My Heart is Booked Blog

During the month of September, I am hosting a series of author interviews to celebrate Self-Published Fantasy Month. For full schedule and more information regarding Self-Pub Fan Month please click here. Today, I am sharing my interview with author Raina Nightingale.

To start, would you please introduce yourself to our readers?  Let us know a little about you and your published work. 

Hello. I’m Raina Nightingale. I would say that my “faith,” my defining belief about the world, is that Love is the power, stronger than hate and death, and will finally be victorious. I’m really attracted to beauty. I like fresh water, especially when it’s flowing. I like the sky! It’s always so beautiful, whether it’s full of stars, dusted as if with diamonds by the Milky Way, brighter stars glowing as if gems with flashing fires in their hearts, or whether it’s lit by the moon glowing softly behind clouds, or whether it’s clear, bright blue by day, or whether it’s strewn with clouds alight with the light of the sun at dawn or dusk. Really, whatever the sky is like, it’s beautiful, and I really like green, too.

I love high fantasy. I have two unrelated high fantasy worlds. I started building Areaer and writing DragonBirth (#1 in the Return of the Dragonriders Trilogy) when I was thirteen, about eight years ago.  Return of the Dragonriders is about a young woman who’s a devout practitioner of her religion, which teaches that dragons are demons who damn people’s souls to the lowest hells, but then she bonds to a dragon hatchling and discovers everything her society has taught her is a lie.

I started building Kaarathlon and writing Knights of the Promise when I was fifteen. Unlike Areaer, which is round, Kaarathlon is a flat world. When I started writing Knights of the Promise, I was calling it Redeeming Death, since it can be interpreted either ‘death that redeems’ or ‘the act of redeeming death.’ One of the main characters is also the main antagonist, Camri the Dragonqueen, who is very dark. Something I’ve often thought about is how it’s possible for human beings to be and do so much evil, so that went into it a bit. Also, Knights of the Promise is very Christian in tone and setting, though I can’t say the Areaer Novels would be thought of as ‘Christian’ by a lot of people!

Both series are in the YA-Adult range.

2. Who or what prompted you to begin writing fantasy? 

It was fated. Since early childhood, I was fascinated by dragons, and as soon as I could read and write I was trying my hand at writing fantasy. I probably wrote hundreds of thousands of pages of trash! I think it really started when I read some of Anne MacAffrey’s fiction. That was the first time I read a book with dragons that weren’t bad, and I really liked the relationships the dragons and the humans had.

3. What part of the writing process do you find most challenging? 

Not sure. I’d say what’s ‘hardest’ is getting the subtlety and exactitude of my thought onto the paper, or screen, but often that’s impossible. Writing certainly takes a lot of energy! I don’t think it’s any less energy intensive when it comes to me while I write so fast it almost feels like the story is flying into my face and I cannot type it down fast enough. In fact, writing those portions is often most tiring!

4. How do you select the names of your characters? 

It depends. ‘Silmavalien’ – she’s the heroine of DragonBirth – is probably influenced by Tolkein’s Silmariel, and her dragon Minth’s name is taken from the herb ‘mint’ since he has eyes that color, but in general I have no idea where the names come from, though I fancy Ryeth – that’s Camri’s true or ‘dragon name’ – might be related to the English ‘writhe,’ even though Ryeth is one-and-a-half syllables and the ‘th’ is almost soft. Mostly, I make them up seemingly out of thin air. It might help that I have a notion of what the languages of the different lands and cultures sound like, and how the languages get mixed and influence each other, so that goes into how the names sound, but it’s not real conscious. Also, I try to find a name that I can ‘imbue’ with the personality of the character, so that whenever I see or think the name I’m reminded of whom the bearer is, what he or she is like, and one into which the character can grow.

5. Are any of your characters based on real people? 

<Laughing> Heck, no! Elements of personalities I’ve encountered in various real persons, including myself, go into them, but based on real people? No.

To elaborate, something I really strive to attain is personal characters, characters that feel like they’re real people. I don’t want to write a single flat character into my stories. I don’t want to abuse a single character for the sake of taking the main characters or the plot where I had originally intended – if it won’t go that way, then I will take it a different direction, though that rarely happens since most of the side characters are fairly well developed in my head from first introduction. In fact, quite a few side characters you meet once in one novel or series have an entire novel about them somewhere in my head, one which may some day be written and published.

6. Why did you decide to self publish? 

The short, easy reason? Knights of the Promise is well over 200,000 words! No agent I could find would even think of looking at something that long, and, no, I could not make it any shorter! Maybe I could clean a few not-strictly-necessary words out of it, but that wouldn’t bring it close to the agents’ upper limits. I am not given to writing lots of fluff. If it’s not necessary to the development of the characters or story, I don’t put it in, since then it would distract from what I do want to say, right?

Anyway, that meant I did not spend a lot more time on the question of whether to self-publish or go the traditional route, since I knew I wanted to publish Knights of the Promise. When I was first looking into publishing I was not sure if I was ever going to finish the Return of the Dragonriders Trilogy!

7. How does your faith influence your writing? 

Well, when I’m writing, I’m often trying to work through, in the context of a story, what I think about life – or death. Through the story and the characters, I’m thinking about things, things that bother me, things I don’t understand, things I think I do understand, anything. I’m exploring. Often, I’m wrestling with the evil and injustice in the world and my “faith” that the strongest thing is Love, that love has to be victorious over hate and death.

If you think of my writing as a final interpretation of my faith, you’ll probably misunderstand a lot of it. Even a really good character might ascribe to a belief or ethic, that I’m fairly certain is wrong, and she or he definitely might think something that I don’t know what I think about.

8. Are you currently working on any writing projects? 

Yes. I’ve got a sequel to Knights of the Promise and the last installment in the Return of the Dragonriders Trilogy which will be coming out within half a year (barring unexpected catastrophes). They’ll be The Three Scrolls and DragonSword, respectively. I’ve got more that needs a lot of cleaning up and editing, including another sequel to Knights of the Promise and a duology in Areaer, the same world as Return of the Dragonriders. I also have what feels like half a million ideas, including ideas for two more in Kaarathlon, and more than that in the Areaer world, which makes sense I guess, since the Areaer Novels are shorter than the Kaarathlon Novels. So I have to decide which of those ideas I’m going to work on, since ten different projects at a time is far more than I can manage. For one thing, the energy that would have to go into that many stories is a lot more than I can sustain!

9. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors? 

Write. Don’t worry about editing (this can wait until you have a story you love!). Write. Oh yes, and keep your trash around. There are some things I wrote a long time ago that I thought were trash and threw out, but which I recently realized deserved at least a second look, and maybe an edit from a more experienced version of myself. Don’t feel afraid to write the same idea twenty times in twenty different ways.

Also, do not get too embarrassed, and do not throw something in the trash because you find it embarrassing or think it’s not good enough. Keep it around at least long enough for your initial reactions to cool. I often feel that my stories expose deep and personal aspects of who I am, things which no one else shares or will understand. Part of this is probably true, but it is a story, so, yes, no one else will understand it quite the way I do, which is good. Also, you’re probably not quite as alone in the way you feel as you think you are. I recently read The Last Herald-Mage Trilogy by Mercedes Lackey, and I was very surprised by it.

The most important part, I’d say, is to write the way you write. I have a very strong instinct for whether a passage flows nicely, whether a passage reads like it belongs in a published book, so I usually don’t write until I can get that feel. When I finally can write it, it is often an energy intensive and exhausting process! Other people have very different processes, so do whatever feels right for you.

One last note: be curious! Be curious about the real world – though who doesn’t know fantasy worlds can be terrifically real to us authors and readers – and about the things you write about. Perfection isn’t required, but I think that it’s more fun to read a fantasy novel in which fantastic elements are purposeful, instead of being accidents because the author didn’t know what, say, lightning in our world acts like, and also that it’s more entertaining to read if the author is actually interested in the things she or he describes. You might find some entertaining and enjoyable pastimes along the way, like watching hours of footage of Hawaiian volcanoes!

10. If you could meet any one person (alive, dead, fictional, or real), who would you choose?

I don’t know. I tend to find questions like this hard to answer! Maybe Mercedes Lackey. I’d love to talk to her about the Shadow-Lover. I’d also love to know the real tune to it! But I’d also love to hear Vanyel play/sing it, so I don’t know: Vanyel or his author?

Thank you so much to Raina Nightingale for taking the time to answer these questions!

You can purchase DragonBirth, DragonWing, and Knights of the Promise at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Connect with Raina Nightingale!

blog: www.enthralledbylove.com/novels 

Twitter:  www.Twitter.com/RainaNightinga1 or www.Twitter.com/Areaer_Novels