Simply The Quest
With a brand new trilogy of novels, Ru Emerson returns to the world of Xena. Interview by Eddie Summers.
Official Xena Magazine: Issue 02
“I had not seen Xena when my agent called to offer me the contract,” admits Ru Emerson, the Xena: Warrior Princess novelist who has recently returned with Go Quest, Young Man, the first part of a brand new trilogy. Thankfully, she's talking about the contract for her very first Xena novel. “I watch very little television and Xena was on a channel with lousy reception. But he told me it was a spin-off from Hercules, which I had caught a couple episodes of, and rather enjoyed. I caught an episode that weekend - The Titans - and by the end of the pre-credits fight scene, I was jumping up and down and yelling, I was so excited. I hadn’t seen anything that great since Emma Peel [of The Avengers]. So I was immediately hooked on the show.”
That immediate love for Xena has led to contracts for a total of six novels, the last three of which comprise the new trilogy currently being published in the US by the Ace Fantasy imprint of Penguin Putnam. The first book was published in September, and the second (Questward Ho!) is due out this month. “It’s been both a challenge and a lot of fun to write this trilogy,” Emerson says. “The first three books were fun, too, but more limited: I wrote them all while the first season was running, so there was no humour, no subtext to speak of... First off, MCA did ask that I insert humour. Well, my favourite season thus far is season three, and my favourite episodes are those like Ten Little Warlords, Comedy of Eros and For Him the Bell Tolls. I knew I wanted to try my hand at getting some of that slapstick humour on paper - and apparently, it's working, since I’m getting lots of good feedback on the first book.”
It’s not just Xena’s humour that appeals to Emerson. “While it was the great fight scenes that caught me [when I first watched it], I also got drawn into the relationship between Xena and Gabrielle, and the interesting take the show’s creators had on ancient Greece. I've been reading Homer and the mythos in various forms since I was six or seven years old.”
Emerson’s love of writing stretches back that far also. “I’ve actually been writing since I was in grade school - stories for television shows I liked, as well as my own stuff. But I really wanted to sing or act (or both), so writing wasn’t a major career notion back then. Not until I was in my thirties and started reading fantasy, especially authors like Anne McCaffrey, Katherine Kurtz, C.J. Cherryh, Alan Dean Foster, Andre Norton... I slowly began to realise that I had my own ideas for worlds and stories, and eventually began writing what became the first book of the Nedao Trilogy [To the Haunted Mountains], The deeper I got into Mountains, the more I realised that (a) I might be able to sell this book (and I did, after first writing four others), and (b) I did not want to suddenly turn 65 and retire as a legal secretary. Mid-life crisis of sorts, I suppose. But the main driving force really was that I found I had stories to tell, and I wanted to get them out there where other people could read them.”
With all her own worlds waiting to be brought to life in her novels, what is it like writing for the worlds that other people have created? “It’s different every time. With [my novels for] Beauty and the Beast [the Eighties US television show], I had extremely strict guidelines, and of course, the book was based on three actual episodes (I did get to choose the episodes myself, and write my own tie-together scenes for all three). With Fortress of Frost and Fire, I worked with Mercedes Lackey, who gave me a very detailed outline and made sure I kept within the guidelines of the Bards' Tales role-playing games, but otherwise left it all in my hands.
“Xena, on the other hand,” she continues, “is the kind of character I would write myself. (I [created], back in 1988, a middle-aged warrior named Liatt, who’d tried retiring to farm, who has a very chequered past and who’s ill-tempered, especially when she first wakes up and all her old war-wounds ache...) And it’s a good deal of fun, working my background in Greek mythos and Homer’s tales into what’s been done in Xena's Greece—particularly [in the new books], with Helen of Troy.”
Thankfully for Emerson, the strictures placed on her by the Xena licensors have been quite light. “By and large, I’ve been given carte blanche in the stories I come up with,” she says. “Of course, everything has to be approved, but there’s seldom a problem. The most recent request was when I submitted the outline for the trilogy: they asked that I change a sorcerer to a priest of Apollo, since Xena usually doesn’t go with non-god-related magic."
This brings up the question of how different the Xenaverse is from a traditional fantasy world. Emerson thinks for a second, then carefully replies, “I’m not sure that Xena does differ from other fantasy worlds - traditional ones, in the Tolkein sense, yes, she’s in a different plane entirely. Since I only attempt high fantasy on very rare occasions, usually when a short story demands to be written (that’s happened twice in 15 years, so it truly is rare), and since most of my fantasy is more ‘pragmatic’, I suppose, I don’t have much of a difficulty writing Xena in that sense. And, for me, it’s nice to be able to insert the things that a television show doesn't have time to be distracted with: the actual things you have to take with you, or pick up along the way, in order to survive a long land or sea journey.”
Accepting that Emerson has pretty much a free rein with her Xena stories, and that the world of Xena is one in which she feels comfortable, which character from the television series does she most enjoy writing for? “Joxer,” she says, “especially when he and Gabrielle are sniping at each other. He’s a complicated character, one thing on the outside and something else inside. Draco - especially since he’s still under the spell of Eros, and still trying to do good for Gabrielle. But hands-down, the best of the bunch has been Ares: I could almost hear him telling me what to write, and even with my own characters, that is a rare occurrence.”
The Xenaverse is a big place, with vast realms of myth and history to explore. Surely there must be something that Emerson wants to write about in a novel that she hasn’t been able to? “I’m not sure there is anything I’d like to get into a Xena novel that I haven’t already. As I say, they've given me a pretty free hand, and I’ve freely tapped into things from past episodes and seasons, helped Joxer write new verses to ‘Joxer the Mighty’...”
So, if she’s happy that she’s not missed anything out of her books, would Emerson grab the chance to write for the Xena television series if she was offered it? “I used to think I wanted to be a screenwriter,” she says, “but these days I am not so sure. Writing for Xena would be a hoot, of course. But I lived in Hollywood and other strange parts of LA for nearly 20 years, and now that I’m up in rural Oregon, I sincerely doubt I’d want to go back there, even though scriptwriters make better money than ‘mere’ novelists. Now, if I could do all that from here... But, I think, honestly, I’d rather write the books and maybe have someone down there adapt them for the show. It would be nice to get paid for that, too, but I don’t think that’s in my contract... Drat.”