An hour-long chat with Carrie Vaughn, author of the Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel Bannerless, the New York Times-bestselling Kitty Norville urban fantasy series: more than twenty novels and upwards of 100 short stories, two of which have been finalists for the Hugo Award.
Carrie Vaughn‘s work includes the Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel Bannerless, the New York Times bestselling Kitty Norville urban fantasy series: more than twenty novels and upwards of 100 short stories, two of which have been finalists for the Hugo Award. Her most recent work includes a Kitty spin-off collection, The Immortal Conquistador, and a pair of novellas about Robin Hood’s children, The Ghosts of Sherwood and The Heirs of Locksley. She’s a contributor to the Wild Cards series of shared world superhero books edited by George R. R. Martin and a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop.
A bona fide Air Force brat (her father served on a B-52 flight crew during the Vietnam War), Carrie grew up all over the U.S. but managed to put down roots in Colorado, in the Boulder area, where she pursues an endlessly growing list of hobbies and enjoys the outdoors as much as she can. She is fiercely guarded by a miniature American Eskimo dog named Lily.
An hour-long conversation with Matthew Hughes, award-winning (and multiply nominated) author of more than twenty novels of fantasy, space opera, and crime fiction and numerous short stories, focusing on What the Wind Brings, his latest, a magical-realism historical novel from Pulp Literature Press.
Matthew Hughes writes fantasy, space opera, and crime fiction, and has sold 22 novels to publishers large and small in the UK, US, and Canada, as well as 90 works of short fiction to professional markets. His latest are Ghost Dreams (PS Publishing), and What the Wind Brings, a magical-realism historical novel from Pulp Literature Press. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, F&SF, Postscripts, Lightspeed, Amazing Stories, Pulp Literature, and Interzone, and he’s in a number of invitation-only anthologies as well, including Songs of the Dying Earth, Rogues, Old Mars, Old Venus, The Book of Swords, and The Book of Magic, all edited by George R.R. Martin and/or Gardner Dozois. He’s won the Arthur Ellis Award, and been shortlisted for the Aurora, Nebula, Philip K. Dick, Endeavour (twice), A.E. Van Vogt, and Derringer Awards. He’s been nominated for induction into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association’s Hall of Fame.
Matthew spent more than 30 years as one of Canada’s leading speechwriters for political leaders and corporate executives. Since 2007, he’s been traveling the world as an itinerant house sitter: he has lived in 12 countries and has no fixed address.
The (Lightly Edited) Transcript
So, welcome to The Worldshapers, Matt.
Thank you. Sounds impressive, doesn’t it? When you hear it like that? Yeah.
I guess I have no idea where you actually are, right now, now that I think about it. Somewhere in B.C., I think?
I’m on Salt Spring Island, right on the sea, in a very comfortable and beautiful house that belongs to some wealthy people who are traveling in Argentina right now.
Oh, very nice. Now, we’ve been acquainted for a long time through Canadian science-fiction circles, and you have an unusual connection to me: you’re the first person I’ve interviewed for the podcast who has actually been one of my editors as well, because you edited my young adult fantasy series, The Shards of Excalibur, for Coteau Books.
I did, yes. Yeah.
So, I always try to establish those sorts of connections off the top. And I don’t think it’s a conflict of interest that I’m interviewing one of my editors. because it was a freelance thing.
Yeah. And also that’s done and finished and it’s all over.
Some time ago now, yeah. Well, we’ll start where I always start, which is asking you to go back into the mists of time. And, first a little bit about your background and biography and how the writing started. Did you start as a reader and that’s where it came from, or how did that all work for you? And I know you have a colorful background.
Well, we’re reaching way back. I decided I would be a writer when I was a teenager when I was about 16. I wasn’t sure how I was going to make a living at it because I didn’t know very much. I was from the working poor. I had no real understanding of the middle-class universe that surrounded me. But the first thing I heard of that writers did and got paid for was advertising copywriting. And I thought, “Oh, that sounds easy,” you know, very short text, you put them in magazines, you get highly paid. So, I even went downtown in Vancouver to the biggest local ad firm and arranged a meeting with one of the partners, whose name I can’t remember anymore, and he told me all about it. And I thought about it, and then I decided, “No, I don’t think so.”
For a while, I decided that I would be a teacher, but that while was only about a week or so because I got into student teaching and, thank goodness, Simon Fraser University, when you signed up for them to be a student teacher, they didn’t give you six months of theory and then put you in a classroom, they put you in a classroom on the second day. And I very quickly realized I did not want to spend my life in a classroom with children, some of whom were not all that bright, you know? It was frustrating.
So, that led to journalism. And in those days, we’re talking the early 1970s, in fact, actually in 1970, you could become a journalist just by being able to write, which is what I did. I wrote some features and book reviews and movie reviews for the student newspaper at SFU, The Peak, until I had a book of clippings with my name on them, and I then took them down to the Vancouver Province, where a guy I knew had been doing what they called stringer work for them—that was going out on Monday evenings to cover municipal council meetings. He’d been doing it and he was quitting to go somewhere else, so I went down, saw the reporter, and showed him my clippings, and he hired me. And that was my first professional gig. Then I did that for month after month. And then they had me write feature articles and eventually made me the SFU-based reporter. Anything that happened at SFU, I covered it, which, you know, is sports kind of stuff, and even…they had a multi-day conference up there once about why we don’t have freeways running through Vancouver, and I covered that every day. Wrote lots of copy.
They had summer staff, which…it was about two months I was on summer staff, and sometimes I was the only reporter there for the, you know, skeleton shift, when there was not going to be a paper the next day. So, Saturday I was in there, all on my own…and that’s when I screwed up, remarkably.
We had the first Canadian trade mission of businesspeople to China, because China was just opening up then. This would have been ’72. So, I got a list of the people who were at that, and they were coming back. I went to the airport, I collared some of them, interviewed them there, then went back to the newsroom and phoned them at the various hotels that I was given, at, you know, the contact places. And I just went down the list, and those I got, you know, I wrote down what they said. The problem was, I called up the president of Sooke Forest Products, and didn’t get him. So, I then went to the sales manager of a little electronics firm and interviewed him, but I put his remarks under those of the president of Sooke Forest Products, who, it turned out had not actually gone to China at all.
Oh, dear.
Oh, dear. And so, what happened was the paper came out on Monday and caused a little flutter in the stock market for Sooke Forest Products, because what sounded perfectly fine coming from the sales manager of an electronics firm didn’t sound good coming from the president of the forest company. So, the publisher had to personally apologize, and there was a retraction on the front page, and I was summarily fired. But, you know…
As a former newspaper reporter. I commiserate.
Yeah, well, every reporter gets fired eventually, I suppose.
I quit. I didn’t get fired.
Oh, well, there you go, okay, yeah. And from there, I went into weeklies. I was news editor, which actually meant editor, of a bi-weekly in Coquitlam and Port Coquitlam and Port Moody, a paper called the Enterprise, and did that for 10 months, I think. Yeah. And then, a guy bought a piece of the paper and he wanted to do my job, so they let me go from there. So I had UIC, unemployment insurance, as it was called in those days, and I had a typewriter, so I wrote a fantasy novel and then went looking for work again. It was a bad fantasy novel, but I learned an awful lot about writing from doing that.
But if I take that back just a little bit further, you actually started writing in high school, didn’t you? Is that when you actually started first trying to put fiction together?
The Dragon of the Ishtar Gate by L. Sprague de Camp
Yeah. I…in those days I really liked the historical novels of L. Sprague de Camp, who also wrote fantasy, but I loved his historicals, and I decided I was going to write one of those. And I came up with a good premise. In fact, I may even sit down one of these days and research and write this book. There is a mention here and there that after Alexander the Great had conquered everything and came back to Babylon, he sent a ship to go down and circumnavigate Africa. And then, of course, he died soon after that—he died of malaria, I think—and nobody knows what happened to that ship, whether it went, whether it went and didn’t come back or went and did come back or where it went. There’s a pretty good consensus that it was sent, but nobody knows what happened to that. So, I thought that was a great premise…
Yeah!
…so I wrote the first chapter of it in the summer holidays in…it would have been ’65…and then I realized writing a book with a pencil in an exercise notebook was a pretty hefty job. I was going to have to wait until I was, you know, better equipped, mentally and physically, with, you know, the writing implements to do this. But I did show up one day in Grade 12 for English class and was told we were supposed to have written the first chapter of a novel. I hadn’t been there for a while, I sometimes didn’t go to school. I didn’t like it. So I whipped this thing out and it actually was…
I’m glad you brought this up because it was a turning point. It was probably the time when I really decided I was going to be a writer, because the teacher we had…her name was Ruth Eldridge. and she was a tough woman, a former colonel in the American army, who was teaching English very hard…a stern, tough kind of woman, she was…and she had told us at the beginning of the year that nothing we wrote was going to get a 10 out of 10 from her because it wouldn’t be good enough, because we were kids. But I turned in my little few hundred words in my first chapter and she gave me 10 out of 10, and I took that as encouraging.
Well, that’s who…one of the people you dedicated What the Wind Brings to, isn’t it?
That’s right. Yes.
I noticed that when I was looking at it that she was on the first, you know, the dedication page.
Yeah. She and my mother. Both of them encouraged me to be a writer.
Were there other things you read? You mentioned L. Sprague de Camp. Were there other books that were inspirational to you as a young reader and then writer?
Cue for Treason by Geoffrey Trease
Yes. I…as I say, we were poor. And when I was still back in Ontario, before we fled to BC in ’63, we were living a couple of years in a quite remote farmhouse up a country road between Kitchener and Guelph, if anybody knows that part of the world. There was no library, there was no bookmobile. We did not have many books in the house. My eldest brother used to leave science fiction books around, until he finally got fed up of living at home and left, and I would read those. And also. there was a book that was on the Grade 9 English curriculum that both my elder brother and sister and eldest brother, I think, had all had. It was a juvenile historical set in the time of Shakespeare in England, called Cue for Treason.
That sounds familiar.
I think a lot of people in Ontario read that book because everybody was given it. And I read that and I was quite taken with the whole idea of historical novels, which I hadn’t run into by then. So, came September of 1962, they started putting us on a school bus to go to Grade 9 in the city, at Kitchener-Waterloo Collegiate Institute, which everybody called KCI. And they had a really good, substantial school library, just chockful of science fiction, fantasy…wasn’t much fantasy in those days, mostly science fiction…and historicals, and I just started reading everything I could get. I would read two, three, four books a week, starting then. And then, by April, I’d read most of what they had that I was interested in, and my father had a shoestring construction business and he got into some trouble with loan sharks, and we packed up everything with no warning, U-Haul trailers, and headed for Vancouver to hide out. But we ended up in Burnaby, only a mile from a very good public library, and I started reading there and read everything I could for years and years. I used to actually spend a lot of time in the library because it was a warm and quiet place, whereas my family home was not a quiet place at all, it was fair amounts of stress and sturm und drang and so on. So yeah, as I sat and read for years.
And…you mentioned that the first thing that you wrote in Grade 12 was basically a historical novel…
Yeah, that was my that was my predilection to begin with. Later on I thought, “Maybe I’ll be a science fiction author,” but I wasn’t very good at science, so that kind of troubled me. But, you know, I could write space opera, I assumed. And then when fantasy hit, in ’65, I read The Lord of the Rings in that Ballentine edition that first came out and thought, “Now, here’s something I could do.” Which is why the first novel I wrote was actually a fantasy,
But a bad fantasy, you said.
Well, it was a good idea, but my writing was a bit clumsy, and the fact is, if you wanted to sell a fantasy novel to Betty Ballantine or somebody like that, writing a tragedy was not a good idea. But there you go.
So how did things did things proceed from that first attempt? Because obviously, you got to the point where you were writing much better things.
Yes. Well, from the newspaper business…my last newspaper job was editing a little tabloid weekly in Port Alberni on Vancouver Island, and I was quitting that because it was pretty much a scam anyway as a newspaper…
I’ll divert here for a moment to explain that. In those days, Conrad Black and his partner, Radler, were going around with a suitcase full of money buying newspapers, small-town dailies especially. And we had one of those in Port Alberni, it was called the Alberni Valley Times, and Rattler was phoning up the owner of that, a guy called Rollie Rose, every week and saying, “We want to buy your paper. We’ll give you X amount.” And Rollie would say, “No, I don’t want to sell my paper. I like it.” And then they would phone back the next week and say, “We’ll give you X plus Y.” “No, I don’t want to.” This went on for quite a while. And a couple of local hustlers, one of whom worked at that newspaper, they got to know about this, and so they borrowed some money and they bought an advertiser. You know, one of those things that come around every week and tell you about shopping and bargains and so on? They bought that. They rented some Compugraphic equipment, hired a couple of people, including me, and it became a community newspaper, which it really wasn’t, because there was only so much copy that I could generate every week, so we filled it with Copley news clips, you know, horoscopes and cartoons and feature articles of all kinds.
What they were doing, the two hustlers, was undercutting the AV Times on advertising, which meant the paper was jam-packed with ads, page after page, which is why there was so much copy we had to write and fill. The idea was that when Rollie Rose eventually said to Conrad Black, “OK, I’ll take the money,” that Conrad would also buy up this paper just to shut it down, because it was cutting into all the ad revenue. And I believe that’s what eventually happened. But, by the time I figured out this was not a real job anymore—you know, after the second time that my paycheck bounced—I thought, “OK.” I was going to do some freelancing for the AV Times, and I had a suit, so I could be a supply teacher (that was the qualification necessary in Port Alberni) and I was working out my two weeks’ notice, when a guy came into the newsroom, and he was the campaign manager for the Liberal candidate, a local insurance guy who had just won the election in ‘74 and was going to Ottawa, and said, “Would you like to go to Ottawa and ghostwrite his newspaper column for the riding press?” And I said, “Yeah, okay.” (It took me a week to get to, “Yeah, okay,” but I eventually did.) And off I went to Ottawa and was quite happy, about six weeks of ghostwriting the column and helping people with their passports and UIC and citizenship problems.
And then the MP comes into the office one day and says, “You have to write me a speech, because I’m seconding debate on the Speech from the Throne.” Which is a big deal. That’s…for those who are listening who don’t know the Speech from the Throne, that’s when the government, at the beginning of a parliament, sets out its entire agenda, what it’s going to do, the bills they’re going to bring in, the things they’re going to concentrate on, and it was traditional—with the Liberals, at least, this was a Liberal government, of Pierre Trudeau—traditional that the debate on that speech, after the speech is given by the governor-general, the debate starts with a maiden MP from the east and a maiden MP from the west moving and seconding the debate.
So I said, “OK,” and I went down to the speaker’s office. They showed me some samples of this kind of speech, and I read them and looked at them, and thought, “OK, not hard. You do half about the Speech from the Throne, the government’s agenda, and half about the riding you come from.” So, I went back to the office and I had my IBM Selectric typewriter and I wrote him a 20-minute speech, one draft, and he loved it, and he went out and gave it, and it was a big hit. John Turner, who was the light that failed in the Liberal Party in those days, came over and put his arm around him and said, “You’re our boy,” and they made him chair of the caucus of the British Columbia Liberal MPs ,and he was on his way up.
And, of course, he started to get requests from riding associations all across the country and chambers of commerce, Rotary and, you know, “Come and give us a speech.” So, suddenly, my major occupation in his office was writing speeches, which were well-received. And he then had this reputation as this great speaker, which he wasn’t all that good at, but I could write so it sounded just like him, that was the trick. But I got a reputation as this hot new speechwriter that nobody had ever heard of. And minister’s offices started coming around saying, “Would you like to come and work for our minister as a communications aide and speechwriter?” And after a certain amount of time, I said, “Yeah, okay,” and ended up writing speeches for Ron Basford, the minister of justice, and then after about a year and a half with him, I went to work for Len Marchand, who was first minister of small business and then minister of the environment.
So, all together, I was four years in Ottawa, pretty much writing speeches full-time. Turned out I had a knack for it. I had no training at all, but I could hear somebody’s voice in my head and right in that voice, so it sounded like whoever it was. And I had a knack for drawing word pictures, which is what speechwriting is mostly about, you put pictures in people’s heads, and they like it, and your good.
Both of those sound like useful skills for a novelist as well.
Oh, yeah, yeah. I’ll tell you how I first developed that knack as when I was working for that paper in Coquitlam, the Enterprise. I had…it was owned by a very right-wing fellow and I had to write very right-wing editorials. And I had trouble with that until I started writing them in Richard Nixon’s voice. It came out perfect and the boss was very happy with them. I would think,”Ruh-ruh-ruh-ruh-ruh-ruh-ruh,” type type type. But, yeah, that is the speechwriter’s trick. It is the ability to get somebody’s work, world view and voice in your head. Hang on a sec…we’re house-sitting a somewhat nervous dog. Yeah, there she goes.
You’d be surprised how often there are animal noises in the back of these interviews.
Well, this one, if I raise my voice at all, she gets anxious and starts to bark. And then, if you put her outside, she immediately starts barking even though there’s nothing there. She’s the runt of the litter. And she’s kind of strange. But she’s a nice dog. I like her.
It was your Nixon voice that set her off.
That was it. “Ruh-ruh-ruh-ruh.” Anyway, so, okay, continuing the saga, I did four years in Ottawa, and then I came back to Vancouver to be a freelance speechwriter, because I’d known guys…I was thinking of the one guy I knew in Ottawa who wrote speeches for the department of the environment, which were then brought up to the minister’s office for the minister to give, and then I would have to rewrite them because they were dull and pedestrian and full of bureaucratic language, you now? They were like a big, long memo.
Yeah.
Passive voice, and blah, blah, blah. And this guy was making then…and this was 1978…he was making 70 grand a year doing this. I thought, well, I’m gonna go back to Vancouver and I’m going to do this and I’m gonna get a lot of money because I’m good at it and he’s not.
So, anyway, I came back to Vancouver and discovered, after…I did a stint as a civil servant for a while until I became politically toxic and was fired by the incoming Joe Clark government…I discovered that nobody had ever been a full-time specialist speechwriter in Vancouver, and the work was not there. I had to spend two years building the practice before I could actually make any money at it. People used to say, “How can you write a speech for our CEO if you’re not an expert in the forestry or mining or whatever industry?” And I would say, “Well, how can you send your boss out to make a speech that hasn’t been written by an expert speechwriter?” So, we would agree to disagree. But I always used to say at the end of the pitch, “The day will come when somebody has screwed up and the CEO or the chairman needs a speech and it hasn’t been written, and you need someone to write it very quickly, and then you call me and I will come in and I will do it for you, and it will be magic.”
And that happened two or three times, and suddenly my reputation began to spread and I got lots of work, and it got to the point where other people tried setting up as speechwriters and they got told, “Well, we’ve got Hughes, so, no,” you know? And I kept raising my rates and nobody complained. I started out at, I think, $75 an hour, and I ended up effectively at about $200 because I would just charge a flat rate. Didn’t matter how many draft drafts or anything, it would be that amount of money. You know, $1,500, $2,000, because I discovered early on that I was writing one draft for, you know, $100 an hour and getting $600-700 for it. Other people were writing four or five drafts because they weren’t very good and they were actually getting more money than I was for an inferior product.
So yeah, being a fast, good writer, if you charge by the hour, you actually hurt yourself. I’ve encountered that myself. So, you’re clearly writing millions and millions of words over all this time. Where was the fiction by now?
Well, the funny thing I discovered…I’m like a factory that is tooled up to produce a certain thing, product, and if you’re going to change the product, you’ve got to shut the factory down for a while and retool, and then make that new product. I could not spend my working day writing speeches or even newspaper material and then write fiction in the evening. It just wouldn’t come. If I took two weeks off, three weeks, then I could write something. But I couldn’t…somehow could not do both at the same time. So, I put aside writing fiction essentially in about ’74, and just almost never did anything until we got right up into the ’80s. And then I wrote over a period of a number of years, in dead time, I wrote my first real novel, the one I sold, Fools Errant.
And, later on, I wrote a couple of crime novels and got a New York agent to represent them, which was good, except that then she had a family crisis and couldn’t do anything for months. And those two sort of died on the vine, because once an agent has taken a book out and not sold it, it doesn’t matter what the reasons are, no other agent is interested in that book. So, my attempt in those days to be a crime writer…I was selling short stories, I’d sold a novel to Doubleday, won the Arthur Ellis Award, which was nice…got kind of got short-circuited because I had two novels I couldn’t sell. I didn’t want to write another one and, you know, wait all that time, I didn’t have the money to be able to set aside the time. On the other hand, people were offering me checks and publication if I wrote science fiction and fantasy by then. And so, I started doing that and have kept on ever since, really. Although, I do tend to write crime fiction in science fiction and fantasy settings, so I’m kind of melding the two together. I don’t write about heroes. I write about thieves and con men and wizard’s henchmen, that kind of thing.
Well, let’s talk about What the Wind Brings, which you have called your magnum opus, and, first of all, where did it come from and how does that compare to the way that most of your story ideas come to you? What generates story ideas for you?
Ok, I’ll do the “what generates” and then I’ll do What the Wind Brings, because they’re different really.
What generates a story for me is a character in a normal situation of some kind, and then something happens and the character has to respond to that situation, that conflict, and that makes things roll forward and other characters get involved, and before I know it, there’s a story. I had one out (A God in Chains), a novel set in the Dying Earth, a fantasy novel set in…it’s sort of my extrapolation of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth. And I started out with a man walking on a road on a big open prairie, and he figures out, looking at what’s in front of him—there’s wheel tracks and animal dung and footprints—and he figures, “I must be following a caravan.” The thing is, he has no memory. He has complete amnesia, doesn’t know who he is, how he got there, what his backstory is, none of that. And when I started writing that, neither did I. I didn’t know who he was. I just started with the character in the situation, and then on we went.
By the time I…I actually thought I was writing a novella to send to Fantasy & Science Fiction or Lightspeed, and instead it turned out I was writing a novel, because other characters got involved and their stories meshed and conflicted with the main character’s. And after about three months, I had a novel of 80,000 words, and I sold it to Edge Publishing, Brian Hades in Calgary—I’d always wanted to do a deal with Brian. I used to edit books for him—and actually, it’s done quite well. It came out in July and it’s got about 28, 29 five-star reviews on Amazon now. For people who like Jack Vance, it’s exactly what they’re looking for. And there are still people around like that.
So that’s my process. I have no idea what I’m doing when I begin. At some point, maybe a third to half the way through, I understand the shape of the story and how it’s going to have to end. And then I start writing towards that.
So, you don’t typically, like, outline ahead of time? You’re more of a…
I can’t. I can’t. I’ve tried that. I tried that years ago. Nothing really comes off. I’m just sitting down trying to make up a story. I have to do it scene by scene and even line by line, sometimes. You know, I’ll be writing a scene and a line of dialogue will come out of the back of my head. It’s the same way I used to write speeches. There’s a guy in the back of my head who does this, and then I type and edit a bit. But a line of dialogue will occur to me and that will take the thing off in a whole different direction. And I follow that. That’s what I do. Normally I write one draft and then a second draft to tighten and add some bits and shore up things I thought at later—you know, I put them in Chapter 2 because in Chapter 8, something has happened—and then I polish and that’s it. That’s my normal process.
But you said What the Wind Brings was a bit different. Oh, and also, before we talk about that, maybe you should explain what the story is about, without giving away anything that you don’t want to give away.
I’m happy to talk about that one. It’s about African slaves who were shipwrecked on the jungle coast of Ecuador in the middle of the 1500s, who melded with the local indigenous people who had been ravaged by disease, and also by the fact that the conquistadors and the Pizarro had come through their territory, going up to the highlands to crush the Inca Empire. So, they were demoralized and scattered and in rather a bad way, had lost a lot of people. But the Africans and the indigenous folk, they were a people called the Nigua, they got together and they formed a mixed society, which became a place for people who were running away, like slaves and so on, escaped, came to them and augmented them. And they also made alliances and connections with other indigenous groups around them.
The Spanish…they tried several expeditions to reduce these people to servitude again. And the mixed people…they’re now called Zambos, which was the term for indigenous and African mixed people…they outfought them and they out-thought them, time and again, until finally the Spanish said, “OK, we’ll leave you alone, we’ll make a deal with you because we really want a port at the mouth of that river that you control. That’s going to cut our transportation costs enormously.” And so they did that. They made a deal. And these people remained a “distinct society,” as we would say in Canada, forever. And then eventually they negotiated their way into Ecuador when Ecuador became a republic in the Bolívar period.
And I had a friend, a client, who in 1970 went up the little back creeks in that area. He was doing a Forest Service survey, I think, for CUPE…not CUPE, CUSO. The Canadian University Service Overseas.
I wondered why CUPE (the Canadian Union of Public Employees) would be doing it.
But he went in dugout canoes, paddling up backwaters and then little creeks that led to the backwaters. And he found, essentially, Africa. Everybody was black. And he even had the experience…he landed at this little village, got out of his canoe and walked into the midst of the huts, and an old woman came up to him and took her finger and wiped it down his cheek and then looked to see if the white came off. Here was an old woman who had never seen the white man. And that’s the story.
Now, the “how it came to be”…I was still thinking of myself as a potential historical novelist from time to time, and back in 1971, I came across a footnote in a textbook in university and thought, “Gee, that would be a good idea,” because it said…the chapter I was reading was about how most castaways who show up on a foreign shore, you know, like Japanese fishermen who might have landed at Nootka Sound 500 years ago, been blown off course and so on, they didn’t thrive. They didn’t last very long. Mostly that’s what happens. But here was this one case where these Africans came ashore and survived and prospered. And I thought that could make a good story.
The problem was, back then, that I couldn’t research it, really. Virtually all the scholarship was in South American journals in Spanish, and my Spanish was, you know, good enough to ask where the hotel is or, you know, (Spanish phrase) kind of stuff, but not good enough to read academic journals from Chile and Ecuador and so on. So, I always kept it in the back of my mind that this is a story I would like to write. And the more I thought about it, even without the proper background, the idea of two societies melding together in the face of opposition—and really desperate opposition, from people who would kill and enslave them—It had a real appeal to me, and I used to think about who the characters might be. And early on, I decided one of them was going to be a shaman, one of the indigenous people. And at some point I thought, “Not just a shaman, but a hermaphroditic shaman. Now there’s a character you can build a story around!”
And then came this century. I discovered …I used to look into it from time to time, see what I could find out…I discovered that North American scholars were beginning to write about this in English, quite a bit, about the Zambos. So, I began collecting material and sketched out what my idea for the story was, three characters, three points of view, and I went to the Canada Council, and they gave me 25,000 bucks to write this.
Nice.
Which was…yeah, it was very helpful. And it was also a vote of confidence, I thought. So I wrote it. And, unlike most of my stuff, I did actually four drafts on this because I wanted it to be perfect.
Did you outline this one, or did you approach it the same way in the writing process?
Well, I knew things that had to happen. You know, about the entradas, as they called the invasions that the Spanish made. And I knew about who characters would have to be, like a merchant up in Quito—and I used a real historical figure who is very important and was trying to build up the wool trade in Ecuador at that time. So, I took real historical people I knew about and things that they had done and I fitted them into the framework. But, there was no real history of what had happened on the ground among those people, the Africans and the Negua, when they got together, because nobody was there taking notes. So, I had to imagine that. And nobody knows what Negua culture was like, because they are extinct and have been for centuries.
So, a lot of room to play.
Yeah, as long as…I was happy with that, but also thought, “As long as I use actual aboriginal cultures as templates.” So I made the Negua, I made them quite matriarchal, and the Africans are quite patriarchal, although the Africans came from different cultures, too. And I happened to know a fair amount about West Africa in that period and before, because I’d once been interested in writing a historical novel set in the empire of Mali in the 1200s. So, I can apply that knowledge and the basic aboriginal knowledge, and out of it came people, and the people had their hopes and dreams and desires and fears, and that’s what you make stories out of, so…
Basically, it’s a political novel. It’s about the politics among people and between the Spanish and the Zambos, the politics. And also, the Inquisition is involved in there, too, because one of the real-life characters was a man named Espinosa, who was a Trinitarian monk from Spain. He was the only Trinitarian monk in Ecuador at the time. His order did not have any functions there at all. And the implication was that he was fleeing the Inquisition in Spain, because he was a what they call a converso, someone whose parents or grandparents had converted from Islam or Judaism, under threat of death, to become Christians. And by the time, the period we’re talking about, the Inquisition was running very well, and what they were doing was they were finding rich conversos and simply stripping them of their assets with fear of imprisonment or being burned at the stake. So, this guy had fled to the new world because the Inquisition did not exist in Ecuador at that time. So, he was fun. He was my good-hearted, innocent character who simply did what he thought was right and the hell with everybody else.
So, I guess what slips this out of being pure historical fiction into maybe a bit of magic realism or fantasy is that the shaman, Expectation, actually has power.
Yes. Yes. I thought that was appropriate, to use magical realism in a story set in South America, where magical realism comes from. And also, it was a way of, I suppose, conferring dignity upon the character and the culture, that these things that others might have pooh-poohed and said, oh, you know, “bunch of nonsense,” actually, she could go into the underworld and the overworld and deal with spirits and heal people that way. That was her main job, was to heal people. And not just heal physically, but to heal psychologically, because in her culture, if you were very depressed or whatever, had a mental problem, chances were that your animal spirit had departed you, and she would go into the underworld and find where it was and bring it back and put it into you, and then you’d be happy again. Also, I knew that in South America there was a lot of trepanning done. People would…you find skulls with holes in them that had been carefully cut and then repaired, because they would put holes in people’s skulls to relieve pressure and so on, I suppose from concussions and whatnot. So, I gave her that power too. That was fun.
So, it’s very long novel, right? It’s like 150,000 words or something like that?
Yeah. Thereabouts, yeah.
And the publisher is…well, basically a new publisher, isn’t it?
Yes. The publisher is Pulp Literature Press which began as two…well, three…women in BC who were putting out a quarterly magazine called Pulp Literature. And they did that for, I think, five or six years, and it developed a following and became a successful small magazine. And then they thought, “Well, let’s do books.” I was having trouble placing What the Wind Brings because 150,000 words of historical novel, with or without magical realism, is not an easy sell these days. I mean, one of my most favorite historical novelists of all time is Cecilia Holland, whom I’ve been reading since the late ’60s, but in the past 10 or 15 years or so, she’s had to make historical novels with a certain amount of magic in them or characters who have second sight and so on, and then get them published by Tor as essentially fantasy historicals. Historicals are just a hard sell.
So, I’d been selling stories to this magazine, and I got to know the people, and I liked them, and they were certainly serious publishers. They weren’t just fooling around and they weren’t fooling themselves as many small-press people can be. So, I offered them the book and they read it and said, “Holy mackerel, this is a really good book.” So, they took it, and we’ve been working our way through the process. There was a limited-edition hardcover, which has sold mostly pretty well. There are people who collect me, so they wanted this book. And now last month (December 2019) we came out with the paperback and the e-book on Amazon and also distributed by Ingram, so booksellers can get it. And I’ve been doing whatever I can to promote it, which I’ve had some success with. Right now, there’s a science fiction and fantasy group on Facebook, which is run by Damien Walter, who used to do science fiction and fantasy reviews for The Guardian newspaper in England, and he picked it as the one book that he was going to promote, starting a week ago, and to promote it for a month. And that’s had quite a good effect. We have sold quite a few through Amazon, especially the e-book.
So…and I’m pushing it. I had a…in John Scalzi’s Whatever blog, I did a piece, his Big Idea feature. There’s a big idea behind his book, which is “diversity makes strength,” a very Canadian point of view, somewhat controversial in some parts of America these days, but that helped, too. That drew some eyes to it.
What was the editing process like for this book? And what is typical when you’re edited? What sorts of things do you find yourself working on after the editor has a look at it.
I have always been quite lightly edited. When I did my book for Tor, when David Hartwell was my editor, I got literally a few lines on a piece of paper telling me not to kill the character that I’d killed and change the ending to make it more upbeat. I’d made a sacrificial hero out of the hero, but I simply changed that so he didn’t die. But with What the Wind Brings, it got a pretty thorough polishing from Jennifer Landels, who’s the managing editor of Pulp Literature. She made some suggestions. I took most of them because I thought they improved the book and I really wanted this book to be polished like a gem.
You know, most of everything I’ve written has been entertainments. There’s some philosophy in them, there’s some maybe quirky points of view, some original ideas that are, you know, little small ideas of how the future might be and so on. But this one, I wanted to be just absolutely the best it could be. And so, I had more engagement with editing than I normally do—but again, it was fairly lightly edited. I mean, structurally, there was one small change. I took a piece out of the beginning and at her suggestion, I moved it further back so that we would get to the action sooner, which was a perfectly valid strategy. Otherwise, it was, you know, a few words here, and a few words there. I’d thrown in some sword fighting using rapiers, and in fact, Jennifer is in aficionado of the rapier, so she corrected me on a few things that I didn’t know.
That’s helpful.
I thought so. Yeah. We don’t want the rapier fans to be, you know, thrown out of the book by whether I go over somebody’s guard or under it.
I once was on a panel about writing fighting scenes, and the general consensus was that if you couldn’t be accurate, be vague, which is probably not a bad…if you can’t be absolutely certain that what you’re saying is correct, then don’t try to be too specific. So, if you have somebody who can actually help with that, that’s great.
Yeah. I had a sword-fighting duel in one book, in the far future, and they used a peculiar kind of weapon which was like a rapier, except the blade was only six inches long at the tip, the rest of it was just round. And so, I invented things, moves and so on, just gave them names, you know, and said that they did this and they did that and responded with a quatrefoil and whatever, you know. No idea what they were, but it sounded good.
So, we’re getting close to the end here. So I do want to ask…I’ll get to what you’re working on next in a minute, but first, I want to ask the big philosophical question, which is why do you do this? Why do you write, and why do you think any of us write? What is this impulse to tell stories? Where does it come from in you, and where do you think it comes from in all of us?
Well, I can’t really speak for other people. I think the urge to tell stories comes from very far back in our evolutionary past, when we developed language. And I don’t believe we develop language in order to make hunting signals, I think we developed language so we could gossip about each other, which is what every culture does. And I think, in a reasonably accurate sense, the idea of story-making is just a form of gossip. We tell each other about people and events and things, because we’re just programmed to like gossip. Everybody does.
For me, as I figured out when I was 16, this is the only thing I can do, writing, that I can do superbly with minimum strain and stress. I was naturally good at this from the very beginning, and so it was natural for me to be doing this.
I must have written 2,000 speeches over my career. Some of them I quite enjoyed, some of them I really didn’t enjoy. A lot of them I just didn’t care about: I was doing a job and doing it to the best of my ability and that was how I made my living. Writing stories, though…
I know I have a kind of fragmented psyche. There are different personas inside me, not full-blown multiple personality, but what a Jungian would call a complex. And when I’m writing fiction, and even when I was writing speeches, very often, those pieces come together and make me more whole or make me more who I am than normally I would be, you know, when I’m doing other things, because other aspects of me do other things as required. So, yeah, it integrates me and that feels good, basically. That’s why I do it. Also, at the level of when I write something and it really works, I enjoy that. I say, “Oh, got that one. Good.” Yeah.
And what do you hope your readers get out of your work?
I guess…I want them to enjoy it. I want them to be transported to someplace else and maybe moved a little. That one I was talking about, the one that started off with amnesia, it’s called A God in Chains, and the ending of it…I knew my central character, who’d been awful and terrible and been part of a massacre of innocents back in his career, he had to be renewed, he had to be reborn in some way, and as I got to the last scene or two, it suddenly occurred to me how that would work within the context of what I’d created for the book. So, I had him do this thing, and people have been saying in reviews on Amazon and so on that it brought a tear to their eyes and it totally unexpected, that that’s how it was going to end. And I thought, “That’s…yeah, that’s nice, when you can do that.”
Now, though, you’ve got a new project that you’re excited about that draws on your love of Jack Vance. So, tell us about that.
Well, I’ve always been strongly influenced by Jack Vance and Booklist, years ago, even called me his heir apparent. And anybody who reads Vance and reads me will see, yeah, there are shadings here that…I’m standing on his shoulders. I’m not doing pastiche, but I’m certainly influenced by him.
So, one of his iconic works is a five-volume novel called The Demon Princes, or five short novels that make one great story, about these space-opera villains. Five master criminals and monsters, and a guy, one by one, tracks them down and kills them because they did terrible things to his community, basically a slave raid that took everybody away and they were never seen again.
Well, I was talking to John Vance, who is Jack Vance’s son, about this, and we made an agreement that I’m going to write a sequel, a kind of sixth Demon Princes novel, although all five demon princes are dead, so they won’t be in it. But I’ve come up with a rough idea for how I want it to go. And I’ve started. I’ve written, like, the first 1,400 words or so just yesterday. And that’s what I’m going to be working on for the next couple or three months. And I want to make it, not a fake Jack Vance novel, but a kind of homage to him and to the universe that he created, the space-opera universe that he wrote so much in. And I’m hoping it’ll go well and maybe I’ll do more.
Is there a projected release date for that? And who will publish it?
Well, that’s an open question. John Vance has his own press now, called Spatterlight Press. Well worth looking at, because he’s been publishing in e-book and trade paperback all of his father’s works, and using the texts that were developed as part of what was called the Vance Integral Edition, where they took the old manuscripts and they put back in the things that editors had cut out because it had to fit a certain space in a magazine or…an Ace Double was only going to be 40,000 words long, so they had to be cut. They put all of that back and they made a complete definitive edition of all his works. And he’s using those texts and putting them out. I’ve written some blurbs for them and introductions and so on, and that’s doing well.
So, I get this thing done and it’s a good book, then it will neither be published by John’s Spatterlight Press or I’ll look at ta third publisher taking the rights. And the idea is, John and I split the proceeds either way. I did have something like this in the works several years ago before Jack died, but when he died, it kind of died with it. And in those days, David Hartwell, who is now gone also, was very interested in getting it for Tor, and we might do something like that.
And is there anything else in the works right now?
I was 22,000 words into a crime novel, which is a sequel to one that’s coming out later this year from Pulp Literature, but I put that aside to work on the Vance thing. So when I’ve done the Vance job, then I will go back to…the book is called The Do-Gooder, and I’ll get that finished, too.
So the question you asked, when would that come out, if it’s coming out from Spatterlight, it would be later this year. And if it’s from a third party, Tor or somebody, probably not ’til late next year.
Okay. Well, that’s about the time. So, where can people find you online?
MatthewHughes.org is where I am, and I have a Facebook page of Matthew Hughes Author, and if you go to Facebook and put down Hapthorn, the name of one of my characters, it’ll take you to my Facebook page. Oh, yeah, and I should always say this, I have a Patreon account. If people would like to be my patrons, they can go to Patreon and look me up there as Matthew Hughes, and they’ll say Click Here and you’ll be a patron.
And you’re on Twitter, too, are you not?
Oh, I’m on Twitter, yeah. Again, that’s @hpathorn. If you go to my web page, you can link from there to all the Facebook and Twitter and everything, and Patreon. You can sign up for my newsletter, which I do every month, now. I just completed three years of a monthly newsletter about what I’m doing, what I’m trying to do.
Sounds like a great way to stay on top of it.
Yeah.
Okay. Well, thank you so much, Matt, for being a guest on The Worldshapers. I enjoyed the chat. I hope you did, too.
A 45-minute conversation with Rebecca Roanhorse, Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Award-winning author of Trail of Lightning and Storm of Locusts, the first two books in the Sixth World series, plus the Star Wars novel Resistance Reborn and the middle-grade novel Race to the Sun (Rick Riordan Presents), and multiple short stories. She won the Astounding (formerly Campbell) Award for Best New Writer in 2018.
Rebecca Roanhorse is a Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Award-winning speculative fiction writer, and the recipient of the 2018 Astounding (formerly Campbell) Award for Best New Writer. Her novel Trail of Lightning, book one in the Sixth World series, won the Locus Award for best first novel, and is a Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy finalist. It was also selected as an Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Library Journal, and NPR Best Book of 2018, among others. Book two in the series, Storm of Locusts, has received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist. Her newest novel, Resistance Reborn, is part of Star Wars: Journey to the Rise of Skywalker. Her middle-grade novel, Race to the Sun, for the Rick Riordan Presents imprint, will release in January 2020, and her epic fantasy novel Between Earth and Sky will follow in late 2020. Her short fiction can be found at Apex Magazine, New Suns, The Mythic Dream, and various other anthologies, and she also writes nonfiction, which can be found in Uncanny, Strange Horizons, and How I Resist: Activism and Hope for a New Generation, published by Macmillan. She lives in northern New Mexico with her husband, daughter, and pups.
The (Lightly Edited) Transcript
Welcome to The Worldshapers, Rebecca.
Well, thank you for having me.
I always look for connections and we have a…we haven’t met, but you were born in Arkansas, lived in Texas, and went to university in New Mexico, and I was born in New Mexico, lived in Texas, and went to university in Arkansas. So there’s a certain…
Wow. Small world.
…although I live in Canada. Yeah, I was born in Silver City, New Mexico. My parents were living in a little town called Bayard down there, so…but didn’t live there very long.
Yeah. That is south and I’m in the north, but I know where it is.
So, let’s go back into the mists of time, as I like to say to my guests, and talk about where you grew up and how you got interested in writing and in speculative fiction in particular. Most of us start with reading, and I think from reading some of your other interviews that that was kind of the case for you, too.
Yeah, absolutely. Always a huge science fiction/fantasy fan. As long as I can remember, I’ve been reading in the genre. And I think really my first sort of big “Wow!” book was Dune by Frank Herbert. I read that one, and that blew the doors wide open. You know, in the fantasy realm, you know, of course, I read the Belgariad, I read all the Wheel of Time books, like those were…
All of them?
Well, OK, not all of them. That’s true. Good point! I haven’t read the last few. I think I tapped out at, like, I don’t know, probably book five or six or something, now I can’t even remember, but I’m very excited for the Amazon show that is coming. I’m really curious to see what they do with it.
So you were born in Arkansas. You grew up in Texas. But then you ended up in New Mexico and you didn’t actually study writing at university. Were you writing as a kid?
Yeah, absolutely. So, I grew up in Fort Worth, Texas. My mom is actually from Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, which is in New Mexico. And so, I didn’t return to New Mexico until law school, actually. So, I did my undergraduate on the East Coast and a master’s degree. But when I was in Fort Worth, I was already writing. I think I wrote my first, I would say my first science-fiction short story, when I was in seventh grade. I always joke about…we had a science report and we were supposed to, like, give some very dry facts about the planets, like, you know, how big they are and how far apart they are and that sort of thing, and I turned it into this very dramatic telling of this astronaut doing research, who for some reason, I can’t remember now, had to, like, commit suicide by driving into the sun at the end. So it was very much like, “Tell my wife and kids I love them,” you know, and then he’s dead. And I turned that in for my science project and my teacher was, ah, not as impressed as I had been with my own work. I got a B-plus or something, because that was not the assignment. But yeah, you know, from there I was hooked, and I’ve been sort of writing my own stuff ever since. I kind of…I only got serious about writing…I just did it for my own pleasure. I was a practicing attorney for ten years. And before that, I was a computer programmer, actually, for ten years. And just, writing was in the background. It was just something that I loved to do for myself. I never even thought about getting published until about 2016, when I decided to take it a little more seriously.
Now, did you show your writing to your friends when you were writing as a young writer? I often ask that question because it’s something I urge young writers to do when I’m teaching writing, because it’s a way to find out if you can tell stories that people like. Apparently your teacher was not completely impressed with your first effort, but did you share your stories with other people?
Yeah. So, in eighth grade, I had a great eighth-grade English teacher, and we actually did a group novel, like, each week, you know, came up with the whole story as a class, and then we each were responsible for a chapter. And it was…I don’t know, there were some…I kind of dominated the, as I recall, a lot of the worldbuilding, because I was really into it. And there were some smugglers and there was some, you know, sort of galactic police, and, you know, this sort of thing. And I definitely shared that one. I probably overshared that, I think I forced that on people.
And then, all through high school, or at least my last couple of years of high school, I guess, I was an editor for our creative-writing magazine. And so, not only did I get to do some editing, which was basically like, just, picking what stories were going to be in the magazine, but I put a lot of my work into that as well. And a lot of that was poetry or, you know, very short fiction, like excerpts…you know, I don’t know, what you would maybe call vignettes or something, maybe a little flash fiction, but I don’t think we called it that back then. But, yeah, so I think those years I was always sharing, probably oversharing. And then…I guess for some of my time I had a friend who wrote as well, and we would share stories, like she would write something, you know, we’d be critique partners. But only for fun. It was never really serious. But I was never shy about showing my work per se.
Well, I was also interested when you…you didn’t study writing, but what you studied is very interesting, because you received a B.A. in religious studies from Yale, and a master’s in theology from Union Theological Seminary. That’s an interesting background for a science fiction/fantasy writer. Has that fed into your work going forward? And the law degree, too? I mean, at least with the law degree, you certainly use a lot of words, being a lawyer. My niece is a lawyer, so…she started as an English major, so…so has all that contributed to writing, do you think?
You know, as we’ll get to Trail of Lightning, there is a lot, actually, of cool stuff in Trail of Lightning, so that definitely did. I talk about checkerboard lands and things like that, and that is all real. You know, I think the religious studies and theology degree probably feed into my worldbuilding more than I realize and probably affect what it is that I like to talk about. You know, I like to talk about, sort of the gods, and sort of spirituality and things like that, and religion, and those are my interests, so I’m sure they feed into my work probably more than I realize. I think there was someone on Twitter once that was like, once she found out I had gotten those degrees, she was like, “Oh, that makes so much more sense now.” And I was like, “What does that mean?” And she didn’t tell me, ’cause she’s like, “I don’t like to, you know, like critique people based on, like, who they are, I want the story to stand on its own,” but she felt that that gave her some sort of insight. So I guess so!
And then, when you were…you said you were lawyer for ten years, but where along there did you start trying to get published and how did that happen? “How did you break in?”, is the cliched question.
So, I was a practicing attorney with a small child, and that was just…and I think at the time, actually, I was in private practice. I later started to work for the government, and that’s a better gig. But the hours were insane, you know, and I had a small child, and so I had actually not written for quite a while, but to sort of keep myself sane and to give myself something that I just love to do, I started to write again. And then I found out about NaNoWriMo. So I’m actually a NaNoWriMo story in a lot of ways. I joined the local NaNoWriMo group here, who would meet twice a week and just write. You know, we would just sit at the coffee shop and write. And I loved it. And it gave me a schedule and it kept me, you know, sort of pushing forward.
And then after NaNoWriMo was over, there were three or four folks in the group that wanted to keep meeting. One was a romance author, she’d been…she had, like, seven books. One was more of an academic writer and one was a self-published writer. And I was like, “Sure!”, you know, “Let me join your group!”, even though I had done nothing. They let me join their group and they became my first sort of writing group, my first critique group. And I wrote the book with, you know, along with, you know, that group. And when I was done, they were like, “You know, you should try to get this published.” I was like, “Really? You think? I don’t know. You know, I just wrote this for fun.” And they’re like, “No, no, no, it’s good. You should try to get it published.”
Good advice!
Yeah, well, I sent it out through the slush. I knew nothing about publishing. I knew…I had done some research on agents and I knew which agents, you know, I was sort of interested in. And I sent it out and it got picked up. So there was no sort of magic to it. I just did it the old-fashioned way.
So the novel came first before you sold any short fiction?
Yes, the novel actually came first. I sold that in 2016, like August 2016, and then in 2017, Apex Magazine put out a call for indigenous fantasists, indigenous science fiction and fantasy. And I thought, “Oh, I should try to get into that. I should write a short piece and get it published. And maybe that will help get my name out,” because the book, it takes a year and a half for a book to come out, and, you know, Trail of Lightning wasn’t going to come out till 2018, so I was like, “I should try to get a short story published.” And, you know, I thought maybe ten, fifteen people would read it, I don’t know, I thought it would just be cool. And that got picked up and that went rather well. So, yeah, that actually came after the book. (“Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience“, Apex Magazine)
That’s a little different from most writers’ experience, to have the novel go first and then start selling short fiction. So that’s why I wanted to mention it.
Yeah.
Okay, well let’s…we’ll talk about Trail of Lightning…well, I guess the whole series, but that was the first book. As I said to you, I somehow managed to schedule a whole bunch of interviews almost on top of each other, so I haven’t been able to read everybody’s books to the end, as much as I would like to, but I have read a considerable portion of it, so I know something about it. But, well, I’ll let you give a synopsis of Trail of Lightning and the setup for the whole series without spoiling anything for people who haven’t finished the book…like me.
Yeah. So, Trail of Lightning takes place in sort of a near future, after a climate apocalypse, where sort of all the world has sort of gone to hell, except for the southwest of the Americas, basically. And specifically, the book takes place on the Navajo Nation, which is now Dinétah Risen, and has become sort of a power player in the region along with some other places like New Denver and the Mormon Kingdom, and we follow a woman there who is a monster slayer, because with the sort of climate apocalypse, all the gods and heroes and monsters of traditional Navajo stories have risen up and now walk the land, like Coyote and other folks you might not be familiar with, but you will be when you read the book. And it is her job to, sort of, a) survive and b), you know, fight them, with the help of her sidekick, who is a very unconventional medicine man.
Okay. And it is a very interesting setup and an interesting character as well. So, how did the idea for it come around? That’s another cliché. Where do you get your ideas? But what was the seed for this book as you were working with this writing group? And…this was what you worked on in NaNoWriMo, was it or was this…?
Uh-huh, this what I worked on for NaNoWriMo.
Okay. So how did the idea come about?
Yeah, so, I am a huge urban fantasy fan. You know, I always say that I sort of drifted away from fantasy, from all that Wheel of Time and stuff like that, for a long time, particularly through college, because it didn’t really speak to me anymore. I didn’t feel like I saw myself in all those questing farm boys and everything, and it just sort of got a little dull for me. So I set aside fantasy for a while, but then one day I was in an airport somewhere just looking for a random book. And I came across, actually, a Laurell K. Hamilton book. If you don’t know her, she writes the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series. And I picked up the book…and this is an earlier book in the series of…the later books get a little not to my taste, but the early books are great…picked it up, not knowing what it was about or who she was. And I read the back, and it was something like, “Will Anita Blake choose between her vampire lover or her werewolf lover?” And I was like, “I don’t know, but I’m about to find out.” I was just amazed a) they let you write that and b) it was on the shelf, right at the airport, and I could just pick it up. So I did. And that’s how I sort of discovered urban fantasy. And from there, I went on to all sorts of other authors, like Ilona Andrews and folks like that, and just sort of fell in love with the genre of these, like, strong, you know, women who are at the center of the story who kind of like kick ass and take on the supernatural, but at the same time have these sort of complicated love lives. I thought that was a lot of fun.
And so, that was really my inspiration for Trail of Lightning. I wanted to write an urban fantasy, but I wanted to write it in an indigenous setting with an indigenous pantheon, essentially, coming from, you know, traditional stories or myths. And then I wanted all the characters and the places and all of that to be indigenous as well, because what you do have in a lot of urban fantasy, or not a lot, but there are a few, is you often have a character that’s half-native, but they don’t…they’re not particularly native in the way their world view, you know, or the way that the story plays out, that’s just sort of a flavoring, I guess. And often the only way that they’re native is that they’re shapeshifters. And I was like, “Well, we’re not going to do that.” I wanted it to be something that felt real to me as an indigenous woman. I wanted it to be the people and the places and the things that I knew and that I had, you know, experienced. But, you know, fantasy. So that’s where that story came from.
And also, well, calling it urban fantasy…a lot of that, you know, it’s like, if you have that character, they’re in some big city somewhere, and that’s just something in their past. But this is actually set…it’s not really urban in the sense of being in a city.
Right. Right. Yeah. This is rural fantasy.
So, how did you go about…well, actually, before I get to that question, is that sort of where all of your story ideas have come from, you’ve written short stories now, and you’re writing Star Wars too. So, you know, in a more general sense, how do story ideas come to you?
Gosh. You know, I think for a writer, part of our job is to just be observant. So it can come…story ideas can come from anywhere. They can come from the news, they can come from an overheard conversation, they can come from a book you read that’s bad, if you want to do it better. I actually think I asked the influence question once to, like, John…I was on a panel, moderating, with, like, John Scalzi, and a bunch of other folks. And I asked, “Where do your ideas come from?” And they all groaned, you know, about the question. But then, as they got to talking, they realized that every one of them had written at least one book because they had read another book that they thought got it wrong. So, like, “I’m going to write my book as a correction.” And I was like, “Ah-ha!” So, yeah, I think they can come from anything. Often songs. Songs are very influential. I’ll often find a song that really captures a mood or spirit that I want to convey, and so I’ll try to, you know, turn it into words.
Well, on the, you know, reacting to other works, it’s often said that science fiction and fantasy are genres that are in conversation with themselves, because we’re all reacting to what we’ve read in the past and what we’re reading now and what other people are doing and things we like and things we don’t like. So, I don’t…I can’t think of one that I’ve written specifically where I was trying to do somebody’s…you know, do my version of something I didn’t like, but I’m sure that figures into it somewhere.
Yeah. Yeah. Even if it’s subconscious, I think we’re always sort of reacting, like you said, like, “Oh, you know, I see it done this way. Let me do it this way,” you know?
So what does your planning process look like? Your synopsizing or outlining or however it works for you. Do you do a detailed outline? Do you kind of just wing it? How does that look for you?
You know, it really depends on the book. I think that first book, because I was just writing for myself and I didn’t really know what I was doing, quite frankly, there was no outline. That was much more of a pantser kind of book and I think you can tell, for better or worse. The second book in that series, Storm of Locusts, was outlined much better. But what I did was, I wrote the beginning and then I wrote the end. And then I decided what needed to be in the middle to get me from that beginning to the end. And then I wrote that.
For books like Star Wars, you have to create a very detailed online, and then it has to be approved by six people at Lucasfilm and ten people at Del Rey, so you really don’t get the opportunity to wing it. So for that one, yes, I wrote probably, I don’t know, a twenty-page outline. I knew exactly what I was going to write. And you have so little time to write it. The turnaround time is pretty crazy. So that actually helped. They know what they’re doing.
They’ve been doing it a long time.
Yes, exactly. So I guess it really varies. And, you know, for this epic fantasy that I’m writing, I have a very detailed outline, because I have a lot of voices to manage and I have a lot of places, the worldbuilding is much more massive. And so I think if I wasn’t organized, I personally would get lost. It would be difficult.
Well, and speaking of worldbuilding and planning, there must be a considerable amount of research going into these books. Is that a fair statement?
You know, yes and no. You know, Trail of Lightning, I wrote what I knew. I know that world. I lived on the Navajo reservation. My husband is Navajo, I have Navajo family, so I didn’t actually do a whole lot of research for that. I confirmed some things that I knew about the stories and things like that, like character names and how to spell things. And there’s always different versions of stories, all across the rez, ’cause it’s a huge reservation. And then, you know, what I wanted to fantasize. And I mentioned before that, you know, I had practiced law, actually, on the Navajo Nation, so a lot of the little things, like jurisdiction and checkerboard land and things like that, I knew from, you know, my practice. So when I put those in the stories, I didn’t have to do research for that. I knew it.
But, you know, for Star Wars, I actually did a ton of research because it’s such a vast universe and you wanted things right. And they do have folks at Lucasfilm who live and breathe the Star Wars universe, so that’s very helpful. And then I think for this epic fantasy that I’m writing, I’m doing quite a bit of research as well.
Now, what does your actual writing process look like? Are you a sit-down-for-a-certain-number-of-hours-a-day at-your-desk typing kind of writer, or do you like write with a quill pen on a parchment underneath a tree?
What is most effective for me is, I am good in the early hours, and late hours. So I think what you need to do is discover when you’re at your best, and when your imagination sort of flags. So I’ll write, maybe, in the mornings from…I’ll drop my daughter off at school and then, let’s say, write from 8 to 12. But I know from, like, 12 to 4, it’s going to be like slogging through mud. I mean, the words might come, but they’re not going to be as good, and they’re just not going to…it’s going to be hard. So, often I’ll take that time, that’s when I do my e-mails or do other things, run errands, whatever needs to get done that day. And then I will pick up…if I have time at 4, but if not, often I will wait till my daughter is in bed and start again and write from like 9 to 12 or 10 to 2, or something like that. So that’s for the first step. And then, if I need speed, I will sketch out the scene beforehand on paper, like, pen and paper, so that I know what it is that I want to write, so I’m not trying to think about what I’m, you know, come up with ideas while I’m typing. I’m typing to get everything done, but I already know what I’m going to say. So I’ll sketch out the scene, you know, put in some important dialogue or things I know. But I will know, you know, how the scene works, where the reversal is, who’s involved, where it’s set. All of that stuff before I start typing.
I wanted to ask you about the voice of the book. You wrote it in first person. Why did you choose first person and what appeals to you about that point of view?
Yeah. So, not all my books are in first person. Trail of Lightning and…like that series….
Yeah.
Star Wars clearly is not. And the epic fantasy is not. But, you know, first person is the conceit that you often find in urban fantasy, so that makes sense. I was also writing a very difficult character. I think that Maggie, who is the main character, is a challenge. A lot of people don’t like her, which I think is fair, because…
She’s not warm and fuzzy.
No, she isn’t. And I think, you know, she doesn’t even like herself very much at the beginning of the book, right? So…and she’s a killer. And so, I felt that if I were going to create a character like that and I was gonna ask the reader to come along with me, it needed to be in first person. You needed to see her, you know, to be in her head and have her perspective on things, or I don’t think it would work as well.
Yeah, I think if she was a third-person character, she would be really hard to warm up to. She would be very scary, I think as third person without some way into her head to see how she feels and is thinking about things. So, what does your revision process look like, once you’ve got a draft done? Do you do a complete rewrite from the beginning or do you kind of rewrite as you go, or how does that work for you?
I edit as I go, normally. What I’ll do is write however much I’m writing that day. I usually have some sort of word-count goal generally, and how I get to that is, I know what my deadline is, I sort of divide that up, how many words I need to write a day to get to that deadline, and then that is sort of the goal. But knowing that I’m going to, you know, miss days. I don’t write every single day. Sometimes something happens and you just can’t. Or sometimes your brain just says no, and you can’t. So, yes, so I have that sort of in mind. I’ll write every day that is on, you know, sort of my schedule try to get to it. Then the next morning I will review what I’ve written, do a light edit and then start with whatever the next thing is. And so on and so forth.
So, by the time I have finished a draft, it has at least been edited once. And then I will go through and like, do a normal, another edit, you know, likely. But I do not…well, this epic fantasy, I am doing a rewrite. This is my first time to do this. But all the other books I’ve not done a rewrite. I edit as I go and I try to draft pretty clean. But this one is just…the whole story has changed. So I’m having to do a rewrite.
And then, once it reaches your editor, have they…what kind of things have they asked you to do? Have there been big changes or they’re pretty happy with it, or how does that work for you?
Well, they tend to be pretty happy with it. Because I do sort of, you know, plan it out. I’m trying to think…you know, probably the most heavily edited book I had, actually, is the children’s book, because that was my first children’s book and it’s the Rick Riordan imprint, and they know what they want, you know, they know exactly what kind of story they want. And it is very hard to write for children. It’s much harder to write for children than it is for adults, in my opinion, because children don’t come with experiences, they don’t come with this sort of set of things, references that you can make that they will pick up on, so you don’t have to spell everything out. For kids, you have to learn everything now.
I remember there was one edit where…in my children’s book there’s this bodyguard that gets left behind, you know, to watch over the protagonist, ’cause she’s in trouble. And I had said something like, you know, “she waiting by the car,” or something. And my editor came back with this whole list of questions about “Well, what is she doing by the car? Well, why would she do that? Well, shouldn’t she come inside if it’s…” And I was like, “Wow, really? We’re really thinking this hard about this throwaway, you know, like, scene?” But those are the kinds of questions kids want answered. You can’t leave them hanging. So I had to bring her in the house and have her sit on the sofa and read a magazine, and, you know, and that’s, you know, because kids need that concrete sort of storytelling. And they also believe what you say, so you have to be…you know, you have to believe what you say, as well, because you might be their first sort of experience of a particular incident or a particular idea, and they take that to heart. So you really have to be more aware of your words, I think.
On the reference side…I have a young adult series called The Shards of Excalibur, and the second book…it’s changed publishers, but the original publisher had a very young editor, who was probably twenty-one or twenty-two or something like that, and I had made some reference to somebody looking like they had come from a Dallas-themed costume party because of the way they were dressed, and she said, “What is Dallas except a city in Texas?” And I said, “OK. First of all, you’re very young. But secondly, you’re absolutely right, because no teenager is going to get that reference, likely.” So, yes, it is very different
I was going to ask you about the children’s book. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?
It is sort of a kid’s version of Trail of Lightning, I guess, like for the middle grades, so eight to twelve, that age group. It focuses on seventh-grader Nizhoni Begay, who can see monsters and no one else around her can. And she is sort of your typical seventh-grader, which means she’s kind of a mess. She wants to be popular, but she’s not. She wants to be athletic, but she’s not. And so, she’s, sort of fighting, you know, that sort of stuff, like how to be cool or how to get likes on the Internet. And at the same time, her mother has left and her father is sort of an artist type, who sort of like doesn’t really pay close attention to what her and her brother do. And so, when monsters show up and threaten the family, it’s sort of up to her to step up and save the day. And then along the way, it explores a lot of Navajo traditional stories, as she has to follow in the footsteps of Navajo heroes in order to get some magical weapons and fight the bad guy.
It sounds like…it does some very much like a middle-grade version of Trail of Lightning.
Yeah. Absolutely.
Hopefully the middle-grade readers and young-adult readers of that will go on to read the adult series as they get older.
That’d be great.
Well, you had great critical response, obviously, and, you know, one or two award nominations and stuff like that along the way. Were you surprised by the reaction that the book got when it came out? Were you happy? How did you feel about that?
Yeah, absolutely surprised. I…like I said before, I didn’t know anything about publishing. I didn’t know about the field in a professional sense. So, I wasn’t really familiar with a lot of the awards and everything. I mean, I was from the year before, clearly, when my short fiction did well, but I did not…really, I thought Trail of Lightning would be sort of a niche book. I thought there’d be a certain, you know, kind of person who liked it and…so, yeah, I was. It was all pretty shocking, you know? Pretty exciting, I mean, clearly. But the fact that that book got published to begin with, that I could write a book like that and a big five publisher would pick it up, and then for it to do as well as it did. Yes, I think it’s pretty amazing.
It’s a pretty amazing list of awards and award nominations you’ve picked up, for sure.
I want to go to the big philosophical questions. Well, it’s really one question that I always ask, which is, “Why do you write?” and then, subsidiary, to that, “Why do you specifically write the kind of thing that you write?” and on an even broader level, “Why do you think any of us write stories that are fantastic?” But start with you. Why do you write?
I think I write to keep myself sane. I think that’s where it started. I am a much nicer, happier person when I’m writing. Just ask my husband. He will attest. But yeah, I mean, I write because I have stories and I did not see a lot of my stories, the kind of stories that I wanted to tell…I saw none, actually, let me rephrase that, out there in the world. And so, I think that’s why I write what I do write, because I feel like those stories need to be told. And no one is telling them. I think those readers need a chance to see themselves in stories, and no one is giving them that. And so I’m excited to be able to do that.
Why the fantastical? I think because I’m a huge fan of it. I mean, I think that’s what I prefer to read. That’s what I read growing up. That was what I’ve always read. I find books, you know, sort of literary realism type books tend to not be my thing. I tend to tap out. So why the fantastic? It’s the genre that I love, that sense of possibility and fantastic, the world building. Those are all the things that really appeal to me.
And what do you think…what do you think is the urge for all of us to write and tell these kinds of stories? Where do you think that urge comes from?
I don’t know. I think that’s like a bigger human urge. I can’t think of, like, a culture or a time when there weren’t stories of the fantastic, you know, whether they were used to sort of explain the world around us or whether they were used purely to entertain or a little bit of both. I don’t think you could, people would listen to your, you know, preaching about the world around you unless you were entertaining, right? These are stories of heroes and monsters and villains and these sort of large-scale, you know, epic stories, the characters. I don’t know. It’s just…I think that’s just part of who we are as humans.
This podcast is, of course, called The Worldshapers…and you’ve sort of touched on this a little bit…I think it’s safe to say that shaping the world is a bit grand. I mean, very few of us actually shape the entire world in fiction or any sort of writing. But certainly we can reach out to specific readers and touch them in some fashion and influence how they think. Is that something you hope you have done and will do as you continue to write?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I know that—’cause I have been sent emails and been told at readings and stuff—that it’s a pretty big deal for an indigenous woman to write in the genre, and especially something like Star Wars. And so, I have had readers tell me that it’s a big deal to them. You know, oftentimes, especially kids, they might read a story with a native character, but to have a native author write a story is a whole ’nother level of, “What? You can do that?” So I guess my feeling when I saw Laurell K. Hamilton, “You could do that? They let you do that?” And so for them, that was, you know, it’s often an idea like, “Wow, I didn’t even know that was an option. I didn’t even know that was a possibility.” And that, you know, is the world to me. If I can inspire a whole truckload of other native and black girls and boys to write, then that’s amazing. More than I could ask for.
We’ve…it’s interesting. I live in Saskatchewan, and there’s a First Nations man—also a lawyer—Harold Johnson, who wrote a climate-fiction novel (Corvus, Thistledown Press – Ed.) set in northern Saskatchewan, where basically the north becomes a powerhouse because of all the climate refugees fleeing to the north. And, you know, I was on a panel with him, actually, on Words on the Street in Saskatoon, and I hear some of that same echo in what he has said and what you’re saying.
Well, that’s very similar sort of set up, too, to my book. I have not read him, for the record, but that’s…I’m sure that’s probably a thing that a lot of indigenous people think about. So that’s not surprising.
He’s an interesting, he’s a very interesting writer. I mean, he’s not primarily by any means a speculative fiction writer, but he does do some. Of course, it’s all through Canadian publishers. You’d be unlikely to have run across him, but if you wanted to look him up, you might find him interesting. Harold. Harold Johnson. There’s also another Harold Johnson who’s a game designer, I think. That’s not him.
I wanted to talk a little bit about the epic fantasy that’s coming up, because my next question is, “What are you working on now?” So, what is that all about?
Yeah, so, I can’t say much because I am in a rewrite, so who knows? But…
It has a title.
It does have a title, because I have written a version of it. I’m just rewriting that now. So I’m not sure what’s going to stay and what’s going to go. But generally, I wanted to write an epic fantasy, sort of in that vein of, you know, the epic fantasy that we’re familiar with, but focused on the Americas, like cultures, like sort of, you know, cultures that reflect or, you know, sort of parallel in a secondary world, cultures of the Americas.
And so, my ancestors, the ancestral Puebloans, lived in places like Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde, which are big in the American Southwest. I don’t know if everybody knows about them. And they were previously called the Anasazi, but we’ve moved away from that term and now we refer to them as the ancestral Puebloans, but sort of these cliffs cities that were, you know, sort of obsessed with astronomy and, you know, tracking the heavens and were centers of…both religious centers and trade centers. And so, I’m very interested in sort of the trade networks and Cahokia and Mesa Verde and the classical Mayan period and creating a world sort of centered around those cultures. But in a secondary world, clearly this is fantasy.
I had an opportunity…I guess it was when WorldCon was in Denver, I think, and then we went on down to New Mexico, which was the first time I’d been down there in ages. And then we went to…I can’t remember the name of the park we went to (It was Bandelier National Monument – Ed.), but it was one with the cliff dwellings, and (I remember) being fascinated by that culture and especially the fact that they had all that trade with other cultures at the time. So, it sounds like it’ll be a very interesting setting for a for a fantasy novel.
I hope so.
And if you want to look even further down the road, how do you see your writing career developing over the next few years? What do you hope for?
Oh, gosh. Well, I’m under another three-book deal with Saga, so there will be two more books in the Sixth World series, for a total of four. I’ll have Between Earth and Sky, and that hopefully we’ll start a new series. And then I have a couple of other projects that I can’t talk about yet, because publishing is all about, you know, keeping secrets for a year. But I think I’m going to be writing for quite a while, and I’m thrilled. I feel very honored and very lucky to be able to do that. So, yeah.
And where can people find you online?
They can find me on my Web site at RebeccaRoanhorse.com. I’m also on Twitter @RoanhorseBex. And I occasionally stop in on Facebook. But it is not my favorite site, Facebook. And that would be facebook.com/roanhorsebex as well.
All right. Well, I think that’ll do it. So, thanks so much for being a guest on The Worldshapers. I enjoyed the chat. I hope you did, too.
An hour-long conversation New York Times bestselling novelist Garth Nix, author of the Old Kingdom series, the Keys to the Kingdom series, Frogkisser, and many others: his books have sold more than six million copies around the world and been translated into 42 languages.
New York Times bestselling novelist Garth Nix has been a full-time writer since 2001, but has also worked as a literary agent, marketing consultant, book editor, book publicist, book sales representative, and bookseller, and as a part-time soldier in the Australian Army Reserve. He has written numerous books, including the Old Kingdom series, beginning with Sabriel, the Keys to the Kingdom series, Frogkisser, and many others. He also writes short fiction, with more than 60 stories published in anthologies and magazines. More than six million copies of his books have been sold around the world, and his work has been translated into 42 languages.
The (Lightly Edited) Transcript
Welcome to The Worldshapers, Garth.
Thank you, Edward, it’s great to be talking to you.
We’ve only met once. I think that was at a world fantasy convention in Toronto. Well, actually, technically, I think it was in Richmond Hill. But you could see Toronto in the distance.
You could see it very vaguely in the distance. It was a shock, I think, to quite a few international persons such as myself to discover that it was not quite in Toronto, despite being called Toronto.
It was a bit of a shock to me, even though I live in Canada, I was expecting it to be a little closer to downtown, as well.
Well, I think we did have the misfortune that the railway was being worked on and the other public transport. So I think if everything had been up and running it wouldn’t have felt quite so far away. But, of course, we were just talking about how with World Fantasy, it doesn’t really matter. That convention is a travelling community that pops up, and you tend to spend all your time with all the other writers and publishers and editors and agents all hanging out anyway. So maybe it doesn’t really matter so much.
It was still a fun convention, even though…
Yeah, it was great. Yeah, it was very good.
...though it wasn’t right downtown. And the other thing I always like to mention, you know, when I’m looking for connections…this is not exactly a connection with you, but I wrote a fantasy trilogy called The Masks of Aygrima as E.C. Blake, and some reviewer said that they liked my fifteen-year-old female protagonist, she was their favorite female heroine since Sabriel.
Oh, that’s a nice thing to say. That is a connection. Yeah.
I considered that a great, great compliment because I really love those books, so…
Thank you.
We’re going to start, as I always start with my guests, by taking you back in time. How…well, first of all, where did you grow up and all that sort of thing, but how did you become interested in writing and fantasy, and which came first? Were you interested in the fantastical and science fiction before you started writing, or did the writing come first and then you migrated into it? How did that all work out for you?
Sure, it’s a good question. I grew up in Canberra, which is the federal capital of Australia. It’s still a very small city, but it was a very small city when I was growing up there in the ‘60s and the ‘70s. Canberra is kind of like the Washington, D.C., equivalent, except that it’s a planned city. It really was only built from the, sort of, 1930s onwards. When I was growing up there, it only had about 200,000 people. It’s quite a small city, and it’s also in the middle…it’s in the bush, the Australian bush. It’s sometimes called the bush capital because it’s got so many trees. So it was kind of like a country town, but then it had the weird extra layer of all the federal government stuff and also all the things like Washington, D.C. has, on a smaller scale, like the National Library and the National Museum and Parliament House and all that sort of stuff as well. So it was an unusual city. It had a very, very good public education system then—it still does, perhaps not quite as good—which I benefited from, and a very good library system, which I also benefited from.
And my parents are readers. Both my parents were science fiction and fantasy readers, amongst many other things. My father is a scientist and my mother is an artist. So, from a very early age, I was exposed to all kinds of books. Our house was full of books. There was a library between my home and my school, which I stopped at every afternoon–a children’s library, a specialist children’s library. And I read everything. I love all kinds of books. I do love fantasy and science fiction, but I also love historical novels and thrillers and contemporary literature and classics, all kinds of stuff. And non-fiction as well. I’ve always been fascinated with all kinds of non-fiction.
I actually noticed, Edward, that you’ve written a lot of non-fiction, looking at your bio before I started to talk to you.
Anything for a buck, basically. But also, I do love that stuff. I love learning about things and writing about them.
And I think it’s good for writers, too. You need to read non-fiction as well as fiction to fill your mind with all kinds of information you can draw upon to create fiction. And non-fiction is very, very good fuel for that.
So, I was always reading, there were books everywhere. My parents read science fiction and fantasy. I probably had more than most people, in part because my father used to spend quite a lot of time in the U.S. working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the United Nations and a few other…lots of international programs, some of which were run out of the U.S. (One mysteriously always had to meet in Hawaii every year. I wonder why that was.) But he would bring back American paperbacks, which we would not otherwise get, because Australia, particularly in that period, most of the books came from the U.K. So, I was actually exposed to many American authors that not all Australians would necessarily have been and would not have been known in the U.K. So, I guess in a way I had a perfect environment to become a writer of fantasy and science fiction because of that reading.
And I was always very keen on making up stories. I’ve always loved making stuff up and trying to get people to believe it. Sometimes I joke that if I wasn’t a writer, I’d probably be in jail as a confidence trickster, because I like to make people believe in stuff. I like to write stories that feel real. I like to tell stories that feel real. And there’s not a big step, I think, from making up those kinds of fictions to getting to some kind of complex scam making people believe things. But luckily, I haven’t gone down that road as yet. I’m sticking to the fiction.
So, you started writing pretty young then, as a child?
Yeah, I did actually start…I loved the idea of my own books. I made little books of my own from a very young age. In fact, I have one from when I was about six. Well, I actually do have one when I’m about six. I don’t take it with me. I have a sort of little replica that I bring with me I use in talks sometimes to demonstrate how far I’ve come in my writing since I was six years old. At least I hope I have.
So, yeah, I was making little books. I was writing stories. I wrote stories in school. But I didn’t actually plan to be a writer. I loved books. I loved writing. But actually, right up until the end of high school, when I was thinking about what I am going to do, in the last few years, I was thinking I would actually join the regular Australian army and go to our equivalent of West Point. But I actually joined the Army Reserve and I was a part-time soldier for about five years, and that convinced me I didn’t want to be a regular soldier. It was actually…it was a very good experience and I really mostly enjoyed it, with some reservations. But I also realized that the life that I would lead as a regular Army soldier would be more contained and closed, the environment would be more closed, than if I did something else.
So, for a few years, I was thinking that’s what I would do. I would go to what was then the Royal Australian Military College and be an officer and learn, and do a university degree, and become a commissioned officer. But then I realized that, “Hang on, I actually don’t want to do that. What am I going to do instead?
And I worked…I got a job after I left school, I worked in a government job for a year, and I saved my money. Then I went travelling in the U.K. and Europe. And while I was doing that, I re-read lots of my favourite books, particularly children’s books and particularly English ones, and I read them in the places where they were set. So a lot of classic fantasy like Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen.
Oh!
Yeah, it’s a fantastic book, in Cheshire. I read other children’s classics, like Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons in the Lake District.
Oh, thank you so much for mentioning that one.
Well, they’re wonderful books. I mean, I still re-read them. That also…I mean, those books made me interested in sailing.
Me, too.
You know, you get so much from those books. And then Rosemary Sutcliff, The Eagle of the Ninth, you know, historical novels, children’s historical novels, were also very much part of my reading. I read The Eagle of the Ninth while I was visiting Hadrian’s Wall and so on. And I while I was doing that, I also started to seriously write, whereas before I’d written stories off and on. I wrote a couple of stories and sent them out, and I also started a novel. I wrote half a novel while I was travelling around. And of course, this is back in the day. So, I had a portable typewriter, a Silver Reed typewriter, and I would type away in the various places that I was I was staying, or actually often not in the places, the youth hostels I was staying, because it would annoy people. So, I would actually go and type just, you know, by the side of the road or whatever, because I bought a little car. Terrible, terrible old car that…once the wheel literally did fall off and I also caught a light once. But it also got me around about 10,000 miles of travelling. And yeah, in the course of that time, I thought, I do want to be a writer. This is what I want to do.
But I also, because I was a reader and I loved nonfiction, one of the areas of non-fiction I read about was publishing and writers and writers’ biographies. And even back then, I realized that a writer’s…economically, a writer’s life is generally very difficult and you need a day job. So…and I’m actually kind of astonished, looking back, that even at nineteen I did have enough common sense to realize I would need a job. That was probably one of the few areas where I had sufficient common sense, but I did. And so, I made a plan to come back to Australia, go to university, get a degree, because that would enable me to get a better day job, and also just to continue writing, which is pretty much what I did.
And when I got back to Australia, I had great encouragement, very early encouragement, because I got a telegram—this was shortly before telegrams were completely phased out, and, in fact, I didn’t even know they still existed at that point until I got one—which was from Penguin Books in the U.K., saying, “We want to publish your story, ‘Sam, Cars and the Cuckoo,’ and we’ll pay ninety pounds.” Prepaid telegram, reply yes or no. And I hadn’t even sent it to them, so I was extremely puzzled, but also very happy. I unraveled this mystery many years later. I’d sent the story to the gaming magazine White Dwarf, because I also wrote, I had a little bit of a success, right, writing gaming articles about Dungeons and Dragons and Traveller and so on. And they, at that point, they did occasionally publish fiction. This is, again, a long way back, the magazine was very different. And so, I’d sent it to White Dwarf, so it was a great surprise to get this telegram from Penguin Books saying, “We want it for our magazine, called Warlock.” And, anyway, as it transpired, I discovered much later, an editor from White Dwarf had left to join Penguin, to work on their magazine Warlock, which was for their Fighting Fantasy books, was in support of their Fighting Fantasy books. And he’d actually just taken…I don’t know, I guess his submission inventory from White Dwarf with him, including my story. I met him years later and he said that he’d just taken his whole folder with him and bought some of the stuff for Warlock.
But I thought, “Wow, this is fantastic.” Ninety pounds, this is in 19…this was in 1982, I think, it was quite a lot of money, particularly in Australian dollars at the time. And I thought, “Wow, I can write a short story every couple of weeks and get this money and, you know, it’ll be brilliant.” But, of course, I couldn’t actually sell a short story for about another five years after that. I wrote about forty without being able to sell any of them. Which is, again, of course, a very common experience. But at least I had the early encouragement of that first short story sale.
I reacted to the Arthur Ransome reference because they were books that were very important to me when I was growing up and I spent my…in Canada, we got a family allowance. I think it was $10 a month per kid. And my parents gave that to me as my allowance and I saved that up and bought all the Arthur Ransome books.
Great, fantastic.
And in my last book before this, my current one is Master of the World, book two in the series, but in the first one, Worldshaper, there is an occasion in which there is a…they get on to a sailing yacht, and I named the yacht Amazon and there’s some reference in there. So, I do try to reference those books when I can.
Yeah, well. These things, books, your childhood books are so important for what you do later. And I think whether you even consciously reference them, they’re there, they’re deeply embedded in the reservoir you call upon to write. So, they’re always present. And sometimes there’s conscious references and sometimes there’s conscious resonance and sometimes it’s unconscious. But having read them is the necessary is the necessary part of the equation.
Now, you got your B.A. in Professional Writing. What kind of a course was that? Is that a creative writing course or is it more of a journalism course or what? I haven’t quite seen that phrase before.
Yeah, well, it’s very old. They don’t actually offer that anymore. But at the time, that was the only writing degree offered in Australia. Again, a very different time. Of course, everywhere offers creative writing or writing degrees now. But at the time, what was then the Canberra College of Advanced Education, that’s now the University of Canberra, it was the only place in Australia that offered any kind of writing degree. And principally, it actually was a journalism school. And most people there were majoring in journalism, but they also had a screenwriting stream, which included a small element of prose writing, fiction writing. So, when I was looking at what I could do, I wanted to get a degree mainly as a kind of ticket to show at door to get a better day job. I thought, “Well, I might as well do a writing degree.” And it was luckily in my home city, Canberra. so it was just much more doable in terms of, you know, I could stay with my parents, which I did most of the time, and…you know, it was just logistically easy. So I was very lucky it was there.
And it was actually a really good experience. I majored in screenwriting, and I guess it’s like a lot of those writing degrees, in the sense that someone once said, “You can’t be taught writing, but you can learn.” And really, I think the most valuable thing for me was that it set up an environment in which you’re expected to do a lot of writing and you were in the company of other people who were very keen to write. So, I met some very good friends there and reconnected with some old friends who coincidentally just happened to be there, I had no idea, old school friends who also wanted to be writers, and being in the company of those people and also having the workshop experience, which is he typical one of where you pass work around in a, you know, tutorial group or workshop group and discuss it, very much as many workshops do now, that was very valuable. To be honest, most of the actual lectures and so forth were not particularly useful. But being in an environment where you need to create work all the time and it has to be on time…because they treated it like a…the journalism strain was very strong…it was treated as if it was a job at a newspaper. If you didn’t file on time, you got zero. That was it. There was no, “I’m sorry, I’ve been ill,” or whatever, it was just zero, because they said, “This is what will happen at the newspaper.” You have to…if you’re told to write something, that’s your job, you’ve got to write it. So that was all very, very useful. So, it was a good three years.
And I started theatre there as well and did some productions. I ended up directing a production of The Crucible in my last year. And it was all…it was fun and it was good experience. And…I think I probably would have kept writing anyway. But it really did help shape some of the discipline to do that. And I wrote probably half my first published novel, The Ragwitch, while I was doing that course, for that course, too. So that was also a good thing.
I’m interested in the theater experience. I’ve talked to a number of writers who have some theater experience and I’m a theater guy myself—I’ve written plays and I’m a professional actor and I’ve directed—and I always like to ask if you find that the theater experience helps you in your fiction writing. Orson Scott Card is one who says it does, and I just talked to James Alan Gardner, and he said it does. What was your experience?
Well, I think it all helps, to be honest. I think all the cross-media stuff helps. The screenwriting experience is also very helpful. I mean, to be honest, I think everything helps. The experience of life helps. Reading books helps. Strange knowledge of rock formations might help. You know, anything can help, but particularly in terms of writing. I think experience of different ways to tell stories and convey stories to people, whether it’s visually or aurally or, you know, using different senses…and theater in particular is often very good for experimental ways to communicate stories. People are always looking at different ways to stage and perform. And that makes you think about, well, “Hang on, maybe I could do something different just on a page, as well.” So, it was very useful. And, I mean, I directed a play, I performed in plays. I’m a terrible actor, but it was probably useful experience and useful for, again, also useful for something that’s very much part of a modern author’s life, which is, of course, talking about your work, because we’re all expected to do that nowadays and need to do that, whether it’s in person at bookshop events or it’s on YouTube or even in a podcast like this. I’m sure some of that early actor training, even though I was a terrible actor on stage or screen, it probably helps me play myself, as it were, and to get across what I want to get across. And it was just interesting. It was just a good thing to do.
I also worked as a stagehand after, briefly, after university, as an additional job. I worked in a bookshop, but also I worked as a stagehand on a couple of different productions with a very good friend of mine, also a writer. And that was a good experience, too, which I’ve not drawn upon directly for a story, but I think some of the conversations we had working on that show and the sort of cynical realism of backstage people, it was an exposure to characters you might not otherwise have been exposed to, and, as with anything somewhat out of what you normally do, was very useful. And some of the old, literally old, as in they would probably be in their 60s, people who worked in the theater, and had done for forever, were such interesting characters and had some very interesting stories to tell. So things like that. I think everything’s useful.
Yeah, theatre people have lots of interesting stories to tell if they’ve been in it for a while.
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.
Now you mentioned The Ragwitch, which was your first published novel. When did that come about? You went on to work in publishing. How did that all line up?
Well, as I said, I realised I would need a day job, and I was at university and thinking about what I could do. I did actually think about journalism for a while. Many of my friends were journalists.
I did it!
Original 1990 cover of The Ragwitch
Yeah, well it’s…and of course, again, it’s a very sort of standard sort of thing. So I toyed with that, but I found that I didn’t…while I could adequately write everything, I could write whatever was required, I actually didn’t particularly like having to stick to the facts, which is a bit of a drawback in journalism, or it should be a drawback. And so I was thinking, “What else can I do?” And I was still fascinated with books and really interested in publishing, so I thought, “OK, well, that’s what I’ll do. My day job will be publishing, and” (I was still, you know, I was writing all the time) “I can continue to write.” And those would feed off each other. And one of the classic ways—and then looking around to see how I could do that, of course, one of the classic ways, and it’s still one of the best ways to get into publishing, is to get a job in a bookshop. So that’s what I did, and I worked in a wonderful bookshop where quite a number of my friends also worked in Canberra, and that then led to…I got a job as a sales representative for a very small publisher, which was in Sydney, so I moved to a much bigger city, but all the time I was writing and at that time I was finishing The Ragwitch.
So, from that small publisher, which was a small trade publisher, I then moved to an academic press on the production side as an editorial assistant. And while I was there, and I was sort of working my way—I worked my way up there to be an editor and then actually the publications manager there—but during that time, when I was at that academic publisher, I got The Ragwitch published. But in the usual way. I researched publishers. I looked at who was publishing that kind of novel. I submitted it to seven publishers, most of whom rejected it. Two, I think, never replied at all. And then one day I came home and there was a message on my answering machine, again back in the old days, a cassette answering machine, from a publisher saying, “Can you come and talk to us about it?” And so it was picked up and published in 1991. Which is a long time ago.
But there’s been several since then.
More than several. Yes. Yes, I’ve managed to keep going, which is basically the whole secret, really, as I often say to people. The answer to any publishing problem is to write another book, you know, whether it’s problems of success or failure or things not working out as you would hope. Write another book. It gives you another chance. Another spin of the wheel.
Yeah, I think it was maybe Stephen King that said…it’s usually either Stephen King or Ray Bradbury who says these things…
Absolutely. Yeah.
That the difference between a published writer and an unpublished writer is that the published writer didn’t give up.
They probably both said that in different ways, actually. And it’s true. Though it can be extraordinarily difficult to keep going because of all kinds of factors. And I’ve been very fortunate across the board, really, in terms of who I am and my background and where I live and even such things as, you know, the fact that we have essentially free health care here in Australia makes a massive difference. I’m very well aware of many of my American friends who are successful authors, but they can’t give up their day jobs to write more because they need the day job for the medical insurance. So there’s, like, those kinds of factors. And I’ve been very lucky.
Well, we’re going to talk about your creative process and we’re going to focus on your latest, which is Angel Mage, which unfortunately I have not had a chance to read. But that’s OK, because I’m going to get you to synopsize it for people who haven’t read it, like me.
I’ll just read it to you on the podcast, Edward. It’s only going to take about eighteen hours. That’s all right, isn’t it?
Oh, sure, I’ll just release it as multi-part podcast.
I wouldn’t dare do that because it’s actually, the audiobook has been read far, far better, anyway. I actually, I recently distilled the sort of elevator pitch for the book, even though I don’t really believe in elevator pitches. But with the help of various people who’ve already reviewed it and commented about the book, the sort of simple summary is that it’s The Three Musketeers crossed with Joan of Arc, crossed with angelic magic, crossed with kick-ass woman heroes. And that kind of sums it up on a variety of levels. But, yeah, Angel Mage is very much inspired by Alexander Dumas’s The Three Musketeers and the Richard Lester 1973-1974 films of The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers.
I love those movies.
I love those movies, too. I mean, they’re brilliant movies and brilliant adaptations of the book. Very much inspired by that, but it’s not a retelling. Angel Mage is the story of Liliath, who is an angel mage. She’s able to summon angels using icons that she makes. And she, Liliath, is perhaps the most pre-eminent angelic mage who’s ever lived. Unfortunately, she has already destroyed one kingdom in an effort to do something, which is unclear, involving an archangel, the archangel of that kingdom. And this all happens before the book begins. She did something which caused a terrible plague that killed most people or turned them into monsters. She was thought to be killed by it as well, or something to have happened to her. But, in fact, she wasn’t. She just went into a long sleep to have another go. And the book is actually about her awakening from her long rest to try and put in motion once again and so successfully carry out whatever her plan is to get closer to her beloved Archangel Palleniel. And this is in the new kingdom of Sarance, which is pretty much an analog of 17th-century France, but with some important key differences. And to do so, Liliath needs to gather to her and direct four key individuals who are young people who are just embarking on their careers in the capital of Sarance, which is a sort of Paris equivalent. So, she is setting up her plan again. She is manipulating these four characters who are brought together. They don’t know why, you know, what their connection is. They feel a connection and they, Dorotea, who is also an angelic mage and a very gifted maker of icons, Simeon, who’s a medical student at the hospital, Henri, who’s a clerk of the cardinal–the cardinal is a woman, incidentally, and one of the, I guess the key differences in Sarance is that it’s an equal-opportunity kingdom, as such, as most of my fantasy worlds are. Women can be all the things that men can be as well, as of course they can be in reality if they’re not constrained by social barriers. And…who have I forgotten?…oh, and Agnez, who’s a musketeer, a cadet of the musketeers. And so it’s an adventure story, it’s set in that alternate 17th century, influenced by Dumas, and I hope it’s just a great, enjoyable adventure that really takes you to another world, as Worldshapers is all about. I hope it takes readers to somewhere that feels real and they can go along for the ride.
Most of your books, and this one included, are classified as young adult. What has drawn you to the young adult side of the spectrum?
Well, classifications are funny things. And in fact, Angel Mage is published as an adult fantasy in the UK and Australia.
Amazon shows it as young adult…
Well, in America it is published as young adult. It really, I guess, demonstrates the fluidity, particularly, of young adult as a category. I guess what I would say is that the clue is all there in the name “young adult.” It’s young adult, not all children. So, to my mind, you know, YA…and it’s confusing to people, because YA covers such a broad range of books from very young YA, as it were, to older books. And, you know, categories in publishing are about publishers trying to find the sweet spot to connect core readers to a book. They always hope that the book will go beyond those, that core group. And you always hope that that’s just the kindling that starts the fire to reach everywhere, as it does with the really big bestselling books. They always go far wider than whatever their categorization is. But, of course, to make that happen, you do need to connect with the people most likely to read the book. And that’s partly about genre classification as well, which is why if you try and categorize a book as something that it doesn’t really fit, which happens occasionally where publishers want to try and position a book somewhere else, but it doesn’t…you know, readers are put off from it because it doesn’t match their expectation. That’s probably the cardinal problem. (Cardinals on my mind, obviously, too many cardinals.) That’s the biggest mistake you can make in publishing, because if you try and sell a book as something t isn’t, you know, the people who would love it don’t buy it, and the people who you’re hoping to try and get to love it typically don’t buy it either. So the safe method is always trying to connect to a core audience.
And partly, of course, what happens is, if you’re known for a particular genre or category, if your book can even halfway fit into that category, that’s where publishers will try and put it. In the case of Angel Mage, I’m absolutely fine with calling it a young adult book. I do think it’s a young adult book, but at the same time, I think it’s important to be aware that doesn’t mean it isn’t for older adults as well. And, in fact, all the data shows that most of YA is in fact being read by 18-to-35-year-olds, anyway, and older. It’s not actually being read by teenagers, which is a whole other discussion, because there’s a whole discussion of how teenagers are actually being marginalized out of a genre that’s out of…not a genre, a category…which is meant to be for them. But, so, it’s not as straightforward as it may seem.
I just write the stories. I mean, going back to answer your question more directly, I just write. I write for myself, and I guess I write for myself as I am now and as I was at 20 or 15 or even a bit younger, where I would have read a book like Angel Mage with no problems whatsoever, in the same way I was reading completely adult titles with no problem whatsoever. But I also, I do write children’s fiction as well, and when I am writing the children’s books, I’m really writing for myself as I was at 10 or 11 or 12. But again, good children’s books work for all ages as well. And they work for all the readers, as well. It’s not the primary audience, but in my view, all the best children’s books will also work for an adult reader because they’ll be, there’s just more to them. There’ll be multiple layers of story and meaning which make them work, and a child reader who may not be as practiced or experienced will just take that top layer of story and meaning, and they will love it and be carried along by it. And later you can come back to it. They’ll come back to it later maybe and get some more of the subtext and more of the other layers of story. And an adult reader, a sophisticated adult reader, will, you know, we’ll get all of that straight away.
Getting the balance of all those things right is the difficult part, except that most writers, I think, do it by instinct. So I think if you start thinking about it, it won’t work. But if you’ve equipped yourself by reading, certainly, lots and lots of the right books, and by the right books, actually I just mean any books ,really, except that you probably should have read lots and lots of books in the area in which you want to work as well as everything else. Then you will have equipped your storytelling and writing instincts to be able to do that without having to think about it too greatly. And, of course, then the editorial process helps as well.
I’ve kind of run into the classification thing myself with the aforementioned Masks of Aygrima trilogy with a 15-year-old protagonist. It was published by DAW Books, which does not have a young adult line, and so it was published in the adult market. And I got people who said, well, you know, “This is really a young adult book.” And then there were young adult reviewers who said, “Well, this is too grown-up a book, but it has a 15-year-old protagonist. So, yeah, the whole genre classification thing, can…
And, well, it’s important not to get too hung up on it, I think. I mean, that’s…when people start thinking, “Oh, I can’t read this because it’s YA” or “I can’t read this because it’s adult” or “I’m not going to read this because it’s science fiction and all science fiction is terrible.” You know, those preconceptions just cut you off from reading good books. I think it’s very important to look at books on their own merits. The whole categorization, the labels that are put on books, are all about how to sell them. They’re not actually about what the qualities are, literary qualities or narrative qualities or whatever, they’re labels to help you find a book, but they are not exclusive labels. So I do think it’s very important for people to…reading about a book that sounds interesting, it probably is interesting. Have a look at it. Read some pages. Don’t think, “Oh, it sounds really interesting, but it’s YA, so it’s not for me, or “It’s children, so it’s not for me,” or “Dang, I didn’t realize it was romance, so I’m not going to read it,” because it could be absolutely the best book for you to read. It could be a wonderful book to read. Just because of some selling labels on it…I think preconception of genre and category just really narrows people’s reading habits, sometimes. Though, many people, of course, don’t care, which is good.
So, going back to Angel Mage, you talked about the elevator pitch, but that came after the fact. So, how did the original seed for this all come together? And is that typical of…the way that Angel Magecame together, is that typical of the way that your stories generally germinate?
That’s a good question. The way I typically develop stories is that I will have an idea for something. And often, it’s just about a character in a situation. And I really don’t know anything about it. I know, I have a…it’s like having a still cut out of a section of film. And I can look at it in my head and think, “Oh, well, there’s this person in this situation and this appears to be the setting,” but I really don’t know any more than that. And then I will start writing something about that. And often, these little fragments I don’t end up using, but that has helped me work out what the story is or what the story might be. And sometimes they become full-on prologues or opening chapters, which, again, I might not, but it does help me set the scene. And I work out, you know, who that character is and what part they play, and if they’re going to be the main character. And I also work out the feel of the setting, the sort of tone of the setting, even if I don’t know many details. And after I’ve written a little section like that, typically I don’t do anything on it for a while, maybe a few weeks, maybe a few months. And my subconscious is working on it, and every now and again, I might make a few notes about that particular idea.
And if it is going to come to something, then at some point, the next thing I usually do is write an outline, which I won’t actually follow. That’s one of those Zen outlines, the act of doing the outline is more important than what it’s going to be used for. I will write an outline and then probably will write the beginning, which I may have already written, and I’ll just rewrite it, or it will be something completely different, but I will get that first chapter or prologue or prologue and first chapter down, and I will then revise the outline again. And at that point, I will have something which I will think, “Well, okay, that’s gonna be my next book, or is going to be the one I’m going to write after the one I’m writing now.” And that’s when I’ll share it with my agent and so on and start talking about it being the next book. And I should say, sometimes when I’m writing these, I begin this process where I have a little idea and I write a little bit, it becomes a short story and I will write it, and then, usually within a few weeks, it’ll be complete in itself. And then I know, “OK, well, that’s done. That is a story. It’s not going to be a novel, it’s not going to be anything else. And then I’ll try and do something with that story.
So, once you…if you decide to go on and write a novel…what does your actual writing process look like? Do you write, you know, 24 hours a day?
I wish!
Do you sit under a tree with parchment and quill? How does that work for you?
Well, I actually did…I wrote many of my early novels longhand first, so I would write a chapter in longhand, pen on paper, in my favorite black-and-red notebooks. So I’d write a chapter longhand and then I would type it up on various computers over the years and then I would print it out and I would correct the printout and take in those corrections to the electronic file, and then I would write the next chapter longhand and then just repeat the process. I stopped doing that probably about fifteen years ago, except that I still do write some sections longhand first. So, I still write difficult chapters.
What does writing longhand do for you or for your prose?
It just seemed to be a good process. I mean, I think I started it because, when I was traveling, and I first started writing when I was traveling, I could just write in my notebook wherever. And this is long before, you know, laptops or, actually, I mean, it was really the early days of personal computers. I mean, when I came back from that trip, I got a TRS-80.
Not portable!
Not portable, no, at all. I got my first Mac maybe the year often. And it was actually one of the very first Macs, the Mac 512K. It was…which was a miraculous thing. I mean, what you see is what you get on the screen. And printing out was astonishing compared to what I’d been using. But yes, not at all portable. So, I think it stemmed from that ability to write in a notebook wherever I was. And on that trip and then later on another trip 10 years later, in the early ‘90s, I mean, Sabriel, I wrote part of, I wrote chapters, you know, I wrote a chapter sitting on the wall of a Crusader castle in Syria, I wrote in a Roman amphitheater in Jordan, under a medieval bridge in Isfahan, in Iran, in the Khyber Pass, and so on. And so, being able to write anywhere, it was, I think, what drove that. I just got into the habit of it and it worked.
But I think also, writing longhand and then typing my longhand, and as I typed, I would correct, as well, did give me an extra layer of revision, which wasn’t just reading, a sort of tactile revision, not just looking at it on screen and going through. But that said, I always wrote short stories pretty much straight on screen, all my short fiction. And then later I did just start to write just, you know, on the computer. But I still write longhand. I still write notes longhand. And I will occasionally, particularly if I’m having difficulty, I will take my notebook and pen and go and write a chapter, often somewhere outside, somewhere in some sort of natural environment, not to sit at my desk. So I mix it up.
And once you get to the end of the book, the first time through, what does your revision process look like?
Well, I revise all the way through. Typically, what I do, in fact, is…say I’ve written Chapter 1. Before I write Chapter 2, I actually will revise…in my writing session, say I finish writing Chapter 1 on Monday, and I would have done minor revision at the time, just going backwards and forwards with every writing session, on Tuesday I will read Chapter 1, revise it and then write Chapter 2, and then when I come to write Chapter 3, I’ll revise Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 before writing Chapter 3. So I’m constantly revising all the way through. But of course, what that means is Chapter 1 will have been…say the book’s got 40 chapters. As part of my normal process, Chapter 1 will have been revised 40 times, by the time I get to the end of it, but Chapter 40 will have been revised, notionally, once, but in actual fact at least two or three times. And then, when I have a complete manuscript, I will go through it again, usually two or three times before it goes to the publisher, with a little bit, as much fallow time as possible between revisions, which in practice normally means only two or three days, because of, just, time constraints and needing to deliver it. But then, I also typically don’t look at it again until I get the edit back from, when I get the top-level edit letter back from my editor, I just won’t look at it at all. So, I’ll normally have at least a month or six weeks of having totally forgotten about it, with luck, before it comes back again.
And in that time, I’ll be writing other things. I’m always writing something. And I usually am writing a couple of short stories or sometimes a screenplay at the same time as writing the novel. The novel will take 80 percent of the time, but I will spend 20 percent of the time working on other projects, and then, once the novel is off my plate temporarily, I’ll be working on those other things and of course also starting the next one. So, it’s always…there’s always the shuffling, short-order-cook-type shuffling of things around on the stove.
Every once in a while, as a full-time freelancer, I remember the song from My Fair Lady, where Eliza sings, “Words, words, words. I’m so sick of words.”
Well, you do get sick of, absolutely, you occasionally do get sick of words, like Eliza. And then when that happens, it’s time to do something else for a while. Go for a walk, watch a movie, you know, anything that refills…or perhaps leeches the chamber of loathing for words.
What…you mentioned the editorial letter that comes back…what sorts of things do you usually find yourself having to work on when the editor gets a look at them?
Well, it varies very much from book to book. I guess…I mean, I’ve always felt greatly complimented by editors who tell me that my books don’t need much revision. And they usually credit that to the fact that I do a lot of revision myself and I do pride myself on delivering a very clean and…you know, a manuscript that’s been revised as much as possible. So, it varies from book to book. Usually, they’re things like tightening up particular sections, which…you know, the pace may have dragged or, very occasionally…one famous editorial letter pointed out that I had a character who could be completely deleted from the book without making any difference whatsoever. And therefore should be. Which…and of course, as always, you know, your initial reaction is, “Oh, ridiculous nonsense. What are they talking about?” And then after calm reflection and looking at the examples cited, I realized that, yes, that character was, in fact, completely extraneous and did absolutely nothing. And so I did get rid of them, and the book was all the better for it. So, occasionally, there’s things like that, but generally speaking, they’re mostly fine-tuning things.
But not always. Again, this is going a long way back. I benefited greatly from the editorial advice from my then editor…at HarperCollins. Because I delivered Lirael and Abhorsen actually as one giant book. And that’s how I write it, as one very large book. And she pointed out that it probably needed to be two. And it wasn’t just a matter of cutting them, cutting it in half. I actually needed to expand upon some aspects of Lirael’s early life, which I’d alluded to without going into. And so, I took the book apart, I broke it in two, and I rewrote both halves, adding and subtracting. And so that was quite a big task. But it was the right advice. It was very, very useful. So, yeah, every now and again, there’s big things, and there’s small things.
I always like to talk about what the editors contribute because there are beginning writers or wannabe writers who are scared that editors will somehow destroy their precious prose or something. And in my experience, they almost always make it better. Almost always.
Almost always, because you can unfortunately get bad editors who just don’t understand the book or who want to remake it in, you know, remake it into something that it’s not. That does occasionally happen. But of course, you deal with that. And I’ve actually been very lucky. I’ve not had that really at all myself, ever. But I was an editor and I did…while I don’t think I’m guilty of doing this myself either, I did work with many other editors and I do know of…and I also, just from being in this business for a long time and knowing lots of other authors, I do know of a very few examples where just the wrong editor was working on a book with someone and it was not a good fit. But that, as you say, that is not the norm at all. Usually, a good editor is very helpful and makes a big difference.
Well, we’re close to the end of the time here, so I want to move on to the big philosophical questions…
Well, I gotta go. Sorry. Time’s…oh, no, hit me. Hit me with a question.
It’s only one, really.
Oh, good. Okay.
With multiple parts, but…why do you write? Why do you write stories of the fantastic, specifically, and on a slightly broader level, why do you think anybody writes? Why do we tell stories? Why do you tell stories and why does anybody tell stories?
That is quite a tough question. Why do I write? Why do I tell stories? I think it’s because I have to, on one level, I’ve always told stories, I’ve always had them bubbling up inside me, and I feel like they need to come out, I guess. I did allude to this earlier when I said that possibly, if I didn’t write stories, I’d be in jail as a confidence trickster, because I do have all these stories in me and I have to get them out. Maybe this is how I make sense of the world, is by telling stories and by writing, or make sense of my world. But I do derive an enormous satisfaction when a story works out. I love it when I can successfully tell a story.
And I should say that never…nothing is ever as good as it is in my head. When I’m thinking up a story, it’s always truly amazing. And then when I write it, it goes from truly amazing to, if I’m lucky, kind of amazing. And I look at it and I think, “Wow, that’s great. I would like to read…if I came to this as a reader, I would like to read this. I would love this.” And that’s what I’m always trying to aim for. So I think it is that innate desire to tell stories just coming up inside me. Also, matched with that, the satisfaction of telling a good story and of making people…making people happy is perhaps not quite the right description, because, in fact, stories might not make people happy, they might make them feel all kinds of different things…but successfully transmitting a story from my head into a reader’s via the medium of text, I guess, is something that gives me great satisfaction.
As to why I write mostly fantastical stuff, that is also quite a tricky question. And possibly the best way to answer it is to say that, whenever I do try to write something that is contemporary and entirely realistic in terms of our contemporary world, it hardly ever works out. I mean, the story might work out perfectly well, but it will end up having some element of the fantastic, even a very slight one. It just seems to be something I do whether I plan to or not. I have set out to write entirely contemporary or historical stories and nearly always some element of the fantastic…I just suddenly get part of the way through, and I think, “This would be so much better if the supernatural intrudes or there’s magic,” or “Wouldn’t this be more interesting if that person is not, in fact, a human?” It just seems to be something, again, inside me that introduces these things. Though I have occasionally written things that do not have elements of the fantastic, my natural bent seems to be to want to include them.
And that sounds very familiar to me because that’s exactly what happens to me.
Yeah, I think it’s very…absolutely, I think it’s a, quite a shared trait of most fantasy writers. But not all, of course, everyone is different. There’s so many different ways to write, and write novels. And that’s also part of the fascination.
And the idea of having the amazing image in your head and then trying to get it…I’ve sometimes used the image of, it’s like you have a Christmas tree ornament and it’s beautiful and perfect and you can see it so clearly and then you smash it with a hammer and try to glue it back together with words.
Yes. And they might still be very impressed, but it’s not quite what you wanted to give them. Yes. Yeah.
So, what are you working on now?
Well, I’ve actually just finished my next book, which is kind of ahead of schedule for me for once, which is good. I’m revising it in response to the editorial letter at the moment. And that book is called The Left-Handed Booksellers of London. It’s set in 1983, and it’s set in a slightly alternative London, London with a…a United Kingdom with a slightly different 20th-century history. And it’s about a young woman, Susan, who comes to London. She’s an art student who will be starting art school later, but she’s come early to London to try and find her father, who she doesn’t know anything about, she just has some clues from her mother to follow up—her very vague mother. And she almost instantly falls in with one of the left-handed booksellers, called Merlin, who saves her from…well, they save each other, actually…from an intrusion of the mythic. And Susan is drawn into this world where the left-handed booksellers and the right-handed booksellers have a kind of secret organization that not only runs a couple of bookshops, but also works to keep the mythic and legendary elements of Britain under control and stop them from intruding disastrously into the contemporary world. And Susan’s quest to discover her father is connected very much with Merlin. Merlin also has a quest, to try and find out what happened to his mother, who was apparently killed by criminals, but there seems to be some connection with the mythic world as well. So that’s The Left-Handed Booksellers of London, which will be out, hopefully, this time next year.
And anything else that you’re currently in process on?
I’ve got some short stories. I’ve actually got a bunch of stories coming out in different venues over the next twelve months. I had a quite a little short-story writing frenzy earlier this year. So I think I’ve got five stories coming out in various places over the next twelve months or so, which range from science fiction to fantasy, different kinds of fantasy…well, actually, one horror, one is just straight-out horror, which I don’t write that often, but every now and again…and some fantasy stories and science fiction. And I’m also outlining a new novel and notes for other stories. And I’m working on a screenplay with a friend of mine, as well, who’s a very experienced, and has had many things produced, screenwriter. So, lots and lots of things on that stove top, as I mentioned before, I’m shuffling those pans around.
And where can people find you online?
They can find me at garthnix.com, on Facebook, it’s just facebook/garthnix, and /garthnixauthor. I actually have my very old personal Facebook, which I always just use to connect with readers, but it’s generally full up with the 5,000-friend limit. And then later I started the author page, which is just the /garthinix one. So Facebook, I’m there, but actually where I’m most likely to respond to people, and I’m much more likely to post, in fact is Twitter, where I’m also just @GarthNix. And if you want to ask me a question, Twitter is generally the place where I’m most likely to be able to respond in a sort of timely fashion. Far more than that anywhere else already.
All right! Well, thanks so much for being a guest on The Worldshapers, Garth. I really appreciate it.
It’s fun to talk about writing, isn’t it? You know, writing and publishing.
James Alan Gardner got his bachelor’s and master’s in math with a thesis on black holes, then immediately began writing science fiction instead. He has published ten novels and numerous short stories, including finalists for the Nebula and Hugo and winners for the Aurora, the Asimov’s Readers’ Choice Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. His most recent novels are All Those Explosions Were Someone Else’s Fault, first book in the Dark vs. Spark series, and They Promised Me the Gun Wasn’t Loaded, the second book, both from Tor. In his spare time, he plays a lot of tabletop roleplaying games and has recently begun writing material for Onyx Path’s Scion line. In his other spare time, he teaches kung fu to six-year-olds.
The (Lightly Edited) Transcript
Welcome to The Worldshapers, James.
Thanks, Edward. Glad to be here.
I guess we’ve kind of known each other for a long time, but we don’t encounter each other very often. But we did see each other at When Worlds Collide, which is something…When Words Collide. It always comes out as When Worlds Collide.
Yeah, yeah. It’s a great idea and a great title. And it was a great con this year.
Was that the first time you’d been?
Yes.
It’s close to me, so I’m there most years. It gets plugged a lot on The Worldshapers, ’cause I’ve asked a number of writers to be on after I saw them at When Words Collide.
Well, if I can make it next year, I certainly will. I had a great time there.
And I guess this is a good place to mention to those interested that the website for that is WhenWordsCollide.org. It does fill up every year, so if you’re interested in going, it wouldn’t hurt to to sign up for next year, right now. But enough about that, let’s talk about you! I always start by taking guests back into the mists of time, and for you and me, it’s roughly the same amount of mists, to find out, first of all, when you became interested in writing, and when you became interested in writing science fiction. I’ve seen from other interviews that you started writing pretty early.
Yes. I still have some of the things that I wrote when I was, like, five. They are hiding in my parents’ house and I hope they will never see the light of day. The first thing…I can remember writing what would be called fanfic these days, which was in my time based on The Man from U.N.C.L.E.—which tells how old I was—and me and my friends were spies: the standard thing that one writes when one is…I guess I was twele at the time…and I kept writing some of that for a while.
I wrote several plays when I was in high school, but I really got serious in my first year of university. I was in co-op at the University of Waterloo, and there the co-op program is sort of four months in school, then four months in work placement, and I was working for IBM in Toronto, where I knew no one, and didn’t have a whole lot of money. But writing was cheap. So, for four months on my work term in Toronto, I amused myself by writing science fiction. And none of that was saleable, but bit by bit, I got better.
Well, I think it’s come up a few times on here with different authors, the famous saying…I always attribute it to Stephen King, that you had to write half a million words of unpublishable stuff before you wrote anything publishable, but then somebody recently who’d met Ray Bradbury said that he used to say 800,000 words.
Yeah, yeah. A whole bunch of junk before you get down to the good stuff underneath.
Yeah, that’s what it boils down to. So, you got your bachelor’s and master’s in math, but you never actually used that? You went straight into writing? Or what happened after you graduated?
I went…for two years after I got my master’s, I tried to write something significant. I was working on a novel…and I still like the idea for the novel, I might…every now and then, I think, “Is it time to write that? Maybe. Probably not yet.” But for two years I tried to make a living writing while tutoring calculus. That was my income. And at the same time, I was also writing for a musical comedy review at the university, and someone who was associated with that show put me in contact with a group in the computer science department who wanted someone to write computer manuals for them. So, I got a job half-time writing computer manuals, and that kept me in money for long enough for me to start selling stories and things.
Well, it’s interesting, because when I decided to be a full-time writer, one of the things that got me going was there was a market for, you know, general computer books at the time. So, people ask me what my first book is, and I always say, well, my first book was actually Using Microsoft publisher for Windows 95. And my second book was the sequel, Using Microsoft Publisher for Windows 97.
Ah! I have a few Unix books out there that I, you know, they’re on the shelf, but I’m not proud of them.
Well, I was never that technical, but at the time there was actually a market at the level of, “To open a file, click FILE>OPEN.” That’s the kind of level I was writing at. And I was interested, too, that you wrote plays and this musical comedy revue…
Right.
…because that’s another side of what I do. I’m an actor and singer and performer, and I’ve done…I’ve written plays, as well. And I like to ask the writers who have done that sort of thing, if you find your theater background helps in the writing of fiction. For me, it feels that it does. But I’m always interested to see if others have the same experience.
Oh, yes, immensely. So, I did…first of all, this onstage musical comedy thing, and then a group of us who helped write for that started writing straight-up plays and radio dramas. And sometime in there, I got into improv and took a number of improv classes. And all those things go together into…theater gives you immediate feedback on whether your writing works or not, by the amount you cringe when you hear your lines being said. You learn a bit on fool-proofing dialogue. And certainly, improv gives you some good practice in structuring scenes and figuring out how actions go together to make plot.
I often feel that, having directed plays and stuff like that, I feel like I have a very solid image in my head at all times of where characters are in relationship to each other in the space in which the scene is happening, and when I tutor younger or beginning writers—and I’m writer-in-residence at the Saskatoon Public Library right now—I’ve done quite a bit of that—and one thing I often find is, it’s like a gray fog in which everything is happening.
Yes.
And I’m not entirely certain where everybody is in relationship to each other. You get an image of them in one place and the next thing you know, they’re looking out the window, but they never left the fireplace in your head.
Yeah. Yeah.
I think theater helps with that.
Yeah. Certainly, just plain old scene choreography helps. Theatre contributes to that a lot. As you say, who’s where and what’s actually there. The idea of what is in the room besides the characters is hugely useful when you’re trying to figure out what the characters do in response to some problem. There’s almost always something in the room that they can use, if you’ve envisioned the room well enough to actually have stuff there.
And if you plant it in the right place and in the story so it doesn’t materialize out of thin air.
Yes. Well, you know, whenever you write a story, every scene has to take place someplace. Every time someone goes into a room, you pretty much have to describe the room and you want to describe interesting things in the room, and just that description, first of all, trying to come up with something that is interesting and not the same old, same old, will give you material to use later on in the scene.
What you said about fool-proofing dialogue is actually something that Orson Scott Card said when I interviewed him for The Worldshapers, and he’s done a lot of theatre, and he actually had a role in your breaking in, didn’t he? Because he was at Clarion West when you were there?
Yes. He was the first teacher in my year at Clarion West. He gave me really good feedback on a story that he liked a great deal, and that was actually my first published story. He put in a good word for me with the editor of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and so when I sent that story to the editor, it sold, and that was my first pro SF sale.
Before you went to Clarion, had you taken any other formal writing training?
Alice Munro
Yeah. Between…the summer of when I got my bachelor’s, I went to Banff, the Banff Centre for Fine Arts, and took a writing course there. W.O. Mitchell was the grandfather of it all, but it was…Alice Munro was there, so, you know, hanging out with some pretty impressive people, and got a lot of good feedback on my writing and how to set about writing stories.
So, I ask science fiction fantasy writers about their formal training…now clearly, at Clarion, science fiction and fantasy is what people are writing, but usually in other writing programs it is not, and there’s sometimes a…
Right.
Sometimes it’s not a comfortable fit with what the program is about. Did you find that, or did it or did you find it helpful that it wasn’t science-fiction focused?
W. O. Mitchell
Yeah, I don’t think I wrote a great deal of science-fiction content while I was at Banff. It was mostly…the method, what W.O. Mitchell called “Mitchell’s messy method,” was just sitting down and seeing what spontaneously arose as you were at the typewriter. And at that point, I was writing a lot of memoir-type things, as opposed to actual fiction, and finding what inside of me wanted to be written was very useful for that. The real trick after that is figuring out how to shape that material into actual stories. And once I got started with that, kind of marrying my own memories with science fiction was kind of fun and useful.
Was Mitchell there when you were there?
Oh, yes.
The reason I ask is because W.O. Mitchell is famously from Weyburn, Saskatchewan, which is where I grew up, and I got to meet him once when he came doing a reading for his book, Roses Are Difficult Here, I think is what it was, when I was at the newspaper down there. He was an interesting guy.
Yeah, he’s a fun guy, and, of course, a great raconteur, or was, so he was great to have in classes. And we all had, I think, a fifteen-minute session with all of the writers in residence. It was, you know, in some sense similar to Clarion, in that the writers were brought in for, I think, four or five days, and each of the students had a chance to show the writers their stuff and get some feedback on it.
The other thing I like to mention about Mitchell is that, when I did see him in Weyburn, there was a woman there named Sadie Bowerman, who was the first white baby to be born in Weyburn, she was still alive then. And she’d been his schoolteacher, and she got after him—she must have been in her eighties by then—she got after him for using bad language. So, writers can relate. You never know who’s going to pop up out of your past.
That’s right. I have a few English teachers who have caught up with me over the years and, you know, kind of patted me on the back. And again, some of them have chided me for using bad language.
The other thing I want to mention about Weyburn, Saskatchewan, is that Guy Gavriel Kay was born in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, so Weyburn is a very important place in the tapestry of…well, much more for him than me, I wasn’t born there, but I grew up there.
A hotbed of literature.
Yeah, exactly. Well, you started with short fiction. Did you write that exclusively for a while, or did you immediately try to write novels, or how did that work for you?
Well, I think I wrote a novel…back when I was in high school, I got pneumonia the year after…sorry, the summer after…I graduated, and was basically locked in the house for the entire summer and spent some time writing a novel-like thing. I wouldn’t call it a novel, but it was a long piece of fiction. So…gee, I forget about doing that. I always think that my writing started when I was in university co-op, but no, that summer where I had nothing else to do. But that was kind of an amusement more than a, “Yes, I’m going to be a writer.”
Still, part of your half a million words that you had to…
That’s right. Yeah. Never gonna rewrite that one. That was self-indulgent, as only high-school students can be.
Yeah. So, when did your first novel come along?
My…so, I wrote it…I wrote several novels before I actually published something. So, I was in Clarion in ’89 and was writing short stories and started a novel sometime after that. And I think there were two novels that didn’t go anywhere—and thank heavens they never saw the light of day—before I wrote Expendable, which was published in ’97.
And so now we’re up to how many novels?
Ten, eleven. I guess it’s eleven now.
Are you still writing a lot of short fiction?
Off and on. I can write novels for two or three hours a day, at least the first early drafts of novels, and that gives…so I write in the morning, and in the afternoon, I want to write something different. So, I sometimes write short fiction. Sometimes I write the gaming material that you mentioned in my biography. Sometimes I do freelance editing jobs for various people. So, afternoons I have several hours when I do something besides the novel in progress, and short stories are one of the things I do then.
Okay, well, that’s kind of getting us into the process part of this of the podcast, which is what I’m going to focus on next. So, let’s move on to that. So, we’re gonna focus on All Those Explosions were Someone Else’s Fault, just as an example of your creative process, and see how that ties in with the way you write everything, but before we do that…I have not finished the book; very much enjoying it, it’s a lot of fun…
Thank you!
So, perhaps you can give a synopsis for those who have not read it, without giving away anything that I haven’t read yet.
Ok. Well, the setup is that in the early 1980s, vampires, werewolves, demons, et cetera, come out of the closet and basically say, “Why have we been keeping ourselves secret? We have a saleable asset here. You want to be one of us, pay us $10 million and we’ll make you a vampire or a werewolf or a demon.” And within twenty years, all the movers and shakers, or the wealthy, influential people, are basically darklings. So…and then in the year 2000, suddenly superheroes start appearing. And so you’ve got this world where the rich one percent are essentially monsters and the ninety-nine percent are protected by the people who were stupid enough to touch the glowing meteor or fall in the vat of weird chemicals, or were just, you know, born as mutants. And so, the background setup is the dark one percent versus the super ninety-nine percent, or the supers who represent the ninety-nine percent, who protect them.
And then the story follows four science students at the University of Waterloo who get into a weird lab accident and gain superpowers and become involved in the shenanigans that were responsible for the lab accident. And a supervillain is part of it all, and a cabal of darklings who are up to no good, and the whole thing takes place in something like nine hours on the night of the winter solstice.
And it’s a humorous novel.
Yes, it is. It’s done for laughs. It could…the setup could get very dire with horrible people running the world, but I like playing it for laughs, and the four characters who get superpowers are all funny in their various ways. The first book is about Kim, who is a geology student who…queer—non-binary, anyway…who has a wry view of the world. The second centers on Jules, who is a wonderful, incautious, brash person, and the plan is for four novels, one on each of the superheroes, having them go through their big life change. I think that a novel should be about a huge moment in a character’s life, and each of the four heroes…I mean, “Hey, you’ve just become super. What does that do to you?” And for each of them, it kind of brings to the fore something that they haven’t dealt with, baggage that they haven’t dealt with. And they’re each going to be forced to confront this stuff that they’ve been ignoring for much of their life and deal with their issues one way or another.
So, what was the seed for this and how does that tie into the way that stories appear for you, in general? I’m trying to avoid saying “Where do you get your ideas?”, but that’s basically the question.
You know, I don’t…the seed was the idea of the superheroes-versus-darkling type things, and the one percent versus the ninety-nine percent, which was relevant at the time I started writing this. You know, it was…the Occupy movement had been taking place. I mean, that’s where I get the one percent versus the ninety-nine percent. And it was a time when the politics of the whole thing was kind of in your face.
And I had also done a lot of roleplaying in various contexts. So, if people are familiar with the White Wolf games, which later became Onyx Path, or were…Onyx Path started writing for the same game lines…you could be a vampire or a werewolf or some other type of creature of the night. And that was one set of roleplaying that I had done, but I’d also done a lot of superhero roleplaying.
And putting them together, as far as I know, had never been done before, but was a really cool idea. As soon as I had the idea, I Googled like mad to see if there was anything like this out there, and there wasn’t. Urban fantasy was big at that point. Superhero fiction was just starting to become more prevalent. One of the things that interests me is that superhero comics have been around for eighty years, but superheroes in prose fiction really hadn’t been done a lot before, say, fifteen years ago? There were a few novelizations of superhero movies, but until…fan fiction for sure and the Marvel superhero movies came out…there hadn’t been a lot of superheroes in prose fiction, but that kind of opened up and now there’s a whole ton of it.
Well, it is an interesting juxtaposition. Certainly, I’ve never encountered the two things put together like that, so it’s very interesting.
Yeah, I hadn’t seen it before. I still haven’t seen it. So, it’s kind of fun to be able to play with that without too much competition.
Now, that’s how this came about. Is that fairly typical of your story generation. Is it basically just ideas bubble up and bounce into each other?
I think I go back to what I said about stories being about some huge pivotal moment in a character’s life. So, whatever the seed for a story is, the next thing I want to know is what character is going to experience the setup and what sort of transition are they going to go through. So, often I think of some dramatic situation, some sort of ticking bomb that is going to cause trouble in some setting. But then immediately I say, “OK, well, what character is going to face this problem and what is it going to put them in?” When I was…you told me ahead of time that we were going to be talking about All Those Explosions, and I went back through my notes, and…on the book as I was developing it…and it’s constantly, “What problem is this going to cause for the characters and what sort of transitions are they going to go through because of it?”
Well, and that’s the very next question. What does your planning process look like once you had this idea? It sounds like the characters come perhaps even before you have the plot worked out?
Absolutely. So, it’s useful to have some sort of background problem that is going to force the characters to act—a ticking bomb, so that even if the characters are, you know, lost, or I’m lost because I don’t know what happens next, there’s going to be some pressure to deal with the situation. But I think a novel is about an overt exterior situation, but it also has to be about a character facing some sort of crisis in their life, so constantly, when I develop things, I’m thinking, “OK, what is this going to put the character through? What is the next thing? How are the screws going to tighten on the character?” Not just in terms of the urgency of the external situation, but the development of the internal situation, too.
So, how do you find those characters? How do you decide what your characters are going to be? I mean, Kim is, in her own words, I believe, a “short, queer Asian kid.”
Yeah.
Which, you know, is not you. So…
That’s right.
How did you decide?
Really…so, the first time I…the first draft…Kim was Asian, but not queer. And, she…the situation…so, for people who haven’t read the book, one of the first things she does is, she comes across an old flame of hers, someone she knew in high school. Really, her first serious boyfriend, who has become a darkling, who was always a rich kid who knew he was going to be a darkling as soon as he was old enough to be transformed. And that relationship went bad, and basically, the…Kim was a bland character who didn’t have a whole lot of personality. And one thing I often do when I’m trying to get a handle on characters, especially when trying to get a handle on personality, is sit down and improv stuff in their tone of voice—just sit at the typewriter…or the computer, of course, these days…and write a diatribe from them as fast as I can and see what just pops out. So, this is Mitchell’s messy method again, just sitting down and blast it out and see what pops out. And Kim’s queerness came from that. I was blasting away, basically a monologue, and it just completely took me by surprise when she started talking about, “No, I’m not as binary as you think,” sort of thing.
And there were several days there when I thought, “Oh, shit. Am I going to actually write a non-binary character?”, you know, a straight middle-aged white guy writing a queer young university-age Asian. Did I have the nerve to do that, and how much homework would I have to do in order to not be that guy writing someone who I had no right to write? But that’s what was…that was the voice that came to me, and eventually I said, “Yeah, OK, I’ve got to go with this.”
Well, she is a very interesting voice.
Yeah. Yeah. And once I had that handle on the character, a whole lot of things came out and the character came alive, and some of the situations that were dead on the page in the first draft took on a whole different character and really much more interesting resonance than they had been in the first draft.
Did you do something similar with your other main characters?
Yeah. So, Nicholas had the same process. I did, you know, a soliloquy from his point of view, and not so much with the other three superheroes, because I knew their books were going to be coming along later. When I did the Jules book, which is They Promised Me the Gun Wasn’t Loaded, the sequel to All Those Explosions, I did do soliloquies from her point of view. And for the future books, I will be doing the same thing. It’s just a really useful way to unlock what inhibitions have been keeping…holding me back from doing, going as far as I need to for a character.
Once you’ve developed the character, you have an idea for the setup, how much of an outline or planning do you do? Is it a very detailed? Are you a pantser or a plotter?
I’m mostly a pantser, but especially because I’m writing superhero things, I want there to be some great set pieces. So, I plan for interesting places where big superhero action can take place. So, in All Those Explosions, there are several big superhero-vs.-monster action things, and I figured out where they were going to take place and sort of some context for why they were happening, and an overarching plot for them.
So, in All Those Explosions…well, Waterloo has a number of tourist attractions and I want, over the course of the series, to destroy them all. So, in the first book, I trash the Waterloo market, which is the St. Jacob’s Market, which is a big farmer’s market. In the second one, I trash a popular club, the Transylvania Club, which is just, you know, a name like that is asking to be associated with monsters. And the third one, Waterloo has a clay and glass gallery, the National Clay and Glass Gallery.
Oooh!
I mean, I got to have a fight there. And Clay and Glass is right next to the Perimeter Institute, which is an institute of theoretical physics, a kind of a world-class physics research center. So, trashing both the Clay and Glass and Perimeter is kind of a gimme. And I don’t know what I’m going to trash for the final book, but we’ll see.
There is some fun to that. The last book in my young adult series, The Shards of Excalibur, the final big climactic battle takes place at a provincial park called Cannington Manor. I do a pretty good job on it, too.
Yeah, I mean, if you’re going to take a place…if you’re going to have your story take place in a real location, then let’s make use of the location. And especially with, you know, if you’re going to have superheroes, there is going to be a large set of smoking rubble.
And I still remember the Jim Butcher, I don’t remember which book it was, in the Dresden Files, where Sue the Tyrannosaurus comes to life.
Yeah, a super thing. I just loved that episode. Yeah, I don’t remember which book it was, but…
So, you talked a little bit about your actual writing process, you know, three hours in the morning and work on other things in the afternoon. Do you just work at home, are you a go-out-to-a-coffee-shop guy? I gather you type and don’t do it longhand or anything like that…
Oh, I do some things in longhand. If a particular scene is not working out well, I go longhand and I write it out. I’m working right now on a haunted-house novel, and this morning I spent writing really the first scene of a particular character, because I really wanted to slow down and cover the bases and really get the character’s voice down on the page. So, when I want to…writing fast is useful, but writing slow is also useful.
Well, then, speaking of that, are you a fast writer or a slow writer when you average the two things together?
I’m not superfast. I can I usually do about a thousand words a day. So, you know, some people do a lot more than that, several thousand words a day, and I’ve done that, but usually, a thousand is good. And that’s for my morning stuff. In the afternoon. I would do maybe the same amount again, depending on whether I’m writing new stuff or revising old stuff.
When you get to the end, you have a draft, have you done sort of rolling revisions, so it’s pretty clean at that point, or do you go back and do a complete rewrite, or how does that work for you?
I do some rolling revisions, but usually I have to go back and do several more drafts. So, as I say, I’m mostly a pantser for the first draft, which means that there’s rough-around-the-edges stuff. So, the haunted-house novel, which is the one I’m thinking of, the rough draft ending was really, “Yeah, OK, I’m gonna keep writing it, but I doubt that I’m going to keep any of it.” The second draft is pretty good. I like the action of the ending, except that the precipitating incident…so, there’s something that makes all hell break loose, and I like the hell that breaks loose, but I’m not so crazy about what actually kicks things off. So, I’m going to at least have to rewrite that again, which will probably necessitate a few other changes. So, I’m refining things as I go along and I hope it’s no more than three drafts, but…that’s about typical for what I’m doing.
You’ve been published by various publishers, which means you’ve worked with a lot of different editors. What typically comes back to you from editors to work on? If anything.
I don’t get a whole lot of structural stuff. It’s mostly cosmetic or, you know, “I didn’t understand this,” or, “This chapter is slow,” or something like that. So, I don’t get…once or twice. I’ve had people, an editor, say, “No, this ending just doesn’t work.” But mostly it’s, “I didn’t understand their motivation for doing this,” or, you know, “Polish up this section again.” So, I’m pretty lucky, in that I want a story to be as clean as possible before I send it to my agent. And she makes a few comments, but not many, and then she sends it off. So, I like things being pretty good to go before I send them out, which means I have to spend a fair length of time…I don’t send out anything that I don’t think is pretty good already.
Now, you do some editing for other people. Do you find that working on other people’s manuscripts helps you when it comes time to look at your own?
Oh, sure. It’s much easier to see problems when other people have them, but I know I have the same thing, so…and, you know, we all have words that we overuse—“really,” “quite,” “very,” all that. And as I’m reading somebody else’s stuff…I have a list of these words that I overuse, and reading somebody else’s stuff, I, you know. “Oh, yeah. There’s one of mine that I should pay attention to, too.”
Speaking of which, brilliant little thing from Brandon Sanderson that I recently heard about in their Writing Excuses podcast is to, you know, you have your list of words that you overuse or, you know…”suddenly,” there’s another one that is real easy to use too much of…just do a global replace on the word with brackets around it, square brackets, and that makes it stand out. So, when you’re reading the book, reading the manuscript, you see these things and you could say, “Do I really need that?” It really draws your attention to the words that you overuse and gets you…makes you think about them again. I really love that technique and I use it now.
Oh, yeah. That’s a good one. I think I’ll have to adopt that, too.
Yeah. Yeah. It just draws your attention to something. Sometimes “very” is a perfectly good word to use, and a lot of times the prose is stronger by crossing it out, by deleting it.
I find that my characters tend to use animal noises too much in dialogue, they growl things and snarl things and…
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s a good point.
I do avoid hissed dialogue because it always bothers me when somebody hisses something that has no sibilance in it.
Generally speaking, I only let myself use “said,” “told,” “replied,” “shouted,” “whispered,” maybe a “muttered” or two…oh, and “asked.” But I do try to avoid the animal noises and so on.
Yeah, I’m aware of it, but that doesn’t mean I catch it all the time. The other thing is…you’ve probably had this experience, too…the best way to find things that you overlooked is to read your work out loud in front of an audience after it’s been published.
Yeah. Yeah. Zadie Smith has a quote, something to the effect of, “The best time to rewrite your stuff is two years after it’s been published and ten minutes before you read it at a literary festival.”
That’s about right. Well, we’ve got about ten minutes left, so I want to get to the big philosophical questions.
Sure.
It’s really one question with multiple parts. Why do you write? Why do you write this stuff? And why do you think any of us do? That’s really three questions. But it’s kind of one.
Oh, well, just like almost every other writer I write because I can’t not write. These days I get up in the morning and write, and I write to understand what’s in my head and to…because I like writing stories.
Why do I write something in particular? Because something about the idea has got its claws in me, and the only way to get free of it is to write it and write it well. So, this…again, the haunted-house story that I’m thinking of was an idea I had probably two and a half years ago. And I had no idea why I wanted to write a haunted-house story, and it’s taken me two years to crystallize what I want to say in the book and why I’m writing it.
I think…writers, as you know, sit alone for hours at a time. And what we write today will not be seen in the world for a long, long time. It’s, you know…it takes me at least a year to write a novel, often more, and after it’s written, it’ll take at least another year before it gets out for anyone to…before it gets published…and so you really have to be obsessed and in the moment to write. There has to be some sort of reward or compulsion to write, because you don’t get the fame and fortune, if ever…
I’m still waiting for that.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, in some sense, we all write to impress someone. Paul Simon said, when someone asked him why he wrote songs, “I write songs to impress girls.” And, you know, there is that aspect…
I went into theater to kiss girls.
Yeah. Yeah. And I certainly started writing to, you know, let’s impress women. But it’s a long time before that happens. I mean, a long time between sitting down to write the sentences today and before anyone is impressed by it. And I am not, you know, making a gazillion dollars or having a gazillion readers. I’d love to. So, you just kind of get the rewards, and every now and then you have a character suddenly come to life, like Kim revealing that she’s queer, and the idea that you…every once in a while, you feel as if you are telling a truth that is out there, as opposed to stuff that you’re just pulling out of your head. And it’s really cool when that happens.
The podcast is called The Worldshapers. Probably a bit grand to talk about shaping the world through fiction, but what do you hope your writing does for the readers who read it? Because you can certainly influence individuals as they read your stories.
Yeah. Well, for All Those Explosions, I wanted to make people laugh, and…
Works for me!
Good, thank you! And to have the fun that I find in superheroes. I started reading superhero comics when I was just a kid. I talked about this at When Words Collide, that my great uncle would buy me one comic book a week when I was seven years old and I bought comic books and I bought superhero comic books. And I do not know anymore any of the people that I knew when I was seven, other than my immediate family, and I still know Batman, I still know Spider-Man, I still know all of those characters that I knew back then. I keep up with them. I don’t know the people anymore, but I know the characters. And so, to be able to write superheroes…not, alas, Marvel and DC superheroes, although, if anybody from Marvel or DC are listening, I’m there, hire me!…but to be able to write superheroes and just have fun with them…I hoped that I could pass on the delight that I get from superheroes to other people, too, and to share in the joy.
And for other books, it’s almost always the same, that I get delight from various types of stories. And so, I want to be part of that conversation, be part of the fun or the delight or the concern or the thrills or the horrors or whatever. It’s such a delight to be a writer and to be part of the conversation.
That’s actually what I always say, that I started writing because I loved the stories that I was experiencing so much, I wanted to be able to create stories that other people would enjoy as much as I enjoyed the ones I’ve been reading. So, that’s probably a very common thing with writers.
Look at fanfic! I think many people get their starts in fanfic, if not actual…these days, you can actually put it in front of the public, but even if you don’t, you write your little stories and show it to your friends and so on. And that’s because whatever you’re doing fanfic of touched something in you and you want to be in that world, you want to have a piece of it, too.
You mentioned what you’re working on, the haunted-house novel, anything else that you’re working on right now?
I’m doing a re-imagining of Sleeping Beauty where nobody is stupid. It’s kind of fun to write a fairy tale with sensible people. There’s a lot of re-imagined fairy tales these days. Naomi Novik immediately comes to mind, but other people have been doing it, too. And it’s fun to write fairy tales which have that feel of depth, mythological depth, folkloric depth, but bring a modern sensibility to them that…there are just some strange things that happen in very tales that are hard to believe, and trying to justify them—or not!—Is fun.
And where can people find you online?
I am…most of my stuff is on Twitter @jamesagard. I do Twitter every day. I also have jamesalangardner.com, which I blog at occasionally. Those are the best places. I do have a Facebook page, which I almost never do anything with, so…
Well, I think that’s about the end of our time. Thanks so much for being a guest on The Worldshapers!
It was great talking to you, Edward. Thanks for having me.
Bursts of Fire, the first in a seven-volume young-adult epic fantasy series, Addicted to Heaven, came out in August from Laksa Media, and will be followed by Flights of Marigolds in 2020.
Susan was the editor for Technicolor Ultra Mall(Edge), a finalist for the Prix Aurora Award in 2013. Strangers Among Us, and The Sum of Us, both of which she edited for Laksa Media, each won the Prix Aurora Award, in 2017 and 2018. The third in Laksa Media’s social issues anthology series, Shades Within Us, was released in 2018 and is nominated for the 2019 Prix Aurora Award.
Susan is also a painter and visual artist whose landscapes have been displayed as part of the Stampede Western Showcase in her hometown of Calgary, Alberta.
The (Lightly Edited) Transcript
Welcome, Susan.
Hello, hello, hello.
Now, we’ve known each other for a few years.
Yes.
Because a science fiction convention in Calgary, which turned into When Words Collide in a roundabout sort of way, was what first started me going over to Calgary on a yearly basis. And I think probably the first time I went, I probably met you. And that’s been a long time ago now.
Probably. Yes, I remember.
Well, I always like to start these by taking guests…I usually say back into the mists of time, which is becoming almost a cliché on the show, but I’m going to say it anyway, because it fits…going back into the mists of time, how did you first become interested in science fiction and fantasy and how did you become interested in writing it? And you know, where did you grow up and all that kind of thing?
Yes. Well, I think the first books I really remember reading, like full novels, were Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan series. My dad, actually, was a big fan…oh, way back in the ‘30s, when they were super popular, and he would go to second-hand bookstores and bring them back from my older brother to read, actually. And so we didn’t necessarily start with Tarzan of the Apes. We started with whatever second-hand book he could find at the store. So, my brother would read them and then he would pass them on to me. So, that’s a huge memory as far as reading is concerned.
But, yeah, I always thought of myself as a writer from the time I was quite small, I think I was in Grade 2, and I wrote a book called Jimmy, the Fish that Couldn’t Swim. That’s the first thing I remember writing. And then, when I was in Grade 7, I used to…I was a very studious person, and I would…I had a big binder with all my subjects in it, and when the teacher was finished teaching, they’d usually give us some time to do some homework. So, I’d sit at the back, I’d get my homework done, and then I had a novel at the back of my binder, and I would just open that up and just work away on that a little bit at a time. So that’s my earliest writing that I can think of.
And did that continue as you went on through high school?
Oh, yeah, yeah. No, I never did stop writing. That’s for sure. I don’t know that it’s something that I pursued professionally for a long time, but I always had a book that I was working on.
Did you share it when you were young readers? Did you share your writing? I always ask that because I think it’s a valuable thing for young writers to do, to let other people read it and get an idea if you’re telling stories that other people will enjoy reading.
Only to a very small degree, maybe a very few close friends. It’s kind of interesting, Even today, like if I’m…I like to go skiing, and I’ll be on the ski lift, and people say, “Oh, well, what do you do?” And I say, “I’m a writer.” And they say, “Oh, yeah, what have you published?”, all this sort of stuff. But they say, “What do you write?” I say, “Science fiction,” and it tends to stop the conversation.
Yes, it does.
Because people don’t have anything to relate to. So, yeah.
Well, and I, of course, live in Regina, Saskatchewan, as you know, but listeners may not necessarily, and our professional football team here is called the Saskatchewan Roughriders, which are the Riders for short. So half the time if I say I’m a writer, people will look at me funny. “Aren’t you a little old to be a football player?” “No, a writer, it’s a wri-TER. So, around here you have to really careful how you pronounce it.
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Well, was it science fiction and fantasy from the start, or were some of your early…well, I guess The Fish that Couldn’t Swim could be considered a fantasy.
I suppose. Yeah, you know I really did enjoy reading the horse stories. So Alec Ramsay, The Black Stallion, was huge, absolutely. I remember one time going to visit my cousin, though. She would read the Tarzan books and she said, “Guess what? Edgar Rice Burroughs also write science fiction. He writes John Carter of Mars!” So, of course, I got into that whole series. A little bit later, I was really interested in Ursula K. LeGuin, you know, the whole Earthsea series, Left Hand of Darkness, some of those books I really enjoyed reading. And I have a really strong memory of first getting involved with Tolkien. Again, it was my older brother who came up with this book, and we had one copy and everybody in our family was reading it, so you had to look right and left to see who had the book, right? And one time he just got so mad at me, he was going out and I knew he was gonna take the book with him, and I grabbed the book and I ran to the local school, the local junior high school that I attended. It had a courtyard that was almost three-quarters blocked off from the street. And I had the book and I was walking around in there and reading it. And he came along and he just glared at me, grabbed the book, and left. He never yelled at me or anything, but I knew I was big trouble.
So, when you got on through high school and university, did you study writing or what did you focus on?
Actually, my first…well, I’ve got a couple of university degrees, but they’re both in education. I was a teacher for many years. I was interested in taking creative writing, but it was quite difficult because the university tended to stream people. If you were in certain fields, there were courses that you couldn’t take in other fields. It was actually after I was teaching for a while that I was able to go back and take a course at the university with Aretha van Herk, it was just an introduction to creative writing. And the way I got into it was kind of funny because it was August, and I wanted to take a course in September, and I went and I got on the website and I signed up, and it looked like a great course to take. And I showed up at the first class, it was an evening course, it was on a Thursday night, and it was absolutely crammed with people. I don’t know, there were like 40 people in this room, which I thought was a little odd. And the teacher, the professor, came in, and she was angry. She said, “Half of you don’t belong here. We vetted the people who were going to come into this course way back in the spring, and the registrar let a whole pile bunch of people in. And there’s only allowed to be a maximum of 16 people in this class, so half of you don’t belong here.” But then she turned around and said, “However, if you have a chapter in your bottom drawer and you send it to me in the next day, I might let somebody in.” And guess what, I had a chapter in the bottom of the drawer. I didn’t know anything, so I went ahead and just sent it in, and she let me in. And I think of those extra 20 people, I was the only person that got into the course. So, yeah.
So, I often ask writers who have taken any sort of formal creative writing whether they ran into a pushback on the genre that they wish to write in. Were you writing something in the speculative fiction genre for that, that chapter that you sent in, or was it something else?
Oh, yes, absolutely. It was a fantasy novel. I always thought of myself as a fantasy novelist, especially before I knew myself better. But I did write a variety of different things while I was in that class, so I was using it as an opportunity to experiment. I learned a lot in that course. I know that…if I can brag just a little bit, I have a daughter who got her Ph.D. in creative writing, and yes, it certainly was her experience that writing in the fantasy and science fiction genres, she did experience that. And I have in other circumstances, as well. But I think the issue for me was I knew so little at that time that I was just a sponge. I was just soaking up every, every possible thing that I could get. I think I wound up with a C on that course, and I really think I deserved it. I think it might even have been generous, I don’t know. But I continued to learn from that course for like two years after I took it, just because I knew so little, and there was so much. And I would go back and I would revisit in my mind and experiment and try new things. So it was a really good course for me.
Well, as I’ve mentioned previously on the podcast, my degree was in journalism. So, I only took one creative writing course in university, and the name of our textbook was actually Three Genres, and I thought, “Oh, wow,” you know, “what is it? Like romance, mystery, and science fiction?” But no, it was plays, short stories, and poetry. And I don’t recall what I wrote for fiction for that—it must have been science fiction or fantasy, because that’s all I wrote, but the one thing I got the highest praise on from the teacher was actually a piece of poetry, which really startled me.
Whoa.
You know, just the fact that you’re writing…because I’d never thought of, you know, writing poetry, but I had to for the course, and it just…those classes and things like that do expose you to different ideas and different writing. Even if they don’t like what you would like to write, you can often learn things from them, I think.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
So when did you start seriously pursuing publication?
Well, way back, actually, a number of years ago, I…although I didn’t belong to any writers’ groups, I would, you know, worry away at my little project—I would work during the day and come home and write at night—and I belonged to the Writers Guild of Alberta. That was a…I mean, the result of that was simply I got a magazine once every three months or something like that. But I would look at the back, and there would be markets listed, and this particular time I was looking Gage Educational Publishing was looking for novels. So, I had a novel, so I sent it off, and that was my first published book. It’s something I don’t tend to talk about very much because I’m really amazed when I look back at that work right now and think, “They published that? Really?” It was really a two-edged sword because on the one hand I now had a published book, so that put me into a whole other category, for all kinds of things. Because it was a young adult book, I’d been working with the Young Writers Conference for a number of years here in Calgary, it meant that I could apply for grants, it meant that I could do all kinds of things because I had a book. The flip side of it is, it’s a terrible book. You know how they say editors do you a great favor when they don’t buy your book that isn’t ready? Yeah, no, that’s a really true thing. So, on the one hand, I’m really glad I got it published. On the other hand, I’m kind of embarrassed by it.
But that was your first one.
That was the first one.
When did the second publication come around, and was it short fiction? Because you started with short fiction before you went back to novels, didn’t you?
Yes, absolutely. Well, a number of things came together. For one thing, I did start to meet other writers, I belonged to writers’ groups—we actually met face to face and critiqued each other’s work—I took a number of workshops, so my writing was really growing. And one of the things that I decided to do was to try short fiction, as I said. I always thought of myself…my image of myself was as a fantasy novelist. So, I didn’t think I could write short fiction. I didn’t think I could write science fiction: all these limitations that I placed on myself. But one of the things I discovered was that I was spending a lot of time at the beginning of long works and I was not learning, I guess, to write a full arc. And I thought, “Let’s work away with short stories and try to write a full arc.” And I would put them on the table for my critiques and they would say, “Yep, that’s Chapter 1 of another novel,” you know? So, definitely I had quite a learning curve as far as writing short stories was concerned, but I pursued and I persisted, and again…I know your mileage may vary and I know other people have found this does not necessarily work for them, but maybe it was because I just happened to belong to a very knowledgeable and supportive writers group, which…I’ll give them a little plug, it’s the Imaginative Fiction Writers Association of Calgary. Very large group. As long as you’re serious about writing, you can join it. You don’t have to be published. So, it goes from rank beginners right up to very well-published writers. Robert J. Sawyer is an honorary member. So, it was a really good place to learn a lot. And one of the things I learned was, when an editor is new to a publication or moves up within a publication to take a stronger editorial role, they may be trying to develop their own stable of authors. And I had a short story that I wanted to submit just about the time that Sheila Williams became editor for Asimov’s Magazine. She didn’t take the first story or even the second story that I submitted to her, but she did take the third story that I submitted to her. And so, that was my burst into what I would call really much more professional writing.
That’s one of the top markets in the field when it comes to short fiction, for sure, that one and Analog and Fantasy and Science Fiction used to be the big three. I mean, there’s a lot more stuff out there now.
Yeah, I’ve never got into F&SF. But my story about getting into Analog was kind of interesting. So, I mentioned that I went to a number of workshops and one of them was…the pro who ran it was Mike Resnick, and, oh, he was really tough on everybody around the table. One of the women, unfortunately…well, she did something that she probably shouldn’t have done. She took out an old trunk piece she hadn’t even looked at and put it on the table. And he kind of gave her a good tongue-lashing. He said. “You have 12 people around this table who have spent time and energy on your work and you didn’t care enough to give us your best.” So, he was pretty tough on us. But one of the things I remember was the absolute look of horror on his face when he looked around the table and he said, this is probably a direct quote, I remember it so well, “You all want to be professional writers and you don’t go to WorldCon?”, you know. So, one of the things that I did start doing was going to international conventions. And, you know, when you have friends like Robert J. Sawyer, who was able to make a few introductions, that really helped.
So, I met Stan from Analog, and I think making that connection maybe made a bit of a difference. But the other thing, too, was just, you know, talking to other writers, people would say, “If you want to get into Analog, try something short and funny.” So, I had sent something in that he called bleak. And then I sent in another one that was full of puns. And he really liked it. He said he laughed out loud, but it wasn’t a piece he thought that his readers would really think of as science fiction. And again, it was the third one that I sent in.
But, I’ll tell you a little story. I also go on a fairly regular basis to the Rainforest Writers’ Retreat in northwest Washington state. And I happened to be there one time, and just in a position to overhear the conversation between two editors, and one of them was saying to the other, “Do you know such and such a writer? Hs she submitted to your magazine?” And the other one said, “Yeah, yeah, she’s pretty good. Have you published anything by her?” “No, no, not yet.” “Well, have you heard anything about her recently?” “No, I haven’t heard anything.” I wonder if she stopped one sale, one story short of a sale. And, you know, it just really struck me that people in the business do know one another and are aware and in some ways, I think, are encouraging new writers…I mean, they have to have the best of the best for their publications…but that that they’re aware and are encouraging. At least, that’s been my experience anyway.
So you would recommend to new writers that they make an effort to get to these conventions and things like that, it sounds like?
Yes. I think…
I mean, it’s a lot of money to go to an international convention.
Oh, it certainly is. And I certainly have to watch which ones I’m able to go to. But, again, Rob Sawyer said something that kind of stuck with me a number of years ago. He said, “Always put your stories into the top markets first. If it gets rejected from there, there are the mid-tier markets and so forth that you can still try.” And his reasoning for this was, he said, “In your mind, you need to think of yourself as at that level,” right? If you think of yourself at that level, then you will write to that level and you will be at that level, which kind of makes sense. So I think the same thing with going to the conventions…by the fact that you attend—you can learn a lot from one thing, you can also meet people, which is helpful—but also, you see yourself at that level. I am a professional. This is what I do.
Well, certainly since those early sales, you’ve racked up a considerable number of short fiction sales. But now we’re going to talk about your novel, which is starting a pretty ambitious project, a seven-volume epic fantasy series.
Yes.
So this…and this still goes back to the short fiction, as well. I mean, I know it’s a cliché, in these sorts of things, to ask, “Where do you get your ideas?” But it is a valid question. I know, ideas are everywhere, but at the same time we all have little things that tend to spark them in us, and spark story ideas. So, first of all…well, first of all, before we do that, let’s get a brief synopsis of Bursts of Fire, the first book. Without spoilers, because I’m only about halfway through it.
Okay. Well, Bursts of Fire, the first book, it’s the story of three sisters. Meg is the eldest…she’s 17 and she’s essentially the protagonist, but the other two sisters are very important as well…they are magic wielders. But they are very highly placed. They’re like princesses. They’ve grown up in a castle, with all of the benefits of that and very little life experience. Their mother is the magic wielder for the king, who has the second-most powerful prayer stone in this fantasy world. Their mother sees a glimpse of the future and she sees that war is coming. She wants to save her daughters. She also wants to save this magical prayer stone, and she wants to save the balance of the world, which is quite healthy at this point. So, yes, their castle is attacked, right away in Chapter 1, and the mother, because she has this bit of premonition, she is able to help her daughters flee. And so, the three daughters flee with their nurse, who is killed almost immediately, and the three sisters are in this world as refugees alone. You were going to say something?
I was going to say I knew the nurse was doomed because you have to get your young protagonists on their own as quickly as possible.
Yeah, exactly. So, they meet…of course, now when something huge like this happens in a world, things don’t stay static. You have people who are going to rise up and say, “Hey, this is wrong. We want to do something about it.” And so, a very nascent rebel group starts to form and the sisters get involved with that. So that’s how the story begins now.
Now, I can go back to the question, what was the seed for this story? Where did that seed come from for you? And is it typical of the way that you come up with story ideas?
You know, it’s been a very interesting process to work on this series, because…I think I heard somebody say this very recently, but I think it’s quite true, that fantasy in particular, I think it tends to take itself very seriously, and a lot of the writing that I had been doing in the fantasy genre, I think, really, I was feeling, “Oh, this is this is dark and getting darker,” and I have a very strong memory. I can’t place the memory in time, but a very strong memory of camping and being in a tent in the morning, waking up, it was so beautiful, it was warm in the tent, the sun was shining through, and just thinking, “Oh, my goodness, what I really want to do is, I want to write a heist romp. I want to do something light, something, just, you know, with maybe even some comic moments and what have you.” And that is actually where the idea came from. I think I had an image of a young female thief climbing up the outside of a castle tower, was kind of the image that I think this whole thing sprang from. And it does happen later in the series. It’s still there. But when I was when I was a teacher, one of the experiences that I was very fortunate to have was to take up a course that was called mini-counselling. It was, like, a three-day course in counselling, because teachers do have to counsel students all the time. And one of the gems that came out of that was, as a counselor, it’s not necessary to talk to a client and say, you know, “What is your deepest, darkest secret that you fear?” You can start anywhere, because whatever is bothering somebody is going to come out in its own good time. And I think that is also true in the writing process, that the themes and the ideas that you yourself are wrestling with may be very sub…you know, you’re not aware of them, they’re in your subconscious, but they’re going to come out in your themes and in your writing anyway. And so, yeah, I wanted to write a really lighthearted heist romp, but no…
I can’t say that’s the way it’s coming out.
No, the book gets into a whole lot of deeper issues because that’s just what’s bubbling up out of my subconscious.
So is that sort of seeing an image, is that a fairly typical way for you to latch on to a story idea? Just something in your mind that’s, “Oh, that would be cool!”
Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think there’s a lot of visualization, for sure, that happens in the early stages of my writing. Yeah, absolutely.
So, as you begin to develop this, what does your…I mean, there’s quite a bit of…a fairly complicated magical thing going on here.
Yes.
And something…I don’t believe I’ve read anything quite like it before. So, was there are a lot of worldbuilding before you even begin plotting, or how did all that planning and synopsizing work for you?
Yeah. Well, I need a lot of people who are pantsers, and I understand that there’s some great advantages to writing by the seat of your pants. A friend of mine once said, “You know, when I’m writing by the seat of my pants, I can surprise myself. And if I can surprise myself, I can surprise the reader.” And, you know, surprise is a wonderful thing to be able to have in your stories, for sure. But I have never been a pantser. I’ve always plotted my stories, right from the very beginning. However, my process is a bit more complex than that, because I do tend to go back and forth in the initial stages between just writing scenes and planning and then writing some more scenes and planning. And I think it’s because I really don’t know enough about my world and I don’t know enough about my characters until I see them in action. So, I have to write some chapters or some scenes before I can really get deep into the planning. On the other hand, I don’t get too deep into the book before I do create a complete of…quite a detailed outline.
And do you follow that outline as you write or does it wander off occasionally?
I tend to follow it fairly closely in the broad strokes. Having said that, you know what? If your story is telling you you need to do something, you need to listen to that because, you know, that’s where the surprise comes from. I remember one time very clearly writing along, and I had two conmen—this was in the same series, it’s a little later on…and one of them said, “All we need is a miracle.” And I thought, “Yeah, that’s perfect.” And then I thought, “OK, now I have to come up with a miracle.” But, you know, as a writer, you have time, because…if you are a performing artist, as you know, because you’re a performing artist, when you’re on stage doing something, whatever comes out of your mouth, well, it’s out of your mouth, whether it’s good, bad, or indifferent, right? As a writer, we do have that to a degree. I mean, eventually there are deadlines, but to a degree, we have the opportunity to go back and rewrite. And if you need a miracle, you can do some research and you can come up with a miracle.
Well, how did you come up with the idea for this particular magic system? Maybe you should explain a little bit about what the magic is like in this book.
This…I’m really enjoying working with this magic system because it’s giving me so many tools to do so much in the books that I really enjoy. For your listeners, I’m sure they’re quite aware that magic systems always have to have a cost. And so, it’s important that the magic system does not allow your magic wielder to just do anything in the world. There have to be limitations. The magic is based on the manipulation of time. So, the people who have this ability can hold an object still in time, so it doesn’t move as the timestream moves around it, or they can take it back in time, or they can take it forward in time. But usually, just a very small object, maybe, I dunno, something the size of a pea is about all they can do. So, they can’t just take the entire world and stop it in time.
But also, let me just give an example, which is right away in the early part of the book, these three girls are trying to escape the city. The gate is locked. They’re able to find a time when that lock was open, and then they walk through the gate. So, it works in these very small ways. The cost of the magic is that once you have used magic, you have disturbed the timestream, and that therefore you live bits and pieces of your own life out of order. There’s no way of knowing how that’s going to happen. It’s quite random. You may suddenly find yourself at a time in your past, but only for a few seconds. Or you may find yourself at a time in your future, but again, only for a few seconds. And that is really important, because take, for instance, the fact that the three girls mother knows something bad is gonna happen, but she doesn’t know what, she doesn’t know when. So, she’s preparing for her girls to get out of the city, but the bad thing happens before the preparations are complete because she doesn’t know when. So it allows for a little bit more adventure, a little bit more, you know, surprise.
One of the things that you sometimes find in fantasy novels that I find quite irritating is the prophecy. Prophecies are very problematic. Either the prophecy is right, in which case it’s kind of boring because you’ve got the prophecy and then you get the adventure, and they’re the same, so there’s no surprise, or the prophecy is wrong, in which case it wasn’t a very good prophecy. So, people tend to write prophecies in very cryptic language that could be interpreted in a whole lot of different ways, which in my mind…I just find it kind of irritating.
It’s like, if you’re a prophet, why can’t you be clear?
Yeah, exactly. So, the advantage to this is that we can see bits and pieces of the future, just not enough to tell what the whole story is. So, you can get that foreshadowing, you can you can get the tool to use to help you to a degree, but without giving away the whole story.
So, once you actually start writing, what does your writing process look? Like, do you write longhand on a parchment out under the stars? How does it work for you?
Does anybody really? Maybe some people do. No, I’m very much…I think through my fingers. In fact, sometimes, you know, I might be helping somebody with something else, and I’ll say, “Just let me write this,” and then I’ll know what I want to say and then tell it to them. You know, I can really think through my fingers on the keyboard. I do tend to be a…I’ve planned it, I’m going to start with scene one, chapter one, and work my way through. But recently, I have been experimenting a little bit more with quilting. So, you’ve heard of writing by the seat of your pants or pantsing, planning, and then quilting is where you write a theme or chapter, and it could fit anywhere in the book or it may not be in the book at all. And then you string your quilted scenes together with the other scenes that you require. And I have been experimenting with that a little bit for a couple of reasons. One is, I love to ride on the back of my husband’s motorcycle, and especially on the winding, twisty roads, it’s like riding a roller coaster. It’s tons of fun. But, you know, not all riding on the motorcycle is hills and curves. Some of it is straight boring highway for hours at a stretch. And we don’t have the means to talk to each other in our helmets, so what I do is, I get a tape recorder and I’ve got a lovely little tiny microphone that I can stuff inside my helmet, and of course have to stuff a lot of padding in there so I don’t get any road noise, and I can write all usually about four scenes in a day of motorcycle riding, which is about 4,000 words. And you know what? If you go on a 10-day motorcycle trip, you can get a chunk of your book done that way.
Well, you’re the first person I’ve talked to that writes on the back of a motorcycle. That’s a new one.
So, what I do is, I know what’s in the scene because I made the plan, I write a little point-form note that maybe has three or four things that I want to occur in this scene, and then I dictate the scene. When I get…you know, if we stay in a hotel, usually by the end of the day, my husband’s really tired because he did all the work, so he’ll have a nap, and then I can get out the tape recorder and I transcribe onto my iPad—you have to carry very small equipment on a motorcycle—and then, I usually just transcribe and I need to do it right away, because sometimes, you know, with the road noise, it’s hard to get some of the words.
I was going to ask you about that, yeah.
There’s no way I would ever try to use Dragon on a motorcycle ‘cause I would get complete gobbledygook. So, I transcribe it right away and maybe do a little bit of editing at that point. But because of this method, I need to be very clear in my mind about the scene that I’m doing. So I pick, like, the best scenes. I pick the most active ones, or the ones with the greatest interpersonal conflict, or the ones that are clearest in my mind, which means that the ones that are still a bit fuzzy in my head, those are the ones that I really need to have that focus and concentration to do my initial drafts.
Well, once you got this all assembled, and you have your first draft, what is your revision process look like? Do you go back to the very beginning and rewrite the whole thing? Or, by the time, you get to the end, have you sort of rewritten as you go along and it’s pretty much done.
Lots of times, there are going to be problems somewhere in the book. Usually multiple places in the book. So, my first go to is going to probably just be a complete read-through to see, “How is this whole thing hanging together?” And you know, the low-hanging fruit, capturing those things that are really obvious. I do a number of edits. I’m not…I think I do actually a fairly clean first draft, but…like, something that I’m dictating, for instance, is not gonna be a very clean first draft. It’s going to be…have all kinds of problems with it. So I revise, revise, revise, revise. And I’m looking for story arcs, I’m looking for character arcs, I’m looking for interweaving the worldbuilding. And worldbuilding is so important because it’s way more than just the physical description, right? It’s the technological development, it’s the social development, the attitudes of people toward everything that’s going on, that you never have—and this is a truism—an entire group that thinks the same way, there are going to be people who disagree within a group. So, ensuring that that layering in that complexity is in? And then, finally, of course, you do have to look at the words and the sentences and making it the best it can be.
And this is where I wanted to talk about your editing career. Because you…how did you get started editing other people, and how does your experience as an editor play into editing your own stuff?
Oh, it has been absolutely amazing. It is one of the best things that I ever could have done. I had…oh, I’m guessing, 20 years of critiquing other people’s works, because I’ve belonged to a couple of…three or four…different critique groups at different times. So, I got lots of practice with that. Between giving critiques and receiving critiques, you learn a lot, and you learn so much by critiquing other people’s work. Lots of times what you do yourself, the mistakes you make yourself, you can’t see them until you see them in somebody else’s work. So that was a, I think, a really solid basis. And then, when I stopped teaching, I was actually approached by Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing to edit for them. So, I edited, in total, three novels for them, one of which was nominated for the Prix Aurora Award, so I was really happy about that. And then, I also became a freelance editor as well. And then, when was it, I guess four or five years ago, when Laksa Media first got started, again, I was invited to edit for them. And that was a bit of a daunting experience because…I remember being at World Fantasy Convention one year and sitting with a bunch of editors at a table at various stages and saying, “I’m starting on this new project, the publisher has invited some really high-level authors, and it’s just making me a bit nervous.” And the advice I got back was, “The bigger the author, the more professional and the easier they are to work with.” And, you know, that was absolutely true. I have to say, I can remember one particular story I edited where the author was really busy with a deadline, and so we got the story a little bit late. And I went through it and I thought, “Oh, this is a really good story, but it’s got a couple of plot holes.” And I really didn’t want to write the letter saying, “Can you fix this and this?” But I did. And the author got back to me and said, “I’ve done all the things you wanted. Have a look.” I looked at it. Not only had this author done all the things I wanted, but way more. And it was an amazing story and I felt so good about it. But the best part was I ran into that author at a convention later, who said to me that that really appreciated my editing. And, oh, I was thrilled.
Well, it’s something that, and, you know, I do a lot of editing, too, and I find the same thing, that editing other people’s stuff and mentoring other writers and all that stuff that I do feeds right back into my own writing, and I start to see things that maybe I wouldn’t see if it weren’t for the fact that I’m seeing it in other people’s stuff.
Oh, absolutely.
I think it is very useful. Well, OK, so now you’ve done your revisions. You’re actually an editor at Laksa Media, but presumably you’re not your own editor.
No, no, no. It’s unfortunate that it’s…it’s a little bit incestuous that way. I did start working as an editor with Laksa Media first, but I did have this novel that I was working on. And Lucas Law…for people who don’t know, Laksa Media is very small. So, it was Lucas law. And he said to me, “I’m interested in your novel, and can we talk about it?” We talked about it, actually, for at least a full year, probably closer to a year and a half, before we finally said, “Yeah, this novel would fit with Laksa Media.” And here’s something that I found really interesting. I found Lucas to be an excellent editor for my work, but one of the things he said early on that was really huge was he said, “I enjoy your story. I think you’ve got something here that we can work with, but Laksa Media has its niche. It is into social causes.” So, the first anthology they put out, Strangers Among Us, was about mental health and mental illness. The second one, The Sum of Us, was about caregivers and caregiving. The third one was about migrations, Shades Within Us. And so, he said, “What is the social cause that your book is really dealing with?” And it was interesting, because that was not something I had thought about up until that point. But, as you say, you know, what you’re wrestling with in your subconscious comes out, and I just took one look at him and I said, “Addictions.” That’s exactly what it’s dealing with. And as soon as he asked me that question, I knew the answer.
Now, having said that, sometimes thematic threads that are nascent that are in the book, but kind of bubbling under the surface, then you want to go back with your edit and say, “Okay, how am I developing this? What is it that I have to say and how is it coming through?” So, for instance, as you mentioned earlier, this is a seven-book series, and the topic of addictions is absolutely huge, which is a wonderful, wonderful way that these things work together, because Bursts of Fire is dealing…exactly like the title says. It’s first tastes. It’s a YA take on a novel. The girls are 17, 16 and 11, and they are out in this world where they have never seen or heard any of the stuff that’s going on around them. So, they get first taste of all kinds of different things, including spells that are…in our world the analogue would be like drugs…that give them all sorts of mystical experiences, as well as, you know, healing spells and curses and all of these sorts of things. So, they’re getting first tastes of alcohol, first case of love, all of these bursts of fire that are happening around them. So, that’s book one. Book two deals with interdependence…codependents, that’s what I’m trying to say. Codependents and enabling. Book three deals with the social conditions that may underlie why certain groups may become more at risk for addictions than other groups. One of the later books deals with Prohibition. You know, there’s issues of recovery and relapse. There’s seven books. You can you can really dig your teeth into a whole lot of different aspects of the theme.
Should probably say, though, that although those are the themes, it’s still a heck of an adventure story.
Yes, that’s primary. And that’s really important, because nobody wants to read a book that’s a) a downer. “Oh, my goodness, addictions, da-da-duh-da,” right? But b) you know, hitting you over the head with, “You should do this or you should do that,” or, you know, whatever. So, it is the thematic content, but there…it’s an epic saga. It is…it’s dealing with war and sword sorcery and magic and, you know, the fantasy.
How detailed is your plot for the entire series? Do you have, like, the future books get sort of a paragraph and you’ll figure that out later as you get there, or is it all figured out to great detail already?
Book two was submitted, so it’s completely written. Book three is completely plotted out and I’d say 85 to 90 percent written. I know it doesn’t come out until 2021, but it’s really nice to be ahead of the curve. The other thing is, by working further into the books, down the series, that makes sure that I can have the proper seeds planted in the earlier books. Books four, five and six, all have some writing in them. All are relatively plotted out, but in broad strokes—more than a paragraph, but still fairly broad strokes—and book seven is planned, and I know how the series ends, it’s definitely ending with book seven, but I haven’t done any of the writing on book seven yet.
Well, we’re getting close to our time being up—not that there’s exactly a firm deadline on these things. It’s not like it’s a live radio show—but this is the point where I ask the big philosophical questions, or question, which is basically, why do you write, first of all, and why do you write science fiction and fantasy, second of all, specifically. And I guess, why do you think any of us write this crazy stuff?
I think that there is a lot to be said for…you know, my initial idea, the fantasy heist romp, you know, just the fun book. I think there’s a lot to be said for that. But I don’t think we ever even write a very light book without some of that thematic stuff percolating away underneath. I think it always happens even if we’re not in control of it. But more important, I think all art is a type of leadership within our culture and within our society. If you look at politics, for instance, political leaders in a democracy need to satisfy the masses or they’re not going to get re-elected, right? The masses, on the other hand, feel kind of powerless because they’ll say, “Well, the leaders are deciding everything.” So I think you’ve got this kind of loop going back and forth between the electorate and the politicians. But where does change come from? It comes from the discourse. The major discourse will determine what both groups are going to pursue. And it is the artist who can influence the discourse. It is the artist who brings up new ideas, who brings up arguments, of ways of thinking, and gets people talking.
And I’ll give you an example of this. I think that for many, many, many years…okay, I’m in Alberta, right? Oh, my goodness. we love our oil in Alberta. If there’s going to be any kind of a development project, oh, yeah, maybe there are some hoops to jump through, but it’s going to go through. You know it’s gonna go through, right? In recent years, the assurance of that has been wavering. It’s not necessarily for sure anymore that these big mega-dams are going to go through. And it’s because the discourse is changing. It’s because other voices are coming forward and saying, “Hey, you know, we need to pay attention to climate change. We need to pay attention to the farmland that’s gonna be flooded by that dam.” And those voices are coming forward, and now the major discourse is starting to shift. So, our voices coming forward…and I think artists are a key component of that.
I guess that kind of answers the other question I often ask, which is, because this program is called The Worldshapers, if you think…I mean, shaping the world is perhaps a bit grand, but if you are at least shaping the way that individuals think about things in your writing, and is that something you hope you are accomplishing, that you hope that you’re having some impact on the way individuals think about the world and everything. Life, the universe, and everything.
Life, the universe, and everything. Yes, absolutely. I think that is the purpose and function of art, and as writers, we are artists, and I think it’s important to be aware of and in control, as much as we can, of the thematic elements that we’re putting forward. But at the same time, the story is primary. I mean, you may have ideas that you need, that you want to bring forward, but, yeah, that is always the under-layer, that is always something that just percolates up. It’s story that has to be first and foremost.
And you’ve said something about things percolating up, whether you know they’re there or not. And there is a story…I’ve told it before, but I always like to, that Isaac Asimov put in his Opus 100, I think, one of his autobiographical books, how he had gone to a university class in science fiction at some university—it would been in New York since he barely traveled—and he heard the professor talking about his story “Nightfall.” And he sat at the back and he listened to him going on about it, then at the end, he went up the professor and he said, “That was a very interesting class, but, you know, I’m Isaac Asimov and I wrote that story and I didn’t put any of that stuff in there.” And the professor said, “Well, I’m very glad to meet you, but just because you wrote the story, what makes you think you know what’s in it?”
You know what? I had heard that story, but I did not realize it was Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall.”
Yeah, definitely “Nightfall,” and I think it’s in Opus 100.
Yeah. Oh, I learned something new. That’s cool.
So, what are you working on next? I think I know the answer to that—it’s probably the next book in this series—but are there other things as well?
Yes. Absolutely. Actually I’m really excited about a book project that I’ve got on the go. One reason I’m kind of glad to be already at book three in this series is because I think, over the winter, if there’s not too many edits, I’ve got still a year and a half before it’s due, I’m working on one that is a World War Two fantasy, and it’s kind of a mystery thriller as well. The magical element is a character who can step outside of his body for brief periods to see and hear things without being seen and heard. So he would make a great spy, right? Except that he’s had some bad experiences and he is in hiding. He’s living on a small farm in rural Alberta. And I’m doing tons of research on rural Alberta in the 1940s, it’s really interesting. The book is actually from his wife’s point of view, and he gets kidnapped and she does not know where he’s gone. So, it is her journey to find and rescue her husband, it does take her over to Europe, but also to find and learn about magic. And it also deals with disabilities and mental illness. Now, I don’t have a publisher for this book. It’s not even written. But I’m really excited about working on it.
Are you still writing short fiction?
You know what? I wish I was. I have, like, one short fiction story that is out circulating right now, and I really should be doing more short fiction. But yeah, no, I’m just so busy with so many other things, I have not been getting to it this year. Maybe it’ll come up in the winter. Maybe I’ll get something done this winter.
And you’re still doing freelance editing as well?
Yes. Yeah. All of the above. And teaching at the Alexandra Writers Center.
All right. Good stuff. And so thanks so much for being a guest on The Worldshapers. I enjoyed it. I hope you did, too.
Thank you
And I’m sure I’ll see you in…probably in Calgary at When Words Collide next year, if not before.
Yep. And I’m going to see you in Ottawa this fall.
Oh, you’re gonna be a Can*Con for the Auroras, so I’ll see you there. Because, of course, this podcast is also nominated for an Aurora this year.
Yeah, good luck.
Yeah. Looking forward to that. And my editor, Sheila Gilbert from DAW Books, will be there again this year. So that’ll be great as well. All right, so I’ll let you go now. Thanks again for being a guest.
Lisa Kessler is a bestselling author of dark paranormal fiction. She’s a two-time San Diego Book Award winner for best published fantasy/sci-fi/ horror and best published romance. Her books have also won the PRISM Award, the National Excellence in Romance Fiction Award, the HOTE Medallion Award of Merit, and an International Digital Award for Best Paranormal. Her short stories have been published in print anthologies and magazines, and her vampire story, “Immortal Beloved,” was a finalist for a Bram Stoker Award. When she’s not writing. Lisa is a professional vocalist and has performed with San Diego Opera as well as other musical theatre companies in San Diego.
The (Lightly Edited) Transcript
Welcome to The Worldshapers, Lisa.
Thank you. I’m glad to be here.
Now, I usually start the show by talking about how we know each other. This is kind of a different one, because basically I know you because I was on your show, so…
Right. Yeah. You’ve been on Book Lights a couple of times and we always have such a great time. Plus, we have the musical background. So, I feel like we already know each other so well.
We will talk a little bit about Book Lights a little later on, too, so you get a chance to talk about that….I think I hear cats in the background.
Yes, sorry. My cat never comes in here, but she just decided to come in and be on the radio. So sorry about that.
It’s quite all right. Mine’s asleep somewhere or he might join in as well.
He’ll hear the other cat, and they’ll have a conversation.
I think it was my second interview, with John Scalzi, there were cats in the background. So, it’s kind of a Worldshapers tradition, so…
Oh, well, good. Maybe my cat knew that, and I wasn’t aware.
He’s probably a long-time listener. Well, we’ll start by taking you back…I always say this, and it’s kind of appropriate, considering the book that we’re going to be focusing on, Pirate’s Passion…take you back into the mists of time, but perhaps quite not as far back as the 18th century, to find out when you became…well, first of all, where you were born and where you grew up and then how you became interested in writing and specifically in writing tales of the paranormal and the fantastic.
Well, it’s kind of an interesting story because it’s sort of paranormal and I promise that it’s true. I grew up in San Diego, and after I graduated high school, I got into our family business–we made hospital window blinds–and so I travelled a lot for trade shows. And one of those trade shows took me to New Orleans. And some background. I sang opera and musical theatre, music was my focal point, but I always wrote for fun. And I was madly in love with Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, but anyone who was a fan back in the ’90s, it took a year and a half for another book to come out. And way back in the day of the Internet, when there were…remember net groups and things like that?…there was an Anne Rice one, and I met some other women there, and we started our own Yahoo! group to write our own vampires while we would wait for the next vampire book. So I probably did that…I would write every night my own vampires just for fun, probably for like eight years. I never thought about publishing anything.
But I had a trade show in New Orleans. And so, since I was in New Orleans, I had to get my palm read. And the palm reader gave me the reading and it seemed pretty right on. And then as we were leaving, she stopped me at the door and said, “Can I ask you something?” And I said, “Sure.” And she said, “Are you a writer?” And I said, “No, I sell window shades.” And then I thought about it and I said, “Well, I write for fun every night.” And she smiled and said, “You’re gonna be a famous writer someday.” And I was like, “What?” And my brain would not let it go. And by the time I got back to the airport, I had written out a plot outline for my first book, Night Walker, which was Mayan vampires in San Diego. Very cool book, but it took me a really long time to get that published. But I wrote it in six months, and I had no idea that all those years I had been practicing.
I got to meet Ray Bradbury a couple times before he passed away, and he always believed that you had to write somewhere around 800,000 words of crap before you became a storyteller. And I never knew that that was what I was doing. I filled up a whole hard drive with text documents of my vampires and never with any inkling that I would publish it. If I hadn’t seen that palm reader, I don’t know that I ever would have gotten that nudge to try and get published.
And then I wrote short stories—that was where “Immortal Beloved” came from—because I thought, “I’m not sure I’m a good writer. I’ve just been writing for fun.” So, I wrote a bunch of short stories and I got five of them published in publications and I thought, “OK, so I’m not horrible,” And I went on from there. But without that palm reader in New Orleans, I…it just wasn’t on my radar. I was so busy singing and working. The writing was just for fun. So, she really changed the course of my life that day unexpectedly. It was very, very strange. And now I write full time. So, who knew?
So you said that you’ve always written. Did you actually start as a kid? I know many of us writers do start whenever we’re quite young. Did you start way back then?
Yeah, I did. I did write when I was a kid, but I never thought I was going to be a writer. I wrote my first book in sixth grade. They actually bound and published it for me in the school library. And thankfully, when they re-did the school library, somebody on the school board found me and brought my book back. It was called The Wonders of Unicorn Creek. It was all of like twenty pages, but that was my first book.
I thought you were going to say, “Fortunately, they threw it out when they re-did the library,” but…
Mo, I got that wonderful book back. But I never…I always wrote, but I didn’t have that, you know, I just never realized I was going to be a novelist. That was never on my radar until New Orleans.
So, when did the music come in?
Music has always been my first love. That was…my dad was a musician, and as soon as I got to junior high, I was in choir and I had all the solos and in high school and right out of high school, I was taking private voice lessons and getting in San Diego Comic Opera and Lyric Opera and stuff like that. It was just, music has always been my first love and passion, and I still have a church job, so I still do sing every week. And that was really where my focus was. And I wrote…but during all of that, I was writing every night. I was building good skills for becoming a writer without any idea that I was ever gonna be one. So it’s very, very odd.
So, you mentioned that you started with short stories. Where was “Immortal Beloved” published? It was one it was a finalist for Bram Stoker Award. Where did it fall in there? Was it like your fifth one or was it an earlier wonder? And what was it about? Because I’m not familiar with the story.
Oh, OK. “Immortal Beloved” was…I was trying to write some short stories that I could try to get published to see…because I really had no concept if I was a good storyteller or not. But I had had the idea about…because I’m very musical, I had the idea about Beethoven, and nobody has figured out, you know, who his “immortal beloved” was, and I was really into writing vampires. So I thought, “What if Beethoven’s immortal beloved really was immortal, and what if it had to be a secret because he was a man?” And so, anyway, the story takes place today, but the vampire is hearing a child prodigy playing the “Moonlight Sonata” and he’s wondering if it’s Beethoven. It’s a really cool story. And I wrote it as an experiment. I wrote it while I was listening to the “Moonlight Sonata” over and over. And it really has, like ,three different acts. And so, the story kind of follows that same kind of structure. And it got…it’s been republished quite a few times. It’s in an anthology that’s out right now called…I’ll have to look it up, I can’t remember what…Dead Souls, that’s what it’s called. It’s a paperback anthology called Dead Souls, and it’s reprinted in that right now. But it was a fabulous experiment. And the story came out really well. I was really proud of it. I did my research and I felt like at the end, maybe Beethoven was in love with a male vampire.
Well, there was a whole movie called Immortal Beloved, of course, which did not have a vampire but was also dealing with that question of exactly who the immortal beloved was.
And somebody recently, they found some DNA or something, I don’t know, but I saw it pop up again recently and they still don’t know. But they think they’re closer to figuring it out. I don’t know. It’s a great mystery, though.
So, talking about “Immortal Beloved,” and I’m also going to get into your research, because obviously there was some involved there, when we talk about the book. So, why don’t we start talking about the book? Now, you’ve written a lot of books. How many series do you have at this point?
I have five series so far. Three of them are finished and I’m currently writing two others, The Sedona Pack and also the one we’re going to be talking about, The Sentinels of Savannah.
The Sentinels of Savannah, and the first book is called Pirate’s Passion, which I read. So, why don’t you give a synopsis of it so that I don’t give away something that shouldn’t be given away?
Okay. Well, there’s actually a novella that’s like the prequel just to get you into the whole world. But basically, there is a pirate crew that sank outside of Savannah over 200 years ago, in the 1700s. But the thing was that their final plunder was supposed to be the world’s greatest treasure. But when they took over the ship, all they found was a wooden cup that seemed to always have water in it. And so, they all drank from this without realizing that they had taken a sip from the Holy Grail. So, all of these men are still alive. They’re now immortal. And so, most of them still live in Savannah and now they have regular jobs. They have made a replica of their ship so that they can still sail. And their captain is still pirating, but he’s pirating in real estate.
And so, anyway, I made this special division of the government, Department 13, who deals with paranormal threats to American citizens. And because they’re the government, they have to…there’s laws, and they can’t steal, but he meets up with the immortal pirate crew and gives them the option of stealing now for the government. So they are going back to some of their piracy ways and also helping America. So, it is really wild and fun series to write so far.
And it is, of course, a romance, as well as paranormal, paranormal romance, kind of right there in the title. So who is the romance between?
So, in Pirate’s Passion, the romance is between the ship’s pilot, do the guy who steers the ship, and a historian who works for the Maritime Museum in Savannah, Dr. Charlotte Sinclair. And she has some secrets of her own. It was a wild adventure of a book to write. And the thing is, when you’re writing romance with these big paranormal elements, it’s really hard to balance the two. because you want the romance readers to get that happy-ever-after that they want, but when you have paranormal elements, a lot of times the stakes are gigantic. You know, the world could end, there’s lots of death and all that kind of thing. So, for me, it’s always a fun juggling act to keep it even, so that the romance is achieved, but we also get a really fun adventure with lots of danger. For me as a writer, I need lots of danger. When my kids were younger and at home still, they who see me sitting at the computer chomping on gum, going, “No, the story is stalled. What’s happening?”, and I had taught my daughter, “Well, it’s time to raise the body count,” because nothing gets things moving like a dead body. So anyway, a lot of people die in my books, as well. But balancing the romance with that is always a challenge. Bu in this book, it was it was not so difficult because the hero and heroine had a lot of spark instantly, which is always fun for me.
Yeah. I was going to ask you about that element of it, because I haven’t read…you know, I’ve read a lot of urban fantasy and I’ve read a lot of paranormal stories, but not paranormal romance, and certainly that balance is different than if it were just an urban fantasy.
Right.
You know, in an urban fantasy, you might have a romantic subplot, but it’s not quite as front and centre as the romance is in Pirate’s Passion. And, of course, there’s also the difference in the cover art.
Right, definitely. Yes. If you’re writing paranormal romance, the market is that there’s some kind of man chest on there, man chest and some kind of fog. And that’s what makes readers go, “Oh, it’s paranormal.” But, yeah, in urban fantasy, there’s almost always a big romance, you know, subplot going on. But in urban fantasy, there doesn’t have to be a happily ever after, and in romance that’s the deal you’re making with the reader. So, like, if it’s a mystery, the deal with the reader is that you will solve the crime by the end of the book, and the deal with the romance is that there will be a happily ever after, somehow. You may not know how that’s going to happen, but somehow there will be a happily ever after at the end. And so it does make it tricky, because if you don’t meet that, the readers are really disappointed. And in urban fantasy, you’ve got a little more wiggle little room, because you can have happy for now, you can have that they break up at the end. But there’s another book, so maybe they’ll get back together, you know? Like Sookie in the Sookie Stackhouse books, you know, she had many happy-for-nows with all different people. So, you have a little…more options there.
You couldn’t do that in a paranormal romance because the reader is expecting a happily ever after. So, in a paranormal romance series you’ll usually see some kind of band of brothers, you know, like this one has a pirate crew, because although all those characters will be in every book, I need a different character to be able to get his happily ever after. And that’s why werewolf shifters and things like that work really well in paranormal romance because you have a whole pack, and each one gets to be the hero of a book.
Does paranormal romance draw in readers from the more regular fantasy side and also draw in readers from the romance side that might not otherwise venture into that territory? Is it like a place where they come together? Ecumenical, sort of?
Yeah, I think so. I think so. I think paranormal romance is like a gateway drug to fantasy for romance readers because they get that taste of the worldbuilding and, you know, the worldbuilding and those super high stakes. You know, the world could end, you know, a city be destroyed or something like that, and it’s a whole new thing because other…there’s lots of genres of romance, historical, contemporary, romantic suspense. Romantic suspense can sometimes have super high stakes also. But the fantasy elements are all in paranormal romance. So, if a romance reader who maybe typically reads historicals stumbles across a time-travel or a paranormal romance or something like that, that can be their first experience sometimes with that kind of genre and can lead them toward, you know, urban fantasy and maybe even high fantasy.
To be fair to the cover art with the “man chest”…
Yes.
There was, of course…for a long time, urban fantasy seemed to be distinguished by the bare midriff of the female protagonist.
Exactly. Exactly. And urban fantasy, for a long time, it had to be the female protagonist, she had to be in black leather and high-heeled boots. And it’s like, if you read the book, the, you know, the women are, like, kicking ass, and I’m sure it wasn’t in high-heel boots. But that was what needed to be on the cover. But all of that is really like marketing and bookstore…you know, what people are expecting, I think. I don’t know who came up with what those need to be, but they sure stick.
Now, we’re using Pirate’s Passion as an example of your creative process. So, where did the idea…I know that’s a cliché, “Where do your ideas come from?”, nevertheless… where did the idea, or the seed, that grew into Pirate’s Passion come from, and is that typical of the way that your ideas come to you?
Well, actually, it was really neat. I got invited to be part of an anthology for the Romantic Times. Romantic Times was a magazine that would have the Book Lovers’ Convention, a national convention, where people came from all over the world. Lots of Australian readers would come to that one, and they wanted…it was happening in Atlanta, and so they called it Moonshine and Magnolias. And they wanted…they picked twenty romance authors, of all different genres of romance, to write a novella that was set in the south. And they needed…and the only requirement was it had to include Atlanta. And I’ve been to Atlanta, and it’s not like my most favourite city, but my grandmother and her family were all from Savannah. And I love Savannah. I’ve been there before. It’s very haunted city. It’s just, it’s so gorgeous and so much history. And so, I thought about Savannah. If I set it in Savannah, I could put the bad guy in Atlanta. And then I’m thinking about it, and I’ve been to Savannah before, and Savannah is all ghosts and pirates. It was a big pirate hub back in the day. You can go The Pirates’ Inn restaurant. It used to be a bar back then, but it is still there. And you can go inside, and they will show you the pirate tunnels that are still there, where they would get…they would get you so drunk that you would pass out and they would drag you through the tunnels onto a ship. And when you wake up out in the ocean, they’re like, “Well, you’re our ship’s doctor now.” So, anyway, you can still see those in Savannah. And when you walk along River Street, you know, they have all the pirate stuff. And so anyway, I thought, “Well, if I wrote a pirate book, but I don’t want it to be historical, I want it to be now, how can I make these pirates immortal?” And then I thought about the Holy Grail and I thought, “Ah, that could work.” And the whole thing came together.
And when I wrote the novella for that event, my agent wanted to read it, and so I sent it to her, and she wrote me back, she goes, “I forgot to eat lunch, I was reading this, and please tell me the whole crew is gonna get a book and let me sell this series.” And I was like, “Okay.” So, anyway, I started working on, you know, what the crew stories would be so that I could give her a series synopsis. And she sold the whole series. So, I’m writing…I’m finishing book four right now. And then there will be four more. There’s eight books altogether.
So….that’s kind of an unusual way for a series to come about…
Right?
…where have some of your others come from? You know, images, characters, settings, what kind of gets you going?
Ray Bradbury
My other series came from short stories that I wrote. When I…the first time I met Ray Bradbury, I had only, I had written my first book. I had written Night Walker, the palm reader told me, you know, “You’re going to be a writer.” Well, I was new, so I didn’t realize how many rejections you get. Oh, my gosh. And I would get so close with an agent and then they would go, “On second read, we’re just not sure, but we’ll be excited to see it on the shelves.” And I’m like, “What? You think it’s gonna get published and you won’t represent me?” It was very frustrating. And I was working for a literary paper in San Diego, and we did an interview with Ray, and part of the perk was that he was going to come down and speak in San Diego and we were all going to get to meet him. So I was beside myself. And so, when I finally got to meet him, I asked, I told him, I had written a book and I’m getting a lot of rejections, what can I do to improve my writing? Because I was sure it must be me. And I thought he would recommend a book, and instead he told me, “Write a new short story every week for a year.” He said, “By the end of the year, you will be a new writer.” And since I had already sold short stories and I knew you didn’t make very much money off of them, I thought, “I don’t know.” It took me a few weeks to decide, “Okay, this is Ray Bradbury. He knows what he’s talking about. I’m going to do this.”
And I wrote the first one, and I ended up having so much fun I wrote a short story every week for a year and a half. So, I have I have over 120 short stories and a few of them just stick with you. And one of them ended up being the first chapter of Moonlight, which was the first book in my Moon Series, which is still my most popular series to date, but the first chapter was that short story, and when I wrote it, I couldn’t let the idea go. So, I wrote that book and the second book in that series while I was writing a short story every week. So, it was the best thing I ever did. Ray Bradbury is a genius and was totally right.
My Muse Chronicles series came from one of my short stories, as well. I wrote a short story called Unemployed Muses Anonymous, and it was that the Muses were still here, because they were daughters of Zeus, so they’re immortal, and they were living in New York and they were all unemployed. And each of them, their personalities were coloured by what their muse was. So, the Muse of Tragic Poetry was a pessimist and the Muse of Dance couldn’t stop wiggling, and anyway, it was a really fun short story to write, but I couldn’t let the idea go that it would be really cool to have this group of women in today’s world who maybe, when they turn eighteen, realize that, you know, they’re the vessel for this muse. And so, anyway, that series was the most incredible writing experience I’ve ever had. It was just amazing, those books, and the way the whole series turned out wasn’t anything like I expected. It was really very inspired. So, I had planned six books, but in the book where I was supposed to kill off one of the muses, it turned out that wasn’t going to happen, there was a new hero who came on the scene and he was not going to let her die, and I called my cover artist and said, “I’m super sorry, but we’re going to have one more book.” So, there actually were seven books in that series. But it was all from that short story. So that, really, those inspire me a lot.
Ok, so that just takes it back one more step, though. If you’re writing a short story every week, you’re having to come up with a lot of ideas every week. So how are you generating those?
Yes, that was the hardest part of writing a new short story every week. Oh, my gosh. So, sometimes I would be so desperate that I would go look at odd news. If you go to like Yahoo! News and CNN, there’s, way in the corner, there’s “Odd.” And if you click on it, it’s bizarre stories of things that have happened. And so, I found a lot of short story ideas that way, and I learned so much doing it, because…you need a story idea. So, you go, and you find this story about a rogue wave. I’m like, “What the heck’s a rogue wave?” And then I go look on YouTube and I’m, “Wow, those are terrifying.” So anyway, I did all this research and now they think that the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald in the Great Lakes, they didn’t know, because we didn’t have cell phone videos and things back then, but rogue waves happen on the Great Lakes. And so now there have been ships where they have video of these rogue waves coming on the Great Lakes, and they think that’s what split the Edmund Fitzgerald. So, anyway, so I wrote a shipwreck story.
And I read about this strange hailstorm in Death Valley that basically took out all the power, and it was so strong that they closed the highway, and so I wrote a sci-fi story about that it was really aliens, and all this kind of thing. So, I found a lot of things looking at weird news.
I was so desperate, sometimes I would look at songs that I like and see if I could come up with a story to go with the song. Sometimes, the ideas just showed up and I was like, “Thank you!” Sometimes I wrote spinoff stories from other stories. The other thing, too, that was fun was I tried to challenge myself to write stories I never thought that I would, just see if I could. So, I wrote…I’m not a big sci-fi reader, but I wrote, like, five sci-fi stories. And I wrote one about a gunslinger, I was like, “Oh, my gosh. Who knew?” But it was a great experiment because you learn to research faster, you learn to get ideas faster, you write faster, you edit faster. I mean, in the beginning, it would take me an entire week to write and edit the short story, and by the end of my year, I could sit down Sunday afternoon with an idea (finally!) and then write the whole thing, edit it, and have it up by midnight, because I was so much faster by then. So, it really was a great thing for my tool kit, as a writer, to keep your brain going and coming up with ideas and writing them down and not picking it apart so much. You know, get the whole idea down and then edit it. And I feel like learning beginning, middle, end, it all works for writing novels because each chapter is, you know, similar to and has that same flow as a short story.
Is this something you recommend to other writers, to beginning writers who are looking to up their game?
Definitely. Definitely. I used to…I’ve been too busy now, so I haven’t done it…but I mentored five writers through it, and they all wrote a new short story every week for a year. And it was the coolest thing. I mean, most people would drop out partway through. It’s really hard. It’s a marathon. But five of them finished. And it was so exciting to see. And we would make it, Sunday night was deadline night, and they all would post their stories, and I would give everybody feedback on their stories and encourage them for next week, and all that kind of stuff, and to see five of them finish, and they were so much better by the end of the year, it was really inspiring. So, I hope that eventually I’ll be able to do that again, because it’s really hard to do it on your own, and I think having a group, the little bit of peer pressure and all, it really helped. They were all cheering each other on, and it was it was a great experience.
When I did it, I did it alone, but I had a blog—this was back in MySpace days—and so for fun, I was just writing my story and I made Sunday night deadline night and I would have put it up on my blog on MySpace. And I didn’t realize at the time, but I was building a readership before I ever had a book come out. I had, I think, over 6,000 subscribers to that MySpace blog who were waiting for the free story every week. And I met Ray Garton, who is a horror master, Grand Horror Master winner and everything, I met him through that. He had stumbled across one of my stories on my blog, and he messaged me and said, “You can write! That was great. What are you doing?” And I got to meet him at Book Expo, and he gave me reference when I was looking for an agent, and all of that just happened because I was writing a new short story every week and putting it up on my blog. And it did get to be a little bit of peer pressure, because the subscribers were waiting on Sunday night, so I felt like it had to go up.
But having that group where I was, you know, cheering these writers on, it was really exciting, and they got so much better. We would compare at the end their first story with their last story, and it was amazing. Ray is right. It’s the best way to improve your writing, for sure.
Well, coming back to Pirate’s Passion, and all of your novels, once you have that idea, what does your planning and outlining process look like? Do you do a detailed outline or are you more of a make-it-up-as-you-go-and-worry-about-it-later, or how does it work for you?
Yeah, yeah. I’m a big time pantser, unfortunately. Sometimes I look at my plotting friends and I’m like, “Dang it, I wish I knew what was happening next.” But the flip side of that is for me, writing can be magical, because cool things happen that I never thought of, and they’re always so much better than what I had thought was going to happen. And so…I always feel like…Ray Bradbury used to talk about that there’s, like, a superconscious up there that wants stories told, and when…he used to think that when you get a story idea, it’s downloading in your head and it’s your job to, like, dictate that, you know, follow the story and let it spill out. You don’t get to direct it, kind of thing. And I feel like by letting myself not have a big outline, it gives me the freedom to let the story go where the story needs to go.
And there are times where I’m like, “I don’t know, this is way off…” Like, in The Muse Chronicles when I’m suddenly going, “Oh, my gosh, I have to add a book.” But it was the right thing to do for that series, and I loved that book. It was great. So, that was all good. But had I been so pinned in by my series outline, and my book outline, you know, I would have just gone, “Sorry, she has to die.”
And, you know, as a writer, for me, part of the fun is the discovery. And so, I try not to pen it in. I mean, for my publisher, they do need a series outline, so I come up with who the hero and heroine will be and sort of what the adventure will be. In the pirate series it’s, you know, which relic are we going to go after of each time, and that kind of thing. But beyond that, I leave it wide open so that I can discover it as I go. And a lot of times, character growth, too, because your characters change as events happen. And so, as a pantser, I’m constantly asking, “what if” and “why?” You know, “So, what if this happened? And why did they react like that?” And that is how the story unfolds for me, that’s my process. And, “How can I make it worse?” I’m always asking, you know, “What, if this happened, why did they react like this, and how can I make it worse?” Well, it’s Savannah, it should rain. So, for me, that’s my process.
I found when I was doing the short stories, I tried plotting for a few of them because I was doing it as an exercise to try new things, and the three stories that I tried plotting, I never finished the story, and I realized that for my writing process, if it’s already basically written, I have no impulse to put it together. I feel like it’s already done. It’s already, you know, it turns into a term paper instead of a creative experience. So, I don’t I don’t do a big outlining, even though sometimes I get stuck and I’m like, “What’s going to happen now?” And I look at my friend across the table who has notecards and she knows what’s happening, like, “Dang it!” So, you know, it all comes down to how your writer brain is fixed up, and I think there’s pluses and minuses to both, but you’ve got to go with what works for you in the end.
What does your actual writing process look like? Are you sitting in a home office a certain number of hours a day? Do you go out to coffee shops? Do you sit under a tree with a notebook and a quill pen? How do you write?
I don’t write by hand. I have to type. But I have a writing chair at home, so I usually write a little bit at home. Panera is my office away from home, and a lot of times…I have some local friends who are writers, too, so a lot of times they’ll come meet me at Panera and we’ll all write. And that’s always fun, because when you start to get stuck, if you see everyone else is writing, you’re like, “Okay, I got to keep right. I’ll come up with something.” So, that’s fun as well.
I am not an every-day…I know there are some people who say you have to write every single day, and I am not like that. Because I don’t plot. I write two chapters at a time and then I go back and edit those two chapters, because the only way I can be fearless is if I can promise myself that if I took a wrong turn, I’m only going to lose two chapters. So, I write two chapters and then I edit those two chapters, and so, it makes my book go a little bit slower, but in the end, I can turn in my first…my first draft is clean, so I turn those in. So, it works for me. It just makes that first draft…it takes a little bit longer than somebody who can just, you know, put it all out there and then rewrite. I’m not a rewrite, so… But for me, because I don’t have an outline, it’s too scary to write the whole book, and the thought of a rewrite gives me hives, so I do two chapters and then I go back and edit. So there may be, you know, where I write three days and then I edit for two, and then I write for three and I edit for two, and then, you know, I might be busy, so I’m doing something else. And sometimes I have deadlines overlap, and so when I get edits back for a book, I have to set aside the one I’m writing because my brain will not compartmentalize like that. I have friends who can write one book in the morning and edit a different book at night, and I can’t. So, when I get edits, I might have to set the book aside and do the edits on the other book and then go back. So I think…I think I lost my thread, but that’s basically my writing process.
Well, you kind of answered the next question, which I normally ask, which is about the revision process, but it sounds like you do essentially a rolling revision, two chapters at time, so that when you have that draft at the end, it’s actually a finished draft, not just a rough draft that you’re going to go back through from the beginning.
Yes.
I wanted to ask you a little bit about your theatre background, because I’ve talked to other authors who have theatre backgrounds, like Orson Scott Card, for example, who’s written multiple musicals and directed plays and things like that. And from my own experience, I want to see if you find this as well. There’s a usefulness to being a stage performer when it comes to keeping track of where people are in relationship to each other and how they interact with each other within a space. That’s what I find. And of course, I also find that being an actor ties directly into being a writer because it’s basically the same thing: you’re pretending to be somebody else and trying to make that person come alive. Is that your experience?
Definitely. And being, you know, with a musical theatre background and opera and all that kind of thing, music plays into it a lot. Like, I build playlists for my books before I even start writing, because when I get that, when I’m going to start a new book, I usually know kind of what the theme of the book is going to be. So, I look for music, movie soundtracks, classical music, even songs with words, I have those on there, too, that will back up, you know, who I think the hero is, the heroine is, the, you know, plot things, that kind of stuff. And I think if you come from a music and acting background, I think that you are able to blend those arts together to make your words, you know…to inspire your words, I guess, is what I’m trying to say. But, yeah, I definitely feel like having that background helps my helps my writing very much.
And, just speaking for myself, my current book, Master of the World, and the one before that, Worldshaper, my character likes musical theatre, so I get to make musical theatre jokes throughout the book, so that’s fun.
Oh, I love it.
Now, you mentioned then, there is still some editing, some maybe not rewriting, but what sorts of things do you find yourself editing afterwards? And I presume this is after it’s been to your editor and it comes back for comment.
Well, and I forgot to mention this, too, I do have beta readers, I have a team of four beta readers, and they read my two chapters at the same time as I’m writing the book because I like to get their feedback as far as…you know, one of them is really good at catching typos, that even after editing, I missed, I’m like, “What?” But there are a couple of them who are really good at character motivations, and they’ll tell me, “Oh, I hate that guy!” and I’ll go, “Good. You’re supposed to hate that guy,” you know, but they give me their feedback, and a couple of times it has been really helpful because, like, one of them said, “He seemed like he would have been angrier. He would have been angrier at that.” And she was right, and so I boosted that up.
So, a lot of times when I get my edits back from my editor, it’s things that I thought were clear that really aren’t clear on the page. I have a writer friend, Mary Leo, who…my favourite saying that she has is, “You don’t get to travel with your book to explain it.” And that is so true. So, sometimes, you know, and I’m sure you’ve had this experience, too, where it seems totally clear to me, you know, why he did that, but it’s because I know the character inside and out and sometimes I don’t get enough detail on the page so that, you know, the editor’s like, “Well, he seems like a jerk here.” And I’m going, “Oh, because I didn’t…” And sometimes…I know I’m a rusher when I write, I’m always wanting to get to the next good part, so I leave out details. Like, one time I had an editor note somebody had gone to urgent care with a stab wound, and I had things happening with this other character, and then suddenly a nurse came in and the editor’s like, “Whoa, there’s a nurse? When did they get into urgent care? What’s happening?” And I was like, “Oh, maybe I should have them get out of the car and walk inside.” But I was so excited to get to the next part that I completely missed getting out of the car and getting…you know. So. usually when I get my edits back, it’s things like that. Like, it was clear in my head, but I didn’t necessarily get that on the page.
And when you’re writing romance, too, a lot of times the editors will look for beats in the book that they think are coming too soon. You know, they said, “I love you” too soon. And sometimes it’s the right thing for the book, and that’s OK. But, you know, they’re looking for things like that, pacing and that kind of thing. But usually…I’ve never had to do a rewrite, thank God, but usually it’s stuff like that.
Well, we’re getting fairly close to the end of the time here, so I wanted to, first of all, before I ask you my big philosophical questions, I wanted to ask you about your program, Book Lights, and how did that come about, and what is that about? I mean, I know, I’ve been on it, but you tell us what it’s all about.
Yeah, well, Sheila English owns Circle of Seven Productions and she makes fabulous book trailers. If you’ve ever seen a commercial on cable TV for a Christine Feehan book, that was Sheila English, she makes those. She is a huge book lover, and she’s also now a published author herself, and she founded Readers’ Entertainment Radio and they have two shows, Readers’ Entertainment and Book Lights. So there’s two shows a week that we do. And, I had been on both of those shows as an author and Sheila sent out one of her newsletters, and I noticed at the bottom she said that she was looking for another host for Book Lights, “So if you know anyone, please send them my way.” So, I emailed her and I said, “Well, I would do it,” And she said, “Really?” And I said, “Oh, I love talking to writers. That would be super fun.”
So, anyway, she had me jump in and try, and I have had such a blast. I’ve been so lucky to talk to so many different writers. And I talk to them from every genre. I’ve had horror authors on and women’s fiction authors on and romance and fantasy and sci-fi. And I never get tired of, you know, hearing from all these different writers from different places. I’ve had people from England and Greece and, of course, Canada. And it’s just, it’s fascinating to me, you know, how people write books and the cool ideas that they come up with for them, where I’m like, “Wow, I never would have thought of that.” And so, it’s a really fun show, and it is not pointed at, you know, we always talk about the author’s new release at the beginning, but it devolves into what we’re all interested in and what TV shows we should binge and all this kind of thing. So, I feel like for readers, it’s a very reader-focused show. It’s readers who are listening. So, I feel like at the end the readers really get to know that author much better. And I hope if it’s a new author to them that they’ll be willing to take a chance on that new book because they’ll be going, “Oh my God, that author watches all the shows I do. And, oh my God, they ride horses and we have a horse ranch!”, you know? So, hopefully…my goal is always that hopefully new readers find new authors, because as an author myself, we’re constantly looking for new readers to fall in love with our series and go and read our backlist and all that kind of thing. So Book Lights is a really good forum for that.
Well, and The Worldshapers, of course, came about because I wanted to talk to authors about writing and so, yeah, authors are generally very interesting people to talk to you.
Yeah, I think so, too.
Now, that does bring us back to the big philosophical questions I’d like to, sort of, wrap up with. It’s really one question, which is, “Why do you write?” with subsidiary questions of, “Why do any of us write?” and, specifically, “Why do you write tales of the fantastic?”
Oh, wow. That is a philosophical question. Well, I think that writing, especially these days, is more important than ever, fiction writing, because fiction…stories have been around since human beings have been around, you know, there’s cave paintings of stories. And I think that Ray is probably not wrong, there’s a superconscious that that needs stories to be told and songs to be written and all these kind of things. And so, I feel like, when you get a reader email from somebody who says, “Thank you so much, I love your books when I’m going for dialysis and it takes me away while I’m going through this,” or somebody who has lost a loved one and they write you an email that this book, you know, gave them welcome relief from all this grief right now that they’re going through and that kind of thing… I think that books also teach us to empathize with people who are very different than we are. Obviously, I am not an immortal pirate, but writing this series…
Spoiler!
Really, I know, right? Spoiler alert. But writing this series, I really dig into the question of what would it do to you if the world around you is constantly changing and you are not? And each character, I get a different facet of that. Because it affects each of them differently. And so I learn.
And I think that fiction teaches us to empathize and learn about people, as opposed to a historical event. You know, it’s not like a textbook. When you go on a story and you go on a hero’s journey and you see people change, it reinforces to you that you can change. You can be anybody you want to be. If this person could do it, you can do it, you know, kind of thing. And I think that there is a magic in that. And so, I think that writing is important, and I feel like when I get these story ideas that they need to come out because they’re going to serve some kind of purpose that I may not even know. But they need to be told. So, we do.
Well, this is…The Worldshapers, of course, again, is the name of this podcast, and that is something you’ve kind of touched on there that I like to ask is if, you know, do you hope that your fiction is…changing the world might be a little grand, or even shaping the world might be a little grand, but at least shaping readers in some fashion and having some sort of impact on them?
Yeah. Definitely. I hope that, if nothing else, it provides an escape from, you know, something that they need a break from. And also, I hope that through the books…there is always, especially in in romance, there’s always a character arc where they’re changed by the end of the book. And I think that that’s powerful. And I hope that that helps people understand, too, and empowers them that you can change you. You know, if you don’t like who you are today or you don’t like how your life is today, it doesn’t have to stay that way. You have that power to change that. And in romance, you know, it’s the powerful emotion of love and how that changes you. But in all fiction, you know, there’s always this change, and I think that that is important. And I hope that my books help people see that that’s possible.
I wrote a novella called “Night Angel,” which…I bawled so much writing that book, but I hadn’t planned on writing it, because this character had been, he was immortal, but he had been like so damaged that he’s a shapeshifter and he shapeshifts into this big hawk, and he can’t fly anymore because part of his arm was ripped off. And, you know, he lives forever and he heals, but he doesn’t regenerate like a lizard, so… So, I wasn’t going to write his book, but readers kept asking if he was going to get a happy-ever-after. And I’m like, “Oh, my God.” But that novella was so powerful to me as a writer because I learned and I…when I was in high school, I used to be a teacher’s aide for the deaf classroom, and so I learned sign language and all this kind of thing. And so, I made the human character, she was deaf from…there was a bombing in Ireland, and so she was deaf. And he crosses paths with her and learns from her that you’re not less, you’re just different. You’re not, you know…handicapped, I think, is this label that makes people feel like they’re less. And you’re not, you’re just different. And she taught him that. And that was such a powerful thing that I learned writing that book. And so, anyway, I do hope that readers come away with a new, maybe even just a new empathy for other people around them and in their life.
Well, I think what’s interesting is that fiction doesn’t just change readers, it changes the writers as well. We all discover things, as we’re writing these stories, about ourselves and about the way we look at the world that maybe we didn’t know going into that story. Do you find that your experience?
Exactly. Yes, definitely. And that’s part of the love of writing. You know, we do all this research and then we throw it into a story, and you put them in situations, and you realize, “Oh, my gosh,” you know, and you learn, too. So, yeah, it definitely changes you, some books more than others. But, yeah, it’s an amazing process, and as human beings, we’re so lucky that we get to do it.
And hey, we can even bring that to a musical theatre quotation because of course, in The King and I, there’s that line about, “If you become a teacher, by your students you are taught.”
So, yes, exactly. That was great.
If you’re an author, by your characters you are taught.
Yes. We definitely learn from our art, for sure.
Well, and that brings us to the end of the time. So, where do people find you online, should they wish to do so? And I’m sure they do.
My Web site is lisa-kessler.com. And I’m also on Facebook and Twitter. I’m easy to find, just Lisa Kessler, writer. And I’m also on Goodreads and Pinterest. Pinterest is really fun. I put up pictures from scenes of every book I write because I use it while I’m writing. But if you’ve read any of my books and you want to see if you were picturing people the same way I was, you can go to Pinterest. It’s pinteres.com/ldydisney, and find me there also. And I do have an author newsletter, you can sign up on Facebook or on my Web site. And I often give away free short stories, free sneak peeks into books that aren’t out yet, so there’s always something fun in there. And I’m also a Tarot card reader, so every month you’ll get a Tarot card for the month with a little reading with it. So, sign up for the newsletter, too.
And what are you working on next?
I’m finishing Pirate’s Persuasion next. And then I will be going back to the wolf pack to write Sedona Seduction. So, that’ll be fun.
All right. Well, thanks again for being a guest on The Worldshapers. I had a great time. Hope you did, too.
I did. Thank you for having me on.
And maybe I’ll be talking to you on your program again sometime. You never know.
Right? When you get that next book out, you know where to find me.
His stories have twice received the Nebula Award, given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, in addition to the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, the Locus Award, and the James Tiptree Jr. Award. His play Faust Feathers won the Paul Green Playwrights Prize, and his story “A Clean Escape” was adapted as an episode of the ABC TV series Masters of Science Fiction. In 2009, his story Pride and Prometheus, on which the novel was based, received both the Nebula Award and the Shirley Jackson Award. With James Patrick Kelly, he has edited five anthologies of stories revisiting contemporary short SF, most recently Digital Rapture: The Singularity Anthology.
Born in Buffalo, New York, Kessel holds a B.A. in Physics and English and a Ph.D. in American Literature. He helped found and served as the first director of the MFA program in creative writing at North Carolina State University, where he has taught since 1982. He and his wife, the novelist Therese Anne Fowler, live and work in Raleigh, North Carolina.
The (Lightly Edited) Transcript
So, welcome to The Worldshapers, John.
Thank you. Glad to be here.
Now, we’ve never met in person, but the way you ended up on this show…I’ve been aware of your name for a long time, obviously, with your record, and being in the field, but I’d never run across you at a convention or anything like that. But Christopher Ruocchio, who was a guest on the program a little while ago, was one of your students, and he mentioned your name. And I thought, “You know, I should have him on.”
Well, I’m glad you had him on. You know, Christopher seems to be well-launched now with his first novel. I guess the second novel in that series is coming out, is that right?
Yeah. Just came out. And he’s a fellow DAW Books author, so I’d met him at a DAW dinner at WorldCon last year. That’s how we made that connection. In this field, you know, you sort of, you know somebody, then they know somebody…everybody’s connected
Even though it’s much bigger than it was when I started, it’s still a fairly small pond, and you will run into people, and everyone eventually knows everyone else in some connection.
Yep.. Well, we’ll start the way I always start, which is by taking you back into the mists of time to find out how you became interested in science fiction and fantasy and specifically in writing it. Most of us, it starts with reading as kids. Is that how it worked out for you?
Pretty much, yes. I was reading science fiction and fantasy…really from, it seems like, from the beginning. I cannot remember the first book I ever read that was science fiction. There were children’s books–and I was born a long time ago, I was born in 1950, so we’re talking, you know, late ’50s, early ’60s, I was definitely already hooked on science fiction and fantasy. I liked fairy tales an awful lot, and then I somehow, you know, I went to the library and got books from the science fiction section of the library.
And back then, they had…a number of publishers had fairly serious attempts to write, publish, YA science fiction, and Robert Heinlein wrote a series of juvenile novels that I really snapped up. And also André Norton, who was Alice Mary Norton, wrote a whole series of YA science fiction novels that I loved. It was quite a shock to me when I discovered that Andre Norton was a woman. It was years later. And then around…I think it was 1963 exactly…I pretty much know exactly when it was…I was at my grandfather’s house on a Sunday, and I had had my library book there and I finished it and I had nothing else to read, and I was bored, and I asked if I could go down the block–this was in Buffalo, New York–to see if I could buy some comic books. And they said, “okay,” and so I walked down to this delicatessen, Cosentino’s Delicatessen, and they had some comic books, but they also had science fiction magazines, which I had never seen. I knew they existed, but I had never seen one. And immediately I bought my first science fiction magazines, and then I was well and truly hooked, pretty much. I had subscriptions to Galaxy and Fantasy & Science Fiction and Analog starting in the early ’60s, so I was really much a pretty much a science fiction nerd from day one.
Well, it’s interesting, because—I’m a little bit younger than you, I was born in ’59–but that’s exactly my list of books that got me interested in it, Heinlein and Andre Norton. Somehow I knew Andre Norton was a woman. I don’t know remember ever being surprised to find it out. So I must have read a bio or something of her early on.
I think it became much more public knowledge by the late ’60s, but up until the mid-’60s, I think, you know, she basically kept her identity close to the best.
There was James Tiptree, Jr. I was surprised to find…
Yes. Right. Me too, really. Yeah.
Well, by the time I was reading it would’ve been the late ’60s, so that’s probably why I knew it from the beginning. But that’s sort of the same list of things that I became interested in as well. So, when did you start trying your hand at writing?
Well, you know, I often tell students, my writing students, that one of the seven warning signs that you might become a writer is that you are writing fiction which is not on command by your English teacher before the age of ten, and indeed, I was writing stories and I actually made a little magazine, I would compel my friends to write them and I would illustrate stories myself, probably…maybe I was eleven or twelve. And so, I was trying to do that, and I remember there was a contest in Fantasy & Science Fiction in the mid-’60s that asked for submissions, and I submitted an entry there and I got my first rejection slip and I still have it. And so, I was at it pretty early.
I was, you know, in my early teens when I submitted my first story. I didn’t ever submit another story until I was in college. But, you know, I really…I knew that there was the possibility of an ordinary person writing stories and sending them off. And it was really quite…I was felt empowered by the fact that they had sent me a rejection slip. The idea that I, you know, John Kessel, a kid from Buffalo, New York, could write a story and send it into the magazine and they would read it and say “No,” but they would send me a slip, just as if I were, you know, a published writer. And so, that was cool.
Yeah, I remember that that same feeling. My first published story, though, was actually…at about that age…I actually got a story published in something called Young Authors’ Open in Cat Fancy Magazine.
Wow, good for you.
It was a terrible, terrible pun about Santa Claus looking for a replacement, and he searched the world over, and he found this guy he thought was perfect, but the guy wouldn’t weed his garden and he knew he couldn’t be Santa Claus because he wouldn’t hoe-hoe-hoe. That was the…
Well, you know, it’s funny because my first submission to F&SF was what was called a Feghoot and it involved a pun.
Oh, I remember those.
Yeah.
So, were you focused on short fiction entirely? Did you try your hand at longer stuff during those years, or…?
Pretty much short fiction. I really loved short stories–still do! And so, that was my thing, was short fiction. Although I read a lot of novels, I’d never tried to write one till I was in my twenties, late twenties, and really had to learn…I mean, novels are different from short stories. And I don’t think the short story is a less important form, although, you know, in terms of making a living, certainly it’s hard to do writing short fiction. But I think artistically the short story is a beautiful form. And it’s not a practice for the novel, it’s not a less worthy or less important form, but it is different.
Somewhere on my bookshelf right behind me, I was just turning around to look, is a collection of science fiction short stories , one of those anthologies from the late ’50s, early ’60s. And, yeah, short fiction was sort of my introduction to it, and that’s sort of the way I started writing it as well. But it turns out I more of a novelist, I think, than a short story writer. Did you show your stories? You said you had this little magazine. Were you letting people read your stories?
You know, in a way, my friends were not as interested in this as I was. So, you know, it was just my thing, at that stage anyway, when I’m talking about junior high school or middle school. So, no, I didn’t. I didn’t really advertise them to people.
I usually ask that because when I’m teaching writing, and I know you’re much more of a writing teacher than I am, but I often recommend to people that they do let other people read their work because it’s a way to find out if you can tell stories that people are interested in.
Well, I think ultimately you do have to submit the story to an audience, either an audience of, you know, a teacher or mentor, or other writers. And so, I’ve actually been very active in workshopping. I like workshopping, and not just as a teacher in the university, but…I went, I was invited to, one of the last Milford workshops, run by Ed Bryant, in 1980 and then again in ’81. That was a real revelatory experience for me in 1980 because I met these other writers, many, many of them up-and-coming writers, but also they were, most of them, unknown. I mean, among the writers who were at this first workshop I went to were Ed Bryant, who was well-established at that point and was sort of a writing hero of mine, although people don’t remember him anymore.
I remember the name.
But then, Connie Willis was there, she had only published a few stories. Cynthia Felice. One of the other people that who had not published a single story at that point, who was one of the workshop members, was Dan Simmons. And George R.R. Martin was one of the writers there. So, I got to know these people really early, and it was really heartening that they would read my stories and give me critiques, so that was good.
Well, when you went to university…where did you go to university?
I went as an undergraduate to the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York. It’s a small private school. And I studied astrophysics, I wanted to be an astronomer. And then I double majored. By the time I graduated, it was a degree in physics and English.
What drew you out of astrophysics to add the English?
Probably you could say that tensor calculus had something to do with it. I could do the math pretty well through the first couple of years, but by the time I got to the really higher math, and the higher physics, too, it’s tremendously mathematical. It especially was at that time, where I think the slogan was, you know, “Shut up and calculate” in physics. And so, I could…I had to struggle to do that, the really advanced math. And I could see other physics majors around me, and they were very…it was a small group of physics majors, maybe there were…I think there were twenty in my graduating class…some of them could do it much better and with more facility, more naturally, than I could. So…and I also saw that my GPA in English classes, which I was taking for fun, was like a grade-point higher than my math class. Great. So, I thought, “Well, and I’m enjoying English classes. I’ll double major.” I didn’t know what exactly I was gonna do at that point, but I know I loved reading and I at that point was starting to write stories again.
And so, I took my first creative writing class in my second semester, senior year at Rochester, and wrote a science fiction story for my final project there. And so, I was getting more serious about that. And then I went to graduate school at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas. And the main reason I went there was that there was a science fiction writer on the faculty there, James Gunn, who’s, you know, still alive, ninety-six years old, I believe, and was…he’s a Grand Master of SFWA. And, so, he was my mentor there. I was in his classes and he directed my master’s thesis, which was in fiction writing. And then, on my Ph.D. dissertation, I persuaded the university to let me write a collection of stories, rather than a scholarly work, for my Ph.D. in American Lit, and so I wrote a bunch of stories and he was also on my committee at that point.
Were those science fiction and fantasy stories?
They all were. And one of them in my dissertation was “Another Orphan,” which won the Nebula Award in 1982. So, I guess I, you know, I was glad I was able to do that. I mean, I was writing anyway. I would have written the stories anyway. But it was…I probably wouldn’t have finished my dissertation if I had had to write a scholarly dissertation, because I knew at that point, although I’m very interested in, you know, literary study, and I’ve taught American Lit for thirty, almost forty, years, I really wasn’t interested in writing books about, you know, canonical writers and being a scholar, I wanted to write fiction, so most of my energy went there.
Well, this is…it’s interesting to me that…I ask most authors about their, you know, if they had any formal creative writing training, and you get a really mixed bag with science fiction and fantasy authors. There are some who did it and it was not a particularly good experience for them because they met so much pushback against writing science fiction and fantasy. Fortunately, you found James Gunn.
Right.
Was he the only one teaching at that level at that time?
Well, there were very few. I think the only one I can think of…this is 1972, when I went to grad school…is Jack Williamson, who was teaching, I think, at the University of New Mexico.
Right.
I don’t know if he was a regular faculty member or not, and I didn’t even know he was teaching there. So, the only one I knew about was Gunn, and that’s why I went there. So, I guess you could say that that was instrumental there, that he did not turn up his nose at my writing science fiction. I’m very aware of what you say, that many creative writing teachers, at least in the past, have been very skeptical of anyone who wants to write genre fiction in a, you know, a literary workshop.
Do you think that’s changing?
I think it’s changing to a degree. It depends on what kind of genre fiction you write now. If you write a story with aliens and spaceships and, you know, basically a space opera or that kind of background, in a MFA program, you’ll probably have a hard time unless you go to one of the specialized programs like the Stone Coast Non-Resident MFA, which has people like James Patrick Kelly and Liz Hand and others as teachers. But, I do think there is, you know, there’s a lot more fiction being published now by, we’ll call them mainstream writers, that has fantastic elements in it. I mean, it’s everywhere in our culture now. So…and there, you know, bestselling novels that are written that have time travel in it say or, you know, an apocalyptic plague like Station Eleven, that kills off pretty much everybody. Things that would have been in science fiction novels in 1960 now are published and they’re not really called science fiction, but they have the material of science fiction. They generally treat it a little different than a science fiction writer would, as well. But if you’re going to do spaceships and aliens, then you’re still, I think, going to be put in a different pen.
It’s interesting for me because I’m…I was asked this year to mentor an MFA student from the University of Saskatchewan, the first time I’ve done that, and he’s writing a young adult fantasy novel. So it was…I was pleased, in fact, that the University Saskatchewan didn’t seem to have a problem with people writing in those kinds of genres. And it’s been interesting for me, too.
Well, there are many more professors and teachers in these programs who have genre credentials. So, I think that it is a lot better now than it was in 1972.
So, in between graduating university and starting teaching at North Carolina State University, what were you doing in that interim there?
Well, I finished my coursework for the Ph.D….must have been by ’78 or something like that…and I was supposedly writing a dissertation. Not very fast. I was writing stories. And I took a crack at being a full-time writer and didn’t have much success at it, just writing short stories. So, I got a job at a wire service as an editor. Fortunate to get that. It was a very good job. For three years, I was a copyeditor and then a news editor for a wire service called Commodity News Services out of Kansas City, which was owned by… half-owned by Knight-Ridder newspapers and also by UPI, the United Press International wire service…and I learned an awful lot from that. That was very interesting work. So, that was what I was doing while I was on the side trying to finish my dissertation.
And thenm when I finished it and got my degree in ’81, I looked for a teaching job. Because I found that, as a wire-service editor, it was very high-pressure work, I was editing text all day, and I didn’t feel like writing when I got home. So, I thought, “Well, if I get a teaching job, I can have the summers off at the very least, and my schedule during the week, I won’t have to be sitting in an office from eight to five every day doing high-pressure work. And I was fortunate enough to get the job at N.C. State and I came here in fall of ’82.
And been there ever since.
And been there ever since, yeah. Yeah.
Were your first sales, then, along in their somewhere? Short fiction sales?
So my first fiction sale was in 1975 to an anthology called Black Holes that…they paid me for the story, but it never came out, ’cause the publisher went under. It was…as with so many young writers, often you’re selling to marginal markets. You can’t get into the top paying markets, so you’re just trying to get in somewhere. And that actually happened to my first three stories. I sold them to markets that folded before the stories came out.
It starts to make you a little paranoid.
Yeah, I began to feel pretty discouraged. But then, it was in the late…I think it was in the ’70s, ’77, I sold a story to Galileo, and then I also sold one to Fantasy & Science Fiction, a month apart. And what happened was, a bunch of stories I had written already sold, then, one after another. And so…if I said ’80s earlier, I mean the late ’70s was when I really started to break in. So ’77, ’78, ’79, I started to see stories come out.
And then, of course, you mentioned you won the Nebula in ’82.
Cover of September 1982 issue of F&SF, containing John Kessel’s Nebula Award-winning novella “Another Oprhan.”
Right, which was a huge shock. It was the first time I was nominated, and I was a complete unknown, and I think it was quite shocking to people that I won. And of course, the story was…it showed my background. because it’s a story about…your listeners may not know…it’s about a commodities broker who wakes up on page one and he’s on a sailing ship and he doesn’t know how he got there. And it turns out it’s the Pequod, and he’s in the middle of Moby Dick. And he read it… had to read it in college…and he knows that at the end everybody dies except Ishmael, and he’s not Ishmael. So, that that was my premise, and it used my literary study, ’cause I’m a huge Herman Melville fan, but also it had this sort of fantasy element, and it also used my commodities-editing knowledge, so it really came out of a lot of things that were going on in my life. I wrote it in 1979 and ’80, and it came out in fall of ’82, and won the award in ’83.
You mentioned the commodities feeding into that story? Has your astrophysics background played into any of your science fiction writing over the years?
Certainly I know a lot of astronomy and I try to get the science accurate. I know physics, and I’m not any kind of genius at it, but I know basic physics. And so, when I’m doing science fiction stories, I do try to make it as plausible as I can, but I’m not afraid to violate fundamental laws of nature in order to write a story. And I’m not considered really a techie writer, I think I’m more considered a literary science fiction writer. And then I write stories that I think of as fantasies…and when I say that, everyone thinks, “Oh, it’s like Game of Thrones, castles, dragons, you know, lords and ladies. No. I don’t…I’ve never written a story of that sort in my entire career. What I mean by fantasy is a story that violates reality, has some element of the fantastic in it, could be set in the present, the past, but it’s not explained by an appeal to science.
Well, we’re gonna talk about your creative process using Pride and Prometheus as a sort of a template for how you work. But I also wanted to ask you before we did that about…I noted that you had written a play, Faust Feathers. Have you done other playwriting? I’ve done some playwriting and I’m a professional actor, so I’m always curious about that sort of thing. So, have you done a lot of playwriting?
I have done some playwriting. I wrote a one-act back in the late ’80s called “A Clean Escape,” based on a short story I wrote, that was performed here in Raleigh, and I was very pleased to see that happen. And later on I adapted it for a thing called Seeing Ear Theater, which is an audio play thing run by the Sci-Fi Channel. And then I wrote Faust Feathers, which won the Paul Green Prize, and it got produced somewhere in Nebraska but I never got to see it. And “A Clean Escape” actually eventually got adapted for that show Masters of Science Fiction. So, I have written some plays and I did take an acting class, although…I actually am in a couple movies. I’m in a very low-budget movie called The Delicate Art of the Rifle. I play…it’s kind of typecasting, I play an obnoxious college professor who gets murdered. So, I’ve done a little bit of that stuff. But, you know, mostly I have stuff stuck to prose fiction.
I’m always interested in the crossover between fiction and plays because they are very different kinds of writing. In the play world, of course, it’s very much dialogue driven.
Right. It’s very much that’s the case. But there’s also…when you’re writing, you have to cast yourself into the mind of a character who may not be like you in order to write a book. And it seems to me that’s what actors do. You know, the idea that you’re portraying someone who’s not you, but you have to make their behavior rational and to act in a way that they would act but somehow make it your own. And that, to me is a kind of mental trick that writers do as well as actors.
Yeah, I often make that point when I’m talking to people about the two things. All right, well, let’s move on to Pride and Prometheus. And before we get into talking about how it all came about, and your creative writing process, maybe a synopsis and what the book is. I’ve not quite finished it, but I’ve read most of it.
Well, it’s a kind of a crossbreed. I’ve written a number of stories over the course of my career where I’ll use characters or situations created by other authors. “Another Orphan,” which won the Nebula, puts my character into Moby Dick. In this story I’m basically crossing Frankenstein with Jane Austen’s character, from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. And this kind of story really appeals to me in that, in a way…it’s a way of sort of thinking about the story and the characters, the way maybe a literary critic might do it, but instead of doing it in terms of literary analysis, I just want to see, you know, what sorts of situations would happen. Because…
I got the idea for the story from a workshop where we were reading a story by a writer named Benjamin Rosenbaum, a wonderful writer, who had a story that was a parody of Jane Austen. And it occurred to me, as I was talking about this story there at the workshop, that Jane Austen and Mary Shelley were contemporaries. They were…if you went to a bookstore in 1818 in London, you could find Jane Austen’s novels, Pride and Prejudice, on the shelf next to Frankenstein. And yet they’re very, very different books. And I never, as an English professor, very seldom ever heard anyone talk about Mary Shelley and Jane Austen in the same context. Now, I think they do a lot more, but not back then. And so I thought, “Well, they’re so different.” I mean, you know, putting a Jane Austen character in Frankenstein, that doesn’t work. I mean, that kind of character, what would they do in Frankenstein? And then putting one of, you know, Victor Frankenstein or the monster into a Jane Austen setting, you know, they don’t belong in a ballroom, OK? But that, to me, intrigued me, and so I got carried…and I wrote originally a novelette version of this, I took the character of Mary Bennet from Pride and Prejudice and imagined her a decade or more after the end of that book, and had her meet Victor Frankenstein and eventually meet his monster.
Yeah, and I guess it’s hard to synopses it without sort of…
Oh, well, yeah, it’s…you know, Mary is the…she’s the old-maid character, the middle sister in Pride and Prejudice, who’s really not very attractive. She’s kind of bookish and moralistic, she’s always preaching at people. In Pride and Prejudice, she’s hardly even in the book, and when she’s there, she’s sort of the butt of the joke. She’s the only one of the Bennet sisters who’s not pretty. If you know Jane Austen’s books, they’re almost all about finding the right mate and marrying. And I imagine that Mary is going to have a hard time of that. So, I imagine her as, you know, thirty-two years old and on the brink of old-maid-dom, and she gets dragged to a ball by her mother and her younger sister, Kitty, who’s still trying to get married. And there she meets Victor Frankenstein, who is in England–she doesn’t know this, but–in Frankenstein, Victor goes to England, after he’s created the monster. The monster gets abandoned by him and has a terrible time of it and becomes very alienated, and eventually finds out that Victor created him, and goes to Victor’s home and strangles his younger brother, and then threatens Victor with killing everyone in his family if Victor does not create a mate for him. Since no human being will have anything to do with him, he needs to have someone to give him solace, and so he forces Victor to agree to make a female creature. And so Victor travels to England with his friend Henry–this is all in Frankenstein–and travels around and eventually goes up to Scotland, on an island, to create the female, the bride of the monster.
And so, my story begins where Mary’s at this ball in London and Victor is there with his friend Henry, Henry drags him to the ball, and they dance together and strike up a conversation, and it turns out they like each other. And so, that’s the beginning of it. And the rest of it, it sort of follows Mary’s encounters with Victor. Victor is being tormented by the fact the monster’s following him, and then the monster is desperate to have Victor follow through on his promise. And the story alternates between the points of view of these three characters. It’s mostly Mary’s point of view, but it’s also in Victor’s point of view and also in the monster’s point of view, which, in Frankenstein, that’s true, too, if you’ve read it, both Victor and the creature, his creature get to have their own points of view.
Yes, one reason it was interesting…I mean, I’ve read a little Jane Austen, but I’ve read Frankenstein twice, and I think I read it for the first time–and you mentioned this in an interview somewhere, that it was Brian W. Aldiss who perhaps first suggested that Frankenstein was the first science fiction novel–and it was after reading his history of the field that I thought I should read Frankenstein, as opposed to just relying on what we all kind of know from the miasma of Frankenstein stuff that’s around.
That’s right. And, frankly, the image we get of Frankenstein from movies is very much not the creature that was…well, one thing is that people call the monster Frankenstein, and it’s Victor who is Frankenstein. The creature has no name in the book. And so, yes, I wanted to present the monster, the creature–I prefer to call him the creature–as he is in the novel. He’s incredibly intelligent, he’s agile, he’s strong. He’s becomes a kind of…he educates himself remarkably. He’s incredibly articulate. He speaks very well, which is so weird because we’re not used to that from the movies. And so, one of the things that Viktor warns people against when he tells them about these creatures, is, “Don’t listen to him because he’s so persuasive.” That’s really interesting. And he’s sort of a social critic of human behavior. So I wanted to get into that. In a way…
You know, Aldiss did say that this was the first science fiction book, and I had not read it until I read Aldiss, back in the ’70s. and it seemed to me that if Mary Shelley wrote the first true science fiction novel in English, and Jane Austen was sort of the ancestor of the novel of manners…so these are the two great streams in literature, it seems to me, since the early 1800s to the present. We have the novel of the fantastic, the science fiction novel, and then we have the realistic novel like, you know, Henry James and Virginia Woolf, following In the footsteps of Jane Austen. And so, in a way, cramming these two things together in the same book is really sort of unnatural, but also, to me, fascinating.
I read it again…I read it out loud to my wife for the 150th anniversary of the novel, because we have…I read out loud while she’s cooking because our kitchen’s too small for us to cook side by side. And so, it was very interesting to read it out loud, too, and to say that sort of early 19th century prose, but also the fact that, you know, Mary Shelley was a teenager when she wrote it, nineteen.
Really, eighteen, nineteen years old. And I think it was published when she just turned twenty, right, so…
And I have a daughter who’s eighteen.
Okay. Actually, it was 200 years ago, 200 years ago in 1818.
Right, 200. Yeah, yeah. I just lost half a century there somewhere. So, you’ve talked about how the inspiration for this came about. Just pulling back from it a little bit, is that fairly typical of the way that your story ideas come to you, things sort of colliding and sparks coming off of it?
Often the collision of two things that don’t fit together is a good way to get a story started, it seems to me. And I’ve written a number of works, as I say, that take off from other literary works, but that’s not all the stuff I write, and so…like, my last novel, in 2017, before this one, was The Moon and the Other, which is a science fiction novel set on the moon in the twenty-second century. Very complex future background, lots of technology, I tried to make it as accurate as I could, showing how people might live on the moon, so that one really comes from a different place. And that’s sort of how it works, really.
But yes, the collision of things…to me, it’s always interesting to have things that don’t seem like they ought to go together put together. Or, another way of putting that is, I really like paradoxes. I like when things don’t easily settle themselves out. You know, where all of the…for instance, all of the morality, or the rightness and wrongness, doesn’t all land on one side. I don’t really like stories where there’s the hero and the villain and there’s just no…it’s easy to choose between them and there’s no confusion or complication of that way of seeing things.
Once you have the idea, for this novel or other novels, what does your planning process look like? Do you do a detailed outline? And how does it differ from your short fiction writing?
Well, again, it depends a little bit on the project. With novels, I do quite a bit of outlining and sketches and notes. I will try to figure out what the inciting incident is, the beginning incident, and then have some sense of where it’s going in the end. Although, when I was younger, I always had to know the ending before I could start a story, but now I’m more willing to get started without a firm idea of how it’s going to end. Well, one thing with Pride and Prometheus is I had many things given to me from Frankenstein. I knew I was going to follow Frankenstein’s plot. And so, I know eventually that Victor ends up in the Orkney Islands, there trying to create the female. So, that to me was a place I was going to get to. I knew I was gonna get up in the Orkney Islands when he’s trying to create the bride for the monster. How he gets there and how Mary gets involved in it, that was not all worked out.
But then, those things are also given to you. For instance, one of the things that happened was…I think I mentioned that in Jane Austen novels, the spring for many of the plots, or maybe all the plots, is finding the right mate. You have these young women heroines who are maybe attracted to one man, who…or someone is being courted by one man…but it turns out there’s someone else who is really the person they should be with. And finding the right mate is the crucial decision of a young woman’s life in Jane Austen’s period, of her social class, anyway. And so, what hit me was that in Frankenstein, Frankenstein is about a lonely guy, the creature, who can’t find a mate. And so, he has to find a female who will love him. And then Victor’s part in this is, he has to create this female. And in order to do that, he’s going to have to come up with a female body. So I thought, “Well, gosh, you know, that’s sort of scary. He’s going to meet my character, Mary, who’s a lonely old maid, and, you know, what sort of things could happen?” And so this sort of offers certain possibilities of scenes that I could imagine. And if you have certain scenes you want to write in a narrative, you can connect them, connect the dots really, like beads on a string. You know, I know I’m driving from here to San Francisco, and I know I’m going to stop in Memphis and Kansas City and Denver and Salt Lake City, but I don’t know where I’m going in between. And so, you sort of try to arrange those, and you drive your characters, you know your characters, you know your characters, you know what they want, what they don’t want, the circumstances around them. The circumstances will change, depending on what happens in the story, and then, you know, given who they are, the kind of people they are, how would they react to that and what would they do to respond to it? And so, that can help you plot a story out. That seems to me a pretty natural way to create a story.
One of the interesting things about Pride and Prometheus is you’ve got this Jane Austen…and it’s also, it’s three viewpoints. I guess there’s third person for Mary, and then you’ve got two first persons, you’ve got the creature and you’ve got Frankenstein and all of them…the prose is…it seems to me that it reminds you of the prose of Austen and Shelley without being…trying to really get into that very convoluted early-nineteenth-century style where you can have one sentence that goes on for like a full page, almost.
Right. Well, thank you. I actually spent a lot of time thinking about that. And so…I tried not to completely imitate Jane Austen’s or Mary Shelley styles, which are quite different. And it’s right, you know, Frankenstein is written in first person from the point of view of these characters, and Jane Austen’s novels are all in third person. But I wanted to allude to them, so that someone who is familiar with those books would feel that this was reminiscent of that, without being so convoluted that it would be difficult to read. So that was my take on it. I hope I did that well enough. I’m pretty proud of how I did it, actually.
It’s…you know, in a lot of ways, the writing of a book is a process of discovery and you have to–I’ve said this to my students, that when you write any fiction, that it’s a collaboration between your conscious mind and your unconscious mind. And if you have everything planned out like a, you know, an architect, it seems to me you can stifle your imagination, because you have everything all worked out and there’s no discovery involved. So, I think that you have to depend on…at least, the life of a narrative can come from you allowing your mind to ruminate over something that you don’t really know the answer to. And that…Jim Kelly, my friend James Patrick Kelly, says that if the writer writing a story is never surprised by anything that happens, then no reader will ever be surprised. And it seems to me that, you know, to a greater or lesser degree, that there have to be things that you didn’t plan that turn up on the page.
I don’t know what your experiences is, but haven’t you ever had the experience where something just sort of comes to you as you’re writing that is exactly the thing you needed, and you did not know it, but there it is, and it proves to be much smarter than anything you could have thought up in advance?
Oh, yeah, that happens. Happens all the time.
Yeah. It’s funny how that works. It seems to me that our minds are more complex than we can easily understand.
The book I’m writing now, which is the third book in a series of mine, much to my surprise, there’s this long discussion on God’s relationship to time that pops up in one scene, which I had no intention of the two characters talking about at that time. But that just seemed to make sense. So there it is, so far, anyway. So, yeah. It’s interesting. It’s very interesting the way the writing mind works.
What’s your actual physical process of writing? Did you write this in longhand in a notebook like they might have, Austen and Shelley, or do you write on the computer? How do you work?
I’m a computer writer, a keyboard writer. I’ve been writing on keyboards since, you know, 1970 with typewriters. I never…I used to…I’ve done some longhand writing, but very little. Very little. And I know some writers who say that they can’t think unless they’re writing longhand, but I work with a keyboard. I work with a laptop right now, although I have it connected to a big screen at my desk.
I tend to work at my desk in my home office. Although there have been times when I will, when I’m having trouble, I will say, OK, I’m going to go to Panera Bread or Starbucks and sit there in the corner and try to write, and that’s worked, too. So, whatever it takes to get the work done, I think, is what I need.
And when I’m teaching, I have a lot of other responsibilities, so I can’t always write every day. And I’m not one of those…actually, I think one of the things that’s told to young writers that can be very intimidating to them is that you can’t be a writer unless you write every day. And it seems to me that…it’s certainly good to encourage the habit of writing regularly, okay? I think that that’s absolutely true. If you want to write anything of any length or…you need to be…you have your head in the game regularly, all the time. But I don’t write every day and I never have. There’ve been periods where I’ve written every day for, you know, a couple of months, when I’ve had the time to do that or when I’ve been hot on a project and I want to finish it, but there are other times when I, you know, I’ll write three days a week, okay, or I’ll, between projects, be sitting around reading and playing the guitar and watching bad movies and thinking. So my process…I mean, I do have habits that work for me. I try to be regular in them. But, you know, other people say, “Oh, we have to write, you write the same time of day every day.” Well, I generally will try to work in the morning, but it doesn’t always work that way. So whenever it comes to me to work, then I will work. And sometimes I do have to kick myself in the pants and say, “OK, you need to sit down there. You need to close the door. You need to stare at the screen. You can’t look at your e-mail. You cannot go to Facebook. You are a writer.”
Yeah, that’s…I know that feeling. Deadlines help sometimes, too, to motivate you.
I like deadlines. I know George R.R. Martin, I think, is a writer who hates deadlines and sort of fights against them. I am one who, a deadline focuses my attention, and I like deadlines because it tells me exactly what I have to do. I have to have this done by September 1st, it’ll be done by September 1st. In my entire undergraduate career and graduate career, I don’t think I ever turned in a paper late, because something about it, the idea of being late on it would be worse. I mean, I would just…not so much that I’d get a bad grade, but rather that psychologically I might never get it done if I don’t make it by the date that I’m supposed to turn it in.
What does your…once you have a draft. What does your revision process look like?
Well, I will certainly go over it and make sure it reads smoothly and revise and edit to a degree until I’ve got a fairly polished version of it. But then I will show it to other people who are writers who I trust to give me feedback. And one of them is my wife, Therese Anne Fowler, who is extremely successful. I mean, she’s much more successful than I am. She wrote a novel called Z, a novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, which was a bestseller and made into a TV show on Amazon. And so, she’s a very experienced novelist, and so she gives me feedback. I often talk to her about it over supper. We’ll be working, we’re both writers, and so we’re working and then we have meals together. “How’s your day, dear?” “Oh, you know…” And she doesn’t talk as much about her work as I do, but I often talk about what I’m doing and what the problems are and what’s going on. But then when I get a draft done, I show it to her.
I always ask James Patrick Kelly to read it, and he’s been my faithful critique and critic for, you know, forty years now, really. A very wonderful guy, wonderful writer, so knowledgeable. And other writers who I have regularly…and get feedback…are my friend Richard Butner, who lives here in Raleigh, and Lewis Shiner, a well-known science fiction writer. He lives in Raleigh and we’ve been friends for more than thirty years. Karen Joy Fowler has helped me a lot with my female characters and Gregory Frost…and often actually for a couple of my things, Bruce Sterling, a writer who many people…I mean, back in the ’80s when he was the head cyberpunk and I was labeled as a humanist writer, people thought we would, you know, we hated each other, but that wasn’t the case, even though we disagreed about an awful lot of stuff. But he’s give me some very good readings over the years.
Are there sort of consistent things you find that your readers come back with that you need to…per up?
I usually find, when I have some women readers, that my women characters need attention, OK? And so…I’m trying to do my best. But, you know, I think it’s good to have someone put their eyes on it who has experienced the things that a woman experiences. And so, that to me is a consistent thing that I have had to pay attention to. The editing of…editing things down. I tend to be, in my early drafts, a lot more wordy than I do in the later. As I’ve gotten older, I’m less and less that way, I think. And Jim Kelly has been very helpful with that. He’s a much more efficient writer than I am, and I have to sort of work to get to that point.
What other things? You know, there are sometimes story-logic issues, but generally, my stories, when I get a draft done…I’ve done a lot of time thinking. I don’t write really fast, so it generally has had a lot of thought put into it, and it’s very seldom that I get told something that causes me to drastically change what I’ve written, like the structure or something.
You teach writing. Do you ever find people telling you to do things that you tell your students to do but you overlook in your own writing?
Gosh, probably. One of my colleagues at NC State is a novelist named Wilton Barnhardt, also a wonderful novelist who has given me much, much good advice. He’s not afraid to tell me, you know, but I think as far as the things that I tell my students, it’s not usually so much that, you know.
Well I ask because, you know, I mentor writers. And then when I’m editing my own stuff, I’ll say, nope, there it is, that’s exactly what I told them not to do, and I did it in my first draft.
Well, it’s certainly true that I will make grammar or usage errors that I would complain about to them. I generally…I know the difference between lie and lay, okay, but it’s possible for me to make a mistake there. Or I will sometimes put an apostrophe in its, a possessive its, when it doesn’t belong there.
Yeah, that’s a pernicious one. That just happens sometimes.
Right. It’s, you know, it’s a matter of you writing fast and not thinking.
So once the book goes to the publisher, what does the editing…we should say Pride and Prometheus is from Saga, is that right?
Saga. That’s right? And my previous book, The Moon and the Other, was also from Saga. And that was…my editor there is Joe Monti, who’s is good. I had never worked with them before The Moon and the Other. And actually, I said that I very seldom change structure, but with The Moon and the Other, I sold on the book, and I…he had the whole manuscript. It was finished, you know, before…I thought it was done. And he read it, and we met in New York City, and he said, “You know, it’s a slow start on this book.” It’s a big book. It’s like, 600 pages long, and it’s got four main characters and it alternates point of view between these four characters.
And I said, “Yeah, I know, it starts really slow because I have to do all four characters and they’re in different places, they don’t know each other, it’s complicated.” And so, he said, “Do you know how long it takes before all four characters are introduced?”, and I said, “Jeez, I don’t know. Maybe eighty pages? Seventy pages?” He says, “108 pages.” “Wow. Okay.” And he said, “Is there something you can do?” I mean, he said…also, the first chapter originally was taking place ten years before the body of the book. It was sort of like a prologue. And he said, “Do you have to have that chapter? Can you take it out?” And I said, “I absolutely cannot take out the chapter because it mirrors the last chapter of the book, and there are all these reasons why I just could not do it. There are too many things introduced there that are vital to the storyline.” And then I went home, and I said, “OK, so…” He didn’t say I had to do it, but he said, “Is there anything you do speed up this this book?”
And so I went home, and I thought, “All right, is it possible to take out that first chapter? What happens if I take out the first chapter? There’s things in that chapter I absolutely need. Is there someplace else I could put them?” So, I took the first chapter out, and one thing that immediately became evident is that I would have to rearrange the order of the next six or seven chapters. And so, I did that. And then I had to rearrange what was in those chapters, because the chapters depended on what happened in previous chapters. And then, I had to get the first chapter stuff in there somewhere else. And anyway, it ended up changing the first seven chapters of the book, and considerable revision. And it got much better. I mean, it started much better. And I’m so glad he…he didn’t tell me to do it, he didn’t say, “You have to do this,” but he made me think about it. And it really was vitally important to the book, I think, to do it, to get that chapter moved. And it really made it better.
And I think, you know, new writers sometimes are concerned about the editing process, you know, they’re going to change my deathless prose and all that sort of thing.
Right. Right.
And certainly my experience has been with my editors, Sheila E Gilbert at DAW Books, Hugo Award winning editor, and my experience has been, editors make things better for the most part.
I think they want the book to be as good as it can be. And, you know, you may have some differences of opinion, but it doesn’t help you to be stiff-necked and defensive about things. You know, actually, Christopher, who was in my undergraduate class, was writing the novel…I can’t remember the title of the first novel in the series…but he had it in my, parts of it in my class, and I remember we met in my office one time, and it had a prologue on it, and I felt the prologue was slow to start, and then the first chapter was a completely different situation than the first, than the prologue. And I said, “OK, so you’re opening this story with a frame here. When do you close the frame? Do you close the frame at the end of the book?” Because I hadn’t seen the whole book. He said, “No, I close the frame at the end of the trilogy.” And I said, “That’s not going to work. You need to…if you’re going to have a frame in front of a book, you need to close it by the end of the book. Or at least that’s my strong prejudice. Think about that, okay.” And so, what he did was, he ended up throwing it out. And I don’t know what he did with the material, if it shows up elsewhere, but he changed that. And to me, I thought that was a, you know, I mean, I didn’t make him do it, but that just was my advice for a better opening. And it’s funny, it’s similar to what Joe Monti told me, although it happened before that. So, you know, I guess it helps to be able to listen to things, even if you don’t, in the end, do what the editor says.
Empire of Silence. That’s the first book.
That’s it. Empire of Silence.
Howling Dark is the one that just came out. Well, now we’re getting close to the end, so I want to move to the big philosophical questions. Why do you write? Why do you think any of us write? And why do you and I and others write science fiction and fantasy?
Wow, those are tough questions. I don’t know if I can speak for everyone else, but…
For yourself, then.
Yeah. Frederick Pohl, science fiction writer Frederick Pohl, said science fiction is a way of thinking about things, and I like that definition a lot. It seems to me that you can think about things in terms of, in science-fictional terms, the same kinds of things you can think about in a realistic story, but you do it differently. So if you think about, say, marriage, okay, or death or love or parenthood or something like that, in science fiction you can twist things in a way that sort of exposes the workings or…I think of it sometimes as like a lever that you can shove into the machine and pry it open and see the workings in a different way than a realistic novelist or story writer can, so that one of the appeals of science fiction, is that you can…
The very. the fantastic element. to me. should be essential to the story. And in fact, that’s one of my principles, is that. if I could tell this story without the science fiction or the fantasy element, then I should tell it without it, okay? That it has to be vital to the story, has to be essential to make the point I’m trying to make that is in there. So, you know, in other words, I could…
You know, The Moon and the Other started from me watching my daughter at the daycare center when she was a toddler. And I was watching the kids in the playground, the little kids, two, three years old, playing out back. And it seemed to me that the boys’ way of playing was different from the girls’ way of playing. And I started thinking about, “Well, is that inherent or is this culturally determined, okay? When did they start behaving differently?” And so that got me thinking about the difference between men and women–not that I hadn’t thought about it before, but… and I ended up writing this big novel set on the moon in the twenty-second century about gender issues. And yet, another person would have written a story about a father at a daycare center with his daughter and the other kids, you see? But that’s not what I wrote. I wrote a science fiction novel. So, there’s something about that tropism for the strange, or the fantastic, that I’ve always had, and I think I always will.
I think that, you know…why does anyone write? It’s a very good question. I think it’s something about…trying to figure out the world, it seems to me. Or maybe just to entertain yourself or entertain somebody. There’s an element also of sort of showing off, isn’t there? Where you want everyone to admire you. And so…I remember there was a TV production company that did sitcoms and stuff, and at the end of every show, they’d have this little logo and they’d have a kid’s voice that would say, “I made this!” And I always liked that, because a kid makes things just to make them and to be proud, you know, to sort of say, “I made this myself. No one else made this.” And I still have that kid feeling, you know, “No one else wrote these books. No one else could write these books exactly the way I wrote them. Maybe for better, for worse, someone might have written them better, but I made this book myself,” and I like that, you now?
That is one of the rewarding things about it, for sure.
It’s bad when they reject your story and say, “Oh, my God, that stinks.”.
Yeah, there’s that, too.
Yeah.
Well, that’s kind of the end of our time. So, what are you working on now?
I have a novella that I just told you about that is on submission right now that is a weird kind of thing. It’s about the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901 at a World’s Fair in Buffalo, New York, and it’s also about a trip to the moon in 1901. And it sort of alternates between the realistic historical story and this fantastic scientific romance about the inhabited moon full of Selenites.
I miss that moon.
Yeah. It’s based on a ride that was there at the at the fair, called A Trip to the Moon. It was the first dark ride, if you know what a dark ride is, like at Universal City or Disney World, where they have these rides, you’re in a vehicle and they show you things. So that one’s going out. It’s a kind of political story. I’ve got a ghost story. I wrote my first ghost story and that is on submission right now. And I don’t know, we’ll see what happens with that. You’d think I would have written a ghost story before now, but I didn’t. And who knows? I like to write different kinds of stories. So, you know, if there’s a kind of story I haven’t written yet, I’m thinking, well, what kind of what kind of monster story would I write?
And where can people find you online?
Oh, I have a Web site…and also, there’s a…I have a pretty active Facebook page, which is open to the public and has lots of things on there. You can find things about me. And I’m in the bookstores. Look for Saga books.
OK, well, I think that’s the end of our time, so, thanks so much for being a guest on The World shapers. That was a fun conversation.
Well, thank you very much. I certainly didn’t lack for things to say. I hope I didn’t get too far off the bat.
No, no, it was great. So, thanks a lot, and bye for now.
I was just saying before we started that usually at this point, when I’m just getting started, I say, “Oh, yeah, well, I met you, you know, this WorldCon or that WorldCon,” but we’ve never actually crossed paths before this.
No, yeah.
So, I’m very happy to have you on. And I just, as I said, also before we started, I just finished reading The Light Brigade last night, so it’s very fresh in my mind.
Excellent.
And we’ll talk about that one primarily as an example of your creative process, but my first step is always…I say this all the time, but I don’t know any better way to say it: I’m gonna take you back into the mists of time and find out how you, first of all, got started being interested in science fiction and fantasy, probably starting as a reader, as most of us did, and then how you got into the writing of it. So, let’s go let’s go way back and then find out how that all started for you.
Way back…yeah. No, I have always had a very vivid imagination, even, I think, when I was in kindergarten, to the point where they would have us, you know, make little storybooks and everything, and I was making this story with, you know, space explorers who went to this strange planet that was blowing up flowers out of the volcanoes and had weird creatures that were crawling around. I had always done stuff like that, and I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed it, and I got a lot of positive feedback from it. And I think that’s important, too, when you think about encouraging young people, right, with things that they enjoy and are interested in. My teachers and my family were just like, “Wow, you’ve got quite an imagination, Hurley,” and so I started doing that for, you know, just as part of the English curriculum stuff.
And then it just turned out that that was what I started to do after school, as well. It just sort of became my hobby. I, gosh, I think I wrote…I typed out…I remember typing on an electric typewriter at one point, a story of mine, an early one. And I think that about 1994, when I was thirteen or fourteen, we finally got a word processor. And that was exciting—I could I could actually keep an entire book on, like, four or five floppy disks. So that was great.
But I…you know, it was just something that I wanted to do because I had all of these stories in my head, and I loved this idea that I could take these things that were in my head that no one else could see or experience or whatever, and I could communicate that to people. I thought that was really cool. And I think that that just sort of sparked my interest in kind of delving deeper and how do I, you know, create a book that absolutely gets across this feeling the best way possible, right, to people, and that’s totally clear. So, yeah, I’ve been doing it a long time.
Where there are things that you were reading that kind of also sparked your interest in telling stories?
Sure. Yeah. Tamora Pierce wrote a really great series, The Song of the Lioness, which is about a young girl who swaps places with her twin brother and goes off and pretends to be a male knight, and she gets knight training, and then she gets revealed.
I read that one!
But it was cool when I was a kid because I think it was the first time that someone really wrote that idea in a way that made sense to me, where I bought it, right? I was like, “Oh, I can see how this happened.” Of course, you look at history…that would happen all the time. But it was someone who actually did that in a way that felt really cool. And so I think that was some of the early stuff. And again, I read The Phantom Tollbooth and all that. I think we all really start with fantasy and science fiction, right? Like talking animal stories. And it’s just a matter of, you know, do we continue reading or do we kind of veer off in another direction?
I think a real formative moment was, I think again, at thirteen, fourteen, I had a family friend and I said, “Hey, I’m running out of stuff to read.” There wasn’t really a YA category, right, when I was a kid. So it’s like, I was in that weird stage where the younger-people, the middle-grade, books were too young, but the older-people books, I just didn’t even know where to start, because some of…a lot of them were just like, I had no interest in. It was old-people problems, right? And he said, “Hey, why don’t I give you some of my fantasy and science fiction books?” So, he brought to me a paper bag full of Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance, and the first, The Eye of the World, the first Robert Jordan book. And that, like, really, really, I just loved. Those Dragonlance books…I’d never read Tolkien, so the Dragonlance books were like my Tolkien. I was like, “This is so original and amazing!” you know, at the time. And I really loved it and enjoyed it. And again, The Wheel of Time, I really got into that one. And that sort of was my gateway into science fiction and fantasy, and yeah, I’ve kind of stuck with that ever since.
Now you mentioned that, you know, your family and friends and all that said, “Oh, what an imagination!” That sounds like you were probably sharing your writing with people along the way. You weren’t just keeping it to yourself?
Oh, yeah. No, absolutely. Actually, what I would do is, I would base characters on some of my friends at school, and so they wanted to read it, to know what happened to their character. And I look at some people who have kind of gotten into D&D and stuff like that, and it’s a very similar sort of idea where it’s like, it’s something you can…it’s something that’s very social, so that if you’re not really good at making friends, not very social, which I was not, it was something to talk about, you know, with people. And it was like, oh, you know, “The scullery maid is revealed as the princess!”, you know, stuff like that. And people did, they really liked it. And all of sudden people said, “Oh, Kameron’s writing stories,” and people that I didn’t even think would ever talk to me were like, “Well, I want to be a character in your story.” And so, yeah, it was…it ended being a little bit of a social activity as well.
Hm. I wonder if you put, like, Oprah as a character in your story if you’d get in her book club or that sort of thing?
I know. Right. Right. It’s like that Obama-Biden comic book. I’m sure he was thinking, “Yeah, maybe Obama and Biden will call me.” Yeah. No.
Were you writing just shorter things? Or were you writing…were these like novel-length, or…?
I just writing pretty long stuff. I called them books. I mean, it was 150 pages, was my first one. And then I think, yeah, we got up to about 200 pages for some of the other ones when I was in my mid- and late teens. I probably wrote, you know, eight or nine books before my first book was published, and some of those early ones were definitely, you know, they were…they were book-sized, for sure.
Well, I ask a couple these questions of everybody. And one reason is because, of course, comparing it to my own experience. My first short story was called “Kastra Glazz: Hypership Test Pilot,” so you can see where my mind was. But I wrote these longer works, too. And actually mine…I was calling them books, too. And I thought it was novel-length, too, but I recently got the typed manuscript of the one I wrote when I was fourteen, called The Golden Sword, and I scanned it, word recognition, and it’s only about 38,000 words. And I felt it was like this huge, epic fantasy.
Yeah, it feels, yeah, it feels like this. Yeah, absolutely.
I may throw it up on Amazon as by Eddie Willett, which is what I went by back then. The scary thing is it might sell better than my real stuff. That would be really scary. Were there teachers or people along the way who encouraged you at that stage?
There were! One of them—again, it’s somebody you always remember their names, right?—and one was Barbara Kreinbring, who was like my seventh- or eighth-grade English teacher, and she was very, very passionate about it, very encouraging, loved that I had this thing that I did outside of class that, you know, engaged me and I was interested in and, again, something academic. I was from a pretty small town, too, and I think that there was certainly this, you know, push to, hey, you know, “If you’ve got it, let’s go.” You know, “If you’ve got something, let’s get you out of town!” And, yeah, she was super-encouraging. She’s probably the most encouraging one.
I’m trying to think, kind of later on…later on, you know, in college and stuff, I actually had a writer, David Marusek, who’s a science fiction writer, who was teaching a class, and he was actually the one who told me, “Hey, you need to reapply to Clarion,” the writing workshop Clarion, because I had and I was rejected, and he’s like, “No, no, your stuff really is good enough.” You know, I was doing stuff in this class all semester and he said, “Apply again.” And I went to Clarion later on. and it really was transformative for my writing career, just meeting new people and forcing myself to write a story a week. You know, you do level up like two years in six weeks. And so that was a really good kind of a moment as well.
Where did you grow up?
I grew up in a town called Battleground, Washington. It’s just north of Portland, Oregon. I think now that they’ve extended the freeway a little bit it’s basically, my mom was saying, I was just talking to her about this, basically it’s become like a suburb of Portland because it’s about forty-five minutes away and there’s no housing in Portland, so it’s like, there’s all this growth. But when I was there, it was like…cows. Which is great! I loved it. We had two and a half acres, I had a great imagination, I wandered around. It was a great place to grow up, it was just definitely a small town.
Well, you mentioned going to Clarion. I want to ask you about that in a minute. But you didn’t actually study writing in university to start with, did you? Your degree was in historical studies?
Yeah, yeah. I considered doing an English degree until I realized that basically what they wanted you to do was just read the classics. And I said, “Well, gonna read the classics anyway, why don’t I do something that is writing-adjacent that will…that I feel like I’m actually learning something.” I mean, one of the things that…and that was, again, that came from a teacher, I do not remember his name, but that was…he was a college teacher, but I was still in high school, I was in community-college classes as part of my high school curriculum…but anyway, he was an amazing history teacher because he’d tell it like a story, and all these wild things, right, that people have done in the past, and what motivates them and all of that, and as someone writing fiction and sort of struggling with, you know, character motivation and where do ideas come from and what are some twists and things, that was really awesome for me to take those notes and be like, “OK, how can I work this into what I’m doing?” And I realized that, “You know, it’s probably going to serve me better to go straight to the source of where all the stories come from,” right, which is our own history. And so that was that sort of leading me more and more…
There was another teacher, again, at the same community college, she was exceptional. I think it was a feminist history course of some kind, and it was amazing learning about…it was wild. So we had a really great time with that one, too. And it just…yeah, it just sparked my interest. And my parents were like, “We’ll disown you if you don’t go to college,” so I had to go to college. But I chose to do something and study something that I found really interesting.
And it has, it’s really changed and transformed my writing, because I’m going straight to the source stuff. As I’ve said, people have said, “Oh, your stories are so weird and stuff happens, it’s so creepy,” and whatever, and I’m like, “You don’t understand, this is sanitized. This is sanitizedfrom actual events.” There’s stuff like…I researched…I spent two years living in South Africa, where I got my master’s degree in history, and I researched all these archives from something called the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, which is what they did after the end of apartheid in that country, where people could come forward and actually tell stories of the horrors that had happened under the state, and they would be, they’d be given political immunity. Oh, my gosh. Like, the stuff you read is just…you know, I’d have to stop and take a break, like, just the things that people do to each other. But to me that was a much better way of spending my time, like researching the real world and what has happened, than just reading books, which I was going to do anyway.
It’s interesting. You’re my twenty-ninth author, I think, that I’ve interviewed so far, and… I don’t want to say names because I’ll forget somebody…but you’re about the third or fourth who actually has a history background.
Yeah!
And that does seem to feed into their writing, and clearly it feeds into yours as well.
Oh, for sure.
So how did you—and when did you—break into writing?
Let’s see. I sold…I sold a non-fiction piece, I think, when I was sixteen, to, like, a local newspaper, which was a nice little jolt. I think I got like twenty bucks or something for it. It was like, “Wow, I got twenty bucks!” And you know, my mom cut it out of the paper, and it was so exciting. And then I think I sold my first genre…I started submitting when I was fifteen to genre magazines, like Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine, and I think Intergalactic Medicine Show was around then, and Talebones. And I think my first professional…I sold one when I was, like, seventeen to an online magazine for five dollars. And then I think my first professional story was to Talebones, and that was when I was…twenty, I think? And so, that was the first one where I actually felt like, “Oh, I’m a real writer,” like, “a publication I’ve heard of is pushing my…” And it was great, though, because I met, oh, I forget his name (Patrick Swenson – Ed.), but I met the editor of that publication like, ten years later. I had just published a book, my first book. And he said, “Oh, I love to talk about you, it’s like, ah-ha, I first published Kameron Hurley.” He’s like, “But honestly, the reason that you were in that particular issue was because I had a spot of exactly 3,000 words, and I had a pile of stories that were on the maybe pile, and your story happened to be about 3,000 words.” I said, “God bless you.” Sometimes that’s all it is, right? It’s so funny.
Well, having been a newspaper editor early in my career, I know exactly what it’s like to have a specific space that you need to fill. And I’ve added a magazine since then and, yeah, it’s like, “That one’s a good story, but I can’t use 5,000 words. This one’s not quite is good, but…”
But it fits!
You mentioned selling to the local newspaper and I was laughing a little bit. My first sale I got paid for was to Cat Fancy magazine.
Oh, yes.
They had something called Young Writers’ Corner. When I was thirteen I sold them this terrible pun about Santa Claus looking for a replacement. And he found a guy who wouldn’t weed his garden and he knew that he could never work out because he wouldn’t hoe-hoe-hoe.
Oh, my God.
And I got paid for that.
And you got paid for that!
So, you know, you take what you can get.
You take what you can get. Exactly. A sale is a sale.
So, you carried on from there. So, were you largely short fiction for quite a while before you tried something longer?
You know, I actually was trying longer stuff. I feel like I’m a natural novelist, so I was writing very long stuff and I think it was from actually encountering other writers. And at the time, you know, the popular wisdom in the genre was, “You need to publish short fiction so that you get known, and then you publish the longer stuff because your stuff will, you know, stand out on the pile or whatever.”
Yeah, I hated that bit of common wisdom.
Oh, man. I hated it. And so I did. So I tried to write short fiction, especially, again, when I went to, again, the Clarion Writing Workshop, they specifically are like, “We would prefer you do a short story, a complete, you know, arc, every week.” And so that gave me a lot of a lot of experience doing that. Again, I think I was twenty when I went to that one, as well. And, yeah, it just…I don’t know. I did a lot of short fiction. I sent a lot of stuff out, and at the same time I was working on longer work, on novels. I think I finally…I sent out a partial, I sent out a novel to several publishers, without…unagented, just to the slush piles, when I was…twenty-two, I think? And, of course, it was rejected across the board and I was like, “Oh, well.” And then I sent out another manuscript again when I was twenty-three, twenty-four, looking for an agent, and all of those are rejected as well. “Well, yay!”, you know, whatever. And again, it’s like I was not having a ton of luck with the short fiction. I sold some stuff to Strange Horizons, again, I had the Talebones sale. I had some stuff to some smaller magazines. I did get into a Year’s Best SF at some point, which was really cool, for one of my Strange Horizons stories, but it just wasn’t…and I could tell, right, that, you know, I could make a short story, but it wasn’t anything special. Like, I look at some of the short story writers who are writing today, Alyssa Wong, Brooke Bolander, like, they put stuff out and everybody’s like, “Ohhh!” The crowd goes wild! And I was not like that. It was just like, well, that was a story. Again, it fits the 3,000-word thing. So I’m like, there’s clearly something I’m missing in short fiction that I was not, you know, it just wasn’t gelling, it wasn’t coming together.
Whereas I think when I finally wrote my first novel, the one that was actually published—ha-ha, “first novel,” again like the tenth one or whatever—when I finally wrote God’s War, I just was like, “Let’s just put in everything. Since I can, I have the space, I’m just going to throw in bug magic and worlds at war and a desert planet, it’s like Mad Max Apocalypse, I’m going to do all this stuff, and—cutting off heads,” and I did, and I ended up sending it out to, I think, three agents, and one came back and said, “Yeah, I’d like to represent this.” And I was like, “Wow, cool.” And, you know, we sent it out and got tons of rejections.
And here’s the…now, here’s the irony, okay? And this is why I tell people that how I broke in is not how you break in today. It’s all very different. Same thing with, like, Scalzi, you know? How it’s done is very different. But I…so the agent sent it all around, we got rejections across the board, nobody wanted it. And then she gets an email from somebody a…an editor at a house that she’d already sent it to, but she’d sent it to a different editor at that publishing house. Well, this editor said, “Hey, I heard Kameron Hurley is shopping a novel, heard it online somewhere, and I read a short story of hers that I really liked, could you send me this novel? I think it’s weird you haven’t sent this to me.” And she, my agent, was like, “Oh, well, I sent to this other, you know, editor. She didn’t want it.” So she sent it to this editor who had read a short story that she liked, and, yep, twenty-four hours later, we had a three-book deal. And that one eventually…there’s a whole thing with that, that didn’t go through, and there was a bunch of messed-up stuff because that editor was fired, it was 2008, it was a disaster. But it was eventually published somewhere else. But that was…like, my first experience was, “Oh, wow,” And then me thinking, “I guess that short story thing really does work,” though I hate to write them. Oh, yeah.
So, yeah, everybody’s story is different. And I do the same thing, when I talk about how I got in with DAW Books, which is my major publisher, it was almost the “here’s a 3,000-word story that fits,” because they had a hole in their publishing schedule, and I had a book published through Marty Greenberg’s…what was it called…Five Star. And they said, “Well, send over some of your stuff and we’ll see if there’s anything that fits,” and they picked mine. And so that’s how I got in at DAW…they had a hole, and I filled it.
That was what they needed. Yeah, totally.
That was…ten books later, I’m still with DAW, so…I also wanted to mention, going back to Clarion, where did that fall in there? Because one thing I often ask writers about their formal writing training, and I get “hit or miss.” You did mention David Marusek was a teacher, so you must have taken some formal writing classes in university at some point. But I get a lot of hit or miss with authors as to whether formal writing training was helpful or not. It sounds like for you, it was.
For me, it was. And it really would depend. I think I started going to, like, local workshops and stuff from the time I was about fourteen, that’s actually when I started reading Writer’s Digest thinking, “OK, if I really…” Again, when I was twelve, I said, “Wow, I could be a writer. How cool is that?” Sometimes I get really mad when I think, you know, how many years I spent studying writing and how long it’s taken, right, to get to where I am, but I also go to the point where, for some people I feel story and structure and all of that stuff comes a lot more naturally, and others of us really have to start early because we have to work at it. But I did, I had to work it, and a lot of it, that was plot and structure. And actually my current agent has been really great with helping me with plot and structure. But I struggled quite a bit when I first was starting out because I could write sentences and there were characters and people did things, but it wasn’t a story, if that makes any sense, it wasn’t…you didn’t get that feeling of catharsis or emotion at the end of it, it was just like, “Okay, so what?” Which is, you know, what Damon Knight would kind of write at the end of somebody’s story that, he’s like, you know, it just tailed off: “So what?” And I had to learn what, the reason I’m writing the story.
So, yeah, I started out doing some of those, some creative writing classes in college, and what I found with a lot of them is, I felt I was a stronger writer than a lot of those people. And I also found that, you know, still, they’re quite hostile toward genre. I think more so than they are now, but nobody likes science fiction and fantasy. They treat it like you are a little kid or something.
I hear that a lot.
Right? All the time. So I got very frustrated with it, and especially having teachers who clearly had, like, they’d published one poem in a literary journal when they were twenty-five. And I’m like, “Okay, what do you have to teach me?” And I think, yeah. David Marusek was the first…I think by that point he had sold about a dozen short stories and possibly had sold his first novel. But it was someone who actually worked in the genre, who took it seriously, who had been published in it, and I was in a class with other people who wrote genre. And it was really very useful to me because they were not only genre, you know, writers—they were also readers, and it was really nice to kind of get that feedback. And I think that was definitely the jumping off point to…again, as I said, he encouraged me to go to Clarion, and then from going from, you know, this sort of small pool of, “Okay, cool, genre writers,” to, like, professional-level, oh-shit genre writers at Clarion, was really, really…it was kind of…there was this feeling of both awe and fear and…I don’t…I can’t explain it. It was one of those things where I went to the writing workshop, and there were seventeen of us, and some had been to Oxford and Stanford and a bunch of them are…one’s a doctor, and all this stuff…and I thought, at the end of the first few weeks, I was like, “You know, we all have different strengths and weaknesses, but I am performing at a similar level to all of these people.” And I think at the time I was like, “Oh, I’m just going to live in a cabin in Alaska, I’m going to write, and I’m not going to…” I wasn’t thinking about all the things I could do with my life. And there was just something about going into that environment and being really inspired and thinking, “These are my peers. Like, I’m not like the lowest person here or the one who just kind of slid in, you know, on my backside. I’m actually writing…I’m performing.” I wrote a short story every week. They weren’t necessarily very good, but I wrote them. Some people didn’t, they weren’t able to do it. I totally get that. But I was there to learn, and I was there to do the work. And I think that there was something about…it’s something about how you approach these experiences and how you decide or not to make the most of them. I think for some people, that kind of environment is not good. It is true. A lot of people can’t do, like, the criticism and the like, the pressure cooker, you know, sort of thing. And there’s, you know, cliques form, I mean it’s six weeks, so it’s like a…ugh, it’s a mess. So some people can’t do it. But I really enjoyed it. I felt it forced me again to kind of push myself and to level up my craft, so…
Well, and your craft was leveled up quite nicely since then, with all these awards and everything. But let’s talk about your craft. So, as I said, I just finished reading The Light Brigade, which came out in March 2019. And so, let’s talk about that one as an example of your creative process. First of all, this isn’t…you know the first question is going to be some variation on, “Where do you get your ideas?” And I’m sorry, but you have to start there. So, let’s put it this way: what was the seed from which this impressive growth sprang?
Well, I have always loved military science fiction, certain military science fiction. I love Conan, too. Now, both of these genres are very problematic in many ways. You know, Conan is a throwback to very racist, sexist times, and a lot of military SF, it’s like people talk about Heinlein, especially like, “Oh, this is just him spouting on about, like, fascism is good.” And I’m like, “I understand that. I also love a lot of things about it.” I think John Steakley wrote a really great military SF novel called Armor, and of course, Joe Haldeman, you know, The Forever War, which is an amazing anti-war novel, which is great.
So, there are some really wonderful military SF titles I really like—Marko Kloos is doing some interesting things as well now—and I, weirdly enough, like, I studied, you know, resistance movements and war for my master’s degree in graduate school. And funnily enough, I was like, “I haven’t written a military science fiction novel.” And we had sold…we had done a two-book deal with Saga Press. One was for The Stars Are Legion, which was a weird-ass feminist space opera, and the second one, it was like, “Well, what do we do now?” And my agent actually came to me and she said, “Hey, you wrote a short story for your Patreon,” ’cause I have a Patreon, which is basically supporting us right now, and she said, “Hey, why don’t you—I really love the voice in that, why don’t you expand that to a novel?” And I said, “Oh, I could do that,” And it was a short story, and I had gotten that initial idea because I love time-travel stories, I love military SF, and I was actually playing World of Warcraft, and there’s this point where you can get between two locations where it actually transforms you into a ball of light, and you sort of follow the ball of light, you know, to the next location, and I thought, “How cool is that? What if you broke down people into light and you, you know, took them to different battlefronts?” And I was like, “Well, so once you start messing with light, then you can start messing with time travel and quantum mechanics and all that stuff.” And so that’s sort of where that idea came from, right, playing World of Warcraft.
We should probably at this point have some sort of synopsis of the book for those who have not yet read it, because otherwise that may have been just a little confusing.
Yes. The Light Brigade is a novel about a disgruntled soldier who signs up to fight a war against Mars to get revenge for her family, who has died, and soldiers are broken down into light to get them to these interplanetary battlefronts. And what she starts to realize, as she experiences this war out of order, is that the reasons for the war are not at all what, you know, they’ve been told they are. So, that’s the journey of the novel, it’s sort of her learning what exactly this war is really about and trying to take control of that situation.
So, that sort of, you know, coming from anywhere…is that how ideas come to you in general? Some people, you know, they tend to start with ae character, or they start with an image or something. It sounds like it can come from anywhere for you.
It can. It can come from anywhere. I think a lot of times, you know, they do start with a character. And then I will actually start with…I’ll start with a character, an idea for a character, and say, “Well, what kind of a world would make that character,” right? And in this particular case, I had this idea…and that’s the thing, too, is that one idea does not make a novel. You have to take a great many ideas. And I can say, “Yes, this…idea of beaming people back and forth, that started it,” but that by itself is nothing. I had to come up with, you know, Dietz as a character, and say, “Okay, what kind of a world will make this person?” And then I had to figure out the structure of the novel, which is a pain in the ass. I had to do all, you know, all these other things, all of the military…
There’s a lot of stories in there that actually come from people that I know who have been in the military, also from a really great book called The Unwomanly Face of War, which is actually an oral history of women who fought in World War Two in Russia. And there, they had a ton of, you know, just first-person accounts of some of these harrowing and heartbreaking and hilarious, also, things, and those sort of also made it into the novel in various different forms. And it all had to come from the media and the books and the writing and all of those things that you sort of soak up throughout the world and your experiences of it, and you then distill it down into a story.
So what does your planning and outlining and all that look like for you? Do you do a detailed outline? Do you…I’m pretty sure in this one you didn’t just make it up as you go, because the structure is complicated.
I tried. I tried the first time, the first time writing it, I sat down, I got to the 40,000-word mark, which was all through the basic, her basic training, and then, yeah, once stuff started going out of order, I…all of a sudden I, it just stopped, and I, you know, called my agent, I said, “Listen, I don’t know how to make this work.” And she said, “Okay, well, tell me what’s going on.” I said, “Well, here’s what I want to happen, but I can’t make it logically happen.” And she said, “Oh, my gosh, you really have made a mess.” And I was like, “Yes, I have. Yes, I have!” Well, it turns out her husband has a Ph.D. in mathematics, he actually teaches in California, and he saw her with a whiteboard trying to figure out, “Okay, how does this, and check the jump that…now they’re back and they’re doing…” And he said, “Oh, well, you just need to…” I don’t know, it’s whatever I said in the back of the book, it’s this, whatever, kind of graph that links these things together. He’s like, “This is okay, you can just use this mathematical equation to make sure that everything is happening in logical order,” and she’s like, “Oh. Oh, great!”
So, we actually sat down, and what she would do is run characters through this graph to make sure that the events as they were happening out of order…because first I had to note how everything happened in order, so I made an Excel spreadsheet of that. Then I would chuck those out of Excel and mix them up, and then I would go to her and say, “Does this make sense?”, you know, just make consistent sense with math. And she’d run it through and be like, “Okay, yes, math says that make sense,” and then I’d go, and I could write the, you know, each section. And it was a matter of me having to say, you know, “Here’s who’s alive at this time. Here’s, you know, here’s what she believed happened last time. Here’s what her squad actually experienced last time.” And I did need to be incredibly detailed and really pay attention to this book in a way that I don’t think I have with any other book.
I was telling my agent, I think it was the third read through of the novel, for the finished novel for me, where I said, “You know, this feels effortless.” And I was like, “How amazing.” Like that….as an author, like, that’s your goal, is to make it look easy. And I mean, you know, the third time I read it through, I said, “It’s at that point where it feels like, ‘Oh, how obvious, you know? Oh, this was easy.’” And again, and still up until, you know, up until we were in proofs, my agent was double-checking, running stuff through, making sure that it all made logical sense, because we knew, with any time-travel novel, we know…and military SF, right?…people are gonna check, they’re gonna re-read it several times and they’re going to check to make sure that you’re right.
So, yes, this was a very different sort of book for me. I think you look at, you know, my first series, The God’s War series, was just, it was a classic quest plot. It was just, it was Conan, it was a female Conan, so it was just like, “Hey, there’s this object of power or person that they need to find,” and they go about, and they have silly hijinks, and they do it. Like that’s, that’s a…I love writing those sorts of plots because they’re just very easy. This was not that…
No math required?
Yeah, no math required, no running it through the graphs. But this one, you know, was a real level up, where it was…I felt like I could say, “I’m writing science fiction now. We used math!” But, yeah, for the most part, with other things I’ll do broad outlines. I used to be almost entirely, you know, a gardener writer, where I would just sort of throw stuff on the page and wander around and I’d have some big set piece like, “Here’s where I want to go and here’s the kind of the big things I want to happen,” but it was just, you know, wandering around. I can’t do that as much anymore because I’m on contract, so what I’ve found is if I try to do that, I end up spending, you know, six times as long editing the book as I would if I do all the work up front like I did with Light Brigade.
Yeah, those deadlines have a way of doing that.
They change your process. It’s a pain in the butt, yeah.
So what does your actual writing day look like? Are you a plant-yourself-at-the-office-chair-and-type-for-twelve-hours-a-day writer, or how does it work for you?
Well, it usually depends. I think my…I’m a binge writer. So, what I like to do is make sure I have big chunks of time. I like to, you know, be sitting at the computer, certainly by about nine o’clock, and I will usually work straight through, with a little break for lunch, until two o’clock or so. By the time it gets about three o’clock, it’s like, my brain is done, I’m done, and I’m ready to do other things, which is great, because then I can spend the early morning hours responding to email, reviewing contracts, and then the later hours doing whatever. So, that’s really kind of the ideal.
Now, does that mean that’s always what happens? No. Right now, I’m working constantly because I’m on deadline. I have a book due Thursday, a big rewrite of some stuff due Thursday, so now it’s like, “Oh, get up at six, type-type-type-type-aaaah!”, you know, and then go to bed late. So, it really depends on where I am in the process. ’Cause there are some other days, you know, once this book is in, I have another book that I’m actually in the research and ideation process right now, and that means going to the library and taking notes and researching things. And that’s a different process. I’m not necessarily making words, but I am preparing to create that outline and flesh that out and get the world in order before I really start it in earnest. And so that’s kind of different mode of work.
Do you ever get lost in your research?
You know, I try a lot more now to stay on target, just like with deadlines, right?
“Stay on target…”
Right, yeah. That’s also, I think, the reason I like to go to the library, because if I’m just like, oh, I’m a hundred percent doing my research online, it’s way easier to lose yourself online than it is in the library, ’cause at the library you have to physically get up, to look for stuff, you have to put this away, do that, so you’ve got to be very clear about…it is much harder to get caught in that. But yeah, if I try and do stuff online, it’s, I feel like, “Oh, it’s been six hours and now I’m watching a YouTube video about basket weaving, how did that even happen?”
So now…I’m presuming you type and work directly onto a computer because you started with word processors when you were a kid, so…
Mm-hmm.
I have talked to one person, I think, who still likes to write longhand, but…once you have your draft, what does your rewriting process look like? Do you have beta readers? Do you just get it done and send it off to your editor? How does it work for you?
At this point in my career, my agent is basically my beta reader. In fact, she is involved…again, I talked about working with structure, she’s very analytical and very much involved and hands-on from the early draft stage…so, when I finish a draft, I usually send it to her first. Occasionally we’ve had ones where, you know, it’s due to the editor and I’ve got to send it to them both at the same time and I just ran out of time, but for most of my work, yeah, she reads the first draft, she gives me her first big batch of notes, I rewrite it based on her notes—that’s usually when the big structural stuff happens—send it back to her, she reads it again, I clean up any last little things, and that’s when it goes to the editor. And that’s ideal, right? But sometimes it just goes straight to the editor, in which case, yeah, then I just end up having…
Like, this last book, The Broken Heavens, which is the third in my fantasy series, The Worldbreaker Saga…that one is so late, and so it ended up going to my editor and to my agent at the same time. They both read it and I had to incorporate both of their comments—sometimes contradictory, so it’s like any other way of taking notes, some of the times you’re just like, “Well, which one best fits my view of the novel and the way the novel should be. Do I agree with them?” and throw them out if you don’t like them. And then again, I just sent it back, and I got the notes back again, fewer notes every time from my agent and editor at the same time. And so, I work on those.
But yeah, I worked with beta readers for my first series, and I think after my first series, the issue became, you know, a lot of my first readers were from my Clarion class, and over time we all became professional writers, and then none of us had time to actually read each other’s books. We didn’t have time. And by the time I had a draft finished, it was already…there would only be, like, a week before it was due to the editor, and that wasn’t enough time to give them time to read it, so, it just…that just kind of fell by the wayside. But early on in my career, yeah, I did have beta readers.
See, I basically never did. I pre-date the Internet, when I was getting started, and I didn’t have any friends…well, that’s not quite true…but I didn’t have any, you know, people that were going to be any use to me. So I’ve always just kind of gotten it written and sent it off to an editor. It’s kind of the way I’ve always worked. Before you send it to your agent, what does your personal rewriting look like? Or are you perfect at the end of your first draft and ready to send it off?
Ha-ha. That’s only John Scalzi is that way. It drives me crazy.
Oh, my gosh, yeah, no, he drives me crazy. But no, I…some of it is…I do, I revise as I go, but a lot of times when I finish something, I do go back and say, “Okay, what are…were there any notes I made…”, see, sometimes I’ll make notes along the way, “Hey, remember to go back and fix that, remember to go back and do this,” and I will go back and I will kind of fix those things up. But, you know, more and more I do…because I am writing to deadline…I wait for my huge edits until my agent sees it. And then I incorporate my edits and my agent’s edits into it, to be like, okay, kind of a gut check, like the things that I thought were wrong, “Oh, look, she thinks are wrong,” or “Oh, she didn’t even think about that.” So, yeah. And I do, I try to take…when feedback comes in, you know, I try and take the small stuff first and get all the small stuff done, and then look at the bigger ones. “Okay, now we have to go through and fix these large sections. This motivation doesn’t seem right, you know, this sequence of events is messed up.” So, I do kind of try and keep track while I’m writing of all the things that I need to address on the next pass.
And yeah, then I’ll go through, I will read it through, address those things. I’m not terribly worried about, like, word choice and things like that. I will spellcheck it at that point, but I wait to really layer on, you know, worldbuilding stuff and work on sentence-level things once I’ve gotten all of the feedback from my editor and my agent, because I found if I try to work at that level first off, a lot of times it takes a lot longer, and then it might turn out that I have a big section that I spent all this time on that in fact needs to be deleted completely. So, I’d rather make sure all of that big structural stuff is in there—in fact, that’s what I’m doing for Broken Heavens right now—all the big structural stuff is fixed, and then I go back, layer on worldbuilding, layer on character stuff, go to the sentence level and say, “OK, let’s clean this up, let’s make this a little bit more poetic,” and that’s the point at which I really start…again, now it is a polish. It’s really shining it up right before it goes to the copy editor.
My final sentence revisions usually happen when I’m doing a public reading and I come across something I wish I’d changed before it got into print.
Oh, yes, we all have that. “What did I do?”
Yeah, it’s funny. Well, it’s not funny, it’s kind of sad, really, but it happens. Well, that’s the novel we were talking about. I also wanted to mention the short story collection that’s just come out. Where do the short stories come from? How did you assemble this collection? You said you don’t write a lot of short stories? Are these all previously published? Are there some unpublished ones in there? It’s called Meet Me the Future.
Yes. Meet Me in the Future. So, two years ago, I think, I started a Patreon. And a Patreon is where my fans can sign up and they get subscribe for a buck a month and get a short story for me. And yes, I’m like, “Oh, I hate short stories, to write short fiction.” Well, when you’re writing short fiction every month for two years…
They pile up.
You do get better. Yeah, you do get better. It’s amazing. But it was really cool, because, I mean, at this point, I was laid off from my day job a few months ago, and so Patreon and my book earnings are basically what we’re living on right now, and, you know, when you have to pay the bills with it, it’s very easy to write a short story. So, I had been doing that. Yeah, I had quite a few lined up for the last two, two and a half years, and what I did is…and I also took some much older stuff, again some of those old Strange Horizonsstories, some other ones that ended up in anthologies. It’s really a “best of,” and it was me taking the best of the Patreon stories, the best of my older stories, and then I basically presented over 100,000 words of these to Jacob (Weisman), the editor at Tachyon Press, and said, “I don’t know what to do with these, you tell me which ones are best. You tell me what you think is good and what order it should go in.” And he read through them, and he’s like, “Wow, this is like…there’s so many, They’re all so great.” And he picked out the ones that he thought were the best. He ordered them in the way that he felt made sense again. Again, he’s an editor, he does it all time. And it’s getting really great reviews, it got two starred reviews, and people have been really happy with it, which is great, again, for someone who’s like, “I don’t know how to write short stories.” It turns out that if you apply…like again, my whole career, if you apply yourself and you work really hard at it, you know, you can get better. And I think that that’s, you know, this short-story collection especially is a really good example of how, you know, doing something over and over again, but with the intent of excelling and getting better and studying, can pay off for sure.
Well, we’ve got about ten minutes left, and this is where I like to get the big philosophical questions. (See, my voice even goes deeper when I say that, “The big philosophical questions.”) And it’s not that…well, it is a big question, really. It’s, “Why do you write and why do you think any of us write?” and concurrently, “Why do you write this crazy stuff?”
I write to change the world. That’s all. I enjoy exploring ways that the world can be really different. And that’s something Joanna Russ actually had said in one of her essay collections. She realized science fiction was the place where she could actually explore how things could be really different. And something about that really struck me, and I really identified with it, because I felt I was writing, especially when I first started, I was writing the fiction I wanted to read then that I wasn’t seeing. And I like, yeah, I kind of grew up in the age of the New Weird genre movement, and which is really strange, really strange, and it’s weird stuff. And I love that stuff because I believe it gets us to think about the world differently. Stories are how we make sense of the world, and kind of pushing that envelope and having people think about the world a little bit differently is really a powerful thing. And I think…my day job, work, you know, the last, like, fifteen years, has been in marketing and advertising, and one of the things that marketing and advertisers know is that stories, and emotional stories especially, can change people’s behavior. You can get people to buy your toothpaste and wear seatbelts or not and smoke or not, and it’s really powerful. And I think they understand that in a way that some other folks don’t.
I think even in genre that sometimes we don’t understand, really, the power of our stories. One of the things that Geoff Ryman, an author, told me the second week of Clarion, he said, “You know, we have to take responsibility for the images that we put on the page, whatever those images are, because they are part of the storytelling, storytelling world that we come from, and that’s how we are each building our own consciousness.” So, I write because I like to show people how it could be different, for better or worse.
I was gonna say, the world of the The Light Brigade is not one for the better.
It’s not a great one. It’s not a great one. It is ultimately, I feel, a hopeful book, but it’s certainly, you know, yeah, it turns around and shows us, you know, a mirror image of certainly some of the things that we deal with now, for sure, so…
A little out of order from my questions, but I meant to mention back when we were talking about it that when I got into it and where the time shift starts happening, I kept being reminded of Gene Wolfe’s book, Soldier of the Mist.
Oh, yes.
With, you know, the soldier who forgets day to day unless he writes things down. A completely different book in almost every way, but that was something that kind of struck me as a similar kind of thing. And I guess that kind of ties in. I mean, science fiction is often said to be a field that’s constantly in conversation with itself. And I think you mentioned that earlier about, you know, you were reading Conan, and then you wrote a feminine Conan, a feminist Conan. Do you feel that you are a part of this great conversation of what’s come before and what might still be coming?
Oh, gosh, absolutely. And that that to me, again, is what so much of Light Brigadereally was. And I think it really depends…a lot of people have asked me, “Oh, can you write down, you know, all the call-backs and Easter eggs and stuff in Light Brigade?” I said, “No, I can’t,” because some of those are actually just in there for specific people. But it’s a book that’s absolutely in conversation with, you know, all those older military SF books, which I think a lot of people really got in there like, oh, here’s our military SF book for this decade. I’m like, “Yeah, see?” It really is, you know, kind of my riposte to a lot of those books.
And it’s in conversation, certainly, with a lot of those books, with Forever War, with Armor, with, you know, Starship Troopersand all the rest. And I don’t think you can say that your work isn’t, unless you don’t read. I mean, if don’t read the genre, then sure, it’s probably not. But one of the things that I actually love about writing genre is that there is still an established…there’s sort of an established community and a discussion of, you know, that we all have about the work, and that you can actually kind of contribute to that conversation as a writer if you’re kind of plugged into it. So, I do appreciate that. I like it because it feels like…you feel like you’re building on something, right? Like, you’re all building toward something. And no one knows what that is, but everybody is contributing to it. And no matter how much one will try and get away from whatever thing in the past, like, influenced all this other work, it’s like, if you are influenced by someone who is influenced by someone who is influenced by someone, you’re part of that kind of timeline. I don’t know. I find it interesting.
So do I. And I guess that’s one reason I got into the field as well. Although I predate you by some time, when I was doing all my reading and writing. Well, what are you working on now? I mean, we’ve mentionedThe Light Brigade, which came out in March. The short story collection is out now.
Mm-hm. Yep.
What’s coming next for you?
Next up, in January of 2020, is the third book—third and final, whew!—in my fantasy series, The Worldbreaker Saga. That’s called The Broken Heavens. And then I actually just sold a book called Losing Gravity, which I pitched to my editor as “Killing Eve meets Die Hard in space.” And he loved that, and the movie people loved that, too. They called immediately.
That’s an elevator pitch.
And I said, “There’s no book! There’s no book yet, guys. That’s a pitch.” So I now have to write that book. So, that’s the stuff I’m doing research and stuff on now while finishing up edits on Broken Heavens.
We haven’t mentioned your non-fiction writing, but you do a lot of columns and that sort of thing. Is that continuing?
That is, that is. I do a column for Locus Magazine every other month, and I also do an essay for Patreon subscribers every month. Occasionally, I do still do stuff when I am, you know, someone pitches me and wants me to write a column. It depends on, really, my schedule, so…
And finally, where can people find you online?
Best place is probably Twitter or Instagram. And that is @KameronHurley, and that’s Kameron with a K, and then, of course, my website, which is KameronHurley.com.
Ok. Well, I think that we’ll wrap it up. So, that was a great conversation. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.
Fonda Lee is the author of the Green Bones Saga, beginning with Jade City, which won the 2018 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, and continuing in Jade War, which came out in August. Book 3, Jade Legacy, is currently in progress. She is also the author of the acclaimed young adult science fiction novels Zeroboxer, Exo, and Cross Fire.
Fonda’s work has been nominated for the Nebula, Andre Norton, and Locus Awards and been named two best-of-year lists by NPR, Barnes and Noble, Powells Books, and SyFy Wire, among others. She won the Aurora Award, Canada’s National Science Fiction and Fantasy Award, twice in the same year for best novel and best young adult novel. Fonda is a recovering corporate strategist, black-belt martial artist, and action-movie aficionado residing in Portland, Oregon.
The (Lightly Edited) Transcript
Fonda, welcome to The Worldshapers.
Thanks, Edward, it’s great to be here.
Now, we kind of almost crossed paths last year at When Words Collide in Calgary, which is where you were born, right? You were born in Calgary?
Yes. Yes.
Was that your first time at that convention?
No, I’ve been to that convention a few times and I’m gonna be there next year as the guest of honor. I still have family in Calgary, so it’s always a great opportunity for me to combine visiting family with making it out to When Worlds Collide.
Well, I always like to plug When Worlds collide because it’s such a great event. We go every year.
It is, yeah. I like the fact that it’s it’s a great size. It’s not too huge, but it’s still very vibrant. And I like the fact that it’s very much modeled after an SF con, but it is cross-genre, and so I always end up seeing some panels and talks about mystery and thriller and romance and other genres besides my own.
Even poetry pops up.
Yeah.
Yeah. I like it a lot. And so, since I have plugged it now, we have plugged it, we should mention that the website for it is whenwordscollide.org. It’s capped at 750 or something like that, or 500, I don’ remember what it is.
Yeah. And unfortunately, I won’t be there this year because I’ll be traveling in Ireland before Worldcon in Dublin, but I will be there next year and I’m always happy to make it over there when I can.
Will you be at World Fantasy this year in Los Angeles?
Unclear. Still up in the air. I’ve got a bunch of travel for the rest of the year, so I’m trying to parse it out so that I’m not totally overloaded. I actually have to write a book sometime this year.
That’s such a nuisance, isn’t it? All these other things you can do, and then, oh, yeah, you’ve still got to write the books.
That’s right.
Well, and speaking of writing books, we’re going to talk primarily about the Jade–I guess it’s called the Green Bones Saga, is the name for the series. I am reading Jade City. I haven’t finished it, but I’ve read quite a bit of it, so I have a good sense of the setting, and I’m enjoying it very much. And Jade War is…is it out now? This is July 15, I guess, when we are conducting this conversation. Is it out, or is it coming out later this month?
It is not out quite yet. It comes out next week. We are one week away from release.
Well, it will definitely be out when this goes live, so…
Yes.
So, we’ll talk about that and how it all came about. But to start with, I always take my guests back into the mists of time–further back for some of us than others, and my mists of time are starting to get quite far back–to find out how you, first of all, became interested in writing science fiction and fantasy, and secondly, how you started writing. You were born in Calgary, but I know then that you moved to the States, so how did that all work out and when did writing kick in for you there?
Yeah. So, I wanted to be a writer when I was quite young. I think I was probably around ten or so. And I was a voracious reader as a child and loved to make up stories. So, at some point I told my parents, “I want to be a writer,” and I think they said, “Oh, that’s nice,” and patted me on the head and encouraged me to get a real job that would allow me to support myself as a functional adult when I grew up. And so, over the rest of my childhood, writing was something that I still loved to do. I always was doing it in my spare time. I had an extremely boring and long forty-five-minute bus ride to school and then another forty-five minutes back, and did not have, at that time, Gameboy or an iPad and whatever else that kids have these days to distract themselves. So, I had a very large pad of paper and I wrote a novel. So, my first novel I wrote when I was in fifth grade, and it ended up being 300 pages of handwritten prose about a young dragon and his motley crew of assorted magical forest friends on a quest for a magical amulet. That was my very first novel, which is possibly still bound with elastic bands in my parents’ attic. I then wrote a second novel when I was in high school that was a pulpy superhero saga, where I cast all of my classmates into this story about cyborgs and superheroes and nefarious corporate tycoons, and printed it out as a graduation gift to all of them. I wrote it, co-wrote it, with a classmate of mine during biology class by passing a graphing calculator.
What do they call that? Tuckerization. when you use real names in your book?
Yes. So that was that. And then I…I didn’t really think that writing would ever amount to more than that for me. I went off and got a business degree, and then an MBA, and I worked in management consulting and corporate jobs and eventually ended up…well, lived in Toronto for a while, then ended up moving to Portland, Oregon, to work at Nike, which is located here. And it wasn’t it until I was in my thirties when I kind of had this epiphany that I wasn’t writing anymore because I just gotten way too busy. I had a full-time job, I had two small children, and writing had just completely fallen off to the wayside. And that’s when I realized, “Wow, something really feels like it’s missing in my life and I need to get back to what I really enjoy.” So I took writing much more seriously than I ever had before and made changes to my work schedule, to what my priorities were in life. And then, once I did that, I was like, “No, I’m in it 100 percent. I want to be published and I want to make this my career.”
Well, you mentioned that you were a voracious reader. What were some of the books that you read that… because clearly you were reading the kinds of books that led you to write your first story as a fantasy.
The Book of Three, Book 1 of Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydain
Yeah. So, I was a fantasy/science fiction reader from the start. I loved…The Chronicles of Prydain was one of my favorite early books. I read Monica Hughes. I don’t know if many readers remember Monica Hughes books. She was a Canadian science fiction author.
I do!
Yeah! Devil on My Back was a book I really loved when I was a kid. I read, well, Narnia, of course, Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising, all of those books. And I also loved animal stories. I read, like, all of those Black Stallion books.
Devil on my Back by Monica Hughes
Oh, me too. You know, I always like to point this out. Walter Farley actually wrote science fiction in the that arc with…the Island Stallion books actually have a science fiction twist.
Yeah! Yeah, so I loved those stories as well. So, I graduated later on in my teens to Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Anne McCaffrey, all of the science fiction/fantasy greats at that time. So, I’ve been very much in this genre as a fan since the start.
Well, those are all the same books I read, which…and I also wrote my first…well, I didn’t write it, I didn’t write my novel quite as young as you, but you were mentioning it, and I just happened to have it on my desk, my first novel, which I wrote when I was fourteen. And you were…yours was 300. Mine was only 201 when I hit THE END, so you outdid me. And it’s in a binder that says “Eddie Willett, Algebra,” on the front of it.
Oh, that’s great. It’s an artifact now.
And it has little drawings of race cars on it. I sometimes take it to school readings to show off. So, how did the first…was the first book you wrote trying to get published, published, or did you have some false starts along the way? How did you break in, I guess?
I wrote a practice novel that I knew would not be published, but I just wanted to teach myself how to write a novel. So, I wrote a novel that never saw the light of day at all. Then I wrote a young-adult fantasy novel that I wanted to see published and I began querying it after it was done. It went through quite a few rounds of querying and it picked up some interest from agents, but nothing…but it didn’t go anywhere beyond that. And while I was querying that novel, I wrote Zeroboxer, which would become my debut. And I took that novel, as well as the one I had been querying previous to it, to a writing conference here in Portland called Willamette Writers. And I didn’t really know which of these projects I should pitch, but Zeroboxer was hot off the press, I had just recently finished writing and revising it and felt like it was in shape to start being sent out, so I pitched that, and I got a lot of agent interest. A number of agents said, “Send me the manuscript right away.”
So at that point, I sent out queries to those agents as well as others that were on my list, and within a couple of weeks in offers of representation, I signed with my agent now, who…I’ve had him since the start…and we did a round of revision, took it out, and within three months we had an offer. So, between me finishing that novel, that would have been August…that conference would’ve been August of 2013. And we had a book deal in December of 2013. So when it happened, it happened quickly.
It doesn’t happen that way for everyone.
I know, it’s funny, because publishing often does feel like it’s slow, slow, slow, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Then it happens and it’s like, boom, all these things start cascading.
Well, I often ask authors if they showed their work to people when they were starting out, but clearly you did, since you wrote with a classmate and put all your classmates in it and gave it to them as a graduation present. And the reason I asked that is because it’s…for me, that was when I kind of discovered that, “I’m writing stories that people actually do enjoy reading.” Did you have any formal creative writing, training or anything along the way? Or were you just…you read and then you wrote, which is what I did, so I often ask that question, too.
Yeah. So, I did not, when it came to formal educatio. In fact, I regret that fact, because when I was in college, I took an English class, and then I think…I probably took a couple of English classes that were required. But I also had finance and accounting and marketing and all of those. And my English classes were…the English department was sort of against giving out As to what no matter what I did, I would always get, like, a B-plus, sort of regardless of, you know, the quality of whatever essay I was writing. It seemed like everyone in the class got somewhere between like a B-minus and a B plus. So, you know, academic overachiever that I was, I was like, “Well, I’m not going to have this dragging me down.” So, I ended up not taking future English classes in in the latter half of my undergrad except for one class that I couldn’t resist. And that was a class on the history of science fiction. And I ended up doing a term paper on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and we read stories by Sawyer and Bradbury. And that was, of all the classes I have taken…I don’t remember a thing from Finance 101, but I remember that undergrad science fiction class.
But, in terms of craft of writing, once I started getting serious about it as an adult, I took an online writing class through continuing-ed classes, I applied and got into the Viable Paradise Writing Workshop–which I’m going back to this year as a faculty member, which is pretty cool. And those were ways for me to get into, first of all, the discipline and habit of writing and treating it really seriously and improving my craft, and also a way to meet other writers and find a community and get validated that, yeah, like, “This is this is really something I could do and want to do.”
Have you ever had any writing groups that you belong to, like critique groups or anything like that, that some writers have?
Yeah, I have…actually my Viable Paradise classmates. I’ve asked them to read for me on occasion. I have a beta reader group. So, I don’t have a critique group that follows the model of meeting once every couple of weeks or every week to share small pieces. I need to write my novels in isolation and I don’t show them to anyone until they’re in pretty decent shape. So, I’ll go for a year or more without showing my work to anyone. And that’s…especially with these novels, thay’re so long. So, I need to write by myself and get it into…see the whole shape of it first. And then I will send it out to beta readers. I’ll have a few people read it and I’ll send it to my agent and he reads it before it goes to my editor.
Well, we’re going to focus on the Green Bones Saga as an example of your creative process, but I did want to mention your earlier books, too, because you started in YA, and now you’re writing adult. And I’ve kind of crossed that divide myself, and back and forth, and sometimes there seems to be…and I was reading an interview with you in Locus, actually, and you were talking about this. There can be a kind of a confusion sometimes if your voice is YA, but your story is more adult, and I think you mentioned that in connection with Zeroboxer, and I’ve run into that, as well. So, what in your mind is the difference between writing YA and writing adult, and how do you go back and forth between them?
So…over the years it’s clarified in my mind that young adult is very much about voice and perspective. I don’t approach the writing of my YA novels differently than my adult novels, process-wise, the same amount of work goes into developing the world and the characters and the storyline. But with my young adult novels I have…I’m conscious of wanting to make them much tighter in terms of the perspective and making sure that that teen mindset, that teen voice, is there, because you can have any number of things going on in a YA speculative fiction world.
Exo is a good example of this, my duology. It has not just global stakes, but interplanetary stakes, where there’s a war between alien races and Earth is potentially caught in the middle, and there’s…entire human cities get demolished. So, it is very…it’s the same stakes as you would find in any big space opera. But it is very focused on the main character, this seventeen-year-old guy named Donovan, and everything is filtered through his experience and him trying to figure out what he should do, what his responsibilities are to his friends, his family, his cohort, to humanity. And that is, I think, the defining characteristic of young adult, is that, no matter what’s going on, it is still about the teen character.
And a good example of this is Hunger Games. Hunger Games…by the end, Katniss is leading a revolution against the capital, but it doesn’t zoom out like an adult novel might and go to whatever political machinations are occurring in the glass towers of the capital. It’s always with Katniss and her situation, her romantic tribulations and her struggle to survive and so on.
So, with my adult fiction, I feel a lot more free to expand the perspective and the scope. And that was certainly the case with the Green Bones Saga, because I knew from the start that it would be a family saga, and that it wasn’t about one character, especially one teen character. It was going to be a cast of characters, different ages. Their relationships were gonna take center stage. The world was going to be a very…there was gonna be a lot of stuff happening in different places. So, from the start, it was pretty clear to me that it was an adult novel. And my very first novel, Zeroboxer, I think could have gone either way. And that was..it ended up being picked up by a young adult imprint and published as young adult, but looking back on it, it could have gone either way. And now I’m more cognizant of deciding early on, figuring out early on what type of story this is.
See, what happened in my case was my…I wrote under the pseudonym E.C. Blake–who was a guest host on here and interviewed me–E.C. Blake interviewed Edward Willett in an earlier episode of the podcast. E.C. Blake wrote a fantasy trilogy, Masks of Aygrima, with a fifteen-year-old female protagonist. And it was always conceived as a YA book in my mind. But DAW wanted it, and DAW doesn’t have a YA line, so it was published in the adult fantasy market. And I got it from two directions, with people saying, “Oh, this read like a YA book”–well, yeah–and others saying, “Well, this is too adult for my YA readers.” So, yeah, I’ve been caught like that too. And the funny thing is Worldshaper, my latest novel from DAW, is up for a…well, it’s longlisted for the Starburst Award for best young adult novel.
Congratulations?
Yeah, but there’s not a teenager in the entire story. The main character is in her late twenties, and I still don’t know how it ended up being considered a YA novel. So…
Well, there is a grey zone, certainly, there’s kind of this blurry line, and what I see is a lot of young adult conventions filtering up into adult fiction. There’s more adult spec-fic these days that features young protagonists that kind of adopt some of that YA pacing and tone. So, there is certainly a gray zone in between there, but eventually, at the end of the day, your book has to sit on a shelf somewhere and the publishing powers that be need to be able to tell the buyers at bookstores this is where you’re your book is going to sit.
And the young adult’s over there, and the adult’s over there, and they’re two different things.
Right.
Well, let’s talk about the Green Bones Saga. Well, first of all, perhaps a synopsis without giving away anything you don’t want to give away, because if I talked about it, I might give away something you don’t want to give away so you synopsize it, and then we’ll go from there.
So, the Green Bones Saga is a modern-era epic urban-fantasy gangster-family saga that I have on multiple occasions described as The Godfather with magic and Kung Fu. It takes place in a…
That’s pretty much I would have described it, so…
It seems to work for people. You know, it’s nice when you can encapsulate your book in a couple of sentences, because you get asked to do it quite a bit. So, it is set in a secondary world on this fictional Asian-inspired island metropolis called Kecon. And what distinguishes this island is that it is the world’s only source of magic jade. And this magic jade is this resource that the Keconese people have long had to themselves. And it gives those who wear it these superhuman abilities that are not unlike superhuman abilities you might see in Wu Chia-Hsiang Kung Fu-movie martial-arts heroes. So they can…they have enhanced strength and speed and perception. And they can, not exactly fly, but they can, you know, jump great distances.
So, they have over time developed this warrior caste called the Green Bones. And the Green Bones can use jade, but not without cost, because it’s not like anyone can use it, they have to train for a very long period of time. And if you have too much jade or you’re too sensitive to it, bad things happened, including madness and death.
So, the story follows one of the two clans that ostensibly rule the city. And these two clans used to be united back when they were patriotic organizations that fought against foreign colonialist powers, but have since become rivals. And the No Peak clan is one of these clans, and it’s led by a family called the Kaul family that has this aging, bitter patriarch who has four grandchildren. And the story is really about them. The brother Lan is the head of the family now, and he has a younger brother, a younger sister, and they have an adopted sibling. And clan war is looming on the horizon. And one thing leads to another and all hell breaks loose. So that is pretty much the summary of Jade City. And Jade War…
I think the title gives something away there.
Yeah! So, Jade War is the second book, and it expands on a lot of the things that happened in Jade City and takes this conflict between the clans and then sees it become an international one on the world stage. So, that pretty much sums it up. You know, it’s very much a mash up of things that I’ve loved. I’m, you know, a big fan of. of Wu Chia-Hsiang Kung Fu films, gangster movies like The Godfather and Goodfellas, and epic fantasy. So, all of those came together and and became this mash-up in my mind that I created in the Green Bones Saga.
Was there…and I guess this applies to all your novels..is there a kind of..do ideas come to you in sort of the same way, is it like an image, or something you’ve read, or two ideas banging together? Or…how do how do stories begin for you? And how did this one in particular begin?
Yeah, so, stories come to me in different ways. With Zeroboxer, it was the storyline that came to me first, the plot came to me first. With my young adult duology, Exo and Cross Fire, the character came to me first. And with the Green Bones Saga, it was the world.
So, this story came to me actually as just the premise of this magic jade and the aesthetic that this world would be, this kind of gangster fantasy. And the first thing I wrote down in my writing notebook was Jade City, was the title. So, that was the first spark. And I wrote Jade City, and then I wrote, “Modern-era world where combat is hand-to-hand. There’s guns and cars and so on, but power rests with those who have magic jade.” And that was it. I had no plot, I had no characters, I had nothing. I just had that idea. And then it sat in my notebook for a very long time. And like many good ideas, it accreted material around it like a piece of sand in a oyster shell, until I had enough to grasp onto it and then start turning it into a book.
Well, and what does that process look like for you, when you start building on the initial idea? How do you then develop a story, and do you end up doing a detailed outline, or are you more of a “let’s just get started and see what happens” kind of writer?
I do write an outline. For me to start writing. I need to know the beginning, I need to know the end, and I need to know some of the big turning points in there between the beginning and the end. And I won’t start writing until I have that. And I will do at least two to three months of just research and brainstorming. And for every book that looks different, but it involves a lot of reading and just absorbing as much information as I can that will help me in that creation process.
What are the things you researched for Jade City?
So, I did everything from, you know, watch a lot of Hong Kong crime dramas to read up on the gangs of New York and the history of the Italian American Mafia and Cosa Nostra, and articles, non-fiction articles about the Yakuza and the Triads and, you know, everything. And oh, jade mining, you know, drug production and smuggling. Anything that I knew would kind of have some bearing in this fantasy world. So I kept a notebook. I have a Scrivener file where I’m just dumping loads of research, and I’m just collecting a lot of stuff and seeing the connections and figuring out how that works. So, for example, you know, I’m seeing connections between…how the Italian-American Mafia family structure could be combined with, like, the flowery titles and ranks used in the Triads. “OK, I like both of those ideas. How am I going to work those into the story?” So, things like that.
And then I will do a lot of just free writing, outlining, writing, like character, little profiles of characters. And then at some point I feel like I have enough of an outline. The outline is helpful to me only as a safety net, for me to feel like, “Oh, I can finally start writing,” because I know that it will change. I know the outline is most likely not going to stay the same. But I have it to at least get started. So, then I set everything aside, close all the research files so that I’m not tied to them, I’m just keeping them in the back of my mind. And then I start writing.
You mentioned doing character profiles. What do those…well, first of all, how do you find the characters that you need for the story and how do you go about developing them?
So, they they start off as fulfilling particular roles in the story I want to tell. So, the siblings, I knew the main characters would be members of this family. And so, it helps to have a vision of what you want this story to be. And because I knew this was a family saga, I knew the main points of view would revolve around this family. And then I started kind of fleshing out, what would the roles be? “What characters do I want to have in this story?” So, I knew there would be a character who is going to be sort of the responsible one, you know, the prudent, reasonable leader. And, you know, he was the elder brother.
And then I knew that other characters were going to be playing off of each other, and there was going to be a much more emotional, impulsive, charismatic brother, and he would be this counterpoint to his older brother, but he would also have this rivalry with his sister, who was very similar in age. And she was bringing a different perspective because she rejected their upbringing and all the constraints of that patriarchal society and left. And she’s coming back. So, I knew that she would have a particular character arc.
So, I just started off, and then I was like, “Okay, well, I also want a character who is new to this, like, he’s the protege, and through him, I’m going to be able to introduce how this jade magic works and how people come up in this world, because that’ll be…the fact that he’s in school, he’s going to be able to show the reader, you know, how people train to be able to harness this magic.
So, they start off as fulfilling specific rules in the story, and then they gain their own unique identity, and then the story starts responding to them. So there’s this interplay. It’s not like, you know, the characters come first and then the plot, or the plot comes first and then the characters, they’re very much sort of interacting, and there’s this whole iterative process between them and the storyline.
Characters change as you write, at least, mine do, from what you might have initially. But as you throw them into situations, you see how they react and how they interact with each other. And I’m always fascinated by that, because these things…we set out with an idea in our head, and yet somehow, as the words flow out of your fingers, it’s not always an entirely conscious process. It’s quite fascinating to me.
Yeah, definitely. I mentioned the outline changing. I initially had…even though I knew how the story would end, I didn’t have the specifics of it correct. So, I had an idea of what the final big climax would be. And as I wrote, I realized, “No, based on what the characters would do, that’s not going to be how it how it goes.” So, you’re right, there’s this…things change, because you get to know the characters better. You start off…they sort of start off as puppets doing your will, having…you’re just trying to move them around. And then by the time you’re finished, get to near the end of the book, you know them a lot better, and you go back to the beginning and start revising and you’re like, “Oh, yeah, no, that’s not really how he would say that. So, yeah.”
So, yeah, and I want to talk about revision process in a mintue. But I also wanted to ask about the…there’s a great fascination in people who are interested in writing fantasy with creating magic systems. And this one is unique, I think. I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite like this. And I kind of like the fact that it’s just this one single magical thing in a world that is otherwise very much like ours, and how that changes things. Is that kind of what you were going for?
Yes, definitely. I really like my fantasy to feel very grounded. And, you know, I’ve never really gravitated towards writing high fantasy, if you will. And before I wrote this series, I was writing science fiction.
And this does have a certain amount of a science fiction feel to it just because it is a high-tech world.
Right. And I’ve had that comment before, that this feels like a fantasy where the magic is treated in a science fiction away. You know, there’s…you may not have reached this chapter yet, but there’s a scene where the Jade is being referred to by these foreigners, and they’re calling it bio-energetic jade. Because, you know, it’s not magic in this world. It’s magic…
To us.
To us, but the characters just see it as, “This is just the way it was,” just sort of…I mean, it’s something that we don’t totally understand. I mean, I’m not sure I totally understand quantum physics. It’s magic to me, but it exists. And so, these characters don’t think of it like magic. In fact, there’s never the use of the word magic in the entire series.
So, I like to write the use of, the existence of, this substance as a way to to heighten and examine the social conflicts. So, the fact that this jade exists creates the particular structure of this civilization, and the fact that other countries are coveting it and that technology is impacting its use is also playing in here, because if there was this substance in our world, you know, it wouldn’t be like a fantasy novel where there is birthright and only certain people are born with magic. There’s a drug being created that would allow other people to use it. And that’s just feels very real to me. Like, yes, of course, like, someone would apply science to this magic thing and figure out how to use it more widely. And so, all of those things are playing into the story.
And it was very much my intention that, you know, this magic substance is a resource. And with any scarce resource, it’s going to create disparity of distribution. It’s going to create conflict. It’s going to create, you know, social questions of, you know, how it’s viewed religiously and socially. So, all of that is part of the story, and it’s not, you know, it’s not treated like magic. It’s just treated like a fact.
In the family and the clans and the whole society, there are all sorts of different points of view being presented and bouncing off of each other. And I noticed in your previous interview that you were a high-school debater, which stuck out for me because I was also a high school debater. And I do think–and I think you mentioned it, this was in the Locus interview–when you do formal debate, you have to argue both sides.
Right!
It doesn’t matter which one you personally are drawn to, you have to argue both sides to the best of your ability. And I think that does come through in the book.
Yeah, I think it is very much present in, I think, almost all of my writing, honestly, I feel like I don’t ever want to write just obviously good characters and obviously bad characters. I like to write stories where you can see the point of view of the other side. Like, the main antagonist in the Green Bones Saga is Ayt Mada, who is the leader of the opposing clan. And, you know, she makes some pretty good points. You know, she wants to kill all of our protagonist characters, but, you know, she has reasons for why she’s doing what she’s doing. And I like to think that I can rewrite the story again from the other clan’s point of view and make a case for your sympathies that way.
That was certainly my approach when I was writing my young adult duology as well. It would be easy to write a teen protagonist who is just, you know, plucky hero fighting against the aliens. But I made him a security officer whose job is to enforce the laws under alien governance. And, you know, there is…because of his position, he can see a lot of the good things that have come out of the intergalactic trade and being part of this larger alien empire. And so, there’s…I like to…I like having characters in that gray zone of, you know, moral ambiguity and which side is right. Is there a right side? And I think that does come through in my writing, even if it…regardless of whether it’s YA or adult or fantasy or science fiction.
So going back to your actual process, what…you said, you have to write in isolation, do you sit at your desk for four or five or six hours a day in your home office? Do you go off and write in a notebook under a tree somewhere? What’s your actual writing process look like?
Much more like the former, the sitting in my chair at the desk for four to five hours. Not always in my home because…well, sometimes in my home, maybe about half the time. and sometimes I just need to get out and have a change of scene. So, I’ll go to a coffee shop or the library and I will write there. But I try to…not necessarily write the same amount of time or the same number of words every day, but I have short-term and medium-term goals that I set for myself by backing in from what I need to get things done. So, I know that I have to hit some deadline at some point and I’ll back out from there and say, “OK, well, that means I need to have a second draft by this date, which means I need a first draft by this date so I have time to give it to better readers…” So, if I know when I need to get a first draft done, then I’ll be like, “OK, I really should try and get the first half done by the end of summer,” for example. And that means I need to really get about X number of words, or this week I’m going to try and get these two scenes done. and then I’ll block out time to do that. So it’s, you know, it’s always thrown for a loop by the schedule, whether I’m traveling or, you know, other things are going on.
But I work best when I am by myself and it’s quiet. I don’t even listen to music. I put on noise-canceling headphones with ambient noise just in the background, like rain falling–it’s actually quite easy because Portland is usually raining, so there’s usually background noise of rain falling–and a big cup of tea. If I can get a solid three to five hours, that’s what I’m most productive.
Now we’ll circle back around to the revision process. So, you mentioned first draft, second draft, so I’m guessing you do a complete first draft and then go back and rewrite from the beginning. Is that how it works?
You know, it depends. It’s kind of…every book sort of is different in that regard. I don’t always do a full first draft and then go back from the beginning and start rewriting. Sometimes that is the case. That was the case with Zeroboxer. I just got, boom!, all the way through and wrote a first draft, but other books have sort of defied that model. Jade War is a good example because I had multiple POVs and they were in different places and I couldn’t write straight through. I would lose the thread of the overall narrative, so I had to write non-linearly. I would write one character’s POV, and then I would write another character’s POV, and I would try to figure out how to stitch the…where they were intersecting and where they fell in the overall timeline…and then stitch them together. And it was…it was more like quilting then like one straight, you know, knitting process. So, I couldn’t even tell you what draft I was on at any given time because it would be like, “I don’t know, is this like 2.34?” Because there would be parts where I had written it and then I had revised that part, but I had still not written the first draft of this other part. And so, it was just all piecemeal and all over the place. So, you know, at some point the idea of even like first, second draft just sort of fell apart.
Once you had it to the point where you considered it more-or-ess complete…you mentioned beta readers. So, what do they provide for you?
So, I will send it to beta readers to have them read the whole thing and give reactions on the structure, which parts felt like they needed more work. Maybe where things were not clear. It really is just to get outside eyes on it.
How many do you have? And where did you find them?
I have, you know, usually between three to five people read it, not including my husband, who I also use as a reader. And I’ve found them from, generally, just the writing community here in Portland, and other spec-fic writers who are also working on novels, because though we don’t have these expectations of meeting every second week, we just are very much…we’ve set it up so that it’s a…we get in touch when one of us has a novel that is done.
So you do the same thing for other writers as well?
Right.
And then once it gets to the editor, what what does your editorial feedback look like?
Well, my editor is…I’ve had multiple editors. So, I have an editor for my YA–I’ve had two different editors there–and obviously my editor at Orbit, and usually it goes to my editor, and then there’s silence for a little while, and then I get this very long, very daunting letter back, you know, with all the reactions and what needs work. And then I look at the letter and I panic for forty-eight hours, and then I set up a phone call with my editor and we talk through it.
And I find…I really…the editorial process is one of the best parts of of the whole writing process, even though it is very stressful at times. It’s where the book really gets better. The editorial feedback is just so intensely valuable. And the editor is both a source of misery, but a real…but also, your greatest champion. Because my editor wants the book to be true to my vision and to be the best possible version of itself that it can be. So, it’s really a partnership. And my editor is frighteningly efficient. I think I turned in Jade War…I can’t even remember exactly when I turned it in…but she read it and had this long edit letter for me like two weeks later, I don’t think I’d even really fully recovered from finishing it and handing it in. So when the edit letter came back it was like whiplash, ’cause she had read the whole thing and gotten back to me with notes so quickly.
But I think a lot of aspiring writers fear the editorial process. I get this a lot. I’ll teach writing workshops and writers will say things like, “Oh, but like, you know, what’s it like when the editor wants to change your book? Like, do you have to listen to them?” And these…they’ll have comments that make it seem like the editor is your enemy. And, you know, “What do you do if they want you to change your book?” Most of the time, that is not not how the relationship goes at all. I mean, I’m not saying there are no bad editor relationships. There certainly are. But in my experience, you know, you and the editor are working toward the same goal. And every one of my editors has made my books better.
Well, you have a pretty impressive list of awards that you’ve picked up along the way. What have those meant to you, to get that kind of professional feedback?
I mean, they’ve been…they’ve meant a lot because, you know, they are…they’re first of all, a sense of, “Wow, like people actually are reading my books and they like them and they think they’re good.” So, I often say this, it’s funny because awards are both very meaningful and meaningless at the same time. So, they are very meaningful in the sense that you have received outside validation that you’re doing pretty well and other people in the know, especially if it’s a pure award like the Nebula nomination, I know I’m being nominated not just by, you know, any random person, but all my fellow science fiction and fantasy writers, whom I respect and I know that that isn’t a nomination that’s given lightly. They’re not going to nominate something that they don’t think is well written. So, it’s very meaningful. The World Fantasy Award, which I won, was hugely meaningful because I knew that…it’s a juried award, and these jurors are chosen carefully, and they’re like experts in their field, they’ve read a lot. They read–I don’t know how many books in order to come up with the shortlist and then to decide. So, it’s incredibly important. It’s a huge honor to get nominated for any of those major awards and to win an award like that.
At the same time, it doesn’t change your day-to-day life or routine. Like, you have this burst of achievement and joy and people are congratulating you, and it feels amazing for a short while, and then it’s, you know, it’s back to work. You know, you’ve still got a sit down, your life doesn’t change overnight or anything like that. It’s not like, you know, you’ve won the lottery in publishing and now from now on, you know, you’re not going to get rejected anymore like you. It’s not a magic sales ticket. It’s not like, you know, the next day suddenly you’re, you know, raking in dough. You get the validation and you enjoy it and you bask in that achievement and then you sit right back down in your chair, and you’re still facing the blank screen the next day.
And, of course, with a lot of these things, you get recognized for something that to you is now way in the past and you’re struggling with something brand new.
Oh, definitely.
It’s like, you know, when get your book, and you…people say, “Isn’t it exciting to get your book?” Well, it is, but I have no desire to read it because it’s in the past, right? I’m working on something new.
Yeah. I remember actually feeling quite stressed after won the World Fantasy Award. I was smack dab in the middle of writing the second book. And the amount of…after the, you know, the excitement wore off, there was the pressure of, “Oh, great. Like, how am I going to write a sequel to live up to the first book?” Because now there’s expectations. So…and I feel the same way.
The same thing happens with book launches. Book launches are very funny because, you know, you’re launching a thing that you worked on so long ago. And you’re, you know, talking to interviewers and you’re doing bookstore events and you’re talking about this thing that you wrote and you’re acting happy and excited. You are happy and excited, but, you know, in the back of your mind, you’re stressing about whatever it is you’re working on right now. You know, “I still can’t figure out this plot point.” So it’s funny. Your brain is always kind of broken up based on the projects that are going on.
Well, we’re getting close to the end here, so this is where I asked the big philosophical questions. Well, one really, Which is simply…well, it’s kind of a three-parter. Why do you write, why do you think anybody writes, and in particular, why do you and I and other people write science fiction and fantasy?
So, I write because I love stories. And I think that stories are the truest form of human communication. I think everything that we do to relate to each other revolves around stories. Have you sat down with a bunch of friends that you haven’t seen for a few years or weeks? You immediately start telling stories, saying, “Oh, how’s it going?” And someone says like, “Oh, well, you know, last month I went here and this and that.” And they’ll, you know, they start telling a story.
I think that the stories are how we share ourselves with others. And everything that I write, I feel like I’m sharing something about myself with the world. And ideally. I’m sending that out into the world so that other people who read it will find something in those words that connects with them, and they’ll be like, “Yeah, like I feel like I relate and I understand and I see myself in that, too.” So, you know, there’s something personal about writing that…I think writers feel very drawn to kind of put their own truth out there. And, you know, when you see things in the world and, you know, you have personal experiences, you know, you can…part of, for me, the way to process them and to talk about them is to tell a story.
And when it comes to, you know, why science fiction and fantasy in particular? I think it’s a way to really stretch the imaginative boundaries of our minds, but then use that to tell fundamental truth or to reflect the human experience. So, if I’m going to tell a story about war, I could write about a specific war in our real history, but I can say something more, both broader and kind of more underlying about war itself in general, by putting it in a fantasy world or a science fiction world where, you know, there’s two alien races or, you know, it’s humans against cyborgs or whatever, and tell a story about war that way. And then I’m not bringing the real-life baggage of a specific event in history from our world into the conversation. Then it’s just a story about the truth of war and how it affects those characters and those characters are a stand in for, you know, any number of humans or people in our world.
So, I think that science fiction/fantasy really builds empathy in a way because, can you make a reader relate to a human who’s living 300 years in the future or an alien or a magical being or a robot? If you can, then you’re asking them to empathize with someone who’s very different than them. And that’s something that we can all use more of in the world.
I was going to say, this podcast is called The Worldshapers, and so I’ll ask you, as I’ve asked others, do you hope in some way that through your fiction you are…shaping the world might be a little grand, but at least shaping individuals and changing them in some way when they read your stories?
I certainly hope so. And I think that, you know, that is really probably the most validating thing about being an author, is when you hear from a reader who has really connected with your work and for whom your book means a lot. We all have those books in our lives where, you know, you feel like you read this book and it really shapedd, you know, our view on something, fiction or, you know, some issue or what have you. And having those moments…I mean, I’ve I’ve been honestly amazed and thrilled by how much international enthusiasm the Green Bones Saga has gotten. You know, I’ve had readers from the Philippines and New Zealand and Britain, like, people all over the world, who’ve said that they really love the fact that, you know, it’s a different take on fantasy, that it’s not fantasy that is set in some version of medieval northern Europe, that they are seeing fantasy worlds that that aren’t sort of the traditional mold of fantasy and that that meant a lot to them. That has been really, really awesome. And, you know, I think the fantasy genre as a whole is seeing a lot of that, just a broadening of, like, what sort of voices and stories are being told in fantasy. And I am really glad I get to be a part of that.
And what are you working on now?
Well, my answer is gonna be the same for the next year or so. And that is the third book of the Green Bones saga.
Does it have a title?
Yeah, there is, and I can’t announce it yet. Maybe by the time this podcast goes live, it will be public (It is, as you can see from the cover art at left – Ed.), but it does have a title. Orbit will be announcing it soon. And that will be my monster project for a while, because capping this trilogy is going to be no mean feat. And then I’ve got some other projects in the works that…well, I won’t speak of yet, but stay tuned.
And where can people find you online?
They can find me on my Web site, which is fondalee.com. I am on Twitter @FondaaJLee, and occasionally on Facebook. But yeah, people can certainly find me on the interweb.
I’m just curious, why is there a J in the Twitter handle and not on your website?
Only because the Twitter handle was taken by some sort of egg.
That’s so annoying.
Yeah.
Yeah. The reason this is called…well, it wasn’t a Twitter problem, but it was a domain name problem. This podcast is called The Worldshapers because Worldshapers was just being held by somebody who said, “Oh, well, we’ll sell it to you for $2,000 or $5,000, whatever it was. I said, “You know, I don’t think I need to spend that money on that.”
Right.
Well, thanks so much for being on The Worldshapers I enjoyed the conversation. I hope you did, too.
I did! Thank you, Ed. And I will be sure to signal boost once it goes live. And good luck with the rest of your interviews you have lined up. Sounds like you’ve got quite a lineup the rest of this summer and year.
Yeah, it’s going really well. So, I hope to keep doing it for a long time. Anyway…
