Monstrous Little Voices was an amazing experience, and I’m so glad that the publisher asked me to take part. It was shepherded by the very talented editor David Thomas Moore, who asked us all to write (loosely) within a shared world – the world of Shakespeare’s Mediterranean and Shakespeare’s magic. We were left largely to do what we chose within that, and the result is fve very different novellas and they’re each so fascinating in their own ways.
I decided the most authentically Shakespearean thing I could do was lift a plot from Ovid, so I wrote a much changed retelling of the story of Pomona and Vertumnus.
I just realized that my next Shakespeare retelling, my novel Mercutio, will come out (in 2026) almost exactly 10 years after Monstrous Little Voices did.
I’m always impressed with authors who kept plugging away over the years in spite of not having instant success. Are there rejected books that you originally submitted that you’ve thought about reworking and resubmitting, or do you always start fresh? It seems like it would be really hard to put so much work into a manuscript and then just kill it.
I knew you had Mercutio coming out in May but hadn’t heard about The Swordmaster. How many books are you working on at any one time, and roughly how long does it take from penning the first sentence to handing the copy to a publisher?
I’m fascinated by your two interactive adventure games, The Magician’s Workshop and The Road to Canterbury. I haven’t played either yet, but definitely plan to soon. How did those come about, and what was it like to write them?
Thank you! Yeah, it is always somewhat painful having to put a manuscript away in the drawer. I am not really tempted to try to rework and resubmit most of them, though, just because I’m a different writer now so there’s a lot of work that would be required to revise an early project, and I have so many new ideas I’d rather prioritize. And I think I have made my peace with it – those manuscripts were part of the process for me, so they aren’t wasted.
This is an “it depends!" one for me. I’ve never been in a position to write fiction full-time, so I don’t know how long it would take me to write a novel if that were all I was doing. These days, fiction writing is roughly half of my working time (freelance work and teaching being the other half.)
Typically, I have one novel in the first-draft stage at any given time, but then I might get editorial comments or beta-reader feedback back on another in the same year, so I’ll be working on more than one novel in a given year, but at different stages, if that makes sense.
Sometimes, the schedule for the publication process means that I’ll have two books released in one year, and no books in another year, but it averages out to about a book a year.
My tightest deadlines have been for my Assassin’s Creed novels: I had solid second drafts over to my editor in five months. But I’ve also taken more than a year on some novels.
I’m very proud of both those games. Choice of Games is a wonderful company to work with and has a long roster of excellent interactive fiction. I knew from some writer friends that they took pitches, so I sent them my CV and a writing sample, and then they asked me to develop some concepts and an outline. The big challenge for interactive fiction is just that it’s a lot of work because you have to write branching plotlines; you can easily write a game of 150,000 or 200,000 words but any given playthrough might cover only 30,000 words of that. I found that tiring (each game took me about a year and a half, although, again, I was working on other things at the same time), and debugging can be a headache. But on the plus side, writing interactive fiction is a really fun challenge that forces you to think about storytelling in different ways from linear prose. It’s been a great way to connect with new readers, too. I recently spoke to a high school Chaucer class about my game The Road to Canterbury, which was amazing.
I can’t imagine what it must have been like to think you’ve covered every single possible scenario only to have someone come up with something else. Do you think there are any more of these in your future?
You mention that you’re interested in medieval swordplay. How in heaven’s name did that attract your attention? I imagine it’ll play into Mercutio, but has it entered into any of your other novels?
I don’t understand how this works, or am I too late to ask a question?! The way this is set up, it looks like a board moderator asks all the questions and the guest answers them. Is this a transcript of a conversation between Kim and Kate?. Am I guessing we only comment on the conversation? I figured it was a race to be the first one to ask about the inspiration for the novel! I came directly from an email link, so I totally missed any permanent post on how to post under the “Ask the Author” topic! Ack!
I hope so! It would be great to write more interactve fiction. I haven’t done much over the last few years, mainly because it does take so much time, but I was one of 10 co-writers on a short, surreal murder mystery called A Death in Hyperspace – and that won the Nebula award for game writing last year, which was a big (welcome) surprise to all of us, since we just did it for fun.
I’ve always been interested in medieval history, since I was a little kid, so swords tend to come into it! I’m very fortunate that we have a swordplay academy here in Ottawa. My teaching schedule ths semester has kept me away from class since September, but now that the semester is wrapping up, I hope to get back to class soon. I’m not anything close to an expert, but I do have access to experts there if I have book-related questions (including my friend Craig Shackleton, who’s thanked in the acknowledgements for Mercutio.) Even being at a novice level, it’s useful for many writers I think to get a sense of how the body moves in space and any martial art can come in handy for anyone who ever writes a fight scene. I also just find it very meditative and good for my mental and emotional health.
Hi Mary! I’ll let Kim chime in with any guidance about the forum, but you are not too late and you can ask any questions you like! I’ll be checking back here later today.
Oh, and as to the question about whether learning swordplay has factored into any of my other novels: there are a few scenes in The Valkyrie where it definitely helped, and in fact when CBC Radio here in Ottawa held a book club about The Valkyrie, they held it at the Ottawa Swordplay Academy, whch was very cool. Understanding fighting a little better also helped me with my Assassin’s Creed novels – and even in The Tapestry of Time, there are some scenes of physical conflict that were informed by historical sources (such as the SOE training manuals) but also benefitted from me being a little more aware of how fights can work.
And my novel coming from Solaris next year, The Swordmaster, is a vampire novel set in Alexandre Dumas’ world, and one of the characters is a real historical teacher of swordplay who wrote one of the books that form the canon.
I am not involved much at all with the audio production, but HarperCollins does typically send me samples from a few narrators and asks my opinion, and it’s very nice to be asked. I also usually provide a pronunciation guide for names and any unusual or foreign-language words (I have a lot of those in my books, and narrators are very diligent and accommodating!)
If you’d asked me this a year ago, I would have said The Valkyrie, and it’s still one of my favourites, because I feel like I achieved what I wanted to artistically with that book. But now it’s Mercutio, because I just love it and I feel it’s the book I was meant to write.
One thing that makes me smile is that everyone I know seems to have a different favourite – my spouse and my agent like The Tapestry of Time best of all my books so far, for example. My fellow writers tend to like The Chatelaine, because it’s weird and we writers are always looking for different ways of telling stories. And The Embroidered Book is by far my best selling.
Hi Mary! Welcome to the Forum! We’re very happy to have you here.
The Ask the Author areas are for anyone to ask a question of the featured author - in this case, the remarkable Kate Heartfield. Unfortunately I appear to be the only one asking Kate about her work.
If you want to reply to an existing comment (say, to ask a follow up question) hit the grey Reply button. To ask a new one, hit the blue Reply button. And if you’ve got any other questions about the workings of the forum you can also click my profile and send me an email.
I came directly from an email link, so I totally missed any permanent post on how to post under the “Ask the Author” topic! Ack!