Karen Perkins Navigates the Literary Seas
Author, publisher and former British yachting champion Karen Perkins is winning new readers world-wide with her Valkyrie Pirate Adventure series and chilling Yorkshire Ghost stories. Here she walks the literary plank and explains how her life and writing are inseparable…
What ignited your passion for writing?
In a word, people. To understand how people live in different cultures and eras, what life is,was it is like for them, and to try to understand why people do the things they do to each other.
In the Valkyrie Series – Caribbean Pirate Adventure, I explore the 17th Century Caribbean. I’m fascinated by the way so many nationalities descended on such a small area in search of riches and freedom, yet enslaved two continents in the process. Added to that, pirate ships were the most democratic societies in the western world, yet were one of the most brutal and unforgiving – another dichotomy that intrigues me.
The Yorkshire Ghost Stories explore the way the past so often dictates the present, although I’ve taken that idea further with hauntings. Thores-Cross examines isolation – so many villages, especially in my native Yorkshire, were isolated in themselves and I wondered what would the psychological effect be on someone if they were ostracised within that community? The next Yorkshire Ghost Story will be Knight of Betrayal (due late 2014) which looks at our sense of honour and loyalty and how we react when we realise that not only have we betrayed those concepts ourselves, but others we trusted have denied them to us.
What do you hope readers will feel when reading your books?
A wide range of emotions – the same range I go through when I write the books, e.g. fear to excitement, sadness to joy, hate to love, and vice versa. But my biggest hope is that they’re able to put themselves into my characters’ world and walk in their shoes, at least for a little while. The world is undergoing great turmoil at the moment, and always has – mainly due to diversity and intolerance; by understanding past conflict as well as human motivation and reactions, maybe we can start to look at our neighbours with a little more mercy and compassion.
Who are your readers?
Good question. My books are selling on four continents and it’s hard to know for sure. Judging by reviews and authorgraph requests, I think most of my readers are female, although I do get some great feedback from men too. One thing I do find very interesting is that my Valkyrie books, set in the Caribbean, are popular in the UK, and Thores-Cross, set in Yorkshire, is more popular in the US. I guess we all want to visit different places/times and cultures when we read – look through a window on to a world we’re not a part of.
An interesting paradox in your writing for me is the gulf between the historical adventures of the Valkyrie (Pirate) Series and the chilling Yorkshire ghost stories-how did each come about (no yachting pun intended)?
All my books so far are very personal, and are my way of dealing with some traumatic life events, albeit in metaphor. As a child up into my early 20s I was a very keen sailor – and the more extreme the boat the better. In the mid ‘90s I was sailing a Contender (a single-handed trapeze dinghy) and competing around the country, then I travelled to Germany to take part in the European Championships. After finishing one particularly gruelling race (I was the only female to finish it and over 30 of the men retired), I jumped out of the boat, and couldn’t stand – I’d pushed my body far beyond its limits, and while I did manage to complete the regatta and win the ladies title, the injury I sustained that day had a massive effect on my life.
Dead Reckoning, the first book I wrote, is very much an expression of the physical pain I’ve been in since that race – when I was editing it, I realised that Gabriella had been married to van Ecken for exactly the same length of time as I’d been disabled, and her struggle to escape him mirrored my own struggle to escape my limitations. Thanks to Gabriella and her example, I am now living a full life again (although I think I’ll stick to sailing in my imagination from now on), although every time I suffer a flare up, a new Valkyrie book is born . . .
Thores-Cross is the result of the way I dealt with the psychological effects of my injury. After living an extremely active life – not only sailing three times a week, but also travelling around the country for my job as a financial planning consultant – I was suddenly stuck at home, my worst nightmare! I became very isolated, and started to think about what it would have been like had I been living in a remote village before the era of telephones, Internet, TV and radio. The result is Jennet, and the area she lives in, Thores-Cross, is now known as Thruscross. The reservoir there is where I learned to sail and had an extremely happy childhood – in fact Emma, the modern character in Thores-Cross, shares my childhood, including finding an old ink pot when my younger sister dared me to go to the haunted house on my own . . . and I still have it.
I’ve come to the conclusion that my Black Series books are basically horror-thrillers- is that how you see Thores Cross and Cursed?
It is yes – similarly to the Black Series (of which I’m a huge fan), they do cross over into different areas, in my case historical fiction, paranormal and thriller. Essentially they are ghost stories and written with a dual timeline, exploring not only the historical aspects of the haunting but also the chilling repercussions in the present. Having had a number of ‘experiences’ I can’t explain with logic, I do believe there is more out there than we yet understand, and these books give me the opportunity to explore the detail of the historical characters’ lives as well as the motivation for someone to haunt, whether revenge, repentance, fear, or just getting stuck. The modern view of hauntings is also interesting – people either absolutely believe or absolutely refute – and the dual timeline also gives me an opportunity to explore these attitudes. If someone fundamentally believes, are they too quick to accept strange goings-on? And if someone fundamentally disbelieves, how do they continue to deny when faced with the unexplainable?
Tell me about LionheART Publishing House – what is it and how do you find a time and place to write given your heavy workload?
I started LionheART Publishing House two years ago with my then partner, Peter Mutanda, a poet and theatre director, and it has grown tremendously in that time. It’s now a full publishing services company, offering editing, formatting, book covers and trailers, and promotion services, and is still expanding. I’ve been joined by Cecelia Morgan, who is a very talented graphic designer and creates amazing book covers as well as videos and promotional images; Louise Burke, who is a close friend and helps me with the editing; and Elisabeth Storrs, a bestselling author and Amazon expert who can greatly increase a book’s visibility on Amazon, which is key to us as Indie authors. All three have helped me enormously and it looks like the team will be expanding further in the near future too as demand continues to grow.
It is difficult to find time to write – and this is a balance I’m still striving to find. I try to leave weekends for research and the odd writing ‘binge’, and I also aim to leave the house (and computer) for an hour every afternoon to sit in a coffee shop with notebook and pen – one chapter at a time . . . A great idea in theory, but it doesn’t always work out like that in practice, especially when my workload is particularly heavy (I just can’t work on my own projects if it means I’m keeping somebody else waiting) and I’ve started taking regular mini writing breaks – just a few days off to relax and immerse myself in my characters’ world(s) when needed.
I thoroughly enjoy my writing – and am sure it’s what keeps me sane – and I’m so lucky to enjoy the editing aspect of my work as well. Helping a new book into the world is a great privilege, and I’m very grateful to my clients and humbled that they trust me with their books, and I take great pleasure and pride in seeing them do well (including when their books are above mine in the rankings!).
Visit: www.lionheartgalleries.co.uk
