I arrive late -- rather my default setting, I’m afraid -- and apologetic. Seanan McGuire is unreasonably gracious about having been kept waiting five minutes (okay, maybe ten) in the chilly foyer of the cavernous Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Center, early on the third day of the 2010 World Science Fiction Convention. She is possessed of a smile and four large bottles of Coke Zero (“The 7-11 has two for five bucks, and I live on this stuff, so I can’t be paying four dollars for a little one out of the vending machine”), and my hangover-plagued mind tries to marshal its meager resources as I realize I should probably be in better shape for a chat with someone who has so quickly become one of my favorite authors.

Seanan McGuire burst onto the Urban Fantasy scene in 2009 with the publication of the first book in her October Daye series, Rosemary and Rue. The best blend of fairy legend and detective noir you’ll ever come across, the witty and injury-prone October “Toby” Daye is a changeling: half-fae, half-human and all kick-ass. In addition to Toby, this year’s eye-popping zombie political thriller Feed can also be attributed to McGuire, though published under the “open pseudonym” of Mira Grant.

A few nights later, McGuire will be presented with the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer at the 2010 Hugo ceremony. But on the day in question, the third October Daye book, An Artificial Night, is due for release in less than a week. Is she excited?

SM: Well, it’s a little stressful right now because I fly back to the States on Wednesday and the book comes out in the States on Tuesday. I realize that my being in country does not actually impact the book launch, but it does change how it feels.

GS: Is it normally a big day for you when you launch a book? Is there a party?

SM: I always have book launch parties -- I’m having two this year at bookstores in the Bay Area and I have a whole traveling circus that comes together. We have musicians and we’re doing birthday cake this year, because it’s the one year anniversary of the Toby series starting up so it’s Toby’s “birthday”.

GS: Who even needs a reason for cake?

SM: Exactly! I’m having a party with musicians and cake: I win.

GS: Chocolate? Vanilla?

SM: We’re doing both. I prefer white cake, but for a lot of people it’s just not cake if it’s not chocolate.

GS: What about Toby? Have you thought so much into her back story that you say: “Yeah, I think she likes white cake”, or “I think she’s more of a chocolate person”? How fundamental is your knowledge of her?

SM: My knowledge of Toby is far too fundamental. I know how she takes her coffee, I know her favorite kinds of soup. Part of getting to know a character for me is that I just write pages and pages of stuff that will never be published -- because it’s dead boring -- but it’s: “Toby Goes to the Grocery Store” Or: “Toby Argues About Doing Laundry”. It’s a little disconcerting at times, because I know so many things about her that I have to remember what has and hasn’t gone into the books yet, so I wind up reading them all again every time a new one’s coming out, and eventually that’s going to be quite a time commitment.

GS: Just how many books do you plan to write in this series?

SM: Well, we’ve contracted for five. In my perfect world of sunshine and zombie puppies, it’s running at least twelve or thirteen, and I know what goes on in all of those. I’m playing a very, very long game to get to my ending. There are things in Book 1 that are put in place that aren’t going to come out until Book 7, and I have to make sure they’re all there so that people can’t say I cheated. I know what the ending is; I do have an end, and it changes a little bit as things move, but the overall sequence of events remains the same, I just push that out a little farther every time we move forward. But when we get to the ending, then that will be that. As a reader, I really don’t like it when I am reading something – or, as a viewer, watching something – and I can see your story finished here, your story finished after five books or after five seasons and they offered you so much money that you continued for two more books or two more seasons. And that’s great for more money now, I understand wanting more money now -- I like to feed the cats -- but it is no longer as good of a story. You can’t just read it all and go “Aw, that was just what I wanted, that’s satisfying.” Instead you get to be: “Aw, that was what I wanted, and then there’s…”

GS: An epilogue?

SM: (laughs) An epilogue that lasts a long time.

GS: So even if your fans were desperate for more Toby, you wouldn’t listen to them? How much fan input do you listen to?

SM: You have to listen to fan input to some degree, because people notice things in your work that you don’t necessarily, because you know what you meant to say. If you kill every female character in a book -- you’re not making a statement on females, you like women, they just happen to die --that might be something you might not want to do again. So I do try to pay attention, and make sure that things continue to make sense or clarify things that were non-comprehensive and correct some things, but I’m not suddenly going to turn everything around because somebody doesn’t like it.

GS: You’re only two books in -- well, three, including the new one out next week. Do you already have people e-mailing complaining of continuity errors, or saying things don’t make sense in a world building kind of way? Because you’ve barely had a chance to build your world!

SM: Exactly. I’ve had people point out what they think are continuity errors; I’m sure there are continuity errors ‘cause there are always continuity errors but those, in particular, were not. But it’s more “Why haven’t you done this?” or “Why haven’t you done that?” A lot of people ship Toby and Tybalt… hell, I ship Toby and Tybalt… [Not Connor? - RH]

GS: He’s so mean, yet so hot.

SM: Thank you! But I have people saying “Why aren’t we having sex yet?” and I say “Because we’re two books in and Toby’s kind of… well, I wouldn’t date that.

GS: You mean she’s a hot mess?

SM: She’s a hot buttered mess! And Tybalt’s immortal. He can wait till she sorts her shit out. And at the end of Book 2, he’s got a couple issues that he needs to sort out, which gets us into Book 3, because Toby’s not supposed to be able to do what she did in Book 2, and that really isn’t what you want to see in…

GS: A changeling?

SM: Yeah.

GS: How did you come to settle on the changeling myth as the area you wanted to play around with the most? Was that something that always fired your imagination when you were studying folklore, or was it rather something that came to you later, when you thought it was a story you could tell -- or retell -- without hitting people over the head with it in a scholarly way?

SM: I’ve always had a passion for folklore, I think it’s brilliant. It was this cohesive story that we put together over the course of centuries and everybody knew little bits and pieces of it but if you actually start looking at it, it contradicts itself constantly, because again it was hundreds of people over hundreds of years, so I started fiddling with it trying to figure out what could be wrong. Look at Xena: Warrior Princess… that is not what Greece was like.

GS: Or look at Hercules; Herakles was really a murdering, raping, pillaging nightmare…

SM: Oh, he was a bastard! He killed his wife and children, I mean come on! So the changeling thing is something that is completely not out of folklore. What the hell is a fairy gonna do with a human baby?

GS: And then they’re supposed to exchange it with, what, a fairy child?

SM: Yes, sometimes it’s a demon, or a fairy child, but I just think: what are the fae doing with the human child, they don’t want those! They scream and they make messes…

GS: And they’re not immortal and they can’t fly.

SM: Exactly!

GS: So much of what we think we know about fairies comes from those images we see as children: Tinker Bell and the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio. But then there’s the dark side of the fae that you show us… it’s kind of like growing up with the Disney Snow White and then watching that creepy Sigourney Weaver version.

SM: The “cute” fairy really came out of the Victorians. I think if we found someone from the pre-Victorian era and showed them what children are watching now, they’d be appalled that children were allowed to look at images of fairies, ever, because the fairies are what steal your children and sour the milk of your cattle and trash everything -- why are we inviting their attention? But the Victorians didn’t like the sexuality of the fairies and the non-containedness of the fairies, so they started melting them down a little bit. Anything pre-Victorian is darker than I’ve been allowed to get so far, because people just don’t expect that from the fae, but the fae will Mess. You. Up. They are not fluffy bunnies. And the older stories like Snow White; that Sigourney Weaver movie was somewhat darker than the original story but not by that much. Sleeping Beauty didn’t wake up because the prince kissed her, she woke up because the prince raped her, she gave birth, and as the children were crawling up her body looking for food they sucked the poisoned pin from her finger. Fairy tales are not messing around.

GS: Is that something you also plan to explore: the way that fairy tales and fairies have been confused in the popular imagination? Because fairy tales and the fae seem to be two very distinct fields.

SM: They are: there’s the folklore and there are the fairy stories. I’m playing a little but with the fairy stories in this series but not that much. I’m mostly sticking to the folklore itself, which is already huge and complicated and I keep making it bigger and more complicated by trying to bring in other areas. The issue with the fae in Toby’s world is that you’re starting from a Euro-centric viewpoint -- which you kind of have to, if you’re looking at that particular fairy tradition -- and I have to try and find ways to bring in other things without breaking the rules of my fae and that can be difficult at times.

GS: And are you finding that as your world gets bigger and more complicated you’re still researching, still finding things that you think: “Hey, that would be cool” and putting them in?

SM: Absolutely! Folklore was my major at University -- I did a split Folklore/Herpetology major, which was basically prepping me to be a Fantasy author, because snakes and fairy tales create dragons. That’s my degree. I still love to read the stories, so I am constantly researching and there are a bunch of books that you can’t find except when you trip over them at a used book sale and suddenly you’ve got eight hundred pages of new things to learn, which is great and fun.

GS: And, of course, every scholar who looks at the fairy has their own take on the stories; do you have a favorite? Is there any one authority whose work you subscribe to, or do you look at all of folklore as a whole and then find your own truth?

SM: I do take everything on board and find my own truth, but I’d have to say that my favorite of the scholars is probably Katharine Briggs. She did the field guide to elves, fairies, gnomes and other little people, she did the folklore of cats, she’s very, very good on the folklore of the British Isles. I also use Child’s Ballads a lot, because while I’m leaving most of the fairy tales off to one side I’ve got a lot of the Ballads very central as recitations of history that just didn’t get the details right. And Child‘s Ballads is a five volume set, they’re each, like, a foot thick and full of annotations. They hate your freedom.

Continued...