Revenge, Insanity, and the Bloody Diamonds
Meredith Mestlven was abused and betrayed by her nobleman husband. After a desperate fit of retaliation, she fled for her life and lost her sanity. Now nearly 20 years later, she returns to her home at Sorrow Watch to destroy her enemies and reclaim her jewels. How far will she go to satisfy her revenge? Dark, cunning and beautiful, Mestlven will win your heart or devour your mind.
THE INTERVIEW
Can you tell us a little more about Meredith Mestlven?
Meredith was maybe 16 when
everything fell apart. To that point, she was a nobleman’s daughter. She never
had to worry about anything. In later years of her life, if she looked back at
her life before 16, she would find it all to be so trivial, violin lessons,
parties, dances, food, the art of idle conversation. She would have found all
these things to be inane. Before the age of 16, that was her life. She was
betrothed to marry a man she’d fallen in love with in the exotic city of
Mestlven. She couldn’t have been more excited. She couldn’t have been happier.
When tragedy, real tragedy, hits someone, it spreads like a cancer. It hits one
particular facet of their life, somebody dies or something is lost, and slowly
it spreads to other places, to other things, touching on the peripheral and
reaching out beyond. Sometimes it can take over everything. That’s what
happened to Meredith. Her tragedy spread like a cancer that devoured her mind,
and she was never the same.
What inspired you to write Mestlven?
Mestlven was largely inspired by a deep-seeded anger
that rested above my heart and just below my shoulders. It sat there, slowly
bending my back, souring my blood. It was a quiet rage that had been building
since I was a child, a seed of anger that had been planted there long ago, and
no matter how much happiness I had achieved, I just could not rip out the root
of that sour plant. I needed a fire, something to burn it all away, a
controlled searing of that bitter brush. I needed to watch something bleed, so
I wrote Mestlven. I put all of that
anger in that book, all that righteous flame, seared it away. Mestlven healed me in a different way
than every other book I’ve written. Mestlven
took care of that seed of that anger. But there are other flora, taken care of
in other books.
Was it hard to write the main character?
Meredith is nearly
impossible to write. She’s insane. Insanity is hard to do well. You have a
tendency to go over the top or not far enough. You have to walk the rope of
delusion, where things don’t make sense at all, to reality, where things make
sense perfectly. It’s a delicate balance because you can’t lose the reader. The
reader has to read the insanity and know exactly what’s happening in the
reality behind the delusion. It’s nearly impossible. The only reason I was able
to do it is because I’ve felt that delusion. I’ve been crazy. I know what it
looks like, what it feels like. I can describe the madness because I lived it.
In that way, I think I was born and specially designed to write this work. You
can’t get Mestlven from any other
writer. And I think that’s the reality behind all of my work. The things I went
through in my childhood and young adulthood were all designed to make me the
writer that I am, the father that I am, the husband. All of those terrible
things hammered out the man I became.
Do you have a genre you feel you like to write more than
others? If so, do you know why?
Fantasy, fantasy, and
more fantasy. I’m writing a blog about my life. It has stories describing
things that happened to me. Partly it’s trying to make sense of my life and
where it’s headed. Partly I’m just doing it for fun. But fantasy is my life. I
say that, I say fantasy is my life, but the reality is fantasy is my life. It
walks with me every day, everywhere I go. I see the world through the lens of
fantasy. There’s something unbridled about it. I was watching a movie the other
night about a group of kids with special powers, and I didn’t know what those
powers were, but I did know, that at any point, at any moment, one of those
kids could unleash a crippling power that I could not imagine. They could just
explode their will out and some crazy ability would become known. It was so
exciting. And my work is the same way. Largely, I don’t know what’s going to
happen when I write. It comes out as I go along. So if I describe a man walking
into a bar, I’m never really sure, I never know if that guy’s going to walk up
to the bar top and order a drink, if he’s going to burst into song, or if he’s
going to burst into flames. He might be no one. He might be huge. The
potential’s always there. That’s why I love fantasy.
Can you tell us more about your first book? Has your
writing style changed since you wrote it?
Oh yeah, so my first
book was Chaste. The original draft
was 776 pages. The rewrite was 320. So yeah, my writing style has changed quite
a bit. When I first wrote Chaste, I
felt like I needed to back up and explain everything, every tiny thing. I
remember I wrote a scene where a guy walks into a blacksmith shop and the
blacksmith’s tools are hanging on the wall. I went into a 50-page tale about
where those tools came from. But in the end, there are very few people who want
to read all that, and details like that lose the rest of the story. Every time
you have to sit and read about where a pair of pliers came from, the story
loses momentum. The story has to sit and get cold. It’s quite like the guy
who’s in the blacksmith shop working. He’s got the horseshoe or the blade or
whatever, red-hot and he’s hammering and working. The other guy walks into his
shop and he sets the horseshoe or blade down, and walks over and explains where
all his tools came from. By the time he gets back to his horseshoe, it’s cold
and he has to heat it up again. He’s lost all that time. No blacksmith is going
to willingly do that. Nor should any writer.
Please click on the picture for details on how to enter this fabulous giveaway!
Jesse Teller fell in love with fantasy when he was five years old and played his first game of Dungeons & Dragons. The game gave him the ability to create stories and characters from a young age. He started consuming fantasy in every form and, by nine, was obsessed with the genre. As a young adult, he knew he wanted to make his life about fantasy. From exploring the relationship between man and woman, to studying the qualities of a leader or a tyrant, Jesse Teller uses his stories and settings to study real-world themes and issues.
He lives with his supportive wife, Rebekah, and his two inspiring children, Rayph and Tobin.
Author links:
https://jesseteller.com/
https://www.facebook.com/PathtoPerilisc/
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/15269506.Jesse_Teller
http://www.amazon.com/Jesse-Teller/e/B01G0ZB7JG/
https://twitter.com/JesseTeller
https://www.reddit.com/user/SimonBard
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/JesseTeller
He lives with his supportive wife, Rebekah, and his two inspiring children, Rayph and Tobin.
Author links:
https://jesseteller.com/
https://www.facebook.com/PathtoPerilisc/
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/15269506.Jesse_Teller
http://www.amazon.com/Jesse-Teller/e/B01G0ZB7JG/
https://twitter.com/JesseTeller
https://www.reddit.com/user/SimonBard
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/JesseTeller