So. Alma Alexander’s Worldweavers trilogy was completed earlier this year with the release of Cybermage. I was fortunate enough to interview her after the book came out, but have been tragically derelict in my duties when it comes to this here website. Hopefully I can make it up to you a bit now, by posting the interview along with a brief description of Alma’s awesome work.
If you’ve been reading the Worldweavers series up until now, you know that our heroine, Thea, was long considered to be a magical dunce. In her world, where magical talent is the norm for humans, Thea showed no aptitude for the arts until she was shipped off to Wandless Academy. At that point it became apparent that she’s not only a magician, but a rare powerful one, whose talent lies in the supposedly un-magical area of computers.
In Cybermage, Thea and her friends meet the famous scientist Nikola Tesla at various times in his life, whilst attempting to keep an important magical object out of the hands of a race called the Alphiri.
The book, Alma’s tenth, is awesome, and I heartily recommend the entire series to you. It’s funny, interesting, dramatic and also exceptionally creative.
Without further delay, I bring you Twenty-one Questions with Alma Alexander:
Question One
Me: You write under the name Alma Alexander, but you seem to be pretty free about your given name [Alma Hromic Deckert]. Why do you use a pseudonym?
Alma: Because when The Secrets of Jin-Shei was being published, my agent phoned me up and said they wanted a pseudonym. They wanted a name that was easier to pronounce. It was presented to me as a dealbreaker. My middle name is Alexandra so I went with that, so it felt more like me. [Alma's maiden name, Hromic, is pronounced H-rome-ich.]
Question Two
Alma: What made you create YA New York?
Me: I used to have a column about trashy novels, called Dustbin Diaries, and even after I left the newspaper that published that column, I was gluttonous in my consumption of teen literature. Eventually I realized that I needed to write about it somewhere other than on my LiveJournal.
Question Three
Me: Can you tell me in two sentences where you’re originally from and where you’ve lived in your life?
Alma: I was born in Yugoslavia. I went to Africa when I was ten because my dad got a job that took us there. We went to Zambia first for two and a half years, then Swaziland for five and half and South Africa for thirteen. In between I went to school in England. Then I went to New Zealand and lived there for about six years or so. Then I met somebody on the internet, got married and moved to America. Started out in Florida. It took me less than three years to start screaming at my husband to get me out now, and currently we live in the Pacific Northwest in Washington. The directions are “Aim for Canada. Just before you get there, turn right.”
Question Four
Alma: You said “trashy” is not a diss kind of thing. What makes a successful novel in your eyes, as a reader?
Me: It doesn’t matter what genre I’m reading, or what the subject is at all as long as the author sucks me in, which is a very visceral feeling that I think comes from personal preference. But I do like certain things like texture, or exploration with different formats and perspectives. And for some reason I’ve read a number of books about teenage girls coming back from the dead in one form or another.
Question Five
Me: What is it with Tesla? I mean, you mention Tesla, and you’re actually not the only YA writer who seems interested in him.
Alma: [Laughs] He was nuts. He was a complete mad genius. How do you not put someone in a fantasy who earned the title of The New Wizard of the West in his lifetime? He came to the States with four cents in his pocket and a letter of introduction; that was all he had. And essentially he got screwed by the system because he was an old-world gentleman … And of course, there’s the blessed pigeons. [Tesla was a great friend to the creatures.]
Question Six
Alma: Did you choose to live in New York, or was it circumstance, or would you pick New York as the place you would ever want to live?
Me: I ended up here as a result of circumstance, and I chose to stay. I’ve told this story before, but we moved here when I was thirteen. My dad was a minister, and he had gotten a church here, and when he died when I was sixteen, I literally refused to move. I did go away to college in New Orleans, but I came back, and I think I always will.
Question Seven
Me: Would you ever consider moving to New York?
Alma: I love coming to New York. Living there, I’m not sure. I’m a city girl, I always have been. I was born in the city, I’ve always lived in a city, more or less. But New York isn’t a city, it’s a megalopolis. … For some reason New York scares the living daylights out of me.
Question Eight
Alma: What was the first book you ever remember having loved reading?
Me: I was six. It was a Nancy Drew novel, and I don’t remember the title. It wasn’t one of the original novels — the ones you see with yellow hardcovers. It was pink, and Nancy Drew had red hair on the cover, and I really wish I could remember anything else about it. Then again, did I mention I was six? It was the first book I ever read that wasn’t a picture book, and it made me feel both more grown up, and more in control of imagining what was happening.
Question Nine
Me: What was the first book you remember ever having loved?
Alma: The book I learned to read on, mainly because my mother read it out to me and she did it twice, and when I asked her to again she wouldn’t. And I went into the kitchen and asked if she wanted me to read to her. I opened the book and started reading to her and she dropped the pot. I was four, and the book was Heidi.
Question Ten
Alma: If you could do whatever you wanted to do, what would you do?
Me: Well, I left journalism — supposedly — to work on my own writing, I should say to work on my own fiction. If I could do anything I would be a novelist, which I’m pursuing right now. But if that didn’t work out or wasn’t an option, I suppose I’d want to host a comedy show, although that might require a whole host of skills I don’t have. Yet.
Question Eleven
Me: Well, that makes feel compelled to ask you how you became a writer. How did you become a writer?
Alma: I always wrote. It was just something I did. … One year when I was in New Zealand I saw this little flyer advertising a science fiction convention and this one featured Roger Zelazny. He was sort of a literary god to me. I essentially took one look at the flyer and my eyes went out. He and Vonda McIntire were hosting a writer’s workshop. I sent in a story six months before anyone else was even thinking about it and spent six months biting my nails. “Why did I send that story? Roger Zelazny is going to think I’m nuts!”
It was the first time I’d ever actually really spent any amount of time in the company of anyone who was a pro at this. And they treated us as junior colleagues, not like little kids.
[Alma got a copy of her story handed back with scribbles all over it. She was sitting next to Roger Zelazny. He didn't have a copy of her story with him.]
He looked at me and said, “I have two questions. How long have you been writing?” And I told him what I just told you. He sort of nodded and looked at me and said “Do you write or read a lot of poetry?” And I said I did.
He looked at me and said, “It shows. You have a voice all your own. No one else will ever write like this.”
Every time I get stuck or discouraged or annoyed, those words are just written in gold in the back of my mind.
This happened in April. In June of that year he was dead.
Question Twelve
Alma: How old were you when you started writing?
Me: My mom says I was four or five, but I’m the same as you. I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t writing. It’s like having a disease.
Question Thirteen
Me: Let’s face it: Worldweavers, as a series, is kind of geeky. Which is a good thing, by the way, same as being trashy would be, but what I want to know is, what sci fi television shows do you watch or own on DVD?
Alma: Well, Babylon Five, all of it. I can probably quote you large chunks of that show. I just happen to think that was some of the best human drama, bar none, genre or non-genre, ever on TV. I don’t own it on DVD, but of course Star Trek was right up there, and there’s an ongoing discussion between my husband and myself about which incarnation was the best. … My own preference, not because it was fantastic acting or original science but sheer character interaction, is the original series. One of the newer ones which is one of those I suspect I shouldn’t have said I liked because they cancelled it in the middle of a cliffhanger, was Carnivale. The current thing that I’m watching, and all I can tell you is that I hope there’s a rabbit because if there isn’t I’m going to be so mad I spent so much time looking at that hat, is Lost.
Question Fourteen
Alma: What’s your favorite Star Trek movie?
Me: Asking me that is kind of like asking a pro football player what his favorite chick flick is, because I honestly don’t spend that much time thinking about them … which is odd, because I would like be knowledgeable enough to give a good answer. But … which movie does Spock come back to life in?
Question Fifteen
Me: What about you?
Alma: Star Trek IV, the one with the whales. I love the one with the whales. “It’s not the whales, Captain, it’s the water.” Someday I just know I’m going to want back the part of my brain that keeps track of entire movies. I can quote you Star Wars.
Question Sixteen
Alma: Are you a night owl or a morning person?
Me: I’m actually very dangerous in that way — I can stay up all night like a vampire and sleep during the day. But at some point I came to realize that most people do it the other way around. So I actually keep a pretty strict bedtime now, which is kind of lame to admit. But it keeps me healthy.
Question Seventeen
Me: How do you feel about the reception that the Worldweavers trilogy has gotten?
Alma: I’ve had some marvelous comments from readers. I just got an e-mail from a teen reader asking if there were going to be any more. The reviews that I got were calling [the books] unique and at the same time comparing them to all that came before. However, they don’t seem to be as widely available as I’d like them to be. [Here, here. Next time you're at your local bookstore, fans, be sure to mention that they should stock the Worldweavers trilogy!]
Question Eighteen
Alma: I’m going to throw a cat among the pigeons here. How do you feel about movies made out of books? To give you an example, I spent most of Lord of the Rings snarling at the screen.
Me: I do that too, just generally. The book is almost always better than the movie, unless the book was really bad in the first place. In which case, why make the movie? The only exception to that rule for me is Breakfast at Tiffany’s, not because Truman Capote’s novella wasn’t fantastic, but because I grew up with the movie.
Question Nineteen
Me: How many languages do you speak and what are they?
Alma: Two and a half: I speak my mother tongue, obviously which is Serb, and I speak English obviously because I write in it. I had but am rapidly losing French.
Question Nineteen-A
Me: What compels you to write in English?
Alma: I just do. That’s the language I started writing and dreaming and thinking in. I very rarely write in my own language any more unless it’s about things that are very highly emotionally charged memories. It’s very interesting, because now one of my books is finally being translated back into my own language. [That would be Embers of Heaven, for those of you who want to grab the translated version.]
Question Twenty
Alma: Was there a magic moment in your life?
Me: Yes, but I won’t share it because it’s the basis of a novel that I’m writing. So you’ll just have to wait for the fictionalized version.
Question Twenty-one
Me: What else may we see of the Worldweavers universe after this last book?
Alma: There’s a story that turned up in my brain that turned up after I finished writing the last one, and I’m still probably going to write it and see if I can get it published.
This story involves the reason magic exists within the world and how it can create and how it can destroy. There’s a reason Alphiri chase but don’t got: they don’t have the underpinnings of a world that has a basis of magic in this. Their attempts to gain it, because without that nothing can ever have permanence. … Even if they could buy the magic, it’s going to be the impermanent kind that they can’t refresh.
This next book is about how they attempt to set up their own source, in essence, which their world, their society, their culture, they don’t have that.
Thank you, Alma, for an awesome interview and for being so patient with me re: getting it formatted and posted here on YA NY. And readers, seriously. If you haven’t read any of the Worldweavers books yet, go get them now. Don’t wait another second. I’m obviously neither a sci fi geek nor a fantasy nerd (this is a failing of mine, I know), and I can say without reservations that the series is totally accessible even to those who, like me, couldn’t even tell you which Star Trek movie was the one with the whales.
Thanks! Loved the chat.