Q: There is already a very famous book called "Beloved," the one by Toni Morrison. Why did you choose to call your novel by the same name?

My novel takes its name from the VNV Nation song, which is on the band's 2002 album, "Futureperfect." The whole story -- including the relationship between my protagonist, Kirin, and her brothers, as well as the political situation and emerging war in their land -- formed while I was listening to a lot of VNV Nation's older albums, particularly "Empires" and "Praise the Fallen." I remember hearing "Beloved" live for the first time in 2001 and thinking how well it suited the main characters and their relationship, as though they were looking back on the past with a sense of closure. When I started writing the novel, I considered a number of different titles, but over time I realized I kept thinking of it as "Beloved." The name stuck.

Q: What do you think is the most important theme of the book?

One thing I'd like to convey is just how crucial it is for historians to be as accurate as possible. My main character, Kirin, enrolls in the city's university for historians. In one of her lessons, she attends a session where the king, Scathan, issues a strident decree. Her assignment is to record what he says and how others responded to it. At one point Kirin realizes she's left out an important aspect of what happened, and rushes to rewrite her assignment before she forgets anything else.

Later on, she realizes that some of the city's history books have disappeared and others have been changed. All of these things raise many questions for her, particularly because her family has lost power and become a clan of outsiders: How do you know the people who wrote the original histories didn't forget something, or intentionally leave something out? What happens when the common wisdom about a historical event changes? And, most important, how can the control of information be used to control a population?

Q: How much of the character Kirin is based on you?

I drew on a number of my personal experiences to create her. As a journalist, I am constantly thinking about the kinds of issues Kirin encounters as a history student and as a person who may someday be in charge of recording the city's major events. I had a newspaper publisher whose motto was "We are writing history," and I think to some extent that's true. As Kirin gets older, her country enters a wartime phase and she essentially goes to the front lines, both to fight and to take notes on what happens.

In addition, I am a three-year student of kenjitsu, a Japanese swordfighting art. Although the fighting style in the book is much more European-based, my training and my teachers helped inform a lot of the fight and battle scenes.

Q: What were some of the influences that went into writing "Beloved?"

I have always been inspired by strong warrior-like characters of either gender, but particularly woman characters like Buffy Summers ("Buffy the Vampire Slayer") or Eowyn ("Lord of the Rings") who rise up against their expected roles and decide they would rather fight than let someone else do the fighting for them. Beatrix Kiddo ("Kill Bill") also deeply influences how I think about women warriors.

Watching this book unfold was very much like watching a film, and there are many films whose battle scenes I've loved and studied, particularly "Gladiator," "Lord of the Rings," and "Tristan & Isolde." I also re-read Robert Holdstock's "Mythago Wood" series while writing "Beloved," and I'm sure some of his myth-based influence seeped in.

The sociopolitical material is almost straight Karl Marx. In his books, Marx predicted that capitalism would someday break down because the people who worked in the factories and the fields would eventually come to hate "the machine," the powers that controlled their workload, their hours, their pay. When that happened, Marx said the people would rise up and destroy the machine, and that a sharing-based economy would result. He called this communism. I liked the idea that you could show a society where that had already occurred, but it had happened so long ago that some people forgot why capitalism was such a bad idea.

Q: After a chapbook of short fiction and poetry and two nonfiction books, what made you decide to write a novel?

It wasn't really a calculated choice. I had already tried to write two novels, one in my teens and one in my twenties, but they didn't go anywhere. In some respects I thought I lacked the discipline to see a plot line all the way through -- my nonfiction books were written slowly, in chunks, over time. But I got to the point with the story of "Beloved" where I felt like I needed to write it down and get it out of my system. Once I realized that, it was very easy to stay focused and finish it.

Q: Two of your books, "Dream Brother" and "Beloved," take their titles from songs, and "Read the Music" is a collection of essays about music. How important is music to your writing process?

Sometimes I think I couldn't write without music. When I listen to songs, my creative brain wakes up and starts turning on light bulbs. Sometimes those light bulbs are directly related to the music, and I wind up with essays like the ones in "Read the Music." Other times those light bulbs have little or nothing to do with the songs, but take me in other directions, and I wind up writing a poem, painting a picture, or telling a story.

I also listen to music while I write. "Beloved" was written predominantly to music by VNV Nation, naturally, but I also used music by Clannad, Lisa Gerrard, and Sting for a fair amount of it -- particularly the more tender scenes between Kirin and Emlyn, or Kirin and other characters with whom she becomes close. I said earlier that this book was very cinematic for me, and that's true. It even had its own internal soundtrack.