Rachel Potter, January 19 2002,
All About Romance http://www.likesbooks.com/paullinasimons.html

Favorite books...
Hmm...
Okay. From childhood (before ten) - all read in Russian:
The Three Musketeers (first and foremost) by Alexandre Dumas
15-year-old Captain by Jules Verne
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
Childhood, Adolescence, Youth by Leo Tolstoy

From adolescence:

Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Summer of 42 by Herman Raucher (plus everything else by Herman Raucher)
The World According to Garp by John Irving
Carrie by Stephen King
Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
From Adulthood:

East of Eden, by John Steinbeck
A Room with a View by E. M. Forster
Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Parliament of Whores by PJ O'Rourke
Promise and Fulfillment: Palestine 1917-1949 by Arthur Koestler
Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsythe

Rachel: What can you tell us about your background?

Paullina: I was born in Leningrad, USSR, in 1963 and came to America at the end of 1973 when I was ten. I went to a state university in New York, then to Essex University in Colchester, England, and finally got my degree in political science from Kansas University in Lawrence, Kansas. I was married to an Englishman from 1986 to 1990 (one child) and then remarried an American in 1994, whom I refer to as my "second husband" (he refers to me as his "first wife") and with whom I have three children. I currently live in Brooklyn, NY.

Rachel: I know The Bronze Horseman is your fourth novel, and that your first novel, Tully, was published in 1994. Talk to us about your writing and publishing history in general, and then in specific, such as how long it takes you to research and write a book? How much of your life is given over to your writing? Do you do a lot of reading for pleasure as opposed to research?

Paullina: I don't worry too much about research unless I'm using it as a means of procrastination, which I did with The Bronze Horseman. The subject matter was just too big. Usually I get a few basics down, write the book, and on subsequent edits fill in what research is needed to complete the novel. But researching your book is not writing. Making notes, outlining, plotting is not writing. Talking about your book is not writing. Only writing is writing.

Each one of my books has been different in terms how long it took to finish because so many factors are involved. When I wrote Tully, I still had to freelance to pay the rent. Writing the first draft from start to finish is not the same thing as revising and rewriting and editing and then handing it in to a publisher and editing the book and then copy-editing, and then proofreading it. Tully's first draft took me a year. To get Tully into fighting shape for the potential publisher took me another year. And then it was one more year for editorial, copy edit and proofread to get it published.

Red Leaves was about three years from start to publication. Eleven Hours two years from start to publication; however the first draft of Eleven Hours took me only six weeks. The Bronze Horseman was four years from start to publication, three years before I handed it in to the publishers.
When I am in the middle of the actual writing of my books, I don't do any reading for pleasure at all, certainly never fiction. But when I'm in an in-between period, then I read for pleasure as much as my schedule will allow me.

Rachel: How do you write? Are you more concerned with plotting or characterization? Do your characters ever get out of control and do things you aren't expecting or don't want them to? Did Alexander and Tania appear full blown and moving or did you get to know them over time?

Paullina: My plot and characters are thoroughly intertwined. Without a story, I don't have a novel, but if my characters aren't fleshed out, what good is a story going to be to anyone? Bits by bits I saw Tully's complicated life, but it wasn't until I was in the middle of the actual writing the book that her character fully emerged. The same can be said for the secondary characters-they all get to be body and flesh when I am in the middle of their life. In very tightly plotted books like Red Leaves and Eleven Hours, the characters cannot ever get out of control because then the story will be changed.

With The Bronze Horseman, I saw a glimpse of Tatiana and Alexander before I began writing the book, and I saw their arc and what they had to go through, but their passion for each other, their consuming love didn't make itself real to me until I was embroiled in their first love palpitations. Somewhere around the Summer Garden scene was when they were both born to me, when she called him Shura. So you can say that their love story was a road of discovery for me as as writer, as much as it was later on for my readers. All the things I wanted to see them say and do, I had them say and do because it brought me so much pleasure and so much heartache.

Rachel: The Bronze Horseman both the time period and the location (World War II Russia) absolutely came alive. How much research did you do to authenticate the details? Were the small things, like the tram routes and locations of stores authentic? Did you feel you had to get the details exactly right in memory/honor of your family? Many of the Russians I met were still living the Great Patriotic War in small ways. I saw many photograph albums dedicated to people who had died in the war. Do you think that you are still affected by the war even though it didn't happen in your lifetime? And, if so, do you think that it was easier or harder to write about it because of this?

Paullina: It was much harder to write this book than any other because the plight of the Russian people in general and of Tania and Alexander in particular was so personal to me. The more intimate the details, the harder on the author, I think. And while the central story was fictional, all the peripheral details I could get right, I tried to get right. So the setting, the war, the siege, the starvation, the history was as accurate as I possibly could get it. The real world in the Soviet Union at that time was so dramatic, so larger-than-life, I didn't need to make any of it up. Truth indeed often almost felt like fiction. "This couldn't possibly be true," many people say to me of some of the details they learn about life in the Soviet Union.

Rachel: Did you base any of the events in The Bronze Horseman on the personal experiences of your family or friends?

Paullina: Certainly everything surrounding the central story was something that was taken from the life in Leningrad as I knew it, as my grandparents had lived it, as people we knew had lived it. The details of the apartment, the food, the historical details, the blockade itself, the village life, the evacuation, was all personal and non-fiction.
And the longing for love, the confusion and breathlessness of first love, the desperation, the intensity, the struggle with doing the right thing, all true emotions.

Rachel: Can you give us any information about the sequels and prequels. We've got a lot of people here who are very concerned about Alexander and Tatiana. Can you give us any reassurance?

Paullina: I do see many many people on various sites who are indeed concerned with the fate of Tania and Alexander, and all I can say is no one is more concerned with their destiny than me, and in The Bridge to Holy Cross, we will have all the answers. As far as the prequel, The Queen of Lake Ilmen, it's a short (250 pages) book about a pivotal summer in Tatiana's adolescence where she meets up with Evil for the first time in her life. I also have a non-fiction memoir called Six Days in Leningrad. There are currently no plans to publish either. I'm hoping that further success of The Bronze Horseman as well as the sequel will propel my publishers to commit to publication.

Rachel: Are you emotionally affected by what happens to your characters when you are writing about them? And, of your books, which one affected you emotionally more than the others?

Paullina: I am tremendously affected by what happens to my characters, during and after I am writing about them. Tully was an intense experience to get through, her life really affected me and for a long time I didn't think I could write a book as emotionally draining-and didn't. Both Red Leaves and Eleven Hours were more narrow in emotional scope, while dealing with some of the same issues (good and evil, destiny, freewill, doing the right thing). Of all my books, nothing has affected me quite like The Bronze Horseman. I'd have to say, few things in my life have affected me quite like Alexander and Tania, and it has taken me a very long time to get over them and on with my life.

Rachel: Have you ever gotten so involved with a character that you couldn't do to him/her what you intended; that you had to rework the book to accomodate your feelings?

Paullina: Yes, in Tully, I had to re-work the plot and some of her character when I realized in the middle of the book that she could never leave Robin.

Not in The Bronze Horseman so much, because I knew the beginning and the end already. The only thing I had to rework was the epilogue. As you see, there wasn't one, but originally there had been. So there had be closure on things there wasn't before.