Muse: First of all, Whispers of the Muse welcomes you to the site. Tell us a little about yourself. What part of the world do you live in? Tell us about your background?
Greta: I live in Queensland, Australia not far from the ocean with my husband. I was born in Amsterdam and migrated to Australia with my family when I was four years old. I have a BA (Hons) in history, a Grad Dip Education and a Grad Dip in Business and Admin – which is actually my IT qualification. After messing about for a while as a teacher, a clerk and a few other things, I discovered my true vocation and worked for twenty-five years or so in IT, starting as a trainee programmer and ending as a senior systems analyst.

Muse: Who are your favorite authors?
Greta: Fantasy and science fiction are my main genres. So there’s Tolkien of course. Terry Pratchett (who mixes so much into his stories). Elizabeth Moon, Anne McCaffrey, Timothy Zahn, Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke. The list goes on. But I must mention A. A. Milne. I still love Winnie the Pooh.

Muse: Why did you write a Historical Fiction? And what other genres do you write?
Greta: I never intended to write hist fic. ‘Die a Dry Death’ has its own history (see below). I write romantic science fiction – to my own great surprise. I never thought I’d ever write a romance, but there it is. Will I write another hist fic? Could be. I have two distinct stories to tell. It just needs to have its time, you might say.

Muse: What is your writing regimen? How often do you work on a book? Do you set daily time or word goals? What keeps you meeting your deadlines?
Greta: I write every day. Sometimes a lot, sometimes a little. I don’t set goals for myself at present. I did with DaDD because I wrote it as part of a course I was doing. But goals are not a problem for me. I’ve worked with deadlines in IT and sometimes those deadlines were difficult if not nigh on impossible. In writing, the only resource to flog is me and provided my health stays good I will meet whatever goals I have to.

Muse: Does the way you personally look at life reflect in your writing style?
Greta: I expect so. You can’t help it, really. But how… I don’t know. I don’t aim to put me into my books. I speak through my characters and I try very much to get into their heads.

Muse: What are the creative jumping off points for you? Are you inspired by dreams? Music? Nature? The occasional black nightmare? What triggers your imagination?
Greta: History. And IT. My IT background means that computers and their increasing role in society are recurrent themes for me. The genie in the bottle, know what I mean? If I’m looking for a plot, I fall back on history. People aren’t going to change. What drove us five hundred years ago, or fifty, still drives us now. I can find an event in history, add a few spaceships and an alien or two and there you are. This is exactly what I did with ‘The Iron Admiral’ which is loosely based on a raid the Germans manufactured to give them an excuse to attack Poland at the beginning of WW2.

Muse: Tell us about Die a Dry Death. What was your inspiration?
Greta: It’s kind of an immigrant’s tale. It’s based on a true story, events that took place on a group of tiny islands thirty miles or so off the WA coast.

As I mentioned before, I was born in Amsterdam and migrated with my family to Perth in Western Australia when I was just four years old. So I grew up as an Aussie kid, in the sun and the surf, and being Dutch only mattered at Sinter Claas or Christmas when mum made yummy Dutch stuff with marzipan. Yes, we learnt a little about the Dutch ‘explorers’ at school. (The ones that accidentally bumped into the horrible unknown south land) like Dirk Hartog and Vlamingh. And we went to the museum and were shown this case with a skeleton in it which (we were told) came from a murder victim who’d been on a ship called the Batavia. I must have been ten or twelve.

In 1963 the newspapers were full of the discovery of the Batavia wreck site and the wreck of the Vergulde Draeck (Gilt Dragon). At last. After hundreds of years of mystery. But for me, it was just ancient history.

And then years later I visited the WA Maritime Museum with overseas friends (as you do). So many people miss what’s in their own backyards. I looked at Batavia’s keel, rebuilt in the museum and the portico, intended for the fort at Batavia, whose stones had been her ballast. Then we went upstairs to the gallery where they displayed recovered artefacts from all four of the known Dutch wrecks – Batavia, Vergulde Draeck, Zuytdorp and Zeewijk. Jugs, plates, scrimshaw, pipes, buttons – all sorts of things ordinary people would have used. And I had an epiphany. I remember the feeling clearly. It was as though I was looking down a four-hundred-year time tunnel. I could have had a relative on one of those ships. Very easily.

I developed something of an obsession, looking up and reading what I could. Every single one of those wrecks has a mystery about it, or a story of enterprise and courage. I visited the Zuytdorp wreck site on the cliffs that bear her name – cliffs known and avoided by the Dutch mariners after 1629. The men in Batavia’s longboat would have eyed those cliffs with dismay as they sailed for Java. I stood at both sites regarded as possible candidates for the place where Pelsaert marooned two of the Batavia’s miscreants. I’ve been on the Batavia replica twice – once in Holland, once in Sydney. And I promised myself that one day, I’d write a book about one of those wrecks. ‘Die a Dry Death’ is it, based on a true historical event.

Muse: What is your favorite scene from the book and why?
Greta: One of the most difficult things to do in this book was how to make murder after murder interesting to the reader. I tried very hard to get across the viewpoint of the people trapped with a psychopath in their midst. I stalled for a long time over one of the more horrific events. A family was involved, a preacher with his wife and seven children, ranging in age from eight to mid-twenties. These people are trapped on a tiny island with this psychopath and his thugs. One of the senior henchmen lusted after the preacher’s eldest daughter, so the preacher and the daughter were invited to dinner. While they were in this man’s tent, eating, all the other members of the preacher’s family were murdered and buried. The people in the tent having dinner must have heard what was happening.

Several people have told me this scene works really, really well. It’s chilling. I have done my job.

Muse: Have you written other books?
Greta: Yes. Three SF books.

Muse: Tell us about your other books?
Greta: ‘The Orionar Queen’ is set in the distant future where humanity catches up with itself. A long time before the events take place, the Human race has been brought to the point of extinction by its over-reliance on technology. The heroine is what I’ve called a BI – a Bio-engineered Intelligence who is all woman but has the processing power of a super computer in her brain as well.

‘The Iron Admiral’ is an SF romance where a human Admiral joins forces with a woman who has been brought up with the alien Ptorix. With the Galaxy already on the brink of inter-species war, they must prevent the deployment of a weapon which will precipitate disaster. Naturally, there are all sorts of complications.

Muse: How do you feel about the current publishing marketplace?
Greta: It’s a complex beast. I’d still love to have my work published by a major player and see my book in bookshops in Australia. But I see epublishing increasing its hold. It’s so easy to download a book. And they don’t get dusty. That said, there’s still room for the old favourites in hard back.