Today we are lucky to have at the Café a writing team — Mary Reed and Eric Mayer. Since they are both coffee drinkers, grab a strong cup in honor of Mary & Eric and join us for a fun interview. Their latest book, SEVEN FOR A SECRET, was released by Poisoned Pen Press on April 15, 2008.

Café:
Tell us a little about the latest book.

Mary & Eric:
SEVEN FOR A SECRET is an historical mystery set in 6th century Constantinople in and around the court of Emperor Justinian I. Here is the official blurb:

Who killed the mosaic girl? As Lord Chamberlain, John spends his days counseling Emperor Justinian while passing the small hours of night in conversation with the solemn-eyed little girl depicted in a mosaic on his study wall. He never expected to meet her in a public square or afterwards find her red-dyed corpse in a subterranean cistern. Had the mysterious woman truly been the model for the mosaic years before as she claimed? Who was she? Why had she sought John out? Who wanted her dead — and why? The answers seem to lie among the denizens of the smoky streets of that quarter of Constantinople known as the Copper Market, where artisans, beggars, prostitutes, pillar saints, and exiled aristocrats struggle to survive within sight of the Great Palace and yet worlds distant. John encounters a faded actress, a patriotic sausage maker, a sundial maker who fears the sun, a religious visionary, a man who lives in a treasure trove, and a beggar who owes his life to a cartload of melons. Before long he suspects he is attempting to unravel not just a murder but a plot against the empire. Or is John really on a personal quest, to find the reality behind the confidante he thought existed only in his own imagination? Is there such a thing as truth in a place where people live on memories, dreams, and illusions?

Café:
How long have you been writing?

Mary & Eric:
Together? Since l992. Before that we had both individually published articles and short stories, not to mention contributing to and editing amateur publications cranked out on duplicators. Some of the essays on our website originally appeared in these fanzines. You can get an idea of what such publications are like here: home.epix.net/~maywrite/hecto.htm. Our collaborative fiction debut was the first short story about John, titled, handily, A BYZANTINE MYSTERY which appeared in The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits in 1993.

Café:
When did your first novel come out? What was it called? Can you tell us a little about it?

Mary & Eric:
The first novel came out in 1999 and took its title from the black-plumaged bird counting fortune-telling rhyme beginning, "One for sorrow..." Our books are set in Constantinople and the rhyme is of English origin though variants are know here in the US and elsewhere. But John, Justinian's Lord Chamberlain, fought in what we call Bretania as a young mercenary, became familiar with the rhyme, and in the first book is reminded of it by one of the major characters, a knight in search of the Holy Grail. At the time we titled ONE FOR SORROW we weren't thinking in terms of a series, but rather just hoping to get a book published. Now we've reached John's seventh adventure we've run out of lines, so starting with the eighth novel we intend to begin inventing them and claim it's oral tradition at work.

Café:
Have you always written mysteries? If not what else have you written?

Mary & Eric:
We've had a bash at writing ghost stories in the M. R. Jamesian mould, both of us being admirers of his subtle but chilling work. Interested parties might care to glance at THE THORN on our website at home.epix.net/~maywrite/thorn05.htm. We've both written a wide variety of non-fiction for publication ranging from essays to feature articles. As far as fiction goes, many years ago Eric made a few desultory stabs at writing science fiction short stories but since he hasn't much cared for any SF written since about 1960 that didn't work out too well.

Café:
What brought you to choose the setting and characters in your latest book?

Mary & Eric:
Our protagonist John was, of course a given. Most of the books in the series have been set in Constantinople, and this one, in particular, we wanted to confine to the city since Six For Gold was set, uncharacteristically, mainly in Egypt. Much of the action in SEVEN FOR A SECRET occurs in what was called The Copper Market, a section of the city named after the metal-working prevalent there. It was an industrial quarter, but situated only a few blocks from the Great Palace. We imagined that a number of disgraced aristocrats exiled from the palace might take up residence in the poverty and smoke, within tantalizing sight of the luxuries they had once enjoyed. Naturally some of them would get up to no good. In every book in the series we have had a recurring character whom John calls Zoe. In fact, Zoe is a girl depicted in a wall mosaic in John's study. Much to the distress of his elderly servant Peter, over the years John has taken to confiding in her over his wine cup or when he is in a black mood. The mosaic was there when John moved into the house and neither John, nor ourselves, have hitherto had any inkling of who the girl was, or if she was modeled on a real person. Though we'd speculated about it. In SEVEN FOR A SECRET we decided to find an answer, and so the model for John's mosaic confidante Zoe is a major character, at least in the sense that John spends the book trying to find out more about her after she shows up and...well, we don't want to give away too much!

Café:
Tell us a little about the setting and main character.

Mary & Eric:
From the reading guide we offer visitors to our website: John the Eunuch is a tall, lean Greek, born around 495 AD. As a young man he attended Plato's Academy outside Athens but grew restless and left to become a mercenary. He fought in Bretania, where he developed a fear of deep water after seeing a colleague drown in a swollen stream. He also lived for a time in Alexandria and traveled with a troupe which recreated the ancient Cretan art of bull-leaping for Roman audiences. While seeking to buy silks for his lover in a border region of the empire, he strayed into enemy territory, was captured by Persians, emasculated and sold into slavery. Purchased to serve at the Great Palace in Constantinople, the story of how he regained his freedom and rose to become Lord Chamberlain to Emperor Justinian is told in Four For A Boy. As Lord Chamberlain, John's official role is as chief attendant to the emperor. As part of his duties John oversees much of the palace administration and supervises court ceremonies. However, his real power lies in his close working relationship with Justinian, who depends upon his advice and, from time to time, his ability as an investigator. Unfortunately, John has attracted the enmity of Empress Theodora. A man of simple tastes, John lives in a sparsely furnished house on the palace grounds. Although wealthy, he refuses to employ slaves or the customary bodyguard. He is fluent in four languages (cursing in Coptic) but is not quick to share confidences in any of them. He has, however, been known to share his thoughts with the girl depicted in the mosaic on the wall of his study. John is sometimes aided in his investigations by Felix, the Captain of the Excubitors (palace guards), his younger friend Anatolius (who leaves his position as Justinian's secretary to practice law) and an elderly servant, Peter. John, like Felix and Anatolius, is a practicing Mithran and has attained the rank of Runner of the Sun. Like them, however, he must keep his beliefs secret since Mithraism is a proscribed religion. John is a man of contradictions — a pagan serving a Christian emperor, a man of principle in a society whose corrupt institutions do not offer justice, someone who has been terribly wounded but has not descended into ruthlessness although he has been known to lapse into fits of anger and near madness, perhaps a result of urges he usually controls.

Café:
Very interesting characters. What is the main reason that you write?

Mary & Eric:
We hope we have an interesting story to tell! But even if only the cat read our work we'd still keep writing — like reading, it is something vital to us.

Café:
I can relate to that feeling. Do you write to entertain or is there something more you want the readers to take away from your work?

Mary & Eric:
We write to entertain but perhaps our idea of entertainment is a little out of step with the times. We are both entertained by history, by learning things we didn't know, by pondering philosophical questions. So, to us, an entertaining book will contain those elements. On the other hand, we aren't entertained in the least by gratuitous violence or gore or mindless action. Which is not to say that John doesn't do his fair share of examining dead bodies, running about, and even drawing his blade. We do, after all, write mysteries, not literary novels. But we like to think we can appeal to the reader's intelligence without being pretentious.

Café:
Do you have a schedule for your writing or just write whenever you can?

Mary & Eric:
What we do is try to arrange for three months with no other work and spend that time writing and polishing the novel. Necessary research will have been done beforehand as time could be found to keep writing with a minimum of distraction. Occasionally vexed questions need to be cleared up, so some research is always needed during the actual writing phase. Of course, it is something of a gamble in that not doing any freelancing for three months inevitably will have an impact financially down the line, but so far, so good.

Eric:
I find that trying to write in a stolen hour here and there doesn't work very well. I never seems to have an interesting idea until I’ve been toiling away for an hour. It may be that my brain needs to warm up before it produces anything!

Mary & Eric:
For short stories, we either fit them in around current work or else take a day or two and write at a furious pace.

Café:
Do you outline? If not, do you have some other interesting way that you keep track of what’s going on, or what needs to happen in your book when you are writing it?

Mary & Eric:
Yes, we outline. However, we find once the actual writing begins we often veer away from the outline, particularly towards the end of a novel, as unknown characters show up and insist on introducing themselves, or new situations suggest they would fit and advance the plot. One necessary practice is to note clues at the top of draft chapters — first to make certain they are all in the text and second to be sure they are all solved and explained in the course of the narrative. Since we collaborate it would be very difficult to keep things straight without an outline. Generally, we begin with every scene mapped out to some extent. The further into the book we get the more we deviate from our initial route, and usually we end up at some place quite different from where we thought we were going when we started out. However, having an outline means, for instance, we can each be writing the first draft of a different scene at the same time, without Eric having John interviewing a suspect in the evening while Mary is busy killing the same suspect off the previous morning in an earlier chapter. Having an outline also means we always have something we can write. We don't suddenly find ourselves stuck for lack of inspiration. That happens when we're composing the outline! Since we each go over the other's chapters before they go into a final draft for polishing, the blended writing style thus produced differs from our own distinctive individual styles and thus the flow of the writing is smoother than it might otherwise have been.

Café:
How interesting. I imagine collaborating would make an outline more necessary. If you had your ideal, what time of day would you prefer to write?

Mary & Eric:
Mary would pick l0 pm onwards as she has always been a night owl and that's the best time of day or rather night for her. Eric picks the afternoon, on the grounds he is not awake enough in the morning or evening.

Café:
LOL I relate to Mary. Day job?

Mary & Eric:
We are both full time freelance writers of non-fiction and fiction.

Café:
Did you find it difficult to get published in the beginning?

Mary & Eric:
Not really after we got down to making a serious attempt at it. One For Sorrow was our first collaborative novel and was seen by few pairs of eyes before it was purchased by Poisoned Pen Press. Eric wrote a "practice" novel on his own, prior to our collaboration, just to get a feel for writing something longer than a short story, which he'd never attempted before. It wasn't meant to sell, and hasn't, but then we only sent it out a handful of times just for the heck of it. Bear in mind we had been selling non-fiction for years, so had a fair bit of practice in the mechanics of writing, an important foundation for fiction. As for mysteries, Mary had managed to sell a couple of short stories to Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine right out of the slush pile. Eric hadn't sold any of his sf stories but then he probably never submitted more than half a dozen. We were very lucky in being able rather quickly to find editors who liked our work.

Café:
Do you have a great rejection/critique or acceptance story you’d like to share?

Mary & Eric:
Well, there was the time Mary had a dozen rejections in two days — these were articles but they all appeared in due course. She often says this points up the virtue of persistence when trying to get work into print. When Eric was in his early twenties he sent a story to Fantastic Stories, a science fiction magazine. The editor claimed he wanted to encourage and help out beginners, so rather than simply responding to submissions with the usual standard rejection form, he developed a form with a long checklist of typical reasons which rendered stories unpublishable. Rather than just being told "your story does not meet our current needs" you would get a sort of critique, with particular deficiencies checked off — "trite idea," "stilted dialog," "ungrammatical" ... etc. ... This must have been a lot of extra work for the slush pile readers but, well, they wanted to be helpful. And, indeed, when Eric got his story back, the slush pile reader had absolutely knocked himself out on his behalf. Not content to helpfully check off every single error listed (and there must have been fifty) he had solicitously scribbled extra helpful notes all around the margins of the list — "UNBELIEVABLE PLOT!," "ABSURD, WOODEN CHARACTERS!!!," "TEDIOUS," "HORRIBLE STODGY WRITING." But Eric reckons he didn't "help" him quite as much as he intended because he kept writing anyway.

Café:
What kind of promotion do you find most effective?

Mary & Eric:
Unfortunately it is impossible to measure what works or doesn't work. For all we know practically every sale we've made has been due to our various efforts, or, for that matter, maybe we would've sold twice as many books if we hadn't driven potential readers away! We don't care for the in-your-face type of promotion some authors practice. If we can talk about writing or do something creative, something that has some worth of its own, and attach a mention for our other work to it, that's fine. As far as just being hucksters and grabbing people physically in the aisles of the book stores, or even in figuratively in cyberspace, no thanks. The world is too full of that sort of thing and we don't care to contribute to it.

Café:
Most interesting book signing story — in a bookstore or other venue?

Mary & Eric:
When we were first setting out we did a signing with Ed Hoch, master of the short story. Despite lack of customers it was a great evening because we were able to talk to Ed for an hour or two, an opportunity sadly gone with his recent death. He was encouraging, as he was to all new writers, and while this is not directly connected with selling books, it demonstrates the kindness we have met since our arrival in the mystery world.

Café:
How exciting. Future writing goals?

Mary & Eric:
We'd like to sell our next book, hopefully the first in a new series. It's an historical, set in Victorian London, with a bit of woo woo. It's currently being shopped around. All offers will be considered Other than that we hope to have the opportunity to keep writing books for publication and to have an audience for our writing. These days it can be more difficult to stay published than to get published in the first place.

Café:
Heroes?

Eric:
I can't say I have any heroes, as an adult. There are some people whose work or accomplishments I admire. I always think about John Lennon trying to explain that people shouldn't idolize the Beatles. Of course, from my childhood, I can pretty much say that Mickey Mantle seemed like a hero!

Mary:
Those who suffer much and remain kind.

Café:
Person you would most like to meet dead or alive?

Eric:
I'm not so sure I would really want to meet anyone I might think I'd want to meet. I'm afraid they might disappoint me and vice versa.

Mary:
I wouldn't mind having a chat with M. R. James or some of the Golden Age mystery writers!

Café:
What do you read?

Mary:
I am devoted to Golden Age mysteries, classic ghost stories, and tales of the supernatural, which is how we started uploading free etexts of this type of fiction into the two libraries on our website. Otherwise biographies and history, particularly social history, of the period between l850 and l950.

Eric:
I read a mishmash of old mysteries, occasional old science fiction, old essays...you can probably see the pattern here. I'm afraid I'm pretty much stuck on writing of the sort I was reading when I grew up. I'm not keen on a lot of modern literature.

Café:
Favorite TV or movies?

Mary & Eric:
Our television set hasn't worked for years. We were keen followers of Millenium and X-Files but alas, they are long gone. The 9 pm spot on Friday on Fox has featured some interesting series, and another favourite in the same slot was Brimstone. Alas, it only lasted one season so we never found out how the devil intended to cheat the protagonist out of the promised release from Hell, just as he always does. Otherwise classic films, historical programmes, some British comedies.

Café:
Pets?

Mary & Eric:
We have an eighteen year old cat named Sabrina who is sitting on Eric's lap and helping him type right now.

Café:
What part of the country/world do you live in?

Mary & Eric:
Pennsyvlania.

Café:
Any advice for aspiring or beginning writers?

Mary:
Persist, practice your craft, don't take rejection personally and keep your sense of humour in good working order because you're going to need it.

Eric:
Beginners should keep in mind that the publishing industry today is dominated by a few conglomerates and is more difficult to break into than ever. Writing is not a career in any normal sense. There are many more aspirants than publishing slots and success is determined more by luck than many published authors care to admit. A writer can do all the right things, and still have difficulty finding a publisher. So, as Mary said, persistence can be vital. Also a belief in what you are doing. If you don't succeed at first it does not necessarily mean you are doing anything wrong or lack talent or suffer from whatever other failing to which you might feel inclined to attribute the "failure." Quite possibly you just haven't found the right editor or agent yet.

Café:
Very good advice. Anything you would like to add?

Mary & Eric:
We appreciate your letting us run riot on your website, and offer thanks to readers for going along with John on his adventures!

Café:
Website?

Mary & Eric:
http://home.epix.net/~maywrite/.

Café:
Where can people purchase your books?

Mary & Eric:
They're carried by or can be ordered from online and brick bookstores, and can also be obtained directly from the publisher at PoisonedPenPress.com. Readers might like to know PPP novels can be purchased from the press signed by authors at no extra cost. ONE FOR SORROW, TWO FOR JOY and FOUR FOR A BOY are available via Kindle, and SEVEN FOR A SECRET has been issued in audio by Blackstone.

Café:
Thanks so much for joining us here at the Café.

©2008 Lorie Ham. All rights reserved.