God Save the Queen (The Immortal Empire) (48 page)

www.orbitbooks.net

Kate Locke
is a shameless Anglophile who wrote her first book at age twelve. Fortunately, that book about a British pop band is lost for ever. When not experimenting with new hair colours, Kate likes to hang out with her husband who, while not from England, can do a pretty convincing accent. She spends her days being bossed about by five fur kids and making stuff up – often while wearing a “uniform” that looks suspiciously like pyjamas. During “off” hours Kate often screeches along to
Rock Band
(being a rock star was her second career choice if the writing thing didn’t work out), watches BBC America, or plays with make-up. She loves history, the paranormal, horror and sparkly things. The author’s website can be found at
www.katelocke.com

Find out more about Kate Locke and other Orbit authors by registering for the free monthly news letter at
www.orbitbooks.net

When did you know you wanted to be an author?

I knew I wanted to be an author when I was eight years old. A teacher had each student in her class write a short story – only a couple of pages – which she then read aloud. When she read mine everyone laughed in the right spots, and clapped at the end. Of course, the same thing happened for everyone else too, but I remember thinking that I wanted more of that. I’ve been writing ever since.

What made you start writing? Were you a big reader?

The previously mentioned incident started everything. I think I was twelve when I wrote my first book. If I had to hang it on anything, it would be my mother who started me on loving stories. She would sometimes read to me at bedtime, but more often than not she made up her own stories, often including me in plotting and naming characters. I still remember many of the ones she made up.

Did the idea for
God Save the Queen
come to you fully realised or did you have one particular starting point from which it grew?

I was sitting on my sofa wondering at all the books that made
people like Abraham Lincoln and Queen Victoria demon or vampire hunters. I thought, “What if Victoria wasn’t necessarily the heroine?” I’ve always been interested in British history (I think some of that must be due to being Canadian), the paranormal, asylums, etc., so I decided to write something with all those things in it, only twisted a bit. Initially
God Save the Queen
was a book I wrote just for my own enjoyment. Then, I showed it to my agent and she thought we ought to go out with it.

What attracted you to writing a story set in an alternate London?

I’m a shameless Anglophile! Not only that, but London has such an interesting history. I was – and still am – fascinated by the literal layers of history that have been found in the city. After reading about plague pits, and watching programmes on the tunnels beneath the city I knew the book had to happen there. Since I was going to have Queen Victoria be a vampire (among other changes) I knew my London was not going to be the London of today. For example, in my world there were never any World Wars. Hitler was a failed painter who, in my head, was eaten by vampires.

Is there something in particular about the Victorian age which appeals to you?

My mother loved the late Victorian, early Edwardian periods. She loved the whole Gibson Girl aesthetic. And every year she insisted on having a “Victorian Christmas tree”. I don’t want to tell you how many ornaments I dyed with tea! I have to blame her for getting me started. The Victorian era was obviously one of gorgeous clothes, but what appeals to me most is the duality of the age. There was the public side and the private side. The public side was very proper and repressed, but the private side … Well, I like to tell people that we haven’t invented anything new as far as sexual behaviour goes. All modern fetish, kink, etc., comes
directly from the Victorians! It was a fascinating time in social history.

How extensively do you plot your stories before you start writing them? Do you plot the entire novel or do you prefer to let it roam where it will?

I do plot the entire book, but leave myself some wiggle room. As long as I end up where I need to be I let the characters decide how to get there.

How much of your own personality is in your characters?

I think a little seeps into every one. I’ve had friends who think all my first person characters are me, even though they’re obviously not! I think that’s just a point of view thing. First person is so … personal. I try to find something I can relate to in every character. With Xandra in
God Save the Queen
the thing we have most in common is that devotion to family. I’d go into Bedlam to save one of my sisters.

Some authors talk of their characters “surprising” them by their actions; is this something that has happened to you?

All the time! I think it’s the best indication that you are writing people and not just characters. When you are subconsciously in their head, and their personality comes out rather than yours – that’s how you know the book is working.

What’s the best advice you’ve been given when it comes to writing?

I think Nora Roberts once said, “I can fix everything but a blank page.” That’s so very true. You just have to write. You can fix it later. Also, I’ve realised that if I hit a wall it’s because something’s not right with the flow of the book. I go back and fix it, and then move on. I don’t believe in writer’s block. I think the advice that best sums that all up is from Yoda: “Do or do not. There is no try.”

What do you do when you’re not writing?

Right now I seem to be doing nothing but writing! I like to play with make-up – I even make my own. I have a lipstick mould. It’s a sickness, I know. I also like to make jewellery, alter clothing and shoes. Read. Surround myself with interesting people. I wish I had as much passion for exercise as I do for conversation!

If you had to live for one month as a character in a novel, which novel and which character would you choose?

Oh dear. So many book characters do NOT have an easy go of it! Maybe Pippi Longstocking?

What book is on your bedside table right now?

As of writing this, fellow Orbit author Lilith Saintcrow’s
Working for the Devil
.

look out for

by

Chapter One

I eyeballed the freezer, trying to decide what to cook for dinner that night. Such a decision was no mean feat, since a visiting stranger might assume that Martha Stewart not only lived with us but was preparing for the apocalypse. Frozen lasagnas, casseroles, pot pies, and the like filled our icebox nearly to the brim. Finally deciding on fish chowder, I took out some haddock and mussels. After a brief, internal struggle, I grabbed some salmon
to make extra soup to – you guessed it – freeze. Yeah, the stockpiling was more than a little OCD, but it made me feel better. It also meant that when I actually had something to do for the entire evening, I could leave my dad by himself without feeling too guilty about it.

My dad wasn’t an invalid – not exactly. But he had a bad heart and needed help taking care of things, especially with my mother gone. So I took up the slack, which I was happy to do. It’s not like I had much else on my plate, what with being the village pariah and all.

It’s amazing how being a pariah gives you ample amounts of free time.

After putting in the laundry and cleaning the downstairs bathroom, I went upstairs to take a shower. I would have loved to walk around all day with the sea salt on my skin, but not even in Rockabill was Eau de Brine an acceptable perfume. Like many twentysomethings, I’d woken up early that day to go exercise. Unlike most twentysomethings, however, my morning exercise took the form of an hour or so long swim in the freezing ocean. And in one of America’s deadliest whirlpools. Which is why I am so careful to keep the swimming on the DL. It might be a great cardio workout, but it probably would get me burned at the stake. This is New England, after all.

As I got dressed in my work clothes – khaki chinos and a long-sleeved, pink polo-style shirt with
Read It and Weep
embroidered in navy blue over the breast pocket – I heard my father emerge from his bedroom and clomp down the stairs. His job in the morning was to make the coffee, so I took a moment to apply a little mascara, blush, and some lip gloss, before brushing out my damp black hair. I kept it cut in a much longer – and admittedly more unkempt – version of Cleopatra’s style because I liked to hide my dark eyes under my long bangs. Most recently, my nemesis, Stuart Gray, had referred to them as ‘demon eyes.’
They’re not as Marilyn Manson as that, thank you very much, but even I had to admit to difficulty determining where my pupil ended and my iris began.

I went back downstairs to join my dad in the kitchen, and I felt that pang in my heart that I get sometimes when I’m struck by how he’s changed. He’d been a fisherman, but he’d had to retire about ten years ago, on disability, when his heart condition worsened. Once a handsome, confident, and brawny man whose presence filled any space he entered, his long illness and my mother’s disappearance had diminished him in every possible way. He looked so small and gray in his faded old bathrobe, his hands trembling from the anti-arrhythmics he takes for his screwed-up heart, that it took every ounce of self-control I had not to make him sit down and rest. Even if his body didn’t agree, he still felt himself to be the man he had been, and I knew I already walked a thin line between caring for him and treading on his dignity. So I put on my widest smile and bustled into the kitchen, as if we were a father and daughter in some sitcom set in the 1950s.

‘Good morning, Daddy!’ I beamed.

‘Morning, honey. Want some coffee?’ He asked me that question every morning, even though the answer had been yes since I was fifteen.

‘Sure, thanks. Did you sleep all right?’

‘Oh, yes. And you? How was your morning?’ My dad never asked me directly about the swimming. It’s a question that lay under the auspices of the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy that ruled our household. For example, he didn’t ask me about my swimming, I didn’t ask him about my mother. He didn’t ask me about Jason, I didn’t ask him about my mother. He didn’t ask me whether or not I was happy in Rockabill, I didn’t ask him about my mother …

‘Oh, I slept fine, Dad. Thanks.’ Of course I hadn’t, really, as
I only needed about four hours sleep a night. But that’s another thing we never talked about.

He asked me about my plans for the day, while I made us a breakfast of scrambled eggs on whole wheat toast. I told him that I’d be working till six, then I’d go to the grocery store on the way home. So, as usual for a Monday, I’d take the car to work. We performed pretty much the exact same routine every week, but it was nice of him to act like it was possible I might have new and exciting plans. On Mondays, I didn’t have to worry about him eating lunch, as Trevor McKinley picked him up to go play a few hours of cheeky lunchtime poker with George Varga, Louis Finch, and Joe Covelli. They’re all natives of Rockabill and friends since childhood, except for Joe, who moved here to Maine about twenty years ago to open up our local garage. That’s how things were around Rockabill. For the winter, when the tourists were mostly absent, the town was populated by natives who grew up together and were more intimately acquainted with each other’s dirty laundry than their own hampers. Some people enjoyed that intimacy. But when you were more usually the object of the whispers than the subject, intimacy had a tendency to feel like persecution.

We ate while we shared our local paper,
The Light House News
. But because the paper mostly functioned as a vehicle for advertising things to tourists, and the tourists were gone for the season, the pickings were scarce. Yet we went through the motions anyway. For all of our sins, no one could say that the True family wasn’t good at going through the motions. After breakfast, I doled out my father’s copious pills and set them next to his orange juice. He flashed me his charming smile, which was the only thing left unchanged after the ravages to his health and his heart.

‘Thank you, Jane,’ he said. And I knew he meant it, despite the
fact that I’d set his pills down next to his orange juice every single morning for the past twelve years.

I gulped down a knot in my throat, since I knew that no small share of his worry and grief was due to me, and kissed him on the cheek. Then I bustled around clearing away breakfast, and bustled around getting my stuff together, and bustled out the door to get to work. In my experience, bustling is always a great way to keep from crying.

Tracy Gregory, the owner of Read It and Weep, was already hard at work when I walked in the front door. The Gregorys were an old fishing family from Rockabill, and Tracy was their prodigal daughter. She had left to work in Los Angeles, where she had apparently been a successful movie stylist. I say apparently because she never told us the names of any of the movies she’d worked on. She’d only moved back to Rockabill about five years ago to open Read It and Weep, which was our local bookstore, café, and all-round tourist trap. Since tourism replaced fishing as our major industry, Rockabill can just about support an all-year-round enterprise like Read It and Weep. But other things, like the nicer restaur ant – rather unfortunately named The Pig Out Bar and Grill – close for the winter.