Sharing excerpts from the article originally published in The San Angelo Standard Times on Sept. 19:
Ilona and Gordon Andrews who write as Ilona Andrews
1. How did you both
get started writing? Individually and as a team.
Gordon Andrews: I would say we
started as avid readers, years and years before we met. Ilona’s parents were
Russian intellectuals who insisted that she read the giants of Sci Fi. Authors, like Heinlein, Bradbury, Harry
Harrison, whose works were highly regarded even in cold war era Russia. Her
father, who has two P.H.D’s, wanted her to have a firm grasp of science and
literature. He felt that she had to have rounded education and the idea was to
read things that forced you to reach outside your frame of reference. He also
encouraged her to read classic mythology.
My aunt and uncle are
fundamentalist Christian conservatives who viewed any book that wasn’t the
Bible as highly suspect. Of course I
rebelled and, at school and secretly at home, read the kind of books they
hated. I was a huge fan of Robert
Howard’s Conan as well as the original Dragon Lance series by Weis and
Hickman. In high school I discovered the
Spencer novels by the late Robert B. Parker, which remains my all-time favorite
series. I could read those openly as the protagonist was an ex-cop and boxer
turned tough guy P.I. There wasn’t any
magic, just lots of violence, so my retired US Marine Corps and Orange County Homicide
investigator Uncle didn’t mind.
We met in a college
English class, competed briefly for the title of “smartest in class” then
started dating. We first started writing
together by helping each other with our school papers. At first we would edit and suggest but by the
end of it, almost anything we turned in was a collaboration between us. It was also at WCU that we started reading UF
and I think the idea for Kate and her world was formed. Ilona started writing what would become Kate
while I was an NCO in the Army.
2. How does your writing
partnership work? (Do you take turns writing chapters? Or do each do a specific
character? etc.)
GA: We plot it out together, usually
floating in the pool and drinking beer.
Ilona, who is a better typist, will write some of it and send it to me to
check over. As it is being written we
talk about the scenes and how they should go.
I would say that yes, I tend to be responsible for what the male
characters would say, or how they say it, while Ilona is obviously the voice of
Kate, Nevada, Dina and others like the female protagonists of the Edge
series. Our desks are very close which
gives us the ability to simply stop and talk a scene or plot point out. By the time a reader gets something of ours,
it’s gone back and forth between us several times.
3. How much advance
work do you do in terms of plotting and world building for a series?
GA: Quite
a bit actually. I think for the Kate
books the world almost came first. We
really wanted that mix of magic and technology.
Then you ask yourself if a person was born into this world, what sort of
adult would they be? Kate and Nevada are definitely products of their
environments. For individual books we
plot out a beginning and an end. We know
what we want to happen. The rest is getting from start to finish. The how and why it happens. We read a lot of mythology books and do
research on the history and geography of the places the books are set in. We never lived in Houston but we feel like we
know it and we hope it’s fairly accurately described. With post-apocalyptic
Atlanta, we took some liberties.
4. Do you prefer
writing series to stand alones? Why?
GA: For
full length books, I guess that stand-alones are easier, because everything
about the narrative is new and you don’t have to remember what happened in book
two, four, or seven. You don’t have go
back and check how tall so and so is or what was said in a particular scene. In a series like the Kate books, which now
includes seven volumes, eight if you count Gunmetal Magic, you must remain
consistent and not contradict yourself while trying to keep the series from
going stale. You also have the burden of reader expectations. People who have read the earlier books in the
series and formed a relationship with the books want their expectations to be
met. We’ve had readers who wrote to us
extremely upset that their favorite character died or wasn’t given enough page
time. Meeting these expectations can be daunting.
With a new book, like
BURN FOR ME, you have the freedom to make up new rules and characters that are
unlike things you’ve written before. The
catch is that you have to wrap it all up in one go. No matter if it’s a stand-alone story or a
series, we just try to write the best book we can.
Mina here: I loved being able to get some insight into the brilliant Ilona Andrews team and asking all kinds of questions. I hope you enjoyed reading the interview. If you haven't read a Ilona Andrews book, go get started!
