5 Minutes With Maggie Stiefvater

Maggie Stiefvater is a wife, mother, teacher and artist- and now, with the coming publication of her debut, Lament: The Faerie Queen's Deception, she adds novelist to her resume.

In addition to all of that, she still finds time to post weekly free fiction at The Merry Sisters of Fate with Tessa Gratton and Brenna Yovanoff. I was lucky enough to catch her recently when she had a spare five minutes!

Lament is full of faeries, but Luke is an assassin and Aodhan is soldier- your faeries aren't exactly sprinkling glitterdust and granting mortal wishes. How did you decide to go dark with a mythological race that's been the very definition of light in modern pop culture?

I'm trying to remember when I first got interested in faeries of the homicidal variety instead of faerie-dust covered benevolent bearers of smiley emoticons. I think it's probably because I came across faeries through my childhood fascination with ghosts and demons and things that crawl out of ponds to nibble on your toes and soul, etc, rather than through Disney princesses bristling with fairy godmothers.

So I started out with pre-Shakespearean fey, who are not necessarily darker, but are definitely more . . . primal. Like the poem about the little girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead: When she was good, she was very, very good, but when she was bad, she was horrid.

Plus, Luke makes up for killing loads of innocent people by being smoking hot and Aodhan... okay, nothing really makes up for Aodhan. He's pretty much 100% squicky (technical term).

It takes a while to get from contract to the shelf- while Lament has made its way to bookstores everywhere, you've already finished the sequel, Ballad. Are you ever afraid you might slip up and reveal secrets from the second book when talking about the first?

Well, I realized the biggest pitfall of having BALLAD written/ sold/ talked about before LAMENT come out is that the narrator of BALLAD is someone who was in mortal peril in LAMENT. So all you have to do is read the name of the BALLAD's main character and you instantly have a big chunk of LAMENT revealed to you. I think my exact reaction to figuring that out was: D'oh!

But otherwise, BALLAD is pretty standalone. (Unnamed) main character's problems are his own, brand new problems. Dee's plot is there in the background, but I don't think it's overly spoilery. Aside from the whole "oh-look-who-survived-book-one" thing.

Getting the cover is a big deal for any author, but you're also an artist. What was it like for you the first time you saw the art for Lament? Do you hope to someday get the opportunity to create the art for your own covers?

Total shock! As an artist, I'd daydreamed and played with cover concepts of my own so my biggest emotion was definitely shock. Because not only did I have another artist's perception of what my main character looked like, I also had another artist's vision of the tone of the whole novel. Somehow I'd convinced myself that LAMENT was a pretty pleasant, summery novel. So to get this dark cover (Julia, the artist, read the whole novel)- I scratched my head and called my editor. Conversation as follows:

ME: I thought LAMENT was a bright, summery book! Cheerful!
EDITOR: Do you remember how Luke got his scar? The giant one you waxed poetic about?
ME: Oh yeah. Forgot about that. Other than that --
EDITOR: And the blood stain on the road, remember that?
ME (laughing fondly): Oh yeah. Forgot about that too. But --
EDITOR: Maggie, someone gets ripped limb from limb by the faeries.
ME: Okay, so maybe it's not going to be a Disney movie anytime soon.

Anyway, I've gotten used to it now but it was definitely weird at first. And yeah, it would be cool to do my own covers one day.

Okay, so you're already an artist. And you have a book coming out. Now I hear you're buying an electric guitar- do you already play, or will you be learning soon? What are your plans for conquering the rest of the arts- should we look for Maggie Stiefvater, movie star, coming to a theatre near us soon?

I play acoustic guitar and harp at the moment, but really the electric guitar is going to be a bagpipe-substitute for me (I was a bagpiper in college). You can't quite rock out on a harp the same way you can on an instrument that can be heard four blocks away. So I definitely had a hole in my life. An electric-guitar shaped hole. A blacked-out Stratocaster shaped hole.

No plans for the big screen. But I am so recording an album. Once I bend the electric guitar to my will, that is. I'm going to be laying down a track for download on my website with LAMENT's release, but I'm envisioning some sweeping cinematic rock album that will be spoken of in hushed, reverential tones. But not this year. One has to have future goals. By the time I'm 30. That sounds good.

And finally, the most important question: which is harder, writing a novel or drawing a portrait?

Depends on just how ugly the baby is in the portrait.