You used to write full-time?
Yeah, but the GFC came along and that was the end of
that!
The GFC has
significantly affected the amount of money you earn from your writing?
Oh absolutely! I’ve lost probably fifty to sixty percent
of my income. I was earning a comfortable wage, then the GFC came along and all
the bookshops closed. I have 23 books in print, so no bookshop – except Amazon
– stocks everything I’ve written. No one’s going to give Jennifer Fallon that
much real estate on a limited shelf in a physical store. The big bookstores –
Borders and the like – they stocked the whole range but they’re the ones that
have closed down. Now people need to go to Amazon to find my work.
So you’ve had to
resume your day job. Do you still travel to Antarctica annually to work your IT
magic down there?
I may have had my last trip. I was working full-time for
Antarctica New Zealand but I’ve just resigned to go contracting. I’ve offered
to go down and do what I normally do at that time of year, but it remains to be
seen. I’ve spent three months all up in Antarctica now and that’s not as a
tourist. I’ve been to places tourists can never see. I’ve had experiences
tourists will never get. But if I won the lottery today – and I’ve just bought
a ticket – I’d probably go back to writing full-time.
What’s probably had the biggest impact on writers like me
is Harry Potter and Fifty Shades of Grey. Publishers all want that now. And if
you haven’t achieved that kind of uptake in your first couple of books it’s
like, “Oh well, moving right along…” They’re hoping every author is going to be
the next E.L. James in terms of sales and it’s frustrating as a writer because
there’s nothing you can do to influence that. It’s absolutely all in the hands
of the publisher.
I mean, I sell but I’m not George Martin, and it’s really
frustrating because I’ll say, “What have I got to do to get out of this?” And
they’ll say, “Oh well. Sell more books.” And I say, “If you printed more books,
we could sell more books!” It’s the publisher’s risk-assessment department who
decide how many books to print. It’s one of the great things about going
electronic. Otherwise we’re just stuck with a very old model.
[I sense a pause
coming so I jump in to ask one of my pre-prepared questions] You don’t shy away
from romance in your new book The Lyre
Thief. In fact you embrace it—
That is one thing that I really hate.
What?
Writing romance.
Seriously?
I do. I really do. I hate it. I hate being thought of as
a romance writer. I hate writing it. It was the hardest part of this book. I
didn’t set out to write a romance and I get annoyed with gratuitous romance but
it was another complication for my characters. If some of the characters had
not been lying to one another, they would have had a much better chance of
making things work out. In future books, when those lies become entrenched, it
will be even harder for some of these relationships to be resolved. It just
added that extra level of complexity.
Of the two sisters in The
Lyre Thief, Charisee is a romantic, whereas Rakaia is much more
calculating. She’s not really in love. She’s out there having a good time, but
she’s not in love with anybody.
Rakaia’s not in love with Mica? [Who’s a romantic
now?]
You’ll find out in later books, but that relationship is
really quite abusive. Mica’s a manipulator. Rakaia’s still in that first blush
of love, but Mica has a power over her that’s not healthy, and in the same way
that a battered wife becomes protective of herself, Rakaia needs to look out
for what’s coming.
Okay, so just to
clarify, you don’t like being called a romance writer— but you have two
first-time sexual encounters in this book…
I don’t think I can avoid it after writing this book.
It’ll be like, “You know that thing you told us about not being a romance
writer? Well now you’ve doomed yourself!”
But in this (fantasy) world I have to say, being a virgin
is not a virtue in and of itself. Being a virgin is generally considered to be
a pain in the arse. The women are trained by the court’esa, and lose their
virginity very early on. The Fardohnyan mentality is that it’s perfectly
legitimate to have a slave teach your daughter how to have sex because a slave
is not a considered a person.
That’s part of what makes the central device, the
identity swap, work so well, because one sister is trained and one isn’t, when
she really ought to be. So no, Rakaia isn’t in love and she has a very
different view of sex than we might have. I love playing with the world and
thinking “What would be the consequences of this or that?”
Do you think
there’s a greater acceptance of the work of female fantasy authors now than
when you started out?
To this day I wish I’d written under the name of John
Fallon. I was writing a blog for someone today about demographics in writing,
and I remembered in 2010 – the day of the earthquakes actually – I was in
Melbourne at WorldCon and I did a book signing with George Martin. There were
three of us in the room – me, some poor new author who only had one book out,
and George Martin. The new guy’s book had only been out a week so he lasted two
minutes before he got up and left. My line lasted for about forty-five minutes.
George Martin’s line went out the door, and at the end of the hour it was still
out the door. My line was 50 to 60 percent male. George’s was 90 percent male.
It’s interesting that you brought up romance before
because there’s always this assumption that female writers do romance. I don’t
mind it if it advances the story and sometimes people do things because of
human relationships rather than logic, and that has an effect on the story. But
a story that’s just about romance? I
don’t write about romance, but
romance can be part of the story.
A lot of people think that if you’re a female writer you
must be writing some form of romance and I haven’t seen a change in that view.
There’s a reason J.K. Rowling wrote as J.K., rather than Joanne Kathleen. She
wrote a book about a little boy, and the publisher was worried that little boys
wouldn’t read it if they thought a woman wrote it.
But you write
under a pseudonym as it is…
There’s a story behind that too. My married name was
Tonkin. The publishers loved that name because it put me next to Tolkien on a
bookshelf. Then my marriage broke up and I went back to my maiden name because
my ex-husband’s biggest contribution to my writing had been to tell me I should
give up and be a better housewife because I was never going to get published.
So I said: “There’s no way your name’s going on my book, buster!” But the
publishers thought my maiden name was terribly boring.
Then my teenage children told me how to work out my porn
name, or the name I would have if I were a porn star. It was a combination of
my first pet, and the first street I’d lived on. So my porn name was
Mittens-Blake. Applying the highly scientific art of porn names, I wrote down
all the streets I’d ever lived in. The first was Blake Street, obviously, but
the second was Fallon Street and I thought, “Jennifer Fallon sounds nice!” Then
it occurred to me that the two biggest selling Fantasy authors at the time were
David Eddings and Raymond Feist. So if you went to the bookshop you’d see
Eddings – Fallon – Feist.
If I could go back now though, I think I’d call myself
John Fallon or something androgynous, so that guys could convince themselves I
wasn’t a girl and they weren’t really reading a romance. That was probably the
biggest mistake I’ve made in my writing career. I mean Robin Hobb is a female
writer who has done really well simply by spelling Robin the “boy” way.
Other than that, I love what I do and it’s a fun job.
It’s a bit hectic at the moment for reasons out of my control. There’s really
no downside apart from the fact that I don’t have any time. You’ve got to
understand that when I’m writing, nothing else gets done. I can either clean a
house or meet a deadline but I can’t do both. In fact I’m at the point where
I’m having to get a cleaner in. So long as I can earn more than I’m paying the
cleaner hour by hour, then I’m financially ahead. That’s how I justify the
expense to myself. It’s a thing known as “cognitive distortion”. It’s big in
prisons. It’s how criminals justify their crimes to themselves. Also
alcoholics, they use it too.
One thing I took
away from your new book was that it is a genuinely fun read, and it reads like
you were having fun writing it.
I reckon you can tell when an author is being tortured,
when the story is being dragged out of them. I write best when I put my head
down for two hours and then look up and go, “Oh, is that the time?” Not only
does that show I’m enjoying myself, it also means that I’m writing naturally
within the flow of the story. I’m not doubting that this is the way events are
supposed to go. I mean, I’ve ditched 10,000 words in the past because they
weren’t taking me where I wanted to go.
So you mostly
plot, but there’s a bit of free-styling going on.
I have to plot because I need a synopsis to sell the
book. I always know what the ending will be and I rarely deviate from that. How
I get there isn’t so clear cut because as you build characters and they start
to come to life you realise that the thing you were going to have that
character do, they would never actually do. Or you realise it would be much
more logical for them to do something else. You need to listen to yourself when
that happens or you’ll have characters doing illogical things because it fits
the plot. These new characters have been good fun in that respect. They came
pretty easily.
I think it shows.
I really enjoyed it.
Despite the fact it was a romance?
Okay, there were a
few key moments, but I wouldn’t categorise The
Lyre Thief as a romance by any stretch.
I think the most common reaction I see when someone reads
my work for the first time, is surprise. I always wonder why that is. They go, “Oh
my God! I really enjoyed it! It’s amazing!” And I’m like, “Yep!”
I’ve seen a bunch of reviews in the US, maybe a dozen so
far, all saying the same thing: “I’ve never read Jennifer Fallon. This is
really good. Why haven’t I read this before?” And it’s actually really
frustrating. What was out there that stopped these guys picking up a Jennifer
Fallon book? What barrier was there to any of these people reading my book
instead of something else? I’d love to know the answer to that…
This interview first appeared in Aurealis #90.
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