Rachel Dacus

As the release of her novel The Time Gatherer nears, women's fiction writer Rachel Dacus sat down with me and shared her inspiration behind the series, the role art has always played in her life and a couple of secrets!

JM: How did the idea for this novel and the series, come to you? What was the inspiration?

RD: The idea for the timegathering series came from my love of history. But I didn’t want to write a historical novel. I wanted to put the present and the past together, and have them look at each other and reflect on each other. Having a woman from our time, the 21^st century, go back to the 17^th, and talk to someone, that she then falls in love with begins a dialogue between cultures, in a way. She says and does things that women of that time really didn’t do and he picks up on it. And then of course they have the art in common. She knows his future,. A time traveler goes back, and they know everything that’s going to happen from that time period forward, and what do they do with that information? Do they tell people? Do they not tell people? If they told them, would it change history? I love all these questions - it’s a bit of scientific speculation, although really more philosophical.

JM: If you could go back in history who would you visit?

RD: Bernini. From a healthy distance because he was a wild child. I would have wanted to peek over Michelangelo’s shoulder as he sculpted, and so many other artists. I grew up with an artist father, so I’ve always been interested in watching artists paint and sculpt and do their thing. I might like to go back and see some of the women painters of earlier periods like Artemisia, or Berthe Morisot, who is an impressionist painter from the 1800s,. I might like to talk to George Washington. There are so many people in history that are interesting. They did things that were extraordinarily wonderful and awful, and sometimes both in one lifetime, and I would love to visit some of those folks. I’d have a dinner party.

JM: The Time Gatherer is written as a prequel to your novel The Renaissance Club.  How is writing a prequel different from writing a series?

RD: I started to write a sequel to The Renaissance Club and got pretty far in, about 20,000 words. And then I said to myself, “I don’t know this guy George St. James well enough. I need to write his backstory.” I started writing his backstory and then I went further back. I had to take him from childhood to find out how he  becomes a time gatherer. What’s your childhood like? What’s your teenage-hood like? I started writing this as a document for me, and it got completely out of control. So I decided to write the whole darn thing right through his 20s. It got up to 70,000 words. I thought “I’ve got a book here. This is not a novella. This is not a document. This is like a book.”

JM: Was doing a prequel the intent when you started The Renaissance Club or not?

RD: It was an accident. Shortly after I finished it, I thought there’s a series here, and someone suggested to me “you could do these other figures,” because with time travel you can go anywhere. But I put it on hold because I wanted to write The Invisibles. I wanted to write a story about siblings. It was a tribute to my late brother. Right after he died, I started writing that book, and it was just an experiment. First it was going to be a brother and a sister, and then it became sisters because I always wanted a sister. I thought. “I’ll write myself a sister.” It turned out that I was really both of the sisters. I put the time travel  series on hold until I got done with The Invisibles. I’ll probably do a sequel to The Invisibles, so I’ll have two series going. I better learn to write faster.

JM: When we first meet George in The Renaissance Club and he is intelligent, kind, a great man. In this book, he’s young, curious, impatient, rebellious. I thought he was very relatable. I think anybody who’s been a teenager or young adult stage of life can relate. Is he based on somebody you know, or is he just fiction?

RD: He was based on someone I knew, but I had to invent his youth. There were certain things about my friend that I took for the character, things about his background, his kindness, his inquisitiveness, that were inspired by the real person. The person I knew was a professor – very intelligent, very unusual person. The timegathering was inspired by him because he seemed like he knew everything about everybody ever. And how would you know that unless you could time travel?

JM: I’ve read The Renaissance Club and The Invisibles, as well as two of your poetry books Arabesque and Gods of Water and Air. They’re all different but they all sort of have the same underlying tone to them – very poetic, very sophisticated, I think. And, to me, I kind of interpret that as you know your voice as an author. Is that hard to come about? How do you discover that?

RD: It’s such an elusive thing, the idea of an author voice. You don’t really hear your own voice as an author. It’s similar to the way you can’t hear your own vocalization the way other people hear the sound of your voice. You may look in the mirror and you may not see what other people see. Perceiving yourself is a difficult thing. One thing I’ve recently learned about my own approach to writing is that I always want there to be something magical in my stories. Not in the wizards and witches kind of magic, but in a spiritual sense of things we don’t perceive directly, but we may feel. I want to express a feeling of awe and reverence in everything I write. I think it’s there in life and poetry, and beauty is a dimension of it. I always want there to be some element of beauty in a book, a character or a setting, even if there has to be difficult stuff. 

 

JM: As a nation, and a world, we’ve been isolated to our homes for a few months. How has this transition impacted your writing?

RD: It’s given me more time. I know a lot of writers have felt paralyzed, and I get that. But for me, it was the opposite. I’ve found that not socializing, not going out to eat, not going out to shop and do errands, gave me extra time. I was trying so hard to finish this book, so that was a boon. At this point, I’m starting to feel restless, as everybody is. But everything is material, right? So loneliness, restlessness – I’m just going to write about it.

JM: Do you have any finished manuscripts hiding away that are unpublished? Do you plan to publish any of them?

RD: I have three - two novels and a childhood memoir. I’m going to do something with the memoir. It’s about growing up with my dad, who was an artist - a fine art painter - but also a rocket engineer. I grew up during the Cold War knowing lots of weird things and lots of weird people from his work with rockets and the defense industry. I knew the Russians could drop a nuclear bomb on Los Angeles and we’d be vaporized, shadows on the wall. My father also was a member of several art studios. I would go with him and watch the painters create art. I grew up at the harbor of Los Angeles, which was then a fishing town, a really interesting environment full of people who were immigrants from Europe. They came for the fishing trades. I wrote a book about that because it seemed to me like there was something magical about this kind of childhood. I’m either going to turn it into a novel or publish it as a memoir. The other two novels were practice in writing fiction. I’m probably not going to publish them, but because I studied ballet, I’m still interested in one, a historical novel set in the Paris opera ballet of the 1830s.

JM: As a professional, you write fundraising grants for non-profits, right? That’s a lot different than writing fiction or a novel. Something I hear often as an aspiring author is to write every day, because it’s something you can work, kind of like a muscle. Are there things in your professional writing area of life that helps you in your fiction writing life and vice versa? Do they complement each other or are they separate entities altogether?

RD: They’re really separate in terms of the style, but they’re wonderful practice both ways because when you’re writing a grant, you have to be able to craft a good sentence. You have to be succinct. It has to be well structured. Your paragraphs have to flow and have a variety of sentence structure so you’re not boring the reader. One of the things that I learned from my fundraising is that you can tell a story in very, very few words. You can tell a story in a paragraph or less, and in fund raising you do that. You might put in a testimonial quote that really encapsulates a person’s whole story. For example, I write for a lot of hospitals so I might tell a patient’s story of getting well, getting treatment and getting better. And I tell it in two sentences because that’s all the space there is in a grant proposal or a mailing. I feel like my work really helped my language skills in fiction. I do think there’s something to the writing every day thing, even if you’re writing a grant proposal or an email. If you take time with it, or you free write and engage your imagination, daily writing is like ballet practice – keeps you limber. And you keep the habit of writing going.

JM: What is something you didn’t know about writing a novel before you did it that you learned along the way that’s become the most useful to you?

RD: The biggest thing is that writing fiction is as much about what you leave out as what you put in. It isn’t like life. You can’t narrate everything. You have to pick and choose the high points that string together into a story, and it has to have structure to create an experience for the reader.

 

JM: What do you like to read?

RD: I read everything from science fiction, fantasy to women’s fiction. I love reading memoirs, especially by writers. I like reading history and of course, poetry. Reading a little poetry every day is good for the soul, I feel. It feeds your heart in a way that nothing else does. It’s like looking at visual art - it just does something for you.

JM: Writing a novel isn’t easy. It takes time, persistence, a special ability to tell a story that makes sense but also entertains and engages. When you get frustrated, stuck feeling like “I just want to quit,” what do you tell yourself to get out of that rut and just keep going?

RD: I’ve been writing fiction since I was about eight. I don’t ever think about quitting, but I do get frustrated. Like everybody, I get blocked and I’m blocked right now actually. I keep trying to start a new novel outline and I’ve got seven ideas going. I tell myself to be patient. I have this funny deal with what I call the Muse, which is probably my subconscious. But my deal is that I will always pay attention when She speaks. And it works for me. I’m a slow writer because I wait for that, but not all the time. Sometimes you just have to be a craftsman and flesh out a scene. You tell yourself, “I’m just going to draft this sucker, and it’ll be crap, but then I’ll fix it.” A novel is a very long project. It’s a year of your life, for me. I don’t want to rush the process because I will be dancing with this partner for a long time. So I want it to be the right partner.

 

 

Before Rachel called an audible and asked a few questions of her own, I got to learn some secrets!

JM: When you take a break from writing, how do you spend your time?

RD: I don’t take breaks from writing. A good writing day for me is like four hours, but with the rest of my day or when I’m not working, I take walks. I live in the Bay Area. I like to eat at restaurants and cafes, go to museums, wineries, have a weekend away. It looks like we won’t be doing those things for a while. For now, I just enjoy culture and nature. I used to have hobbies - I used to sew clothes and I gave that up. I used to draw and paint a little with water color, and I gave that up. Writing took me over. I might get back to drawing at some point. And of course, I read.

JM: George goes back and visits a band called Curdled. If you could go back and visit a band and help them out, or even a Broadway show, which one would you choose?

RD: Hamilton! I’m such a Hamilton geek. I got to see the show in person in San Francisco. I didn’t get to see the original cast in New York which I would have died to do. But now we have the movie. I adore musical theatre and I actually write musicals. I grew up on rock and roll in really good places and times in the 60s and 70s in Los Angeles and San Francisco – it’s the best rock music in the universe. The first concert I went to was the Rolling Stones. I’d go back in time to listen to all the great bands like Jefferson Airplane, Creedence Clearwater, The Birds. I didn’t get to see the Beatles in concert but I did get to spy over a fence at the house they were staying at while they were in the pool but that was in the 60s in LA. I would go back to that period just for the music but not for anything else in the period because the 60s were so awful in so many ways, especially for girls. I wouldn’t live in the past but I would go back and visit the bands.

JM: Is there something you did as a child that you should have gotten in trouble for but never got caught?

RD: I didn’t do a lot of really bad stuff. I had kind of a traumatic childhood so I spent a lot of time by myself, writing and reading. I had a really mischievous friend and she had a house on a hill that overlooked a highway. She showed me how to throw eggs at car windshields as they drove by. I didn’t know that it got stuck on there permanently. When we got caught, I was told in stern terms that was a very bad thing to do to cars. And dangerous. I did other things as a teenager but I didn’t often get caught.

JM: Do you have a dream car that you would love to own or an exotic pet or something you’d love to have?

RD: I’m not really big on cars. When I was a teenager in LA, I desperately wanted a pet ocelot because I’d heard there was a rock band that had one. My parents talked me out of that. Now, I’d just like to have another silky terrier or two. Or a horse. A horse would be my dream pet. I gave George a horse for that reason.

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Rachel lives in the San Francisco Area with her architect husband and Silky Terrier. She raises funds for good causes and love walking in the Bay Area’s beautiful trails. As the daughter of a rocket engineer who was also a fine art painter, she's delighted especially by Renaissance art and fascinated by space and science. 

She blogs about mostly about writing, reading, and publishing. She's a member of the Women's Fiction Writer's Association and Authors 18.

To read her blog, find additional resources for writers and contact information, or to purchase her novels and poetry books, visit https://racheldacus.net/.

**Cover design for The Invisibles by Melissa Williams Design.

***Author photo by Jim MacKinnon.

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