Shelley Adina Interview

We’ve talked to with Shelley Adina, author of the Magnificent Devices steampunk series.

For those not familiar with your Magnificent Devices series, can you tell us a bit about it?

The Magnificent Devices books are set in an alternate Victorian age where the combustion engine has flopped as spectacularly as the South Sea Bubble investment scheme did in the 1700s. My heroine is Lady Claire Trevelyan, and when her father bets the family fortune on the combustion engine, he loses everything and Claire is forced out onto the streets. Through a series of fortuitous events, she falls in with a gang of street children and becomes the queen of the London underworld.

Can you give us some insight into your main character, Claire? She seems like a very strong character even when the odds are against her.

Her moral center is very strong, but she is also a 17-year-old girl who is a little unsure of herself socially and not very good at dealing with young men. She would rather tinker with the engine of a steam landau than go to a ball, and when the Prince Consort asks her to dance, her greatest worry is that the society ladies looking on will see that there is a spot on the glove she fished out of a market rag-pile. Balancing that is her fierce intelligence and an ability to see patterns and circuits and to extrapolate technology to make even grander things.

What is it with the Steampunk genre you find fascinating?

The best part about it is that there are no limits. If you can imagine it, you can write it. A rifle that shoots lightning or sound waves instead of bullets? No problem. An airship powered by automaton intelligence? Go ahead. The city of Venice is actually sitting on a giant moving clockwork and that’s why there are no postal addresses? Why not?

Where do you draw your inspiration from? I almost get an Oliver Twist kind of feeling from the way you portray London. Has that been an inspiration?

Charles Dickens has definitely been an inspiration, as were engravings of 19^th century London and my own travels there.

As London is one of my favourite cities I have to ask if you have any favourite spots yourself and if you have been able to incorporate them into your writing somehow?

When I was in London in 2012, I was able to do some interesting things to bring the flavour of the stories to life. The London Walks company [http://walks.com] has a walk called “Mudlarking on the Thames,” and since my characters in the gang grew up along the banks and docks, I did the walk to see what they might have seen as the tide went out. I found a fossil of a starfish and a few bits of clay pipe J I also did a Mayfair walk and a Westminster one—in fact, I do one or more of the London Walks every time I visit. I love the gardens and squares so I incorporate those when I can, bringing in the scents of lavender and the hum of bees.

Have you done a lot of research in the places and time period that the series cover?

Yes—I made up my mind early on that even though I was writing historical fantasy, the reader should still recognize landmarks in a world that could have been. So Lady Claire lives in Carrick House on Wilton Crescent, an actual street with very pretty houses. Her best friend lives in Cadogan Square. She springs a mad scientist out of Bedlam in book two, Her Own Devices—and when I went to the Imperial War Museum (where Bedlam was housed during that period), even though I had “flown” over it with Google Earth, it was eerie how accurate my descriptions were, right down to the airing garden for the patients and the stone wall at the back over which Lady Claire escapes!

Readers have been kind enough to tell me that part of what they enjoy about the books is their feeling of being rooted in reality, whether that’s the streets and markets of London, or the vast desert spaces of the American Southwest, with its flash floods and unpredictable weather. My “Americas” are also an alternate reality. The Fifteen Colonies occupy the east coast, and the Civil War never happened. In the 1880s and 1890s, when the story is set, North America is divided up into territories—the Texican Territory, the Idaho Territory, and so on. California is a colony of the Royal Kingdom of Spain, and they are techno-phobic. My characters are hustled out of there when they try to land because man was not meant to fly, and an airship is an abomination before God.

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?

Writing steampunk is often a balancing act between what we’d like to see happen (jet packs! human flight!) and what could actually happen given the physics we have set up. I’m not heavily into the science part. There are some things, like automaton intelligence, that I simply put into existence without going into how that might actually work. Same with underwater steam-powered vessels. They happen, but the science is beyond me. I’ll let someone else write those kinds of books! My focus is on character—strong women discovering who they really are in extraordinary circumstances.

As I understand it the sixth book in the series, A Lady of Spirit, is due for release later this year and you even have a seventh book planned? Do you see an end to the series, how many books will there be?

At this rate, the books could go on for twelve, LOL! There are 8 books planned in the series now. The first four were about Lady Claire. Books 5 and 6 feature the Mopsies (twin girls whom we first meet at 10 years old, who are 16 in their own books). Then I’ll go back in time for Book 7, and pick up the adventures of Alice Chalmers, the Texican mechanic who is the closest thing Claire has to a best friend. And book 8 will return to Claire and wrap everything up.

Then, I’d like to go further back in time to Claire’s grandmother, during the English Regency, when the steam engine was actually invented. I plan to be the first to release books in the sub-sub-sub-genre of “Prinnypunk™”.

How do you market your books?

I don’t actually do that much—Facebook, my blog, Twitter, and the occasional advertisement on BookBub. Mostly it’s word of mouth and putting a book on sale now and again. I’m a firm believer that readers don’t want to buy my latest blog post or FB comment. They want to buy the next book, so that’s where I focus the bulk of my time.

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

I enjoy music, and play the piano and Celtic harp. I love to travel and am an amateur photographer. And I rescue chickens. You will notice that a red hen named Rosie (named after a barmaid that teenage pickpocket Snouts had a crush on) is an important character in the Devices books. There is a reason for this—chickens are terribly underrepresented in the arts. I aim to fill this disgraceful cultural vacuum.

What else are you working on?

A Lady of Spirit is about halfway there, with a planned release at the end of April 2014. A Lady of Integrity and A Gentleman of Means will follow it in autumn 2014 and winter 2015.

I write Amish women’s fiction as Adina Senft [http://www.adinasenft.com] so Herb of Grace will come out in August 2014, and in the same month I turn in the third book in that trilogy, Balm of Gilead.

In and among all these books, I teach in the MFA in Writing Popular Fiction program at Seton Hill University, and run a copyediting business. A busy year ahead!

* * * * * * *