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An hour-long conversation with Kendare Blake, New York Times-bestelling young-adult author of the Anna Dressed in Blood duology, The Goddess Wars trilogy, and the Three Dark Crowns quartet.

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The Introduction

Kendare Blake grew up in the small city of Cambridge, Minnesota. She’s a graduate of Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York, and received a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from Middlesex University in London, England. Her bio notes: “Adopted from South Korea at the age of seven months, she arrived with the following instruction: feed her chocolate. Though not medically advisable, she and her parents are eternally grateful for this advice.”

The (Lightly Edited) Transcript

Welcome to The Worldshapers.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Now, we met at C2E2 in Chicago, I guess that’s Comic Con and Entertainment Expo in Chicago. When was that? Four or five years ago now?

Yeah. It was such a long time. You sent me that photo of us and I opened it and I was like, “Oh, yep, yep, that is where it was.” And my second thought was, “Wow, what a long time ago, like where does the time go? It seems like yesterday.”

Yeah, it was a few years and, of course, at the time you actually thought that we shared a last name because I was there in my capacity as E.C. Blake, which is a pseudonym of mine. So, we do kind of share a last name.

Yeah.

As E.C. Blake, I wrote a fantasy trilogy for DAW Books called the Masks of Aygrima. So, that was current at the time, and so that’s what I was…that’s who I was pretending to be, or however that works with pseudonyms, but we had a great panel there and I enjoyed getting to know everybody that was on it, so you came to mind but I was thinking of possible guests, and here you are.

Well, thank you. Thanks for reaching out.

We’re going to focus primarily on Three Dark Crowns, which started off a new series for you. I have read the first book, so I’m prepared. I literally finished reading it about 15 minutes before I called you up here. So, it’s fresh in my mind.

Nice!

But first I’d like to go back in…I always say this…into the mists of time (speaking of going back a long ways). How did you become, well, first of all, interested in, I presume, reading science fiction and fantasy, that’s where we all kind of start, it seems like, and then how did you get interested in writing it? What was the…your story that led you into this?

I think a love of reading, it oftentimes just progresses into a love of storytelling and then it naturally lends itself to wanting to live a life of stories and write your own stories. My mom largely was the one who got me into reading. She…when we were growing up, we didn’t have a lot of money, but the library was always free, so we were frequent visitors to the library, We had one of those big canvas sacks that we would frequently fill with probably about the same twenty unicorn picture books just on repeat, and the poor woman just read them to me over and over again without ever once expressing the boredom and annoyance that she must have been feeling about the same twenty unicorn picture books. So, I was reading voraciously…like, I could read before I went to kindergarten because of her, because she just really immersed me in words. And my Dad, too. We would sit around and read the Sunday paper together and I would, he would read me the Garfield comic strips, and then I would read him back the Garfield comic strips, just by memory, and eventually, that’s kind of how I learned to read. So, that kind of kept on. They always kept my nose in books. So, thanks, parents!

Now, the town of Cambridge, Minnesota…although I live in Saskatchewan, so it’s relatively close to Minnesota, I’m not familiar with Cambridge. How small a town is it?

It’s like…man. I mean, you know, you always pass the population sign, and you wonder, “Well, how often are they updating that?” But I believe the population sign, when I was there, was something like 7,000 people.

Very close to…I grew up in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, and the population signed for years said 10,000 but they were rounding up, and then…I think they have finally passed 10,000. But for most of the time it was more like 6,000 and something, I think, officially, but they rounded it up to 10,000.

Oh, wow, they really rounded. They went for it.

I spent a lot of time in the library there as well and I also learned to read before I went into Grade 1. So, kind of a similar story there. Well, once you started reading things other than unicorn picture books, did you gravitate to the fantastical at that time or were you reading other stuff?

It was a pretty fast switch, actually. I went straight from you know, unicorns and The Black Stallion right into Stephen King and Anne Rice. Just a hard turnabout, God, I must have been like ten or so, when my mom and I or somebody and I, probably my mom and I, were walking through Wal-Mart or Sam’s Club or something and adult novels caught my eye, and, yeah. That was the end of Black Beauty for me.

My other library story is similar, in that my mom got called in by the librarian, and she said, “You know that your son is reading stuff from the adult side of the library,” because it was split into the kids’ side and the adults’ side. And my mom said, “Oh, it’s okay. He only read science fiction and fantasy.” And I thought, “Mom, you don’t actually know what’s in science fiction and fantasy.” But I was glad for her for standing up for me anyway.

Yeah. I spent so long dragging my mom through bookstores and, you know, trying to pick out the one book that I was gonna get that day, that it didn’t matter what I’d pick up, and, like, “Hey, can I get this?” By the time I asked her, she was so just fed up with waiting, she’d say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever, yeah. Let’s go.” So, I probably got away with a lot.

So, when did you get interested in trying to write your own stories?

Well, the earliest fledgling attempt I can remember to actually write anything of length, it was kind of a length challenge. I wanted to know if I could write something that was as long as a book, like a book-length something. So, I started writing this horse story when I was in seventh grade. And it took up, like, three spiral-bound notebooks by hand. I don’t know if…I don’t remember how serious I was about it. or if it was just an experiment. but that was. that’s the earliest thing I can remember. I’m sure it was terrible.

So, as you went on through high school, did you write more and more stuff. Did you share it with other people to read, at some point?

I didn’t share much. I’m pretty private…a private writer. But whenever, you know, there’s those word problems in math and they kind of let you go on and on? I was…whenever you gave me an option in homework to use words instead of numbers, or to have, like a more than just a simple answer, I always took it. So, my teachers would often say, like, “Hey, you know, you think you might be a writer or something?” I’m like, “Maybe.” But I…it was kind of a far-off dream at that point. Authors were like…that was like becoming an actor or something, you know, like, “Sure, I’ll run away to New York and become a writer. Right. That’ll happen.” So, I didn’t really think about it seriously. I wrote a couple of…well. quite a few. actually…short horror stories. I love writing short fiction. and when you’re in school. you know. that’s oftentimes what you have time to do. So, I wrote a collection of short fiction with my then-boyfriend, like, he wrote a bunch, and I wrote a bunch, and so I shared them with him. But that’s about it. And then I wrote another novel in high school that was also terrible. And I think that was when I first thought, “You know, maybe, maybe I could try to get something published, you know, someday.”

Well, just the act of writing something long, you know, just putting that many words on paper, is an important part of becoming a writer. I mean…

It is. Yeah. Learning to finish is important.

You mentioned Stephen King. I think he’s famously said that everybody writes half a million words of unpublishable stuff before they write anything publishable, and I think he may be on the low end of that.

I know! I agree.

So, when you did to university, though, you didn’t go into writing right away. You went to Ithaca College, but it was a business degree, wasn’t it?

It was, yeah. I always loved books, I always loved writing, but I also…I just wasn’t…I also wanted to be able to make my own way, you know, and um…I’m pretty practical. I’m a pretty practical person. So, I wanted to have something where if, you know, I couldn’t live my dream of being an author, then at least I wanted to be able to make some money. So, I went into finance and was going to be, you know, I’m not sure what at that point, like a stock analyst or an investment banker, I don’t know…I like foreign currencies, maybe foreign currency trader or something like that. But by the time I finished the degree, I hated it, so…I didn’t really figure out that I hated it until senior year. They actually brought in a speaker who I think was supposed to be inspiring to us as the senior class, but all I heard the whole time he was talking about how he had a Lambo and worked for Merrill Lynch and had this great office and…but all I heard was. “Yeah, my friends go skiing in Aspen and I stay and work, and I never get to drive the Lambo because I’m always at work, and I’m a little bit bald now because I’m always at work, and I haven’t…” It was really, really kind of upsetting, all the things he was saying in between the other things that were supposed to be inspiring, and those things were what I clung onto him, like, “So, you’re telling me I’m going to have no time, I’m going to be stressed out, I’m gonna be bald and miserable. OK. I’m not…I’m going to change. I’m not using his degree.”

Well, maybe it was…maybe he was the perfect speaker. then. from your point of view.

For me, yeah, I’m very grateful. And I’m pretty sure that my classmates already knew that going in and they were ready, but I was not.

So, did you then immediately…you went on and got a master’s in creative writing in England, so how did you make the leap from here to there and from that to that?

It was a year or two of working kind of horrible jobs. I sold garbage at one point. Literally. I sold people trash service, like, “Who do you want to pick up your garbage? Let’s just decide, you know, who has the best garbage truck that goes around your neighborhood?” And I just…I kind of knew I had to go back to school for something, and at the same time I just knew that I wasn’t…by then I’d figured out, like, I wasn’t going to be happy if I didn’t give this writing thing a try. So that was my chance. I said I’d give myself this degree and I’d take this time and I’d just put everything into it, and if it worked out it worked out and if it didn’t, well, at least I would know that I gave it a shot. So, I asked my parents if they were cool if I moved back in with them. They said, “Of course,” because they’re those kind of clingy parents that you want but don’t want but you’re lucky you have them. And, yeah, I took out just massive student loans and went to London–with a friend! So, I wasn’t by myself. That helped.

Why London?

I always wanted to live abroad. I’ve always loved, you know, British culture. One of the first classics I read was Jane Eyre, and I like…I’m kind of like an Austen head. So, I really wanted to go over there, I’ve always wanted to travel there, and really I’ve always wanted to live there, so I figured the language barrier was okay, I could discern the accents, and that was probably the safest bet if I wanted to go overseas.

So how long a program was that Master of Arts in Creative Writing?

It was only a year, which was another selling point, which I still…I still give that piece of advice to young writers who come up to me and ask about, “You know, should I get an MA, should I not get an MA.” Well, you know, in London it only takes a year instead of, you know, oftentimes it’s two years in the States. So, when you even it out, it’s about the same cost, despite the exchange rate, and it’s less time. So, yeah, it was only…it was a thirteen-month program, I think? That’s how long we were over there? And it was wonderful. Just really relaxed. Laid back.

So, I’ve talked to a number of authors at this point and many of them had no formal training at all and others have had formal creative-writing training. I think you’re the first Master’s I’ve encountered, though I have another one coming up, I know, in a future episode. So, I get varying degrees of was it worth it or not, depending on who you talk to. Some of the ones who took creative writing said that they ran into professors who, you know, said, “You can’t write that crap,” meaning science fiction or fantasy, and so they found it a very negative experience. What was your experience doing it formally?

Oh, well, they…my professors were wonderful. It was a really small class. Like I said. it was extremely laid back. I don’t know if it’s just they have a different view of that over there, or what, but small class sizes…I’m talking, my graduating, my actual graduating class, was probably about six of us. It was just a very small program. And so, it made the workshop aspect of it extremely effective because we all got to know each other’s work very well. And it was a supportive and collaborative kind of environment. But they were very open to whatever our natural voices and our natural inclinations were. Most of the writers on the course were of a more literary and sometimes even journalistic bent, but…and that’s what I tried to do. I mean, I love literary fiction, and I do write it occasionally, so I was trying to do that. But my love of fantasy and just the weirdness kept kind of creeping in and eventually I started writing stories about, you know, a girl who is suicidal and then accidentally, when she’s like cutting wrist, she finds that, you know, she unlocks, like, a portal to the Greek underworld and, you know, just weird stuff like that kept coming out in my stories and they never…they really embraced it. I was, I told them immediately, like, you know, I’d really like to give this a go, I really, I’m hoping for some kind of literary life, for life in Book World, just to carve that out for myself, and they were very quick to hook me up with every resource they had. They got me an internship with a literary agency in London, so I had some work experience and got to see things from the other side of the desk, and they just embraced my voice. They’re like, “You know, it’s…you’ve got a nice commercial voice.” So, I never ran into that kind of snobbishness, I guess. So, I’m lucky.

It’s nice to hear, because I’ve had more of the other than I’ve had that from the authors I’ve talked to. So, I’m glad it does work out sometimes. I’m actually…I have…my training was in journalism. I never had a…I took one creative writing course in university. But the funny thing is I’m currently mentoring an MFA student from the University of Saskatchewan. So, I’ve actually just sort of jumped straight up to teaching people who are getting a masters in a way.

How’s it going?

Good. But he’s writing young adult fantasy and so clearly, you know, the university up there did have a problem with that. They just found him a mentor who could, who could help him with that. So, obviously it just depends on the program. So, you went on from there. Your first book, Anna Dressed in Blood. That was the first published one, wasn’t it?

Well, actually, a literary novel called Sleepwalk Society was released by a small press the year before, and I had actually written that one before my Master’s course. And it was such a small press…I’m talking a micro press. Really wonderful people and I’m so glad that I got to work with them and met them, but I do consider Anna Dressed in Blood to be my first mainstream majorly published novel. So, yeah, that’s usually what I talk about.

Were you actually working on that while you were still doing your masters? Did that sort of start during that time or did it start afterwards?

No, it definitely started afterwards. Probably about six months afterwards was when I started writing? And I was…I worked on a different novel during my, for my dissertation, and I completed it. It was also literary, but it didn’t, you know, it just, it wasn’t there. But when I switched to write…when I switched gears and kind of really embraced the fantasy side and my horror-loving side, which maybe I had been fighting because I thought, you know, you’re supposed to write literary, that’s when everything kind of changed. Like, all the short stories I’d been selling prior to that, I’d sold maybe one or two literary ones but most of them had a horror or a fantasy bent.

Well, and we’re going to talk specifically now about Three Dark Crowns, which started a new…is it a series? A trilogy? What would you call it?

It’s a quartet. The final book comes out in September.

It’s a quartet. Okay. And we’ll talk about…use that as an example of your writing process on everything that you’ve written, but maybe the first thing to do is to get you to give a synopsis of it, so I don’t give something away that you don’t want me to give away.

Sure! So, the Three Dark Crowns series is set on an island. It’s a magical island, where a person can be born with a number of different gifts. So, you can be like an elemental, for example, so you can control one or more of the elements. You can be a naturalist, so you can make things grow, like crops and flowers, and you can also commune with nature and the animals, and you have a little animal companion, called a familiar, who kind of knows what you’re thinking and feeling and vice versa. You can also be a poisoner, so poisoners really like to ingest poison, because it has no effect and it kind of gives them a rush, actually, to ingest poison, and they really like poisoning other people. So, on this island, it’s always been ruled by a queen, and in every generation that queen gives birth to a set of triplets, triplet queens, who all have a particular magical gift, and they are raised, and when they turn sixteen they have a year, essentially, in which to just kill the crap out of each other, and whichever one survives gets to be the new queen, and then bear the next triplets, and so on and so forth. So, Three Dark Crowns is the story of one such generation of these sisters and how they deal with their battle to the death.

Now, you mentioned, that you, you know, your fantasy often also dips into the horror side. That certainly seems to be the case in Three Dark Crowns. Is that common in all of your fantasy? Do you…does it always have that kind of dark edge to it?

I would say so. And I don’t know why but it always tends to be a little bit violent. Someone pointed out to me about two years ago that every single one of my books has intestines, like, intestines somehow end up always on the outside of someone’s body. And I went through and, like, sure enough, yes, every single book that I’ve written has intestines on the outside, so now I make sure that I always put intestines on the outside at some point.

Well I certainly noticed them making their appearance in Three Dark Crowns. So, what are the…what is the seed for you for a book? I mean, this one, specifically, but also any of your books. How do the ideas come to you that you then develop into a book?

I’m not sure it’s the same for you, but for me it’s always different and random. Three Dark Crowns, with its triplet sisters who have to kill each other, actually came from a ball of bees, like a swarm of bees? Are you familiar with beekeeping at all?

Um…slightly.

Ok. So I was not, and I was at a book event in 2013 and they had like a hot-dog truck outside and it was a lovely day and people were going in and out through the bookstore, but there was a swarm of bees, a big ball of them about the size of a human head, stuck to the tree, like the fork of the tree, right next to the hot-dog truck and everybody was afraid to go and get the hotdogs and maybe we should cancel the event because there were kids there and we didn’t want anybody to die, but there happened to be a beekeeper there, and she said, “You know, when they form a ball like that, their only concern is protecting their queen, who is at the center of the ball. They’re on their way to a new hive. And if she dies, you know, that’s the end of them. So, really, they’re kind of docile when they’re in that state, as long as you don’t poke the ball or annoy it in any way, you can go right up to the hot-dog truck. And everybody was fine and that was true, but since there was a beekeeper there–I mean, what have I ever met a beekeeper? So, I just followed this poor woman around all day asking her bee questions, and I wanted to know, like, “Why does she have to travel in the middle of the ball? That seems very inconvenient. Does she do this a lot?”, and she told me a bunch of stuff about bees and keeping bees and how she gets her hive, but she also told me that a queen bee will leave her hive for a number of reasons, but before she does she’ll lay four or five baby queen eggs, before that she is only laying worker eggs, and she takes off with half the hive and then the baby queens hatch out and they just spite and sting each other to death, and whichever one lives is the strongest queen and she gets to take over the old hive. So, I just really liked that idea and I wanted to do it to people, so on the way home that’s what I started to do, I started to develop the idea of Three Dark Crowns. But that is the only time–the only time–that I can pinpoint exactly when an idea arrived. Do your ideas…can you can you distill them down and go back and find out, like, “Ah, that was the seed of the idea,” because Three Dark Crowns, that’s the only one for me, I have no idea where the rest of them came from.

It depends very much on the on the particular story. Some of them I can and some of them…I was doing an interview recently on an older book that I reissued, and I couldn’t for the life of me remember why I wrote it.

Exactly! Yeah, it’s by the time you…you know, it seems like it’s kind of a compilation of ideas? Like, you get a spark of something, and you’re like, “Oh, that’s kind of an interesting thought.” And then you push it away and if it comes back you know it’s a worthy idea. But it may be has gained something in the time that it was gone.

Well, so once you had this this initial idea of this case–this is good, because at least you remember this one–how do you go about fleshing it out and developing it into a story? Do you do a detailed outlined, do you do kind of just a sketch, what’s your process there?

I do not. You know, there was something going around on Twitter yesterday, like, one of those square, you know, tables, like a chart, and you could kind of..it had different definitions for, like, “Are you a lawful pantser?” And you know the pantser versus plotter…

Yes.

So, “Are you a lawful pantser? Are you a lawful plotter? Are you a chaotic pantser?”, and it had all these different levels of plotting versus panting, and different definitions for each. And I read through it and I was very surprised to find that…I thought I’d be a combination of a couple. like. you know. whenever those things come out most people are a combination of a couple. But I’m actually quite a lawful pantser. I don’t outline, unless I’m really deep in a series and kind of in over my head as far as the plot lines are going, I never outline. I had the idea in 2013, spring of 2013. I didn’t start writing it until…late 2014, I want to say?” So, it had been sitting there for at least a year, which I like to do because I want it to prove itself to me that I really want to write it. I don’t want it to be one of those ideas where you’re like, “Well, that’s neat,” and then two months later, like, “No, it isn’t.” I don’t, I don’t want to work on this for as long as it takes to finish it. So, if it’s a novel, I make it wait for at least a year and percolate, and it kind of just develops in my subconscious, I think?

So, initially I met the three queens, you know, the three sisters kind of introduced themselves to me and told me what their names were, which I love, because I hate naming characters. Please just introduce yourself to me! And I knew what their gifts were. And I kind of knew…over time, I grew to knew what their situation was, you know, what their culture was like in the different cities, because on the island different cities foster different gifts. So, the poisoners have a city, the naturalists have a city, the elementals have a city, and each one has a different culture because each gift values different things and are raising these girls differently. all of them trying to win. And so, by the time I started writing I had a pretty good sense of who these girls were and where they were coming from. But I had no idea what would happen once I threw them together. And that is the ultimate joy that I have as a writer, is I love my characters, and they are real people to me. That sounds weird, but they’re real, living in another dimension, and I just want to take them and shove them in a room together and see what happens. So that’s what I do.

So, you didn’t write down anything before you just started writing the actual narrative?

Right. I usually like to…as soon as I start, like, I’ll start hearing snippets of conversations and I’ll start hearing snippets of scenes, and as soon as that starts happening with enough frequency that I’ll actually write down a paragraph or two by hand, just to keep it, I’ll know that it’s almost time to start. And when I start I like to have a good idea of where I’m opening and maybe an idea of where the first three chapters might go. And then after that I just depend on it to fill itself in.

So, you don’t even have the ending in mind when you start?

Usually not. I like to be surprised.

You are a lawful pantser!

Yeah. I did have…with Three Dark Crowns, I did know the secret. So, I did know that that is what would be revealed at the end. But I didn’t know how she was gonna get there, I didn’t know how anybody was gonna get there, and I didn’t know…like, yeah, that’s all I knew. I knew these girls were gonna have to fight, I knew there was ceremony involved, and tradition, and…but I didn’t know anything. It was very going in blind, and it usually is, as far as my books are concerned.

So, you must write completely sequentially then, you don’t do scenes and then move them around later? Or do you?

I don’t. I write from start to finish. That’s just…I’m finding…I’m just throwing words out into the void and following them and hoping that there is, you know, like something to catch them on the other side.

So, what is your actual physical writing process? Do you write by hand, do you write in an office, do you go off to a coffee shop, do you sit under a tree, how do you like to work?

Oh, except for those very brief notes I never do anything by hand because my handwriting is just bad.

Exactly. That’s how I feel about it!

It’s just bad. I really envy people with pretty handwriting. And I have an office, I have a home office, so I write here pretty exclusively. There’s a writing group around where I live and sometimes a bunch of us will meet up at a coffeehouse and write for a day just so, you know, we’ll write, and then we’ll have lunch and chat about it and just kind of commiserate, but that’s only once every few months. It’s so…by and large, yeah, I’m that stereotypical writer by myself in an office in a room, sometimes in the dark…no, not usually in the dark, but yeah.

How fast a writer are you?

Slow. I mean, I think I’m slow. I’m slow by young adult standards. Probably fast by adult standards. So…young adult. I mean. we all like to keep to a book a year, which, when you think about it, is tough. Some of us write three books a year, which just makes my brain hurt and wish for sleep. But I probably…left to my own devices, I would love to have eight…seven to nine months…to do a first draft. I love it. Love it! Haven’t had it in years, but that’s, like, my natural writing habitat.

Publishers tend to want you to keep producing books.

I know!

So, when you have a first draft, then what? What’s your revision process? Do you have beta readers? You mentioned a writing group, but that sounds like it’s a very infrequent thing. Do you show to other people or do you just go back to the beginning and…what’s your process?

Well, lately my process has been, “This has to go to my editor, so it goes.” And…

That also sounds familiar!

I don’t…I’ve never had critique partners. I’ve never had beta readers. I kind of wish that I did. I’ve just never…I have writing friends, but we don’t have that kind of environment. I think it takes a particular kind of trust, a particular kind of friendship to have…to be able to do that back-and-forth beta reading and I’ve just never come across that. Maybe it’s just not my nature. So, and when it hangs out with my editor, while it’s hanging out with my editor, I do like to cool drafts off for a number of months, because when I finish it I’m like, “Well, this isn’t so bad. That went pretty well.” And then two months later I’ll say, “Well, that was a garbage fire. Let me just take that back from you and do it all over again.” So, that’s, yeah. Good process.

Do you do revision before you send it to your editor, or does it…are you done when you get to the end of the first draft? Like, do you publish it as you go, or do you go back and start from the beginning and work your way through it again? How does that work for you?

Well, lately…it’s been different with every with every series,. With the Three Dark Crowns series, I’d say I rewrote Three Dark Crowns from top to tails about three times, and I wrote the first hundred pages maybe three times before that. So, yeah, it was hard, it was a lot. Each book has gotten a little bit better. The final book in the series I only had to rewrite, like, once, which was nice, but everything else has been like two times, a full rewrite, just full rewrite, because I just…it’s not that necessarily all of the beats in the plot were wrong but the way that I was telling them were wrong and the writing was not very good. And I just…I really need those few months of just letting it cool off so I can gain some perspective. so I can step back and look at it with. you know. actual eyes and say, “Yeah, this is really, really bad, and I’m sorry that I made my editor read it, but, you know, what’s done is done, now I get to fix it.”

What kind of feedback do you typically get from your editor? Have you had the same editor all along?

I haven’t. I had the same editor at Tor, Tor Teen, for the first five books, so Anna Dressed in Blood series and The Goddess War trilogy, I had the same editor, she’s wonderful, love her. I have a new editor for the Three Dark Crowns series because I moved from Tor to Harper teen and I also love my new editor. I’ve been really, really lucky with editors. And the kind of feedback that I get from her is I think fairly standard. I don’t know about, I mean, you know, you can tell me a little bit about your editors, too, if they give you, like, the shit sandwich? That’s what I call it. So, there’s like bread…it’s like a, about a sixteen-page, single-spaced, one page of bread where they tell you what’s great about it and then like, and then like fourteen pages just of shit, like everything that needs to be fixed and reworked. And then they’ll, you know, finish it off with another slice of bread that’s like, “Oh, yeah, but it’s still so wonderful and let’s have lunch when you’re in town,” and all that stuff. So, yeah, it’s…she’s very, very detail oriented. She really has a strong handle on worldbuilding. She has a really good sense of character. So there was a lot of that, a lot of tracking through the arcs, and the further you get, the further we get, into the series, the more the feedback has to do with, like, the arc of the character and making sure that all the beats are coming through with the proper dramatic hits and that I’m making motivations very clear for the readers. I can’t really the early feedback for Three Dark Crowns, because I would have been about four years ago now, but, yeah, that’s the long and short of it.

Well, my editor at DAW, which is my major publisher, is Sheila Gilbert, and she’s been doing this for a long time, and Sheila actually doesn’t send us, us being her authors, doesn’t send us a written editorial letter, we do it all by phone. So, it’s a two-hour phone call, and after the first fifteen minutes of talking about cats, then it’s talking about the book and…and she’s, yeah, it’s much the same thing. You know, I have gotten to the end of one of those conversations..and sometimes it’s done in person, if I happen to be at a convention or her see her in person, and you get to the end of it…I got to the end of one and I actually said to her, “But I am a good writer?” And basically, she said, “I’m by buying your book, aren’t I?” Yeah, so there can be some of that, but at the same time it’s, you know, it’s all necessary and it’s done from a knowledgeable place, from somebody who has seen an awful lot of this stuff and knows what works and what doesn’t.

Yeah. That’s why they’re there and that’s why, when you’re, you know, when we’re deciding on who to work with, you know, you definitely want to have an editor who shares your vision for the project. And I do the phone calls, too, so she’ll send me the letter and I’ll read it, and I’ll just, you know, weep, and then we’ll jump on the phone and we’ll have this, you know, like a really long two-hour conversation about it. And by the time I’m finished I know exactly what I need to do and I’m very energized. So, I guess that is our process, our process is kind of a combo, like, the letter just like land the blow, and then the phone call to really soften it out and get things moving.

Are there any specific writing tics that you have to watch out for? I mean aside from the entrails thing, which apparently you have fully embraced?

Things that I think…

You know, we all, or I do, anyway. I have these, you know, and it doesn’t necessarily come from the editor, I find it in my own rewriting. My characters, for example, I have a tendency to have people make animal noises when they’re speaking, they’ll growl dialogue or they’ll snarl something, and I have to watch out for that. Anything like that for you?

It differs by book. Like, if one book she’s like, “They’re frowning too much,” then I take out all the frowns and then the next book they’ll be, like, smirking too much. So, it’s…yeah, there’s definitely stuff like that. I will catch myself slipping into passive voice a lot more than I appreciate, but I’m pretty decent about going through and picking that up.

Yeah, that’s something I check on all the time, too. I find that more than I would like.

Yeah, and I don’t know…but, yeah, it’s always there and sometimes you just…even through, like, the line edits. So, you’ve been through major revisions probably a couple of times by that point, and then you go through the line edits and you realize, “Man, a lot of your paragraphs are just totally structured very poorly,” so you have to, you know, change the sentences around or, yeah, there’s definitely a lot of it. It seems like I was more naturally talented in the beginning and there’s a lot more heavy lifting to fix, you know, just the crap that comes out in the first draft. My first, Anna Dressed in Blood, had almost no revisions, like it just, there it was, like it felts like most of them were additions, story smoothing, but as far as sentence-level rewrites there were practically none. And that’s definitely not the case anymore.

One thing I did want to comment on in this book…and I don’t know if it’s your common choice…but it is written in present tense. Is that something you often choose for your stories?

It depends on the story. It felt right for this, third-person present, which I know really, really bugs some people, but third-person present felt right for this. I usually write…unless…if I’m working with a first-person narrator, unless I want them to be an unreliable narrator, I almost always go present tense because of the immediacy. I don’t want to give my narrator time to color things with their own recollection. I really want it just to stream right through, so it adds a little bit more authenticity to the voice, a little more believability. But if I do want, you know…because nobody…we never remember things how they really happened, you know, even things that just happened to us, it’s always colored by experience and the passage of time. So, if I’m writing in past tense that’s always, I’m always very aware of that, as far as if I’m working with a first-person narration. My Goddess War series was told in third past, so it’s…and I think my next fantasy series will be in third past as well, and my next stand-alone is going to be in in first past. So, I don’t know. Maybe I just need a break from present tense.

Well, I admit, I was…I don’t know, I was maybe four or five chapters in and it suddenly twigged on me that it was in present tense, which is interesting, that it didn’t immediately…I was reading it in past tense even though it was written in present tense. That’s something weird in my brain, I guess, but I didn’t immediately notice, which is interesting. Probably more to do with me than you, though. So, you mentioned going through all these stages of rewrites, and line edits, and it is something I like to point out to readers, sometimes, who, you know, say, “Well, you must be so excited your book is out,” and it’s like, “Yeah, but I’ve seen that thing so much at this point.” Do you feel that way a little bit when it comes out, that you’ve read it way too many times already and you don’t have to look at it again after it’s published?

Oh, exactly. Like, that’s…yeah, I remember, you know…more so in the early books. You know, people say, like, “Oh my God, your book is out and you can hold it in your hands and are you so excited to just bring it home and read it?” And it was very exciting to see an on a shelf and to hold it in my hands. And it is still very exciting to see my books on shelves and be able to hold them as physical books because books are so, you know, such a big, monumental part of my life. But I never want to crack my book open and actually read it because I have read it like ten times from cover to cover within the last six months or so. And, I mean, even my favorite books I haven’t reread ten times. So, yeah, I think I’ve had enough…and yet. I will sometimes now…it’s been about ten years since Anna Dressed in Blood…I will pick it up and if I need to reference something, like, “Oh, what did I say then?”, I’ll read it and then I’ll catch myself, like, reading a little more and going, “Well, that’s not bad, that’s OK,” but it’s taken ten years for me to do that, and as far as Three Dark Crowns goes, it’s still so fresh that the only reason I’ll crack one open is if I need to reference something that I said before, just to make sure, like, I’m in the right area of the castle or the right hair color or eye color, et cetera, et cetera.

I presume there are audiobooks of your work. Have you ever listened to those?

No, I can’t. I just…I think it’s too weird to listen to somebody else read my, you know…do you think that’s weird? Do you like…I mean, I’ve chose the audiobook narrator for the Three Dark Crowns series, which is my first time doing that, and she’s wonderful, she’s fantastic, and I do listen to enough of it so that I’m like, “Oh, yeah, Amy Landon, you knocked it out of the park again,” so I can, you know, really appreciate that. But then I stop. Do you do the same thing or can you…?

Well, I did one young adult fantasy series, I retained the audiobook rights, it’s from a smaller publisher here in Regina called Coteau Books, and it’s an Arthurian, modern-day Arthurian series called The Shards of Excalibur. So, I actually found the narrator,, but I was also the publisher because I was doing it through ACX–audio book exchange or whatever that stands for–Audiobook Creation Exchange or something like that. So, I had to listen to them all because I had to do the proof listening, And actually, I kind of enjoyed it. It’d had been a while. She did such a great job. It was…she did… there’s a teen girl and that was great but there’s a teen boy and she made him believable and Merlin’s like a computer guy like Bill Gates or something in my story and she gave him this obnoxious English accent. And, yeah, I actually quite enjoyed listening to my own stuff, but I’ve never listened to the ones that are done…like, my latest one, Worldshaper, has one out and I’ve listened to the opening of it and I can’t quite bring myself to listen to anymore because it’s just too soon since that came out and I just want to hear it again right now. Also, I read it out loud to my wife, so I feel like…

Yeah. That’s another thing I do. I do the same thing, I read them all out loud to my husband. So, yeah. He’s an audiobook guy. Is your wife an audiobook listener?

No, but we have this thing where…our kitchen’s not big enough for both of us to work side by side, it’s an old house, so she…I pour wine and she cooks and I read to her. That’s kind of our suppertime ritual.

Oh, that’s nice.

We’re currently reading Life of Johnson by Boswell. So, it says it takes fifty hours, so apparently it’s a long book…I’m reading it on e-book. Anyway, that’s what we do. So, you’ve got the last book coming out…and it’s called Three Dark Crowns, is the name for the overall quartet, is it, as well as the first book?

Yes. So, yeah, the series doesn’t have a special name, it’s just the Three Dark Crowns series and it will be comprised of four main novels, and then I also released a short bind-up of novellas. They’re prequel novellas, so they take place before the start of the series, when the queens were children, and then one of a queen from 500 years before. And that one’s called Queens of Fennbirn. But the last book will be called Five Dark Fates. So, completely out of numerical order, which is really bugging people.

What are the two middle books called?

So, the order of the series is Three Dark Crowns, One Dark Throne, Two Dark Reigns, and Five Dark Fates.

They don’t even add up!

They don’t even add up. They totally skip…I totally skipped number four. Originally, the series was designed to be a two-book series. It was just a duo. So, the story…it completes an arc at the end of One Dark Throne, and then, the next two books…I like to think of them almost as separate duologies, because the first is, like, the story of the Ascension and then the second is like the story of the reign. Yeah, so, when it was just going to be Three Dark Crowns and One Dark Throne, well that wouldn’t have been too confusing, that would have been OK. And then I started adding more numbers and it just got out of control.

Well, now we’re at the point where I’m going to ask you the big philosophical questions. Why do you write and why do you think any of us write? In particular, why do you write this kind of stuff, and why do you think any of us write this kind of stuff? What do you think is the impetus?

I think escapism has so much to do with it as far as why we write fantasy, and even horror, in particular. I don’t know about you, but I find there’s something soothing about being extremely frightened of something that can’t actually hurt me. There’s enough to be afraid of for real when you’re just walking around living your life. So, if I can be afraid of, like, a guy with Butterfinger knives on his hands, that’s wonderful to me. I love, I have Freddy nightmares every now and again and they’re my favorites, just waking up just terrified and knowing, “Well, he’s not real,” and hoping someday he will be. So, there’s a lot of…at least, for me I think that’s where it is. I always used to try to find, you know, magic when I was a kid, in the real world. I always thought, like, “Man, our world is so dull, it’s so boring, like, my horse doesn’t have a horn, not a single horn on that horse whatsoever. Not even an invisible one. She never grew one. I waited… And so, yeah, escapism. And…what was the other question? Kind of starting to ramble here.

Well, that’s sort of one reason we read it and maybe why you write it, but, like, do you enjoy it? I mean, is it fun?

Oh, yeah. I don’t know what it is about…I don’t know, for me, since I’m a hard-core pantser, when I’m drafting, it’s very much living the story. Like, I’m very Bastian Balthazar Bux about that. I don’t insert myself, you know–that might be fun at some point, but–I’m just living, I’m finding things out along with my characters, and I’m really along for the ride, and I start to get inklings about what might happen, and it’s not always what happens, and that’s exciting. So, for me the act of writing has always been a little bit magical. It’s…I mean, there’s no reason why it should work out. There’s no reason why I should be able to just sit down with these threads of story and just plop down and write, and they’ll, like, twine themselves into some kind of a sensible arc and reach a, you know, a conclusion that makes sense, like, without planning it out. But it does. Every time it does, and that is just magic. So, for me, yeah, the act of writing is…just, writing anything, it doesn’t even have to be fantasy. Just the fact that you…there’s a story out there and it’s waiting to be discovered is very, very magical.

Have you found that the writing process, where you are drawing all these plot threads together and bringing the story out, has that gotten easier the more you do it or does it…has it changed for you? You’ve done many books now.

I have, and I’ve done standalones, and I’ve done series, duos…I actually realized the other day…well, I realized this about a year and a half ago…that Sleepwalk Society was a standalone, then Anna was a duo, then The Goddess War was a trilogy, and now Three Dark Crowns is a quartet, so I would either forge ahead and go for five or I should reset and go back to one, and I did. I reset and I went back to one. Probably the best, for the best, because…it’s really hard sometimes to get real deep into a series and you’re coming up on the conclusion and you’ve got a whole bunch of things just stretched out there waiting to be resolved and at the outset of that final book you’re looking at them flapping in the wind wondering, “How am I going to catch you?” Like how are you going to braid together to, you know, work yourselves out. And they do, I suppose, but it’s a little bit nerve racking. It hasn’t really changed, though, over the course of…the writing process, over the course of these books. The revision process has changed a lot, but the actual drafting has remained the same. It’s just very much getting to know the characters, letting the characters make their choices, and following the story wherever it wants to go.

Since you mentioned series, something I often ask series writers…the last interview that just went live was Kevin Hearne, who has like a ten-book series, the Iron Druid series…do you find any issues with continuity and remembering what you put in the previous books so you don’t contradict yourself in the current book?

Well, it’s always…I always think about that when I’m starting out, because I’m a pantser, and whenever I put something to paper, every once in a while I’ll think, “Man, I hope I’m not just writing myself into a corner,” you know, just making it so that there’s no way that I can get out of here, and then the last book just has to have a meteor strike and just take out everybody because that’s the only way. Which I suppose is always an option. But, no, I haven’t yet. It’s been OK, despite not having all of the rules in place and not knowing…like, I don’t know, often I don’t know the ins and outs of a locale until I bring a character there and walk around with them. I don’t know the ins and outs of a culture before I have a character’s excuse to go and learn about it, or a character’s…yeah, so, but it’s  worked out OK so far. I will have just plain old flubs. A reader pointed out that in Two Dark Reigns, one of the characters…so there’s a line of queens, right, in these books, and the last three queens have been poisoner queens, which is unprecedented. Usually there’s not the same type. Nobody, like, three in a row just don’t win. So, the poisoners are kind of experiencing this dynasty of sorts and they’re kind of going mad with power and the three poisoner queens directly before this are Camille,, Nicola and Sylvia…or Camille, Sylvia, and Nicola, in that order…and in Two Dark Reigns they’re referred to as Camille, Sandrine, and Nicola, because in the very early timeline, which apparently I mistakenly worked off of, the second poisoner Queen’s name was Sandrine,. and then we changed it to Sylvia. I don’t even know why. So, that’s actually in print in Two Dark Reigns, and I’m thinking that we’re gonna have it fixed, but that was embarrassing. So, stuff like that does happen, yeah.

And it doesn’t seem to matter how many eyes look at it in the publishing side, ultimately it’s a reader that always seems to find these.

Isn’t it? Those readers. They’re good!

And speaking of readers, what do you hope readers get from your work? You mentioned escapism, are you looking for any other impact on their way of thinking or their life. I guess it sounds a bit grand, but this is called The Worldshapers, so, are you trying to shape the world with your fiction?

I’m not. I really want readers to enjoy it. I hope they care about the characters and I hope they care about the story and I hope they enjoy it. I’m…if. you know. Three Dark Crowns is set in a matriarchy, where women are in power, and they’re the heads of households, and that’s the way it’s always been, and nobody seems to bat an eye about that, I mean, if that leads some people to go, like, “Oh, yeah, why should we bat an eye about that,” well, that’s great. But I didn’t set out to do that.

I don’t think I’d recommend the system of government that has built up…

Oh, no, no. By no means do I mean to say that a matriarchy would be without flaw, because women are still humans and we just mess things up no matter what, no matter what gender we are we will mess it up, guaranteed, but…

That’s where stories come from!

Exactly. But, no, I often…sometimes folks ask me to, like, do keynote speeches, and I always caution them, because I love keynote speeches–I’ve listened to quite a few, just going to conventions and things, and they’re always so inspiring and just uplifting and, you know, all these great personal stories of things they’ve overcome or mentors that have affected them, and I just make it very clear that I’m …I don’t have those kind of stories and I’m not that kind of change-the-world, you know, writer. It’ll be mostly dick jokes and, yeah, just a lot of court-jestering for however long you want to have me up there. So, no. Like, I…I don’t want to say that I don’t take my work seriously, because I really, really do, but…and I hope that it has, for that rare reader I think, you know, maybe it does…you know, a really good book can change your world. It doesn’t really matter what it’s about. So, I hope that does happen for some people but I…I don’t think…you know, I’m not like a, I’m not like a Jason Reynolds or an Andy Thomas or a, just…yeah. I’m not that.

Well, when I think of the books that really had an impact on me, I don’t think, in most cases, they had any sort of impact that the author thought they might have. It just happened to be the right book and the right character hitting me at the right time to really make an impression on me.

Exactly. Yeah. And that’s true for me, too, as a reader. So, I don’t know, maybe that’s why I don’t have that hope, is you know…I hope that it will happen, but I don’t I don’t set out for that for sure. When I’m writing, it’s really just…honestly, I don’t think about audience much at all, I just want to serve the characters and tell the story as best I can.

Well, it seems like the readers are coming along for the ride, so that’s good. And speaking of that, what are you working on now? I mean, we know the fourth book is coming out in September, I think you said?

Yes. September 3rd. And I just finished it. We got a little behind. They…well, they asked me to do the novellas shortly after, I think, One Dark Throne was published. And at the time I was like, “Sure, yeah, what are they, like 25,000 words apiece? No problem, I can knock them out,” and no, that took a while. So, ever since then we’ve kind of been working from behind and so, we’re very late. Normally, I would be…they would all be wrapped up by now. We’d be through pass pages, everything would be set. And I just turned in another edit, like another decent-sized edit, and we tried to combine the line edits and the copy edits into that edit and I only had four days to turn it around.

Ooh.

So, it was tight. I’m still pretty happy with where it’s ending up. And…but, yeah. So that immediately was what I was working on. I’m going to be starting my next standalone, which hasn’t really been announced yet, but it’s kind of like a, kind of like a YA In Cold Blood mixed with Natural Born Killers. Are you familiar with the serial killer…he’s not a serial killer, he’s a spree killer…Charlie Starkweather and his girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate?

The names vaguely ring a bell but that’s all I could say.

There’ve been a couple movies, like, based off of them, Badlands, and they were…they were teenagers and they just went on a killing spree that lasted several days, possibly a couple weeks, into…they just shot up the heartland and it was just very, very shocking, you know, just like In Cold Blood, the Clutter murders were shocking, things like that just didn’t happen in the heartland at that point in time. And Caril Ann Fugate was only thirteen when this happened, and she was tried as an accomplice, and she went to prison, and Charlie Starkweather, I think, was only fifteen or sixteen. I mean, these were kids. So, that story has always really interested me, and…it’s not going to be exactly like a retelling or based on them really at all, that’s just the inspiration. So, it’s gonna be kind of a twisty crime thriller. In a sense, that’s what I’m going to be working on next, and then I’ll go back to fantasy after that, but it will, I mean true to form, it will have kind of a horrifying fantasy-like spin because of the nature of the murders and the possibility of some supernatural involvement.

Does it have a title yet?

It doesn’t have…it has a working title, but it doesn’t have a title that I think is going to stick. Right now I’m just calling it…like the full title in my brain was, like, All These Bodies Without Blood, but I think…then we shortened it to All These Bodies, and I don’t know if All These Bodies will stay or if it’ll be something else by the time it comes out. I’m taking a year off, though. I need time to shift gears, and I really…I’m afraid of this book. I know what it needs to be and it’s one that I’ve had in my head long enough that I kind of know most of the beats. So, you could almost say that I’m plotting this one. And I haven’t felt up to it as a writer so far. I think I’m ready to try it now. But I need a lot of time.

Well, it certainly sounds intriguing. Well, we’re just about out of time here. So, where can people who want to keep up with your writing exploits, where can they find you online?

Well, my website is a good place to start, just KendareBlake.com. I try to keep the events updated. I’m not as good about keeping the blog updated. Maybe I’ll blog like once a year. I’m on Twitter, and if you @ me I will definitely do my best to reply. I’m on Instagram, ditto, if you tag me or something I’ll do my best to reply. And I’m also on Facebook. And those are all just my name. I’m not very creative with the handles, it’s just Kendare Blake. I don’t do Snapchat because I don’t get it and the filters scare me. But uh, yeah, you can definitely find me there.

All right, well, thanks so much for being on The Worldshup…Worldshapers, I can’t even pronounce the name of my own podcast…and I think I mispronounced your name in the introduction. You said…how do you pronounce it?

I say Kendar-ah but I don’t care. Whatever you say is fine.

I think I said Ken-dare off the top.

That’s fine. I get…if it starts with a K and you’re looking at me, I’ll answer to it.

Well, thanks so much for being on the podcast. I’ve really enjoyed talking to you.

Well thanks for having me. It was it was great to talk to you again after all these years.