Katrina Archer is joining us today to talk about her novel The Tree of Souls. Here’s the publisher’s description:
A murky past. A forbidden love. A deathly power.
When the river spits Umbra onto its bank, naked and shivering, the only clue to her identity is the arcane brand seared into her skin. A brand hunted by both a murderous necromancer and a handsome stranger. A brand that thrusts Umbra into a simmering conflict between the ascendant Clans and the nomadic Gherza. A brand that may make her the key to averting all-out war.
The Tree of Souls weaves an intimate tale of dark sorcery, doomed love, and implacable revenge, amid an age-old clash of nations, with all the souls of the living hanging in the balance.
What’s Katrina’s favorite bit?
KATRINA ARCHER
“That came out of your head?”
I think every writer must get a variation on this comment from a non-writer at some point in their career. I most often receive it from my husband. Coming from him, it’s not meant to imply I’m a freak. It originates from a genuine puzzlement, even awe, that anyone can create stories from whole cloth.
I, on the other hand, don’t understand how people can’t. I’ve always been a daydreamer. As a kid, when lights out denied me my books after bedtime, I’d tell myself my own stories. The only difference between now and then is that now I write those bedtime imaginings down. I probably shouldn’t call them stories—they’re more like little scenes or vignettes. Never enough for a whole plot, but both of my books, including The Tree of Souls, have at least one of these vignettes still in them, fundamentally unchanged from when they saw me off to dreamland.
The vignettes are easy, but creating a whole story that then hangs off one of them is the hard part. I rigidly outlined my first novel just to ensure I could finish it at all. Which left me little room for improvisation and serendipity. With The Tree of Souls, I outlined to a point, wrote, saw where it took me, and then outlined again. With the constraints loosened, I’d sometimes surface from a writing session dazed and blinking, not fully aware of what I’d just written.
I’d been in the zone, a state of working in which you’re not really conscious of working at all. I’m a software engineer, and I’ve experienced the zone before while coding. Some people call the phenomenon flow. The world around you ceases to exist and there’s nothing but the task before you. If you sneak up on me while I’m in the zone, you’ll startle me so badly I’ll jump.
The snippet below comes from one of those episodes of flow. My protagonist, Umbra, and her companion, Fayne, have just been ambushed and are battling for their lives.
Time billowed and expanded, and I saw Fayne, blood dripping from a cut to his cheek, turn to come to my aid. Behind him, a dagger glinted in its inexorable arc toward his heart. I gazed up into the eyes of my executioner, the sword poised over his head for the killing blow.
I cried out, smelled clover and blood. So much life.
I felt the air part as the blade sliced downward.
To end.
Like this.
No.
The brand at my throat scythed icy cold.
No.
Umbra’s on a big voyage of personal discovery in this story, and this fight and how she gets out of it show her that she’s really not the person she thought she was. I love this part of the story not just because it’s critical to Umbra’s journey, but because when I reread these scenes the day after writing them, I said to myself “This came out of my head?!”
My favourite bit is the one that surprised even me.
(My second-favourite is the bit with a horse (see what I did there?) that everyone tells me breaks them out of the story because it’s just too implausible. It also happens to be the only bit I have actually witnessed in real life.)
LINKS:
BIO:
Katrina Archer is the author of dark fantasy The Tree of Souls, YA fantasy Untalented, and nature photography book Shorescapes of Southern British Columbia. A professional engineer, she lives on her sailboat in Vancouver, BC, Canada, and has worked in aerospace, video games, and film. Connect with her online at www.katrinaarcher.com.
I think every writer must get a variation on this comment from a non-writer at some point in their career. I most often receive it from