With four novels under her belt and two more in the works, author Gabrielle Mathieu brings her special gifts for spirited dialog and deft plotting to the fantasy-adventure genre. We’re so glad to have this opportunity to talk to her about her books.
Congratulations on the publication of your fourth novel, Girl of Fire, book one in the Berona’s Quest series. Can you tell us a little about the story?
The story centers around a young heroine who is hunted down by the oldest, most malicious creature in her world, a demon that preys on your insecurities and fears, rather than killing you outright. Swords won’t kill her. Neither will magic. But there are ways to defeat her.
Your publisher has already created covers for books two and three in the series. How much of the plot lines for the upcoming books do you already have mapped out?
I’m halfway through Book Two, so I’ve got a good idea what’s coming up for Berona and her circle of friends when the dangerous Elementals—incarnate natural forces—go on a rampage. Book Three, I have the setting, the Island-Nation of Vendrisi, and I know who the villain and love interest will be. My practice is to have a peripheral character in the first book who later develops into a dangerous adversary.
Berona’s Quest is not your first series. Tell us about the three books in your Falcon Trilogy and how it differs.
Aside from both series having eighteen-year-old women as their main characters, they’re very different. In the Falcon series, Peppa Mueller, an androgynous, awkward young woman who thinks she knows how the world works, finds out that not all answers are revealed in chemistry textbooks. By necessity, since the adventure-driven story takes place in the fifties and sixties, many of the interesting characters are male. Girl of Fire is about a sweet, if stubborn, village girl, put in the difficult situation of defending herself and her family against the oldest creature in the world, the inimical Water Demon. Since it is set in a fantasy world, I have the leeway of creating the character of Kendall, an accomplished female warrior who can drink and brawl with the best of them, as well as other powerful women.
Many of your characters in both series share a predilection for alternative states of mind. Is this influenced by your day job as a practitioner of traditional Chinese Medicine, prescribing Chinese herbs and offering acupuncture and massage?
Probably more by my nighttime expeditions to clubs in my twenties than my day job now. I did learn not to take psychedelics while listening to the punk band, Gang of Four. It’s like sticking a pickaxe into your soul. I hope my heroines learn something both less obvious and more useful.
The world that you create in both series is complete, meaning you provide enough details so that the reader can visualize every setting, even when they are settings that have no place in the real world. That is quite a feat. How did you develop this skill?
Creating the setting for the Falcon Flies Alone, which takes place in Switzerland and Munich, took more diligent research than unbridled imagination. The scenes set in the other worlds in the Falcon series must be the result of my tendency to daydream. My new novel, Girl of Fire, is based on medieval and renaissance life in Europe. The trading power and sophistication of 14th century Venice was the inspiration for the Island-Nation of Vendrisi, the home of Luca, one of the main characters.
In addition to being visual, you write great dialogue and your plots are intriguing. Which of your series would make for the best film or Netflix/other TV series?
That depends on your taste. The psychological suspense, claustrophobic 50’s setting, and disconcerting oddness of the first Falcon book, The Falcon Flies Alone, would be the perfect material for Del Toro, the director of The Shape of Water (2017) and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). Girl of Fire is your evergreen quest book, complete with bonding, a long slog through dangerous territory, and a looming danger that threatens to end the world. Fans of Peter Jackson and the Netflix series The Witcher would love a series based on Girl of Fire and the upcoming books.
In addition to your own writing, you host New Books in Fantasy and Adventure, which is a podcast channel in the New Books Network that features authors discussing their novels. How does this influence your own work?
I’m a very critical reader, though I try to silence that aspect when I’m talking to an author, who, after all, is a guest on the program. I learn from the mistakes in the books I read, and occasionally, I’m also inspired. Just recently, the orderly and thorough world-building of debut author Sarah Kozloff was an incentive to be more attentive to world-building myself. Other books read as though they were written in bursts of speed, and then barely revised. Those are the ones that leave me scratching my head because the plotting and motivations often suffer as a result.
What would you like writers just starting to know about working in your genre?
It will take longer than you expect to produce a well-crafted novel.
Where can readers learn more about you and your work?
https://twitter.com/GabrielleAuthor
https://www.facebook.com/gabrielle.mathieu.3
https://www.instagram.com/gabrielleauthor/
Images courtesy of Gabrielle Mathieu
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