Once Upon A Romance Interview
With
Karen Mercury

http://www.onceuponaromance.net/

May 2005

We're happy to bring to you our interview with Karen Mercury. She was very open with her answers to our questions offering much insight into her world of writing and reading. It was a pleasure to have the chance to interview Karen.

Tina and Connie: Welcome, Karen. Thanks for joining us. It’s a pleasure to be able to visit with you and probe your mind on your thoughts on writing and life. Before we get started, would you tell us a bit about yourself, your road to publication, and what you’ve got in the works for the readers?
Karen: Thank you for inviting me! My first historical, The Hinterlands, was just released in March 2005 by Medallion Press. It’s set in the 1897 Niger Delta region which is a setting that’s never been done before. That was exciting, to be led to write about something completely different. It’s an action-adventure love story involving an ancient tribal kingdom, human sacrifice, the crazy characters I love so much, a place and a way of life that was wiped off the map overnight.
My next historical, The Four Quarters of the World, will be released in February 2006. I just wrote "FINIS" on the rough draft last night! It tells the incredible tale of the fall of the Emperor Tewodros of Abyssinia in 1868, who went off the deep end and took dozens of Europeans prisoner in his mountaintop fortress. There are plenty of grand, dramatic gestures, wide open vistas, again with the whacky characters that I adore, and most importantly, brutal warriors racing about on horseback. Can’t live without that! I modeled the hero after my idol, Sir Richard Burton (the explorer, not the actor), and I must say, he’s got to be the sexiest, most testosterone-driven hero of all time—an expert swordsman, soldier, explorer, linguist, engineer, historian, who knows "twenty-five languages, not the least of which is the language of pornography" because he also translates ancient Hindoo and Arabic sexual texts.
I cried when I finished it. I felt like the man I loved had just died, because now I don’t get to talk to him anymore.
Tina: I've heard a lot of authors feel much the same way, Karen. Maybe you'll be able to fall in love with the next character you create...
Starting out in general...besides your enthusiasm and love for researching and writing, do you have a certain friend or person in your life who helps keep you motivated to write?  Or is your enthusiasm enough to keep going?
Karen: Strangely, I don’t really hang around literary people. For example, my husband’s idea of a transporting literary experience is a magazine with a gun or deer on the cover. He may have read a couple of Hemingway stories in his time. I’ve never lived with or known many people who read. That’s why I put the illiterate sub-plot into The Hinterlands, because I’ve known so many people who really are that way, and I can understand it. I guess you could say it’s my own strange literary upbringing that keeps me going. I raised myself on books, because I felt so isolated from the world around me. Books were my friends, where I could imagine what I considered to be "real" worlds.
Connie: I'm sure there are many people out there who are happy to know they're not the only ones who considered books their friends, myself included.
Karen, experience teaches us lessons all the time. As a published author, what have you learned that you will always remember that may help an aspiring author?
Karen: Be true to your own voice. Write the story of your heart, with all of your heart’s blood pumped onto the paper, and it will find a home. Your love and passion will show through. Readers can tell when you’re true to yourself, or just phoning it in, writing for the market, or what you’ve heard is hot.
Everyone has heard that sex sells now, so they’re all trying to write that. But it really shows through when someone is just faking it. Stick to your guns. If you don’t want to write explicit sex, don’t!
Connie: Thanks for those words. There are so many authors and aspiring authors out there who are trying to write with the varied trends but don't feel comfortable doing so. Thanks for the encouragement to aspiring authors to "write the story of your heart."
Tina: Moving on...what was it about Historical Romance that appealed to you enough to make you want to write in that genre?
Karen: I adore historicals because it’s so much easier for me to believe in the integrity and sincerity of big, dramatic, loving gestures coming from someone who lived more than 100 years ago. The hero in my WIP just literally walked across ten mountain ranges to save the heroine. If you asked someone to do that nowadays, they’d say, "Are you kidding? I’ll just fly. Or better yet, that’s too big of a hassle, let her find her own way out, I’ll just email her, make sure she’s not dead yet."
But anything in the Victorian days or prior, it’s very simple for me to imagine huge, brave, bold acts of valor, and that’s what I like to hear about. My second favorite movie is "Last of the Mohicans." I get shivers picturing Hawkeye running across the battlefield to grab Cora, or bravely walking down the path calmly, basically sacrificing himself, while all the warriors are beating on him, and he doesn’t react or fight back, because his goal is to save Cora. That’s not something you could see, say, Adam Sandler doing in a modern romantic story. He might race zanily down an escalator, or upset a popcorn stand. It doesn’t have the same impact, somehow.
Connie: I love the way you answered Tina's question and I agree with you. It can lose something in the translation so-to-speak.
Your characters are on another plane; you sit and listen to them. I take it you let the book flow in the direction they take? But you also write from an outline. Is the final outcome a blending of your ideas and the characters? How much do you listen to them?
Karen: They have to follow a certain historical timeline, because I would never, ever, tamper with history. But within that framework, they’re constantly fussing and fighting and going off on their own tangents. Just last night in my denouement, a secondary character, a German deacon, started kicking and screaming being dragged to meet the woman he’s been begging to marry for years. I had to allow him to run off, or he would’ve whacked me with his bible!
Tina: How many MS did you write before having one accepted?
Karen: That’s a great question. About forty, actually. I’ve been writing "books" since I was four years old, but I never tried to publish anything until recently. I’ve always been compelled to write full-length novels just for the sheer enjoyment of it. It’s something I would do, and have done, if I was stuck in a hut with no electricity at the top of the Mountains of the Moon, or in a desert cabin with tribesmen armed with Ouzis coming to raid the village. No one’s ever been able to stop me from writing, though some have tried, because they didn’t understand the compulsion.
Connie: Your passion for it is obvious, Karen.
You’ve based a character or two on real-life people. What do you do, or keep in mind while creating characters that are three-dimensional, larger than life, and believable?
Karen: Some of my core characters, I’ve been writing about for thirty years. They’re the same people in different guises every time, because I know them like the back of my hand.
I just read the most amazing book on writing one could ever hope to read, "Making A Literary Life," by a wonderful woman named Carolyn See. She says to write down the ten most important people in your life, whether it’s your mother or your butcher. Then write down the five most annoying people who just drive you to distraction, even if it’s one blind date you had once. Of course you’re wondering "What’s the purpose of this exercise?" She tells you that these are the core characters that you’re going to utilize your entire life, because you know them so well, and they affected you so strongly.
When I made my list, before I even knew the point of the exercise, I added a completely fictitious character I’ve been writing about for thirty years…Because he has affected me so strongly. He’s the brother I never had, and wished for when I was a child. And I guarantee you, he’ll always pop up in my writing.
Connie: Thanks for the tip!
I’m going to stick to the characters for another minute or two...they’re very well fleshed out, vivid in your mind. What characteristics are important for them to have? What do you want the reader to see and feel when it comes to their personalities?
Karen: I get a kick when I’ve described a character so well a reader tells me they feel they know him. Even when they’re not completely on the money as to my intentions—for instance, someone might say Rip Bowie in The Hinterlands made them imagine Brad Pitt, when really I based him on Matthew McConaughey—I got the nudism aspect of Rip from Matthew’s infamous run-in with naked bongo drumming, couldn’t you tell? (very big grin) But just that the image was vivid enough for them to even picture someone, then I’ve succeeded in painting a lucid portrait, as opposed to just some generic person who was thrown in there without characterization.
Tina: Karen, where did you find the story The Hinterlands is based on?
Karen: I collect African art—or, at least, try to, the better pieces are beyond my reach!—and have always admired the Benin bronzes. One day I was reading about the "Benin Punitive Expedition" and I was blown away. I simply couldn’t believe that a civilization so advanced as to craft such exquisite works, yet so seemingly "barbaric" as to practice human sacrifice, existed as recently as 1898. It’s something you expect to hear in "King Solomon’s Mines," or other imaginary adventure tales, not in an era when they were inventing the automobile!
Connie: Have your extensive travels to Africa, Egypt, and Sudan (to name a few) played a part in your writing? Found their way, in some aspect, into your novels?
Karen: It imbues it in very minute, subtle ways. The smell of cookfires, little idiosyncracies of speech patterns, the sounds and feelings of chanting, the way the air feathers against the arms—the way Africans love to make so much of what we perceive as noise. Funny memories that come back to me at odd times. I was once standing on a smoky green mountain ridge in Uganda, dumped off there unceremoniously when the truck driver was arrested for some unknown reason. I was like "OK, this is unreal." Schoolkids crowded around me, shrieking with glee, afraid to touch me, holding out their battered textbooks with titles like "Introduction to Physics." I’m sure that unfortunately they probably didn’t really teach that, but it was a big status symbol to carry around the textbooks.
It dawned on me they had never seen a white person. I thought of something from late 50s adventure movies ("White man create fire"), and I took out my cigarette lighter and lit it. They all ran back screaming! Eventually one bold boy was convinced to come forward, pushed by the other kids, and I showed him how the lighter worked. This is stuff you can’t make up, and it gets underneath your skin, into your psyche.
Africans are so very scholastic, it’s a shame they can’t access halfway decent tools.
Tina: It sounds as if you have a ton of memories to tap into and put into your writing.
We’re going to move to a few questions about research now. You did a lot of it for The Hinterlands. Where did you get your information?
Karen: It wasn’t easy! Unbeknownst to me, I’d chosen a subject there was a dearth of information on. I had to do a lot of strange things. One of the books I relied on the most was actually a YA book, and they had excellent drawings of Benin City. I read only moldy old primary source material, had old Burton and Gallwey articles snailed to me from London, things like that. That’s one big problem with doing accurate historicals. Most of the primary source books are long out of print and way beyond your price range, although I do adore collecting vintage books and have spent thousands on, say, second editions of Burton—I could never afford the first editions! One of my dreams is to have a relative I never knew about expire, and leave me his entire library.
I believe in obtaining an expert to proof your manuscript. For The Hinterlands it was Dr. Nowa Omoigui. He’s a cardiologist in S. Carolina from Benin City, and an expert in Nigerian military history. For The Four Quarters of the World, I’m extremely honored to be working with Dr. Richard Pankhurst, the world’s premier Ethiopian historian. His mother was the inimitable suffragist, Sylvia Pankhurst. I still can’t believe I’m working with him, that’s how big an honor it is. His resume is taller than three ex-husbands lined up foot to foot. I expect him to mail me something any day now saying "Just kidding! Go back to kindergarten now, Karen, and do your homework!"
Connie: With all the research and information you found, which appears widespread, did you have a hard time deciding how much would go into the book and what information you would use? Is there a trick to blending history with fiction you create so that both parts of the story are told?
Karen: Hoo boy, is there ever! That’s the finest line to walk. You don’t want to create huge "information dumps" and bore the reader to death with details. The method is to sprinkle in the details as you go. The trick is to learn what to leave out, as opposed to what to put in. It might kill you, as a writer, to leave out certain things you found fascinating, such as Mormonism in the Deseret Territory of Utah—I’m just throwing that in there, as an example, of course (very big grin)—but in the final analysis it streamlines the story to leave it out.
Tina: And are there any facts that stand out from your research that you were surprised to learn?
Karen: Yes. That human sacrifice wasn’t the gruesome barbaric thing we imagine it to be. The Edo, as well as the Yoruba and Dahomeans up the coast from them, saw human sacrifice as a way of appeasing their gods. They believed the dead ones, or the recently arrived, would carry messages to their fathers in the higher realms, so they were actually eagerly dispatched, because they couldn’t wait to be the messengers to the fathers.
Connie: Very interesting. Things aren't always as we think, are they?
A personal direction now, Karen. What is one household chore you do, but wish someone else would take over? Or do you love the housework, cooking, and laundry?
Karen: This cracks me up, because I don’t do household chores anymore, thank goodness! That’s actually a very handy writing tip: hire a housecleaner! I work 16-20 hours a day and there was just no way to clean anymore, though if I had my druthers I find it very relaxing to clean, and it definitely puts you into a better space to operate in a clean house.
I love cooking, but when I’m on deadline, which has been the past 9 months now, it’s Lean Cuisine all the way.
I can’t get Sherry to do my laundry, though, so I’d have to say that’s my most hated thing. I wish someone would just deliver all new clothing every week. Maybe I should become one of those people who has twenty outfits of all the same thing. A Frank Zappa T-shirt, for instance.
Tina: My husband does the laundry :-)
Serious or fun. It’s your lucky day. You’ve thrown a coin into a wishing well and are granted not one, not two, but three wishes! What would they be?
Karen: I’d eliminate AIDS, starvation, poverty, and warfare in Africa. They deserve much better than this. Is that more than one wish?
Once that was completed, I’d have massive sex with Sir Richard Burton. If there’s still a wish left after that, I want to own Vasco de Gama’s old fortress in Mombasa, Kenya. I’d love to have acres of orchards and vegetables, go fishing on dhows every day, discuss art, politics and literature, live with all of my old friends, and about fifteen Newfoundland dogs. I think we’d be very happy together.
Connie: Sounds like it...What one/two appliance(s) couldn’t you live without? Food? Article(s) of clothing?
Karen: I’ve never really had any appliances until recently, so that doesn’t bother me. This here newfangled voice recorder is pretty cool, I can dictate story ideas while I drive. I know the only food I can’t live without is curry. And milk. There’s no milk in Africa.
Tina: I can just about guess, but let me ask anyway. You’re given the opportunity to time-travel. What time-period would you pick and what would you do or see first? Why?
Karen: Ooops, did I just waste a wish about Sir Richard?
You guessed it, Tina…All-out sex with Sir Richard circa 1850! Oh man, I absolutely die thinking I was born into the wrong century…! I dream about welcoming Captain Burton back to Zanzibar after his earth-shaking trip with that dork Speke…I ‘d go back in time and welcome him properly, and show him what a real brazen hussy was all about. Intellectually now, of course.
Then I’d go back and stop his straight-laced wife Isabel from burning all of his manuscripts. That was the biggest loss to all branches of science. Just think how much more there could have been, had she not done that.
Connie: We all have things we can’t leave behind when we go on a trip. What can’t you leave behind?
Karen: I hate to leave my gorgeous bronze Newfoundland, Ishmael. I try to take her everywhere, and it’s very upsetting when she can’t go on the plane with me. She would be very well-behaved on a plane, in fact, much better than some of my friends. In the car, she sits in the passenger seat and I put the seatbelt on her. I don’t have children, so she’s my baby.
Tina: I love my animals, too. The dogs and neighborhood cats and my lizard. They're a part of the family.
I know books have had a great influence on you, Karen. What writers, if any, have had the most influence on you and how?
Karen: Without a doubt, Henry Miller was the biggest influence on me as a teen. It’s the books that you read as a youth that are your strongest influence, and remain that way throughout your life. Henry Miller, you can pick up any book of his, and he led an extremely happy, joyous, and lust-filled life, and you can find inspiration in almost every paragraph, not just the so-called "smut" he was famous for in the first part of the 20th century. Just last weekend I picked up an essay of his called "The Angel is My Watermark." He talked about the newfound joy he’d found through painting watercolors, and it’s the most luminous prose one could ever hope to stumble upon. "The nearer I get to the grave the more time I have to waste…What I recommend for the few remaining years that are left to us is to piss the time away enjoyably."
"One doesn’t sing because he hopes one day to appear in an opera; one sings because one’s lungs are full of joy."
Tina: And who are a few of your favorite authors? What is it about them or their books (characters and plots) that make them a favorite?
Karen: Through Henry Miller I learned to appreciate the greats. I was basically an orphan, and had to educate myself through reading, so through HM (as I call him fondly) I learned about the greats, especially Dostoevski and Knut Hamsun. Dostoevski eternally had outrageous characters busting in the door, making bold statements, and then rushing out again, in truly dramatic form. Knut Hamsun wrote about, although nobody knew it back then, all sorts of mystical schizophrenic characters that were mired in Norwegian folk stories. There’s nothing to rival the tale of "The Midget" before the fireplace, with his scraggly beard and his pipe. Those three were the heavies, the masters. You just can’t even get next to those guys. I’d like to believe most of their characters were also based upon dreams they had.
Connie: One final question. You’re fascinated with African history and art. What sets them apart from other cultures? What would you say to someone to pique their interest in this culture?
Karen: Africa is a continent we should all pay attention to—politically, as well as culturally. It’s where a lot of us come from. They’ve been colonized and enslaved for centuries, and only now are they trying to come into their own. It’s a rough road for them, and I think—and know, mostly through the assistance of Bono, the model for my hero in The Hinterlands—that maybe there’s a shred of hope for them. Bono’s efforts have been nothing short of heroic, what he’s done for the continent. I give every praise to him, and his DATA organization. He’s done more to help Africans than anyone in modern history. He’s very powerful, and also very sexy.
Tina and Connie: Thank you Karen!

Karen, thank you! It was nice to visit with you.

The Hinterlands, was released in March 2005 by Medallion Press.

For those of you who would like more information about Karen Mercury, please take a moment to visit her Website at www.karenmercury.com/index.html .
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