We got the opportunity to have a chat with the extremely talented Mera Akiana! She has recently released Bond and Song, her debut novel! And the reviews coming in for it have been spectacular. If you haven’t had the opportunity to check this book out, we strongly recommend it. It’s absolutely haunting and beautiful in so many ways. We were able to connect with the book so well and honestly cannot wait for the next work to hit the shelves. So keep reading for our Mera Akiana interview!
How do you feel about the initial response to your debut novel, Bond and Song?
There’s been a lot of loud squealing every time a new review comes in, and people turn out to be totally taken with it! I’m still amazed to see how much people connect with it and are deeply touched by it, and it makes me so happy. I love learning the details of how readers experienced it, both the story and the literary style, which are both somewhat unique. How much readers feel through reading Bond and Song and how much they take from it in terms of deeper messages that stay with them or made them ponder.
I feel the best kind of satisfaction when I learn that people wept over it, and the love story gained a new forever-place in their hearts. I also had to laugh when one reader said how in the beginning it felt to her ‘like an interpretive dance where you don’t really know what’s happening, but you can feel the importance, and so you pay attention to every detail’ — and that you get every detail and end up feeling like you live inside the pages of the book. Now I’m really excited for more and more people to find out about it and read it; for Bond and Song to get out there and the word to spread. So if you loved it, please tell everyone you know about it!
This is going to be a trilogy, right? Can you give us any teasers about the upcoming books or additional characters we may come across?
I started out thinking it would be a trilogy, but then realised that I actually wanted to leave this as a standalone, and brought in and tied up some things that otherwise would have come through in the next books. In a hypothetical book two you’d have met Daina and gotten to know the circle of the Sisters in the Dark some more. Maybe I’ll change my mind sometime and decide to tell you more of Zaja and Sin’s story and where I saw it going. For now I’m feeling very happy with what readers seem to feel through and take from their story as it’s told, and am all sorts of keen and nervous and thrilled to dive into my next book world. Oh, and I’m eager to see Bond and Song as an audiobook (or hear, rather) and in foreign translations.
Do you already have plans in the works for additional books after this trilogy?
Yes! My next book I actually do intend to make the first of a series, and I’m working out right now exactly how many tomes I plan for it to be — it’ll be between three and five. I know the major themes and general idea of the world, characters, and story, and it’s time to get specific and figure out exactly what the story wants to be so it can express what I want it to be about at its core.
What does your writing process look like?
Well, it’s always a matter of staring down the blank page and being amazed at how it does end up filling itself. Giving myself permission to just start with whatever I do know, whatever small moment or exchange or what-have-you, and then building and filling in around it, really helps. Often I’d start with just the actual exchanges of dialogue, then grow the scene around it. Most of the ‘feet on the ground’ location description type stuff went in during edits — my brain tends to glaze over those as a reader when they’re not directly relevant to the character’s experience in that moment, and so I found I also don’t naturally spend time writing them.
For my next book, I’m going to experiment with applying a bit of writing technique I’ve been reading about and intrigued by — basically giving my intuitive process a bit more structure. I also share more about my writing and editing process from time to time in my ‘Mythical Mera Missives’, aka newsletter, and some of those love missives also wind up on my blog on my website (https://meraakiana.com) some time later. Come join me over there for the wacky, whimsical, and wonderful fluttering into your inbox!
Do you plan things out and work around them? Or do you write as the thoughts come to you?
I seem to start with themes or ideas or moments of a specific felt experience that speak to me in a deep way and that I want to creatively express and share. Then with Bond and Song I pretty quickly knew who Zaja and Sin were going to be, and I knew the first and final scene. I wrote those first, and pieces of those original drafts are still in there now! I added the prologue and epilogue later, towards the end of the whole process actually, during editing.
So as I was discovering how we were going to get from that first to the last moment, it was a lot of writing forwards, seeing what it wanted to be. I did have lots of mental snapshots of imaginary moments that I liked and treated as a sort of library to pull from, though not all of them fit into the story at the end. Sometimes throughout writing, new ideas would come in when I’d be inspired by a dream I had, or an experience, or something I suddenly imagined, felt, or remembered.
Overall one might say that Bond and Song is somewhat literary-leaning, with a slightly unusual narrative style of emotionally potent moments we get to experience like pearls of a necklace, and those build the overall emotional ride for us, rather than one continuous narrative flow. (Well, that’s how it feels to me — I wonder how you as a reader experienced it?) I suppose that style resulted from the way I’m moved and inspired by the essences of those types of moments. They’re what I’m really interested in and what ‘makes’ a story, I feel. As in, when I think about some of my favourite books — I think about specific moments of the story that emotionally hit like the ring of a bell, and never fail to do so. Those are what I love, and those single moments carry so, so much. So many layers and so much history and emotion!
Is there a specific character you’ve written that you feel deeply connected to?
I do feel quite connected to Zaja. A lot of me and my experience of life is in her, though sometimes heightened and dramatised of course. If you’re into Human Design, I’m a Reflector, which is the type that supposedly only 1% of the population are, and I think Zaja gives a bit of a window into what life might be like from that perspective.
I also happened upon a paragraph describing one of my Gene Keys shortly before publication (not something I know a lot about yet) and it made me go all tingly, because I was like: This paragraph is supposed to describe an aspect of me and my life experience, and it literally is an impressively concise and to-the-point summary of Zaja, her story, and her internal transformation. I was pretty gobsmacked when I read that. Beyond that, I just really love a lot of them, for their personality and who they are!
Are your characters based on anyone in particular?
No, not that I can consciously recall at least! Other than what I shared above, they’re mostly based around their essence, I think. I feel like I might have had some comparisons in mind initially of people or other characters who had that core flavour, as it were, to help guide me a bit, but I can’t remember who they were now. How weird! I guess Bond and Song’s characters became too much themselves in my mind for me to know them any differently.
Is there any specific author that inspired you to become one yourself?
I’ve been an avid reader for as long as I remember. I’d be that kid walking down the street with my head in a thick book, and would always have about seven books going at the same time, delighting in jumping back and forth between them and experiencing a kind of synthesis between the different stories. As expressed by the dedication in the front matter of Bond and Song and again in the acknowledgements, books have felt vital to me throughout my life. When I was around nine or ten, I’d already consumed vast quantities of books, but each only ever once. I really couldn’t imagine re-reading.
Then I came across A Cage of Butterflies by Welsh-turned-Australian author Brian Caswell, first published in 1992. I found it on the shelves of my German school library — the German version initially at that time. When I went to check it out, the librarian kindly tried to convince me that it might be too difficult for me, jumping between multiple POVs as it does, and I assured her I was quite confident in my ability to choose books for myself.
I wasn’t your average kid wandering into a library for the first time; I was present in the worlds of books more than in this one. I even felt a sort of spiritual connection to them, in the sense I’d feel when it was time for me to read a certain book I might’ve had on my radar for a while, and invariably felt like I’d be guided by it and receive a specific message from it that I needed at the time.
A Cage of Butterflies
Anyway, back to the Cage of Butterflies — titled IQ – The Experiment in German — that was the first book I finished, and immediately felt the urgent need to re-read. I read it about five times in a row, and some years later my sister achieved the feat of tracking down an original English version for me as a birthday or Christmas present, I don’t remember which. But I believe it was out of print at that time. Throughout my teenage years, since beginning to learn English in school and seeking out books in English, I’d gained an appreciation for the nuances that an original language version will carry that even the best translation sometimes loses, so I treasured having the original. Despite having been deeply touched and moved by so many books I’d read and loved, it was a different experience with Cage of Butterflies somehow.
So I did this funny thing of deciding I was going to have a list of my ‘eternal top five’ — favourites amongst all the favourites. Cage of Butterflies became the first on the list, and I knew the spots would fill chronologically over time. Which they did. In a way, I feel those books chronicle my becoming of who I am today — since they were the books that spoke to my soul so deeply, even transforming me in some way, that beyond being a favourite that I cried over for days and loved to the heavens and back, of which I sure had more than five, they earned a spot on the list.
And I often think, wouldn’t it be cool if we could exchange our eternal top five lists with friends or people we meet, and gain a deeper understanding and empathy for who they are that way? Especially if we learn why each made it onto the list? All of this to say — any author I ever read led to me becoming one myself, and the authors of my eternals likely inspired it most of all. Weirdly, though, because books have always meant so much to me, I’d almost placed them on a pedestal, and it took a bit of an epiphany to go ‘Oh! I could write one of these myself!’. Once that insight finally hit, I did, and here we are!
Have you always wanted to be an author? If not, what career path did you originally see yourself taking?
Looking back, I can see that I’ve expressed myself through writing for a long time. I even remember specific moments of fantasising that I might write a book — on the loo one time, on a train station platform another… I’d always be secretly scribbling highly dramatic poems, I wrote a story several pages long during one of the first years of school that I remember adults being very impressed by, and won a short story competition in school as a teenager. But I didn’t see myself being an author. I’d say ‘if only my job could be reading books — maybe I could be an editor?’. I even studied up on professional editing for a while. But, duh, author — nope, as I told in the story above.
As a kid I dreamed of working with whales and studying their communication. Then I grew up acting on the professional stage and training as a professional ballet dancer. Later I went to Oxford studying psychology and philosophy, and then I did end up in Hollywood, and also in the field of somatic (embodied) healing work specifically relating to sexuality, and in the traditions of sacred sexuality. My path has been a colourful one, and you can glimpse many of those influences in Bond and Song.
What has been the most difficult obstacle to overcome on the road to being a published author? Any advice you can share?
The self-doubt and self-criticism. As my best friend said one day: ‘I think you’re having a proper artist’s crisis’. Writing a novel can feel so intimate and revealing, and it can feel really scary to share it and wonder if anyone’s going to get it or connect with it at all. Which is why each time I receive feedback that someone did, it’s the best and most beautiful, wondrous, magical and meaningful feeling. There’d be days where I’d love it, and days where I’d think it was awful, and a heap of indulgent drivel, and ridiculous and embarrassing. Luckily it’d be followed again by days where I’d think, no, I do love this, I do feel this is powerful and beautiful and worth sharing. It’s not perfect, but who says it needs to be.
I’d think about my favourite books, those eternal top five I mentioned in particular, and imagine those authors had let themselves be held back by their doubts and not published them. What a loss that would have been for me! Also, if you look at reviews for any book out there, including your favourites, there will be people who swear it’s the best thing ever and those who swear the opposite, and not always kindly. That’s so helpful and important to remember I think, and again goes back to what I allude to in my dedication and the end of the acknowledgements in Bond and Song: No book is for everyone, and every book is for someone. And if you can touch that someone, it’s all been worth it. You might have given them more than you ever know. So write it and let others read it.
Expectations and Judgments
It’s also been funny facing my own internalised judgments about genres and their readers. I kept fearing that while gals might be all here for the swoony romance, guys would rather put their heads through a wall. I just expected it to be the type of story women might like, but guys would roll their eyes at. So when some of my guy friends read it and told me they loved it, I was totally flummoxed. Overall it’s been a process of hesitantly learning to trust and believe that people really do seem to deeply connect with it and genuinely love it.
Martha Graham was an influential dancer and choreographer. There’s a wonderful quote by her that I try to remind myself of often, the essence of which says: Keep the channel open. Be the flute for the divine, express what wants to come through you. It’s not your job to judge it. But it is your responsibility to express it, in the unique way only you can, for otherwise it will not exist. Keep the channel open.
If you haven’t checked out Bond and Song, we strongly recommend it. It’s truly beautiful, inspiring, and deeply emotional. Be sure to check out our site for more articles, quizzes, and more on all things Disney and beyond! You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram!