Guest post written by author Jacey Bedford
Jacey Bedford is a British writer of science fiction and historical fantasy. She is published by DAW in the USA. Her Psi-Tech and Rowankind trilogies are out now. Her new book, The Amber Crown, is out now and is available from Amazon and good bookstores. Her short stories have appeared in anthologies and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, and have been translated into Estonian, Galician, Catalan and Polish. In another life she was a singer with vocal trio, Artisan, and once sang live on BBC Radio4 accompanied by the Doctor (Who?) playing spoons.
You can find Jacey on Facebook and Twitter, as well as at her blog and website.
My husband is a songwriter and people often ask him which comes first, the lyric or the melody. Usually they both come together.
People ask me which comes first in my novels, the story, the setting or the characters. They are always closely linked, but I think a character in a situation is what comes first. At that point the setting might be a little vague, but as the story reveals itself, so the setting solidifies.
In The Amber Crown, Valdas, came first. I usually get a scene in my head and I have to write to discover what it’s all about. The scene I got with this one was Valdas, captain of the King’s High Guard (i.e. the king’s bodyguard) taking one night off – the first in months. He’s getting pleasantly drunk in a tavern with his favourite whore, and suddenly he hears the Didelis bell ring out the death of the king – the king he’s sworn to protect.
No spoilers. That ‘Oh, shit!’ moment is right there on the first page, and it drives the plot of the book. I knew how the story started, I knew how it ended, and I had several key scenes in my head, but the story itself coalesced as I wrote it. I’m a ‘pantser’ (i.e. Iwrite by the seat of my pants) rather than a plotter.
I knew immediately that the story wasn’t set in Britain. I’d recently been reading about the Northern Crusades and that turned my attention to the Baltic. When we think of Crusades we think of the Middle East and Saladin, but the crusades to the Baltic States began in the late 12th century. That region was the last in Europe to be Christianised, and it wasn’t a pretty story. It got me interested in the region, and even though my story is set some 400 years later, there are still echoes of paganism and magic. Valdas, who isn’t very religious at all, worships where his king worships, but sometimes, when he’s up against it, he whispers a prayer to Perkunas, the Baltic god of thunder and the second most important deity in the Baltic pantheon.
My other viewpoint characters are Mirza, and Lind. Mirza is the witch-healer of a Landstrider band. She walks the spirit world and is given a task by Valdas’s dead king. She must be Valdas’s spiritual guide because he doesn’t believe in magic, which is unfortunate as it turns out. It’s a task she doesn’t think she’ll survive.
Lind is the assassin-for-hire who does the job he’s paid to do, but soon comes to have regrets. He’s clever, and good at what he does, but he’s got more hangups than a closet full of coats. He’s the one with the biggest change to undergo as the story progresses. I really enjoyed writing him.
Once I’d got the opening, I began to research the region, looking at food, fashion and history. I took liberties, of course. I changed country names so that it became an analogue of the Baltic lands rather than a true historical representation. When I wrote the Rowankind trilogy (Winterwood, Silverwolf and Rowankind) I set it in Britain in 1800 – 1802. Apart from inserting magic, the history is fairly solid: Napoleon is rampaging around Europe, King George III is going steadily bonkers (though for a magical reason), and my cross-dressing privateer captain sailed a tops’l schooner in search of French merchantmen under letters of marque. I didn’t have those kind of specifics in The Amber Crown. Instead of a Swedish invasion I had a peace treaty bound by a marriage. My country of Zavonia covered approximately the lands where Latvia and Lithuania are today.
The costumes of that region are lovely, though again I mixed and matched between Russian and Polish fashions which were quite different from British dress of the day. I was able to clothe my male characters in wide, gathered pantalones, with zupans (long garments to mid calf that button down the front, worn with a wide sash) and deljas—a bulky outer garment with semi-attached sleeves, sometimes worn with the arms through the armscye (the armhole left open at the front) and the sleeves dangling down behind. Respectable women wore modest kaftan-like garments, covering from neck to feet with long sleeves. Though maybe they weren’t all as covered as Albrecht Durer’s Three Mighty Ladies of Livonia.
