Welcome to this Track of Words Author Interview, in which I’m talking to D.K. Fields – the pseudonym for collaborative authors Katherine Stansfield and David Towsey – about their new novel The Stitcher and the Mute, which is book two in the Tales of Fenest. It’s published on the 12th November by Head of Zeus, in hardback and ebook formats, and ahead of its release I asked Kath and Dave to give us a rundown on the series, some details of the new novel, and what it’s like writing as a pair.
Without further ado, over to Kath and Dave for the interview!
Track of Words: The Stitcher and the Mute is the second book in your Tales of Fenest series – for anyone unfamiliar with this series, could you give a quick overview of what to expect?
Dave: The Tales of Fenest series is, in short, a blend of crime and fantasy. Our hero is Cora Gorderheim, a chain-smoking middle-aged detective with a gambling habit she’s just about keeping on top of. Cora catches a case that leads her out of the street gutters and into the world of politics. There’s an election going on, and the dead body Cora’s investigating turns out to be someone very, very important: a storyteller. Because in this world people vote on stories, not parties or manifestos, and someone wanted this particular story silenced.
So, it’s a mix of noir, with a dash of political intrigue and a soupçon of metafiction, all set against a backdrop of Regency gaslamp fantasy.
ToW: Could you talk a little about the world in which this story is set?
Dave: The trilogy takes place in the Union of Realms: a collective of six different peoples with their own customs and traditions. At the center of the Union is a capital city, Fenest, which is not only Cora Gorderheim’s home but the seat of political power in our world – something akin to Washington, D.C. Some of the realms keep to their own geographical areas, for example the Torn live in the volcanic region known as the Tear, and the Lowlanders farm the Lowlands. But the Caskers roam the river ways of the Union on their barges, and the Wayward drift where they please when they’re not tending to their herds. To help readers keep track we have a handy map at the start of each book. Gotta love a good map in fantasy.
ToW: Bearing that in mind, how would you describe The Stitcher and the Mute?
Kath: As the middle book in the trilogy, The Stitcher and the Mute ups the stakes for our hero – problems deepen, and it’s hard to know who to trust. At the end of the first book, Widow’s Welcome, Cora thought she was getting somewhere with the mystery of the murdered storyteller, but the answers she found have led to more questions – questions that make some powerful people very uncomfortable. Cora’s always known that Fenest is corrupt, but in The Stitcher and the Mute she finds out just how widespread that corruption is as well as her own family’s part in it. Things become very dark for our chain-smoking, gambling detective. As Cora does her best to balance a murder investigation with pressure from above to abandon certain lines of enquiry, the election continues and the reader gets to hear the stories of the Torn and the Perlish.
ToW: Without spoiling anything, who are the main characters in this book and what do we need to know about them?
Kath: Detective Cora Gorderheim is our main character for all three books in the trilogy. At the Bernswick police station she’s ably supported by Constable Jenkins: tall and lean, good at chasing down cutpurses but not so hot on jokes. Chief Inspector Sillian is keeping a close eye on everything Cora does and seems to take her own orders from the Assembly building, where the all-powerful Chambers reside. Chambers are the most senior elected officials of each realm, and quite a few seem to have something to hide in The Stitcher and the Mute.
Helping and hindering Cora in equal measure is loud-mouthed Marcus: a girl named on Drunkard’s Day who sells pennysheets and keeps her eyes peeled for dodgy goings on among the elite. And then there’s auburn-haired Fire Investigator Serus who Cora would quite like to spend more time with, if only parts of the city would stop catching fire and killing her sources . . .
ToW: It’s interesting that you write collaboratively, under a single name. Can you tell us a bit about why you chose to work in this way?
Dave: Well, the ‘story’ of this decision varies a little depending on which one of us you ask. For my part, I distinctly remember the moment we were walking along a local beach and Kath said: “I’d like to write a big fantasy book, like Game of Thrones, but I’ve never done something like that before”. It was about the time the fifth season of GoT had wrapped up, and Kath was still reeling from the (spoiler) death of Stannis Baratheon – one of her favourite characters (there’s no accounting for taste). So, I said why don’t we write a big fantasy book together? We’d always edited each other’s work, from our student assignments right up to the novels we published as individuals. How hard could it be to write together, I thought. How naive I was…
But even with how challenging it has been, I don’t regret that conversation on the beach one bit. There’s no way we would have reached the Tales of Fenest independently, and not just because it’s a big fantasy book of the kind neither of us had written before.
ToW: What made you choose a pen name, rather than using your own two names? Presumably the D and K refer to your own names, but where did Fields come from?
Kath: We’re aware that, for some readers, seeing two author names on a novel can be off-putting. Unless one or other of those names is massively famous, there’s a risk that readers might think the book will be uneven, a hodge-podge. We wanted to avoid that, and in turn we realised we had a chance to create a new writing identity. For both of us, fantasy is a new genre to publish in so it seemed a sensible move to ‘start afresh’.
You’re right that it’s D for Dave and K for Kath. ‘Fields’ is a shortening of my surname Stansfield. I think other Stansfields have done this in the past: the actress Gracie Fields is one example (my dad tells me we’re distantly related but I don’t know if that’s true!). We wanted a made-up name that seemed plausible, that wasn’t hard to spell and which would position us a bit more centrally in alphabetized bookcases in bookshops. We were both fed up of being at the end of the alphabet, often near the floor!
Kath and Dave are published authors individually, as well!
ToW: Could you talk a little about what your writing process is like, and how the collaboration works practically? Do you each take certain characters/scenes/plot arcs, or is it more organic than that?
Dave: Initially, it was less process and more madness. We were lucky enough to do some travelling for a few months in a country where we barely spoke the language. So we talked to each other an awful lot, about setting, plot, characters, etc., just to have something to talk about. But when we actually got down to writing we passed the pages back and forth, mostly on a kind of 3 days on, 3 days off rota. It wasn’t so important how much each of us got done, just that we were happy spending some time pushing the story forward, and then just as happy to take a break. In a very real sense, we were writing our way into the project. There were some debates, some arguments, and some much-needed apologies after.
But looking back on those months now, they were the crucible in which this series was formed. It was essential, if a little painful. Since then, we’ve decided to take a more separate or compartmentalised approach – especially in the drafting. But I honestly don’t think we could have done that right from the start. We needed to be in each other’s pockets, so to speak, to live together in this world and with its characters, at the same time. Otherwise we risked one of us being unintentionally alienated from what was supposed to be their book too.
ToW: Now that you’re two books into your collaboration, what would you say the pros and cons are of working in this way?
Kath: A real pro for me is the increase in imaginative energy. There are ideas in this book that neither of us could have come up with on our own – they exist because we shaped them together. Plus, if I run out of steam with a scene or can’t work out a plot problem, Dave is on hand to help. This is true for writer friends or partners that you don’t co-write with, of course, but it makes a massive difference if the person you’re asking for help is as immersed in the world as you are, and just as motivated to finish the book by the deadline too!
A con is the fact that it can be hard to reconcile our individual ‘visions’ for a given scene, an aspect of setting, or how a character will behave. Co-writing, in the end, is about compromise and that can be hard when you can see something clearly in your head and the other person is saying, ‘no, it doesn’t go that way’. To finish a book we have to reach that point of compromise, and we know we always will, but the process can be tough (with lots of swearing).
ToW: How does this compare to the first book in the series, in terms of tone and stylistic approach? Would you say that it’s a similar sort of book, or have you taken a different angle this time?
Kath: All three books in the trilogy share the same core structure: Cora has a case that involves the election. As she tries to solve it, the election continues around her and there are two stories to hear – two in each book so all six election stories overall. Cora’s case changes in each of the novels but all three cases are related. The more she investigates, the more she learns of the corruption in the Union.
In The Stitcher and the Mute this becomes much more personal, but just as Cora’s struggling to deal with her past crashing into her present, she discovers that the Union faces a much bigger problem – one that will change everything. This inevitably impacts on tone so it is darker than the first book, Widow’s Welcome, but we’ve included some light relief in the Perlish election story which is a comedy. The Stitcher and the Mute is also different in that it takes Cora, and the reader, outside the city of Fenest. We see more of the Union in this book and the threats are different: cutpurses seem mild-mannered compared to what Cora discovers on the road.
ToW: What have you been able to explore this time around that you weren’t able to with Widow’s Welcome, in terms of characters, the setting and so on?
Dave: That’s a great question. We explore a lot of this world in The Stitcher and the Mute that we couldn’t in the first book. Part of that is because of our decision to give the election stories for each realm gradually across the three books, and these stories are our way of showing the readers (and voters of Fenest) each realm, in its own words. In The Stitcher and the Mute we get the Perlish and the Torn stories – two realms who couldn’t be farther apart both geographically and politically. Their stories give a good window into the lives of the proud Perlish aristocracy, and the challenges of living in the volcanic Tear.
But that’s not the only way The Stitcher and the Mute expands the series. As much as we enjoy writing about the gritty streets of Fenest, we want to show Cora outside her urban comfort zone. This book takes her across the Union, which gives us an opportunity to show the realms as they are now, not just as they appear in their stories. That’s quite an eye opener, for both Cora and the reader.
ToW: Where did the concept for Tales of Fenest as a series come from? What made you want to write these stories in particular?
Kath: We both love fantasy stories and have read them, and watched them, since we were kids. Once we’d decided to create our own fantasy world in our own fiction, an interesting question for us was: what happens to fantasy when you remove monarchial disputes? Can fantasy ‘do’ democracy? I’m an ardent republican (with a small ‘r’, firmly believing we could do without a monarchy in the UK) and I’m often frustrated that this kind of system is a ‘go to’ in traditional fantasy as a plot driver. Getting rid of this is where our election comes in.
We also wanted to explore how politics uses narrative, the relationship between the press and politics – hence the pennysheets which everybody reads all the time in our world. And finally we wanted to write about displaced people – those who are fleeing a disaster that is no fault of their own, seeking safety for their families. We began writing this trilogy in the midst of Trump’s rhetoric about a wall on the US / Mexico border, the EU Referendum in the UK, and desperate people risking the Mediterranean to reach Europe. The election stories told in our novels reflect the politics of the Union of Realms but also of our world too.
ToW: What do you hope fantasy fans will get out of The Stitcher and the Mute by the time they’ve finished it?
Kath: First and foremost, we hope readers enjoy the trilogy – that it’s entertaining and moving, and that the characters and their world stay with readers after they finish reading. That’s our most important job as novelists.
But there’s another side to The Tales of Fenest. We hope that readers might see how the relationship between politics and storytelling in the Union of Realms isn’t too dissimilar to that of the real world, and that we should all be thinking critically about the political narratives presented to us.
ToW: How are you getting on with the next book? Can you tell us anything about what to expect, or when it’s likely to be out?
Dave: It’s going really great. The next book is called Farewell to the Liar, and it’s scheduled for August 2021. We’ve got a few edits to do in the next few months, but we’re really happy with how it brings the trilogy to an exciting close. Readers can expect the final two election stories, including the hotly anticipated (and chequers’ favourite) Wayward story. That is, as long as Cora can keep the Wayward storyteller safe – a notoriously difficult task. It’s shaping up to be a close-run thing at the end, and the future of the whole Union is at stake.
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Thanks so much to Kath and Dave for taking the time to give such great, in-depth answers to these questions! I don’t know about you, but I’m really keen to make a start on this series – it sounds fantastic.
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