Brothers' Fury (Bleeding Land Trilogy 2) (52 page)

Do you set yourself word-count targets each day or week?

If I write a thousand words in a day I am happy. Because so much of my day is spent on research it’s not a question of simply sitting there and letting it pour out. But even then I suspect I’m on the slow side. I take my time over those thousand words and they change very little from the day they’re first written. All authors work differently and I’m always fascinated by how others do it, but for myself I don’t do draft after draft. My ‘editing’ process is perhaps unusual as it invariably involves adding words – the seasoning as I call it – not taking words away.

Does your own life and family work its way into your writing?

I think I always intended to tell the story from the point of view of three main characters, but what took me completely by surprise was how these people, Edmund, Tom and Bess Rivers were going to try to dominate the tale. And yet why shouldn’t they? After all, it’s through their eyes that we see the world. It’s through them that I the writer and you the reader experience the time and place, find ourselves caught up in the maelstrom of bloody civil war. So what happened was that almost immediately the story became about the Rivers family and not the famous English Civil War battles, of which I had thought I was going to write. Of course, this is how it should be. Historical fiction – I suspect all fiction – only works if you empathize with the characters. And empathize I did, more than ever before in my writing.
The Bleeding Land
is close to home because it’s a story about family. I found myself asking over and over again, what would I do if I had to face my own brother across the battlefield? How would my mother deal with it if one of her sons turned his back on the family in search of vengeance?
What would my sister do if she had to give birth amidst the horror of a siege? Putting my own family into the book helped me explore the tale at a deeper level, so that at times during the writing I found it all really quite emotional.

How do you convey the war scenes in such incredible detail? Your readers say they can hear, smell and taste the scenes – that they feel as though they are in the thick of the action
.

I have always been intrigued by conflict and in some ways been drawn to it. I’m quite a physical person, having done karate, kickboxing, Krav Maga, rugby, fencing etc, all of which involve challenging and beating your opponent. Perhaps this physical competitiveness has given me some very small insight into what it must be like to face an enemy in battle. As well as that there is a whole weird spiritual side to me which is too complex to get into, but the short version being that I feel I have inherited memories and experiences from my ancestors. Told you it was weird!

The Bleeding Land
series gives a sense of the futility of war. Is this deliberate?

Certainly there is a marked difference in the portrayal of violence between the
Raven
saga novels and
The Bleeding Land
. In the Viking books you expect the characters to get involved in some pretty gruesome activities, after all, they’re Vikings! It’s part of the job description. But with the Rivers family and the other characters in
The Bleeding Land
it’s different. We think of the 17th century as a more civilized time than the Viking Age, so that when the violence does come it is much more shocking. Tom and Mun, Sir Francis and Lady Mary, are a family suddenly thrust into the horrors of war and each of them must commit terrible violence simply to stay alive. The fact that the family splits and they end up fighting on opposite sides just adds to the horror. So in a way the characters in my last novels gloried in violence whereas in
The Bleeding Land
they are utterly appalled by it.

Cavalier or Roundhead?

I’m sorry to say that I cannot answer this. Because the Rivers family is torn apart, with the brothers fighting on opposite sides, I would rather the reader decide whether I am for one side or the other if that is something that interests them. I don’t want them to read the books with a prejudicial eye or suppose I wrote this or that scene because of some allegiance. Having said that, I do find it very interesting that even after all these years if you were to walk into a pub and ask this very question you would face a salvo of impassioned answers. It’s intriguing that we still have some sense as to which side we would be on.

Raven: Blood Eye

Sons of Thunder

Odin’s Wolves

The Bleeding Land

For more information on Giles Kristian and his books, see his website at
www.gileskristian.com

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First published in Great Britain
in 2013 by Bantam Press
an imprint of Transworld Publishers

Copyright © Giles Kristian 2013

Giles Kristian has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781409043898
ISBNs 9780593066164 (cased)
9780593066171 (tpb)

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