The writer’s war – A conversation with Ronlyn Domingue

In 2005, Ronlyn Domingue published her first novel, The Mercy of Thin Air, which was quickly embraced by readers and critics and is now available in 10 languages. I studied at LSU, her alma mater, where we became friends. Later, I watched as she delved into what she called Novel No. 2, which was published March 5 as The Mapmaker’s War.

This new novel is mythic, epic and much different from her first. It is the story of Aoife, a woman who is apprenticed to the king’s mapmaker. Later, as she travels the kingdom to create its maps, she discovers a wealthy, Utopian society nearby that her own people seek to conquer and is exiled for treason when she tries to warn the peaceful community.

Domingue and I met for coffee a few days after the sixth anniversary of when she began The Mapmaker’s War to discuss the book’s long gestation and its sequel, The Chronicle of Secret Riven, due out in 2014.

Originally, her follow-up to Mercy was going to be an entirely different story. But, as she says, “the energy just wasn’t there.” Procrastinating, she went looking for some old essays and found the manuscript for a novel she had tried to write at age 20.

Domingue: And, I just knew this was the project. I work on such an intuitive level … I spend a lot of time just researching and thinking and incubating before I start writing, so that gap … was about four years. There wasn’t much research I could do for a world that didn’t exist, but I was trying to frame it in reality. About half of this book was written in three weeks, and I had an experience with this book that is like the first one [Mercy], which is that the first one came very clean, practically no revision.

What was coming for what I didn’t yet know was The Mapmaker’s War was a spew, a stream of consciousness spew I have never experienced. I got possessed. Seriously. [Aoife] addressed me personally. That point of view [second person], that wasn’t my choice; that was her choice. You can’t argue with the characters. I can’t anyway.

Domingue: [With The Mercy of Thin Air] there was a permeability, which happens to me as a writer. There was definitely a clear sense of, “There’s something coming through, and I’m getting it down.” There’s also the reverse; I’m able to enter the story and move around, so I’m like a ghost in my own novel … I’m a presence there, as much as they become a presence in my life.

[With The Mapmaker’s War], the characters forgot to respect my autonomy, and I felt used. There’s no other word to describe it. There was something they wanted to say so intently that they were willing to violate my sense of boundary in order to get it heard. That’s really not pleasant. And I think that’s why these books have been so hard.

Domingue: [My agent Jillian Manus] realized that this wasn’t another book from Ronlyn, it was a new book from Ronlyn, and I really love the way she phrased it. I wish I were the kind of writer, I do, genuinely, who could repeat what worked the first time. Apparently, I don’t have that option, because the characters come to me.

Domingue: [The sequel] is about a young woman who must end an age-old pestilence with the use of a plague. There is a tie between them, and Secret is the bearer of a legacy.

The Mapmaker’s War is available now, and like Domingue’s first book, is already receiving praise from Publishers Weekly and from such authors as Deborah Harkness, M.J. Rose and Ava Leavell Haymon.