Arwen Elys Dayton Interview

Hailed as the new Hunger Games or Divergent. We’ve talked to Arwen Elys Dayton about her new novel Seeker.

First of all can you tell us a bit about your new novel, Seeker?

Sure. I like to describe Seeker as a heroic family tale that goes terribly wrong. It’s set in the future, maybe 40 years from now, in Scotland and Hong Kong and a little bit in London.

The teens at the heart of Seeker have spent years on a remote estate in Scotland, undergoing pretty brutal training. They are taught to fight and use some unusual weapons and they are gradually initiated into hidden knowledge.

All of this is to become a Seeker—someone who uses this training and knowledge to make the world better and more fair. The characters look on Seekers as something like the Knights Templar from medieval times, committed to doing what’s right. They believe they will become modern versions of these legends. They believe they’re stepping into a noble calling.

But things are not at all what they seem. The adults they trust have been lying to them, manipulating them, using them. The life the imagined doesn’t exist.

When the truth is revealed, things get ugly and dangerous and intense. We chase the characters around the world as they try to escape from the lives they’ve been leading, discover who is a friend and who’s an enemy, and find a way to survive.

Can you give us some insight into your main characters?

Quin Kincaid is fifteen years old and has spent most of her life isolated from the rest of the world, training to become a Seeker. Since she was little, she’s trained side by side with Shinobu, her best friend and distant cousin. In recent months she’s fallen in love with the third Seeker apprentice, John Hart. Quin believes that she and Shinobu and John can make a difference, like the Seekers in her family’s legends. She’s an idealist.

Shinobu MacBain is of Scottish and Japanese descent, with red hair, and at fifteen years old, he’s already six feet tall. He’s the best fighter among the apprentices, and particularly loyal to Quin. Like her, Shinobu has no reason to doubt that he’s about to take his oath and begin the life he’s been imagining since he was a child.

John Hart is a latecomer to the estate and the Seeker training, but he’s intensely committed to proving himself and taking the oath. He seems to love Quin in the same way she loves him, but John’s long-term intentions are not at all clear. He alone among those training on the estate realizes what truly awaits them after they take their oaths.

And then there’s Maud, also known as the Young Dread. The others guess her age at about fourteen, though with Dreads, age is a tricky thing. Her uncertain origins, her history—beginning centuries ago—her silent, deliberate way of moving, and her capability for intense action, all mark her as someone one should not tangle with lightly. And yet Maud can be trusted to choose what is right—most of the time.

Tell us a bit about the unique weapons?

Designing the weapons was one of my favorite parts of writing Seeker. I’ll tell you about two of them:

The whipsword. At rest, a whipsword looks like a coiled whip made from a black, oily, rubbery sort of material. But when in use, the material can be cracked out into solid, straight form, and then manipulated infinitely in shape—so it can become any sword or knife you can imagine, and you can change its form as you fight to suit the moment. It’s also “tuned” to you as the user, so it won’t harm your own flesh, even if you grab the blade.
 

The disruptor. This is an evil invention, if I do say so myself. The disruptor is a large, metal, cannon-like weapon, worn across the chest and secured with a heavy harness around the shoulders and back. The disruptor fires thousands of electrical sparks in a giant swarm. If these sparks reach a victim, they surround his or her head, and then feed off the energy of this unfortunate person’s body and cause havoc to the mind. The victim stops being a rationally thinking individual and is “disrupted”.

 I know the disruptor is fictional, but every now and then, while working on Seeker, I would feel a rush of fear in the pit of my stomach, as though an actual disruptor was pointing at me. The characters in the book look on “disruption” as a fate worse than death.

 Did you do a lot of research for Seeker? I’ve heard you’ve traveled to Scotland, London, and Hong Kong among other things.

 I go down many different research paths when a story is taking shape in my head. I like to follow any thread that interests me, even if it doesn’t end up being directly relevant to the story I tell. While I began to see glimpses of Seeker, I researched all sorts of things, like the history of London Bridge, the early days of Hong Kong, how swords are made, and stranger topics like royal murders throughout history.

But the most important part of my research was traveling to Scotland and Hong Kong. They are each fascinating places in their own right, but there’s something about the difference between them that particularly inspires me. In many ways the city of Hong Kong and the Scottish countryside are perfect opposites. Visiting them and imagining both places in the same story created a friction in my mind that gave Seeker a lot of its energy—ancient and timeless (Scotland) meets modern and ever-changing (Hong Kong). I love the contrast.

Because Seeker is set in the near future, it was helpful to walk places where the characters actually walk and to envision how things would be different 30-50 years in the future. In the Scottish countryside, I don’t think the environment would look all that different from how it looks today—just as it doesn’t look all that much different today from how it looked 500 years ago. But in Hong Kong, where the city already feels futuristic, it was thrilling to imagine pushing the place decades ahead.

Walking through the crowds in Hong Kong, and the desolate Scottish countryside, I began to feel I was peering through Quin’s and Maud’s and Shinobu’s eyes, living in their world for a time. It was quite useful in the writing process.

Can you tell us a bit about the process that led to the book being published?

My previous novel Resurrection was published by Amazon’s 47North in 2012. Resurrection was doing very well on Amazon’s sales charts as I was writing the manuscript for Seeker. Resurrection‘s success helped me get the attention of the agent I’d always wanted at the agency I’d always dreamed of joining (Jodi Reamer, Writers House).

After working through a few drafts of the Seeker manuscript, my agent and I were extremely fortunate to get strong interest right away from several publishers. Krista Marino and the team at Random House felt right, and we were delighted to place Seeker there. The whole Random House team has been amazing. They are a perfect fit for this book.

How did you start writing? Was there a particular book or moment in your life that spurred you on?

As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a writer. At around age 8 or 9, I wrote a long science-fiction saga which was about, I think, a prince from another planet who comes to Earth to save his younger sister who was abducted and brought here. Or possibly she was accidentally left here when they were visiting on holiday—I don’t recall all the details and my parents didn’t keep the story (WTH???). I wrote this story by hand in large, childish handwriting, and then I forced my entire class to listen to it during read-aloud. So if anything, I needed less encouragement than I got.

Have you ever struggled between what you would like to happen to a character and what you considered more sensible to occur? Can you tell us when and what did you do at last?

Yes, this happens all the time when writing something with many intertwining plot lines and characters who take on lives of their own. It happened in Seeker with Maud, and her reaction to and relationship with one of the other characters. I wanted Maud to act a certain way, and she simply refused.

If I try to force a character to do something that doesn’t make sense for that character, it simply feels off. Even if I can sort of make it work for a little while as I’m writing, when I go back over that section, it trips me up. So then I have to ask what that character would actually do, and figure out the dynamics of the story differently. It may be a matter of building up to that moment better, or it may be a matter of getting rid of that moment altogether and finding a different way.

Can you tell us a bit about your other book, Resurrection?

Resurrection is set in modern and ancient Egypt, as three worlds collide in the search for a long lost technology buried on Earth in the time of the pyramids. The book has developed sort of a cult following, which is lovely.

One of the best things about writing Resurrection was going to Egypt for research. I spent an afternoon exploring the Great Pyramid with maverick Egyptologist John Anthony West, by the light of a single dying flashlight. It was awe inspiring.

Any news on the movie adaption of Seeker you can share with us? It has already been labeled the next Hunger Games by some.

The screenplay for Seeker is being written right now. The production team is a wonderful group of people from Columbia Pictures and Mark Gordon Productions (Saving Private Ryan, Source Code, The Day After Tomorrow), who blew me away with their personal attachment to the story and the characters. I can’t wait to see their take on the book!

What was your first reaction when you heard Seeker might become a movie?

I screamed out loud, startling several other people who happened to be in the room with me at the time.

How involved will you be in the process?

I have a very nice relationship with the producers. Since my time is fully committed to writing the second and third book of the Seeker series, I am very happy to let them work on the script for the movie. But they call me with questions and we’ve had many conversations about the direction I’m taking the story and how all the threads of Seeker will intertwine as the book series continues.

For your own reading, do you prefer ebooks or traditional paper/hard back books?

I love owning actual books, and with traditional books I love the ease of flipping back a few pages or finding a passage I particularly liked. But honestly, I do a lot of my reading while traveling, and it’s hard to beat the convenience of an eBook when you’re on the go. So often I own both the physical book and the eBook.

What kind of books do you read any favorite authors?

I read and enjoy many, many genres, but particularly science fiction and fantasy, historical fiction, and contemporary fiction. Maybe my favorite genre is science fiction that feels like historical fiction—I love the sense that you, as the reader, are getting to see a small slice of a much larger story that began long ago and will continue into the future. Most of my favorite books fit into that description.

Some books I’ve enjoyed recently are Outlander, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Cloud Atlas, Legend, The Name of the Wind, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, The Darkest Part of the Forest, I’ll Give You The Sun, and Ready Player One.

What do you do when you’re not writing, any hobbies?

I like to travel, I love to run, and I have three kids who keep me on my toes with plenty of games of hide-and-seek and Monopoly.

What’s next, what are you working on now?

Book 2 of the Seeker series. It’s called Traveler, and will come out spring 2016.  There are new characters, and new perspectives on old characters—including chapters with John’s mother Catherine when she was a teenager. In Traveler, the danger to Quin is real and immediate and the story moves quickly. It’s been a lot of fun to follow her and the others around the world the story continues.

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Interview by Dag Rambraut – SFFWorld.com © 2015

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