Today on the blog, I will be hosting author Lindsay Duncan. Her new book Scylla and Charybdis, will be released April 15, 2018. I would like to invite you all to get to know Lindsay as she she stops by the Mind's Eye today on her blog tour. You can preorder a copy of her book by using the links provided below. And now without further ado, I will turn the blog over to Lindsey:
Thanks for hosting me! My name is Lindsey Duncan, and I’m a bundle of creative oddities with a new book, Scylla and Charybdis, forthcoming from Kristell Ink, an imprint of Grimbold Books. I live outside Cincinnati, Ohio, which is notable for its chili and flying pigs. My primary occupation is chef / pastry chef, and I’m also a professional performer and teacher of the traditional lever harp – sometimes known as the Celtic harp. I have two dogs, Bichon Frises (tiny white puffballs with attitude), named Peri and Lexi. Don’t start me talking about them, because I can turn into that crazy dog-mom.
I’ve been writing since I learned to type and handwrite, probably in that order: I have memories of working with an old typewriter and, not being a perfect typist (who is?), correcting my typos in-line: “swrod, I mean sword.” Early opuses involved talking multicolored sheep, unicorns, and the cast of a castle village. But I couldn’t tell you why I decided to become a writer, because I honestly don’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be. It was just something that was. A fact of my personal universe, if you will.
And it was always fantasy (and later, science fiction). I suppose that’s true for most kids, but I simply never grew out of it. I was fascinated by Greek mythology. I checked D’aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths out of the library until I ran out of renewals, returned it, and then lurked until the librarian had put it back on the shelf only to check it out again. (At this point, my mother wised up and bought me a copy of the book.) One of my very first short stories was a retelling of the Pandora myth where Pandora was Barbie.
That brings us to Scylla and Charybdis. The novel started out as a short story, with the crux being the presentation of two equally unpleasant societies and the question: which would the protagonist choose?
Now, I’m terrible at titles. (This is not a digression.) The method I’ve found works for me is I come up with the title before I start writing, when the story is still an idea. If I go back when it’s a concrete, completed entity, nothing ever seems right. For this story, I wanted something on the lines of “a rock and a hard place,” but none of the more familiar metaphors in this vein seemed right. Devil and the Deep Blue Sea? Not a big fan of space as nautical metaphor …
My mythological obsession led me to “Scylla and Charybdis.” In mythology, Scylla and Charybdis are a pair of monsters that rest on either side of the Strait of Messina, in an area so narrow that one is forced to confront one or the other. Charybdis is usually depicted as a giant whirlpool; Scylla is more human, a woman from the waist up, but below the waist, the rest of her body is formed by a pack of ravening dogs. (I am not making this up, I swear.) Perfect title, to my mind.
This decision formed some of the backdrop of the short story. I gave the denizens of the all-female space station the names of Amazons. And since I was drawing upon Greek mythology for them, I felt that my male visitor needed a name that also had a callout from another mythology. That’s how Gwydion got his name, from the Welsh mythos … and later, the (comparatively) more modern Welsh concept of hiraeth would play a role in the novel.
If this doesn’t give you enough of a feel for what Scylla and Charybdis is about, here’s the back-of-book blurb:
Anaea Carlisle, raised on an isolated space station populated solely by women, believes the rest of the universe has been plunged into anarchy and ruin by an alien-engineered disease known as Y-Poisoning. On a salvage mission, she helps rescue a hypermental named Gwydion who challenges everything she thought she knew.
Forced to flee the station with Gwydion, Anaea finds herself in an inexplicable, often hostile world, permanently divided between the Galactic Collective and the Pinnacle Empire. She longs for some place to call home, but first, she’ll have to survive …
Scylla and Charybdis will be released by Kristell Ink (http://kristell-ink.com/) on April 15, 2018, and can be found on Amazon – for preorder, too! – at this
