Here's a nice interview

I promised I wouldn't put a blog here. If you want to hear me talk, friend me on Facebook. Or look at my Pinterest boards or my YouTube channel. Lots of good people read there!

But I came across a fun interview I did with SerialBox about Whitehall and other topics. They ask great questions and publish great serials.

What comes to mind when you hear, “Serial Box”?
A man in a fabulous Restoration-era embroidered waistcoat eats a cardboard box for breakfast, reading the box first. He will eat several boxes at one binge, not able to resist the story, and will need to restore himself intermittently with hippocras for the rest of the day.

Can you describe your most recent project in one sentence?
A multicultural Titanic. Titanic meets Jim Crow.
[Now I'm on a new project, which is a fantasy, set in a Brazilesque country, with a bisexual poet/pirate hero and talking eagles.]

Where are you a local?
Starbucks, 4 PM; small green tea latte, please.

If you could live in one fictional world, which would it be?
J.K. Rowling's attitudes are problematic, to say the least, and Hogwarts should be more diverse, more LGBTQI-friendly. In my mind I do a few rewrites on the casting. That said...Hogwarts, so I could ride the moving stairs. Quidditch is cool, it’s good to cast spells, but I love those stairs. And going through the portrait. 

Favorite quote or line?
“Anything worth doing is worth doing badly at first.” I mutter this frequently while grinding my forehead against the wall.

First Love:
Oh, let’s get serious for a moment. Mistress Masham’s Repose.  I was 7 or 8 and we were visiting my aunt out in the country. I was the sort of pale, nocturnal child whose parents are always asking it hopelessly, “Why don’t you go out and play?” On my aunt’s shelf was a gray hardbound book. I opened it. “Maria was ten years old.” And there was a map of where she lived, the Palace of Malplaquet, “about four times longer than Buckingham Palace, but was falling down, …and it was surrounded by Vistas, Obelisks, Pyramids, Columns, Temples, Rotundas, and Palladian Bridges…” I wouldn’t go home until my aunt gave me the book. I was hooked on that hinge between history and fantasy, and I’ve never looked back.

Here’s one of Fritz Eichenberg’s lovely illustrations. Years later I had the pleasure of meeting him and being a complete fangrrl.

You now have a time machine – to where and when do you go?
Such a cliché: First performance of Hamlet. We might have to go hunting for a bit to see when it actually happened. But then I need to see a dinosaur. And Jesus. Yes, in that order:  Shakespeare, dinosaur, Jesus. And then Oscar Wilde. Actually, I’m never giving it back.

If you could have one magic spell up your sleeve, what would it be?
Narratio Reparo.

Where is your happy place?
Starbucks, 4 PM, small green tea latte, and a new scene to explore.

Last thing you read that made you think, “Well damn, that was cool…”
Augusten Burroughs’ Lust and Wonder. What a great love story.

If your soul was manifested outside of your body in the form of an animal (like in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series), what would it be?
A harpy eagle. They have excellent vision and hearing, are long-lived and intelligent, prefer a certain degree of solitude, and like to eat monkeys. Many of these are true of me.

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