Jane Fletcher is a GCLS award winning writer and has also been short-listed for the Gaylactic Spectrum award. She is author of two fantasy/romance series: the Lyremouth Chronicles - The Exile and The Sorcerer, The Traitor and The Chalice, and The Empress and The Acolyte (all to be published by Bold Strokes Books in 2006) and the Celaeno series - Walls of Westernfort, Rangers at Roadsend and The Temple at Landfall.

Her love of fantasy began at the age of seven when she encountered Greek Mythology. This was compounded by a childhood spent clambering over every example of ancient masonry she could find (medieval castles, megalithic monuments, Roman villas) It was her resolute ambition to become an archaeologist when she grew up, so it was something of a surprise when she became a software engineer instead.

Born in Greenwich, London in 1956, she now lives in south-west England where she keeps herself busy writing both computer software and fiction, although generally not at the same time.

Tell us a bit about your background. How did you first get into writing, and decide that it's something that you'd like to pursue?
The plots were the easy bit; I've always told myself stories. Writing them down was what gave me trouble.  I used to try, but I could never get the first sentence right. After an afternoon of writing in pencil and rubbing it out, I'd have a couple of paragraphs of turgid prose, and a sheet of paper that was getting holes worn in it. I read it through once, then screw it up and toss it in the rubbish bin.

The way my partner would tell you the story of my starting to write was that, for the first eight years of our relationship, I used to bore her, describing at great length the plots for books that I wasn't going to write. Her patience broke at about the time we got out first computer. So the next time I came bouncing in with a new plot to tell her about, she sent me off to write it out on the word processor. She told me she'd read it when it was written, but she would not listen to a word. So I gave it a go.

The first paragraph was still dire, but knowing that I could go back and edit, kept me going forward. By the time I'd finished the complete first draft of the novel, I was starting to get the hang of stringing sentences together. When I looked back over the story, I could see that the ending was far better written than the beginning. So I rewrote it, starting at the beginning, thinking that it would turn out more consistent, but the same thing happened again.

After six complete rewrites, my style had just about settled down into something  fairly reliable, which is where it's at today. It may not be great literary quality, but I'd like to think it was reasonably workmanlike prose, that gets the story across, without making too many readers wince.

I still find the plots easy.

Which authors do you consider to have had an influence on your own work?

Everyone I've ever read, to some extent, if only as a negative example.

Top of the list would I guess be Marion Zimmer Bradley. Her Darkover series definitely stands as model for my Celaeno books, in that the world is the central strand that binds the stories together, rather than any one or two characters. Also the way of reusing the main characters from one book as secondary characters in another. And it not writing the stories in chronological order, but rather picking up plots wherever they interest me.

Another writer I have made a conscious effort to model some aspects of my writing on is Agatha Christie. Her plotting of a whodunit has never been matched by anyone. The best of her books are lateral thinking brainteasers. In 'Rangers at Roadsend' I tried to bury clues and structure their disclosure in the same way that she did. A whodunit should not be a question of whether anyone can 'guess' the murderer. It should be a logical puzzle, with only one possible solution. That is what Christie could do, and that was what I was aiming at. Although, as the writer, it's impossible for me to judge how close I came, because I knew who'd done it before I wrote the first word.

Of course, I feel more than a bit presumptuous, mentioning my own work in the same paragraph as Bradley or Christie

What are you currently working on?

I'm about half way through the next book in the Celaeno series, 'Dynasty of Rogues'. After that I've got vague plans for the next one, and I want to return to the Lyremouth books again. But I start plotting out books in my head years before I write them, so I need to be thinking about several plots at a time.

What attracts you to the Fantasy genre specifically?

The freedom to deal with the issues that I want to deal with, in the way I want to deal with them. The way I can play with ideas. I can take things out of context, which allows me to look at them from angles that aren't possible in any other form of fiction, and ideas are what really interest me.

For example, in the Celaeno stories, I've created a woman only world, which is one of the staple scenarios of lesbian speculative fiction, but I did not want to make it a utopia of vegetarian pacifist amazons, because the women I've met in my life haven’t been like that, and I wanted the characters in my books to be as much like real people as I can write them to be, and then see what sort of world this gave me. As it turned out, it's not so very different from our own, in many ways.

At the heart of the books, I'm asking questions about what it means to be female. In the absence of men, does it mean anything at all? I could have tried tackling this in a dry political polemic. Instead, by using fantasy fiction, I'm able to write an action-romance, that is hopefully far more fun to read.

You'll be at both WisCon and the GCLS conventions this year. What type of fulfillment do you personally get from these two different occasions?

For both of them it will be the first time that I've attended the particular event, so I'll be going with expectations that will hopefully be met. WisCon is a Science Fiction conference, and I am looking forward to concentrating on aspects of how I work within the genre, and what other writers are doing. GCLS is a lesbian event which will have a deferent dynamic and I'll be dealing with the aspects of my writing that are aimed at a lesbian audience.

Apart from this, I expect to be dancing more in the parties at GCLS than at WisCon.

Generally, I love attending book festival and conventions. Partly to hear other writers, because I am always picking up hints and ideas that make me think more about my own writing. But also these events remind me that I really have written the books, and it's not just some game that I've been playing on my computer at home. Sometimes, being a writer can feel a touch unreal.

Book One of the Lyremouth Chronicles, The Exile and the Sorcerer is set for release end of February 2006. How do you prepare yourself mentally for such an occasion? Does it get any easier the more books you publish?

The publication is the fun bit. There is a wonderful warm glow when you hold the printed version of a book for the first time, and this doesn’t seem to be fading with each new book. The time that I need to mentally gear myself up, is right back at the beginning, when I start on a new book. I love writing, and all the steps along the way, but I am also aware that I am setting off on a very long journey.