Special Guest Friday: L. Jagi Lamplighter

Today’s Special Guest is debut novelist L. Jagi Lamplighter. Jagi’s novel, Prospero Lost, is the first in the thrilling Prospero’s Daughter trilogy, coming soon from Tor Books. Jagi’s not only a novelist, but a writer of short fiction, an editor, and a Scout mom, too. (If you don’t have any Scouts at your home, trust us – it does crazy things to the time you thought you had!) Even so, she’s managed to bring us a fabulous fantasy adventure featuring Miranda (from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”), who’s now a modern woman, running her family’s centuries-old corporation, Prospero Inc. When Miranda’s wizard father disappears, Miranda has to bring her farflung family together in order to rescue him and defeat the Three Shadowed Ones. Please welcome L Jagi Lamplighter!

You began, as many fantasy novelists do, by writing short stories.  What do you like best about writing short fiction?  What do you enjoy about writing novels?

The truth? I hate writing short stories. I have written some – even a few that I like, but I find that it is difficult to say anything I would like to say briefly. What I like best in stories is the interplay that comes from established characters and events interacting with each other in new ways that are logical yet surprising. (You see this a lot in long running TV shows or comics.) You can do this really well in a novel or a trilogy. It is hard to do in a short story.

So…yeah. I really enjoy writing novels. I like the leisure to draw things out to epic proportions and tie little things you thought were forgotten from the early scenes back in later on.

2. Your upcoming debut novel, Prospero Lost, features the characters of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest.  What are your favorite works of Shakespeare, and why?

My favorite works of Shakespeare are: Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest, As You Like It, and, followed by Henry V.

I like the first two for the magic. (Mab, the airy spirit posing as a detective in Prospero Lost, says about these two plays that they are “the only histories of Shakespeare’s where anyone of importance appears.”) The third one for the romance and the delightful main character, and the fourth one because I studied it in school and came to appreciate it.

My single favorite Shakespeare speech is probably from King Henry IV, Part 1, where Prince Hal (Later King Henry the Fifth) reveals his plan to act like a wastrel now, so that when he proves to be a good king, it will be all the more impressive.

It begins:

“I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humour of your idleness:
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wonder’d at,”

I love his idea of acting bad to look better later.

3. You just won a sweepstakes allowing you to invite anyone in the world to come to dinner with you!  Who would you invite?  What will you talk about?

I would fly friends in from all over the world. We’d talk about either writing or roleplaying, depending on which friends. It would be very much like a science fiction convention.

If the question is really meant to ask who out there do I admire? The funny thing is that, with the Internet, I’ve spoken, at least briefly, with many people I admire. So, it’s not quite the big deal it might have been years ago. I’d love to meet Jane Goodall and Ursula LeGuin, both women I really looked up to when I was growing up. (I have a friend who did meet Jane Goodall and told a funny tale of his tongue-tiedness upon the occasion.)

Now, if the question was “You’ve been granted a time machine and can draw anyone you want from any period of history…that would be another story!

4. Your husband is acclaimed science fiction writer John C Wright.  Tell us a little about the two-writer home.

It is, as you might imagine, messy. We have three boys under the age of eleven and three cats. There is a great deal of creative work done and not nearly enough housework. But it is definitely a house of ideas. John and I bounce ideas off each other all the time, and my children, the ones who talk, spend all their time working out their own games and stories. It’s a delightful place to live…if you can survive the mess.

5. What are some of your favorite books?  What makes them special for you?

Funny. I just answered a very similar question on one of those Live Journal Memes.

Someone once described my Prospero novels as: “C.S. Lewis meets Neil Gaiman or, for an American equivalent, Roger Zelazny meets Lloyd Alexander.” Not only is that a pretty good description of the Prospero’s Daughter series, but it also lists four of my favorite writers (though Gaiman was not an influence, as I read him mainly after I started the Prospero series…which I started in the early 90s.)

Other favorite books include:
War and Peace (worth the whole fortune my dad spent on St. John’s College just to have been required to read this one book.)
Gone With The Wind
Tolkien
And Ladies of the Club
A Wizard of Earthsea
The Weirdstone of Brisingamen

6. You told me you’ve just ended a year of no coffee or chocolate.  Being a complete coffee addict myself, I can’t imagine going that long.  Why did you decide to do this, and how has it been for you?  Do you intend to go back to those vices now that the year is over?

I did it for a number of reasons. The main one was that I thought about nothing but coffee and chocolate last spring…and I just felt I needed to think about something else. But there was also a search for discipline, too. There isn’t a whole lot of discipline in our household. It’s nice to discover that one can keep be disciplined if necessary!

May do again…but not cut out coffee entirely.

It’s all over on Monday (June 29th!) Can’t wait!

7. What advice would you offer for fledgling writers hoping to be published someday?

Don’t give up!
Read Donald Maass’s Writing the Breakout Novel and its related Handbook.
Don’t give up!
Oh, and…don’t give up!

Someone once told me that a person should not be a writer unless they found that they could not do anything else…not that they failed at everything else (though Edgar Rice Burroughs did and look where that got him!) but that they just can’t seem to not write. I don’t know if this is true…but I do think the desire to write, to do it regardless of result, is important. If you want to be a writer, you can be, so long as you don’t give up.  You would be amazed how much you can improve just by continuing to try! (And if you don’t believe me, I’d be happy to lend you some of my earlier stuff!)

8.What’s on the horizon for you?

I’m working on a children’s series that I hope something will come of. It’s about two boys who get whisked off to a magical world with twelve cities based on the twelve Boy Scout virtues: Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, etc. The first book is done and looking for a home. It is called The Lost Brothers and the Trustworthy Griffin.

Interestingly, I showed up to help at my sons’ Cub Scout camp and discovered that this year the Dens were named after these same virtues. My sons were in the USS Courteous and the USS Brave. My younger son, who is quite familiar with my new series, was devastated. He knew that the “mythical creature” for Courtesy was a dwarf. He kept asking to be in the USS Friendly, so he could be a winged horse instead of a dwarf.

I’m also working on a series based on our long running roleplaying game, The Corruption Campaign. The Prospero series is also based on this game, but the stuff I stole from the game was heavily modified to fit into the modern earth setting.