Let’s be diplomatic and not reveal exactly how long Karen Webb has been a Baha’i, but if you want to do the math, she’s been a Baha’i roughly twice as many years as she spent in the Roman Catholic/Lutheran synthesis of her youth. She and her husband Paul have been married nearly as long as they’ve been Baha’is (they became Baha’is independently within about six months of each other and met providing music for a fireside given by a mutual friends). They finally have a teenager in the house (Karen was hoping someone would have perfected cryofreeze by now and she could skip over her son’s teen years. Unfortunately for her but fortunately for the Faith, he’s the best teacher in the family!) Zayne was adopted from another Baha’i family; she sometimes feels this was more a matter of the birth family adopting her and her husband than the two of them adopting a son. (For couples seeking a child, she extends thoughts of hope: “Keep on praying and turning over stones, but don’t try to force the Universe into the mold you want it to have. Baha’u’llah will send you what you need; your job is to recognize it and embrace it when it comes.)”

Karen’s husband is a musician (mainly guitar and woodwinds) and jumped track from doing music for video games after his last lay-off to doing tech support. His idea of owning his own business fell to Karen and a good Mormon girlfriend, so the pair co-own a little business called Mad Science of Greater Salt Lake dedicated to bringing good science enrichment activities to area grade-schoolers. The two were previously members of the helping professions, Karen as a nurse practitioner and certified nurse midwife and her friend Laurie as a social worker. Karen and family are homefront pioneers in a northern suburb of Salt Lake City; Laurie and her family of seven are very active members of the LDS Church. Both were reemerging into the work force when Mad Science befell them. “It’s an interesting partnership,” quips Webb. “We like to say it works because we have mutually complimentary dysfunctions.” But she does feel there are parts of the series where her medical and hard science backgrounds (her initial degree was in chemistry) come through clearly.

In her spare time (OK, who was that laughing???) she edits for another small press, Virtual Tales. She is also trying to develop a second very youth-oriented fantasy series (working title The Zayn Chronicles) based on bedtime stories she and her son used to make up together. Central to the plot is a very different kind of magical sword: it has many magical power, but its wielder must display one of a long list of virtues in order for those powers to activate. Think there might be some more Baha’i material at the root of that effort? You bet.

BW: Congratulations on the publication of Tapestry of Enchantment. It came out hot off the press just days ago, officially on July 9, 2010. How does it you feel to have another installment of your story?

Karen:  Thrilling, Mitra! This is the first series of this length Dragon Moon has put under contract. The first book made it to a second printing with gorgeous new cover, so that made me feel they had found something worthwhile in the story (for those who don’t know, cover art is often an up-front expense, whereas most of us work for a percentage of the profits, so I feel their paying an artist to recreate the cover for the second printing was quite a show of confidence). The series is eight books long (something of a gamble for a smaller publisher to contract), but the plan now is to try to release two books a year till it’s all out there. This will be a bit of a marketing challenge since the first book came out in very late 2006, so I need to make sure people remember the first book, The Chalice of Life, before I can hope for them to take an interest in Tapestry! Side note for Robert Jordan fans: the whole series plus a prequel and sequel are written. Although I’m not to my knowledge terminally ill, if something were to happen to me, the series would still see the light of day with just a few editing tweaks without having to contract another author!

BW: Wow, excitement is oozing out of you. Before I get deeper into this new novel, tell us when you discovered the passion creative writing?  

Karen:  I think I was born with it. I had written two novels by the time I was in eighth grade and a bunch of odd short stories and poems, and I remember as early as grade school my teachers commenting on my use of advanced vocabulary. Plus I went through the usual period of questioning and depression a lot of teens get and ended up expressing myself through writing: my one brief flirtation with poetry and song-writing!

BW: Impressive start. In your first novel, The Chalice of Life, what is story question you expect the readers to ask? And does the hero achieve her goals?  

Karen:  Since The Chalice of Life introduces the main group of questors and has them tackle the first leg of their lengthy adventure, this is not as straightforward a question as it might be with a complete stand-alone novel, although I wrote the series so each novel is its own self-contained story. With the initial seven questors representing seven different worlds or cultures, all but one involved in a bitter war 20 years past, I guess the big question is can these seven strangers learn to work together to achieve their common goal? How do they get past the barriers that would very naturally divide them? The consequences are going to be pretty bad if they fail.

BW: Working together is a challenge to many of us. Tell us about your second one, Tapestry of Enchantment. 

Karen:  This is a little embarrassing to admit, but this is the one story of the eight that I actually wrote as a campaign for a game of Dungeons and Dragons (although after I had the whole series written, I ran the entire cycle as a very long campaign for the group I was playing with at the time). The way The Chalice of Life has some dungeon crawl elements or elements that might remind you of the great days of Infocom interactive logic computer games like the Zork or Enchanter series, Tapestry of Enchantment has at its heart a dungeon with a very complex puzzle to solve. But as it got integrated into the main story and as I worked on polishing all the plot arcs of the series and developing the characters, it took on a lot more dimension. It’s really the story of a time in the past of one of the character’s homeworlds that has been deliberately shrouded in mystery by the mainstream church of the day. His world eschews magic in his day, but his rank and status have given him access to some hidden materials that suggest things were once otherwise.

BW: What was the biggest challenge writing this one?

Karen:  Probably converting a simple dungeon crawl (well, simple with a pretty good puzzle at its heart) to a plot with a fair amount of depth and making the history and theology of this world consistent with things that come later in the series. My concept of this world changed a lot while I wrote and then edited. Tolkien talks about having had to rewrite Lord of the Rings backwards once he got to the end; this felt a little more like rewriting sideways. One plot seed remained consistent from the outset, though: this particular character believes he may be living in what we might call the “end times” of his own world, and late in the book you hear his first perspectives on what he hopes will become a successful search for a Great Redeemer his culture expects.

BW: You use many Baha’i concepts in your stories. Unity being one.

Karen: Unity, and certainly unity in diversity! Working within a fantasy paradigm and trying to underpin that with an idealized view of the future envisioned by Baha’u’llah had its challenges.  I paraphrased one of Rabbi Hillel’s most famous statements as a chapter head quote in Chalice: When asked to recite the entirety of Jewish law while standing on one foot, he is quoted as saying “What is abhorrent to you, do not to your neighbor. This is the Law; all the rest is commentary.” And this from one of the chief authors of the Talmud, which is filled with extensive and minute comments on Mosaic law to interpret it for the time during which it was written (not long after the end of Christ’s ministry).

The Carotian moral standards are a lot like ours in the sense that there is consonance with the will of God and disobedience to Divine law (look at how few actual laws are codified in the Kitab-i-Aqdas); the idea of sin is not a well-developed one. So they have a code of morals just called the Ethic; the tweak on the above quote is “…This is the Ethic…”

As with the above true confession on the whole origin of Tapestry, I had started this particular branch of the novels centered on Caros and the Carotian Union as something simpler. TSR, the original publisher of Dungeons and Dragons, had decided to start a fiction line and I began the original draft with the thought it would find a home there. But, quoting Tolkien again, “the tale grew in the telling,” and it took a good six years to finish just the first draft. And then (a lot of writers will tell you this) my characters just wouldn’t let me go. So I was on to the sequel before I’d even begun to redraft the original material. At which point TSR had changed hands a few times and gone to writing for hire. So I had to do a lot of rethinking, but that rethinking and reworking is how I managed to do things like create a polytheistic culture that integrated with Baha’u’llah’s vision of the future and Baha’i theology (not to give it away, but LOOK AT THE RING SYMBOL, or read the “Tablet of All Food” if you have access to it), give breadth and depth to all of the cultures represented in the story, and develop the main characters to the point that a simple quest cycle also comprises a spiritual journey for each of them. I do remember pointedly changing my prayers to, “Please let me find a publisher” to “Please let me make this work worthy of publication so it can teach as well as entertain.”

BW: When you mentioned Rabbi Hillel’s quotation, it reminded me when I served at the Baha'i World Centre. There is a Hillel Street where many Baha'i live and I often used to take this street. Also, a Jewish friend living in Israel told me about this quotation.  How do you intertwine spiritual concepts into the plot such that the flow is natural?

Karen:  That was not easy because the minute people hear a lecture start, they stop reading.  C.S Lewis did it so beautifully with The Chronicles of Narnia, although that’s clearly allegorical where Adventuers isn’t. So a certain amount of the threading of spiritual concepts is in the chapter head quotes that sort of sum up some theme of the chapter to which they relate. There are some “in” references like that The Chalice of Life is a phrase from the “Kitab-i-Ahd.” But largely the concepts are conveyed via the Carotian culture actually being modeled on the society of the future envisioned by Baha’u’llah. Even in the fantasy tweaks, like the domains of the different deities, you can see Baha’i influences (e.g. justice and mercy are the domains of two separate deities).

I also don’t believe in the unflawed hero or the irredeemable villain (or the villain with no admirable traits) and work a lot of recognizably Baha’i precepts in through that. Mistra, the heroine who’s really more of a first among equals, and Mosaia, the one character from a completely different culture than the others, have a lot of discussions where they’re comparing notes about their different world views (including, of course, the thread of a search for a Great Redeemer). Anyway, I try not to be too heavy-handed and let a lot of this come out in conversations that, I hope, flow naturally and intelligently into the plot. Sometimes you’re despondent over a misstep and need someone to tell you that God cares less about your falling off the path than about your getting up and making the effort, however fumbling, to find the way back; sometimes a healer, even a magical one, will go so far overboard trying to preserve a life that he needs to be reminded that death is not the enemy.

BW:  Your readers have compared this series to that of Narnia, Potter, and the Ring, and even Eragon but with an originality of its own. Was this by design?

Karen:  Though Tolkien, CS Lewis, Doug Adams, and Terry Pratchett are among my literary gods—I dedicated Chalice to the first three and would have included Pratchett if I’d been introduced to him (and all things Discworld) before I wrote the dedication. I was thrilled to hear that I was developing a young adult readership because the series wasn’t written specifically for the young adult audience (although young people especially relate to Habie, the youngest of the group, who starts out as a cute little street thief). As a parent and owner of a business that offers science enrichment for young people, I know first-hand how hard it is to find materials for a child who is capable of reading at the college level but developmentally isn’t ready to tackle Tolstoy or the French existentialists! (My 13-year-old broke the bank on the standard reading tests in fourth grade and has tested at above 12th grade reading level since then. But no way am I letting him read even a meaty fantasy like Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series because of the level of violence, especially sexual violence, in the narrative. I have rethought some plot elements that happen down the road in Adventurers because of this issue, but even the darkest moments as written compared to some of Goodkind’s stuff make the whole series seem barely PG.

But, no, this was not by design. When I was schooling to become a mid-level practitioner, I started having dreams about this specific place. Lots of dreams. I saw the home world the planetary system is named after, Caros, and I saw the humans and Tigroids, huge intelligent cats. A number of elements including the chalice from the first book and the truly one-sided buildings of the world Mobius they encounter later also came from dreams. It was like having the people of a whole planetary system calling out to me to tell their story, or the story of their salvation. I had read Narnia and Lord of the Rings, but I’m not sure Harry Potter and Eragon were even a gleam in their creators’ eyes when I first set pen to paper. One thing (I’ve heard this from other Baha’i writers as well) regarding this sort of heroic fantasy, though, is I feel this is something we really lack when it comes to books published for and by Baha’is. I wasn’t trying to be C.S. Lewis or Tolkien, but I wanted to create something Baha’is might be a little inspired by, to be able to point to and say, “We have something heroic and inspirational we can call our own.” And I was hoping that  maybe—just maybe—the books would be something that would appeal to that one person you want to teach who just won’t respond to the literature we currently have in circulation but then might read this and say, “What great ideas. I wonder where they came from.” And then he would ask you and you could trot out Anna’s presentation.

BW: I understand there are 6 more books that are forthcoming.

Karen:  Yes. They take a while to get to their lost prince’s plane of incarceration. Lots of interesting stops along the way. Some came from the dreams and some like one that toys with the origins of the Hopi and the one where the questors interact with the entire Greek pantheon during the Golden Age of Greece, were just environments I thought would be fun for my characters to play in. And of course in all of the settings, the questors have to right some wrong before they can move on.

BW: Tell us about the challenge of writing so many books in serial manner.

Karen: I had the whole series mapped from the time I began, so the story flowed out, although once the story and characters developed to a certain point, I almost had to fight the characters for control and let them have their heads, so to speak. I did have to go back and sort out some of the theology on Mosaia’s world for the sake of continuity because of some things that cropped up very late in the story where they finally free Eliander, but a lot of this had to do with relationships amongst the characters. The plot itself remained essentially intact from the beginning.

One tip for aspiring writers: a series of this length has to be sold on the strength of the first few chapters. I think I spent more time writing and polishing and editing and rewriting the first three chapters of Chalice than I spent on writing the entire  rest of the series. Tip two? There are two parts to a story: the story, what actually happens to everybody, and then how you tell the story—what happens onscreen, offscreen, whose perspective you narrate from, how much of the story you give away at any one point, whether your entry into a story arc is subtle and given with just small hints or if you clobber the reader over the head with it.

I had a scene in the first book that I knew was good and needed to be there, but it involved a certain amount of provocation on the part of one of the main characters and a certain amount of humor related to the culture that I couldn’t have laid the foundation for that early in the story. For Babylon 5 fans, it would have been akin to “How many Vorlons does it take to change a lightbulb?” (The answer is “The lightbulb has always been there,” which makes absolutely no sense if you never followed the series.) I think what finally sold the book was when I switched the whole thing around from this character’s point of view to the point of view of the innkeeper and the fellow running drinks and pretzels back and forth to the table. The fact that it was their conversation observing what was going on just suddenly made that scene hum. I had one or two more scenes down the line that basically had to be told from the point of view of two characters sequentially. I got lucky on those. In editing, I said, “Wait, this needs this other person’s point of view on what’s happening,” and it spilled out with virtually no editing needed.

BW: How do you plan to market Tapestry of Enchantment?

Karen:  Another tip for new writers: unless you have a great media hook like those for Eragon and Harry Potter, even if you publish with a large house, you need to do a lot of your own marketing. Dragon Moon, fortunately, has developed a following over the years and has a newsletter, but, while I do science fiction and fantasy CONs, the internet is your best friend. Blog, get on newsgroups, be a friend to aspiring writers, solicit people with these entities to interview you or review your book, ask people to post to Amazon if they have something to say. I’ve been told reviews don’t truly sell books, but they look good on your website, which you will of course build and put some time into. If you join a writers’ group, Bragging Rites being the possible exception, don’t just jump on and say “Buy my book” and then leave, but try to be an active member. I happen to edit for a small house called Virtual Tales, so I do have one built-in avenue that a lot of people don’t in that there’s a Yahoo group for writers, editors, and fans.

BW:  Excellent advice. Any upcoming book tour?

Karen: Other than hitting the CON circuit, no, but I’ve friends who have had great success with virtual book tours and I may try that route.

BW:  How one can find out about the tour schedule?

Karen: I usually post to Baha’i Announce and the Baha’i Writers Group (and my own website www.chaliceoflife.com and to my Facebook page) to see if other Baha’is might be going to a CON (my limited means keep me to the Intermountain West, but we have some good CONs) but it’s more to see if other Baha’is are headed in that direction to meet them and maybe do some teaching. People who like the CON environment, especially speculative fiction, are often open to new ideas like those espoused by the Baha’i Faith.

BW:  You went directly to Dragon Moon, a Canadian press, rather than going through an agent. Looking back, should one have an agent or not?

Karen:  I think there are as many answers to that as there are writers. A smaller house like Dragon Moon is not in a position to deal with an agent haggling for a better deal (unless you are hoping to score big with one of the larger houses like Tor, I would say don’t try). With the electronic market changing the way publishing works and the big houses buying one another out right and left, I think the whole complexion of the industry is changing, although I would say it’s not a bad idea to get an agent, especially in this genre. A lot of houses like Roc simply won’t take an unagented submission. I would say that self-publishing and publishing on demand are still looked at a little askance by the brick and mortar world (for gosh sakes, if you do this, read your publisher’s fine print!) and I know it’s harder to get such books bought by libraries, who buy a lot of the initial print run. I think maybe the draft I sent to Dragon Moon could have made it with an agent, but a small house has more time for you and often knows its authors personally, which is not what happens in the large houses. That said, if Roc or Tor came to me with a contract tomorrow, I’d be on the phone with my publisher negotiating!

BW:  Your main character is a dancer and you were a dancer yourself. Dancing and writing came together at an early age. How did it happen?

Karen:  They probably didn’t come together until I started writing and the character who is now the High Queen of the entire Carotian Union saw to it that the art was imported (the Union is a founding member of a loose consortium of worlds, and she took a very active interest in cultural exchanges). It was something she and her dance teacher (think Isadora Duncan) worked on and unveiled at an important arts festival, and it immediately caught on. Mistra, the younger sister, started dancing almost before she could walk. As a third child who never looked to see a throne, she looked to excel at her studies and often got herself out of fairly serious trouble at school with inventions she coughed up in the biochemistry lab. She was one of those people who needs three hours of sleep a night and then is driven to use every other hour in the day to excel at something (her sister Ariane and brother Philo cast a long shadow). So, yes, it may sound strange that she knows about the sciences plus the arts but HMMM maybe there is a reason.

In the sequel (which I’d like to see in print before I die), her involvement with ballet becomes important in that a visit to Mosaia’s world by the company she dances with actually becomes the tipping point for revolution. If you look up the history of a ballet like Swan Lake and how it changed between Czarist and Communist Russia or if you look at the influence of the Cultural Revolution in China on the arts, you’ll see that this is not that far-fetched a scenario.

BW:  Editing and creative writing use different parts of the brain. Is it a challenge for you?

Karen:  I’ve been lucky in that I’ve always had both sides run neck and neck for supremacy (like I scored identically in my math and verbal SATs and quite closely on math, verbal, and analytical GRE’s. Those even got me into Mensa—where, may I say, we need more Baha’is!!!) I’m guessing the lovely dreams came from the right side but then when it got down to the brass tacks of plot details or scientific know-how or ways that could logically combine science with magic or designing plot points that amounted to puzzles for the characters to solve, that was when the left brain kicked in. But writing a good book, I think, with rich characters and plots that are overall downright fun takes both. But I know I’m lucky I’m a woman in whom both sides function pretty equally. Plus I can multi-task!

BW:  You have a wonderful mind. Thanks you so much for this interview and wish you the best in your upcoming book.

Karen:  Thanks so much for inviting me. Good luck with the site. It’s a great initiative.

To our readers, Karen would love to hear from you. Click on ‘comment’ below and send your questions, comments, and appreciation.