Karen's Books

Sunday 28 September 2014

Why I chose to write for a YA audience



Karen Wrighton
Author of Ascension of the Whyte

When I was young there were children’s books and there were adult’s books.  From a very young age I loved reading and I gobbled up Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and Secret Seven like Chinese food, I never seemed to be able to get enough. I read pretty much all of them before I even started high school.  Then there was little else to read apart from the traditional oldies like Alice in Wonderland and Black Beauty. Eventually I had no choice but to make the big jump into adult literature and I began reading classics like Little Women, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights as well as popular adult fiction such as John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit (I loved Science fiction and fantasy even then).

In those days there was little if any literature for the ‘gap’ between children’s and adult fiction and although I was able to make the jump quite easily, many of my contemporaries did not. Finding relatively few books that included teenage protagonists with whom they could identify, many of my friends just stopped reading.  Some of them never read for pleasure again.


When my own children, both keen readers, approached that age I worried that the same thing would happen to them, but it didn’t, because there was a book out there that changed all that, it was called Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.  Instead of my children being turned off reading, they were turned on big time, and what’s more the books managed to bridge that ‘gap’ so seamlessly that I could even share the enjoyment of the stories with them.  I thought that this was WONDERFUL, which is why it was the natural choice for me to write for this audience and join the ever growing number of YA authors who are successfully continuing what J. K. Rowling started and encouraging young people not to fall through that gap into the abyss of ‘Never to pick up a book again land’.  However, this is not the only reason that I chose to write for young adults, perhaps the main reason is that, quite simply, I like young people, and I also happen to love to read the books that they love to read; books that produce a tingle down your spine as you read them, books that make you feel like a child at Disney Land, books that make you really BELIEVE in the magic of make believe.  I hope that my books do that, and if they do I will be one very happy storyteller. 

Karen


Sunday 21 September 2014

Character Interview With Rose The Whyte


Character Interview with Rose the Whyte

In your own words, how would you describe the four different areas of the world you live in?

Well I have only really explored Aurum and Ferrum to any extent yet. I only know about Hydrargyrum and Rhodium from what I have learned from the Sooth and from Cognito class. Aurum is the most eastern of the Afterlands, the land of the golden dawn. The climate in Aurum is temperate, but quite warm and the landscape is generally one of wide open plains, though there are mountainous and wooded areas and a large area of swampland off towards the south west inhabited by the wolf men known as rougarou. The capital city of Aureus is rather grand and its people are intellectuals who are relatively wealthy. There is little evidence of hardship in Aurum from what I have seen, everyone seeming to lead a happy and contented existence, except for the rougarou that is.

When we travelled into Ferrum the landscape changed dramatically to one of green rolling hills, forests, waterfalls and areas of open water.  There seemed to be a lot of animals and farm land, the buildings had a more rustic feel and the people were less refined than in Aurum. We ran into some prejudice in one of the small towns and that upset me a great deal. I was disappointed that such a hardworking and unpretentious people could harbour such hostile feelings about people from their own world, many of whom even had Ferrish blood running in their veins. 

I learned a little about the southernmost land, Hydrargyrum, from one of its people; the Blood Ascendant, Lady El-on-ah. She described it as a hard land, a barren land, where its people were forced to endure great hardship and had to work in the mines in order to provide for their meagre existence. In the Oratory we were taught that the area was inhospitable because it was mainly volcanic, but that it was also one of the few areas in the Afterlands where dragons could be seen living wild.

Of my own land, Rhodium, I have yet to travel there and I know very little except for what Lord Dux has told me. Rhodium the most northerly of the Afterlands and is a land of snow and ice, its towns and cities were now mainly in ruins after the Great Dragon War of over a thousand years’ ago.  No one lives there now; all of the Whytes were destroyed. I am the only member of a long dead race, from a land of ruins frozen in ice and time.


How do you feel about each of the different members in your cell?

When we ascend to these lands, alone and without memory of our past lives or our families, we are told that the members of our cell will become our families, and that is sort of how I see them now.

Auriel is like a sister to me and I regard Ash and Lee as brothers. I love them all dearly; I love Auriel’s strong moral compass and unshakable loyalty, Ash’s sense of humour and his ability to always see the rainbow in every thunderstorm and I even love Lee’s naive insensitivity and cold clear logic, because it’s unashamedly honest. Lee would never lie, he just wouldn’t know how to.


What is your favourite aspect of your world?

I think that my most favourite thing is that being a Whyte ascendant has given me the freedom to be anything that I want to be, to do anything I want to do and to have the chance, despite being young and female, to really make this world a better place.

At first when I discovered that I was the only Whyte I hated it.  I felt alone, isolated and powerless to change anything.  Now I feel different, because of Eldwyn’s prophecy, being a Whyte has actually given me power, power to make people take notice of me and listen to what I have to say.  It has made me realise that I can make a big difference, maybe even save some lives or at least make some peoples’ lives better.

I also LOVE magic and I especially love being good at it!

What is your favourite thing to eat?

In the Afterlands every ascendant’s favourite food is the same; Guilywally Fyre-pot, it’s a traditional dish from Hydrargyrum, a pink stew that is enchanted so that it tastes of whatever it is that you are hungry for.  So you could eat it every day and never get bored with it because it would taste different every time you ate it. It really is the most delicious thing ever!

However, In Cognito class we learned that as good quality fresh food was so scarce in Hydrargyrum, that the alchemists devised the charm so that scraps and poor quality food would taste as good as the finest Aurum feast. That way everyone would have enough to eat, there would be no waste, and no one, but especially the children, would realise that they were often eating food that was not really fit to be eaten. It never quite tasted the same after I learned that.

What is your biggest dream?

My dream is that prejudice and inequality be wiped from the face of the Afterlands. That it’s people would live in harmony, each of them, though different, being accepted as equal, and that Lord Ka and the Djinn of Erebus be purged from these lands forever.

Where would you love to live in your world if you could live anywhere?

I would like to live in Rhodium, in my own land, with my own people, but my people are gone forever, so this can never happen.

What do you think about the place you’re studying?

I expect you mean the Oratory?  When I first arrived at the Oratory I felt rather overwhelmed by the opulence and grandeur of the buildings and the obvious high status that had been afforded to me and to a lesser extent the other ascendants.  The Sooth frightened me and so at first, did Lord Dux, who used magic with such ease and to such effect that it took my breath away. However once I had met my cell and settled in I enjoyed being there.  I learned so much about my new world in such a short time that I quickly began to feel a part of it.  The classes were amazing and all of the Magisters were such experts in their field that I doubt I could have been schooled by a more qualified group of teachers.  Who wouldn’t like learning how to read a whole book in a few seconds, talk to bees, brew charms and cast spells? I struggled a little at first, but Lord Dux helped me and I soon discovered that I had a great aptitude for most of it, especially the magic.

Do you like magic?

Magic is at the core of my soul. It now comes so naturally to me that it is like a reflex... like blinking, I do not have to even think to use it. When I need it I just react, in the blink of an eye, no conscious thought involved, even the incantations are instinctive now. So I don’t like it exactly... that’s like asking if I like breathing, but I don’t think I could live long without it now.

Are you ready?

Can we ever be ready for something as all consuming as a war against evil, against prejudice and cruelty, and against an enemy so powerful that they can take the very essence of what you are and imprison that essence within their bodies for eternity?
I believe I am here for a reason, the prophecy of Eldwyn predicted that I would ascend and tells of my unifying the people of the Afterlands against an old enemy, but the way I read it, it does not predict the outcome of that confrontation. 

Am I ready to unify?  Yes.  Am I ready to fight Lord Ka and the Djinn of Erebus? Yes.  Am I ready to lose my friends in battle, to see these lands burned to ash and to be assimilated into the body of a Djinn until I can no longer act for myself and can only bear witness to the horrors that unfold before me?  No... no... I will never be ready for that.

Rose