This Friday I'd like to welcome author Kaki Olsen. Tell us a little about
yourself.
I’m a Boston-raised, BYU-educated Red Sox fan who writes in
between her full-time job, her volunteer work and as much travel as she can fit
in. I’ve been writing since elementary
school, but it took me 16 years of non-fiction publications to get around to my
debut novel. I write horror, mystery,
sci-fi, fantasy, adventure and literary fiction as well as personal
non-fiction. I have no kids, but I have
six nephews, three nieces, one step-nephew, two fish and a lot of fictional
characters to keep me company.
Wow you sound busy. Will you share a short excerpt from
your novel?
I think it’s inevitable that every
high school student read Kafka’s The
Metamorphosis. Gregor Samsa, a
traveling salesman, wakes up one day as a giant cockroach. He tries to live a normal life, even when
everything’s changed. He can’t work or
go out. He can’t find joy in things that
used to make him happy. He overhears
conversations about what a burden he is to the rest of his family. Eventually, he allows himself to die to put
an end to that.
In all of Aislin’s years of
homeschooling, I only asked to change the curriculum once. When Mom mentally replaced Gregor with
Aislin, she removed it from the planned reading list without further argument.
It may be just a story, but I’ve seen
some of the guilt Aislin feels for the circumstances she didn’t ask for. If anyone in this world knows what it was to
wake up one day with a different life, it would be her.
Aislin has always said that I try to
compensate for her lack of a life with my own activities. She scoffs at my attempts to keep her life
normal, but I would rather risk her scorn than let her believe that she has
nothing to contribute to our lives.
As far as I know, Aislin has never
read that novella, but I’m sure that she knows the story too well.
What brought about the idea
for this book?
I have always loved Swan
Lake, but thought one night that the premise would be impossible in a modern context. Within ten minutes, I
had imagined a life where a character was expected to find true love when she
has human contact only with people she runs into at the all-night convenience
stores.
Sounds interesting, I bet that would come with all sorts of challenges along with a bunch of interesting characters. Have you been given any
helpful advice? If so What?
A few years ago, I took the author of Ella Enchanted out for lunch.
We got around to talking about writing and she said that the best
character tip she had been given was to search the pockets of the character in
question. It’s how she came up with a
book of proverbs that one of her kings uses as his guiding principles. It’s also how I found a rag doll that once
belonged to the dead daughter of a prisoner of war.
I'll have to remember that one. That sounds like fun. Currently, what are you
working on?
Last year, I published the story of an android who saves a human
colony ship by illegally smuggling a dragon egg on board. My roommate encouraged me to write a
collection of stories set in that world.
The dragon now has an Italian adopted sister, goes to elementary and is
passionate about voting rights for family pets.
I’m writing my first murder mystery
and historical fiction, set in 1926 England, where the daughters of a
stationmaster find a dead body on one of the trains to pass through their
father’s station. It connects to a
greater mystery and pattern of deaths.
My third project is entitled Here There Be Humans and chronicles the
epic quest of young dragons to find their long-lost kin. The catch is that in the wider world, there
are bloodthirsty monsters who kill dragons on sight and practically worship
anyone who slays a dragon. When they
finally meet a human, she is an autistic princess who is intimidated by humans
as well and whose advisors want her to feel too incompetent to sit on the throne.
It looks like you are keeping busy. I find jumping back and forth between stories keeps me from getting bored. Tell us a little bit about
your main characters
Swan and Shadow is the story of twin sisters. Aislin is homeschooled, intelligent, reserved
and uninterested in taking risks. Maeve
plays three sports, dates regularly and has made it her mission in life to find
her younger sister a boyfriend. This is
complicated by the fact that Aislin is so wary of taking risks because she is
the latest in a string of Byrnes who have spent their days as swans and their
nights as humans. She has a deadline for
breaking the curse and is terrified that she will screw it all up, but it takes
another catastrophe to take her own destiny in hand. Maeve feels guilty about the life that her
sister can’t live just because the curse only afflicts one member of the
family. She sees everything she does as
well-intentioned and an acceptable level of interference.
What was your favorite
scene to write?
Aislin and her love interest go to
see The Nutcracker and discuss how
crappy most ballet stories are to the main characters. Only one of them knows that she’s living the
crappy story of Swan Lake. I loved writing the dramatic irony of
that and it takes place as they’re sitting on the subways that I rode in high
school.
What has been the best
compliment you have received since you released Swan and Shadow?
My book came out in March.
I gave my best friend a copy of Brandon Sanderson’s Calamity for her birthday in late Febraury and she said I could
borrow it after she finished reading. When
I tried to borrow it, though, she said she’d put the book down until she
finished reading my book. I got very
angry that she had her priorities wrong, but when she announced at the end that
my book was phenomenal, I forgave her.
(She’s also the person who proofread draft 3, which caught my
publisher’s attention.)
That ties with a commentary from my first male reader. His wife bought the book for his birthday and
since he was the 83-year-old, gruff, no-nonsense tenor who sat behind me in
choir rehearsal, I wasn’t sure he’d like a fairy tale retelling. One day, he approached me and said, “Kathryn,
you’re writing the rest of that story, right?”
“Yes, I will.” “Good,’ he
muttered. “Otherwise, I’d have to kill
you.”
What kind of research do
you do before you start a new story?
It depends on the story.
For Swan and Shadow, I
researched folk tales and swan behavior.
I watched videos of flight patterns.
I calculated range because someone asked me if the swan ever got out of
reach of home. She is the same person
who found me a Roman recipe for roast swan.
For What Is Behind Him,
my murder mystery, I’ve been researching such things as shell-shock, inter-war
home life, socioeconomic problems, the history of the British railways, the development of the BBC programming, fashion in the 1920s, burial customs in
rural England, educational opportunities for women, war service of certain
battalions and wildflowers of Southeast England.
I think my most interesting research was for Here There Be Humans. I
decided that the dragons needed to run into a human who catches them off-guard
and immediately, a 17-year-old girl walked into my mind. She was dainty and well-dressed, but also
very nervous in appearance and prone to fluttering her hands like tiny
wings. She wouldn’t tell me why this was
because I knew immediately that she had a verbal output disorder and I spent
several weeks finding out what her symptoms meant. Eventually, I ran across Fragile X Syndrome,
which manifests at time as high- functioning autism in females, and I knew I had
her diagnosis. I’ve since read books
from the perspective of people on the Autism Spectrum Disorder and talked to
parents of autistic children. I even
found a name meaning “swallow,” which fit her birdlike mannerisms. In a book on Tudor life, I discovered that
the mentally impaired were listed as innocents because they could not be held
accountable for their actions. So
Princess Celandine the Innocent was born, a name which suggests she’s virtuous,
but is actually a sly insult to her disorder.
Who designed the artwork
for your cover? Or did you design it yourself?
Cedar Fort sends a questionnaire about cover ideas out with their
book contracts. I then got an e-mail
with a proof of the cover. I gave
feedback and was surprised to have a good friend of mine respond. Rebecca Greenwood works as one of their
artists and is a published author in her own right, but I knew her from church
and she even was in a musical that I helped choreograph one summer.
Kaki, how do you handle criticism
when it comes to your writing?
Most of the time, I remember that it’s not personal. If I have a specific issue that I refuse to change, I discuss it with the critic.
For example, my acquisitions editor wanted me to change the ending to Swan and Shadow. I told her in detail why it had to end that way, but she still disagreed. Eventually, I wrote something in the middle
and she loved it.
In another case, my proofreader objected to an insecurity of a
main character and went on at inappropriate length about how annoying it
was. By the end of the manuscript, I was
ready to scream. We worked out that it
was a matter of the character never developing from beginning to the end in
regards to that insecurity.
I think the hardest part is knowing when to take it and when to leave it. How many times
do you think you read your book before going to print?
14. I kept track.
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