Interview with Laura Antoniou

Interview with Laura Antoniou

The scene was May 17, 2002 at TesFest in NYC’s famous Pennsylvania Hotel. After seeking an interview with Ms. Antoniou for approximately 6 months, the opportunity finally presented itself through her return home for the event and subsequent signings of her new book, “The Reunion”, the fifth book in her “Marketplace” series published by Mystic Rose Books.

     While event attendees milled about and sitting in the lounge area of the 6th floor, amidst the green backdrop and black leather (and deep) couch, Ms. Antoniou availed herself of my microphone and was gracious enough to lend me her time between seminars.

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Joseph:  Laura it is a pleasure to be here with you to discuss your new book and yourself.
Tell me about the book, please.

Laura:   Well, “The Reunion” is the 5th ‘Marketplace’ book.

It continues the story told sequentially in all of the books, and… contains 2 of the most popular characters.  One of the reasons it’s entitled “The Reunion”” is because this is the  (and, I use the phrase exactly) long awaited reunion between Chris Parker (who has been in every book) and Robin Cassidy (the titular character in book #2 called “The Slave”).

People have been asking me for years, “When are these two going to get back together?”  I kept saying, “Robin has her happily ever after ending and they’re not meant to be together.”; but the fans of the books insisted that they were.  So after a while, I decided I would do what the ‘customer wanted’ and I wrote the book that would bring them back together.

Joseph:  So that was your motivation then for this book?
That was one of my questions, “What drove you toward writing this book in particular?” I had believed you rounded and completed it very well with the last one.

Laura:   Well, the last book “The Academy”, I wrote in different stages.
I had started writing it while I was still being published by Masquerade. And then when Masquerade ‘went under’, I stopped working on it because I had no idea where I was going to sell it. And I thought it might still be under contract. And, then years later, when Molly Devon, publisher & author of “Screw the Roses, Send me the Thorns” made an offer to publish me, that’s when I finished the book.

I didn’t know whether I was going to do another Marketplace book. I didn’t know what it would be about. Then I finished “The Academy” with an ending that I thought would indicate to most readers “well that’s it for this character” and  “there’s nothing else to be said”. But that didn’t work very well because I wanted to keep writing.  That was when I put my mind to thinking “how could Robin & Chris get back together?”

Suddenly, this concept occurred to me about how I could do it without betraying what I thought the characters would ‘really be doing’ in my ‘fantasy world’ and that’s how the concept of “The Reunion” was born. A kind of: ‘get-together’ for slaves & former slaves.

Joseph:  What gives you your ideas?
I mean, and this is a stupid question that’s asked in every freaking interview, but what gives you your ideas as an individual?

Laura:   Uh… the Sears & Roebuck ‘idea catalog’? (laughs)

Joseph:   (chuckles) I gotta get that.

Laura:   Well… I’ve always made up stories and a lot of the Marketplace comes from my particular personal fantasies – some of them going back to childhood. And, everything else comes from other media I’m exposed to.

I get ideas for characters from other books or from movies, occasionally from television series. I get ideas from plot lines from all the great books.  I’m a shameless thief of other people’s ideas, but the thing that authors do is ‘recycle’ other people’s ideas. When we do it well, people like it. Because, there are very few stories and the best you could do is tell a story in a better way. But the stories are the same. In fact, people who study literature and also read my books, can ask me questions about the next book and they’ll know that I’m going in that direction.

Joseph: So, on that subject, what about your next book?

Laura:   Well, writing “The Reunion”, it is a 650 page book.
It’s very long, and it took a long time so it took a lot out of me.  So I’m not plunging into another novel right away.  I’m putting together a collection of all the stuff I wrote for other publishers and other books, and some unpublished stories and stories that I wrote under other names including some of my gay male s/m porn and I’m putting all that together in a book I’m going to call “Now Look What You Made Me Do”, and hopefully have that together before the end of this year.

Then after that, my wife and I are splitting a book together called “Slaves of the Marketplace”, which is going to be a collection of short stories all about the ‘B characters’ in the Marketplace books.  The ‘walk-on’ slave characters.
We’re basically going to tell their stories in a tag-team fashion, one story at a time. And I’m intending that to be an entry-level Marketplace book. This will be the one that we can give to people who say “Oh my God, five novels? I don’t know if I want to start there.

So we can give them a book of just short stories and see if they like ‘the world’ of the Marketplace. And, it is also for the fans of the books who always want more detail. But there’s just a limit to how many 650 page books I want to put out. But the next novel will be called “The Inheritor”, and I figure I might start working on that in 2004.

Joseph:  Do you consider this book [“The Reunion”] to be your best one so far, or if not, which one do you consider the best?

Laura:   Oh, “The Reunion” is by far the best.
It is the best plotted, it’s got the greatest amount of character development in a short time.

I think I worked much harder on things like physical descriptions of characters and I have never so tightly plotted 8 days in my entire life. And so I think just from the sheer amount of work that went into it, it’s the best thing I’ve ever done.

Joseph: You mentioned that you have a gay male persona that you wrote with.

One of the things that has been commented to me (and that I’ve noted myself) in reading your writings was that you seem to have an incredible empathy with different viewpoints from whatever ‘lifestyle’ you live relative to everything from vanilla, to the gay male, to the heterosexual community and the like.
What do you attribute that to?

Laura:  I’m a pervert. 

(laughter)

Joseph: Can I quote you on that?

Laura:   Absolutely.

Joseph:   Cool.

Laura:   I’m a big pervert.
I find all forms of human sexuality to be interesting. I don’t find them all arousing, but I find them all interesting.

In another world, I would have studied it as an academic, rather than just become a pervert. But the fact is, gay men turn me on, lesbians turn me on and straight people turn me on. I have been (and I am) a terrible “tranny-chaser”.  My transsexual friends are like “get your hands off me already.”
And it’s not just so much that I feel I ‘need’ to put it in so that everyone has their own sex scene.  It’s that I want to put it in because I find them all hot.

There are times when I sit back and I say to myself: “Oh, look this is just a vanilla sex scene between heterosexual people. How can I write that?”  And then eight pages later, I realize that I’ve written this enormously detailed sex scene between 2 heterosexual characters and I’m turned on by it.  I really like that because I never want to be jaded.  I never want to take an attitude such as “oh here comes another lesbian scene” or “here comes another flogging scene”. I do want people of all kinds to enjoy my books.  One of the greatest things that I love is when people who are one particular orientation (as opposed to a polymorphous pervert like me) say, “You know, I’m not gay, but I even found the gay scene in your book really hot.”

You know, that to me… …that’s right. 

Joseph:   If you can reach across a sexuality and especially some preconceived notions and touch them – that’s excellent?

Laura:  Yes, and then people write to me and say “I wish you wouldn’t put so much ‘gay male sex’ in your books”, and I tell them to go screw themselves.

Joseph:   (laughs)  “Write your own damn books”?
One of the things that I know has been brought to your attention is that you write about the Marketplace and you write about cultures of ‘ancient lore’.  And I mean ancient as in greater than 30 or 50 years…

Laura:   Mmhmm…

Joseph:   That has a history that goes further back in time and that sells slaves, own slaves, obviously, that basically train slaves for sexual and other services.

Laura:   Right…?

Joseph:   And, folks are using that as a basis (and, it’s unfortunate to say, but true) for reinforcing their claims that they belong to an ancient house with an ancient lore and places that have this sort of a “heritage”.
Do you have something to comment on this?  I mean, they’re saying (basically) that you must know about this.

Laura:   Yeah. (snort) Well, if I wrote a Star Trek novel, then that must mean that I know about quantum physics and that I fly to other planets.
I mean, I say this all the time:  I write fiction and there’s a reason why I write fiction.

Most of the things in my books not only don’t exist in real life, but could not exist in real life.

We do not live in a world where you can hide a multi-national slave-selling culture without it being known.  And we do not live in a world where there are literally thousands of people who would go into training and leave their lives behind to be sold to a complete stranger without having a say as to who they would be sold to or what they would be used for.
Those are the two biggest fictional aspects of my books; and, what I would say to people who try to use my books as an excuse for their ‘delusions’, is: they [the people making these claims] are about as ‘realistic’ as people who say that they’re ‘Klingons’.  You know?

Some of my best friends are ‘Kingons’.  But…  they’re ‘Klingons’ at Star Trek conventions; and, they put on their costumes… and they put the make-up on… and they go to Burger King and order as a ‘Klingon’.  But Monday, they’re back at work at the Stop & Shop and life goes on.  And, they are not fully Kingons.

Joseph:  So… Are you saying that there is absolutely no chance that these exist?

Laura:   Well, there’s about as much chance that they exist as the Klingons. Or you know, some outer-space- dwelling-people who drop by here every once in a while to capture farmers and give them high-colonics.  I don’t much believe in that either.  Do I believe that people are held in slavery?  Absolutely.

Non-consensual chattel slavery is a fact of history. We can trace it back. We can look through thousands & thousands of years of human records about the sale of human beings.

We could look into organized crime and find that right now there’s the sale of human beings going on all over the world where [women] are forced into prostitution; children, in the Philippines and Polynesia forced into prostitution; people are brought here from China, they’re brought here from Russia, they work in sweat shops, they work in some small communities where they’re kept here illegally.

Those are slaves. They’re slaves. And we can find their stories.
But a “secret organization” with “mystical backgrounds” and “secret handshakes” and people actually going on an auction block willingly?  No way.

No way.  We’d have evidence of it “Somewhere”.