend to consider it a gift to loyal readers, to let them see how old favorites are coming along. The way I see it, the Brallierverse is a single world, inhabited both by strange things lurking under the skin of reality and by people who (mostly) don't know they are there. But occasionally, the people will stumble on those things--and on each other.

I know a lot of the rage in the paranormal fiction universe these days is to make the paranormal creature the hero or the heroine of the book, but that is just not the way my brain works. To me, that sort of magic always has a darker, more sinister edge. Not that I won’t ever write a kicky vampire series (I never say never), but I've always been most drawn to the idea that the intersection between the human world and that realm of the other is far from benign. (Authors like Barbara Michaels do this brilliantly; everyone needs to read her.)

CG: On that note, will readers see Liza again?

KB: Maybe. And I'm not just being coy; I honestly haven’t decided. I always know roughly where a book is going, but the specifics often surprise me. But if she doesn’t appear physically in the next one, she will at least be a presence. Because, you see, our hero has already met her....

CG: Could you give our readers a teaser about your next project?

KB: What, that's not enough? But happy to. There is a character, mentioned several times in the background of The Boundless Deep: Caroline, Adam Gallagher's troubled and mysterious ex-girlfriend. Readers will get to find out what went wrong between them as Caroline takes up the reins of the narrative in the next book. It is her first experience of one of those infamous summer getaways in New York--the summer share in the Hamptons--that brushes her up against the unexplained. (Oh, and yeah, two of the girls she is sharing that house with may well appear in future volumes...)

CG: As both a writer and an editor, do you have any advice for the first-time novelist?

KB: Be persistent, and don’t give up your dream. It's a tough old world out there--even for us published authors--and I've yet to meet a single author whose course has run smooth. But persistence does pay off, and talent will out. Just don't expect to quit your day job any time soon. >;-)

CG: Thanks for taking the time to answer some of my questions, Kate. I'll see you at your reading on the 22nd.

Previously:

The Boundless Deep by Kate Brallier

An Interview With David Keck

In a Time of Treason by David Keck

David Keck on Fame and Obscurity

In the Eye of Heaven-A Review

Categories: Interview, buzz, SciFi & Fantasy, Winnipeg, Event News

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The Boundless Deep

- Kate Brallier

Trade paperback $37.99
Reader Reward Price: $34.19

Philosophers have said that we travel through our lives, past and present, surrounded by the same souls, that we spend each new life trying to mend the hurts we've done to one another in the past. In The Boundless Deep, Kate Brallier explores this idea in a combination of strong storytelling and gifted characterization.

Grad student Liza has long been plagued by vivid dreams of whaling. Offered the chance to trade her land-locked existence for a summer on Nantucket, the well-preserved heart of New England's whaling trade, Liza jumps at the chance, eager to see how well her dreams mesh with historical reality.

The answer is: all too well. Liza's dreams become highly sexual; her visions of ship's captain Obadiah Young grow increasingly intense. At times the past and present mix before her eyes, with automobiles replaced by horse-drawn carriages.

Though skeptical of Liza's claims of a past life, whaling museum curator Adam is drawn to Liza's intense desire to know the truth--about herself, and about Obadiah, accused of murdering his beautiful, young wife. But Adam isn't the only man with an interest in Liza--handsome Lucian, whose home Liza is sharing for the season, has designs on her as well.

In a single summer, Liza must answer the riddle of her dreams, reunite lovers separated by death, solve a hundred-year-old murder . . . and figure out her heart's desire.