Author Nancy Baker Interview and Book Contest LIVE Here!

BBB: What’s the funniest thing that has happened to you while writing a book?

NB: I’ve never had anything funny happen while writing a book but TALKING about writing with my best friend and fellow writer has led to a number of entertaining situations. We both write fantasy, horror and SF and when we’re together, we spend a lot of time in restaurants and coffee shops, discussing what we’re working on. When we’re really involved in it, we can get quite animated, happily debating ways to dispose of bodies and terrible things to do to people. However, we’ve never quite topped the time my friend stood up and mimed shooting me in the middle of a restaurant to demonstrate the climax of a short story. A good number of patrons switched seats after that.
BBB: What character was the toughest for you to get onto the page, and why? How did you finally crack it?
NB: Sadamori Fujiwara from Blood and Chrysanthemums was the character that scared me the most, because I was trying to write for the point of a view of a thousand-year-old vampire from another culture. I did a lot of research for that book and really only found my way into the story when I realized that I could use the elements in Japanese popular culture that functioned in the same way that vampires functioned in our own popular imagination.That allowed me to create a series of short stories linked by a diary that used ghost stories, Noh plays, Heian-era court literature, and samurai tales to dramatize his journey. The funny thing was that once I started actually writing his sections, I loved it. He had a wonderful voice and self-awareness of the way he was manufacturing his own myths by telling his truths through fiction.
One of the characters in my new novel, Cold Hillside,was a struggle until I learned to just let him swear whenever he felt like it and then edit it out later.
BBB: What were you like in school?
NB: The nerdy girl with glasses who sat in the front of the room. In my last year of high school I deliberately started sitting in the last row – the stoners couldn’t figure out why I was there. To the extent I can consider myself to have bloomed, it was definitely late. I liked university much more than high school.
BBB: What would you say are the main advantages and disadvantages of self-publishing versus being traditionally published or the other way around?
NB: I’ve never really self-published, beyond putting out a short story collection and an illustrated excerpt from Blood and Chrysanthemums with my friends at the House of Pomegranates Press. We were all terrible at self-promotion though, so that’s definitely an advantage with being published by a traditional press. When my books first came out from Penguin, I actually had a publicist and was able to go to Calgary and Vancouver for interviews. I love my experience with my new publisher, ChiZine, because not only are they friends, they’ve got a team that’s very,very good at publishing incredible books.
BBB: Please tell us more about  The Night Inside and the storyline that drives it.
NB:  The Night Inside grew out of a short story idea, influenced by punk and goth, by one incident in The Vampire Tapestry by Suzy McKee Charnas (who wrote a lovely introduction to the e-book edition), and my general feeling that there was something I wasn’t seeing in other vampire fiction. I wanted to write about how it would feel to be an ordinary person transformed into a vampire, when that transformation didn’t make you beautiful, wealthy and powerful, but just meant that now you needed to drink blood to survive.
Dimitri Rozokov actually appeared in another short story of my (Cold Sleep) but I didn’t know who he was at that point. What appealed to me about him was his essential cautious nature and his loneliness.
I was interested in exploring the choices the characters make and the interplay between evil that springs from something inside them they can’t help and evil that they choose to do.
BBB: Is this a series? If so, how many books will there be?
NB: Blood and Chrysanthemums is the sequel and I expect that will be it, but who knows? I haven’t thought about Ardeth and Rozokov in a long time and something I’d like to explore with them might appear.
BBB: What sets  The Night Inside apart from other books in the same genre?
NB: I think it’s that my vampires are firmly rooted in the real world. They can’t fly, they don’t have amazing supernatural powers, and they’re not necessarily smarter or better than mortals. They have the same struggles most of us do, both the practical ones (how to pay my rent) and the existential ones (what is the meaning of my existence?)
BBB: What types of creatures/characters can readers expect in your world?
NB: In the first three books, it’s vampires, though the ones in  The Night Inside are actually quite different from the ones in A Terrible Beauty. In that book, which is basically a version of Beauty and the Beast, I had a lot of fun creating a vampire heroine who DID have supernatural powers, who couldn’t see herself in a mirror and who could no longer pass as mortal without using her power to disguise her appearance. I also got to indulge in my love of costume porn, because it’s set in an imaginary fin-de-siecle milieu.
In my upcoming book, I spent a fair bit of time in the Fairy Court.
BBB: What advice would you give to your younger writing self?
NB: Try to avoid that damned writer’s block. Sadly, I’ve suffered from that for years, to the extent that I didn’t think I’d ever actually finish my fourth novel I’d tell myself to learn to turn off the internal editor sooner and to realize that the things you think suck,usually don’t. Except when they do.
BBB: Is there a message in books that you want readers to grasp?
NB: Not really. I hope they feel that the characters are realistic and the choices and situations they face are tough and moving.
BBB: What has been the toughest criticism you’ve been given as an author?
NB: I received a bad review in Maclean’s (Canada’s equivalent of Time), which I read in the dentist’s office. That was rather unpleasant on many fronts. I’m a pretty harsh critic of my own work. For A Terrible Beauty, I found it interesting that all the female reviewers knew which fairy tale it was based on but most of the male reviewers didn’t recognize it was a fairy tale at all.
BBB: Have you written a book you love that you have not been able to get published? If so, can you tell us more about the storyline?
NB: I’ve been fortunate that because I’m not very prolific, almost everything I’ve written has been published. I do have a fantasy novel that I’ve used various versions of as my “warm-up” writing for years and if I ever can actually come up with an entire plot (as opposed to just the “good bits”) I’d love to actually write that.
BBB: Please describe your current writing area? Is it perfected or what do you want to do to make it that way?
NB: I’m seduced by the idea of a lovely writing area but the truth is that I sit at a desk in my messy office/wardrobe closet/general dumping ground, surrounded by items as diverse as an souvenir Eiffel Tower, some Day of the Dead Christmas ornaments and a stuffed hamster (not sure why I have that, come to think of it). Sometimes I’ve had a corkboard where I posted pictures of scenery or art that tied into whatever I was working on.
BBB: What’s coming up for you for the rest of 2014?
NB: I’m enjoying having my first three novels available for the first time in years and I’m waiting to start the final edits on my new novel. I’m looking forward to seeing the cover, because ChiZine’s artist, Erik Mohr, is incredibly talented. And then I suppose I’d better think about something else to write.
Read a 4 star review of The Night Inside by clicking here.
Buy a Kindle copy of The Night Inside from Amazon by clicking here.
Books in the series in the order they should be read: The Night Inside Blood and Chrysanthemums

10 Quick Things About Nancy

Favorite Food? Cheese
Favorite Color? Black
Favorite Movie or TV Show of all Time? BBC Pride and Prejudice with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle. I watch it whenever I’m sick or sad.
Favorite Drink? Any martini made by my husband
Favorite Book? How can I ever choose? But I love anything by Patricia McKillip, especially The Firebird and the Cygnet.
Favorite Season? Autumn
Favorite Online Hangout? I lurk on Jezebel.
Favorite Animal? Sparrows.
Favorite Band or Musician? Hard to say but I was up at 5:30 am in a fruitless attempt to buy Kate Bush tickets last month. If we could have scored some, we’d have gone to London for that.
Mode of Travel? (Trains, Planes or Automobiles) Trains, because you can see the backs of things.
Favorite Vacation Destination? J’aime France.

About Nancy Baker

Author Bio:

Nancy Baker blames her life-long love of horror and fantasy fiction on the first horror story she can remember: The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin by Beatrix Potter. She dabbled in rock and roll (writing lyrics and singing in basement bands during her university years) before switching to writing fiction. She made her first professional sale in 1988, to Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone magazine and has subsequently published 3 novels. Her 4th novel will be published by ChiZine Publications in November 2014.

Connect with Nancy

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Prize:  One eBook copy each of the following books to one winner.
The Night Inside
Blood and Chrysanthemums
A Terrible Beauty

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