Getting 2 Know Margaret Gill

What is your favourite thing about writing?

Margaret Gill: I love searching out bizarre connections and doing lots of research to flesh out my story lines. I’m constantly amazed at the many coincidences that occur when following a chosen theme. I wrote a novel several years ago about a Tibetan manuscript that had just come to light after thousands of years, and shortly afterwards was invited to write about objects in the archives of our local city museum and incredibly turned up a tattered manuscript that was actually Tibetan and no one had any idea where it had come from.

While researching The Quetzal Skull, which is about a crystal skull belonging to Quetzalcoatl , the Mayan god, I discovered  a  book called, Quetzalcoatl, by D.H.Lawrence, his ‘last unpublished  manuscript’  available for the first time as a paper back  since his death in the 1930’s.

The coincidences of books and items turning up just in time seem to multiply when you’re writing. You could end up having too much information and this is where you have to do some serious pruning but it’s all so exciting like having all the goodies in the sweetshop to choose from. For Quetzal I researched runic inscriptions, shamanistic lore, bee shamanism, medicine men and totem medicine bags, rainforests and their inhabitants, human and animal, how zombies are created by whom and for what reasons, how to kill a zombie, Mayan legends, the significance of the mermaid/siren and the whale, narcotic plants, truth drugs, drug dealing in Costa Rica, clairaudience ( my main character ‘s special ability) Precolombian artefacts, perused maps, lonely planet guides, travel survival kits and  all the  world wide sites devoted to ancient crystal skulls. Then I came across books whose significance I was unable to include like those which foretold the return of the god Quetzalcoatl  on the fateful date of December 21st 2012,  the date the Mayans predicted as the end of time.

What might readers like to know about you?

Margaret Gill: As you might have guessed I’m a pushover for secrets and mysteries of any kind. I enjoy unearthing mysteries and unlocking secrets. When I was at school I ran several ‘secret societies’. One of them was the secret society of ‘daring deeds’ where the members had to out perform the others with ‘dastardly deeds’. I always kept a diary of such exploits and wrote it in French so my mother couldn’t read it. It was probably such bad French it must have amounted to secret code any way.

There are secrets and mysteries in all my books and two of them actually have the word ‘secret’ in the title which I wasn’t aware of until someone pointed it out.  The Secret of the Rothley Papers and  The Secret of the Scrolls.   In The Quetzal Skull Gray has to find the secret burial place for the skull and in Narwhal its prequel Gray had to find the secret of the runes.

Somehow I don’t think I’m done with secrets yet.