Unexpected Time Travel to Ancient Egypt in Vanessa MacLellan's THREE GREAT LIES

One of my favorite new markets for speculative fiction is the Dreaming Robot Press series Young Explorer's Adventure Guide. I was honored to share the 2015 table of contents with Vanessa MacLellan, and I'm further honored to have Vanessa as a guest today to discuss her new novel, Three Great Lies.

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When I was little I had three great fascinations: Dinosaurs, terraforming other planets, and Egyptian mythology. Sit for a moment and remember the focus you had as kids, when all you wanted to do was play ball, or teach your dog to fetch, or read about space aliens? Well, for me, those three were tops. I had plastic dinosaurs I'd play with in the mud; they built towns and had a government. Read sci-fi where human colonists turned desert landscapes into rolling fields. And I had this great picture book with pyramids and pharaohs and mummies in it, along with a description of what each god meant.

I've been fascinated ever since. So, back in 2008 when I was preparing for my fifth NaNoWriMo challenge, I began to ponder... how well would I survive in an ancient world, like, say ancient Egypt?

Thus the seed was planted and much research was tackled.

A major aspect of the book (the stray dog theme) sprang to life at an agility dog show. The midsummer day was baking hot and I had parked myself under a tree for the next show. A Jack Russell Terrier was looking at me with that intelligent tongue-lolling smile terriers have. Honestly, the dog was smiling.

And that was the original start of the novel: "The dog was smiling at her." It's since changed, but that line and scene are still in there, the theme planted throughout the novel. The story just unfolded from that one dog's smile. I thank the heavens for smiling dogs!

After that, sitting in the hot sun, I began writing long hand. Then moved the novel to my computer and it flowed from there. I wrote 50,000 words of a woman fumbling her way through ancient Egypt, being chased by mummies, crocodiles and slave masters. Of her using her vast knowledge from spy movies to infiltrate a spy ring and help a young woman find her purpose and a mummy find his soul. It was a good ride.

It is still a good ride. One that's just starting.

Blurb for Three Great Lies:

While vacationing in Egypt. . .
Jeannette Walker, a cynical scientist jaded by swarms of tour groups and knick-knack shacks, is lured by a teenage tour guide to visit a newly discovered tomb. No other tourists there! Inside the chamber, she tumbles down a shaft and 3000 years back in time.

Now, in a world where deities walk the streets and prophecy stinks up the air, Jeannette is desperate for normal and the simple pleasures of sanitation and refrigeration. However, a slave master hawking a cat-headed girl derails her homebound mission, and Jeannette—penniless in this ancient world—steals the girl, bringing down the tireless fury of the slaver.

Saddled with a newly awakened mummy and the cat-headed girl, Jeannette, through her unparalleled experience gained from watching spy movies, contrives a plan to free them from the slaver's ire, but will she have to dive into the belly of the beast to succeed?

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Follow Vanessa MacLellan on her website, Facebook, and Google+.

You can purchase Three Great Lies on Amazon. 

Writing Baba Ali and the Clockwork Djinn (Part 1 of 2: Co-Author Danielle Ackley-McPhail)

We've got a two-week special going on! The two authors of Baba Ali and the Clockwork Djinn will be my guests this week and next, respectively. Today I welcome Danielle Ackley-McPhail, who talks about the crossing of cultures she experienced in researching and writing this story.

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It may seem odd to have a steam adventure couched in the desert, among nomads and a people long known for their faith and a belief in magic. Quite a challenge, in fact, to meld so many different threads: history, engineering, magic, and the Islamic culture. What could they possibly have in common, after all?

You would be surprised.

Baba Ali and the Clockwork Djinn began—rather naïvely—as a short story based on the tale of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, meant for the upcoming anthology Gaslight and Grimm (Dark Quest Books). Because I always strive for authenticity and did not have much knowledge of the culture and tradition of the Middle East—beyond a familiarity with one variation of the tale itself—I enlisted the help of my friend, Day Al-Mohamed, who quickly became my co-author. Between us we used our knowledge, experience, and a good deal of research to find the right details to seed our story with to create an alternate Saudi Desert fitting to the tale we wanted to tell, where the magical and the mechanical co-existed and reason and faith mirrored one another in an intricate dance.

By taking historic references—such as Charles Babbage’s work shop and Al-Jazari’s The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices and building the story around them we captured the essence of another era, grounded it in fact, and then made it our own. Thanks to resources on the internet we were able to draw on mechanical puzzle boxes, Egyptian stick fighting (dancing), early airship designs, and Persian dynastic history, all of which fed life into our tale, along with an echo of reality that makes “what if” plausible.

One of my covert ways of enriching this tale could have only been accomplished via the internet. Names have power. Names have meaning. In Baba Ali and the Clockwork Djinn, those names not dictated by the original tale or history also have hidden significance—unless you are conversant with the meaning of Persian/Arabic names, then they are overt. Each name was researched and chosen for a desired meaning relevant to its use.

See, as writers we build worlds and create people with our words and if we take care with our choices we do so very well. Baba Ali and the Clockwork Djinn has become a tale that the Western World can take up and experience a different era and an exotic culture so very different from their own, and the Middle Eastern World, or descendants of it, can pick up and see themselves, their culture and history, as everyone should be able to do from time to time.

Thank you for reading. Come back next week to hear what my co-author, Day Al-Mohamed, has to say about the multicultural aspect of our tale.

Baba Ali and the Clockwork Djinn Back Cover Copy

Come, Best Beloved, and sit you by my feet. I shall tell you a tale such as sister Scheherazade could have scarce imagined…

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You can learn more about Danielle Ackley-McPhail at her websites: www.sidhenadaire.com,www.literaryhandyman.com
www.badassfaeries.com.

You can purchase Baba Ali and the Clockwork Djinn on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other retailers.