Please join me in welcoming the H Team to Let Them Read Books! Christian Cameron, Libbie Hawker, Kate Quinn, Vicky Alvear Shecter, Stephanie Thornton, SJA Turney, and Russell Whitfield are touring the blogosphere with their third fabulous collaboration on a novel in parts, A Song of War: A Novel of Troy. I had the chance to ask them a few questions about writing as a team, and we had a little fun imagining movie casting and deserted-island scenarios. Their answers are hilarious! Read on and enter to win a paperback copy of A Song of War!
Troy: city of gold, gatekeeper of the east, haven of the god-born and the lucky, a city destined to last a thousand years. But the Fates have other plans—the Fates, and a woman named Helen. In the shadow of Troy’s gates, all must be reborn in the greatest war of the ancient world: slaves and queens, heroes and cowards, seers and kings . . . and these are their stories.
A young princess and an embittered prince join forces to prevent a fatal elopement.
A tormented seeress challenges the gods themselves to save her city from the impending disaster.
A tragedy-haunted king battles private demons and envious rivals as the siege grinds on.
A captured slave girl seizes the reins of her future as two mighty heroes meet in an epic duel.
A grizzled archer and a desperate Amazon risk their lives to avenge their dead.
A trickster conceives the greatest trick of all.
A goddess’ son battles to save the spirit of Troy even as the walls are breached in fire and blood.
Seven authors bring to life the epic tale of the Trojan War: its heroes, its villains, its survivors, its dead. Who will lie forgotten in the embers, and who will rise to shape the bloody dawn of a new age?
Hello, H Team! Thank you so much for stopping by Let Them Read Books!
Russ: Thanks for having us :-)
What inspired you to write a novel about the Trojan War?
Simon: Coming up with an idea that can be tackled by several authors from several points of view seamlessly sounds troublesome but in actual fact it is really very easy. There are so many great tales waiting to be told. After
A Song of War came out, in just one conversation there were a dozen or more ideas bandied about. Some were discarded as unsuitable or too divisive, but most were intriguing enough to hook at least one of us. Troy was just the idea that hooked the most people’s imagination, but some of the other ideas were not so much discarded as put on the back burner for future projects.
Libbie: I was brought into the project later than the others, as one of our good writer friends had to bow out of
A Song of War due to some conflicting deadlines. So Troy was already the decided-upon topic when Kate Quinn approached me about filling the empty space. I’d never thought of writing anything having to do with the Trojan War before, but I immediately wanted to do it as soon as I heard about the project. It’s such a big, beefy chunk of history. It’s very hard to resist.
Christian: I was late to the party, but the Iliad has always inspired me. Really, almost anything to do with Greece, from Achilles to Byron.
Russ: I think it was Kate or Simon who came up with the idea of Troy… it sort of made sense as the first H Team project was took place over one day, the second covered the events of a year… so a decade seems like a natural progression from there. Handily, the Trojan War lasted ten years so that was that.
How did you determine who would write each part?
Simon: I can’t speak for the others, but for me, as soon as we decided on Troy I knew I had to write Aeneas. I am first and foremost a writer of Roman novels, and so with Aeneas being the mythological Pater Familias of the Roman people, the opportunity was too good to miss.
Libbie: By the time I came on board, I believe there were only two “songs” still unclaimed. The one I ended up choosing was the one where two major characters have to die (Paris and Achilles), and I knew I had to take that part. I love killing characters in the most pathetic and heart-rending ways possible. Plus Penthesilea had to die, too. Bonus! In addition, we cast Paris as the villain of the piece – or if not the villain, then the guy everybody really wanted to kick. So it was kind of fun to orchestrate his demise.
Vicky: My initial choice worked better for someone else so I ended up with Odysseus, kind of at the last minute. Which worked out just fine because if I’d thought too long and hard about it, I would’ve been terrified about taking on such an iconic figure. But put a deadline in front of my face and nothing else matters.
Kate: I’ve always loved Andromache, so it was easy. And Hellenus, a lesser prince of Troy, made a wonderful Everyman foil to all these larger-than-life Capital-H heroes.
Russ: We bandy around suggestions, but most people I think knew who they wanted to write from the get go. Agamemnon was a bit of a challenge to be honest because he’s almost universally despised, but it was one that I fancied taking on because I don’t think that many people wake up in the morning thinking, “How can I be eeeevil today?” So the thing was to try to find something in Agamemnon that would explain why he acts the way he does. I don’t think that anyone reading his story will like him at the end of it, but I’m hoping that I did enough for readers to maybe understand him a little more.
