Today we welcome D.K. Fields to the Inn. D.K. Fields is the pseudonym for the writing partnership of novelists David Towsey and Katherine Stansfield. Their debut novel together, Widow’s Welcome, was released in paperback in March from Head of Zeus.
Hello David, hello Katherine! Welcome to the Inn. Would you mind telling us a bit about yourself, and your book, Widow’s Welcome?
Kath: We’re delighted to be here! Thanks so much for having us. As sharp-eyed readers will no doubt have realized, there are two of us in D. K. Fields and we’re going to answer these questions between us.
Dave and I each write and publish under our own names (Katherine Stansfield and David Towsey), and we use the name D. K. Fields for our co-written projects.
Widow’s Welcome is the first D. K. Fields novel to be published. It’s the start of a gaslamp fantasy crime trilogy, The Tales of Fenest, published by Head of Zeus. The novels take place in the Union of Realms where, every five years, there’s an election, held in the capital Fenest (think Washington D.C.). But there’s something a bit different about elections in our fantasy world: votes are won through storytelling. Each realm sends a storyteller to Fenest to tell a story, the audience votes for their favourite, and the story with the most votes wins that realm power over the whole Union for a five-year term.
Elections in the Union are always fraught affairs, but this year’s is like no other: before the election even starts, a storyteller is found dead in a back alley in Fenest. Detective Cora Gorderheim must find the killer, but her quest leads her into the dangerous territory of powerful politicians. The future of the Union is under threat, and Cora Gorderheim finds herself at the heart of a story someone else doesn’t want told . . .
How did your collaboration go? Did you feel like you’ve learned new things about writing through this experience?
Dave: The short answer is: collaboration is painful!
The long answer is, we really had no idea what writing together was going to be like when we started this project, so we had a lot to learn. We thought we should look in to it a bit first, but we didn’t know any other writing partnerships personally, so we only had author interviews (like this one) and a few blog posts to go on. What became quickly apparent was that no-one had the same way of going about this process, so we decided to just try a few things and see what worked for us. We started writing a good chunk of words each and then – it sounds so strange now – passing the same Word.doc back and forth. We read what each other wrote, discussed it, and then forged ahead with it. Though the discussions did, perhaps inevitably, lead to one or two arguments this was the way we managed to push the draft forward and get words on the page.
For my part, I felt like co-writing really helped some of the weaker elements of my own writing. Someone who has read my previous work might recognise my tendency to under-explain things. It can be anything from a strange concept in a new world, a character, or even just conversation. And this can go too far. Co-writing gave me a much-needed push out of that mode, which I learned a lot from. I like to hope we both learned a lot of unexpected things from the process.
How did writing individually in different genres contribute to this experience? Were you able to transpose or incorporate tropes and codes from your respective genres into this book?
Kath: Our previous writing experiences definitely played a big part in writing Widow’s Welcome. I’ve been writing historical crime novels for the last few years and I also teach writing crime fiction too so my knowledge of genre conventions for that side of the book was very useful. Though Widow’s Welcome is very much a fantasy novel, at its heart is a crime plot: our protagonist Cora is a detective working out of a police station full of constables, a sergeant at her elbow, and a suspicious chief inspector who tries to direct the investigation more than she should. Writing crime fiction has helped me learn a huge amount about plot engines and ensuring that protagonists are active in their respective stories.
I’m also a poet which I think has an impact on my writing style in terms of word choice and cadence, but it also helps me to ‘throw’ my voice and write in a variety of styles. This has been handy given the way the Tales of Fenest novels are structured, with an overarching frame in each book – Cora’s ongoing murder case – and the different election stories told by the realms to win power, which the reader gets to hear as well.
An area I was less confident about was building a fantasy world from scratch, and that’s one reason Dave and I decided to try co-writing. We thought – rightly, as it turned out – that pooling our creative energy would help with ‘big picture’ questions like religion and society in the Union of Realms.
Book 2, The Stitcher and the Mute, is already up on Goodreads. What can you tell us about the series as a whole? How many books have you planned so far, is it going to be a procedural-like series, etc?
Dave: Good spot! Even very early in the writing of this book we knew it had to be a trilogy, titled Tales of Fenest (a series title we had before any individual book title). We wanted to give the reader each realm’s election story in its entirety. Anything less felt like we’d be cheating them out of such a major part of our world. We also knew those stories needed to feel substantial, not just small snippets or anecdotes – the stakes were too high for that. So we decided to feature two tales per book; Widow’s Welcome has the stories from the Caskers and the Lowlanders, and in The Stitcher and the Mute it’s the turn of the Perlish and the Torn. That leaves just two realms for the final book in the trilogy to complete the election. Will our hero, Cora, have stopped the dark forces behind the strange goings-on in her city by then? You’ll just have to read on to find out.
And then, once this trilogy is finished, there’s always another election in five years…
The cover for Widow’s Welcome is absolutely beautiful! Did you have a say in the process?
Kath: Thanks so much! We absolutely love the covers for the Tales of Fenest series which have been produced by designer Helen Crawford-White, and the reception from readers and booksellers has been fantastic. We actually had quite a bit of input into the cover designs which isn’t always the case for authors. For both Widow’s Welcome and The Stitcher and the Mute, our publisher, Head of Zeus, asked us to make a list of key objects and motifs in each novel, including in the election stories. Helen took these and worked them into final design.
The Widow’s Welcome cover features a ship to represent the Caskers’ election story, and a carved wooden figure of a man using a spade which is part of the Lowlanders’ story. Other items ‘swirl’ around these details, in particular some winged insects called mostins which play an important part in Widow’s Welcome.
One of the funny things about the cover design process was being asked to explain exactly what a mostin looked like so Helen could draw it, and as I was the one who came up with them in the first place, I had to remind myself which dusty corner of my brain they’d emerged from. Turns out, I’d been picturing something like a death’s head moth, but not too like one. Another aspect we really like about the covers is the level of detail and the feeling of the covers being very richly worked, with all available space filled in with hand-drawn shapes. For us, this conveys what we hope is the richness of the world we’ve created.
This is shaping up to be a strange, strange year. What are some of your go-to comfort books/movies/any other media?
Dave: It sure has been a strange few months. Without meaning to, Kath and I have been doing a lot of re-watching of movies and TV. I guess that has the obvious comfort of the familiar. I wouldn’t say there’s been any rhyme or reason behind what we’ve chosen to watch again. It’s ranged from stuff we saw at the cinema like Birdman to things we watched as undergraduates, like Snatch. We also watched The NeverEnding Story – a film I loved as a kid, but Kath missed. Sad as it is to say, I’m not sure it quite stands up to an adult re-watch, especially without the nostalgia behind it.
I’m also a keen gamer, and I’ve been drawn back into the Total War: Warhammer series (both 1 and 2) which I’m playing online with a friend. Despite not playing it for over a year, it’s been super addictive and I think I needed that right now. Something to lose myself in and scratch the gaming itch.
We’ve both been reading a lot too. I’ve finally got round to tackling the Gormenghast series, and Kath is re-reading Hillary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies in preparation for the final novel in the trilogy. She’s been tearing through them, and loving every page.
What is the strangest thing you researched while writing Widow’s Welcome? Something that has possibly put you on a list now?
Kath: I’m not sure it’ll put me on a list (at least I hope not!) but I did spend a lot of time researching grave goods in Ancient Egypt. Dave and I were travelling in Italy when we started Widow’s Welcome and while we were in Turin, we spent a lot of time in the Museo Egizio / Egyptian Museum. This has the largest collection of Ancient Egyptian artefacts in the world, outside of Egypt. The Turin museum included several striking displays of ushabti: carved figures placed in graves to represent a workforce that the dead person could call on in the afterlife – sometimes hundreds in one grave. I was absolutely fascinated by this idea and it went directly into the election story of the Lowlanders. This is really the latest manifestation of an ongoing obsession with grave goods. I don’t know where this comes from, but I seem to return to it frequently!
Reviewers have compared Widow’s Welcome to Ripper Street meets Game of Thrones. What would you compare your book to?
Dave: Well, I can’t imagine we’ll top that. But one of the books that directly inspired Widow’s Welcome was Dan Simmons’ SF novel Hyperion: a re-working of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales in space. We have always loved ‘tales within tales’ – stories which self-consciously remind the reader of their construction – and Hyperion is a fantastic sprawling novel that zooms around a richly conceived galaxy through its embedded narratives. We liked the possibilities offered by the ‘stories within stories’ motif but wanted to use them in a different way, to show how storytelling shapes our political system.
For the political side of the novel, House of Cards became a real touchstone for us (both the US and UK TV adaptations of the Dobbs novel that, we must admit, we’ve never read). The writing in that show is just so sharp, and manages to handle complex political intricacies in such an engaging way, we really wanted to emulate that as much as possible. There’s a risk with any politically-leaning fiction that both writer and reader will get lost in the minutiae and lose narrative momentum, but that never happens in that show. We hope Widow’s Welcome has the same kind of drive alongside the depth.
Anything you guys would like to add?
Just a big thank you for letting us “visit” the Inn! We’re so grateful for online book platforms in these challenging times. We, like many authors, have had to cancel in-person events across the UK. It’s great to have the chance to keep connected with readers through interviews and posts like this.
About D.K. Fields
D.K. Fields is the pseudonym for the writing partnership of novelists David Towsey and Katherine Stansfield. The couple are originally from the south west of England, and now live in Cardiff.
David’s zombie-western The Walkin’ Trilogy is published by Quercus. Katherine’s historical crime fiction series, Cornish Mysteries, is published by Allison & Busby. She is also a poet.
You can find them at their website or on Twitter as @dkfields1.
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