M.A. Carrick is the joint pen name of Marie Brennan (the author of the Memoirs of Lady Trent) and Alyc Helms (author of the Adventures of Mr. Mystic). The Mask of Mirrors, the first book in their Rook & Rose trilogy, hit shelves on January 19th, and we recently had the opportunity to chat with the co-authors about it! In the interview, they talk about the process of co-writing a book, fantasy tropes, book recommendations, and more!
Hello Marie and Alyc! Thanks so much for joining us! Would you tell us a little about yourselves, and what made you want to start working together?
Marie: We’ve known each other for over twenty years now — we met at an archaeological field school in Wales and Ireland (field schools being where baby archaeologists go to learn how to dig). That’s actually where the pen name comes from, too; during the Ireland portion of the school, we were living in a town called Carrickmacross.
Alyc: And we’ve been writing buddies for most of our friendship — bouncing ideas and problematic drafts off each other. But we never seriously considered collaborating on something until we already had 50k words of fiction we’d written for a tabletop RPG that I started running as a birthday present for Marie. We were having so much fun doing that, we said ‘hey, maybe we should write something for an audience besides each other!’ … and the Rook & Rose trilogy is the result of that.
What can readers expect when they pick up The Mask of Mirrors?
Alyc: We like big books (and we cannot lie). Marie and I both cut our teeth on hefty, doorstopper fantasies that took time to develop plots and cultures and characters. We wanted to write something like that, but also something where we could really geek out about worldbuilding (we both studied anthropology and folklore in school), in a queer-normative setting that you sometimes see in YA, but much more rarely see in adult fantasy. We wanted to write something fun, full of politics and intrigue and capers and banter, but that also had some weighty structural underpinnings about colonialism, imperialism, power, and the tools those in power use for oppression. So… all of that. Our book is like a really good broth; we let it take time to develop, and we hope readers will take time to savor it.
Marie: I’ve been quoting The Princess Bride at people a lot — “fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles” — which I suppose is a little misleading, because while all those elements are present, our book isn’t a fairy tale satire like that film. There’s grim stuff in here . . . but it isn’t a grim story, if that difference makes sense. In the long run, this is a tale about how things can get better.
What are your favourite and least favourite fantasy tropes?
Marie: Oh, heck — I could go on for ages! And actually, the first step in our collaboration was to make a list of tropes each of us likes, looking for places where we overlap. Many of those wound up in this series, though not all of them. I love soulbonds, for example (more the Elfquest or Mercedes Lackey type than the destiny/red thread type), but we don’t have those in here. Least favorite . . . zombies, maybe? I’m on board with pretty much anything if it’s done well, but with that one, the best you can usually hope for is that I’ll enjoy everything around the zombies.
Alyc: I’m a sucker for thieves, assassins, and rogues. I love it when characters in conflict have to work together, and through that come to respect each other. I adore competent, smart, heroes whose morals and worldviews are constantly challenged and can change and grow over time. On the really tropey end of things, I love stuff like Enemies-to-Friends-to-Lovers, any of the fake relationship tropes (fake dating, fake marriage, fake-out/make-out), and other ridiculous things that rachet up romantic/sexual tension (only one bed, trapped in a closet, etc.) I think the trope I’m completely done with is love triangles (and love Vs pretending to be triangles). Either the attraction between the characters ends up feeling contrived for conflict’s sake, or friendship as a valid solution to the problem is dismissed, or the feasibility of a poly-style ‘Both, both is good’ scenario is completely ignored.
What were your inspirations behind The Mask of Mirrors?
Alyc: As we mentioned, it came out of a game I was running. There was a caper Marie wanted her character (Ren) to put together with a few of my NPCs (Grey, Vargo, and some others who will remain unmentioned for spoilery reasons). It wasn’t a thing that involved the other PCs, and it would have worked less well as a session, so we decided to write it out as a scene, with Marie writing Ren’s PoV, and me providing the plot structure, NPC activities, obstacles, etc. We had so much fun writing that scene that we wrote another. And another. And another. A lot of the final novel — the plot, the setting — changed between that and the original game, but the relationship dynamics between those characters formed the core of what excited us, and remain the warp that the rest of the story is woven through.
Marie: Of course, when we pulled those relationships out of their original context, we had to build a new housing for them. Many people have commented on Nadežra having a Venetian feeling, because of the canals and the masks, but if you scratch deeper you’ll see a whole lot of influences feeding into here — everything from the ancient Egyptian concept of a multi-part soul to pre-modern Chinese cuisine to the cross-cultural symbolism attached to different numbers. It’s a whole stew of our anthropological training, the tropes we both love, and that game’s character providing the beating heart of it all.
We see two vastly different magic systems in the story: the Liganti – based upon astrology, and the Vraszenian, centered around a divinatory card system called pattern. Would you tell us what your process of constructing both these magic systems looked like?
Marie: Pattern was very much my baby, in part because the game version of Ren was likewise a fortune-teller. But we didn’t want to just slap new names on top of the tarot deck, so I had to sit down and work out a completely different structure. I think my two starting ideas were the Faces and the Masks, and the three threads. Both Liganti and Vraszenian religion view gods as dualistic — one benevolent deity paired with one malevolent one — and in Vraszenian theology, those are the same entity, showing either their Face (the nice part) or their Mask (the wrathful part). Which led to the idea that the Face and Mask cards can be interpreted both positively and negatively depending on their position in the spread, because each contains the seed of the other. The other part was the threads, which are the suits of the deck: the spinning thread represents the “inner self,” matters of the mind and soul, while the woven thread is the “outer self,” social relationships and institutions, and the cut thread is the “physical self,” the body and the material world.
Alyc: Since Marie had done so much work on the pattern cards, I took on numinatria, which is a structured, ritual magic system used by the Liganti that draws inspiration from sacred geometry and numerology (and, tangentially, astrology). Each number from 0 to 10 has a portfolio of associated meanings that, when inscribed, channel the divine energy of the cosmos to create particular effects. Think of it almost like a magical circuit-board, with the numina (the numbers) as the code that tells the energy what to do.
It amuses me because I’m not a ‘math person’, but to develop numinatria I ended up getting really into using basic drafting tools (compass, chalk, and edge) to craft the various geometric figures that form the basis of numinatria. I even ordered some custom golden mean calipers from Australia so I could more easily draw the spira aurea (that nautilus spiral shape, aka the golden spiral) that is the framework for numinatrian workings.
For all that numinatria is a divine magic (powered by the Liganti godhead, the Lumen), it reflects the Liganti worldview that the cosmos is a place of structure, order, and rationality. That makes it a nice contrast for the intuitive, divinatory magic of the Vraszenians.
Tell us a little about the creative process of co-writing a novel. Do you map out all the plot points beforehand, or do you make it up as you go? What do you do if you disagree on where to take the story?
Alyc: We have so many spreadsheets. Color-coded spreadsheets. 3×5 cards. A wiki. A whiteboard that Marie won’t let me call a murderboard because it doesn’t have red threads connecting all the various plots we’re keeping track of. I think any collaboration requires communication and planning because the people collaborating don’t share a brain, but The Mask of Mirrors is a complicated book. There are multiple PoV characters running around with multiple identities, and all of them are keeping secrets. There’s political intrigue and incomplete information. There are seeds planted in the early part of this novel that won’t see fruition until the end, or even until later novels. I don’t think even a single author could pants their way through that and have it all work out.
Marie: It’s honestly remarkable how infrequently we disagree, though — at least in the problematic sense. I think that for any collaboration to work, you need the ability to say “this isn’t working” or “it could work, but I think we can do better” or even just “there’s nothing wrong with it, but it doesn’t light me up.” That happens a lot, and it’s a good thing; by pushing each other, we make the result so much better. We pretty much always agree on where the story is going — it’s only a question of the best way to get there. (Amusingly, we’re pretty sure our two biggest arguments during the first book both involved putting Vargo into a state of semi-undress. We were in absolute concord about the goal; it was only specifics like “so what is he wearing” and “how do we get the coat off him if you’re adamant that he wouldn’t leave the house without it” that we butted heads over.)
If it isn’t too spoilery, can you tell us about any particular scene/character you enjoyed writing the most in The Mask of Mirrors?
Marie: It’s much easier to talk about characters than scenes without spoilers! Unsurprisingly, I like Ren; as we mentioned above, she’s my PC from the game, so I’m used to identifying pretty strongly with her. And I realized the other day that when you see her manipulating people, calibrating her behavior and actions to produce the results she wants . . . there’s a sense in which that’s a lot like what a writer does. I’m also very fond of Oksana Ryvček, who doesn’t show up a huge amount in this book, but she’s a badass middle-aged bisexual duelist — basically all the flirty flamboyance you could want, wrapped up in a package with a sword.
Alyc: There’s so much I love in this book — Vargo, Tess, Grey, the Rook, the banter, the capers, the fashion, the ballroom politics. I’m listening to the audiobook for the first time, and hearing it in a narrator’s voice separates it enough that it’s like getting to discover it all over again. One scene in particular is a short-touch con near the middle of the book that Ren and her sister Tess run (with some spoilery help) to get another character to trust them. It’s just so fun and smart to see what they’re doing and to know the hidden mechanisms that make the con work. I think that’s a lot of the fun in this book — watching smart people being competent and being in the know about what they’re doing.
Could you give us some hints as to where the story takes us in book two of the Rook & Rose trilogy?
Alyc: More secrets, more lies, more revelations… and I seriously think we have 2x the caper quota of the first book.
Marie: There are some small-seeming elements in the first book that are actually major load-bearing pieces for the second. This is the kind of story we hope people will re-read, because both within a book and across books, we’ve left all kinds of hints and clues that will make you go “oh my god, it was there all along!”
Aside from the Rook & Rose books 2 and 3, any other writing projects on the horizon you can tell us about?
Marie: For my sins, I have two books out within two weeks of each other! The other one is The Night Parade of 100 Demons, which takes place in the setting of the game Legend of the Five Rings. Think fantastical historical Japan, with two samurai investigating an outbreak of spiritual disturbances in a remote mining village, and getting tangled up in some mysteries of the past.
Alyc: Nothing with a home yet. I’m revising a hefty Mediterranean-inspired fantasy that shares some surface similarities with Rook & Rose, but also a lot of differences (it’s set in a port city, but it’s got winged traders, clockwork golems, and uncanny merfolk flying/running/swimming around). And I started working on a new cyberpunky thing about a memory-wiped assassin that is too SF to be romance, too romance to be SF, and too tropey to be marketable. Mostly, though, Marie and I are gearing up for the publication of book two (it’s coming out in November of this year!) and finishing book three (which is currently slated for November of 2022).
Finally, what are some books you would recommend to the fans of The Mask of Mirrors?
Alyc: Several readers have commented on how much they’ve enjoyed the fashion-as-plot in The Mask of Mirrors, which was an absolute joy to write because it’s a detail we both love that often doesn’t get emphasized as much as history suggests it should. But if you really want to dive into sartorial bliss, I highly recommend Rowenna Miller’s Torn, the first in The Unraveled Kingdom series. It’s sort of like if Tess stepped into a protagonist role and found herself in the middle of a revolution. It’s a complete delight.
Marie: Of all the things I’ve read in the last year, I think the one that feels the most like the Rook and Rose series to me — not in its plot, but in the general feeling of a sumptuously rich world with politics and intrigue and some really unusual magic — is Curtis Craddock’s Risen Kingdoms trilogy. That starts with An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors (. . . no relation, heh).
