Rhiannon Lassiter, author of Ghost of a Chance (Feb 7-13)

Please welcome Rhiannon Lassiter, author of Ghost of a Chance. Rhiannon will be chatting on LibraryThing until February 13th.

Hello, readers of author chat and thanks Dan for organising this.
Ghost of a Chance is my 14th book and my 12th novel. Readers might also know me from Bad Blood, Waking Dream, the Hex trilogy and other works.

I'm looking forward to chatting and happy to answer questions about my other books, not just Ghost of a Chance. (Sorry, I can't make the touchstone work for that one.)

Do you ever worry about ideas that seem overdone? Supernatural creatures or stories that have shown in the same form with a different cover. Or do you just write what you want to write about and don't worry if it's been done to death?

Hi scistarz, that's a good question.

Yes, I do worry about overdone concepts. I don't want to be covering old ground or seeming to be clichéd. Also, publishing companies won't be enthusiastic about an idea that's been done to death.

I do try to write the idea that's in front of me. Sometimes the theme might have been used before but my idea feels like a new approach or a subversion of the existing genre. Or I just really want to write the idea and see how it comes out.

But I don't finish every novel I start - not by a long way. I generally know after about 15,000 if it's going to be worth continuing and sometimes it just isn't and I cut my losses. At the end of last year I wrote a chunk of text about a teenage demon hunter but after critique from my writer's group decided it wasn't new or original enough and stopped working on it.

I'm nearly halfway through your 'Ghost of a Chance' and enjoying it very much, thank you! One of the disadvantages of many a realistic novel on magic or the supernatural is that there is often little plot justification for the mechanisms involved, their extent and their limitations. What I like so far about Eva Chance is that she is discovering her attributes as a ghost slowly and that through her we recognise and accept those traits familiar from other ghost stories simply from being told them from her point of view. Would you say that this is fair comment?

Whether conscious or not I detect faint echoes of Diana Wynne Jones' The Time of the Ghost and Chrestomanci Castle; I've mentioned before your love of words and use of names so I wonder for example whether, aside from the punning title of your book, there is a little influence of the name Chant on Eva's family name.

Hi ed.pendragon (Chris), thank you for your message. I'm so glad you're enjoying Ghost of a Chance and that you think the revelations about supernatural side are coming gradually and believably.

I really didn't want to over-explain the supernatural. I think part of the attraction is that it is mysterious and affected by emotion, mental state, ties of blood, moments of tension etc. I wanted there to be a learning curve for Eva and for the reader. I also wanted to seed some more subtle hints about how Eva is learning to be a ghost from the other ghosts and how they shape her idea of herself.

I wasn't consciously hinting at the name "Chant". I think the similarity is the result of the fact I like Ch- names. There's a character called Charm in Borderland and its sequels. But I can't deny that I love the *feeling* of DWJ's fiction and when I write this sort of contemporary novel with magic I try to give a similar sense of a real world in which extraordinary things can happen - but are not taken for granted or accepted credulously but challenged and explored.

The Chances are an odd family. What made you decide to give them a witch and a torture chamber in their basement?

Hi, RuneFirestar. Every stately home I've ever visited has had some sort of unusual collection. Shrunken heads, Crimean War memorabilia, Georgian snuffboxes. Sometimes it seems stately homes are an antiques roadshow of miscellany. I've seen a collection of torture tools at one of the major houses: Blenheim, I think. That was pretty creepy and I had that in the back of my mind when creating the Chances. The idea of the torturer's tools being haunted came naturally form that.

So, I guess my answer is that they're not that weird, compared to other country house families.

I just wanted to compliment you on your work. The HEX trilogy is my favorite book series. You have a real gift for making these worlds come to life. I could almost see the events in the books going on around me. Is there any chance you might revisit that saga at some point?

Hi Draconae, thank you for posting and for the compliments.

I don't want to say never. But I did everything I set out to do in Hex and it was a long time ago now. I usually feel that when authors return to worlds they wrote a long time before it's because they've run out of new ideas. Also, I don't always like it, seeing characters I know and care about changed as the author returns to them years later. I didn't like Tehanu, for example.

I think it's unlikely I'll return to Hex but I am writing another science fiction novel of a similar kind right now.