The Winged Child by Henry Mitchell

Posted: February 22, 2022/By: achristay@aol.com

Please welcome Henry Mitchell author of The Winged Child

Henry Mitchell will be awarding a $25 Amazon or B/N GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

The Winged Child

by Henry Mitchell

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GENRE: Fantasy

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INTERVIEW:

What or who inspired you to start writing?

I started writing late. I worked as a painter and sculptor for fifty years. My current wife badgered me for years to “write something.” When I was approaching seventy, I thought I’d done my best work as a visual artist and I wanted to do something that I could get seriously better at. “Write,” she said again. And so I did. I’m still at it.

How did you come up with ideas for your books?

It usually begins with a place, a setting. The feeling I get while being there. People who have lived in one place for a decent length of time tend to interest me more. My characters are shaped by their landscape. Once you start observing people, thinking about their actions and interactions, how they relate and conflict with one another, you begin to glimpse the possibilities for story.

What expertise did you bring to your writing?

Until I was nearly seventy, I made paintings and sculpture. That may account for the strong visual element in my novels and stories. My first publisher and editor was Rosemary Kind at Alfie Dog Fiction in the UK. She essentially taught me how to write. Looking back recently at some of the visual work I did across five decades, it occurs to me that a lot of my work was in some sense narrative. I think I’ve always been a storyteller at heart.

As far as your writing goes, what are your future plans?

I’m trying right now to finish another novel, tentatively titled, Among the Fallen, about the further adventures of Wendl VonTrier and his friends. I met Wendl for the first time in The Winged Child, and am impressed with his potential. Also on my bucket list is a third collection of short stories, a poetry book, and maybe a brief collection of essays. At eighty-one, that may prove an overly-ambitious goal.

If you could be one of the characters from any of your books, who would it be and why?

I think I would be Wendl Von Trier, Millicent McTeer’s mentor in The Winged Child. Apart from the fact that Wendl can do all sorts of things I wish I could do, he’s an enabler, a trickster but a benevolent one. He is never the main figure in a story, but he is the one who makes things happen.

When did you first decide to submit your work? Please tell us what or who encouraged you to take this big step?

After I finished my first novel, my wife read it, said, “You ought to send it out.” I sent out over two hundred queries to agents and publishers over the next year with no takers. I read about a new small publisher in the UK that was publishing short stories. I already thought I was a pretty good writer and wanted desperately to be a published one. So I wrote a short story, Maggie and the Witch, and sent it away to Alfie Dog Fiction, and they accepted it. A dozen or so short stories later, Alfie Dog announced they would begin publishing novels. I fired off an email, “I have a novel.” Eventually, they published three of my novels before I found a publisher on my side of the water.

Do you outline your books or just start writing?

I just start writing. I’ve always been in awe of writers who can plan their plots and outline their books, but once I know where the story is going I lose interest in writing it. If it doesn’t surprise me, how will it surprise the reader?

Do you have any hobbies and does the knowledge you’ve gained from these carry over into your characters or the plot of your books?

A lot of my characters are gardeners, or spend a lot of their time tramping through woods and over mountains. That gives us a lot to talk about in the course of writing a story.

Have you started your next project? If so, can you share a little bit about your book?

Generally, I have at least one project on the back burner while I wrestle with the current one. As soon as I glimpsed Wendl VonTrier in The Winged Child, I knew he would need his own book. I’ll probably have a draft for Among the Fallen in hand by spring. Rewrites and editing will likely take a year before I have anything solid enough to submit. Wendl will still be a púca in this one. There will be ghosts in it, and a couple of dragons. Most of the action will take place in one small town that exists in two worlds.

Can you tell us a little bit about what it was like to write a series.

My first three novels made a trilogy. I hadn’t planned to write a series, but my publisher didn’t like the ending of the first novel, The Summer Boy, and the conclusion we finally settled on was rather open to possibility. I began to think the protagonist, Benjamin Drum, had more to tell, so the second novel, Between Times, came along the next year. Ben was getting tired by then, but a bunch of new characters had turned up of whom I was quite fond, so I gave them a third book to have their say while Ben Drum retired with his dignity intact.

BLURB:

An adult fairytale about a girl who might know how to fly, a neurobotanist who might be a dragon, an innkeeper who might be a machine and a politician who might be the antichrist.

Millicent McTeer grows to adulthood in Ashton, an Appalachian tourist town, convinced she knows how to fly. With a new president in power, the life Millicent knew changes. The government has spies on every corner, coercing citizens to follow the new order. As the country descends into anarchy, Millicent is drawn into political activism by her professor and becomes an exile.

In the Laurel Creek Containment District, separated from the chaos of the Atlantic American Republic, she finds a new life. As she develops her unique abilities and leads the exiles, incursions from the outside world threaten to destroy the tranquil life they have built together. Will Millicent reclaim her reality and discover the peace that has eluded her?

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EXCERPT:

“Do you have wings, Dad?”

“Sure I do. Runs in the family.”

“So, why don’t you ever fly?”

Joshua shot her a convincingly wistful glance. “Grownups aren’t allowed to fly in this country, Angel. Otherwise, on special occasions, like birthdays, I just might.”

“That would be showing off,” said Millicent, affecting her mother’s stern expression.

“I suppose it would, but that didn’t stop you trying, did it?”

Millicent couldn’t summon a proper retort, stared intently at the road ahead.

Joshua rescued her from silence. “Anyway, grownups can’t fly, except on airplanes. It’s the law.”

“Then, I don’t want to grow up,” declared Millicent. “Ever.”

“I truly hope you don’t,” said her father, watching the truck in front of them turn without flashing a signal. “I hope that when you become a woman grown and strong, you are still my little girl inside.”

Millicent found no more words to say over the next two blocks until they turned onto McTeer Street. Ahead, she could see Hillhaven, the inn that had been run by their family ever since her great-grandmother Alice inherited it from her employer and life-long friend, who had no family of her own to whom she could pass it on.

“Will you always be my dad?” Millicent asked, gazing up at her father, who kept his eyes on his road.

“I’ll always be your dad, Angel,” he said. “Ever and ever amen.”

That sounded to her like an impossible promise. “Even when you are dead and gone?” she asked, using a phrase she’d overheard from one of the guests at the inn.

“Nobody’s ever dead and gone, Angel.”

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