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Book of the Month - The Spanish Pearl
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Book of the Month - The Spanish Pearl
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The Spanish Pearl by Catherine Friend is our featured book this month. We've transcribed an interview with Catherine Friend so you can read it if you prefer. The sequel to The Spanish Pearl, The Crown of Valencia is also available at Ultra Violet Lesbian Books.

We'd love you to go and review the book on our site - once you've purchased and read the book of course! Please let us know what you thought of the interview and the review. At the end of the article is a comment section. Does this sound like a book you'd like to read? What kind of questions would YOU have asked?

Interview

Listen to the interview: 
The Spanish Pearl

You can download it here and listen to it later:

Download Catherine Friend Interview (Right click, "Save as")

Read the Interview:

Michelle Mee from Ultra Violet Lesbian Books (UV) interviewed Award Winning author Catherine Friend (CF). As we spoke to Catherine, she had just heard the news that she just won 2 Awards for her novel The Spanish Pearl at the GCLS Awards held in Phoenix, AZ.

Hi, my name is Michelle and I'm going to be chatting to Catherine Friend, she is the author of The Spanish Pearl and the The Crown of Valencia which is the sequel to the Spanish Pearl and she has also written another novel called Hit By a Farm. I'm going to ask Catherine a few questions. She is going to be our author of the month for August. Catherine I'm going to go through a few questions with you today and we are going to chat about some of your books.

UV - Catherine, what compels you to write?
CF - What compels me to write, um, that's a hard question. I was not a person who wanted to be a writer ever since I was a kid. I had a different career and just sort of stumbled upon writing. The reason I love to write know is because I love to tell stories and writing is a challenge and never boring and I learn somthing and then I forget it and I learn it again and learn the answers and new things all the time. So what compels me to write now is because it is so interesting and I will never stop learning.

UV - Catherine, was The Spanish Pearl your first novel that you wrote, as Hit by a Farm was a memoir. Was the Spanish Pearl your first fiction novel?
CF - It was my first fiction for adults. I had written a couple of novels for kids that weren't good, but the Spanish Pearl, I did not even know that I wanted to write for adults because I pretty much wrote for children but I wanted to do something totally different after The Farm, sort of hit my career, so the totally different thing was to do something fun and escape and that's what I wanted to do, so that's when I wrote The Spanish Pearl as a kinda escape from real life.

UV - When you started writing the Spanish Pearl, did you know you were going to have a sequel, and when you started writing did you have the end in mind. Did you know how it was going to end?      
CF - Right, I knew the whole story, I thought it was going to be three books and I knew how it was going to end. But I wrote the first one and then started writing the second one and I thought oh, I don't think there is enough here for three books and I can't stand trilogies where the second book is there to bridge the first and third book. There's not much story. I decided to condense the second and third book into one book. So, before The Spanish Pearl came out I had written both books and revised them over and over for many years (laughs). It took me a long time to get them published.
I knew going in how I wanted fit to end. Yip.
That's the kinda writer I am. I have to know my endings first.

UV - Do you do alot of preparation before you start writing?
CF - I do, I do alot of reading, and it is another reason I like to write because it's a good excuse to research, and read lots of books. I just read as much as I could on eleventh century Spain. There isn't alot on 11th century Spain but I tried to soak in the culture and the history and I picked out real people that existed in history and said okay, I'm going to use them in the story. So when I was just full, my head was full of details about the time period and the people then I put all those books away and sat down and started to write.

Image
Catherine Friend

UV - For me it was a very, very unique type of book because it brought so many different types of elements into it for instance the history was amazing because when I read it I thought wow, 11th century what would it be like living in those times and your descriptions and everything were amazing. Would you carry on writing in this type of genre?
CF - I love mixing genres up, that's why it was so hard to sell actually, because it is history and it's romance and it's adventure and it's time travel. And a lot of main stream persons are afraid of that. So I had to wait actually until Bold Strokes was formed a couple years ago so that I could find a home for it. And, yes, I want to keep writing that kind of story. I need lots of different things going on to keep me interested, but I love history and so most of my novels I think in the future will have some aspect of history to them. It's fun to read history.

UV - And the next question, do you have a specific writing regime?      
CF - I wish I did (laughs). I think my life would be easier if I did. I do try and get up and write in the morning. But one day a week I do chores. There might be an emergency. I mean just as we are talking I see there is a baby chick missing out from the mother who's got her chicks out there. So as soon as we are done here I have got to go out and find that missing chick. The animals come first, if an animal is sick or hurt then I have to put the writing aside, but I do try to do my writing in the morning when I'm my freshest.      

UV - You've said that the genre you like and consider writing more of is historic type books, where do most of your ideas come from?
CF - Where do my ideas come from, um, I might see an article in a magazine or I might hear something on the radio and I think, OOh, what if this happened or what if this person did that or what if. It is kinda the standard writing question to ask yourself, what if? What if this happened. So I read lots of different things and you never know when it might become important. I'm working on a pirate novel and I happenend to buy a book on the history of jiggsaw puzzles and I'm going through there and I'm finding jiggsaw puzzles of woman pirates. So, OMG, this has to be in my book, so suddenly I had to figure out a way to get the jiggsaw puzzle into the novel, because I thought it was so interesting. I just kind of pull from different areas.
      
UV - What do you think is the most demanding part for you personally about writing?
CF - For me, it's getting it right, it's making sure what's in my head comes out on the paper because I want to entertain people. I do not want people to be bored. I just can't stand picking up a book that bores me and I do not want to do that to other people and I realise everyone has different interest's and not all books appeal to everyone, but I really want to tell a good story and that can be really challenging if you have the story in your head and it's hard to get it down on paper. That's challenging. Deadlines is hard for me. I did not write any of the three books that you mentioned on deadlines. But I've had to write deadlines since. It takes a little longer to write than I thought. Meeting deadlines is hard.


UV - Tell me if your book, The Spanish Pearl and the Crown of Valencia were to be made into a movie, who would you choose to play the main characters.
CF - That's such a hard question, we've been asked that before from people. (laughs) We kinda just look at each other. I don't know, I'don't know. I'm really hooked on Claudia Black, who is in the Farescape TV Series. I'd love to have Claudia Black in something I wrote.

UV - Has your life changed much since becoming a published author.
CF - Yes, it has actually. I wrote for many years without anybody caring what I was writing or paying attention. I wrote Pearl and Valencia, um, eight or nine years ago, together. Nobody was interested and since my books have been out, it's has been a very different story. People are interested, editors are interested in my work and people are interested in what I'm writing. So that's been pretty wild actually (laughs). To go from having a very quiet life to having people recognising me and want to know what I'm working on next, but I'm adjusting.    

UV - What changes and trend have you noticed happening in the lesbian world over the past few years?
CF - Well, I read lesbian fiction when I came out, I came out thirty years ago. (laughs) So, for a long time there was not much until the 80's and some of it really stuck with me like the McTavish Series by Sara Dreer. But alot of it I did not connect with, I did not enjoy it, it did not have the adventure. I needed the adventure. So I stopped reading lesbian fiction and it was not until the last three, fours years that I started reading it again because it really has exploded as far as options and there is more specultive fiction, there is more mystery, there is more adventure, there is better written romance. I think it has just exploded the last couple of years and I'm excited to be a part of it.   

UV - Do you read other novels while you are busy writing?
CF - I don't, I don't. I might pick up a Charlotte Bronte, I might pick up Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen sometimes. Reading those books, they're so good at sexual tension, I know that sounds really weird, those Victorian times. But I will read one of those books that are very different from my own novels. But when I'm working on my own novel I just don't want to be influenced, I just want to have my own story in my head so that I don't get confused. So I read non fiction.

UV - You were talking about pirates, are you working on a new project right now and is it going to be released shortly?
CF - I have a few more weeks of work to do on it and it will come out in December and it's called 'A Pirates Heart'. Part of it takes place in modern times. A Librarian who's trying to track down a map, left by a pirate. The then other part of the novel takes part in 1715 and it follows the life of the woman pirate.
UV - That sounds awesome. (laughs)
CF - It's been fun to work on.
UV - Is it in the final stages?
CF - Yes, I'm doing the final edits, then it has to go through copy editing and then we have to check for typo's and everything. It will go to press in November and then it will be shipped out in December.

UV - Do you have any influence over the actual image, cover of the book.
CF - With Bold Stokes, I do actually, with my other publishers they ask, but they pretty much have a clear idea. With Bold Strokes I sort of throw out some ideas I throw out some elements that are in the story and Sherry who does the cover takes that and runs with that and I'm really happy with the covers. I think they have a very distinctive look and they pull in elements of the stories. The publisher does ask if you like the cover or would you see something changed. I have worked with Sherry on a couple of things to tweak the cover. They are just very open to having feedback, which is great.        
 

UV - We have quite a few or we get approached by quite a few new writers or budding writers. What advice would you give them about their writing?
CF - The best advice I can give is to persist and to just hang in there. I mean, that's the way to get published. I've been writing since 1991. I wrote The Spanish Pearl in 1999 and Valencia in 2001. So that's almost 10 years ago, and you have to hang in there and keep writing. Once you've finished one novel, start over and write another one and write then another one. Someone told me once that most published authors have 6 manuscripts in their draws that never got published by the time they got published. So just keep writing and hang in their.     

UV - Thank you very much for doing the interview with us.
CF - Thank you they were good questions. They were fun questions.

Click next to read the book review of this book. 

  

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