Catherine Fisher
About Author
Catherine Fisher was born in Newport, Wales. She graduated from the University of Wales with a degree in English and and has worked in education and archaeology and as a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Glamorgan. She now lives in Newport, Gwent.
She is a poet and novelist, regularly lecturing and giving readings to groups of all ages. She leads sessions for teachers and librarians and is an experienced broadcaster and adjudicator. She has also been named as the first Welsh Young People's Laureate.
She has won many awards and much critical acclaim for her work. Her poetry has appeared in leading periodicals and anthologies and her volume Immrama won the WAC Young Writers' Prize. She won the Cardiff International Poetry Competition in 1990.
Her first novel, The Conjuror's Game, was shortlisted for the Smarties Books prize and The Snow-Walker's Son for the W.H.Smith Award. The Oracle, the first volume in the Oracle trilogy, blends Egyptian and Greek elements of magic and adventure and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Children's Books prize. The Candleman won the Welsh Books Council's Tir Na n'Og Prize and Catherine was also shortlisted for Corbenic, a modern re-inventing of the Grail legend.
Her futuristic novel Incarceron was published in 2007, winning the Mythopoeic Society of America's Children's Fiction Award and selected by The Times as its Children's Book of the Year. The sequel, Sapphique, was published in September 2008. Obsidian was published in 2012.
Interview
OBSIDIAN MIRROR
HODDER CHILDREN'S BOOKS
NOVEMBER 2012
Catherine Fisher, the author of the bestselling novel Incarceron, has turned to tales of time travel, alchemy and the immortal world with her latest novel, Obsidian Mirror, which is the first in a new series.
In Obsidian Mirror, Jake gets himself expelled from school so that he can return to his godfather's house to confront him about the disappearance of his father. Jake is convinced that his godfather, Venn, a famous explorer, has killed his father but the truth is stranger by far.
Catherine Fisher tells us more about writing Obsidian Mirror:
"I was brought up reading a lot of folk lore and legends and I love the ideas of archetypes and magic. The supernatural soaks into you and when I started writing it was fantasy that appealed to me, especially around the ideas of transformation and taboos.
"Writing Incarceron was a big project for me, it was quite complicated and there were two books to write. I then wrote a book called The Crown of Acorns, based in Bath, which has three strands like a short novella and is focused in a real place so it was very different from Incarceron. People won't let me leave Incarceron though, they hanker after it. It was originally designed as a one-book project but it got too long and now people want book three.
"Then I decided I wanted to do another series that was a bit younger in feel and not so heavy as Incarceron and I began writing Obsidian Mirror. There will be three or four books in the series; I don't have them all planned out.
"When I begin writing a new book or series it's like pushing a snowball down a hill, you start it off and add to it as it goes along so you have as many possibilities in the book as you can. In Obsidian Mirror, I wanted to give myself as wide a scope as possible. I am thinking it may take place over one year, a book for each season, but I am not sure yet how it will play out.
"The starting point for the story was one of the main characters, Venn, who is an explorer. From that came the issue of time travel as I wanted to explore the question of time because it's the one thing that human beings can't tamper with. Once something has happened it has happened and you have to live with the consequences of it. I wondered if you could go and change things, what sort of confusion would that cause?
"Venn had to have a reason for going back in time which was his wife dying in an accident, and then I needed a portal or machine for time travel. I wanted to give it a 'steampunk' feel, modernist but also Victorian and medieval. A mirror seemed the obvious thing especially as John Dee, the Elizabethan alchemist who is mentioned in the story, used one for scrying.
"I liked the idea of the mirror being black. I didn't have much detail about the mirror until I saw a documentary about black holes and then I decided that the mirror could have a kind of 'black hole' within it and be all-absorbing.
"I didn't feel I needed to do any research for the time-travel element, I just used what I already knew and a lot of what I write about these past times is suggestion rather than fact.
"I did do some research into Venn's character though, I read a lot of polar narrative explorations. He's not straight-forward, he's a complex character, so I needed a model for him.
"Jake coming back to his god father's house was my starting point when writing the novel, and that's also when I brought in Sarah. I thought I would let it run and see what happened. Sometimes unexpected characters turn up, like Moll who helps Jake when he goes back to the past. She was just going to be an urchin who gives him a hand but then she got more interesting than that. All the characters stand out for me but Venn is the central character.
"I introduced the idea of the Shee into the novel, the faery world, because I didn't want to have a novel that was pure sci-fi. The Shee live in a land that is always now. If you go back in time in our world, the Shee will still be there and they would still be 'new' and I thought I could do something with that.
"I also wanted a love element and this is where Venn and Summer come in, as the fairy king and queen, so he experiences the pull between the mortal and other worlds, and between Summer and his wife. He has a choice, he could go to Summer and be immortal or stay and be human and in book two, he will be torn between the two.
"Gideon is the changeling in the story, although we don't see him as a changeling in the human world, but as a human in the immortal world. He can't get back to his own time and has his own agenda when he offers to help the other characters. I have built a lot of mystery into the story, all the characters have their own problems and agenda.
"The problem with writing a series is how you keep the momentum going in each book. You want to give enough away for the reader to keep going but if you give away everything at the beginning, what are you going to have left to write about? Each book has to have its own momentum and holistic plot which has to fit into the overall plot - does Venn get Leah back, does Jake find his father? - and you have to concentrate on keeping all these characters alive. It's all about experimentation - trial and error.
"Book two opens in the past, during the London Blitz, but the focus is on the present. There will be a number of new characters in the book.
"I have a vague idea of how to resolve the series but quite often things change. I find all my books hard to plot, there are a lot of elements that you need to manipulate and I like that, that's the challenge for me. It's easy to write the same book over and over again but I like to make the reader think.
"I tend to write in a downstairs room that has a desk in it, from 9am until 2pm and in the afternoon I do other things that are not writing - I enjoy fencing, music and painting. I edit my writing lightly every day. I write the first draft, usually things have to be added for the plot and I tighten up the language a little. It takes six to eight months to write the first draft and then I go straight into editing.
"For budding writers I would suggest that they write their own thing, write about what interests them, don't be put off by people's comments. When I started writing fantasy it was not popular but you can see how much that has now changed."
