I was lucky to get an interview with Jean Gill the author of the fantasy novel Queen of the Warrior Bees, one of this year’s #SPFBO8 entries.
Please, tell us a bit about yourself…
For nearly twenty years, I’ve lived in a village in Provence called Dieulefit (in English, God Made It) after a ‘follow-your-dream’ move from rainy Wales and a teaching career. Don’t get me wrong – I still love Wales and I loved teaching English. My claim to fame is that I was the first woman to be a secondary school Headteacher in my Welsh county (Dyfed). But the rain was depressing (Hah! Am rethinking that in drought and heat!) and I couldn’t find enough time to write.
I still can’t find enough time to write 😊 because I became a photographer too and had my first solo exhibition this year in Privas Photo Festival. I also trained for two years as a beekeeper and keep bees on the four-acre hillside which is our conservation area, home to foxes, badgers, deer, hares and wild boar. All of these have starred in photos taken with an infra-red trail camera and I’ve learned that badgers and foxes happily hang out together. In March, my wild neighbours turn up with their mates. This makes me happy.
I wish I could have lived 10,000 lives but I’ve crammed quite a lot into this one, including training to be a dog trainer; dogs, cats, kittens, puppies. I’m mother or stepmother to five children, I’m a step-grandma and a step-step-great-grandma – yes, that’s a lot of steps so I know a little about ‘found families’. And my Long-Suffering Man has stayed with me for 37 years so far, running around a hillside in a white suit when required. For beekeeping, obviously.
“I still can’t believe I get fan mail – amazing!”
Why should I buy your books?
Because you’re adventurous in mind and spirit and want a wild flight. Because you want to live a story, not just read it. Because you need to know what it’s like to shift shape into a bee, to fly through an ultra-violet world and communicate by dancing, to go inside a beehive and be part of the-life-or-death decisions made by the hive mind. Because you like multi-layered YA stories where misfit teenagers with superpowers and magecraft fight against an evil society, and, in doing so, find friendship and acceptance.
My great #SPFBO8 review from Al Burke of Booknest said, ‘This has a really interesting premise. Humankind, out of fear of allergies and other risks of nature, has shut itself up in a sterile city created by magic, known as The Citadel. Everything is controlled to the max, few are allowed outside and the city is run by a number of magicians. Think a Puritan 1984 meets The Book of Koli’.
DO NOT read this book if you want tacky sentimentality about ‘nature’. My only bad reviews come from readers who are offended by the biology of bee sex.
Oh- and it’s been lucky in awards, including 10 out of 10 and a Quarter-Finalist in the Booklife Prize; a Finalist in the 2020 Kindle Book Awards, a Royal Dragonfly Silver Award and an IPPY Silver Award for the audiobook.
What got you into writing? And how long have you been doing it?
When I was seven, I used to type up my stories in my soldier-father’s office on his big typewriter. I gushed adolescent garbage into private scribbles. Then a university degree in English Literature in 1976 taught me that great writers were dead men – not one female writer in my three-year course - and I didn’t presume any more.
However, I kept Stevie Smith’s Collected Works and Colette on my shelves so I knew women did write. I guess Bon Jovi was right in my case; ‘a poet needs the pain’ and in my turbulent twenties, the poems came. My first poetry book With Double Blade was traditionally published in 1988 and I turned to prose at forty with my first novel No Bed of Roses (see the Bon Jovi connection?). Since then, I’ve published 25 books, some with traditional publishers but now all except my three translations (from French) are self-published.
Why did you choose to write this kind of fantasy?
It makes good commercial sense to stick to one genre but that’s just not how my motivation works so I’ve written in many different genres, confusing the hell out of my readers. I’m best known for my dog book Someone To Look Up To and my medieval fiction but the idea for Queen of the Warrior Bees was definitely fantasy so I accepted commercial suicide and set to work.
As a self-published author aged 67, I have the freedom to write what matters to me and what makes me proud of my work. I’m lucky that the dog food is paid for by my pension so I can take the time needed to write the best book I can. My hope is that my books will make an impact on a reader’s imagination and be remembered.
My fantasy subgenre is ecofantasy (I might have invented the term) and came from two elements of the inspiration for the Natural Forces Trilogy. I was stung on the head by more than fifty of my bees after handling them carelessly and had to have an epinephrine injection. This was quite an out-of-body experience and fellow writer Babs Morton suggested I should write a story about a girl who became a superhero after such an incident. Alas, I developed no super-powers but the idea stuck. Then I read an exchange on social media about how wonderful fake grass was, how easy to vacuum-clean, and all I could think about were the homeless insects, and the chasm between urban dwellers and ‘nature’. Don’t get me started on that!
And the Citadel was born, in all its sterile humans-only patriarchal awfulness.
Which other author has had the biggest influence on your writing?
Colette is still an inspiration to me. I have a line-drawing of her on a shelf by my writing desk. She freed herself from the husband who took credit for her first books, she lived a wild life, her writing is so sensual and she was the first woman to be a member of the French Academy. She reminds me to live by my own rules.
What’s the best thing about being a writer?
Living 10,000 lives. And fan mail. I still can’t believe I get fan mail – amazing!
What’s the hardest thing about being a writer?
Self-doubt and other authors’ numbers – sales, ranking, reviews, book output, book quotes on goodreads, hats, whatever! - when they’re bigger/ better than mine. I know there are also authors with smaller numbers and I know that success by numbers is illusory – humans always want more – but sometimes I feel envy.
Do you have any tips or an author app, tool, or resource that you can really recommend we try?
My two top tips:
- Stop writing in a session at a point where you know what comes next. I’ve always done this and never had writer’s block. I’m raring to go when I sit down to write.
- When you re-draft, do what Bernard Cornwell calls ‘putting the doors in the alleyways’. Imagine your hero is trapped in an alleyway, attacked by the forces of evil, no way out – then a door suddenly opens and through it he goes. Unless that door is mentioned earlier in the novel, your reader will feel cheated. So go back through your novel making sure the doors are in place for use later.
All kinds of foreshadowing, whether a character defect or dropping in clues like the famous ‘smoking gun’ that will appear in the story later, are important in all genres of story, not just murder mysteries.
And now it's time to yank out your Palantir! Let’s talk about the future. What new projects are you working on?
I am in Viking Orkney in my new Historical Fiction/ Fantasy trilogy! I am back in the 12th century, where I spend much of my life because I find it a more civilised period than this one. In the twilight of the old gods, two cursed orphans meet on an Orkney beach and their fates collide. The Ring Breaker is just published and I’ve started Among Sea Wolves. For research purposes, The Man has to put up with me navigating my way around the garden in the fog using a sunstone. Yes, I actually bought some Iceland Spar (a form of calcite) so I could experiment.
Do you expect new technologies to come along soon that will have a huge impact on self-publishing? For instance, when will we see a decent novel written by an AI author?
Thanks to you, I’ve been playing with AI imagery using DALL-E. I’ve called my AI friend Mephistopheles because I think AI could steal my soul. Very addictive, amazing potential but there’s usually something ‘off’ in the images and they need to be fixed in Photoshop. As someone who earns an income from photography, I do feel threatened but also fascinated and would rather learn how to use this new tool than ring a handbell and cry ‘Beware AI!’ I would use it for adverts but would never claim AI as my artwork.
AI could not write my poetry or my novels. Read them and tell me I’m wrong 😊
I’ve been amazed by AI narration and how quickly it’s ‘learning’. I am very protective about my audiobook narrators’ jobs but when I filled in an AI audiobook questionnaire, the last question was, ‘Would you change your mind if your audiobook could be narrated by a cloned version of your voice?’ After a little AI magic, I was sent a sample and the result shook me. Amazing. Tempting. Get thee behind me, Narrator Mephistopheles!
I was actually contemplating the same thing and it will be so easy and fast to do audiobooks when we get it to work properly! I guess maybe somebody already did.
Google’s AudioLM AI can even do seamless continuations of speech or music without any text input or musical transcription. Just listen to these four quick examples.
Do you have any dreams you’d like to share?
Apart from bigger numbers 😊 I would love to have HB copies of my books with embossed covers but I use my royalties on projects such as audiobooks and translations. I love self-publishing but if a traditional publisher offered me embossed covers, or – whisper the words - luxury editions with artwork and sprayed edges, I’d sign that contract in seconds! Luckily, traditional publishers have not realised this.
I could make such beautiful merchandise too!
My life-dreams outside writing and photography are now all for other people and when you make a wish on a star, you must never speak it aloud.
I’d love such “bling for my books,” too, sigh! Anything else you would like to say before we close?
Every time I hear that someone has read and enjoyed one of my books, it comes alive again for me. I can never say thank you often enough.
That goes for the writing community too and all the writers and bloggers who give generously of time, publicity and friendship. Having joined in Mark Lawrence’s #SPFBO8 this year, I’ve added new contacts to my network and can highly recommend both the contest and the list of books from entrants. Check it out here!
Thank you, Rune, for being so supportive of other writers with this series of interviews.
Don’t mention it and a big thank you for doing the interview, Jean! I wish you the very best of luck, I hope you find many new readers for your books and some cool new AI tools 😊
