Out of the shadows
Ottawa native Amy Mcculloch realizes fantasy as first book is released
Maybe it’s because the family business deals in oriental rugs. Or maybe it’s the background in medieval literature.
Combine the two with a major sense of adventure and you have Amy McCulloch’s first fantasy novel for young adults called The Oathbreaker’s Shadow.
The Ottawa native, now overseas in London where she is a commissioning editor for HarperCollins’ sci-fi and fantasy imprint Harper Voyageur, is living her dream.
Anyone who was watching local TV about a decade ago will recognize her face from the commercials that featured Amy and her sister Sophie pushing the carpets from the Canadian Rug Traders, a business located on Clarence Street and run by parents Angus and Maria.
Even though she was ribbed about the commercials by her friends at Immaculata High School, the ads were actually a pretty useful experience.
“I did the first one when I was 12. By the time we got to commercial four or five, we were old hands. We were comfortable. We had the same crew and the same team for all the commercials. Dad wrote all the scripts, towards the end I would make little suggestions.”
It was about the same time that Amy began developing an interest in writing.
“I actually remember not liking writing in elementary school. My parents would have to sit me down and say just get it over with.
“But in high school, I just really suddenly became interested in creating stories with my friends. And from there I wrote my first full-length novel in my last year of high school. It will never see the light of day, but it was a big thing to write something that has a start, a middle and an end.”
At the University of Toronto, she started with a joint degree in English and International Relations. She thought of a career in the foreign service.
“But I discovered that the only subject I was really enjoying was English.” And a very specific brand of English — medieval and old. That’s Chaucer and Beowulf.
“I loved seeing the origin of stories and seeing how strangely modern some of it is. In Chaucer, so many of the jokes are so modern.” Even a bit rude.
The germ of The Oathbreaker’s Shadow happened after taking a course in Chinese history. She became fascinated by the Mongol khans who rode roughshod over the known world.
“I was actually writing an essay on Kublai Khan, the Mongol emperor of China and grandson of Ghengis. And all of a sudden I was immersing myself in the Yuan dynasty. I was so fascinated by how a nomadic culture with very little or no written language at that point managed to conquer China. And then, at the same time, I was studying medieval history and literature and reading about oaths fealty knights were making to lords.
“I remember thinking what would the biggest consequence be, for breaking one of these oaths. What if there was a physical consequence like a scar or a shadow.”
It all came together at a performance of The Lord of the Rings musical.
“I was sitting in the theatre and I had vision of young boy in a desert who had broken an oath that he didn’t know he had made. So he was exiled and scarred and confused and frustrated. I had to find out what he had done and how he was going to redeem himself.”
That pretty much sums up the beginnings of her novel centred around young Raim, who lives in a Mongol-like culture on the edges of a great desert.
She admits to being fascinated by the Mongol reputation for ruthlessness and loyalty. She likes her characters to not be black and white.
It was a natural that McCulloch turned to fantasy writing.
“That was always what I read for pleasure. I was a Harry Potter child. I was the perfect age. As I got older, I was camping out at Indigo waiting for the books. I was a serious, serious geek. At university I took all the science fiction and fantasy courses that I could. Books like Dune had a huge effect on me.
“Fantasy stories are as old as time. They deal with universal themes. People often read fantasy without even knowing it. Some of the biggest classics of all time are fantasy books like Lord of the Rings,” says McCulloch.
None of this explains the day job at Harper Voyageur, though.
“After university I was going to do a masters in medieval literature. But I had a friend in England who was graduating the same time and she said she was going to travel for a year instead.
“That sounded amazing, so I jumped on board with her and ended up travelling for 10 months from Africa to Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia.”
After that, she was done with academia.
“I needed to work at that point. I was still writing, but I didn’t think it was a very viable career.
“I knew that if I wanted to work with books, I wanted to work on the editorial side. The competition was so high in Canada. So I moved to England kind of on spec (she has a passport). And I ended up getting a job with a small, nonfiction publisher in 2008 just as the crash was happening.”
She was immersed in the publishing business and when an assistant editor job with Voyageur came up, “I knew that I had to get that job. In the weeks coming up to that interview, I read everything I could that had the Voyageur logo on it.”
As you can tell, McCulloch is pretty goal-oriented. “I like to do my research,” she says.
A year later, she was made commissioning editor and now manages her own list of writers. One of Voyageur’s big clients is the author of The Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin.
But what about her book? When we last looked, it was sitting in a drawer.
“I had tried to get book published at university,” and failed.
During her travels, McCulloch was in Namibia and learned about the lives of desert nomads. “I came back and rewrote the whole thing from scratch.”
And she started again. This time she snagged an agent in London. And that was the key.
Random House came calling and signed McCulloch up to write two books based on the story of Raim.
“They loved the setting. It’s slightly unusual and they found it refreshing to have a boy main character. Young adult fantasy these days is dominated by strong female characters. (Think The Golden Compass and Lyra Belacqua.)”
She didn’t specifically write for an audience, but she does think her ‘voice’ is a younger one.
“I’m sometimes asked, because I am a commissioning editor, how I would have written this as an adult writer. But I don’t know how I would have written it differently apart from adding some gratuitous sex or violence,” she says with a laugh.
“That didn’t seem right for this story. This is very much a coming of age story.”