Thank goodness I enjoyed Freedom's Sisters. I enjoyed it rather a lot. I enjoyed spending time with the main characters, I found the twists and turns of the plot satisfying, and I appreciated the conclusion. I stayed two hours in the bath finishing the book one night, and that's a lot of of hot water to heat when you're worrying about global climate change.
Granted my appreciation for Freedom's Sisters was somewhat surprising, because as Kritzer herself warns, readers should not read the third book in this trilogy before reading the first two (Freedom's Gate and Freedom's Apprentice). It is confusing to be plunged into the end-game adventures of folks who inhabit an an intricately designed alternative world where bisexuality is the norm, shamans and sorceresses visit the badlands and enslave daemons, and readers need to understand the complicated and only partially explained prior histories of the characters involved. I'm sure the romance elements of the story will be far more satisfying once I've gone back to read Freedom's Gate and Freedom's Apprentice.
Kritzer was kind enough to answer some questions about the book and her writing habits. Her generosity is especially compelling in the face of my utter banality. For more information about the book, and the process, you should read another interview she gave over at By The Way....
1. What's your daily discipline for writing? How do you, as a spouse and parent, make sure the writing gets done? How has it changed, now that both girls are in school for predictable periods of time? Are you more or less productive than you expected you would be?
I am most productive when I write without fail every single day, at least briefly. In the last few years, I've started setting daily word goals: 500 words is the baseline, what I try to crank out unless I have a really good reason not to. I think of it as a minimum, but on occasion, I've sat down at the computer, added a single word, and then gone to bed with the calm assurance of someone who has completed her ritual obligations for the day. On a weekend day when I have a long time to write, I'll try to write 1000 words.
I have a three-year-old and a six-year-old, and now that they go to bed at a predictable (early) hour, and stay there, it's a lot easier to find quiet time to write. Molly is in kindergarten now, and Kiera is in preschool three days a week, so in theory I should have lots of time during the day. In practice, I've found that mid-morning is a really convenient time to schedule doctor's appointments, run errands, and do other things that are difficult to do with small children in tow. When Kiera was an infant and Molly had just started preschool, if Kiera went down for a nap while Molly was at preschool, I dropped everything to sit down and write. Now -- well, I know I'll have time in the evening, so it's very tempting to use free time during the day for other things.
2. What freedoms and limitations does the fantasy genre impose on your writing?
I really like the fact that in fantasy, I'm free to make impossible things happen. It's not precisely true that ANYTHING can happen in a fantasy story -- the things that happen need to remain internally consistent, and the people need to respond to them in believable ways. But, if I want to write a novel where Jehovah shows up in person, looking like a scruffy engineer, and rants at the protagonist about how all his experiments seem to go awry, I can do that in fantasy.
The main limitation is that weird stuff probably does have to happen somewhere. If it's fantasy, it needs to have some sort of fantastic element. I can still write about pretty much any aspect of the human condition, I just need to frame it in magical terms.
3. If there was one thing you could change about how fantasy is read or reviewed or both, what would that be?
I wish all the people who voraciously read best-selling "mainstream" novels like The Lovely Bones would notice they were reading fantasy and check out the stuff that's shelved in the fantasy section.
4. I've noticed that many women in the sci-fi and fantasy genres have a more diverse/creative approach to sexuality in the worlds they create. What inspired you to open up those boundaries in the Dead Rivers trilogy?
I thought through the world and the characters and decided that what made the most sense to me for this set of books was a world where bisexuality was the default.
My first two novels have a lesbian protagonist because she fell in love with her roommate -- I'd envisioned them as Just Good Friends but I realized very quickly it was not coming out that way.
5. You locate the world of the Alashi in Central Asia, but you create an alterna-Greek society, too. Why Greece?
I talked this through with my friend Kelly McCullough, who has studied Greek and Roman history extensively. (He's also a fantasy writer; his first book [WebMage] came out last summer.) I needed a colonial power. I didn't want the colonial power to be the Romans; they're the default oppressive colonial power and that gets kind of boring. Kelly suggested the alternate timeline, where Alexander the Great lives long enough to consolidate his conquests. I started thinking about that, and really liked some of what I started coming up with (the stuff about Prometheus and Arachne, the idea that Alexander overthrew Zeus...) so I went with it.
I am feeling very done with the world of the trilogy. I occasionally have serious twinges of nostalgia for the alternate Italy of my first two novels [Fires of the Faithful and Turning the Storm], but haven't followed up on that.
My current project is set in present-day Minneapolis, and involves a young woman who inherits the Ark of the Covenant from her German great-uncle. The magic in the novel is religious -- so if you're a Christian sorcerer, you can command demons, and if you're a Jewish sorcerer, you can make a golem. The protagonist is Wiccan, and the Ark lands with her in part because God really wants it to be with someone who won't use it. (It was an experiment, and did not turn out as planned.)
I'm definitely looking forward to the Minneapolis experiment, however it turns out, and meanwhile, I'm going to be finding the rest of Kritzer's books. I realize that some people just cannot bring themselves to buy anything labeled "Fantasy" or "Science Fiction" (although I suspect they're a rarer breed in the land of blogs) but if you're hesitating, don't. Give Kritzer a try, you'll like her.
Bonus inducement to read Kritzer's trilogy? The story is set in Kazakhstan, and everyone knows that this is Kazakhstan's moment.
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