
Q: I guess the obvious question to ask is how you came about teaming up to write books together under the pseudonym M.A. Carrick. You met on an archeological dig in Wales and Ireland, which it seems inspired the name. What pulled you two together to decide to write collaboratively? Was it common interests, friendship, something else?
Alyc: I still have my journal from that field school, where I jotted down (among other things) my impressions of my fellow students. And my ‘first-impression’ notes on Marie were all about how much we had in common, how inspiring it was to watch her dedicated daily writing practice (even by the light of a halogen lamp in a finds tend in rural Wales), and how much she reminded me of a younger, more put-together version of myself. But I think what really drew us together was our love of stories — how they worked, the joy they could give us, and our need to share them.
Somehow, I ended up running a tabletop RPG in the evenings and other downtime, which became the first of many games I’ve run for Marie (though she has run even more games for me in the years since.) And it was gaming, as much as anything, that became the crucible of our collaboration.
Q: Who first proposed the Rook & Rose trilogy? Did it start out as a series or even as books?
Marie: It started out as a game! Alyc was running a tabletop campaign in which I was playing a con artist named Ren . . . There was a scene we wanted to do with Ren and a certain masked vigilante, a little side caper that wouldn’t really involve the other player characters (and which was mostly an excuse for flirting), so we decided it might be fun to write it as a scene. It was fun, so we wrote another scene . . . and then another one . . . and then one day I realized we’d written fifty thousand words of side fiction for this game. At which point we said, hey, maybe we should write a book together?
It wasn’t originally going to be that book, though. We noodled around for a while, brainstorming what kinds of things we each enjoyed and where the overlaps were, before I finally suggested that maybe we should write the obvious thing right in front of us. Of course, we didn’t just take what we’d written and start running: those fifty thousand words were very much in the vein of fanfic, taking for granted that you already knew who these characters were and cared about their adventures, bringing in details that belonged to the intellectual property of the game, etc. We had to step back and ask ourselves what were the core elements we cared about and wanted to rework into a novel, file the serial numbers off the bits that weren’t our own creation (fortunately that was relatively little of the whole), and then build an entire world and plot and so forth to support the parts we were determined to keep. There was a ton of prep work before we wrote even the first word of The Mask of Mirrors — more prep than I think either of us has ever done before starting to write something!
Q: Do certain characters ‘belong’ to either of you (as in you write primarily from their POV)? Are there characters in the trilogy you enjoy writing over others?
Alyc: Because the series started as scenes for an RPG, we tended to fall along PC and NPC lines for character ownership. This balance shifted when we broke the game version of the story down to the bones and rebuilt it with new muscles and flesh, with each of us taking more ownership of all the characters, but it still lingered in the breakdown of how we wrote scenes. If a scene featured Ren talking with another character, Marie would take point on Ren’s thoughts/dialogue, and I would take whomever she was interacting with. If a scene was from Vargo’s perspective, then I usually took point. For Grey, we had about equal ownership. And then there are characters like Tess and Arkady Bones, who I tend to write because their voices are so strong in my head.
The only other division of labor I can think of is that Marie usually handles the bulk of the fight scenes, whereas I tend to beef up a lot of the flirting and banter. We each have our strengths.
Q: There’s a lot of great world-building in the series, from the setting reminiscent of Venice, to the different languages, titles, and names, and most interestingly, two magic systems that are very different but both in their own way centered around divination. What motivated you to go with the settings, characters, and magic systems present in the books?
Marie: We knew going in that we wanted divinatory cards, because that was a central feature of Ren’s character in the game. Since she’s my PC, I took point on designing the pattern deck — in terms of its structure and how it’s used, not the art! That, we left up to the artists we hired later on, when we produced an actual, physical deck. (All the patterns that show up in the story, I laid out using a very elegant deck consisting of, uh, blank cards I’d scribbled names on with Sharpies.)
Meanwhile, numinatria and its astrological derivative were Alyc’s baby. We had the vague notion of doing something with sacred geometry, so I loaned them a book I’d read in high school, A Beginner’s Guide to Constructing the Universe: The Mathematical Archetypes of Nature, Art, and Science by Michael S. Schneider, vaguely hoping it might be of use. Three days later, Alyc sent me something like a ten-page document laying out the structure of numinatria, so I guess it helped!
Where the characters are concerned, a lot of them had their roots in that game, though they mutated as needed for their new circumstances, and of course we had to invent a lot of new ones. The rest of the worldbuilding was essentially cobbled together out of things we found interesting: canals are cool, so we gave the place something of a Venetian layout, but it’s in the middle of a trade network along the lines of the Silk Road, and due to the environment Vraszenian food is loosely based on Chinese cuisine, but we gave them hot chocolate because we both love it so much . . . The end result has a lot of eclectic pieces worked into the corners!
Q: Marie, how’s the poetry going?
Marie: Earlier this year I was boggled to learn that my fourth published poem, “A War of Words”, was a finalist for the Special Hugo Award for Best Poem! For a field I’m so new to, that’s an astonishing thing to hear. But at this point I’ve sold nearly a dozen poems, with many more making the submission rounds at various magazines, so this is well on its way toward being a normal part of my career now. However peculiar that may feel!
Q: Alyc, are you running any RPGs, or playing in any? What’s your current favorite?
Alyc: For a variety of reasons (injury, job loss, the pandemic), I put the game that inspired Rook & Rose on hiatus back in 2020, and I’m ashamed to say I haven’t had time to pick it back up (or start up anything new).
However, Marie recently started running a game for our crew based in the Elfquest setting, using a new tribe she developed back when she was… nine? Ten? A wee-ickle Marie. [Marie: I was twelve, thank you.] Since I also imprinted on Elfquest at a wee-ickle age, of course I was all in to play in a campaign run by Marie. We just had our first big plot reveal in the last session, and I’ve been chewing over that scene and the ramifications like a kid with a new and tasty piece of gum.
So that’s the gaming landscape now, but the wheel turns. Eventually Marie’s game will finish and I’ll find the time and energy to give her new gum in thanks for all the gum she’s given me.
Q: You’re obviously necks deep in The Sea Beyond duology. Any tidbits to share?
We’re in the middle of revisions now, but here’s a small snippet from the book! At this point Estevan, our changeling character (a faerie masquerading as a human), is at university in Salamanca. When our research turned up the boggling factoid that recipients of a doctoral degree back then were expected to fight a bull, we knew we had to include that in a scene . . .
*
The stands had been erected some weeks earlier, in celebration of medicine from the Sea Beyond saving the king from a near-fatal illness. For all that the Church frowned on the pagan overtones of bullfights, any attempt to separate them from what ought to be moments of pious gratitude — let alone to outlaw them entirely — was a heresy no true Spaniard would accept. Now the temporary arena was being repurposed for a smaller event, the students and townsmen of Salamanca piling into the flimsy stands for the chance to see blood.
“Does Sánchez fail to get his degree if people die before he kills the bull?” Estevan asked, still not entirely certain what the former had to do with the latter. Bullfighting was a sport for noblemen, and university doctors were ennobled by their degrees, but why did that mean they had to fight? It was as arcane as any challenge set by a faerie. Empty the sea into this walnut, and you will be crowned king.
‘Dunno!” Alejandro said cheerfully. “Let’s not be how he finds out. Oh, here they come!”
They was Sánchez, atop his horse and looking more than a little pale beneath his feather-decked cap, surrounded by what Estevan assumed were his friends and favored students. Together they paraded around the arena, Sánchez dutifully saluting his audience, as the legendary Frog of Salamanca watched from its perch atop a skull carved into the gate. That sculpture was supposed to bring luck in examinations to anyone who spotted it. Estevan wondered if that extended to corridas, too.
Sánchez’s last salute was to a large man across the arena from Estevan and Alejandro. “That’s Geryon over there,” Alejandro shouted to Estevan, over the cheering. “Not literally, of course — no more than Sánchez is Hercules — it’s just what they say. And the bull –”
Whatever he’d been about to say was lost in the roar of the crowd as a bull was let through into the arena. To Estevan it seemed monstrously large, gleaming in the sunlight, a furious demon loosed out of a hellish realm to kill the poor scholar in front of him.
Behemoth.
It was a melding of stories worthy of faerie tradition. Hercules’ tenth labor, stealing the cattle of Geryon from the island of Erytheia in the Sea Beyond; a myth straight out of Greek paganism. Sansón slaying Behemoth; good Biblical fare. The pillars of the Philistines’ temple were the Pillars of Hercules — only Estevan remembered when it had been Melqart instead, and the Phoenicians were the ones telling the tale. Round and round the stories went, but all of them sung in the same key, which was the death of the beast of the land.
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