Barbara Barnett is publisher and executive editor of Blogcritics Magazine and the author of Chasing Zebras: The Unofficial Guide to House, M.D. Barbara has won several awards for her writing, spanning from technical writing achievement to her writing on spirituality and religion. Barbara has a degree from the University of Illinois in biology/chemistry and has worked as a microbiologist. She is the current president of the Midwest Writers Association. We talked to her about her newest book, The Alchemy of Glass, second after The Apothecary's Curse in her Gaelan Erceldoune series.

Tell us a bit about your personal background.

I'm a life-long resident of the Chicago area, mostly living not too far from the Lake Michigan shoreline. I've always been a speculative fiction geek, from the time my mom plopped me in front of the TV to watch Twilight Zone with her when I about five years old! I've always sort of gone back and forth between my two loves of writing and science, and have enjoyed being able to fuse the two of them in my fiction (and non-fiction).

Whether on screen or in literature, I've always gravitated toward the tragic antiheroes and misunderstood champions (In other words, Spock, not Kirk; Han Solo, not Luke Skywalker!) I suppose it was inevitable that someday I had to create one of my own, and that would be Gaelan Erceldoune and I feel incredibly blessed to have been a finalist for the prestigious Bram Stoker Award for Gaelan’s first outing in my debut novel The Apothecary's Curse.

I live about 100 feet above the Lake Michigan shore on a bluff north of Chicago in an ancient house, where my husband and I seem ever to be at the beck and call of our Australian Shepherd Semra.

How would you characterize the fiction market today? Anything you see too much of? Too little?

I'm always looking for something unique to read, no matter the genre. There are never enough good novels out there with smart, flawed characters put in impossible situations. Perhaps too many zombies and vampires in urban fantasy (still). I'd love to see more really good, beautifully written science-y climate fiction and looking forward to reading a good contemporary (but not cliched) pandemic story once we get out of this corona-mess. I'd love to write one, but have no idea where to begin!

Tell us about the new book and how Celtic legend, gene therapy, and time travel turned out to fit so well together!

Thank you!! It was the biggest challenge of the book--and the most gratifying to see how it all threaded together. The short answer? A ton of research, re-writing, thinking and twisting those words to my will! Seriously? I think some of it is magic. It was the most challenging piece of fiction I've ever undertaken, and the most challenging part of writing it was fitting those disparate parts together.

Here's a bit about the book: In the catacombs of an ancient ruined monastery, hidden away in the Eildon Hills of Scotland, a land of myth and mystery--the place where immortal apothecary Gaelan Erceldoune found sanctuary as a lad--Gaelan discovers a journal, apparently written by his old friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, chronicling an adventure into the Otherworld, a land of fairy castles and filigree trees hung with Spanish moss.

Falling from the journal's pages is a small piece of glass, which Gaelan recognizes as a fragment long missing from a stained-glass panel he'd created a century earlier. When the opalescent glass seems to come alive in his hand, Gaelan is suddenly thrust into a strange world far from the fantastical dreamscape Conan Doyle describes.

Alchemy of Glass weaves a tale that draws upon cutting edge science and the most ancient of Celtic mythology, intertwining the magic of fairy lore and the harsh reality of difficult choices, returning us to the world of Gaelan Erceldoune as his past, present and future collide.

Tell us about one of your favorite scenes in the book and why you like it.

It's really hard to pick one! There is a very short scene late in the book when Gaelan is being questioned by a man named LaSalle. They get into a debate about Dante's circles of hell and the pits in one of them. I called him LaSalle as a shout out to Edgar Allen Poe, and his story The Pit and the Pendulum. LaSalle was the name of a man in Poe's story that kept the hero back from the edge of the pit. Also LaSalle Street in Chicago is a famous financial district in Chicago. LaSalle in my story is a pit boss in the stock market trading floor. I just thought that was a very cool little three-way play on words: from Poe to LaSalle Street to Alchemy of Glass. I adore Poe and his work has had a big influence on me.

It's not an incredibly important scene to the novel, but a lot of fun to puzzle out for me.

Besides that scene, I think my favorite is the big reveal that links the prologue (an apparently one-off scene outside the 1893 Columbian exposition in which my hero Gaelan meets Nicola Tesla) with the rest of the novel (much later in the narrative).

Can we look forward to more stories about Gaelan in the future? Or is his cure permanent this time?

I am working on a new Gaelan novel provisionally called The Structure of Chaos. The question is whether Gaelan's and Anne's actions in Alchemy of Glass had consequences both for our present day and the future.

Tell us about Anne. Why is she the hero of this story? Why do you think readers identify with her so strongly?

Anne is a physician and a scientist. She is compassionate, but at the same time in this story carries a very heavy ethical burden. I think readers identify with her because although she is brilliant and successful, she is unlucky in love. It's hardened her, but not squashed her. I think she's a good foil for Gaelan--and I hope they find happiness (but not too soon, says the author!)

What's your favorite part of the process? What's your least favorite?

My favorite part of the process is the discovery, the teasing out of narratives and letting them wander (but not too far). The eureka moment when I know I've gotten it right. The least favorite part is the knowing when something's missing, not right, doesn't quite fit together. Then it's back to the proverbial drawing board. More research, more rewrites. With Alchemy, I had to at one point unravel the three narrative threads of the novel and read them separately to know what I was missing in an earlier draft.

As a writer, who or what are your inspirations?

I have an eclectic collection of influences, from Charlotte Bronte and Dickens, to HG Wells and Franz Kafka. I'm also influenced by the writing of the 20th Century Jewish philosopher Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and his work on the concept of radical amazement. I think Gaelan Erceldoune is the embodiment of this sort of maintaining a sense of awe at the world--even for someone who is nearly 500 years old, he still appreciates the tremendous beauty of the natural world and its intricacies.

The back story of both novels is largely inspired by the British Ballads collected by FJ Child (and also in Sir Walter Scott's collection of Borders Ballads), especially the ballad Thomas the Rhymer.

Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?

Keep at it, take classes and read, read, read. Outline or storyboard, even knowing you'll probably change everything by the time the second draft is done--and even if you're a "pantser" writing stream of consciousness. A plan and knowing where you're going with the story is the only way to get to "the end."

How long have you been writing? Why do you write?

I've been writing since I was a very little girl. Even as a science undergrad I minored in English. I can't help myself, really--I must write.

What's your next project?

I have a 2021 Lord of the Rings boxed trivia calendar coming out in July from Sellers Publishing, which was a lot of fun to do. (It's the first of three LOTR calendars I'm doing for Sellers). I'm working on the new Gaelan story, as well as a novel that explores the British ballad Tamlin.

Are there any special promotional plans for the book our readers should know about?

I will be doing a couple of giveaways over the next few months on my website (Goodreads and Amazon) so readers can keep up with those plans by joining my mailing list or visiting my site (BarbaraBarnett.com) or following me on Twitter @B_Barnett. I'm also offering an autographed Victorian bookplate to anyone who posts a pic on Facebook or Twitter holding the book and tweets it to me. I just taped an interview with Drunk Mythology which will air sometime in the next several weeks as well.

Is there anything else you'd like to tell us?

I would be delighted to come to your readers' book clubs or groups (via zoom or Skype) and talk about the writing process and the Apothecary series. They can contact me through my site.

Where and when can people get the book?

Both novels (The Apothecary's Curse and Alchemy of Glass) are available from all online booksellers and can be ordered through Bookshop.org or from your favorite independent brick and mortar bookseller. They are available in Trade paperback and in every imaginable digital format from Simon and Schuster ebooks.

Thank you so much!!

This is great, thanks! I enjoyed the book very much, I love strongly-researched fiction.
Best of luck with all your projects!