Mythic Friday Interview: Number 21 - Robin McKinley

You know those '50,000 Important Things To Know About Writing A Novel' sites and the way they tell you that the hook in your very first paragraph is VITAL? Well, I'm here to tell you that today's Mythic Guest, the very wonderful Robin McKinley, has one of the best examples I've ever seen of a hook in the very first line of her upcoming novel Pegasus (published November 2010).  Just listen to this:

" Because she was a princess, she had a pegasus."

How can you not read on after that?  It's simple, it's factual, and it pulls you right in with its strong little story claws and holds you tighter than a wyvern's prey, so that you immediately want to find out more.  Now, I've been lucky enough to get my hands on an ARC of Pegasus, and in the best tradition of Robin's famed footnotes, you can find out below what happened when it arrived one sunny morning*.  Yes, dear Reader, I was just marginally excited.  A new Robin novel is an eagerly anticipated event, and I'd got mine 3 whole months early.  So...what do I think? 

What I think is this.  It's probably the best book Robin's ever written--and I don't say that lightly.  I've been reading her books since 1985 (when I discovered The Blue Sword), and I've been reading and re-reading ever since.  Her urban vampire book, Sunshine, is what I give to teenagers to wean them off vanilla Edward Cullen, and I took both Beauty and Rose Daughter to hospital with me earlier in the year as my 'comfort reads'.  So you could say I'm qualified to comment.  Reading Pegasus for the first time was like walking into a dream I’d always had in the far reaches of my mind and always wanted to remember properly, but just didn’t know how to--until Robin told me. That seems a strange thing to say, but there’s just something about the pegasi which spoke to my whole being and fed a need in my soul. When I got to Rhiandomeer (the pegasi homeland), it felt like coming home in some indefinable sense. (I also had to say all the pegasi words out loud, because I wanted to be quite sure how they sounded on the air). In short, Robin's pegasi are simply unique beings who I fell in love with and who will now inhabit my mental hinterland forever. I don't want to reveal too much about the plot, for fear of spoilers, but if you want a sneak preview, and you'd like to read the first few chapters for yourself, you can do so HERE.  What I will say is that her human heroine, Sylvi and her pegasus hero, Ebon, are perfect foils for each other.  Sylvi is serious--a worrier and a worker like her father the king.  Ebon is a different kettle of feathers entirely. Larky, joky, unable to understand the fuss humans make about certain things.  What they have in common is their courage--and boy, are they going to need it in Book 2, is all I'm saying. Oh, and if you want a really VILE and TEETHGRINDINGLY NASTY magician, you'll find him incarnated in Fthoom (into whom I want to stick a very sharp and probably poisoned stick).  Truly--buy this book when it comes.  If you don't like it, I will eat my hat.  Publicly. On YouTube.

Now, that's quite enough from me.  Robin has worked her magic on my mythic questions--and I think you'll find that this 21st and last of the Mythic Friday Interviews is a real corker.  Welcome to Scribble City Central, Robin, thank you for persevering in the face of stomach 'flu plus other assorted horrors, and over to you.  I'll definitely want to be there when you don the mantle of Goddess of the Prevention of the Abuse of Power.  In fact, I'll be your hatchet and hammer bearer. Bloodthirsty?  ME?

1. Do you think that the retelling of myths is important or relevant for the children of today? Why should they care about some “dry old stories” which come from ancient or forgotten cultures they might never even have heard of?
I think the retelling of myths is important for EVERYBODY—and the earlier you start ’em the better! Myths—and folk and fairy tales—tell the big stories, the stories about what it really means to be human, and never mind the tedious restrictions of science and rationality. I belong to the ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy’ camp anyway. When I’m feeling crabby it seems to me that one major difference between science and art is that art admits to constant refocus and redefinition while science wants to claim that the answers are the answers and maybe it made a mistake last week but give it a minute or a year or a decent grant and it’ll have the answer nobbled. I don’t think most mortal answers can be captured and put on permanent display. Stories tell what we need to hear, fluidly and adaptably, without reference to this year’s technology . . . and yet isn’t it interesting how certain ones get told over and over and over again? That kind of inclination, orientation, accumulation says ‘truth’ to me, however much the details change.

2. What age were you when you came across your first myth or myths? Tell us how you felt then about the myths you first discovered. Did you love them or hate them? Did they scare you, excite you—or were you indifferent? What kind of myths were they? Greek? Norse? Native American? Celtic? Or from another culture entirely? Were they in a book you read? Or did you hear them as oral storytelling from someone else?
My first recollection of being swallowed up by myth was in the shape of D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, which is still in print: I have an actual 1962 first edition, a Christmas present from my great aunt: I would have been ten years old. (I wouldn’t discover The Lord of the Rings till I was eleven.) I read it and read it and read it. For years if you said ‘myth’ to me I automatically thought you meant Zeus and Athena and (ahem) Bellerophon (a golden bridle? Use your wits, man!) and so on. And some of the pictures haunt me still: Perseus’ sea monster, for example, and the look on the face [sic] of Sisyphus’ boulder. There were other important stories in my life—King Arthur, Robin Hood, the Mabinogion, the Arabian Nights. I took a dislike to Richard Wagner very young, so the Northerners were mostly off my radar till I was a grown-up (except as filtered through LOTR), and I knew very little about Far Eastern myth. I did have two much-loved books of Japanese and Chinese fairy tales, but these were fairy tales. It said so on the covers. But myths were Greek.

3. Looking back, what is your favourite myth of all time, from any culture? And why would you choose it?
I do have enormous trouble differentiating between myth and fairy tale. It’s a bit like science fiction and fantasy, perhaps: chiefly-SF writers/fans think fantasy is a subdivision of SF and chiefly-fantasy writers/fans think SF is a subdivision of fantasy. (You can draw your own conclusions about my opinion on the matter . . . ) But there is no way I can choose anything else than Beauty and the Beast, so for present purposes it’s a myth. It appears in some form in pretty well every culture we know about, in every period of history. Cupid and Psyche shows up in writing for the first time in the 2nd century as a retelling of an older tale. (And I met it, retold by Andrew Lang, for the first time in a book of fairy tales when I was six. So four whole years before D’Aulaire.)

As to why Beauty and the Beast: I have no idea. It’s my story. Everyone has a story. If you’re lucky you know what it is. It may be easier if you’re a writer, I suppose; then—if you’re lucky—it may hijack you. Possibly more than once. (Ahem.) Although some writers I imagine write in search of their story; such a writer might feel sorry for me, I suppose, for having the journey over. For me it’s like having a garden I can always go to, where the roses are always blooming and it’s always sunny and warm but not too warm—this is a garden I can sit down in, as opposed to the real-life ones which always need weeding and deadheading and feeding and tying in and fluffing up or strapping down . . . which is like the writing part of being a writer.

4. Who is the mythical hero, heroine or being you most dislike, and what made you feel that way about them?
Oh dear. There are so many. Pretty much any of the thick-thewed thick-headed bash-it-first-and-ask-questions-later mighty hero types—and frankly some of the chicks who are just like them only with bronze bras. I don’t particularly hate Heracles, although a lot of the nonsense seems to start with him—which brings up another pet hate, which is the vicious-bitch goddess type, like Hera, who kept sending Heracles mad. Hera was a cow, no question, but what about her led-by-his-gonads husband, that total jerk Zeus? GAAAH. I think if I have a pet hate, it might be Zeus. King of the gods and the biggest abuser of power—mind boggling abuse of power. In my pantheon there is going to be a Goddess of the Prevention of the Abuse of Power.

5. Is there a mythical beast you are particularly fond of? If so, which one and why?
Ahem. Well, clearly I have to say Pegasus—or the pegasi, which are not in the original—but I just tend to like mythical beasts, full stop. Dragons have always been very popular with me—I loved Kenneth Grahame’s reluctant dragon long before I met Smaug. I grew up hating unicorns—except Peter Beagle’s last one and Ted Sturgeon’s Silken-Swift—because I was a child and teenager in an era where fuzzy unicorns, quilted unicorns, crystal unicorns and other extreme unicorn twaddle was overwhelming. And then I found myself putting unicorns (very much against my will) in Rose Daughter and we had to kiss and make up.

I periodically fiddle with the idea of writing about the hydra. I feel there is another, more sympathetic side to her story—perhaps something a little like Terry Pratchett’s Luggage, only with heads.

6. How have myths had an influence on your writing life, if at all?
LOL! I think I’ve already answered that!

7. If you could choose to be the demigod child of any one mythical god or goddess, which one would it be and why? Which power would you like to inherit from them—and what would you do with it?
I was faced with that ‘what would your superpower be’ question that has become so popular before it became ubiquitous, and I was very proud of myself for on the hoof (as it were) coming up with the answer ‘wisdom’. I’m now old enough that if I were going to grow wise as an inevitable part of the maturation process, the way the older generation liked to tell you it was when you were still the younger generation, I would be getting there. I’m not. And I look around at this world, mostly run by people with at least some grey in their hair and I think, nope. Not happening. So I’ll be Athena’s daughter, please. (Quite how this is going to be done with a virgin goddess I’m not sure—but if Pegasus can be born out of Medusa’s severed neck I’m sure something can be arranged. Oh—parthenogenesis, of course. It was probably Metis anyway, and nothing to do with that ratbag Zeus). And my specialty will be the prevention of the abuse of power, and my signature attributes are the handful of long nails with which I pin body parts of abusers to walls.

More about Robin:
Robin McKinley is an American writer who has won many awards in the US, including the Newbery Medal for The Hero and the Crown, a Newbery Honor for The Blue Sword, and the Mythopoeic Award for Adult Literature for Sunshine. She lives in Hampshire, England with her husband, author Peter Dickinson (see Mythic Friday Interview 14), two hellhounds nicknamed Chaos and Darkness, an 1897 Steinway upright named Rhodanthe, and increasing numbers of rose bushes wedged into three [sic] tiny gardens. The view out her office window is her change-ringing bell tower and in the next village over is a paragon among horses whom Robin is so fortunate as to have permission to ride.

Robin's Blog, Days in the Life* *with footnotes is HERE  Beware!  It's addictive....
Robin's Website is HERE
You can follow Robin on Twitter at @robinmckinley
or you can become a Facebook fan HERE

*Person (might be me) says in high voice: “ohmygodohmygodohmygod” several times. Dogs look at person as if mad. Person rips open parcel and peeks inside. Person shrieks: “OOHOOHOOHOOH, EEEEEEEEE, MEEEEEEPPPPP,” pants and does little jig round kitchen. Person seizes contents of parcel and holds to beating chest. Person leaps and capers around table, yelling maniacally and incoherently. Dogs join in general rejoicing.

Mythic Friday Interview: Number 20 - Herbie Brennan

Nicolas Tucker of  The Independent called Herbie Brennan's Faerie Wars, (first book in his Faerie Wars Chronicles), "a crossover title from which few readers of any age would wish to cross back" and I quite agree with him.  If your kids want to move on from Potter, Herbie has created three really excellent characters in Pyrgus Malvae, Henry Atherton and Holly Blue for them to do so with.  Now I want you to brace yourselves here.  If you don't know about him already (and if not, why not?), Herbie Brennan has a CV which might make you reel slightly when you read it in the notes below.  A journalist at eighteen; youngest newspaper editor in Ireland at twenty-four; booksales of over 8 million in fifty countries. I could almost say Blimey! if I used that sort of expression, but in any language it's an impressive record, you'll agree (well, you'd better or I'll be after you with those wolfy fangs of mine!). If that wasn't enough, then just for a little additional awesomeness, Herbie is also an expert on stuff like comparative religion, being a magician (of the Merlin sort, not the rabbits and hats kind), reincarnation, esotericism and quantum physics--things which, with my links to shamanism and wicca, I too find of great interest.  (Well, maybe not the quantum physics, because my brain simply won't cope with the understanding bit.  The spirit is willing, but the little grey cells are holding up placards saying "What?" and "Eh?" and "Come again about Schrödinger's blasted Cat."  If only someone could EXPLAIN (where are you Anne Rooney)...but I digress.)  Back to Herbie.  On the subject of magicianship, he talks a little below about the concept of Pathworking (a technique which has something in common with the shamanic vision quest), and the power of journeys of the imagination when combined with myth.  Having experienced something similar when I worked with the great British mythologists and shamans John and Caitlin Matthews a few years ago, I can attest to that.  Working in that way with myths brings up some extraordinary and exciting paths of the spirit to explore, and it's something I very much want to go back to doing.

I wrote about the Faerie Wars Chronicles over on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure a little while ago when I picked my Five Fabulous Forays into Faerie and said how much I liked them (and how much I couldn't wait for number 5--The Faeman Quest which is coming from Bloomsbury in January).  After that, I thought a bit about whether Herbie would ever consider doing an MFI for me.  To cut a long story short, Reader, he said yes!  (Well, I am VERY persuasive.)  So here we are on the second last Friday of the series, and I'm delighted to welcome Herbie to Scribble City Central, and to share his mythical thoughts and wisdom with you.  Here we go...you are definitely not going to be disappointed.


1. Do you think that the retelling of myths is important or relevant for the children of today? Why should they care about some “dry old stories” which come from ancient or forgotten cultures they might never even have heard of?
Ah, but they’re not just dry old stories — they’re the basic patterns of human existence. They teach everything we need to know about how to lead our lives, what to embrace and what to avoid. Furthermore, myths contain a very special type of magic; and I mean that word literally. Search any myth and you’ll quickly come across what Jung referred to as an archetype, a creature who is certainly a spirit and quite possibly a god, trapped in the web of the story like a djinn in a bottle. Release him or her and they’ll accompany you forever, wandering in the depths of your mind giving you guidance and sharing their wisdom. Important for today’s children? Myths are absolutely vital and much of the mess the world is in today springs from the fact that the West has largely abandoned its myths.
 
2. What age were you when you came across your first myth or myths? Tell us how you felt then about the myths you first discovered. Did you love them or hate them? Did they scare you, excite you—or were you indifferent? What kind of myths were they? Celtic? Greek? Norse? Native American? Or from another culture entirely? Were they in a book you read? Or did you hear them as oral storytelling from someone else?
Can’t remember exactly, but it must have been when I was a child, almost certainly Greek and almost certainly in a book I read.
 
3. Looking back, what is your favourite myth of all time, from any culture? And why would you choose it?
I’ve always been drawn to the Arthurian mythos, the Matter of Britain. When I was a young man I trained for nine years as a magician and much of the work involved imaginal journeys through aspects of the myth — the Grail Castle, for example, or the Isle of Avalon. The process is known as Pathworking and at one stage of my magical career I developed a freeform style of Pathworking that permitted groups to engage on such inner journeys without preconception or guidance. The first group to experiment with the technique went straight to the Lady of the Lake and had an experience of the Eternal Feminine, with profound implications for several group members. These myths are alive and the figures in them are living entities. There is nothing to beat the feeling of excitement that arises when you realize this.
 
4. Who is the mythical hero, heroine or being you most dislike, and what made you feel that way about them?
I can’t say I dislike any of them. Even the mythical baddies have something to teach.
 
5. Is there a mythical beast you are particularly fond of? If so, which one and why?
Well, that would have to be the dragon, wouldn’t it? Even as a boy I was trying to work out how it could breathe fire. (My best guess was flint teeth to strike the spark that would ignite methane belched up from a double stomach.) In later life I was fascinated by the widespread stretch of the dragon myth from China through South America and all across Europe. It proved remarkably tenacious as well. The last reported sighting of a dragon in England wasn’t in the depths of history but during the Victorian era, in St Leonard’s Forest in Sussex. I’m not sure we don’t still have dragons in our skies, except that now we call them UFOs and mistake them for space ships. In mythology, dragons have always been the most magical of creatures, dangerous and helpful by turns, guardians of treasure and, most important of all, the vital element in one or our most important life myths — the need to slay the dragon in order to release the feminine within.
 
6. How have myths had an influence on your writing life, if at all? 
Huge. I wrote a series of gamebooks in the 1980s that were based, in a completely batty way, on the Arthurian mythos. More recently, there are mythic and archetypal elements in all of my Faerie Wars fantasy series. The fourth book, Faerie Lord, is one long mythic epic outlining a quest that culminates with the slaying of the dragon guardian of the hero’s beloved, as arranged by the Trickster archetype. I didn’t even bother to disguise it.
 
7. If you could choose to be the demigod child of any one mythical god or goddess, which one would it be? Which power would you like to inherit from them—and what would you do with it?
I was tempted to say Venus, the Roman goddess of love, then rabbit on sanctimoniously about the power of love, the need to love one another irrespective of race, creed, colour, sexual preference and yada-yada-yada. Then I remembered Julius Caesar was descended from Venus and all he ever did to get famous was kill people. So I think I’ll opt for Merlin instead. His parentage may not have been directly from the gods — Geoffrey of Monmouth insists his father was a demon and his mother was a nun — but he is the premier Western archetype of the magician and I like that. What would I do with his power? Take things as they come, I think.

More about Herbie:
A professional writer whose work has appeared in more than fifty countries, Herbie Brennan is enjoyed by children and adults alike — sales of his 108 published titles already exceed 8 million copies.

His young adult fantasy novel, Faerie Wars, rocketed to international success, achieving best-seller status in more than 20 overseas editions, and was voted No 1 Top Ten Teenage Pick in the United States and listed as a New York Times Best Seller title.

Equally prolific in the adult market, Herbie has a powerful reputation for challenging conventional assumptions. This is reflected in his interests, which range from transpersonal psychology, spirituality, reincarnation and psychical research to comparative religion and quantum physics.
Web site: http://www.herbiebrennan.com/
http://www.faeriewars.com/homepage.asp

Mythic Friday Interview: Number 19 - Joanne Owen

Dreamy, gothic, chilling, macabre--these are all words which can be applied to Joanne Owen's first two novels, Puppet Master and The Alchemist and the Angel. They are a hauntingly original blend of the historical with a kind of Angela Carter-esque fantastical absurd.  But I think what I like best about Joanne's books is that they are liberally dotted with golden nuggets of folkloric myth.  The tales of Central and Eastern Europe are not my field of expertise--Baba Yaga is one of my favourite stories (as it is Joanne's), but that's about as far as it goes for me.  So when I met Joanne for the first time this year (we shared a speaking platform at a recent Writeaway conference) my ears pricked up at once when she started talking about Cabinets of Curiosity and Chapels of Bones and, of course, all that Slavic and Czech folklore.  It was immediately obvious to me that she would be the perfect person to do a Mythic Friday interview, and after reading her books I'm all fired up to go and find out more about golems and magic hazelnuts and enchanted tree stumps in deep dark forests. No doubt I shall have nightmares for weeks!  Welcome to Scribble City Central, Joanne, thanks for visiting and over to you. 

Do you think that the retelling of myths is important or relevant for the children of today? Why should they care about some “dry old stories” which come from ancient or forgotten cultures they might never even have heard of?
Yes, I think myth, legend, folk and fairy tales are still very much relevant and important. Their exploration of character archetypes and the psychology of relationships, fear, conflict and confronting and overcoming problems has enormous emotional resonance. They also open doors to other times and places, bringing history alive in a far more intense and inspiring way than simply reading about those places and periods in a text book. Above all, whether populated by vengeful gods and goddesses, monstrous beasts, wicked witches or wise old women, they possess an incredible capacity to excite, terrify, inspire and delight - nothing dry about that!

What age were you when you came across your first myth or myths? Tell us how you felt then about the myths you first discovered. Did you love them or hate them? Did they scare you, excite you—or were you indifferent? What kind of myths were they? Greek? Norse? Native American? Celtic? Or from another culture entirely? Were they in a book you read? Or did you hear them as oral storytelling from someone else?
Not exactly myths in the strict sense, but one of my earliest memories is being read a collection of fairy tales I still have. There was a time - I must have been five or six - when my dad read Rapunzel to me every single night! I always preferred the scarier stories, the thrill of following a character’s journey through the most unimaginably terrible situations, from being trapped in a tower by a wicked witch, to being set the overwhelmingly impossible task of spinning wool into gold, to the horror of realising the gingerbread house in the deep, dark woods is anything but a safe haven.

As a child, I also enjoyed Welsh folk tales, and from classical mythology I found Pandora’s Box particularly impactful. I was intrigued by the idea that she was said to have been the first ever woman, and you can’t fail to empathise with her desire to open the box, and share her horror when she realises she’s responsible for unleashing evil into the world.

Looking back, what is your favourite myth of all time, from any culture? And why would you choose it?
Tricky, but I think it has to be all those tales connected with the Slavic witch Baba Yaga. ‘Baba’ means granny or old woman in many Slavic languages, and she’s very much an archetypal crone figure, sharing characteristics with the likes of Hecate and The Fates of classical mythology. Bony, long-toothed, and wild-haired, Baba Yaga scales the skies in a pestle-propelled mortar, and lives in a log cottage that’s raised from the ground by a pair of chicken legs and surrounded by a skull-topped fence. Some believe her origins reach back as far as Paleolithic times, when she was a patroness/goddess of huntsmen, horsemen and agriculture. She’s most known as a destructive force, but her reach is all encompassing: she’s both Destroyer and Creator. She controls time and nature, the rising and setting of the sun and the cycle of the moon. Life and death – human, animal and plant - is in her command. She’s also Mistress of the Underworld: her hearth is said to be the threshold to the world of the dead. In some stories more weight is given to her all-knowing capacity. Interestingly, the Russian word for witch, ved’ma, derives from the word to know, ved’. One of my favourite Baba Yaga stories is ‘Vasilisa the Beautiful’ in which a girl, guided by her magical wooden doll, successfully completes a series of tasks set by Baba Yaga and is freed from her bullying stepfamily.

Who is the mythical being you most dislike, and what made you feel that way about them?
None in particular come to mind. There are plenty of unpleasant, horrific mythical beings, but that’s their purpose and appeal!

Is there a mythical beast you are particularly fond of? If so, which one?
Again, no single being or beast comes to mind, but at the moment I’m preoccupied with Slavic Rusalki – the water-dwelling ghosts of girls who’ve died untimely or violent deaths – who will play a role in my next book.

How have myths had an influence on your writing life, if at all?
Very much so. In my first two books I retell Central European folktales and legends about Prague, and interweave them into the narrative and characters’ lives.

The initial idea for my first book, Puppet Master, was sparked by the legend that tells how Prague was founded by a young woman called Libuše. Prophetess, healer and wise woman, Libuše was elected to be her tribe’s first ever queen and foretold Prague’s greatness as a city of spires and gold. Both Puppet Master and my second book, The Alchemist and the Angel, incorporate several such tales and legends – from Prague-specific stories about blinded clockmakers and golem creatures fashioned from clay, to Czech and Slovak folktales populated by trickster devils and tree stumps that transform into greedy children.

As well as Baba Yaga and the Rusalki beings previously mentioned, I’m currently enjoying lots of Russian and Baltic stories and legends as I plan my next novel, including some very exciting Lithuanian nature god myths.

If you could choose to be the demigod child of one mythical god or goddess from any pantheon, which one would it be? Which power would you like to inherit from them—and what would you do with it?
I’ve always been more drawn to and inspired by home-spun folktales than myths about all-powerful gods or super humans. I love the idea of adventures happening close to home, of the seemingly ordinary and domestic being transformed into the weird, miraculous, terrifying or magical. So it follows that I’d prefer to be the granddaughter of a wise old woman than to have superhuman powers, or be the offspring of a particular god or goddess.

More about Joanne:
Joanne Owen was born in Pembrokeshire, Wales and read Anthropology and Archaeology with Social and Political Sciences at St. John's College, Cambridge. A visit to Prague in 2000 inspired her first novel, Puppet Master (Orion, 2008), which was long-listed for the Carnegie Medal and Branford Boase Award, described as ‘beautifully crafted, rich in the tradition of circus, theatre and magic’ (Julia Eccleshare, Love Reading) and has been translated into German, Polish, Greek, Dutch and Romanian to date. Her second novel, The Alchemist and the Angel (Orion, 2010), follows an orphan’s quest to create an elixir of life in Renaissance Prague, a journey that takes him from the city’s plague-ridden ghetto to the court and Cabinet of Curiosity of alchemy-obsessed Emperor Rudolf II. Joanne now lives in north London where by day she works in publishing and by night writes and plays accordion and bass guitar.

Become a fan of Joanne Owen Books on Facebook
Follow Joanne on Twitter http://twitter.com/joanneowen
Visit http://orionbooks.co.uk/ for further information

**TWITTER COMPETITION** Win 2 Signed Sets of GREEK BEASTS & HEROES

To celebrate all 12 books now being out, my lovely publishers, Orion, are running a Twitter competition to win 2 complete signed sets of GREEK BEASTS AND HEROES.  All you have to do is RT the competition and then (separately) tell @ninadouglas which is your favourite myth (from any culture) and why in 140 characters. The competition runs till Friday 13th August at 12pm, and that's when I shall be judging the entries and picking the 2 lucky winners.  So please spread the word and get tweeting! You can find details at @lucycoats and @ninadouglas, and the hashtags are #bookgiveaway and #GBandH.
This is the luscious prize...!

Over at the Other Place Today

I'm talking about The Importance of Reading over on the Awfully Big Blog Adventure today, so please do go and join in the conversation.  I'm looking for really good recent book suggestions to add to my huge reading pile....

Mythic Friday Interview Number 18 - Steve Feasey

If I needed any piece of arcane knowledge on lycanthropy, guess who I'd go to?  Yep.  Steve Feasey.  Why? Because Steve has written a series of the most original teen werewolf novels I've ever read, and his encyclopaedic knowledge of dark monsters (mostly vile and horrible things that go bump in the night and rip your head off) is second to none.  I first met Steve in a very literary setting--The Eagle and Child pub in Oxford where Tolkien and his fellow Inklings met to talk and drink.  I like to think that we carried on the literary tradition--certainly we talked about books all night. We also talked about werewolves, with the result that I went straight home and bought the first in Steve's Changeling series (Wereling in the USA).  I fell for Trey Laporte, his reluctant werewolf, at once, and I can absolutely understand why teenagers queue up to buy these books.  I've read all the Changeling novels now (and can't wait for Demon Games, the 4th in the series, which is published on 3rd Sept in the UK).  Not only do Steve's books have werewolves in them, they also have vampires--plus a series of really excellent invented denizens of the Netherworld (I particularly like the Necrotroph), and the adventure rocks along in a way that has you turning pages quicker than a Draugr's revenge.  I knew Steve would give us a great Mythic Friday Interview--and he hasn't disappointed one little bit.  Welcome to Scribble City Central, Steve--and over to you for some marvellous mythic answers (I'm SO with you on Dionysus and the Hangover Cure, by the way!).

1. Do you think that the retelling of myths is important or relevant for the children of today? Why should they care about some “dry old stories” which come from ancient or forgotten cultures they might never even have heard of?
Who couldn’t like the great action/adventure yarns that are the ancient myths and legends? Okay, some of the characters are annoyingly flawed to the point that they make you want to scream: “Now whatever you do, don’t open that box. Got it? DON’T open the box.” Whoops. But even the ninnies like Pandora and Icarus still hold great appeal for younger readers.

2. What age were you when you came across your first myth or myths? Tell us how you felt then about the myths you first discovered. Did you love them or hate them? Did they scare you, excite you—or were you indifferent? What kind of myths were they? Greek? Norse? Native American? Celtic? Or from another culture entirely? Were they in a book you read? Or did you hear them as oral storytelling from someone else?
I discovered Greek mythology when I was about ten years old. I would borrow books from the library and read them over and over, and I remember being quite annoyed that the Romans nicked all of the Greek gods and tried to pass them off as their own. How dare they?

Later on I discovered the Norse legends, but they never had quite the same appeal as those early Greek stories.

3. Looking back, what is your favourite myth of all time, from any culture? And why would you choose it?
I used to adore the stories of Heracles (Hercules? Who he?) and his twelve labours (although when you consider the reason he was set them in the first place is to atone for infanticide, it takes some of the shine off of the tale). The depictions of the demi-god draped in his lion skin, and wielding his club is just too delicious for a young, impressionable boy. I particularly liked the way that Heracles was so dismissive of the gods, not kowtowing to them in the way they wanted him to. He wasn’t above a bit of skullduggery when he thought he could get away with it either, like when he tricks Atlas into taking the world back onto his shoulders.

But if I’m honest, I think the real appeal of Heracles to me as a young boy was the slaying of all those terrible monsters. Fabulous stuff!

4. Who is the mythical being you most dislike, and what made you feel that way about them?
As a young reader, I remember taking a dislike to the rather heartless elfin blacksmith, Volund, of Norse mythology. I know he was dealt a rather harsh hand by the dastardly Nidud the Cruel (who hamstrings him and imprisons him on an island to either work or starve), but I felt his own callous treatment of the king’s daughter and the murder of the young princes was rather unseemly.

5. Is there a mythical beast you are particularly fond of? If so, which one?
My son, who is also mad about the Greek myths at the moment (thanks to the Percy Jackson books), asked me this question the other day. I answered that the Lernean Hydra was my favourite. I explained that this was because there had been a picture in one of my books about Greek mythology, depicting Heracles frantically lopping heads off of the beast with one hand whilst wrestling more heads with the other hand. It was rather gruesome (which is probably why I liked it so much).

I’m naturally a big fan of werewolves, and during school visits I often tell the myth of King Lycaon who was cursed to become a wolf after feeding human flesh to Zeus. The first lycanthrope.

6. Finally, how have myths had an influence on your writing life, if at all? 
Most of the horror creatures that feature in the Changeling books are the stuff of myth and legend. When I was researching for the books I was surprised at just how old some of these stories were, and how our western portrayal of creatures like vampires differs so radically from the original descriptions of ‘gas-filled, bloated, purple-coloured, undead creatures that stank of decay and the earth that they had to bury themselves in each night’. About as far away from Edward Cullen and the other Twilight vamps as you could imagine!

In addition to the classic horror tropes, I had to invent a huge number of nether-creatures to populate my own version of Hades, and there is little doubt that my early love affair with Greek mythology and the wonderful monsters contained in those tales helped me no end in this.

7. If you could choose to be the demigod child of any one mythical god or goddess, which one would it be? Which power would you like to inherit from them—and what would you do with it?
Dionysus. I bet he threw a great party, and I have no doubt that he would have the ultimate hangover cure – and I’m talking a hangover CURE. Now a person could make a lot of money with something like that….

More about Steve:
Steve  lives with his family in Hertfordshire, UK, (where he sometimes hears a strange and unidentifiable howling just after midnight). He coaches under-8s rugby and likes to win! He's passionate about reading and spends a lot of time visiting schools, talking about Changeling, his favourite books, the best horror movies ever and his next series, which will launch in Spring 2011.  Steve started writing relatively late, in his 30's, and the Changeling series of books are his first venture into teen fiction.

Steve's website is at: http://stevefeasey.com/
His blog is at: http://rantsteverant.blogspot.com/

His Facebook Fan Page is HERE and you can also follow @stevefeasey on Twitter