{"id":185,"date":"2009-03-24T10:33:00","date_gmt":"2009-03-24T16:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/2009\/03\/24\/shana-abe-interview\/"},"modified":"2012-02-18T08:19:51","modified_gmt":"2012-02-18T14:19:51","slug":"shana-abe-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/2009\/03\/24\/shana-abe-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"Shana Ab\u00e9 Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
\nShana Ab\u00e9<\/a> is one of those authors who doesn’t publicize herself much, which is a bit of a shame, cuz she is such a lovely, fun person. On the occasion of her new hardcover release,
\nThe Treasure Keeper<\/em><\/a>, I hunted her down and forced her to do an interview with me.<\/p>\n

Okay, I didn’t have to tie her down, then shove a mike in her face. (Is it just me or does it sound terribly dirty? *g*) But you get my gist. The Treasure Keeper<\/span> hits the stores today.<\/p>\n

Go get your copy.<\/p>\n

You wrote six straight historical romance and one book of mermaid novellas (2 historical, one contemporary) before you burst on to the scene anew in 2005 with your Dr\u00e1kon<\/em> series, beginning with The Smoke Thief<\/em>, featuring an ancient race of dragons who have learned to shapeshift and pass as humans. <\/span>I know, from a podcast you did with Sandy Coleman of All About Romance, that it had been a long-held desire for you to write romances with fantasy\/paranormal elements. <\/span>Did you also always want to do something with dragons? <\/span>Or was it a case of \u201cHmm, vampires, no. <\/span>Hmm, werewolves, no. <\/span>Hmm, dragons, well, well, well?\u201d<\/p>\n

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Actually, you pretty much summed it up right there! I realized I wanted to write about shapeshifting creatures of some sort, but I felt that there were already so many good werewolf\/vampire novels out there, I really didn\u2019t want to plunge into that pool.<\/p>\n

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I used to live in the foothills of Los Angeles, where there are a lot of red-tailed hawks. And I have pet house rabbits. A person with pet rabbits always keeps a sharp eye out for predators when they\u2019re outside playing. I learned to recognize entire family groups of hawks, and I suspect they learned to recognize me. One cast of at least thirteen would circle by nearly every day at bunny playtime in my backyard. Being the superior, brilliant human that I am, I would stand in my yard and try to shoo them away by waving my arms and jumping up and down and yelling, \u201cGo away!\u201d Which astonished my neighbors (not in a good way) and totally frightened my bunnies\u2014but not the hawks. Finally one day the hawks very firmly and rudely responded by, um, loosening their collective bowels directly above me. Seriously. I had to run away and hide under the porch. And it was a huge<\/em> mess upon landing.<\/p>\n

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Anyway! Hawks. Despite all that, it\u2019s impossible not to admire their elegance in flight. One afternoon as I was idly watching a courting couple above me, their fantastic circles and loops and turns\u2014with the back of my brain simmering over my shapeshifting, werewolf\/vampire dilemma\u2014the answer came to me. It seemed so obvious. Not hawks (I mean, come on, they tried to poop on me!), but dragons. Dragons can fly, dragons are mystical and interesting, and plus, since they don\u2019t actually exist, I could make up whatever traits I wanted to about them. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

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The Dr\u00e1kon<\/em> books have been an instant hit with both readers and critics alike. <\/span>The Smoke Thief<\/em> was Romantic Times<\/em>\u2019s Historical Romance of the Year. <\/span>The second book in the series, The Dream Thief<\/em>, which totally blew me away, made the New York Times bestseller list and<\/em> was named by Amazon.com its #1 Romance of the Year. <\/span>Bantam, your publisher, obviously did anticipate just such a reception, as the series is brought out in hardcover. Did you personally expect this level of success?<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>God, no. Like most novelists, I try to write the very best book I can every single time. But still, some books just end up being better than others. I don\u2019t know why. As a writer, I do feel a certain tingle of excitement when I compose something I<\/em> think is good…but I don\u2019t necessarily expect anyone else to think it\u2019s good. I only hope that they do, LOL.<\/p>\n

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It was a very happy surprise to get the call from my agent telling me that Bantam planned to release THE SMOKE THIEF in hardcover. In fact, I couldn\u2019t really believe it for a while; I thought maybe they had made a mistake. Or that they would come to their senses and change their minds. But they put together a lovely package for it, and I think I\u2019m very, very lucky that it turned out so well.<\/p>\n

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One thing I love deeply about your books is that they feature power couples. <\/span>So often in romance–and particularly paranormal romance–the balance of the power is tilted, sometimes overwhelmingly, toward the hero. <\/span>But your heroines have stunning abilities and nerves of steel and are full equals of your heroes. <\/span>One of my favorite moments from Queen of Dragons<\/em>, the third book in the series, is when Kimber, the hero, says to Maricara, the heroine, \u201cLet me ask you, king to king\u2026\u201d <\/span>Ah, it just melts me when a man is strong enough to be secure in the presence of a strong woman. <\/span>Can you tell me a bit about how you arrive at this dynamic balance between the hero and the heroine?<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>It\u2019s a very delicate balance, isn\u2019t it? Personally I don\u2019t enjoy a story as much when either the hero or the heroine has far more power than the other, either by societal or supernatural means. Because I chose to set the Dr\u00e1kon<\/em> Series in the eighteenth century, and then chose my characters to be beasts disguised as humans, I had already set up a radically inequitable balance between the males and the females. Georgian society never exactly embraced the notion of women\u2019s rights, and on top of that you\u2019ve got this wolf pack-like tribe of beings whose ruling faction asserts that it\u2019s biologically impossible for a female to lead, for example. It\u2019s a double whammy against the girls!<\/p>\n

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So I definitely needed my heroines to have backbones of steel to deal with this. They were both underestimated and undervalued, even by their own kind. Yet they\u2019re not soft, fragile little flowers who wilt in the face of difficulty. In my mind, these women are real, and that means they must behave in realistic ways. Even today we struggle with the consequences of sexual inequality, so imagine how much more extreme, and socially acceptable, it was then. I don\u2019t know a single woman who feels she\u2019s of lesser value than a man, and certainly not merely because she happened to born with a pair of ovaries instead of the other stuff.<\/p>\n

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Like real women throughout history, these dr\u00e1kon<\/em> females have learned to relish their own strengths, to hone them; they understand that the foundation of their world is fundamentally unjust, but they adapt to it. They stretch their boundaries as they can, and sometimes they simply flat-out shatter them. Whether that means challenging the layers of rules that constrict them, or more directly just running away to live free, they make the choice not to endure the role their society attempts to force upon them.<\/p>\n

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Of course, that means they need a man\u2014a male dr\u00e1kon<\/em>\u2014who is smart enough and wise enough not only to accept the heroine as she is, but to cherish her strength and individuality. It\u2019s one of the facets of his character that makes him a hero: he falls in love with all<\/em> parts of this amazing creature, even the aspects of her that buck societal norms and directly challenge his own authority.<\/p>\n

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In another interview with All About Romance, you described yourself as a young girl as \u201cScrawny. Chalk-white pale. Lank, dark hair that would never hold a curl. Terminally clumsy.\u201d <\/span>And you wore coke-bottle glasses because you were \u201cone tiny degree away from being legally blind.\u201d <\/span>But then you went on to become a runway and print model in Japan. <\/span>I find that absolutely fascinating\u2014a real life transformation story. <\/span>How did that impact how you view femininity and beauty and how you craft your heroines?<\/p>\n

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\nIt\u2019s interesting how our childhood shapes us, isn\u2019t it? In my case, I didn\u2019t get rid of the glasses until junior high school, and by then I was so profoundly shy that my mother enrolled me in modeling and acting classes to try to open me up a bit. I enjoyed acting and tolerated modeling, but I never thought it would really lead anywhere. It was a shock to get an offer to model in Japan as a teenager, and to this day I am so grateful for it, because it turns out that traveling to other countries and learning about other cultures is something I love.<\/p>\n

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But modeling was only ever a job to me, one I always realized would be extremely provisional. In the end, I modeled professionally for about eleven years, which was longer than most girls I knew. I did it around high school and college and then a little later, and the very best part of it was always getting to travel.<\/p>\n

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However, modeling is a grueling, fiercely competitive and sometimes vicious line of work, and it can breed monsters. I never once thought of myself as beautiful; I had a good look for a strong market, I was very lucky and that was enough. When you\u2019re surrounded by peers whose jaw-dropping physical attributes become almost commonplace, you search for a deeper connection. You search for the mind, for the heart. You want to learn the who<\/em> of the person instead the what<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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That\u2019s what truly matters. I still believe it. Physical beauty has its advantages, but it\u2019s fleeting, and there\u2019s nothing you can do about that. It\u2019s far more important to develop the beauty of your soul, because that\u2019s forever (or, if you\u2019re of a more non-theological bent, it\u2019s for the whole of your lifetime, at least).<\/p>\n

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Most of the other models I met were deeply insecure about their looks. That\u2019s natural, when you consider how much emphasis is placed upon the seemingly random arrangement of skin and cartilage and bone. Girls I worked with would freak out over a chipped nail. They had reason to. You could lose a job over it, which might be a significant loss of income. A chipped fingernail! It\u2019s a weird, weird profession.<\/p>\n

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I\u2019m way happier as a writer, LOL.<\/p>\n

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You live with half a dozen bunnies and a dog. <\/span>Now lots of people have dogs, so the dog is not very surprising. <\/span>How did the bunnies come about? <\/span>And is that the reason I never read about rabbit stews in your book? <\/span>\ud83d\ude42<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n


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\nHa! Once, I think in my first novel (a medieval) I had the hero go hunting and catch a hare for dinner, and I felt like such a traitor after that I never have anyone eat rabbit again. \ud83d\ude09 I\u2019ve also managed to insert the names of almost every one of my rabbits (there\u2019s been quite a few of them over the years) into my books, just for fun.<\/p>\n

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Many, many years ago, I was a desperately impoverished associate editor at a small weekly paper in Malibu (which shall go nameless but does still exist; it\u2019s a really great paper, actually). We had an office parrot and one of my jobs was to go to the local pet store and get him (her? none of us were really sure) supplies.<\/p>\n

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The pet store, which I very much hope is now out of business, was a sad, small, dirty place. They sold all kinds of animals, and usually for heaps of money (it was Malibu, after all), but one animal they could not sell was this full-grown rabbit. It was a brown lop, nothing fancy or unique, but they kept it in an aquarium because it kept figuring out how to open the wire cages. The aquarium was so small the rabbit couldn\u2019t even stretch out.<\/p>\n

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I watched this rabbit for almost six months, cramped and miserable in his glass prison. No one wanted him. I knew nothing about rabbits. I had no money. I could barely afford my rent, but one day I just couldn\u2019t take it any longer, so I bought the rabbit.<\/p>\n

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I named him Christopher, until I saved up enough cash to have him neutered, and then I named her Katherine. LOL. She was brilliant and sassy and I loved her to pieces. She led to two more bunnies\u2014brothers, abandoned Easter bunnies\u2014and then to another one with a deformed ear, and so on.<\/p>\n

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That\u2019s how it began. Right now I have five rabbits, some very old, one very young, all rescued, all house rabbits.<\/p>\n

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You need a good sense of humor to have house rabbits, and a lot<\/em> of wood toys. They chew through everything.<\/p>\n

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Book four of the Dr\u00e1kon<\/em> <\/span>series, Treasure Keeper<\/em>, hits shelves today itself. <\/span>It features a son of the original Dr\u00e1kon<\/em> couple from The Smoke Thief<\/em>, the girl he first fell in love with when he was thirteen, and is set in a most intriguing and dangerous time and place. <\/span>Would you tell us something about it?<\/p>\n

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Well, twist my arm, LOL. THE TREASURE KEEPER is the tale of Rhys Langford, who (as you mentioned) is the youngest son of Kit and Rue from the first book in the series, and Zoe Lane, daughter of the local seamstress (also a dr\u00e1kon<\/em>). We glimpse them together as youngsters briefly in QUEEN OF DRAGONS, and she seems a little cold then, even as a girl, but it\u2019s all explained in the new book.<\/p>\n

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I wanted Zoe to have different abilities from the other dr\u00e1kon<\/em>, and so, something like a chameleon, she has the Gift of invisibility. She also sees ghosts in glass, and is shadowed by the dead (but not in a creepy way). She\u2019s run away from the confines of the English shire in which she was raised because her fianc\u00e9 (not Rhys!), who was sent out into the human world, has gone missing. Rhys, however, is also missing, because it turns out the dr\u00e1kon<\/em> have a dire human enemy: the sanf inimicus<\/em>, human dragon hunters. Both Rhys and Zoe\u2019s fianc\u00e9 are thought to be dead, but only Rhys shows up to haunt her in spectral form.<\/p>\n

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He starts off in the story a lot like what you\u2019d think the younger, handsome son of a ridiculously privileged family would be: cocky, sophisticated, fairly wild and irresponsible. But deep down he\u2019s also kind, protective, and genuinely in love with Zoe, the only vibrant thread of true life in his now-gray existence.<\/p>\n

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Zoe\u2019s made it to Paris, and it\u2019s just a few years before the French Revolution. It\u2019s a dangerous and gritty and exciting time. Plus, she\u2019s hiding out in a castle, which is pretty cool, LOL.<\/p>\n

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I had a great time with both the setting and the protagonists. Every time I get to delve into this world, I learn something new. It\u2019s such an amazing process, and I\u2019m truly delighted that other people have enjoyed the stories of the dr\u00e1kon<\/em> as much as I have. I know I\u2019ve said this before, but I feel so, so fortunate.<\/p>\n

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Well, I know I\u2019ll be at the bookstore to pick up my copy. <\/span>Thank you so much, Shana, for talking with me. <\/span>And thank you for writing your wonderful books.<\/p>\n

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Thank YOU for your kindness! I was thrilled that you wanted to chat. Like a lot of folks, I\u2019m a big fan of the Fabulous Sherry Thomas! \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

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::blushes::<\/span><\/p>\n

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Below are links to excerpts for Shana’s Dr\u00e1kon<\/em> books<\/p>\n