Erika Mailman’s girl trouble

Erika Mailman had already written about prostitutes and witches and other historical women of note when she woke up in the middle of the night, shaken by a nightmare about another female.

The dream: A young girl was wandering through the woods when she came across a quaint cottage—the kind straight out of the old “Hansel and Gretel” tale. As Mailman’s subconscious continued to drift, the cottage was revealed to be part of a larger house. An evil house, filled with secrets, and one that the young girl was actually fleeing from, not approaching.

“I awoke and couldn’t stop thinking about it; I jotted down two pages of everything I could remember,” the El Dorado Hills-based writer says. “And then realized this would make a good young adult novel.”

In fact, it would make three.

Mailman, who will discuss and lead a workshop on young adult literature April 29 through May 1 at the Gold Rush Writers Conference in Mokelumne Hill, had little trouble selling the book to her agent, but the deal came with a stipulation. The stand-alone book Mailman had envisioned needed to evolve into a trilogy.

Mailman agreed and the series’ debut installment, 2015’s Haunted, was published to strong reviews under the pen name Lynn Carthage.

Betrayed, the second book in Mailman’s The Arnaud Legacy, was released in February, and Mailman just completed the third installment, Avenged, set for a 2017 publication date.

Trilogies are hot in YA, of course. Think Twilight, The Hunger Games and Divergent. That doesn’t necessarily make writing them an easy feat to undertake.

Haunted follows 16-year-old San Francisco-native Phoebe Irving, who moves with her mother, sister and stepdad to a mansion in rural England. Her stepfather inherited the mansion and, as it often turns out in books like this, the house is filled with mysteries and ghosts—both figurative and literal. It’s the entirety of that story that came from Mailman’s dream—with nothing left over for two sequels.

“Everything in the first book is everything I had,” Mailman says. “I was inventing fresh for the second and third books, and that was one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done as a writer.”

For inspiration, she turned to the Harry Potter books and the Shinobi samurai-themed series by Fair Oaks writer Susan Spann.

The Arnaud Legacy, in the vein of the Potter series as well as the Chronicles of Narnia books and Twilight, follows classic young themes. It’s rich with teenagers in love, mythical creatures, scorned women seeking revenge and families torn apart by love and death.

Throughout, there was an exhausting amount of detail to remember and sort out.

“I tried to create something that hinted at the rest of the story in the first book and then pays off in the second and the third,” Mailman says. “That kind of thinking doesn’t come naturally for me. I filled notebook after notebook, trying to keep the story straight in my head.”

Whatever the genre, if there’s a commonality that runs through Mailman’s writing it’s found in her posse of strong, complicated female characters. Her debut, The Witch’s Trinity, centers on the story of an elderly woman, Güde, facing a witch trial in 16th-century Germany. Woman of Ill Fame is a gold rush-era murder mystery set in San Francisco that’s anchored by a sassy, gold-digging prostitute named Nora Simms.

Mailman says it’s no coincidence that her main characters are all complex and tough as nails.

“I [write such characters] very consciously,” she says. “I am a strong feminist. I love stories about strong women—women kicking ass.”

Still, Mailman acknowledges, there’s something of a leap between the worlds of witches and prostitutes and, well, adolescent heroines. That’s why the author decided to write The Arnaud Legacy under a pen name.

“I wrote a book about an unapologetic prostitute, and while it’s not über-secret—any kid who can Google will learn my real name—I did want to protect YA readers,” she says.

While the young adult series seeded in a dream, Mailman says the idea for both her adult novels “very much arose out of how many women’s important stories from the past were not being told.”

Woman of Ill Fame, for example, came out of research that Mailman did when she was living in Oakland, writing a history column for a newspaper there. The research involved hours spent inside the history and archives room at a local library.

“There were all these great books about Wild West prostitution and I wrote several articles about [the subject],” she says.

At one point in her research, she came across the photo that would later become Woman of Ill Fame’s cover: A black-and-white image of a young 18th-century prostitute wearing a fierce, defiant expression.

The old photograph immediately inspired Mailman.

“She’s really who I wrote the story for—I had this movie in my head and she was the main person.”

For The Witch’s Trinity, Mailman was halfway through the writing process when her mother sent an email that made her realize just how deep and personal her connection to the subject matter actually was.

“The story is a good one to illustrate the power of the uncanny,” she says.

Indeed. Mailman’s mother had forwarded her a link to a University of Massachusetts website devoted to the Salem witch trials. The site included historical documents, including trial testimony. And, as it turned out, proof that Mailman was related to a woman named Mary Bliss Parsons, who’d stood trial for witchcraft not once, but twice. Both times she was acquitted.

The family had known about Parsons’ husband, but this was the first they’d learned of his wife’s history, and for Mailman, it gave her writing and novel a sense of urgency.

“That 400-year period in history when women were consistently burned to death—that story needs to be told; the world was once that way,” she says. “[Parsons’ story] did make me feel a strong connection to whatever power flows through us to make us write stories.”

Mailman says learning Parsons’ story had a profound effect.

“There’s so much to be said for blood and genetics and what remains,” she says. “Something was calling me to these stories.”

Next up: Mailman is working on a novel about a 19th-century Massachusetts murderer. The character, not surprisingly, is a woman, and Mailman calls the undertaking “fun and morbid.”

So, you know, business as usual.