This Tuesday At The Tiki Hut - Marie Treanor

Author Marie Treanor is joining us today in the AuthorIsland Tiki Hut all the way from across the pond in Scotland!!

Marie Treanor was born and bred in Scotland, but for some years moved around the UK working and studying. Now she's back home and happily married with three young children.

Having grown bored with city life, her family lives in a picturesque village by the sea where, instead of working for a living, Marie is lucky enough to be able to enjoy herself writing stories of romance and fantasy.

She draws the inspiration for her books mainly from the people around her and from Scotland's rich history and culture - with, of course, large helpings of fun and imagination!

Visit Marie's Website *** Visit Marie's Myspace *** Visit Marie's Blog *** Get Marie's Newsletter

Thanks for joining us today, Marie!

Hello!

I’m thrilled to be here at the Tiki Hut today. Actually, I have to confess I’m also a tad nervous, because it’s my first visit as guest blogger, and because, like many authors, I live so much in my imagination that it’s difficult to readjust to write about “real life”.

But then, even the most fantastical worlds in fiction have to be based on some degree of reality. My most fantastic world (in the sense of its distance from our world today) is undoubtedly the setting of my City of the Damned trilogy with Changeling Press. It’s a bleak, post-apocalyptic future world, devastated by nuclear war. The survivors live in isolated, very different communities - and the City of the Damned is more different than most!

Here, the particular cocktail of radiation poisoning suffered by the inhabitants appears to have created mutant species - the most powerful of which would be instantly recognizable to many generations of gothic, horror and romance readers as werewolves and vampires.

So, definite fiction. But inspired by some of the more dangerous aspects of our own world. Fascinatng, if scary, to speculate on what might happen if it all goes horribly wrong, and how surviving humanity might cope with what’s left.

This was a big departure for me. When I began writing romances, I set them deliberately in my home country of Scotland, because it’s the place I know best. With the City of the Damned I had to bring my own vision of this ruined, struggling world to life, almost in a vacuum. Somewhere on Earth. And it was curiously liberating. I thoroughly enjoyed creating my unique City.

I’m not sure when I first realized where my City was. I think it was when I first began to consider the relationship between it and the safer Dome City from which Lara, my heroine in Loving the Wolf, came in search of her missing brother. Subconsciously, I’d placed Lara’s Dome City in the south, and the City of the Damned in the north. There’s no such thing as country, so it’s never named, but I began to realize that, without really meaning to, I was still writing about Scotland. And by extension, Britain.

My City of the Damned is, in fact, a devastated Glasgow. The ruined graveyard through which David tracks the beautiful vampire Katia in Loving the Man, is Glasgow’s historic Necropolis. The southern Dome City, better protected than anywhere else from the consequences of nuclear war is, of course, London.

The vast, empty Highlands to the north of the City of the Damned, where my heroes and heroines hope to discover the tether that could save the world, now needs no introduction. The same Scottish Highlands turn out to be the home of the mysterious and powerful Dragul in the two spin-off series Dragul Rising, and Rogue Warriors.

Having admitted it to myself, as more contact formed between these communities, I called their shared environment “the Island”. And when in Rogue Warriors, the Island drifts in to a new war with the next power they encounter spreading from the west, the West is a similarly devastated and recovering America. And the outer islands over which their military forces fight are Ireland and the Hebrides.

So there you have it – the geography of the City of the Damned revealed for the first time! Although the observant may already have guessed! If you haven’t yet read the City of the Damned trilogy (Loving the Wolf, Loving the Vampire and Loving the Man), all three novellas are now available from Changeling Press in one bargain e-book collection: http://www.changelingpress.com/product.php?&upt=book&ubid=1072.

Even better, it’s today’s spotlight book at Author Island - you could win it here: http://www.authoriland.com/.

Well, thanks for letting me ramble about one my favourite subjects! If you’d like to read some excerpts from City of the Damned, or find out more about my other books, please visit my website, http://www.marietreanor.com/.

You can also keep up with my latest news by joining my Newsletter only group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marietreanornewsletter. Or the chat group I share with fellow authors Kyla Logan and Kara Griffin: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sexydelights.

Best wishes!

Marie