[updated August 2006]

Read any good books lately?

Non-fiction and French study have taken up the bulk of my "free" reading time of late, as I research my fourth book and hobble down the road toward fluency at the same time. That said, I do hear the call of a certain book from time to time, and if it persists, I usually obey and buy the book. (Reading it, however, is sometimes another issue altogether. Like many of you, I have stacks and stacks and stacks of books begging to be read.) Of late, I've loved Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which moved me, big time. John Crowley's Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land was exquisite—not a "book snack," by any means, but well worth the work. Very much enjoyed Misfortune, by Wesley Stace. Also, I enjoyed catching up with the third volume by Michael Gruber featuring a Cuban-American detective in Miami, Jimmy Paz. This was entitled Night of the Jaguar, and follows upon Tropic of Night and Valley of Bones, all of which incorporate the supernatural, anthropology, and lots of other interesting stuff. …Is that a mixed bag of recommendations, or what? On top of that, I could probably hold my own amongst a group of sixth-graders in a Pendragon, Artemis Fowl, Vampire Plagues trivia contest—all thanks to my nephew.

On the French front, I've been tackling the series of Inspector Maigret novels written by Georges Simenon, some Julian Barnes (both essays and fiction about France and the French, written in English—as well as his new novel, Arthur and George), some Flaubert and Oscar Wilde (The Portrait of Mr. W.H., in a bilingual, face-a-face edition). Also reading anthologies of French letters—Colette's to her daughter, and Marguerite Yourcenar's as well. It also helps with the French, I find, to reread books I've loved in English, ie., Haddon's Curious Incident, as well as plays—I have lots of Tennessee Williams sitting bedside at the moment: "La Chat sur un toit brulant," "Un Tramway nommé Désir," "La Menagerie de Verre," et cetera.

Finally, I'm thinking of tackling a little project this year: Reading every book on the Publishers Weekly paperback bestseller list, as knowing what folks are reading seems a valuable lesson for any writer to learn. May just chose a list from sometime earlier in the year and dive in. Stay tuned for progress on that project.

I'm new to the Herculine Trilogy. Should I read the books in order?

Ideally, I suppose you should. So, that's The Book of Shadows first, followed by The Book of Spirits and now The Witchery. If I've done my job, though, you shouldn't be confused starting in the middle, or working backwards.

Any advice for us writers?

Tons, for what it's worth; and it's all in the general Q&A and the Commonplace Book....My newest fave comes from the soon-to-be-released notebooks of Tennessee Williams, wherein he says that in order to get something written you have to convince yourself it is easy to do, and then do it easefully (knowing all the while that you're lying to yourself, of course).

Also, I'm much more into outlines these days. That's always a controversial topic for writers—some hate them, others swear by them. But this fourth book I'm working on is much more plot-driven than the Herculine books, so I'm finding it helpful. It's early in the process though, so my opinion may change yet again.

What are you working on now?

I'm not too keen on talking about the work before it's done, but the fourth book will be something of a departure from the Herculine trilogy though still squarely in the gothic tradition. The manuscript is due next summer, so it shouldn't be too long before the book is published. Stay tuned for details.

Can I get my book signed?

I won't be touring for The Witchery, but I'll do my best to get signed copies into the hands of my friends at the following book stores:

The Garden District Book Shop
www.gardendistrictbookshop.com

The Vero Beach Book Center
www.verobeachbookcenter.com

If that doesn't work, or you have a special request, write me via the site (Contact tab) and we'll see what we can do.

Do you read your reviews?

If I can't stop myself, yes. But when I do, I adopt the model of the Olympic diving and skating competitions—I throw out the highest and lowest "scores" and average the rest. Otherwise the mood swings would be the end of me, as it seems I write books people either love or hate.

What is "gothic"?

The following—cribbed, with all due thanks, from the Norton Anthology of English Literature — is a good, albeit lengthy, definition of the gothic:

"When it was launched in the later eighteenth century, Gothicism featured accounts of terrifying experiences in ancient castles—experiences connected with subterranean dungeons, secret passageways, flickering lamps, screams, moans, bloody hands, ghosts, graveyards, and the rest. By extension, it came to designate the macabre, mysterious, fantastic, supernatural, and, again, the terrifying, especially the pleasurably terrifying, in literature more generally. Closer to the present, one sees Gothicism pervading Victorian literature (for example, in the novels of Dickens and the Brontës), American fiction (from Poe and Hawthorne through Faulkner), and of course the films, television, and videos of our own (in this respect, not-so-modern) culture.

"The Gothic revival, which appeared in English gardens and architecture before it got into literature, was the work of a handful of visionaries, the most important of whom was Horace Walpole (1717-1797), novelist, letter writer, and son of the prime minister Sir Robert Walpole. In the 1740s Horace Walpole purchased Strawberry Hill, an estate on the Thames near London, and set about remodeling it in what he called "Gothick" style, adding towers, turrets, battlements, arched doors, windows, and ornaments of every description, creating a kind of spurious medieval architecture that survives today mainly in churches, military academies, and university buildings. The project was extremely influential, as people came from all over to see Strawberry Hill and returned to Gothicize their own houses.

"When Gothicism made its appearance in literature, Walpole was again a chief initiator, publishing The Castle of Otranto (1764), a short novel in which the ingredients are a haunted castle, a Byronic villain (before Byron's time—and the villain's name is Manfred!), mysterious deaths, supernatural happenings, a moaning ancestral portrait, a damsel in distress, and, as the Oxford Companion to English Literature puts it, "violent emotions of terror, anguish, and love." The work was tremendously popular, and imitations followed in such numbers that the Gothic novel (or romance) was probably the commonest type of fiction in England for the next half century. It is noteworthy in this period that the best-selling author of the genre (Ann Radcliffe), the author of its most enduring novel (Mary Shelley), and the author of its most effective sendup (Jane Austen) were all women.

"Some of the most frequently mentioned works in the Gothic mode [are]: Walpole's Otranto as the initiating prototype; William Beckford's Vathek (1786), which is "oriental" rather than medieval but similarly blends cruelty, terror, and eroticism; two extremely popular works by the "Queen of Terror," Ann Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest (1791) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794); Matthew Gregory Lewis's The Monk (1796), involving seduction, incestuous rape, matricide and other murders, and diabolism; and two works of 1818 poking fun at the by-then well-established tradition, Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (which refers specifically to the two Radcliffe novels just mentioned) and Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey. A number of these novels feature villainous, tyrannical, egotistical, even maniacal male characters—Manfred in Otranto, Caliph Vathek, Montoni in Udolpho, Ambrosio in The Monk—who are the main or ultimate source of almost unrelieved terror once the plot gets under way.

"Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), which has two Gothic/Byronic protagonists (Victor Frankenstein and his Creature), was inspired, as Shelley explains in her introduction to the edition of 1831, by a communal reading of German ghost stories with her husband and Byron during bad weather on the shores of Lake Geneva. Frankenstein is the single most important product of this Gothic tradition, but it considerably transcends its sources. Its numerous thematic resonances relate to science, poetry, psychology, alienation, politics, education, family relationships, and much else. Even so, one cannot imagine a more archetypically Gothic circumstance than the secret creation of an eight-foot-tall monster out of separate body parts collected from charnel houses; some of Victor Frankenstein's most extravagant rhetoric in the novel almost exactly reproduces the tone, and even some of the words, of the extract given here describing Isabella's distress in Otranto—as in this passage expressing Victor's feelings of horror when Justine is condemned for the murder of his brother William:

My own agitation and anguish was extreme during the whole trial. I believed in her innocence; I knew it. Could the daemon, who had (I did not for a minute doubt) murdered my brother, also in his hellish sport have betrayed the innocent to death and ignominy? I could not sustain the horror of my situation; and when I perceived that the popular voice, and the countenances of the judges, had already condemned my unhappy victim, I rushed out of the court in agony. The tortures of the accused did not equal mine; she was sustained by innocence, but the fangs of remorse tore my bosom, and would not forego their hold. . . .I cannot pretend to describe what I then felt. I had before experienced sensations of horror; and I have endeavoured to bestow upon them adequate expressions, but words cannot convey an idea of the heart-sickening despair that I then endured. . . .

"More pervasive signs of Gothic influence show up in some of the most frequently read Romantic poems—for example, the account of the skeleton ship and the crew's reaction ("A flash of joy . . . And horror follows") in Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; the atmosphere, setting, and fragmentary plot of witchery and seduction in Coleridge's Christabel; the initial scene ("a Gothic gallery") and most of the rest of Byron's Manfred; and the medievalism and several details of the plot of Keats's The Eve of St. Agnes, including Porphyro's invasion of Madeline's bedroom, which, while the poem is always at some level an idealized tale of young love, has obvious connections with… both Udolpho and The Monk."

Who are some of the best-known gothic writers, past and present?

In addition to those writers of the past mentioned above, I'd add the following alphabetical (and very much non-chronological) list of writers whose names I've taken (based solely on personal prejudice and preferences) from The Gothic, by David Punter and Glennis Byron, (Blackwell Publishing, 2004), an excellent introduction to the genre: Iain Banks, John Banville, Clive Barker, Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, James Branch Cabell, Angela Carter, Wilkie Collins, John Crowley, Arthur Conan Doyle, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Washington Irving, Henry James (The Turn of the Screw), M.R. James, Stephen King, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Sophia Lee, Gaston Leroux (The Phantom of the Opera), H. P. Lovecraft, Charles Robert Mathurin, Herman Melville, Joyce Carol Oates, Mervyn Peake (Gormenghast, a very fun film version of which is available on DVD), Clara Reeve, Anne Rice, Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), Bram Stoker (Dracula, and several lesser works, i.e., The Lair of the White Worm), H. G. Wells, and Oscar Wilde.

Many other contemporary writers dabble in the genre as well, ranging from Toni Morrison (whose exquisite Beloved could rightly be deemed a ghost story, ditto her more recent Love) to Kathryn Harrison (notably Poison and The Binding Chair). Many of today's writers mix the gothic with other genres, such as sci-fi (China Miéville), history/fantasy (Michael Moorcock's Gloriana), fantasy (Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel series), pure horror (Clive Barker), erotica (Anne Rice's pseudonymous Sleeping Beauty series), and the "nouveau-Victorian" (as in Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White). Essentially, the gothic genre was born a hybrid — one with limitless possibilities — and so it remains.

Who are some of your favorite writers?

My interest in the gothic began with Anne Rice, who remains one of my favorite writers. Reading backwards in the genre from Anne, I discovered many of the authors mentioned above: the Brontes, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe and Matthew "Monk" Lewis. Lewis's novel, The Monk, is one of my all-time favorites, and anyone with an abiding interest in the gothic needs to read it. It's outrageous, in every sense of the word.

Of course, there are the early American gothics as well, beginning with Charles Brockden Brown and moving onto Hawthorne, Melville and Poe, all of whom I read over and over. Favorites? Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables and The Marble Faun, Melville's Redfern and, of course, "Billy Budd"; and most anything by Poe, including the marginalia, and his scathing reviews of his contemporaries. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is fun as well, and a bit of a departure for Poe.

If I had to choose two writers whose style I most admire, they'd be Marguerite Yourçenar and Isak Dinesen. Yourçenar was a Frenchwoman who lived out her life on an island off the coast of Maine, and was the first Frenchwoman—born in Belgium, actually—elected to the Academie Française. Her best known novel is Hadrian's Memoirs, in which she fictionalizes the life of the Roman Emperor Hadrian. The several volumes of her own memoirs are exquisite, as is her short novel, Alexis. Dinesen wrote a handful of longish short stories that are dreamlike in tone, with prose polished to a sheen. Among them are "The Supper at Elsinore," "Babette's Feast" and the seven gothic tales of, yes, Seven Gothic Tales.

Others? The Irishman William Trevor. He can sum up a character's life in a one-line description of their house, or their clothing. He can be ghoulish, and creepy in the best Celtic tradition—see the short story "Attracta," wherein a soldier's widow receives her husband's head via post!—or the novel, Felicia's Journey; and then he can break your heart, as in The Story of Lucy Gault. …Three writers who demonstrate what it means to have a "voice" of one's own: Colette, Alice Adams and Grace Paley.

Finally, if I had to chose one work of non-fiction to read over and over again, it would be The Journals of John Cheever—sad, sometimes funny, full of insight into both writing and life, and beautifully written.

What are you reading now?

Mostly I read non-fiction, as my own work requires a great deal of research. Occasionally, I'll try to catch up on some contemporary stuff. The best I've read of late, within the past few years? Two books by writers who share a name but are not related: Colum McCann and Maria McCann. His Dancer is a fictionalized biography of Rudolf Nureyev, which I enjoyed very much. And her As Meat Loves Salt is a first novel that tells a unique love story set against the backdrop of the English Civil Wars. Both books have language you can get lost in—a must for me—and stories that veer all over the place, shoved to and fro by love, lust, sex and bits of history. Ditto, Geraldine Brooks's Year of Wonders, Frederick Busch's The Night Inspector and Patrick Suskind's Perfume. The film director Neil Jordan is an excellent writer, and his recent Shade is nicely eerie. Others, off the top of my head: The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber, Jamie O'Neill's At Swim, Two Boys, Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt's Possession, Emma Donoghue's Slammerkin, Sheri Holman's The Dress Lodger, Sarah Waters's Fingersmith, Anthony O'Neill's The Lamplighter and, going back a few years, the "Supernatural Minnesota" series by Thom Disch: The M.D., The Sub, and The Priest. Also, I just read and enjoyed Caleb Carr's take on a tale featuring Sherlock Holmes, The Italian Secretary. Right now I'm into Misfortune, by Wesley Stace. And I'm looking forward to Anne Rice's Christ the Lord, to see what she's up to now. …I'll list more as I think of them.

How did you get your first book published?

The old-fashioned way. …I quit my job and moved to Key West with half a manuscript and all my research. (And I do mean all. To paraphrase the writer Carolyn Chute, I was the possessor of twenty boxes of Christmas ornaments in search of a Christmas tree.) I knew I had to try and write a novel, and that it was too difficult a thing to do in my "off" hours, after work and on weekends, etc. Throughout the writing, I was conscious of there being a two-part goal: to write the book, and then, with luck, get it published; and I knew the first part of that goal was as worthy as the second, and worth celebrating. When I had finished the manuscript of The Book of Shadows, I celebrated that accomplishment. Soon after, I sent a query letter to three agents. These were the agents I most wanted to represent the novel, based on the other authors in their stable. Within a few weeks I'd heard back from two of the three—the first said he was no longer reading manuscripts, as he was no longer signing new clients, and the second would soon become my agent. That was Suzanne Gluck, now at the William Morris Agency, who had represented Caleb Carr, whose novel The Alienist I very much admired, and Theodore Roszak, author of another book I'd enjoyed, The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein. (By the way, the third agent responded to my query letter more than a year after I sent it to her—no apologies or explanations either, just a few lines saying she wasn't interested. Needless to say, the feeling was mutual by then.) The manuscript of Shadows was too long, and needed tightening. Suzanne and I worked on that for a few months, and then she "made the rounds" with the manuscript, selling it to William Morrow, a division of HarperCollins. All in all, that's the way things are supposed to happen in publishing; meaning: I didn't know anyone, had no favors owed me, etc. So, my story of publication ought to give heart to any of you "out there" writing, worrying that you don't know any other writers, let alone anyone in the publishing industry. It can, and does still happen the old-fashioned way.

What's your advice to someone who wants to write (and publish)?

To someone who wants to write, my advice is simple: Read. Read the best writing you can get your hands on. Be discriminating, but not so discriminating that you dismiss whole genres. If reading the best writers gets you down ("How am I ever going to do that?"), read a bad writer. They're easy to find. Mix it up, but remember: Read. …If you read enough, and you have the urge to write, eventually you'll put pen to paper.

Secondly, once you start writing, continue to mix it up. How do you know you're a novelist, and not a playwright? Well, you don't, not until you've tried (and probably failed) at both genres, and more than one time. Write poetry. And see if you have that skill set particular to short story writers. (I discovered that I don't, at least not yet. The short story is a very difficult thing to do well; and just as many short story writers lose themselves in the vastness of a novel, many novelists suffocate within the confines of a short story.) Try a play. Or a screenplay. That'll hone your dialogue, and give you a skill you can take back to your genre of choice. Or maybe you'll be content within the bound covers of a journal, writing for no one's eyes but your own. You're no less a writer if that's the case, but if—like most writers—you hope to publish, read on:

Well, the basics are available elsewhere. I.e., finish your manuscript to the best of your abilities (and then some), check out the Literary Marketplace and find your target agents—look for their names in the acknowledgements of recent books you like, books which are similar to your own, and do research in trade publications like Publishers Weekly and Poets & Writers — and then start the querying process. What I would add to the basics is this: You get one chance to make a first impression, so work on your manuscript. Today, editors are too busy to work on it with or for you. An agent is more likely to do that, but only on a limited basis. Once the work is as good as you can make it, turn your attention to your query letter. This single sheet of paper (shorter is better) is often overlooked, and dashed together even though it will serve as your introduction to prospective agents and, moreover, the introduction to your work. Why hurry through the introductory phase when you've spent months, years, a lifetime on the piece you're introducing? Answer: Don't hurry! Write a query letter that is accurate (spell the agent's name right, duh), know who and/or what they represent (don't send your query about The Life of Satan to Jan Karon's publisher), don't blow smoke and yet don't demur so that your letter reads as if it's printed in six-point type (agents are too good with bombast, so don't insult them by claiming you've written "Gone With the Wind" meets The Bible, with roles Julia Roberts and Tom Cruise cannot refuse"). My own query letter to Suzanne Gluck began by citing Carr and Roszak's books, and then—before I launched into a three paragraph summary of the book—I wrote that I'd written a novel that was "the bastard spawn of the Marquis de Sade and Mary Higgins Clark." …Ok. A little bit of bombast might just do the trick. …Bottom line: work on the query letter. It's important.

Finally, here's some advice that was helpful to me. From Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird: give yourself short assignments—i.e., a page or chapter at a time - and allow yourself to write shitty first drafts. And from the playwright Beth Henley: the two most important words a beginning writer ever writes are The End. Until then, you've got nothing to work with.

Other recommended books on writing? The nuts and bolts of it are dealt with well in two very practical guides, Noah Lukeman's The First Five Pages and Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, by Renni Browne and Dave King. The first provides an agent's perspective on your manuscript, and the second prompts you to ask yourself the questions you should (but might not) once you have completed a draft of something. Also, the dancer Twyla Tharp published a book last year about her take on creativity, which I enjoyed, entitled The Creative Habit—art is art, no matter what kind you make; so give the Tharp book a look as well.

How do you go about researching your books? Does anyone help you?

I don't understand how writers delegate their research. So much of what I find in the course of researching isn't what I thought I was looking for. True: if you need to know an actual street name from 1906, pre-quake San Francisco, someone can get that for you; but would they give you the same street name you'd choose for yourself if you spent a few minutes with the same vintage phone book? Doubtful. And whether your character lives on Elm Street or Delgado Circle, well, that makes a difference, doesn't it? …For me, research is a large, large part of the process. It is also the most time-consuming and, often, the most enjoyable part of the job. So much so that sometimes I have to stop myself, reasoning that three books on the birth of the US postal service will suffice, and the other three I've found can sit unread. (That's true. I researched the postal service for The Book of Spirits, unable to fully conceive what the characters would write without first knowing how they'd write it, post it, retrieve it, etc.)

As for the particulars of the process, that'd be a too lengthy response, and would involve embarrassing references to index cards, legal pads, scads of cutting and pasting (some on the computer and some involving, yes, scissors and glue), and so I'll leave it to your imagination. …I will add this, though: I find big, big sketch pads useful in the early stages of conceiving the story. There are some things a computer doesn't let you do, and one of those is seeing the whole story on a single page, with arrows drawn from this to that, and paragraphs scrawled all over.

Do you use an outline?

More so now than earlier, as publishers like to see some sort of outline (usually before cutting a check). I used to hold a loose, very loose outline in my head, but that's not so easy as a novel grows in scope. Then I began writing loose outlines on paper. That's progressed to a not so loose outline; which is to say I know the beginning and end of a book before I begin it, and much of the middle, but the connections come on a daily basis (hopefully). Do I recommend outlining? I recommend trying. You'll know if it works for you. And if you find it saves you time—as it does me—than yes, it is working for you. Do it. But remember it's neither a contract nor a recipe. It's an outline, just like those in coloring books. Finding the crayons to fill the outline in remains the fun part, the "art" part.

What is your workday like?

I wake up early, smother the phones and try to seat myself at my desk. If anyone calls before I get into work, I'm sunk, especially if they're calling with a lunch invitation. If I make it to the desk by eight or nine, I'll stay there till four or five perhaps, taking a break for a sad, solitary, not-so-fun lunch. (Poor me.) And at the end of the workday, I wander around in a daze for a while, trying to return from the nineteenth century. (Not always easy.) Often I'll take a long walk, hoping to work out some plot points or something similar. …Then I do it all again the next day. And the day after. All the while trying to convince myself that the effort will result in another novel, someday.

What do you do when you're not writing?

Read. Plan trips I hope to take. Play tennis. Read some more. Take a few of the trips I've planned. Work on my French. Play more tennis, all the while telling myself I should be reading. …That's about it.

Why do you live in Tampa?

I was born in New York and lived there—on eastern Long Island and in NYC—for a long time. Then, as a refugee from northern winters, I made my way to the South. I have lived in New Orleans and the Florida Keys. I moved to Tampa five years ago in order to be near family, and I remain in Tampa for that and other reasons, i.e., I'm watching dolphins breach in the river outside my window while my New York friends are sitting at their sills frowning at snow plows. Additionally, my professorial partner works in Tampa, keeping an academic's schedule that allows us to go elsewhere for months at a time. So, Tampa makes for a nice, sunny home base.

What's coming up for you?

I'm working on the novel that will conclude the Herculine trilogy. Right now I'm referring to it as The Book of Secrets, but that may change. I've got some more travel scheduled in the coming months, including two extended stays in Europe. I am very lucky to be making my living as a writer, and I'm determined to make the most of the flexibility that comes with the job while still writing the best books I can. Also, I have dual citizenship—US and Irish—which makes me more mobile than most. I hope to spend even more time abroad, most probably in Ireland and France, as time goes by. Finally, my fingers remain crossed—figuratively, at least—that I will continue to write beyond the Herculine trilogy, and that publishers will continue to demonstrate the faith they've shown in my work up to this point. (Which grows out of the readers' faith, of course. Or, to be crass, sales.) If both things come to pass—my productivity, matched by the good faith of both readers and publishers—then there should be many more books bearing my name in the future. (I already have the next three outlined, in fact.)