Today we are joined by author Skyler White whose second book In Dreams Begin will be released on November 2nd. Skyler kindly took a few moments out of her busy schedule to chat with RAO Reviews about her new book (read my review of the book here). After reading the interview, if you have any questions for Skyler, feel free to leave them below.

Also, don’t forget we are giving away an autographed copy of In Dreams Begin here.

I would like to take the opportunity to thank you for allowing RAO Review to interview you once again.

My pleasure! You ask some of the most interesting questions in book bloggery, so I’m very happy to be back.

So let’s dive right into it: Why William Butler Yeats and Maud Gonne?

After the modern intellectualism of Dominic in and Falling, Fly, I was interested in good, old-fashioned romance. I wanted to create a hero who was romantic in all the classic ways: good-looking, brave, and devoted. And as I started trying to write that, I found myself struggling with what it would look like today. Can a modern man still go down on one knee, profess his undying love, and propose marriage to a woman he’s only seen once or twice? I couldn’t make it work. It either felt like parody or innocence, and I didn’t want to write YA.

So I started reading the Romantics, but they, of course, didn’t feel modern enough. Yeats was closer to me in time than Byron, but still had the optimism and total lack of irony I was looking for. You can see, particularly in his work before the First World War, a sort of self-confidence in humanity and a belief that the world was perfectible, the idea that science could prove the existence of the soul and that all the mysteries of god and man could yield their secrets and respond to our improvements. I found that very attractive, and I was excited about putting a modern woman against that kind of man. And at first that was all I was looking for in research, “that kind of man.” I had no intention, initially, of writing real people into the story. I’m not crazy, really. And research is hard. I was planning to write a turn-of-the-century Irish poet based loosely on Yeats who could fall in love with a modern woman moving backward in time through some time-travel device or portal.

But. But the more I read about Yeats, the more I was becoming attracted to him specifically – to his height and his wire-frame glasses, to his poetry, but also to his biography. I was intrigued by his thirty years of fruitless love for Maud Gonne. He proposed to her and to her daughter. He wrote about her as a woman, as a symbol, and as a supernatural being. And I couldn’t stop wondering what was going on with that. He, after all, wasn’t crazy either. He was at odds with Maud’s politics, the two of them were rarely in the same country, and neither of them was much interested in changing to meet another person’s needs. He liked quiet, she travelled with over a dozen animals. He loved the Irish countryside. She adored Paris. This was never going to work. And he knew as much. But she was an amazing woman – she worked for Irish independence but not women’s suffrage, claimed to be part faery, bore two children to a married French revolutionary, and married a man who was subsequently shot by firing squad for his part in the 1916 Easter Rising. She was six feet tall, famed for her beauty, pro-violence, and psychic. If I was going to write a book set in the literary circles of Victorian Ireland, she was going to have to at least make a cameo. She was just too cool not to include.

There’s some very interesting parallels between you, Laura Armstrong and Maud Gonne (shared birthday, name, and I believe you even worked in advertising like Laura). Intentional?

Oh yes. That was the final straw. I was already half in love with Yeats, and determined to find a place for Maud in the book when I came across the tidbit of her birth date. She and I were both born on the winter solstice exactly a hundred years apart. I’d already run across the Yeats quote that’s on the back cover “Every passionate man is linked with another age, historical or imaginary, where alone he finds images that rouse his energy,” and I’d never really been happy with the portal/time machine device anyway. I started to toy with the idea that perhaps, if two woman had a connection in time, like their birthdates, and the time of one was the era to which she was linked in the way Yeats mentions, then might that not connect them somehow? But how? I already knew that both Maud and Will were involved in the occult, she intermittently and he throughout his life, and that the two of them even talked about the marriage they had “on the spiritual plane.” And that’s where the idea of the modern woman being channeled into Maud’s body began.

That idea opened up a lot of others. What would it be like to inhabit a different body? Would time move differently in the past and present? What would be in the modern woman’s present? And how much of it would she remember in the past? And those questions got me even more excited. That Yeats’s first love’s name was Laura, which is my given name, and that his first lover was named Olivia, which is the female lead from my first book, was all just gravy.

All the pieces just lined up. Yeats was too wonderful not to write as himself. Maud’s life was full of actual events that were too bizarre not to include. The fiction made sense of the facts. Their mutual engagement with the occult provided a means to move spirits through time, as did Maud’s belief in her faery heritage, and the more of Yeats’s poetry I read, the more he seemed to be hinting at a secret very much like this one. Also, importantly, it gave me space to ask some questions that were becoming relevant from my own, personal, modern life about the nature of love and fidelity. And finally, it was that I was falling in love with the poet. And if a writer can’t get a little wish-fulfillment for all the agony, than what are we in it for?

As we can see from the “Works Cited”, a lot of research went into this novel. What was that process like?

Um, painful? Once I decided to actually write Maud and Will rather than characters based on them, the work more than doubled. I almost talked myself out of it. Finally, I took six months off writing just to research. I read both Yeats’s autobiographies and several biographies. I read Maud’s autobiography and two very good biographies of her. I read all the letters they wrote each other. And I read some specifically Irish history. I took a lot of notes.

The constraint I put on myself was that I wasn’t allowed to contravene history. I couldn’t write anything provably untrue. So there was an awful lot of plotting things out story-vs-history. I needed Maud and Will in the same city every time I wanted Laura and Will together, and the two of them argued enough that half the time I knew that they were both in Ireland, I also knew they weren’t speaking to each other. After I got the timelines sketched in, I did location research and then I wrote a first draft. The writing itself turned up racks of additional questions. So I did another round of research between the second and third draft. And the whole time I was writing, I was reading Yeats. In the course of the time it took me to write Dreams, I read all of his poetry, collecting the lines and little snippets that preface each chapter.

Finally, with a pretty evolved draft finished, I went to Ireland, London and Paris for two weeks and visited every location (or the closest thing still around) where I had a scene set. I have a tiny little netbook computer, so I was able to actually re-write scenes in the places where they were set. Which was wonderful. There are some pictures from that trip on my website here.

To the Victorian woman’s mind, enhancing your appearance was seen as ornamentation. Whereas today, we’d rather alter our looks rather than adorn what we already have. Are those two mentalities something you have struggled with yourself?

I think so. The whole question of appearance is sticky for me. I’m a very visual person who believes a person’s looks don’t matter. It’s weird. So yes. The Victorians had a very different relationship to their bodies than we do. They showed a lot less of theirs, certainly, but, from what I could tell still seemed to use the signaling device of their appearance to say what kind of person they were, or wanted to be seen as. And there’s some interesting overlaps and differences. Class information then, as now, was signaled by dress, although in a kind of inverse to what we currently use. And certainly temperament information was delivered then, as now, with clothing and bearing. They could have told as quickly as we can whether a man was a businessman or an artist by his dress, even without tattoos.

But there are some cool differences too. The present seems much more concerned with maintaining a healthy appearance, with the Victorians would have found odd, I think. A certain physical fragility, particularly in woman, was seen as a sign of high social standing, in fact. Peasant and working women were naturally healthy, strong and robust. Like cattle. But before antibiotics, your only option, if you got sick, was to go to bed and wait. Healthy wasn’t seen as something you could work on. Although you were expected to suffer with some dignity. People had years-long illnesses, and often carried residual damage from a childhood sickness (or an adult indiscretion) for the rest of their lives. Much the same was true for mental health. It wasn’t expected the way it is now.

Another place that I found same-but-different was in the tension between the self, between the “I” (whatever we mean by that – the high mind, the executive function, the prefrontal cortex, the soul, Reason) which was in conflict with the body. The Victorians worried their bodies would lead them into sin and, although the vocabulary has changed, we still seem dubious about our body’s willingness to carry out our good intentions. We’re still suspicious of our “bodily desires” although we seem more focused on gluttony than lust and more worried about what our sins might do to our physical health than our social standing.

Unlike and Falling Fly, In Dreams Begin dealt less with mythology and more with esoteric topics like astral projection, séances, mesmerism and ritualism. Was this due to the subject matter of the novel, or were there themes in occultism that could not be told through myth?

That’s a really interesting question. I don’t know. There’s some mythology in Dreams; Orpheus makes a brief appearance, and of course the mythological Irish sidhe figure into how the Laura/Maud body switching works. But I think I’m primarily interested in the energy behind the myths, which “Falling” deals with through myth, and “Dreams” through magic.

Are my suspicions correct in that In Dreams Begin is a sort-of prequel to and Falling, Fly? And if so, which story came first to you?

Bonus points for you! Yes. The action of Dreams occurs before that of Falling, with a little bit of overlap on the airplane when Laura and Amit sit beside Olivia but, to a large extent, Dreams is the origin story for the hotel Olivia is going home to. As for which idea came first – I have a “Secret Plan” (you should imagine me cackling here) for the whole of The Harrowing, which is my not-quite-a-series to which both Falling and Dreams belong. The big idea for both books (and for the rest of them) came first. The details of Dreams came after the details of Falling because I wrote them in that order.

“Spiritus Mundi” (Latin for “spirit of the world”) is a phrase brought up numerous times in the novel and may be something unfamiliar to a lot of readers. Can you tell our viewers a little about that concept?

(Ok, now you should picture me beaming. I love this stuff!) “Spiritus Mundi” is actually a phrase Yeats used a lot, and it’s the idea that there’s a soul or spirit to humanity. Jung would say “collective unconscious.” Yeats, I think, thinks about it as the personal essence of the world. It’s part energy, part personality, part divinity to him. To me it’s the memepool. In the same way that there are specific patterns of DNA, of genes, that code for human features and abilities, I believe that there are equally specific patterns of narrative, of information, that code for human thought and inspiration. And I wanted to splash around in the memepool.

I was really intrigued by the bit on page 307 about two bodies sharing one soul. Am I sensing a little Aristotle influence here?

Absolutely. (Damn, you’re good!) Yup. That’s Will’s first explanation for what he feels about Laura. He would have been fully versed in the classic philosophers and that story would have been readily available to him. The specific reference I’m making is to Plato’s “Symposium,” in which a group of increasingly drunk and slap-happy philosophers debate the nature of love. Aristophanes (after he recovers from a bout of gluttony induced-hiccoughs) proposes the following explanation for love: that men and women were once a single creature with four arms and legs, but Zeus cut them in half when they became too powerful, and so we are, each of us, only half a being until we find our other half.

Do you believe our bodies are truly ours to possess?

On the most literal level, I believe we are our bodies. I’m a fairly bald materialist, and I don’t really think there’s any real distinction between body and soul, body and mind. But I also think the conscious “I” part of me is smaller and more dependent than it feels.

Both of your novels take place in Ireland, what is it about Éire which pulls you?

Well, I’m adopted but clearly genetically Irish, so certainly part of the appeal is that Ireland is the closest physical representation I have of ancestry. Part of the pull is simple romance. It is just an absurdly beautiful place. And part, I think, is a spiritual/emotional/memetic version of the same genetic longing I feel. So many of our stories and magic come from there.

What’s up next for you? Will the Harrowing series continue or will we see something completely new?

I have two things in the works right now, and I don’t know how they’ll play out in terms of what’s next. But both are part of The Harrowing, one from its very earliest beginnings, and another from pretty much right now. The modern project is actually a kind of mini-series which places three books, with the same central characters, in Los Angeles working as a kind of mythological detective agency. But the arc of those three books ties in to the larger universe and moves the meta-arc along.

Now for some seasonal questions :) What’s your best Halloween memory?

My medieval fairy princess costume. I had a pointy hat *and* wings. My mom made them for me from a bedspread, and the veil which hung from the hat’s tip wilted badly in the rain, but for at least the first rain-free hour, I was the coolest 9 year old in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Or the happiest anyway.

Any special Halloween ritual you have? A certain movie or book that you have to watch or read this time of year?

I have kids, so the primary ritual we’ve got is generally an insane dash to get home from school, through homework and the preparation and scarfing down of dinner, and into costume before we lose the light. And I always dress up. Always. But I really like Neil Gaiman’s idea of turning Halloween (or Hallowe’en as he so charmingly styles it) into an occasion to give scary books to friends is awesome. So I think I’m picking that up this year.

Thanks so much for being here, Skyler! We’ve had a blast! And you are welcome back anytime.

Wonderful. Thanks so much. I gotta tell you, it takes me longer to write your interviews than anyone else’s but I think I enjoy them most! Thanks for the smart, challenging questions and the clearly thoughtful reading you do.

Skyler White is the nationally bestselling author of dark fantasy novels ‘and Falling, Fly’ (Berkley, March 2010) and ‘In Dreams Begin’ (Berkley, November 2010). She lives in Austin, TX. Visit her on the web at http://www.skylerwhite.com.