In the first guest interview of this series, editor Kat Kourbeti sits down with author Kate Heartfield, whose 2015 story 'Limestone, Lye, and the Buzzing of Flies' marked a turning point in her publishing career.

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Transcript

Kat Kourbeti: Hello, Strangers, and welcome to Strange Horizons at 25, a 25th anniversary celebration of the speculative fiction magazine Strange Horizons. I'm your host, Kat Kourbeti, and it is my privilege today to welcome you to our first episode looking back at the history and impact of Strange Horizons on the speculative genres. Today's guest, Kate Heartfield, was first published with us in 2015 and has since gone on to publish novels, win awards, and have an illustrious career as a journalist. It's great to have you here, Kate.

Kate Heartfield: Thank you so much. I'm very happy to be here.

Kat Kourbeti: And thank you very much for taking the time. This is in fact, our second time recording this, because we've had some technical issues. So we really appreciate you taking the time to be here with us.

Kate Heartfield: No problem. I think we've cleared all the bad luck now, I hope.

Kat Kourbeti: Me too. So yeah, I think you're kind of the ideal first guest to have because you've been very public about your appreciation of what Strange Horizons does, and our ethos and everything that we try to do within the genre.

First of all, before we get into the Strange Horizons side of things, I want to hear about your writing journey. Because I know that you always had stories and novels that you wanted to tell, but life took a different way to get there.

Kate Heartfield: Yeah, definitely. I have a long story, which I do try to tell people a lot because I hope that it's helpful for people who are on a long journey of their own. So I am a person who's always written, since I was a kid. I've always enjoyed creative writing and I always wanted to be a novelist as far back as I can remember.

So I wrote some short fiction and started some novels when I was quite young, and then I finished my first complete draft of a novel manuscript when I was 19. I was also writing some short fiction back in the 1990s as well but in a sort of desultory way. If a story appeared in my head and I was able to get it out on the page, generally very short vignettes, sometimes I had some luck in placing those, but I didn't really know a lot about submitting short fiction.

I had a few pieces appear in literary magazines, and then for about 15 years or so, I was trying to get an agent and I wrote four different novel manuscripts, and in the meantime, developed my career as a journalist so it took me a while, and it was around 2012 to 2014 when I both got an agent for the novel side of things and I also started to sell short fiction more regularly.

Kat Kourbeti: You've always worked, or at least the stuff of yours I've read is historical fiction, but with a speculative kind of twist to it. What draws you to different eras of history and different kind of places in the world and their various histories there?

Kate Heartfield: Yeah, I do tend to go back to historical settings a lot. Sometimes in my short fiction especially, I will bounce around a little bit more and do some futuristic things and contemporary, but even in shorts I do write about historical settings a fair bit, and all of my novels are historical as well.

And I think one of the reasons that I do that is because I'm really interested in political and social questions and how we got to this place and the story that we tell ourselves about how we got here, has a lot to do with how we move forward. So I think telling and retelling and reshaping and asking questions about the story that we've told ourselves about history is fascinating to me and also I think very important to do. I think it's one of the things that fiction can do, is shift the lens a little bit on the narratives that we've all grown up with, or haven't been told in many cases. A lot of times history gets forgotten more quickly than we might like or realize.

So that's one part of it. Also I'm a big history nerd. I find it really fascinating. And I also find it a little bit uncanny and it gets under my skin in a way that the speculative elements do. So those two things go together in my mind, the past and the strange or the uncanny.

Kat Kourbeti: I think I'm the same in that, I rarely get drawn to completely secondary worlds. I love to twist ours in ways that fit the story that I'm trying to tell. But also it's just that question of what if this but like that.

And how in tandem has it been for you to work on different lengths in fiction, like your shorts and your novels? Do you always find yourself working on things in parallel? Or do you have maybe periods where you work on shorts more than novels?

Kate Heartfield: Yeah, for the most part I've worked on them in parallel. And as I mentioned, about 10 or 12 years ago is when I started to have a little bit more success with publication with both shorts and novels, and I don't think it was a coincidence that they both started to move forward at the same time, both in terms of being able to get published and also just feeling a little bit more confident about my ability to tell a story in the way that I wanted to and to experiment in the ways that I wanted to without it falling apart and the cake collapsing in the oven, which can happen sometimes when you experiment, which is part of the fun.

So yeah, I think those two things have worked in tandem for me, the different lengths. And I started to deliberately write more short fiction around 2012, because I was finding that a lot of my struggles with long form fiction and a lot of the rejections that I was getting and the frustrations I was having had to do with the shape of story.

I was fairly confident with elements like description and dialogue, and a lot of the prose level things I felt like I could express myself the way I wanted, but at the story level things were not maybe as coherent as they could be, or I was not expressing them in a way that the reader was getting what I was trying to put across.

So writing short fiction was great for me as a really deliberate direction in my career, because it allows you to iterate over and over again in a shorter period of time. So instead of taking six months to a year to write a novel, you can write several short stories in a month and practice endings and character arcs in a way that can really help with those issues as a storyteller, and help you to understand what you want to do as a writer, in terms of telling stories and the kinds of stories that you want to tell. I always hesitate to suggest that it's some sort of training ground, because I don't think that short fiction is a training ground for long fiction at all. But because it's so short, it's a little bit flexible in terms of allowing you to try things and to stretch yourself as a writer, and to get to know things about telling stories.

So once I went on that path of really deliberately trying to write a lot of short fiction while I was writing novels, I haven't really stopped. I do go through periods of time, several months at a time when I don't write any shorts just because I've got novel deadlines. But it is always nice to take the time to write a short story just to break it up, to give your mind a little bit of a change, a different track to work on.

And so in between novels, or if an idea strikes that I really have to get down, or I get a solicitation or something, I definitely will write a short when I can.

Kat Kourbeti: I gotta ask about the story that you submitted to Strange Horizons. First of all, before we even touch it, tell me about finding Strange Horizons as a reader. Do you remember coming across it for the first time?

Kate Heartfield: I don't remember my very first time, but I remember being aware of it in the early two thousands sometime, maybe around 2005, 2006. I remember being really aware of it both as a reader and as a writer, that this magazine was publishing things that were resonating in both the literary community that I was part of at that time, I had a lot of friends who were writing mainstream and literary fiction and my very first critique group, I was the only speculative fiction writer.

The other writers tended to be literary fiction writers for the most part, we all dabbled, but, they were aware of Strange Horizons as well, and really, it seemed to have this big impact in a lot of different fields at once, and because it was a very established online magazine that had a reputation for treating writers well and having a really transparent process.

It immediately became a goal for me that I really wanted to get published in Strange Horizons and I would read whatever I could there. And there are a lot of writers that I encountered in Strange Horizons for the first time, like Tim Pratt and Sofia Samatar and probably many others, and it really shaped not only my opinion of the magazine, but also of the field that I was going into and the genre.

Kat Kourbeti: Did it influence at all, do you think the sort of speculative stories that you were thinking about, in any way? Cause we, I think we tend to publish, historically anyway, quite introspective sort of stories. Did that influence you at all in thinking, oh, I should write a story that might fit Strange Horizons?

Kate Heartfield: I think it gave me the permission to try different things and definitely gave me confidence that the field of short fiction in the speculative short fiction is broader than people might believe, because Stranger Horizons will publish a wide range of things and it doesn't have a, really rule set for, only this counts as speculative fiction, or only this counts as good fiction. It's interested in telling all kinds of stories from all different parts of the world and all the different kinds of writers. I say as a reader, I've never been on staff, so I can't speak for the magazine, but that was definitely my impression as a reader.

And so I think it didn't really lead me to want to tell a Strange Horizons story per se, but whenever I had written a story, and I was thinking about where to send it, often Strange Horizons would be at the top of the list because I felt like it would get a fair hearing there.

I always felt like anything that I wanted to try, I felt like the editors were on my side, even if they decided it wasn't a good fit, which most of the time they did, as is the way of all magazines and all submissions. I felt like they would be coming to it in good faith and with an open mind and that I could put myself on the page and be respected in return.

I think that's a really beautiful thing that does influence your career as a beginning writer.

Kat Kourbeti: Wow. That's a beautiful answer. Everything you said is pretty much true for the staff. I'm not on the fiction team, but just seeing the way in which the fiction team does discuss how to approach, say, a special issue, when we all talk together about a topic or, if we're going to do a focus on a geographic region, like the fairness with which we just blanket the topic and are like, okay, so anything goes. So let's see what people come up with. But there's no specific answer to what that is that they're looking for. And so that means that, yeah, you're free as a bird to try and find your version of whatever that is.

Kat Kourbeti: So let's talk a little bit about your short story that was published in Strange Horizons in 2015. Can you tell me a little bit about how the idea came to you originally?

Kate Heartfield: Yeah, so the story is called 'Limestone, Lye, and the Buzzing of Flies' and it was published in 2015, and it's probably my most autobiographical story, at least on the surface; although the actual characters lives, I always hasten to add, are not my own, and their families are not my own, and that kind of thing.

It is about a girl who is a kid in the eighties who lives in Manitoba, very close to Lower Fort Garry, which is a fur trading fort that has now turned into a museum. And so the autobiographical part of it is that I was also a girl in the eighties who lived very close to Lower Fort Garry.

And I used to ride my bike there every afternoon with my best friend after school. Gary, if you're out there, I haven't seen you in decades, but we used to ride together to Fort Garry and just quietly walk around the grounds and there was a back way in where you didn't have to pay and we would just walk around and watch the interpreters and yeah, I don't know if that contributed to my love of history or not, but it probably did because it was just my playground.

So I wrote this story set in the Fort and in the interpretive aspects of it, about what if these two children that had grown up near the fort then got jobs as teenagers and dressed up in costume and started to play historical characters there. In the story, there are the remnants of two old souls that seem to be affecting the people who are dressing up in the costumes. The sort of deeper aspects that I wanted to get into with the story have a lot to do with growing up as a white settler in Manitoba and just starting to ask questions about what that meant to be on stolen land and the kind of stories that we brought over and the sort of toxicity of that, and engaging with history in that situation. Because I think that, even as a historical fiction writer, telling stories about Canadian history has always been somewhat of a struggle for me because of the colonial history that I'm writing about and finding ways to write about it, I think, is something that we're still learning as settler Canadians. So it's a lot to put in a short story, but that's the undercurrent underneath it, and then the higher more obvious surface levels, it's basically if anyone's ever seen the movie Dead Again, it's a lot like that. It's about old stories coming back and coming back.

Kat Kourbeti: It's a beautiful story. I do think that the autobiographical elements make it feel incredibly grounded, because I got a sense of place from your descriptions that I was like, she has to have been there. And so it's really cool to hear about how that came to be.

So what was the journey from submitting this story? Obviously you said, you'd been reading for a little bit. This wasn't the first story you submitted, correct?

Kate Heartfield: Correct. Yeah, so I don't know when I first started submitting to Strange Horizons but the earliest submission rejection that I have in my email is from 2007. So it was at least as far back as 2007. And my first story was published there in 2015.

Kat Kourbeti: So a journey.

Kate Heartfield: Yeah, a journey. I'm happy to be the poster child for people who get many rejections.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, I think that's normal for most people. And if anything the story of 'that was my first submission and it also got accepted' is astronomically unlikely, so I do think that hearing these stories and telling these stories about how long it can take to get to a place, of being publication ready, is important. So when you submitted this, was this in 2015 or before?

Kate Heartfield: Yeah, it was the fall of 2014. So not only do I still have emails of my old rejections, but I also have the acceptance email right in front of me. So I will read it, from October 10th, 2014. So almost exactly 10 years—actually, 10 years ago the day that we're recording!

Kat Kourbeti: Oh my God. That's amazing!

Kate Heartfield: Yeah! So I just wrote back saying "dear Julia," as Julia [Rios] had sent me the acceptance:

"Dear Julia and the rest of the team,

My goodness, I actually just had to put down my coffee to avoid spilling it in excitement.

I've been a reader and admirer of Strange Horizons for so long. I'm beyond thrilled."

So clearly I was happy to be accepted at last. And yeah, I do think that this story, because it did have so much of myself in it and was trying to get at something that only I could tell, or that felt very much like something that I had to say to the world, I could definitely see how that in hindsight was my best chance. I think that trying to get to that place of just clearing off the mirror so that you can reflect yourself back to the world in the best possible way takes a lot of work, but sometimes those moments come through and I think the story is one of those moments for me.

Kat Kourbeti: What a beautiful happenstance that we're recording exactly 10 years to the day since then.

Kate Heartfield: Exactly 10 years. Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: Incredible, that's awesome. And so then, would you say that the final story that we saw in the publication is mostly what you sent in?

Kate Heartfield: Yeah, it was a pretty light edit, as I recall. There were a few little suggestions, and of course, very respectful and professional process. I recall a few little things where a couple of the phrases and dialogue tweaked a little bit. But not a lot of edits, and the process was really smooth and yeah, it was just a joy to work with everybody. Having that same sense that I was talking about earlier, about feeling confidence when submitting that you would be read by somebody who was rooting for you. I definitely felt that during the editorial process as well, that everyone was on the same page and just wanted to make the story

Kat Kourbeti: There was another piece that I discovered in my, kind of digging through the archives for your name in relation to anything within the Strange Horizons archive. And I found a really lovely piece that you wrote for, I think a fund drive in 2017. Can you tell me a little bit about that? I will also, of course, link it in the show notes for folks to read, but it's a beautiful, kind of, "here's Strange Horizons, please submit, I love this magazine so much."

Kate Heartfield: Yeah, I had forgotten about this until you found it and mentioned it. This was a little nonfiction piece that I wrote about the magazine. I think it was Kate Dollarhyde who wrote to me in I think it was 2017, in association with the fund drive for the magazine, and I wrote about what a Strange Horizons story was for me and as a reader what I tended to enjoy about that fiction, and also how that helped me develop as a writer. So a lot of the same things that we're talking about today.

Kat Kourbeti: Upon finding it, I was really overjoyed because it shows that the readers who read us, who then become the writers who submit, really get a sense of exactly what we try to do. And it also warmed my heart because we still try to do the exact same thing now. I think it's impressive, and I will keep saying this all this year as we record these interviews, that I can't believe how it hasn't been diluted, it hasn't changed. If anything, it's grown stronger. And it's great to see that reflected in your earnest letter and urging for people to fund and to submit to us.

Now I want to jump into slightly more fun stuff. I want you to tell me about your work.

You and I go back a little ways. We were on a panel together, I think in Eastercon or some such, virtually, a few years back. And I've also interviewed you for a different podcast for your novel, The Valkyrie. So I have read bits of your work, but I want you to tell the audience as well, because I think there's a lot of really fascinating historical periods that you delve into, and some really cool plot lines that in our last conversation, I was like, oh man, put these on my TBR, and in fact, put them at the top.

So with your novels, because that's your bread and butter, how do you start working on a historical fiction idea? Does it come from the historical period usually, or do you have a sense of perhaps bits of politics that you're like, maybe I want to touch on this?

What's a period that works? How does that manifest for you?

Kate Heartfield: Yeah, often it's two or three things coming together, and then they'll sit in the back of my brain and in the back of my email inbox, because I email myself when I get ideas for a while until I'm able to work on that thing, and if it's been percolating all that time, generally it starts to coalesce into something.

I'll talk about my debut novel which was called Armed in Her Fashion, came out in 2018. And it has since been re-released as The Chatelaine. So it's the same book with some edits and prologue added. But the two books are the same, The Chatelaine and Armed in Her Fashion.

And that one, it came to me as I was researching for a different novel that hasn't been published, and I was looking for names of canons. I needed a couple of different names of canons, like actual historical canons, and I came upon one, it's actually technically a bombard I think, in Ghent called Dulle Griet, which is named after a figure in folklore, a particular story about a woman who raided Hell, armed only with pots and pans.

And there was this beautiful painting by Peter Bruegel that depicted this figure, this woman, who was raiding a Hellmouth, and as soon as I started reading that story and I saw the painting, I immediately knew that it was a novel, and I knew that I was going to write that novel. It immediately said things to me about the legal rights of women, especially in terms of dealing with family life and death and the sort of power of spite and stubbornness and determination for middle aged women, as I was becoming a middle aged woman myself.

It immediately just conjured up a lot of things that I wanted to talk about, and I had a lot of fun writing this novel, which is set in the 14th century during a revolt in Flanders, at the beginning of the Hundred Years War. There's a lot of a sort of a Hieronymus Bosch vibe, there's just very strange dark creatures and an actual hell mouth that is actually attached to a hell beast. It's the darkest of my novels and the strangest. I think in a lot of ways it's similar—even though on a superficial level there's almost no connection between it and the story that I wrote for Strange Horizons, they're different tones, different settings, everything—but they're similar in some ways in that they're both very much drawing on things that I felt were very genuine to me, and that probably nobody else would write in quite that way.

So I think there's a lesson to be learned about really writing from your heart the things that you want to tell, and just having some faith that somebody out there will get it.

Kat Kourbeti: Absolutely, and this is the book that's jumped to the top of my TBR immediately, because I am familiar with that painting, and with that story. Side note, back in the Twitter days (RIP), I was following a bot that would post a different Hieronymus Bosch like little bit of a painting. Every day it would kind of have like, Oh, here's this a little bit and I'd be like, ooh, I like that one. It's a vibe.

Kate Heartfield: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: I know that for The Valkyrie, it was also a similar idea where you had the concept of retelling a traditional folk story/mythology, but putting your own spin, for reasons.

Kate Heartfield: Yeah, exactly. So the Valkyrie is a retelling of this collection of Norse and Germanic stories. They were historical fiction when they were told. Our oldest versions are from about a thousand years ago, but they actually tell the stories of 600 years before that which was the stories of, a little client kingdom on the edges of the Roman Empire, in the final days of what we think of as the Western Roman Empire, and the coming of the Hunnish army and of Attila. And these stories have been told over and over again about this great catastrophic event for this kingdom, of the Burgundian people and how they were then exiled and had to go to France, which is why Burgundy is in France.

But as the stories have been told over and over the centuries, they acquired a dragon, and a hero with a magic sword, and a cursed hoard of gold, and various other elements. And those stories then really inspired Tolkien, and inspired a lot of the modern fantasy that I grew up reading.

The exercise of The Valkyrie, it actually started as a piece of short fiction. I was writing for a little weekend flash fiction contest among friends. I started writing the story of Brunhilde, the Valkyrie, who is a figure in these stories, and I was thinking about her perspective, because in the versions that I had read her behavior and the behavior of Gudrun, who is her great rival, this princess, their behavior didn't really make a lot of sense to me. And so I thought well, I wonder how she would tell the story. And I wonder whether one could explain the same events, but with different things happening in the background. Maybe what was happening behind closed doors is not what people then saw and told later.

So in my version, instead of rivals, these two women actually fall in love, and the choices that they make for their community lead to this great downfall. So it was in a similar way, it was finding the seeds in history and in old stories, and then thinking about how I could use that to talk about some of the concerns that I had about just the way that we tell stories about women and the way that we think about war and all kinds of things.

So I think there is always this tension for me between finding inspiration in old things and then trying to bring my concerns of today into it.

Kat Kourbeti: What's really fascinating to me from like just a craft perspective, is how you use language and vocabulary. Every single piece of work that I've seen from you has its own voice, it's not ever formulaic. You really attune to the historical periods that you work with.

Including the short story in Strange Horizons, which is very modern and punchy, and then it switches a little bit when the old souls come in, and like the vibe completely changes. How do you do that? Cause especially with The Valkyrie, I think you tap into that kind of prose poetry kind of language, which is quite difficult to do, I think, and it fascinates me. Teach me your secrets. Me and the listeners, of course.

Kate Heartfield: Oh, that's wonderful to hear. It is something that I've worked on very deliberately and didn't come naturally to me, so it's really wonderful to hear that it's working at least part of the time. I think a lot of it has to do with immersing yourself in the research of whatever you're trying to write about. That can really help.

I think another key part of it for me too is just recognizing the glory of revision, because it's a lot of pressure to put on yourself to say, "well, everything's got to pour out perfectly and also in the voice that I'm looking for in the first draft." Sometimes it just does flow when it's been building and you've got it there in your head, but often a scene will take a few passes to say, okay, actually this line, what if I had a different word choice here? Or what if I borrowed a rhythm from the sagas, or sometimes I'll even find a sort of sample piece, like something that has the kind of musicality that I'm looking for. And I'll think, okay well, what if I were to write it in that rhythm? Not copying it or not doing a pastiche, but thinking, what is it about this work that I can borrow for my own work and reflect back in some way?

For example, I've written a novella that was in a shared world that was inspired by Shakespeare. It's called Monstrous Little Voices, and I wrote a novella for that. And I'm also, right now, working on a novel that is Shakespearean. It's a prequel to Romeo and Juliet. I'm not trying to be Shakespeare. That would be silly and ridiculous and also probably impossible for me. But I am always thinking about, it's like a bumper sticker, what would Shakespeare do? If I'm faced with a decision about a rhythm in a sentence or about wordplay or a particular word choice or something like that, I will just always remind myself, okay, what is the more Shakespearean choice in this regard?

So sometimes it can be very deliberate, and it's not as if you just put on the mantle of the voice and then write the piece necessarily. Sometimes it works like that, but sometimes it's more actually getting down there in the nitty gritty in the mines and revision and doing it very deliberately. And then ideally, it will read to the reader as if it just came to you from above.

Kat Kourbeti: Well to me, it definitely does, so I would say your hard work is paying off, for sure. And thank you for sharing your wisdom. I think a lot of people, when they try and do that—and I'm certainly guilty of this—where if the first draft isn't a reflection of what I want it to be, then I get very disappointed and frustrated. The importance of revisions, I think, cannot be overstated.

Tell me a little bit about, you have two books with similar titles that are in fact not related.

Kate Heartfield: Yes.

Kat Kourbeti: Which at first I totally thought one of them was a sequel. It is in fact very much not a sequel. But there is a common, uh, thread. [Ba-dum-tiss!]

Kate Heartfield: Yeah. My novel The Embroidered Book came out in 2022, and that is my big, fat novel. It's 672 pages and it's the story of Queen Marie Antoinette of France and her sister, Maria Carolina of Naples. But the twist is that they are magicians and they are in fact rival magicians. Sort of like Strange and Norrell if they were sisters and queens. It's about sort of 30 years of 18th century politics leading up to the French Revolution, and the secret magic that these women learn and develop, and the kinds of things that they give up in exchange for that power.

So there's a lot of literalizing metaphors about political power, and yeah, it is called The Embroidered Book because embroidery plays a big role, and there is an actual embroidered book cover that is central to the story.

And then the other one that has a fibre arts title is The Tapestry of Time, which is my latest book. So that one just came out in the UK and in Canada and in all of the markets that the UK exports my books to. It's not coming out until June 2025 in the United States, but you can pre-order it now, and it's out everywhere else pretty much. So the Tapestry of Time, even though it also has a similar title, it's not connected to The Embroidered Book except in that it is about sisters and politics again. There is a piece of embroidery that figures very largely in it, so it's connected in those ways.

So The Tapestry of Time is about four clairvoyant sisters in the summer of 1944 in France and England, and it is based on the true story of what happened to this famous piece of embroidery that is in a bit of a misnomer called the Bayeux Tapestry, which is a record of the events of 1066, the Norman conquest of England.

In 1944, as the Allies were approaching, and as Paris was rising up, Heinrich Himmler, a very high ranking Nazi, did his utmost to get the Bayeux Tapestry out of France, and basically loot it the way they were trying to loot everything. He was very interested in it as a historical artifact and as a propaganda tool, and he was also the head of the Nazi occult wing, I guess you could say; this branch of scientists and archaeologists and occultists that Himmler was the figurehead and leader for. And so his ideas about history and artifacts, and this true story of how he tried and failed right up to the final hours to steal the Bayeux Tapestry—what happened was he sent two SS men to Paris in the final days when Paris was rising up, and the resistance captured the Louvre where the tapestry was, hours before the SS men got there to steal it.

So this story was really inspiring to me and I thought well, there's a lot to say here about the rise of fascism, and how people have resisted that in various ways, and how fascists try to manipulate history for their own ends. And getting back to that idea of the stories that we tell about history and the political ends that people can put them to, and how they change and change over and over again.

So that's The Tapestry of Time. It's probably the most Indiana Jones-ish of my books, and also the only one that's set in the 20th century.

Kat Kourbeti: It sounds very fascinating and sadly, really timely. I think we all need a little bit of this, to know how to bring those elements of resistance in our own lives, because unfortunately it is very much Happening right now, across the board. Especially as we record now, the misinformation around climate change and the political situation in America, and for some reason, conflating the two? So yeah, it sounds like a really fascinating book.

And then, I don't know how much you can and or want to talk about your next one, but maybe give me like a bit of a glimpse because you say "prequel to Romeo and Juliet", and I am all ears because I am such a Shakespeare nerd that I want this in my life. Tell me about it.

Kate Heartfield: Yeah, I can talk about it. The Publisher's Marketplace announcement went out, so it's out there in the world, so I can talk about it. I finished the first draft now, so it's also not in that awkward stage when you don't want to mention it for fear of upsetting the elves or whatever. So I don't feel superstitious about talking about it now.

It's in the revision stage and it's called Mercutio and it will be published by Harper Voyager UK, like my previous few books. It is about the character of Mercutio before the events of Romeo and Juliet and where he came from basically and who he is.

He's just, he's always been under my skin for many years. And this book has been just building and building over this time. The basic premise is that it's set a couple of hundred years before Shakespeare because, again, Shakespeare was telling historical fiction about the feuds in Italy a couple of hundred years before, and it begins with him on a battlefield in a real battle that happened in Italy and he's fighting next to a young poet named Dante Alighieri who is there at the same time, and they accidentally, as one does, open a door to Faerie during this battle and then they have to deal with the consequences.

So it's been a lot of fun to write and it is in that stage now where I'm just trying to really work on that voice and get it to where it needs to be.

Kat Kourbeti: Oh my gosh. Amazing. Also, like, Dante? Are you writing this for me? Like, thank you?!

Kate Heartfield: Yeah, a few people have said that and I think, okay, clearly I'm not the only one who is like, "and I'm going to put in Dante!" It's like all the things that I love too and it is kind of like, "I can't believe I get to write this" feeling because it's just lots and lots of candy for people who love this sort of thing.

Kat Kourbeti: Oh, that's excellent. Oh, man. Cannot wait. That's gonna be awesome. I think in your long fiction, I'm looking at the list of your publications here, there's also a little really interesting thing, which is your side hustle in the franchise business of writing video game novels, which is super cool in particular because you have a couple of books in the Assassin's Creed universe, which is very historical. So that's a perfect glove fit. How did that happen?

Kate Heartfield: Yeah, so I have two books that I've written in the Assassin's Creed universe, and doing the thing I always say when people ask me "is it a good idea to write for someone else's intellectual property," or in someone else's franchise. And I think it makes a difference when it's something that is a good fit for you as a writer. Assassin's Creed was for me because, as you say, it's historical periods, and it allowed me to write the kinds of books that I love, which is all kinds of weird and convoluted plots, tangled up in the real events of history, and talking about the political aspects of history, but also this incredible adventure.

And also talking to readers who might not otherwise have encountered my work which is really nice. One of the things that I've really enjoyed about writing for Assassin's Creed is that I occasionally will get emails from someone who says "I hadn't read a book in 10 years, I went through this long, dry spell of not reading, and now I'm reading again because I picked up one of your Assassin's Creed books." Or I've heard from very young teenage readers who are encountering some of the history for the first time, so that's been really gratifying. And yeah, it's been lots of fun.

I've written interactive fiction as well, and a little bit of video games. That is another part of my writing career.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, that's really interesting. I've always found interactive fiction fascinating because you can't just tell one story; you have to leave open avenues for people to make those choices. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that? Like how does that kind of work for you, when you think about the narrative? Because normally you would follow a character's story, right? But how do you let it be something else, maybe?

Kate Heartfield: That's a really good point. I think it's really been central for why it's been fun for me as a writer. I've written two big interactive projects for Choice of Games, called The Magician's Workshop and The Road To Canterbury, and they're both historical as well. I'm one of several writers on a new piece called A Death in Hyperspace, which is a fun interactive project that's out there that should be able to Google.

Yeah, interactive fiction is always something I try to do when I get a chance, and that point about choosing the pathway as a writer, I think was actually really helpful for me because it gets back to what we were talking about, about understanding the shape of story and also working in revision. It helped me to break out of the mindset that there was some sort of perfect platonic ideal of the story, and if I could somehow attune myself like a tuning fork, to the muse, I would be able to channel that ideal story onto the page and that if it was not coming out perfectly, it must be a problem with me. I was not the best instrument for that story or something like that.

Which might be a perfectly valid way of looking at it for some people, but for me, it was just getting in my way. It was creating a lot of pressure and writing interactive fiction allowed me to see that actually, there are multiple possible ways of telling any story. There's no canon version of anything, really. And if you tell it one way rather than the other, it's not right versus wrong, they're just different choices, and they could all be interesting and take you down an interesting path as a writer and a reader.

So it really helped me to open up a little bit in that regard, to play around more and to understand that you're not just beating your head against the manuscript trying to get it perfect, but just allowing yourself to try different things and see which is the most interesting for you.

Kat Kourbeti: This sounds so interesting. What about the video game writing you've done?

Kate Heartfield: I wrote for the game Evil Genius 2 which came out from Rebellion a few years ago, and it was lots of fun. I'm so glad that they brought me in on that project. I wrote several of the characters and some of the scenarios and dialogue. Other than interactive text based fiction, I think that's the only video game writing that I've done. It was a lot of fun to do, and I'm certainly hoping to do some more at some point, because as a game player myself, it's really fun to be able to contribute to that and see the other side of the industry.

Kat Kourbeti: And just hone a different skill set. Cause dialogue is a different beast to narration and descriptions, and not necessarily a fixed form where you have the rhythm of narration to contend with the dialogue and with everything else.

Kate Heartfield: Yeah, it's fun to be a part of a collaborative project like that, where you're only contributing one aspect of it and then you can see the final thing with all the animation and the art and sound and amazing voice actors and everything else. And it was fun for me because Evil Genius 2 is a retro science fiction, like James Bond-y evil lairs, volcano lairs and that kind of thing, which is a different kind of vibe than I usually write, so it was really fun for me to just do something out of my wheelhouse.

Kat Kourbeti: So thank you so much, Kate, for taking the time to talk us through your career and to share your Strange Horizons story with us. I'm really happy that we played a part in your career somewhat.

Kate Heartfield: Yeah, thank you so much. I can't overstate how important Strange Horizons has been and especially I think the openness to writers telling their own stories and from all parts of the world and in all English-es, and keeping that going for 25 years is an amazing feat.

Kat Kourbeti: Thank you.