Alina Bellchambers (part 1)

Speaker 1 00:02

This is a Vision Australia Radio podcast.

Speaker 2 00:18

On Vision Australia Radio, welcome to our conversations on the work and experiences of emerging writers. I'm Kate Cooper and our guest today is Alina Bellchambers, whose debut novel The Order of Masks has just been released in Australia and, through a global publishing deal, will be released in the UK in December. As well as being a published author, Alina is an actor, model and public speaker who has a background in psychology. Congratulations on the release of your debut novel, Alina, and welcome to the program.

Speaker 3 00:55

Thank you so much for having me, and hello to all the listeners as well.

Speaker 2 00:59

I'll begin with a question that I often ask guests on this program: where did you grow up and what does that place mean to you now?

Speaker 3 01:07

So I actually, I was very fortunate. So I grew up on a 40 acre property in the Adelaide Hills, which is just so wonderful and picturesque. But I also spent a lot of time in my family bookstore - to the point where I almost lived there. And that was just such a special experience. I can imagine a lot of book lovers would very much like to, you know, stay in a bookstore after hours. Yeah. So that really helped me to fall in love with writing. And even before I could read, I just fell in love with books.

Speaker 2 01:37

Growing up in your family's bookstore would be an ideal childhood for many of us. Before we talk about your own writing, would you tell us about your own reading preferences and what you have on the go at the moment?

Speaker 3 01:52

Oh, I have lots on the go at the moment, so it's hard to pick a couple. I think recently I really loved The Serpent and the Wings of Night. I also really love Fourth Wing, Throne of Glass. And actually, my book is sort of being pitched as Throne of Glass meets Fourth Wing, which is very exciting. And, you know, I love the Caravel series by Stephanie Garber. It's a sort of a romantic fantasy. And also I like thrillers, too. So I sort of write in the genres of thrillers and also fantasies. And that's typically the genres that I read in as well.

Speaker 2 02:26

And Alina, what are your earliest memories of working creatively?

Speaker 3 02:31

Oh, that's such an interesting question. Well, some of my earliest memories actually of attending my mom's book launch events, because she's also a published nonfiction author. And I really found that I would spend most of the time making up speeches and making up stories and then taking over the microphone and reading them out to customers and to people in attendance. So yeah, so I think lots of people at my family bookstore got very used to hearing my stories as a child.

Speaker 2 02:59

Can I ask you mum's name for the interest of our listeners?

Speaker 3 03:03

Of course. So my mum is Diane Bell Chambers, and she now runs self-empowerment workshops - sort of mind, body and spirit, but also about sort of psychology and dream analysis as well.

Speaker 2 03:14

Oh wow, sounds really interesting. And speaking of dreams, you mentioned the fantasy genre before, and The Order of Masks is a novel in that genre. Would you tell us more about the fantasy genre in general and what appeals to you about it?

Speaker 3 03:31

Sure. What I love about the fantasy genre is, it's that real sense of escapism. And I think, you know, a lot of people relate to that. It's lovely to be able to pick up a book and just be transformed into a completely different world. But also in the fantasy genre, there's the ability to have very strong female main characters. I think it's done very, very well in this genre. And one of the books that made me fall in love with reading and also fantasy was Sabriel by Garth Nix. And I picked that up at a time when there weren't as many strong female characters in books as there are now. And I just fell in love with that sort of concept and, you know, how amazing fantasy books can be and how, you know, absolutely immersive.

Speaker 2 04:17

And I think too, at the moment, that a lot of young people are looking to fantasy as a genre that really speaks to them.

Speaker 3 04:25

Oh, definitely. I think there's a huge market for YA now, which is young adults. And actually my book is being pitched as young adult in the UK and adult in Australia, which effectively means that it's good for ages, say 15 plus. But yeah, that's, it's so special to see how enthusiastic young people are reading these days. And I get so many questions from students as well about writing. So it seems like there's a lot of very passionate students at the moment.

Speaker 2 04:57

And I've heard that from other guests on this program. A few years ago, people were worried that electronic devices would take away an interest in books, but that's not what I'm hearing as I speak with people.

Speaker 3 05:09

No, if anything I think it's been the opposite. I have so many people that I see in Instagram that are just avid readers and they've got kindles and they love to be on book talk and post about books but then you know you see pictures of their libraries and they're just filled to the brim with physical books as well and so I don't think it's all all or nothing it's very much a bit of both and personally I love to have the physical books but also to read you know via audio books or on a kindle that sort of thing too.

Speaker 2 05:40

We'll talk a bit more about audiobooks later on in our conversation. Alina, before we continue though would you read an extract from your debut novel The Order of Masks? 

Speaker 3 05:50

Of course. So the Order of Masks follows two fierce female main characters... so I'll read an excerpt from both. I'll do this one here from Mirror 4 towards the end of Chapter 1. 

The stranger was watching me from a few tents away, his arms folded as he surveyed the spectacle. Now that I'd seen him, it seemed odd I hadn't noticed him before. He was older than I was, at least choosing age, and he was arresting even from a distance, with ebony hair and cut glass cheekbones. Something about his talk-like stare made me uneasy, a feeling that only intensified as he came closer. Black whirls of ink covered his face, obscuring even his dark skin from view. The details of the tattoos were impossible to make sense of. Every time I tried to focus on an image, it started to transform.

Are you doing my job for me? he asked, his voice pitched low. A fortune teller, a real one. Sweat beaded across my forehead, but I met his eyes steadily. His eyes were the only features truly visible on his face, unobscured by the tattoos. One was so dark it was nearly black, the other was an eerie color leached grey. You're from the order of artisans, I said, standing and facing him. He smiled. His lips were covered in ink, the upper wholly black, the lower dusted in gold. The effect was beautiful and disturbing all at once.

Run. I should run. I didn't move. I wasn't sure I could. His gaze lowered to the card resting on top of my stall's table. The red was very bright against the black sheeting. It gleamed like a drop of blood. I wasn't predicting anything, I said quickly. I was just... I know what you were doing. He picked up the card in his hands, turning it over. I noticed that he held it very gently, like it was something precious. The sorceress, he murmured, his disconcerting eyes flicking to me. I tensed, uncomfortable with the scrutiny. So much fear, he said in a low voice. What do you know of fear? I knew a great deal, but I didn't answer. I didn't want him to know anything about me. 

His mouth twitched as if my reaction amused him. Relax, he said. I'm not going to hurt you. His teeth were startlingly white against the black of the ink. In fact, I might even tell you a secret. Would you like that? If I could, I would have declined, but there was no way to politely decline anything freely offered by an artisan. What would you tell me? He considered me for a long moment. First, he said, look down and tell me what you see. I followed his gaze down to his hands, down to the ink that seemed to lighten and shift underneath his gaze, forming into the charcoal likeness of a person. 

My mother, I breathed. Apprehension crept over me as I took in the details of her face, the hollows of her cheeks, the harsh line between her brows, the pinch to her full lips. She looked scared. No, she looked terrified. Even as I watched, a tear fell from her inky eyes, so dark that they could have been empty sockets. Her mouth opened as if to form a name. My name. And I knew, with shocking certainty, I was watching my mother die. I know what she is, the artisan said, a million miles away. She can run from the past all she likes, but the past always leaves traces. It leaves a trail. He lent in his lips brushing my ear. And if I can see the trail, he whispered, then so can they.

So that's chapter one from Mira's point of view, or some of Chapter 1, and I'll read just a very short excerpt from Chapter 2, which is from Scarlett's point of view. 

I only remembered flickers, russet hair and a cruel smile, the sound of ice cracking, terrified realisation that came a second too late. After that, everything happened in a rush, a haze of panic and confusion as hands reached out, not to help me, but to push me. I tried to scream, but water flooded my mouth instead, and there was nothing I could do as I dropped like a stone, my heavy clothes dragging me under. Desperation gave me strength as I tore off the furs and kicked towards the distant surface. Only when I reached it, it wasn't there. I could have cried then, could have wept and raged at the thick translucent barrier above me at the unbearable closeness of the sky.

Footsteps thuddered overhead. My brother was moving, but I couldn't see him. I slapped my palms frantically against the ice, trying to break through even though I knew it was useless. Raun clearly knew it too, because the echo of his boots grew fainter. My only hope was for someone to rescue me, for one of my guards to dive in and pull me from a watery grave. But there were no guards. My brother had sent them all away. I swam frantically, searching for the hole I'd fallen through. I didn't even know if I was going in the right direction, but I tried anyway, propelling myself forward with increasingly numb arms. My lungs were burning now, begging for air, but there was no air, there was no escape, there was only cold and silence.

Strangely enough, I no longer felt afraid. It was almost peaceful, the panic and fear dissolving as I sank, slowly beyond their reach. How nice it would be, I thought dimly, to close my eyes and drift. But just as I prepared to stop fighting, I saw her. The girl was directly above me, kneeling on the other side of the eerie blue ice. She was as cold and infinite as the frozen lake that would become my tomb, and it was impossible to tell whether she was flesh and blood at all. If it hadn't been for her halo of long red hair, she would have been indistinguishable from the snow around her. 

Even in my delirium, I knew that what I was seeing wasn't real. In the throes of death, my mind had summoned the only comfort it could - myself. Except I had never looked so beautiful or terrible in life. It was like staring into a distorted mirror image, wrong in every way, yet achingly right. Was that what my drowning self looked like, lips tinged with blue and all warmth leech from my veins? My doppelganger placed a corpse-white hand against the ice. As if in a dream, I raised my palm to meet hers. A thunderous boom sounded as the surface split apart. Ice cracked and rained down around me, like a million shards of glass. And I breathed.

Speaker 2 13:17

Thank you, Alina. You have a very powerful and appealing style, and it's interesting you mentioned earlier about reading thrillers as well as fantasy because the way you build up the tension in both of those extracts feels like I'm listening to a thriller as well as a fantasy.

Speaker 3 13:35

Thank you. That's wonderful feedback. I definitely want that to come across. I think I really wanted my book to feel very high stakes. And one thing that my publishers said to me when they bought the book was that they loved the ending of every chapter. I leave it on a little bit of a cliffhanger. And I think one of my editors said that she could almost just publish a book just with the last line of every chapter, which was just very special to hear.

Speaker 2 13:59

Fantastic. On Vision Australia Radio, you're listening to our conversation program Emerging Writers. Our guest today is Alina Bellchambers, actor, model and public speaker and author of the fantasy novel The Order of Masks. Alina, the media release for your book launch tells us that you used your background in psychology to create a narrative that explores complicated dynamics and the hard choices that women in power must often make. So my next question has two parts. The first part is, what was the initial inspiration for your novel?

Speaker 3 14:42

That's such a good question. And that's definitely going back to my degree in psychology. I was always fascinated by moral complexities and criminology. And I guess with this book, I really wanted to explore that. So I wanted to have morally grey characters, and I wanted to put them in... complicated situations and also in a situation where really survival's not a right, it's something that has to be won. And, you know, it's... not a critique of what is right and wrong and what people should or shouldn't do in these situations, but it's very much just interesting to have that drama and that explorative sort of narrative around morally grey characters, and women in power as well and their hard choices, as you mentioned.

Speaker 2 15:29

And so how did you go about planning the overall storyline and structure of your novel?

Speaker 3 15:35

That's a very interesting one too. So I actually started out writing The Order of Masks completely from Mira's point of view, and that didn't take me very long. I think I had it written in about a month, which is usually how long it takes me to write books. But having said that, I realised that even though I loved it, Scarlett had to be the second point of view character. And as soon as I did that, everything just fell into place. So I went back through the book, and I wrote Scarlett's chapters in separately after I had all of Mira's chapters done. And then I just really had the girls interacting. And I think they're just such interesting foils for each other. They're sort of allies, but also potentially adversaries as well. And yeah, the drama and stakes just fell into place after that.

Speaker 2 16:23

So you've told us how you wove their stories and, as you said earlier, their perspectives in the two female protagonists, Mira and Scarlett. How did you initially conceive of the two women? Did you do a character sketch? What were those steps?

Speaker 3 16:41

Ah, so... I'm probably someone who's in between being a plotter and a plant and a... is it a plantser? You know what I mean. So I like to sort of discover the story a little bit as I go. I always start out with a pitch. So it's basically a back-of-the-book blurb. And then that way I sort of know that the story is marketable. I know where it's going to fit into the market, what stories it might be like. And I also get a sense as a reader, whether or not I'd want to read it. Once I have that, and I'm very happy with the pitch, I just start writing and I see where it takes me and then I'll start to sort of have an idea of what I want to include in each chapter as I go. 

When I write thrillers, I plot them out a lot more than I do with my fantasies. But with my fantasies, I think there is a bit more room to be surprised. And in a way, I like that because I think if the author is surprised, the reader is going to be surprised as well. So it's nice to keep you guessing a little bit. But yes, I very much just discovered it as I went along. And it started out really about a mother and daughter on the run. And as I started writing the parts in the Ravelian court and Scarlett came into it as a character, that was where I was starting to think, no, it's got to be a focus on these two female characters because they're so strong and I want to know what happens to both of them.

Speaker 2 18:00

So without giving too much away, because there is that element of being a thriller... and we don't want to spoil it for our listeners, what else can you share with us about your novel and the story?

Speaker 3 18:11

Well, so I can share, you know, just the short statement that basically it's a dual point of view fantasy that follows two fierce female main characters as they rise up to reshape their respective destinies. So if we want to unpack that a bit more, I've got Mira Tundra, who is a performer from the elusive Isles. She's on the run from a past her mother refuses to explain, and she wants to join the magical order of warriors and fight for the empire and also be able to then protect her mother and stop running.

Scarlett is an illegitimate princess, so she's under constant threat. Her half-brothers are trying to kill her, her parents want to use her in their political schemes, and the only way that she's ever going to have control over her own life is if she has power. So she sets her sights on the Ravelian throne, and when she sees Mira, she sees an opportunity to alter the balance of power, but only if she can keep Mira alive through the trials and induct her into the order of masks and then use her in a bloody bid for the throne.

So both female characters, they've got their own respective love interests. Scarlett has got, you know, some forbidden romance kind of happening with her love interest. Mira's got a bit of enemies-to-lovers there for her as well. So it's yeah, it's very exciting to see how it all comes together. And then both of them sort of have to choose between love and power as they rise up to get, you know, revenge and yeah, and just come into their own.

Speaker 2 19:41

[?Sunset] there are many many layers of complexities and stories within stories. I really love a novel that's got stories within stories so looking forward very much to to reading it. 

Speaker 3

Oh thank you.

Speaker 2 19:55

We spoke before about the overall structure of The Order of Masks. What about the day-to-day practicalities of writing your novel? When and where did you sit down to write? And how did you keep yourself on track with the storyline and characterisations, especially with all that complexity?

Speaker 3 20:14

Oh, definitely. So, I'm very fortunate to live on a 40-acre property in the Adelaide Hills. And the good thing about that is there's lots of privacy. It's really nice and quiet. It's fantastic for writing. So, I can just really bunker down in my study and I can just write. And I have to admit, something that I probably need to work on is a work-life balance because when I'm in the writing stage where I'm really trying to get my thoughts down on the page, I could write for 12 hours a day plus. And it's almost like I just have to write because I have to get it down. And then once I've done that, I can step back a bit. And during the editing phase, I can have a slightly more balanced life where I'll go and I'll walk the dog and I'll do other things socially or do some acting, modelling.

And then I will come back to my writing. But I really try and write every single day because I find it's very much like muscle memory. Sort of if you're practicing for a sport, you need to practice every day so your body knows what it's doing. And writing is no different. It's very much like you've got to stay in practice with it.

Speaker 2 21:26

So are you a morning person? Do you get up and get straight into your writing, or do you ease into the day and then go for it?

Speaker 3 21:35

I think it depends on what I'm doing. If I'm starting a new project and I'm writing, then definitely I'll just be straight into it all day. If it's something where I don't have a deadline for it and I've got a bit more time and it's editing, then I might reply to emails and do promotional side and admin side in the morning and then get moving late morning onwards. It's a little bit variable depending on the day.

Speaker 2 22:00

And you mentioned editing before, and I wanted to ask you about that. After you've drafted a section of your novel, how do you go about editing your own writing to achieve that consistency of style that really came across in the passages that you read to us?

Speaker 3 22:15

Thank you. It's an interesting one because there's that advice, isn't there, with the first draft that you don't edit as you go. And a lot of people do that and I completely respect that. For me, I can't, I absolutely have to edit as I go. So what I'll do is I'll have a chapter as I'm writing it and I'll be thinking, okay, I need to change this or just tweak this slightly. And so in a way, when I end up with a first draft, it's something that I've edited along the way.
So my first drafts are always really, really clean writing on the line and pretty much what I want them to be. But then what I find is I'm usually too close to the story. So at that point, once I've got that first draft, that's where I really want to get outside feedback.

Speaker 3 23:01

And that's where now that I'm published, my amazing editors from Pan MacMillan, Claire Craig, and from Hot Escape in the UK, Molly Power, they come into it. So they will then read it and they'll come back with some notes. And then I basically take their notes on board and make the changes.

Speaker 2 23:19

And I wanted to ask you about that too. Do you negotiate? I mean, if they make a suggestion that you think, Not sure about that, do you have a back and forth discussion to resolve whatever the point is?

Speaker 3 23:32

Oh for sure. I mean look, they're very supportive, and I think that's one thing through the editing process that I have been learning too is that you can say that as an author, and it doesn't have to be that you take on everything, and you know I think Claire straight away said that to me in one of her early edits, she had written on there, Look these are all just suggestions - as the author it's up to you... and there have been places where I've said Look no, actually I think it better suits the story to be like this... but I am the sort of person where I always like to take on people's ideas. 

So the majority of all the editing suggestions I've definitely taken on board - and I think pretty much every single suggestion I will go away and I'll write it that way and then I'll make a decision looking at the new version versus the old version and I'll say Hey actually there's this a merit to this, or No the original was stronger.

Speaker 2 24:26

And are you working under tight timelines by this point? So do you have to very much make decisions on the spot? Do you get a little bit of thinking space?

Speaker 3 24:37

I'm so glad that before I got published with some of my early manuscripts, I actually worked with a freelance editor and that really taught me how to work under deadlines and that was so important because when you do get to the publishing stage, that's very true. The deadlines are tight and you want to hit the publication date, so you want to make sure that the book isn't pushed back. So yeah, it's been a learning curve doing that, and I've been fortunate, I've been hitting the deadlines, but I just make sure that I get stuck into it as much as I can really, and just am very careful of time.

Speaker 2 25:17

Alina, I'm really enjoying our conversation and I've got more questions that I want to ask you, so let's continue with Part 2 in next week's program. 

Speaker 3

Yeah, fantastic. I'm looking forward to it. 

Speaker 2

Our guest on Emerging Writers today was Alina Bellchambers - actor, model and public speaker, whose debut novel, The Order of Masks, is being released in Australia in September 2024 and in the UK in December 2024.

This program can be heard at the same time each week here on Vision Australia Radio, VA Radio on Digital, online at varadio .org and also on Vision Australia Radio podcasts, where you can catch up on earlier episodes.

Speaker 1 26:11

Thanks for listening to this Vision Australia Radio Podcast. Don't forget to subscribe on your preferred podcast platform. Visit vairadio.org for more.

Speaker 2 26:22

Vision Australia Radio... Blindness, Low vision, Opportunity.