A chat with Aurora Award-winning YA author James Bow about his new science fiction novel, The Sun Runners, and its companion anthology, Tales from the Silence.
“Hello, people of Mercury. This is planet Earth. Are you receiving this? Please respond.”
Lieutenant Adelheid Koning was only twenty-three when the Earth’s long fight against its environment ended in collapse and nuclear war. Earth’s sudden silence leaves the colonies of the inner solar system without lifelines, in various stages of self-sufficiency.
Or, in Mercury’s case, not.
To help her fellow stranded colonists of Mercury survive starvation and a breakdown of order, Adelheid fights some cold equations and makes some hard choices, ending up wearing an iron crown as queen of one of the rail cities of Mercury, constantly moving to stay ahead of the Sun.
Fifty years later, Adelheid’s granddaughter, Frieda, is a seventeen-year-old princess who would rather be an engineer. Frieda’s life is shattered when a suspicious accident takes one of her arms—and is then turned upside-down when her mother dies from that accident. Frieda is left a young and vulnerable queen, locking horns with her grandmother, who is now regent and dowager.
When the Earth makes contact again, after fifty years of silence, Frieda is eager to end Mercury’s isolation, but Adelheid is suspicious of the Earth’s sudden return, and wary of the other latitude towns’ desires to accept all that the Earth is offering, without question.
With thousands of lives on the line, is it wise to hope for healing? Or are we forever defined by what we do in the dark?
About Tales from the Silence
On August 4, 2151, the world will end.
It’s been a long time coming: climate disasters brewing conflict, conflict breeding chaos. But on that fateful day, someone will set off the nukes. On August 4, 2151, human civilization on Earth will fall silent.
There are survivors, of course—and not just on Earth. There are scientists on the Jovian moons. Miners in the asteroid belt. Thriving colonies on the surface of Mars and above the clouds of Venus. Far more precarious ones on Mercury. When the silence falls across human space, one thing is clear: Earth’s space-born children are on their own. No more supplies are coming. No more orders. No more meddling. No more help.
Set in the universe of James Bow’s new novel, The Sun Runners, Tales from the Silence is a gathering of award-winning science fiction, fantasy, and YA authors who explore the worlds the Earth left behind, as well as the Earth itself, as they struggle through Earth’s new dark age.
Join James Bow, Phoebe Barton, Kate Blair, Cameron Dixon, Mark Richard Francis, Jo Karaplis, Kari Maaren, Fiona Moore, Ira Nayman, Kate Orman, and Jeff Szpirglas as they tell the stories of what happens after the end of the world.
About James Bow
James Bow
James Bow writes science fiction and fantasy for both kids and adults. He’s been a fan of science fiction since his family introduced him to Doctor Who on TV Ontario in 1978, and his mother read him classic sci-fi and fantasy from such authors as Clifford Simak and J.R.R. Tolkien. James won the 2017 Prix Aurora Award for best YA Novel in Canada for Icarus Down.
By day, James is a communications officer for a charitable land trust protecting lands from development in Waterloo Region and Wellington County. He also loves trains and streetcars. He lives in Kitchener, Ontario, with his two kids, and his spouse/fellow writer/partner-in-crime, Erin Bow.
A collection of short stories contemplating horror, grief, and trauma.
Simulacrum: A dark comedic tale about college life, and love. It is the story of what happens when two sociopaths attend art exhibits, drink lemon vodka, and spar over everything and anything.
Periods.
Coloring books.
Art.
This is the story of our unnamed narrator . . . an origin story of a would-be, hopes to be, serial killer.
The Japanese Box: Story that blends memoir, creative nonfiction, and the horror of a coming-of-age story, and a coming of middle-aged story.
Imagine growing up with a reflection that is often absent, and a Japanese box that is filled with things that should never have been there.
Memories.
Violence.
“The Japanese Box” is a love letter to anxiety, trauma, grief, and longing. It is a story of a child becoming an adult, and all the ghosts and misfortunes that happen in order to survive.
The Lithium Moon: Simone is an artist by day, and an emotionally abused wife at night. She is a successful artist with a long history of schizoid effective disorder with bipolar tendencies.
When her marriage goes from good to bad, she suffers her first miscarriage. The tragedy coincides with a wolf moon-Trauma and magic converge seem to converge in Simone’s head.
This story explores sadness, illness, hallucinations, full moons, and the creative process.
What Stage of Grief is not a poem, or a song, but a dirge.
Fantasy and facts, this poem walks a fine line between nightmares and memories. Grief stories and love stories. Dogs, and drama. Nightmares, and nevermore.
Praise for The Japanese Box and Other Stories
“The precision of observation here speaks not only to the honesty of the writer, but to the respect granted in all phases of life; Jennifer Anne Gordon is on full display. Smart, full of character, vibrant. You will feel, you will feel big, and you will return, too, to the richest moments of your own history, landmarks that bring you to both smile and weep.”–Josh Malerman, New York Times best-selling author of Bird Box and Daphne
“I compulsively read anything Jennifer Anne Gordon writes. Like the best contemporary filmmakers stitching together grief and horror, her storytelling is a sharp needle that both pierces and tugs us close. Compulsive and genre-slashing, with exquisite, rhythmic prose, THE JAPANESE BOX is an extraordinary exploration of alone-ness that beats and breathes: grief is horror, grief is love. We as readers are drawn ever closer to this beautifully haunted narrator until we’re face-down in the box with her. Does she feel us? She thinks she is alone. We all think we are alone. By the end we’ve become the ghosts in her black room, reaching out to gently touch her hair and whisper we’re here.”–Diane Zinna, author of The All-Night Sun
About Jennifer Anne Gordon
Jennifer Anne Gordon
Jennifer Anne Gordon is an award-winning author and popular host of the Vox Vomitus podcast. Her novel Beautiful, Frightening and Silent won the Kindle Award for Best Horror/Suspense for 2020 and Best Horror 2020 from Authors on the Air, and was a finalist for American Book Fest’s Best Book Award- Horror, 2020. It also received the Platinum 5-Star Review from Reader’s Choice as well as the Gold Seal from Book View.
Her latest novel Pretty/Ugly, won the Helicon Award for Best Horror for 2022, as well as the Gold Medal from Literary Titan.
Jennifer is a member of Mystery Writers of America, the Horror Writers Association (where she served on the jury for the Stoker Awards), and is an A&E chair of the New England Crime Bake Committee.
An hour-long chat with Christopher Rowe, Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy (and others) shortlisted author of the critically acclaimed novellas The Navigating Fox and These Prisoning Hills, as well as the story collection Telling the Map.
Christopher Rowe is the author of the critically acclaimed novellas The Navigating Fox and These Prisoning Hills, as well as a story collection regarded as one of best of recent years, Telling the Map. He has been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Neukom, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards, as well as others. He lives in Kentucky.
Brian Trent’s work regularly appears in The Magazine ofFantasy & Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, the New York Times-bestselling Black Tide Rising anthologies, The Year’s Best Military and Adventure SF, Terraform, Flash Fiction Online, Daily Science Fiction, Apex, Pseudopod, Escape Pod, Galaxy’sEdge, Nature, and numerous year’s-best anthologies.
The author of the science fiction novels Redspace Rising and Ten Thousand Thunders, Trent is a winner of the 2019 Year’s Best Military and Adventure SF Readers’ Choice Award from Baen Books and a Writers of the Future winner. He is also a contributor to the Baen anthologies Weird World War III, Weird World War IV, Weird World War China, and the newly released Worlds Long Lost. Trent lives in New England.
James Van Pelt is a former high school English teacher who is now a full-time science fiction, fantasy and horror writer (among other things). His short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Asimov’s, Analog, Talebones, Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and others. He has eight books out, including six short story collections, Strangers and Beggars, The Last of the O-Forms and Other Stories, The Radio Magician and Other Stories, Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille, The Experience Arcade, and The Best of James Van Pelt. His two novels are Summer of the Apocalypse and Pandora’s Gun.
He has been a Nebula finalist and a John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer finalist and has been nominated for Pushcart prizes. His first collection was named a Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association, and his last collection won the Colorado Book Award. Many of his short stories have appeared in various Year’s Best collections.
Richard Paolinelli began his writing journey as a freelance writer in 1984 and gained his first fiction credit serving as the lead writer for the first two issues of the Elite Comics sci-fi/fantasy series Seadragon.
After nearly a quarter of a century in the newspaper field, in 2010, Richard retired as a sportswriter and returned to his fiction-writing roots. Since then he has written several award-winning novels, two non-fiction sports books, and has appeared in over 20 anthologies including eight of the 11-book Tuscany Bay Books’ Planetary Anthology Series and five Sherlock Holmes collections. He also blogs and writes some fan fiction on his websiteand is co-owner of Tuscany Bay Books.
He runs weekly features on his website, including an occasional podcast, and serves as a regular co-host on LA Talk Radio’s The Writer’s Block. He sometimes leads the show whenever Jim Christina’s horse runs off and leaves him stranded in the middle of the desert.
A 45-minute chat with Cat Rambo, Nebula Award-winning author of more than 200 published short stories and several novels, editor, writing teacher, and past president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, about her creative process.
Cat Rambo’s more than 200 published short stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Weird Tales, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and many others, and consistently garner mentions and appearances in year’s-best-of anthologies. Cat’s collection, Eyes Like Smoke and Coal and Moonlight, was an Endeavor Award finalist in 2010 and followed their collaboration with Jeff Vandermeer, The Surgeon’s Tale & Other Stories. Their most recent collection is Neither Here Nor There, which follows Near + Far, containing Nebula-nominated “Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain.” Their most recent novel is Hearts of Tabat from Wordfire Press, Book Two of the Tabat Quartet. They have edited anthologies, including the political-SF anthology If This Goes On, as well as the online, award-winning, critically acclaimed Fantasy Magazine. The work there earned a nomination for World Fantasy Award in 2012.
Cat runs the decade-old online writing school the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, a highly successful series of online classes featuring some of the best fantasy and science fiction writers in the business, and has also taught for Bellevue College, Johns Hopkins, Towson State University, Clarion West, the King County Library System, Blizzard, the Pacific Northwest Writers Association, Cascade Writers, and countless convention workshops. And although no longer actively involved with the game, Cat is one of the minds behind Armageddon MUD, the oldest roleplay-intensive MUD (interactive text-based game) on the Internet. They continue to do some game writing, as well as technology, journalism, and book reviews.
A long-time volunteer with the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Cat served as its vice-president from 2014 to 2015 and its president for two terms, from 2015 to 2019, and continues to volunteer with the organization.
The (Lightly Edited) Transcript
So, welcome to The Worldshapers.
Thank you.
You may not remember…we did meet, actually, at the SFWA table in San Jose, I think. I was volunteering, and you happened to come by.
Oh, nice.
Like I said, you wouldn’t remember, but I remember you.
Conventions become a giddy world for you when you’re SFWA president, unfortunately.
I’m sure. So, we’ll start, as I always start by taking the guest, you in this case, back into the mists of time, which…as I keep saying, especially when I’m talking to young authors, the mists of time is deeper for some of us than for others. But, how did you get…well, first of all, where did you grow up and all that kind of stuff? And how did you begin to become interested in science fiction and fantasy and in the writing of it particularly?
Well, I grew up in South Bend, Indiana, which is northern Indiana, and I was a child who read ravenously and early on discovered that I loved fantasy and science fiction. My babysitter was reading Tolkien’s The Hobbit aloud to me, and I began sneaking chapters on weekends when she wasn’t there. And at the same time, it was always assumed that I was going to write because I loved to read so much and because my grandmother wrote young adult novels, under her initials because they were sports novels. So, she was the author of such classics as Football Flash, Basketball Bones, and my favorite Martha Norton, Operation Fitness USA.
I’ll have to look those up. So, when did you start writing? I.
I started…when I was, I want to see nine or ten, I had a poem published. My grandmother had actually given me a book on writing, and I started writing poetry and sent something off to a contest. So, I was writing from nine or ten. After a fashion. Some of them were, I think, more story-shaped than others.
I always like to say that—because it’s true–that my first published work was in Cat Fancy Magazine when I was about 12 years old or something like that. They had something called Young Authors Open, and you could send stuff in. And it was a terrible pun about…they were looking for a replacement for Santa Claus, and they found this guy that looked like he’d be perfect, but the previous Santa observed him all year, and when he saw what his garden was like, he realized he could never be Santa because he wouldn’t hoe, hoe, hoe.
Oh, that’s cute. That’s awesome, though.
So, I think I got like fifteen dollars or something. So, my first professional sale.
I remember that magazine? So, yeah. Oh, that’s too funny.
When you started writing, did you…you had the poem, but were you writing other stuff, and were you sharing with other people? I always ask that because I shared my writing and with my classmates and so forth, and that’s how I found out I could tell stories.
I was. I had a story, a serial story that I was writing instead of actually practicing in typing class, because my parents and the parents of four of my friends enrolled us in summer school in typing class because they thought it would be good for us. And my act of rebellion was to actually write a long serial space opera that the other girls loved. And so, I did. I learned that people enjoyed my stories and kept writing them after that.
Did you write longer and…I guess, when did you start trying to get your stories published? I guess that’s the next step.
I had a few stories published in high school, usually connected to gaming, like, in gaming magazines. I had a couple of game reviews and book reviews and a terrible, terrible short story. So that, yeah, in high school pretty much.
Did you study writing formally at some point?
I did. I was one of those people who took a while to go through college, and so I dropped out and worked in a bookstore for a long time and then came back and actually dropped out a second time, just to make sure I was totally confused. But then, after I came back to college, I ended up going off to get a master’s in writing at Johns Hopkins, where I studied with John Barth and enjoyed myself very much.
I often ask people who did do formal writing training if it was helpful. And it sounds like in your case, it was.
Well, I think it was. But I also want to say that it wasn’t until I came to fantasy and science fiction that I got a lot of the nuts-and-bolts stuff. I felt like Hopkins was a lot of theory, which certainly is very useful, but it wasn’t until I got to Clarion West that we started talking about kind of, like, here’s the advantages of, say, first-person versus third-person. The more crafty sort of stuff.
And when the longer there, did you start making sales?
I…let’s see, I started selling stuff when I was in grad school, to small literary magazines, which meant I was making like five dollars or ten dollars a sale. And then I got kind of sidetracked and went into computers. And it wasn’t until 2005 that I sort of came back and started sending stuff out again, began sort of taking it seriously. And so, after about 2005, I started making some decent sales.
Yeah, well, I was interested in the writing, working in computers. My first books that I wrote were all these sort of basic computer manuals. My first book was Using Microsoft Publisher for Windows 95.
Then you will appreciate, that’s what I did, I was a documentation manager, and we were documenting VisualBasic.net.
And has any of that fed into your writing in any other way, the working on that side of things, has that fed into your stories at all?
Well, I tend to be more open to new technology and interested, particularly in new computer stuff, I think, than some other writers. One of the things I found, paradoxically, about science fiction writers is that many of them seem to sort of freeze at a particular technological level. And apparently, I haven’t encountered the one I’m going to freeze at yet.
When did you move on to the longer work, your novels?
I went to Clarion West, which is a local fantasy and science fiction workshop in 2005, and started writing a book immediately out of that, but it didn’t get published until eight years later. It went through, like, thirteen drafts and various convulsions. One of the jokes in my family is that I could never leave my husband because he’d read thirteen drafts. Which I’m not sure…we don’t need to tell him this, I’m not sure I would have done for him. I mean, can you imagine reading thirteen drafts of the same book? Holy crap.
I get tired of reading my own books, much less somebody else’s.
Oh, God.
Do you think that you’re…I mean, people do seem to specialize in one thing or another. You’ve clearly written more short fiction than long fiction. Do you think you’re more naturally a short-story writer than a longer fiction writer? Or do you even think that’s true, that people tend to be one or the other?
Well, I think they’re very different forms, and I think that they play to different strengths. One of the things I have to tell my students often is that a novel is not just sort of a bunch of short stories clumped together. It’s a lot more complicated than that. I think I’m good at both of them. I think I’m better at short stories. But I don’t want anybody to go, “Oh, shitty at novels. Why should I check them out?” Because my novels rock. Go buy them immediately.
Yeah, I was not suggesting that people not go out and…
No, but a good short story is, just can be, so pleasurable and so interesting and, at the same time not be the huge investment of time that a novel is, right? Depending on how fast you read, a novel can be a substantial investment of time, and a short story can be fit into standing in line somewhere.
Well, you’ve also done editing. How did you fall into that?
I was very stubborn about sending out stories. And so, I was sending stories to Fantasy Magazine, and at some point, the editor asked me if I was interested in, I think in reading slush, and then, was I interested in editing? And it was because we had done a lot of talking and I had been, I think, very persistent about sending him stories. So, I became the editor. I sort of fell into it. And since then, I’ve pursued a couple of projects. I’ve actually got a project coming up that I’m really excited about, which is going to be an anthology of near-future science-fiction relationship stories, because I think one of the things that science fiction has fallen short on is…often it’s very good at projecting what technology will change, but not so much on what the social dynamics are that will change.
What have you found…I mean, the editing I’ve done, and I’ve done a lot of…and so have you, you teach writing, and this will tie into that, too. But all that kind of working with other people’s work, how does that fit into your own work? Do you learn, you know, by…what’s that thing from The King and I, that by your students you are taught, if you become a teacher by your students you are taught?
Oh, you do. No, you really do learn so much. And I think that critiquing and editing other people’s stuff gives you some distance that lets you learn things that you might not from reading your own. But the other advantage of the school is that I go out and pursue teachers that I want to study with. And so, like, Seanan Maguire has done four classes for me now. I just got Henry Lien to do an awesome workshop that I’m very excited about. And so, I don’t just have the benefit of teaching. I have the advantage of, at least once a week, I’m sitting in on a class with someone world-class talking about fantasy and science fiction, and I count myself incredibly lucky.
So, despite all the teaching and everything you have published, you still feel that you’re learning the craft as well as teaching the craft?
Oh, absolutely. You’re always learning. It would be sad to stop learning.
Well, we’re going to talk about two things here. You have a…so, we’ll start with the joint project that’s coming up from Arc Manor, you and Harry Turtledove and James Morrow. James Morrow is going to be on the podcast; I’m talking to him in a couple of weeks, as well. So, tell me a little bit about that and how that came about and what your contribution to it is.
Well, A, how fricking intimidating, to write something with Harry Turtledove and James Morrow. Harry and I are Twitter friends, you know, and then we’ve met at a few conventions and talked back and forth. I’m a huge admirer of his work. And he said, are you interested in being the third in this project that Arc Manor is putting together? And I said, sure. And it was…I don’t know, it’s a really interesting project. The three novellas are incredibly different. I don’t know that you could find three more different pieces.
Three very different writers.
And Harry’s is very considered, and it’s full of quotes from Confederate history and civil war history. And you could tell he really knows his politics and stuff. So, I’m reading it, and I’m thinking, “OK, so this is what I need to do.” And then I read James’s, and James’s has a cross-dressing porn star persuading Mike Pence to do increasingly improbable things, and I’m just like, “Well, this is so like, OK, you know,” and so my story is, I just went in a completely different, different direction and went rather Black Mirror and depressing because I figured all the humor had been absorbed by James.
So, the name of the book is The Last Trump Shall Sound, is that right?
And the Last Trump Shall Sound. Yeah, it’s got a great cover based on that Grant Wood, “American Gothic,” Trump and Pence dressed up as that couple.
And that’s coming up in September, right?
It is coming out in September. And that was surreal. I’m going to say…I just did an essay about this. It’s coming out in the SFWA blog, where it was just weird. I had turned the novella in January, and I got the copy edits back a few months later. And I was just like, “Wow, the world has changed radically in the last three months.” And it was hard knowing whether to go back and insert some of the incredibly improbable things that had happened in the meantime.
Yeah, this is one of those years that should have been a science fiction novel about, oh, 1990.
Yeah.
Except nobody would have believed it, so…and then the other one, and we’re going to use this one as kind of focusing on your creative process. You have the Nebula Award-winning novelette Carpe Glitter.
Mm-hmm.
So, for those who have not read it, can you give a quick synopsis?
Carpe Glitter is about a young woman who goes to sort through the belongings of her grandmother, who was not just a hoarder, but a stage magician. And in the course of sorting through not just one but three houses worth of clutter, she discovers a magical legacy that has influenced her family history in a way that she was not aware of.
OK, so how did this one come about and how does, more generally, I know this is a cliché question, and yet it’s a legitimate question…
It is a legitimate question.
…where do you get your ideas? Or as I like to say sometimes, what was the seed of this particular…?
What was the seed? So, with this one, it actually was the title. I was playing around with phrases, and I really liked “carpe glitter.” And I started thinking about what sort of person might have that as a life motto. And at the same time, I had been reading a book that was talking about hoarders, and I started thinking about that idea of kind of seizing the glitter and then never letting it go. And at the same time, there was a call for dieselpunk short stories. And so, I threw in a dieselpunk context and started writing from there. As far as where ideas come from, I find that the more that I am both reading short fiction and writing down ideas as they come to me, the more ideas come. It’s when I’m not reading or not paying attention to inspiration that things dry up.
I can’t remember who I was talking to, maybe it was James Alan Gardner, who said ideas are like neutrinos. They’re everywhere, but you have to be dense enough to stop them, or something like that.
I like to think of it as…your unconscious mind is a lot like a cat, and it will bring you small dead-animal story ideas as long as you are praising it. And if you are not sufficiently appreciative of the little bodies, then it will stop bringing them to you. It’s actually a pretty bad metaphor.
I like it. So, once you have your idea and you’ve decided you’re going to write this story, what does your plan…and this applies to all of your stories and also to your novels, because they often would take more planning, I would think. Are you an outliner, or are you more of a just launch right in and get writing…?
That is something that has changed a lot over the course of my writing career. And I used to be a total pantser, and now I’m much more of an outliner. But I also…I have, actually, a book called Moving from Ideas to Draft, which is about the fact that…I think ideas come in different forms. And the question I often get asked at conventions is how do I tell the bad ideas from the good ideas, by which people mean, you know, how do I tell the idea that I can turn into a story versus the one that I get halfway into and then abandon? And my theory is that there are no bad ideas. It’s simply that different ideas give you different things. And so, I have stories that started as titles. I have stories that started as characters. I have stories that started as, I want to write a story about how people carry grudges around with them and how it gets in the way. I have stories that have come about in all sorts of different ways, including just springing into my head full-fledged, which is very nice and does not happen half as often as it should.
Yeah, and sometimes…well, I have a metaphor I use sometimes, which is when you have that initial idea, it’s like you have this beautiful Christmas ornament and it’s perfect and round. And then you smash it with a hammer, and you try to get back together using words.
That’s perfect. That’s exactly what it’s like.
Because sometimes those ideas are, like, this is brilliant! And then somehow, the process of actually turning them into story can be a challenge.
The thing I always say to my students is, I used to be like, “Well, yes, sure, there’s some ideas you just, you can’t do anything with.” And then I read a story by Michael Swanwick, which basically is a story of people journeying across the surface of a giant grasshopper. And I was like, “OK, if Michael could carry that off, you can do whatever you like in a story,” because that is the dopiest idea I had ever heard. And he did it.
I always think of Cory Doctorow, who’s also going to be on the show, no too long from now.
Oh, awesome.
And, you know, he had the one with one of the characters was a mountain and one was a washing machine.
Was it, like, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town?
Yeah, that was it. Yeah.
That was an excellent, excellent book. Yeah. Yeah.
So, once you begin writing, are you a straightforward start-to-finish, or do you write, especially in longer stuff, do you tend to write scenes and piece it together, or how does that work for you?
The longer the piece is, the more likely I am to write it as a sort of a creation of scenes. I just got…Beneath Ceaseless Skies just took a novelette from me. And one of the things I was very worried about, in fact, that it was that it had gotten written out of order. And I was worried that in the rewrite I had not made it, put it all in order. But apparently, I seem to have. So, yeah, it’s…and it’s hard. I just finished designing a class called “Principles for Pantsers,” which is basically about kind of like what to do when you’ve got these huge lumps where you’re just like, none of this makes sense. How do you untangle it?
That’s interesting that…you know, you’re teaching all these classes, and as I said, I’ve done some teaching as well, and I sometimes find that I will be telling, you know…I was writer-in-residence at the Saskatoon Public Library for nine months, this last September to May, although I was writer-in-residence in my residence for the last two and a half months of that, but anyway. And, you know, I’ll tell them something, and I’m all confident and, you know, this is this…and then I think, you know, if they look in that book of mine, they’re going to see that I didn’t actually do any about it. Do you ever feel that when you’re, a little of that, when you’re teaching writing, that, you know, that sometimes you don’t do what you teach?
Oh, every once in a while, yeah. Because I’m…one of the things I’m big about is, for example, is telling people that they need to build enough time into the writing process for revision. And I suggest that they put the story away for a week at least, and then come back to it. And of course, you do that because the story in your head and the story on the paper are, as you said, one is a Christmas ornament that is beautiful, and the other is much less beautiful. And I do try to do that, but I’m also aware that I am human, and I am prone to procrastination and there is always at least a few times each year where I am like, “Holy crud, this story is due tomorrow. Why is it not done yet? Oh, oh, oh, and then turn it in at the last minute.
I always think of the…I guess it was Douglas Adams that had the quote that he loved deadlines, he loved the whooshing sound they made as they rushed by.
And as an editor, you become aware of what a pain in the ass those writers are, right? And so, you don’t want to be that person. I just had a friend, bought a reprint from me, and she sent me an email that said, basically, “We cannot send this to the audio folks until you send in the contract,” and I was like, all right, that was a really smart thing to say, because if it was just sort of like, we’re not going to pay you till you get the contract, you know, it’s ten dollars. So, of course, I’m going to probably procrastinate because, you know, ten dollars. But when I know that I’m holding people up, I’m going to be much better about it. At least, I’d like to think so.
You mentioned the revision process. So, what is your revision process…first of all, do you do it all yourself? Do you use beta readers, or how does that work for you?
I try to use beta readers, particularly for longer work, and I do have a fairly structured process where I do try to put it aside, and then I read, I create a sort of plan of attack. I move the big, kind of look for the big-ticket items, and I try to sort of work my way in with finer and finer-grained edits because it doesn’t make sense to polish a scene if you’re going to cut it out. So, the line edits are the last thing, and then the read-out-loud pass, which has to happen, is one of the very last steps.
Do you find that you have certain things that you find yourself having to polish every time?
Oh, yeah.
We all have tics that…
Oh, yeah. One of the things I do, which your listeners may find handy, is if you run a word-frequency count, you will catch, for example, the fact that you had characters tilt their head twenty-seven times over the course of a single book. So, I look for that sort of stuff because, you know, sometimes it’s basically, your mind is just saying sort of “insert body language here” and you have defaults. And so, you stick in your default, and you need to go back and just sort of make sure that you aren’t constantly tilting your head.
Yeah, I saw somebody on Twitter today who was talking about writing, say, “Is there any way that characters…” I don’t know what he was reading, or maybe it was something he was writing… “where the characters express emotion other than taking deep breaths, taking short breaths…”
Yes. And you find yourself doing whatever you’re doing. I can remember writing a short story at one point, it was when I was a smoker, and I went back and looked at the draft and realized that I’d had the character light a new cigarette like every two pages and that they surely had an ashtray smoldering in front of them, just disgustingly full of cigarette.
Somebody asked me if my character was perhaps drinking too much and if I had a problem. But no, it was just, you know, again, it’s business to fill. Sometimes you need something for the character to do. And I said, you’re probably right. I should maybe not have her, especially when she’s, like, about to be interrogated or something. She probably shouldn’t be having that second glass, whatever.
Yeah.
I also find that my characters tend to make a lot of animal noises, like, they tend to growl dialogue or snarl dialogue. And I try to catch all that, although my most recent one has werewolves and vampires in it, so the werewolves, I guess, you know, they do growl dialogue. So then, once you have this polished to your satisfaction and it goes to an editor, what kind of editorial feedback do you typically…in short stories, it’s there’s sometimes a lot, sometimes a little. In longer stuff, you’re more likely to get more editorial feedback.
Some places I get no changes at all, or they’ll fix a typo or whatever, but, like, the novelette with Beneath Ceaseless Skies, I’ve just got a second round of edits from the editor, which is kind of, that’s actually outside the norm for there to be that much. But Scott Andrews is just super, super careful with the sentences. Plus, I think he has learned to explain things at length when he makes changes because he knows I will push back if I don’t understand the change. I love Scott, and just we really go back and forth on the edits, so that may be atypical. I think most of the time when you sell stories, though, there’s not that many edits.
And if they are, I mean, I think you probably run into this when talking to starting writers and some writers are worried about what an editor will do to their…
Oh, yeah.
…deathless prose. And I always say they make it better. Typically, they make it better. If it’s a good editor.
Yeah. And it’s so rarely…I mean, I can only think of a couple of times when I have run into an editor where I thought, “OK, they are they are not doing happy things to my prose.” And I think most of the time editors are also very good about letting you push back if you can say why you’re pushing back, and” because it’s my deathless prose” is unfortunately not sufficient reason to push back.
Now, Carpe Glitter is a novelette. Was it published as a standalone originally, or did it appear somewhere else or…?
It was a standalone. Meerkat Press came to me and asked if I had any novelettes or novellas because they were starting a standalone series. And I think it had been to a couple of markets. And it actually was sort of sitting on my shelf because, as you know, longer stories are harder to sell. And so, I gave it to them, and I was so happy to work with them. And then it surprised me by winning a Nebula Award, which was super cool.
Yeah. What was that like?
That was a ton of fun. I’m kind of sad that I didn’t get to go to the Nebulas in person, but they did just a glorious job with the online events. And honestly, I had talked myself out of it by the time that they announced it, you knew, as you do, you’re just like,” I’m not going to be disappointed. I know I haven’t won.” And so, when I won, it was just…really, it was very cool.
You’d been nominated before. But that was the first time you’d won.
That was the first time I’d won. And I’d…actually I had been nominated once and stayed on the ballot, and then I had been nominated once and there was an unfortunate issue with it having been put in the wrong category. And I ended up withdrawing from the ballot that year because if I had moved categories, I would have bumped three people off of the other ballot because they were tied and I didn’t want to do that.
You’ve been nominated for a World Fantasy Award, too. Do you think awards are valuable?
Oh…no.
I mean, aside from the, “It’s really nice to win one because it makes you feel good.”
Well…I do know that…I think it increases your stock a little bit. I know that I’ve talked to Ann Leckie, who was a classmate at Clarion West and sort of irritated us all by winning, like, every single award that she could the first year she published a novel, and she said, yeah, it’s made a difference to her career. Because she won the Hugo, she won a Nebula, she won a, I forget…Compton Crook, and she won a Clarke Award. She’s just disgusting. And I love Ann, but if I didn’t, I would have to kill her because she’s just way too talented.
Yeah. I mean, the one I’ve won is the Aurora Award here in Canada. Won it for this podcast, actually the first time I won it for a novel, but then I won it the podcast last year. And it’s really nice, and it gives you something. But, especially in the case of the Aurora, which…this is a pretty small market up here…I can’t say I’ve noticed any uptick in sales or anything. But every time a book comes out, they’ll put…you know, you can legally…not legally, but morally, say, award-winning author. So it does that.
Yeah. And you get an award. Like, I have my Nebula sitting on my shelf. I can look at it, and it’s really pretty. And it reminds me that people read my books and like them. Because writing is so solitary, as you know, it’s nice to be reminded that it’s not entirely.
That’s kind of the big philosophical question which I was headed to, which is, why do it, then? Why do you write, and why do you think any of us write, and why write this kind of stuff in particular?
Well, I think to a certain extent…at least, I meet a lot of writers who, like myself, we write because we kind of have to. We are always making stories. We are watching a paper cup floating down in the gutter, kind of going along the street, and we’re constructing a narrative in our head where it’s the brave little paper cup, and it’s, you know, that sort of thing. I mean, we just, we make stories all the time, and we like making them because making art is pleasurable. Making art is very pleasurable when other people like it, it builds to our ego. But making art is simply pleasurable for the sake of making art and knowing that you created something cool that nobody else could create.
Well, I think most writers would…or have, actually, at least for part of their career, wrote without any particular expectation that anybody much was going to, you know…it wasn’t going to get published. And even if you weren’t getting published, would you still write?
Oh, yeah. Yeah, definitely.
Now, I want to go back to the teaching of writing. I have to ask you about the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers. Where did it come from, and how did it get the name?
So, I was teaching for Bellevue College, and no offense to any Bellevue College people that are listening, but I looked at my paycheck, and then I looked at the brochure and noticed the amount that they were paying me versus the amount that they were charging the students. And I thought, well, that seems like…kind of like a big discrepancy, actually, because I was making, like, twenty-five bucks an hour. And Google Hangouts had just come out, and I was, I had a lot of people who were also coming up to me at conventions and saying, “I really want to take a class with you, but you’re not in my area. How do you do it?” And so, I started teaching classes online about ten, eleven years ago. And at some point, I talked to my friend Rachel Swirsky and said, “You’re interested in teaching, will you come talk to my students about a class?” And then, I forget…Ann Leckie, actually, I think was the second person I brought in, I said, “Ann, will you come talk to them about space opera?” And after that, I started going after people that I wanted to take classes from. And we now have on-demand and live classes. We have a virtual campus, which, during the pandemic, we actually have been doing daily coworking sessions, and we have a short-story discussion group, and the people play writing games for an hour every week. So, the school has become a very important part of my life, actually. Particularly nowadays, that virtual campus is a place that I’m hanging out. Yeah, it’s my community.
How did you get started teaching to begin with? What drew you to, from just writing to start trying to teach other people how to write?
That was how…for Hopkins, for grad school, I got a teaching assistantship. And they had us teaching absolutely hapless Johns Hopkins freshman creative writing. Talk about the blind leading the blind. And it was this class called Introduction to Contemporary American Letters, which was basically, in my opinion, a scam to sell books by the faculty members. And so basically, they were like, here’s a list of twelve books, it just happened to be twelve books of fiction by our faculty members that you will teach. And so, it was always a very eclectic and kind of weird mix of fiction and poetry. But you have not lived until you have tried to explain John Barth to freshmen that are actively hostile to the idea that fiction might actually have something more than just sort of a story in it. It’s just…it was hysterical and wonderful.
But clearly, you got the bug.
I did. I like doing it. I like teaching. I like explaining things. I don’t even know…I like talking to people. And I think I’ve always been one of those people who enjoys talking to people and giving them advice. I suspect, were I not a writer, I would be a counselor of some kind.
Well, and is that side of things kind of what led you into becoming so involved with SFWA?
A long time ago, when I was up at DragonCon, I took one of my first writing workshops with Ann Crispin, who was a long-time super volunteer. This would have been in 2004. And she said to us, “You write a story and you qualify for membership. You join SFWA and you volunteer. And that is what you do. That is the career path you will all take.” And I was like, “Yes, ma’am.” And so, I qualified and joined. I was on a committee actually with Cory Doctorow on copyright. So, that was interesting. So, yes, that was one of my first experiences.
And then you rose up through the ranks…
Rose up…
And is it as much like herding cats as has sometimes been said?
Oh, God. It’s hysterical. Because you’ve got…like, there’s two thousand members and they are all strong, most of them are what I would call strong personalities, and even the ones that are very shy are very capable of being very strong personalities online, and you have a lot of ego, and writers are by nature insecure and prone to imagining things, which is not a good quality in a membership, in my opinion, but I mean, I had so much fun with SFWA. I made so many good friends, and one of the things that I did when I was done that last month was I sat down and I wrote a thank you note, and wrote them to all the people who had helped me or who I had encountered. And I’m sure I left out a bunch of them, but I sent out over 800 thank you notes to people.
Did you get any sense of the…state of the union, I guess, state of the genre, from your time there? You would have a different window on things than I think those of us who are just writing our stories and sending them to editors.
Oh, I think right now science fiction is in an absolutely marvelous time in some ways. I think that you’re seeing a lot of potential with independent publishing. You’ve seen a lot of potential with stuff like games that are also fiction. One of the things SFWA has done is that they now have a game writing award, which includes interactive novels and stuff like that. And it’s also a time when people, many people are working to bring a more diverse group into publishing and trying to help the already diverse folks that are there, and to me, I see a community that is so well-meaning and so good about helping each other that it is, quite frankly, one of the things that still gives me faith in humanity in, as we said, today’s odd world.
Well, I guess we can wrap things up here pretty much. First of all, though, what are you working on now?
I am writing a book two in a space opera series, the first of which is coming out from Tor Macmillan next March.
And what’s it called?
It is called You Sexy Thing, which is the name of the intelligent bioship that my protagonists steal.
So, it sounds like a far-future space opera.
It is. It’s a bunch of retired mercenaries who have started a restaurant aboard a space station. And then a mysterious package arrives, things start exploding, and we are off on adventure.
And anything else that’s in the offing?
I have a fantasy novel that should be coming out soon. It is the third book of the Tabat series, Exiles of Tabet, and I’m finishing up the edits on that right now.
And where can people find you online?
You can always find me on Twitter as @CatRambo. Most social media I’m there as Cat Rambo or findable thereon, or find me at catrambo.com.
OK! Well, I think that kind of wraps up everything I have to ask. So, thanks so much for being on The Worldshapers. I enjoyed it. I hope you did, too.
I did. Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it.
An hour-long conversation with Jeremy Szal, author of Stormblood, Book 1 in the dark space-opera Common trilogy (Gollancz), author of more than 40 science fiction short stories, and former editor of the Hugo-winning online audio magazine Starship Sofa.
Jeremy Szal was born in 1995 and, he says, “was raised by wild dingoes.” He spent his childhood exploring beaches, bookstores, “and the limits of people’s patience.”
He’s the author of more than 40 science fiction short stories, and his debut novel, Stormblood, a dark space opera, came out from Gollancz in June 2020 and is the first of a trilogy. He was the editor of the Hugo-winning Starship Sofa until 2020, and has a B.A. in film studies and creative writing from the University of New South Wales. He carves out a living in Sydney, Australia, with his family.
He loves watching weird movies, collecting boutique gins, exploring cities, cold weather, and dark humor.
The (Lightly Edited) Transcript
Welcome to The Worldshapers, Jeremy.
Thank you very much, Edward. Lovely to be here
Well, thanks so much for being on. I haven’t been able to finish your book, but I’ve delved into it enough to know that it looks really cool. So, I’m looking forward to talking with you about it. But before we do that, we will do…well, first of all, we should point out that we are talking across a vast expanse of the planet since I’m in Saskatchewan and you’re in… Sydney, is it?
Sydney, Australia, yeah. I think fourteen hours difference.
Fourteen hours.
Yeah.
So, he’s actually…you’re actually in the future, from my point of view.
I am in the future. It’s not too bad here, you know. Another day has dawned, we haven’t, you know, destroyed ourselves. Aliens haven’t invaded. Not yet. Yeah.
Well, that’s good to know. I can get up in the morning without fear then. So let’s start, as I always do with my guests, by taking you back into the…I’m going to put reverb on this someday…the mists of time, and find out how you, well, first of all, where you grew up, and how you got interested in science fiction, and how you got interested in writing. So, how did that all work for you?
Yeah, I grew up here in Sydney, Australia. I was always a reader, and I never really thought of genre in any particular fashion. I just read the books I liked reading. But when I was ten years old, we moved to Austria for a couple of years, basically to a small mountain village, because my dad’s from Poland and my uncle and grandfather had died in a very short period of time and he needed to go out and sort some things there.
Anyway, so I’m living there in tall mountain regions of Austria. And for some reason, whatever reason, the local school library has a small English section. And, you know, obviously, they all speak German there. Alas, the world does not speak the language I speak wherever I go. You do have to learn the local tongue. And so, I hadn’t spoken German yet, and so I was still picking through what they had for me to read. And, you know, I quickly devoured a lot. But then, you know, my mother is an English teacher, and she was very, very determined to get me books. And so, whenever we would go to London, we’d always stop at the bookstore and I’d always, you know, devour whatever they had there. Like, I picked up whatever I still thought was interesting, you know, there was no, as I said, it was no genre, I didn’t think of fiction as science fiction or not. I just picked up whatever I wanted to pick up. And one of those things happened to be the Artemis Fowl series. And then I picked up the GONE series by Michael Grant. And then I picked up a few books by Stephen King. And again, I didn’t think of them…I just bought whatever I liked reading. And the covers appealed to me. I liked the action, I liked the adventure, I liked the weirdness of it.
And then, I remember distinctly seeing a cover from Iain M. Banks when I walked into a Waterstones when I was thirteen, fourteen, and something about it just appealed to me, you know, the spaceship, the planet, the weirdness of it, the technology. And I couldn’t put my finger on it. Like, I couldn’t think, “OK, why do I like this?” I just did. You know, obviously I’d seen Star Wars, I’d seen my own fair share of science fiction, I was an avid videogamer, and so I had a little science fiction, but I never really thought of it as sci-fi. But then, when I came back to Australia and when I, you know, finished, started going into high school, I took up a few creative writing courses, and I found that I quite liked it.
And then, I started reading the whole Song of Ice and Fire series, when I was way, way too young to read those books. And then I saw the first season of Game of Thrones, again when I was way, way, way too young for it–I don’t even think I legally could have seen it at the time–and something about the whole idea of fantasy just appealed to me, you know, the idea of a magical realm with its dragons and creatures and these different cultures and different landscapes and all this weird stuff going on like that, this really appealed to me. And so, when I started acknowledging, you know, the idea of science fiction through video games like Halo and Mass Effect, it just really grabbed me. And so, when I did finish high school, I just started reading, going to the bookstores, and going to a science fiction bookstore, science fiction section of the bookstore, deliberately, like, I started picking up The Witcher books, I started picking up Brandon Sanderson, I started picking up Karen Travis, Greg Bear, a bunch of other people and, you know, as I say, the rest is history.
Well, you said that you took some creative writing classes in high school. Were you writing outside of class at the time? When did you start writing your own stories?
Yeah, it was probably earlier. I just basically parroted whatever the hell I was reading at the time, you know? And, you know, I didn’t really think of myself as a writer. I just thought of myself as someone who, you know, I liked typing, and so I just started getting it all down. I mean, like, I don’t even think it was, you know, anything remotely cohesive. I just, you know, did whatever jumped to mind. But then, when I was in high school, and I started taking those classes, I did start thinking of the idea of writing to be published, you know, writing to be read. And one of the things that did that was reading the adaptation of Halo, one of the video games, novelizations by Karen Travis. And I just…it was very, very little action, but it was a very human story. And I just found that I could visualize it very easily because I’d played the video games. And so, it just…I was able to pick it up very, very easily. And I had a very short attention span, so that was, you know, priceless. And so I started thinking, “Hell, I’d like to do this!” And so, yeah, I started doing it seriously. And when I did finish high school, I started pursuing it seriously.
But you didn’t actually study writing when you went on to university. You did film studies, right?
I did both. I did creative writing and film studies. I don’t actually think the creative writing was anywhere near as much help as the film studies thing was. I think the film studies really did hone in on the nature of craft and the nature of scriptwriting and the nature of pushing your characters forward, always intriguing the audience, always having something behind the next corner. A lot of the creative writing classes were, “OK, how do we allude to metaphysical imagery that this obscure 1920s writer was trying to get out, probably while he was depressed, high, and on his deathbed? How can we apply that to our own, you know, creative process, our own creative lives?” And, you know, I zoned out pretty early on in most classes. But the film study was quite educational. So, I think it’s very good to get a diverse range of inspirations.
I often ask people who have taken creative writing in university how helpful they found it for the kind of writing they ended up doing. And you just answered that. And I often get that, especially from people who write in science fiction and fantasy.
Yeah.
It’s just still not a genre that is particularly welcome at university creative-writing programs.
Absolutely not. I straight-up had one teacher tell me that any sort of science fiction, fantasy, anything like that, is just bad. And you could just hear a groan go around the audience, and some girl put her hand up and said, “Yeah, but why?” And I don’t remember the answer because I was too annoyed to pay attention.
But I do remember this one creative writing class where this one girl literally showed up to class with, not a story, she just pasted together all these newspaper clippings of various things that happened around the world and then wrote her own sub-stories about the Salem witch trials, but not really. And so, there were newspaper clippings on this big canvas sheet, like a collage. But the thing is that there was a massive bloodstain on it. And we’re all sitting there, thirty of us, looking at this bloodstain, and wondering who this, you know, ultra-Goth writer, this girl who, what she’d given us. And the teacher’s like, “Uh, what is this?” And she’s like, “Oh, yeah, I was cutting together all these newspaper clippings with a box cutter and accidently sliced my own fingers. And I started bleeding all over the pages. But I’ve decided, you know what? Instead of that, instead of just getting a new one, I’m just going to keep it.”
And I looked at the teacher, waiting for her to tear her down, and she’s like, “Oh, yeah, I can see there that there’s a bit of an arterial spray around the word ‘pain’, there’s a big, big splatter around the word ‘witch,’ there’s a big clump of hair and, you know, residue of nails and tissue right there around the words, the time, you know, and it’s like echoing back to the blood spilled by generations lost.” I almost flipped the table across. I’ve never been closer to picking up a chair and hitting someone with it in my life.
And because one of my friends at the time, she–who ended up ultimately beta reading Stormblood and is in the acknowledgments for Stormblood–she was a filmmaker, and she’d just come off making a short film that had been screened around the world. And a lot of the actors, some of the actors in the short film have gone on to do bigger things, like, one of the actresses, she’s in a movie, just finished a movie with Jason Clarke and Helen Mirren. And she’s in these, like, another TV show that’s going to be on HBO, and, you know. So, my friend basically helped discover her in short film. And so, we both of us had a background in what we were doing, a semi-professional background. So, we just looked at each other, and we were just boiling. And this other girl, of course, got top marks, for doing, like not even, she didn’t even do any writing. She just cut newspapers together and bled all over them. I think that, if nothing else, that summarizes what my experience at university was like.
Well, you’ve written a lot of short stories, and you’re not a particularly aged individual. So, when did you get started on the short stories, getting-published short stories,?
I think when I was 19, I started getting good news from short-fiction editors. The responses weren’t just, “No, we don’t want this,” The responses were, “This is interesting, but we’re going to pass.” And so, I kept sending them out and sending them out and sending them out, and eventually, one of them sold for actual money. And I was over the moon. I’m like, “OK, I’ve cracked the code. I actually can do this. There is actually a way for me to do this,” because, you know, if you look at that wall, that impenetrable wall between you and being a published writer, it looks unscalable. But now that I actually had done it, I’d actually reached out and found some measure of success, it boosted my confidence.
And so, I kept writing and kept writing and kept writing and I kept sending them out. And eventually, one of those stories, when I was 19, ended up selling to Nature magazine. So…and that was pretty amazing, for me to actually sell to a professional magazine published by Macmillan and to be able to have that, you know, see my story in print and know that it’s widely distributed all around the world. It was an incredible feeling and showed that I actually could do it. And so, yeah, I just kickstarted from there, and I kept writing short fiction over the years and getting them out, and I kept getting my stuff published. And it was, yeah, it was pretty interesting.
I still don’t think that I’m a good short-fiction writer, and I only say that because, as someone who has edited short fiction for about six years and has read thousands of thousands of stories, I think there’s a very, very, very specific sort of story that most short-fiction magazines want these days, all the sort of structure, the sort of style that they’re after. Short stories are not condensed novels. They’re not truncated novels. They’re not very, very quick stories. Short stories, I think, have a very, very specific sort of style to them, not just the way they’re written but the sort of writers that they appeal to. And that’s great, you know, the more, the merrier. But that sort of style generally isn’t for me. I say generally, because sometimes there’s a sort of freedom being able to just go wild and experiment with something, try a new POV, try a new setting, try any of that, you know, and I’m writing 180,000-word epic dark space operas, that are all from first person, voice-driven, and so sometimes it’s a relief to break away from that and just go crazy. But yeah, I don’t think I’ve quite cracked the sort of thing that most short-fiction readers and editors would like to read
I mean, if you look at something like Ted Cheung, he’s never written a novel, but he’s probably the best short-fiction writer living today. And he’s probably one of the only short-fiction writers, modern writers, who’s had his work adapted to an incredible film. That’s how good he is, not only how good his work is, but how widely it appeals, and that in itself is a skill. And I don’t think that’s something I have quite yet.
I did want to ask you about the editing for Starship Sofa. You’re both a short-fiction editor, but it’s also an audio…magazine, I guess. How has that fed into your own writing and the way that you work with words? Has it been…doing all that editing and reading those thousands of short stories, do you think that has benefited your own writing going forward? And also, how does the audio aspect of that fit in?
It absolutely has benefited me. I mean, it’s hard not to, because I’m reading all this fiction and, you know, you have to come to a conclusion. You know, there’s no, “I don’t know if I like this or not,” it’s, “Do I think this is something I want to buy and give money for? Do I want to accept this and be responsible for helping adapt it to audio and putting it on the podcast as something that I’ve edited? Do I want to work with this story?” The answer is yes or no. And in order to come to that conclusion, you have to look at a story, quote-unquote, “objectively,” and think, “OK, is it ticking the right boxes? Does it appeal to me? Do I like the genre? Do I find the style engaging? Do I want to keep reading? Do I like the ending? Do I like the approach that it’s taking?” You know, you do have to sit down and think, “Yes or no, this is something I want to read?” I mean, we’ve all read books that, we’re not quite sure we love them, but we kept reading them anyway. But doing the short fiction, I think, really helped me know, “OK, yes or no.” And one reason why I did that was, I’d read the first page, the first couple of pages, and think, “OK, do I want to continue.” And knowing, being able to say yes or no, would save me, not only so much time but so many headaches, because I’ve gotten fiction that’s made my eyes bleed, not literally bleed, but close to it, but thankfully that’s not the majority. The majority of the stuff is good, or it’s just OK. But, yeah, I would look at the fiction I was getting and make, come to a conclusion either way.
And it really helped me, I guess, nail down not only what I thought was engaging fiction, but what I liked, you know, “I like this!” And a lot of that…for a long time, I thought I was an epic-fantasy person. And now…I moved on kind of to cyberpunk, and then I started developing a taste for space opera. And so, being able to know that when I get something that was set in space or set in a future or set in an urban city, or something that, especially if it was first-person or especially if it was voice-driven, I’d always get excited, like, “Yes, this is my thing.” And knowing that helped me quantify my niche, I think. And that really helped me establish, “OK, this is the sort of thing that I’m into.” And so, when I’d be reading, I’d think, “OK, this is what I don’t do. And all this is a really good trick. This is a really good method of easing you into a universe.” And so, I did slowly accumulate knowledge in that way.
The last question, the answer to your next question, is slightly less interesting, I think. The audio version, the way it basically works, I read it, I decide if it is something that can be read aloud in audio, on top of whether if it’s a good story, I send it to a narrator, they do all the hard work of actually reading aloud the thing and editing it and cutting it together. They send it back to me, I just pop up on the show, I just pop it up to my the editor in chief, Tony, and he broadcasts it. That’s pretty much it.
How did you end up being the editor for Starship Sofa? How did you make that connection?
I think it was Neil Asher who shared a post by Tony C. Smith, the editor-in-chief at the time, and still is. The other guy had left…I don’t know why or whatever, I think just didn’t work there anymore, and so I just messaged him and said, “Hey, can I have the job?” And a short Skype interview later, I got the job. I wish everything in my life came to me as easily as that did.
You mentioned that, you know, sort of going through the different genres and seeing what you like. In your own short fiction, has it gone through various genres as well, or have you tended to write in one genre in your short fiction? Or subgenre, I should say?
Yeah, definitely. I think I started off very, very much sort of fantasy, a bit weird. Mythological sort of style, you know, like the sort of Skyrim, Game of Thrones-esque sort of low fantasy, Joe-Abercrombie-sort-of-style fantasy. And I still love Joe Abercrombie, but that’s not the sort of fiction I ever want to write. It’s just not me. And I think I did kind of develop more into cyberpunk, sort of New Age punk fiction, like China Mieville, Ian MacDonald, Paolo Bacigalupi, that sort of thing. But then I started, you know, getting more into space opera as I consumed, you know, Alastair Reynolds, Iain M. Banks, Peter Hamilton, that sort of thing. And I just felt, “OK, this is the sort of thing that I like.” And I thought, “OK, can I write this?” And of course, no one tells you what you can or cannot write. And so I thought, you know, I’m just going to take a stab at it. And I did.
But I found that short fiction was a little bit constrictive for the space opera genre, especially the sort of space opera that I wanted to write, and so I started developing it more into novels. And that’s more or less the trend. I think the transition that happened in late 2015, early 2016. I’d just come off writing an epic fantasy, a YA fantasy, that I absolutely loathed. I got about two-thirds of the way in, and I’m like, “I never want to read fantasy, write fantasy, ever again. I can’t stand it. This is not the sort of thing, that is not me,” because I go, you know, “OK, I just got rejected for a YA sci-fi novel and 50 percent of the rejections said, “YA sci-fi is a very hard sell,” like, “Science fiction is a hard sell, YA science fiction is an even harder sell.”
And I’d just come off reading Red Rising, and I thought, “You know, this is the sort of thing that I’d like to do.” But I was writing in a fantasy and I’m like, I felt trapped by the genre. And I thought, “You know, screw it. I’m just going to write whatever I want to write. If it sells, doesn’t sell, that’s fine.” I did look at the market a little bit and think, “OK, what’s the sort of thing that is appealing to agents?” And I’ve always loved crime, always loved murder mysteries, and I thought…I had the great, I had the barnstorming, original idea, “Hey, what if we had a murder mystery in space?” And so I wrote it, and I’m glad I did because I wrote that novel in three months, it was incredibly powerful for me to be able to just sit down every day, no matter what I had on, and just pour out a thousand words or two thousand words every single day. Just get it down. No thought of, you know, “Is this good? Is this not good?” I just thought, “I’ll come back and I’ll fix it later.” I just powered it down, punched it out, and in about three months, literally three months, I wrote a whole space-opera novel, and I must’ve done something right because a year later I got an agent with that novel. So, I’m very, very glad I did it. I did do that.
Now, it was that Stormblood or was that a novel before Stormblood?
That is a novel before Stormblood.
Because I didn’t think Stormblood was–it didn’t seem to be a mystery novel set in outer space.
No, it’s not. It was a previous one called The Rogue Galaxy. It was about, you know, the whole premise of it, basically, what if you were convicted for committing a murder you didn’t remember committing? And so that was…and you had to go to the other side of the galaxy to find that answer.
But no, I’d finished that. I’d written it in third person and about halfway through I’m like, “This would really work well in first,” because I was reading a lot of first-person fiction. And it was a little bit too late, and I thought, “OK, at the end, I’ll just go back and change it.” And when I did get to the end, I’m like, “OK, I can’t be bothered about changing it.” So I thought, “I’ll just write a novel,” I think about the end of that year, I decided to just punch out another novel. I mean, even if you do get an agent, having another project under your belt is always a good thing. Having another project, you know, in the percolator is, you know, it’s always good to keep those juices flowing.
And so I started writing in December, either November or December 2016, page one, chapter one of Stormblood. And I thought, you know, “What if we had, you know, a fiction that was very set in space, but it was also very voice-driven, it was first-person, it had an edge to it?” And that idea just appealed to me. And I wrote that first draft in six months, and I must have done something right because a year and a half later I sold it to Gollancz.
Well, this seems like a good place for you to give us a synopsis of it without giving away anything you don’t want to give away.
All right. Stormblood, yeah?
Yeah.
All right. OK, Stormblood. The basic premise is that the DNA of an extinct alien race is used as a drug, and it makes people addicted to adrenaline and aggression. And so, of course, this one empire injected it into those soldiers and got them to fight off a brutal invading empire. And, you know, all seemed well and good. You know, these soldiers are literally addicted to killing, they’re literally addicted to running headfirst into a bullet-storm. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, everything, because it’s permanent and the high didn’t stop when the enemy was over, and the high didn’t stop when the battle came to a close. And they also had these, all these soldiers restless and not knowing what to do with their own bodies. And it didn’t stop when the war was over, and they got sent home, and they had these tens of thousands of soldiers permanently addicted to being on a battlefield. And so, the main premise of this is that the main character is one of these soldiers, comes back from a war, you know, traumatized, ridden with PTSD, but looking for a way to get his life back together. Anyway, the main forces that injected the DNA into him, the Galactic Empire, whatever you’d like to call it, they call him back and say, “We need you to do something for us.” And he wants nothing to do with them, for obvious reasons, because they ruined his life. They lied to him. They’ve lied to millions of people, the cost of winning a war, but at great consequence. And he says, “Why should I talk to you?” And it turns out that his fellow soldiers, the ones that he knows and loves, are all being murdered, being killed off, being overdosed. And it turns out that his brother is the prime suspect. His estranged brother is the prime suspect.
And so, as the book unfolds, you find out his history, you find out his history with his brother, you found his history with his teammates, and their whole central conflict is that he was very, very close to his brother, they developed a very strong brotherhood, you know, when they were surviving together on a brutal backwater planet, when they were surviving an abusive father. And he transferred that same sense of brotherhood and camaraderie to fighting in a war where the only people who knew what it was like to have an alien organism actually, like, squirming around in your head and sniffing up your chest and sniffing up your backbone was to be with, and, you know, what it felt like to be in cover and see the enemy charging towards you and like, get excited, “Yes! There are people shooting at me,” to actually get an adrenaline spike. The only people who knew what that was like were his fellow soldiers. What it was like to want to be suicidal. And so, he developed a very, very strong personal relationship with them.
And he comes home, as I said, and finds out they’re being murdered, potentially by…his brothers are being murdered by his flesh-and-blood brother. And so, the whole central conflict is him keeping the balance between that, being able to hunt down his brothers’ killers while dealing with the fact that his own brother is murdering them. And, of course, because this wouldn’t be a good story without a central personal conflict, the more he investigates danger, the more addicted to adrenaline and aggression he gets. Because he’s been out of the war for a few years, so he’s able to control his body’s, able to control his urges, but, of course, when he’s going up against killers and a shadowy organization, that doesn’t quite work out. And so, the more confrontations he gets into, the more hyped up and the more dangerous he gets and the more dangerous his body gets. And so, there’s that balancing act of keep of trying to get this all done while still not going insane, basically.
Well, it’s a bit of a cliche question, but, you know, it’s still a legitimate one, where do you get your ideas? So what was the seed for this? Where did this the seed for this novel come from that then sprouted to do this trilogy?
Oh, it was just my original genius, just sitting in a dark room and just thinking at all. No, not at all. I borrow very, very heavily from cinema and gaming because I’m a very visual person. And so, the idea of a far-future society has always intrigued me, both in the ideas level and a visual level, to be able to go to some central city on a spaceship, you know, galactic skyscrapers, you know, kind of like Coruscant from Star Wars, and to go down in all these neon dark cities, on all these busy streets that are frantic with these different alien species and different spaceships. You know, that idea has always very, very much appealed to me. And so, I knew that I pretty much wanted to set my story in that sort of universe.
And one thing I found is that there was very little of a Star Wars-esque sort of fiction being written that is not tie-in. There’s a lot of, you get a lot of alien stories that are either first-contact stories or the stories that are basically war-driven stories, that these humans are fighting a war against these aliens, but there’s not quite as many stories about a future society where humans and aliens have, you know, have joined forces or, you know, there’s this multi-species society, like, sort of Mass Effect. And that’s my bread and butter of fiction, and there wasn’t quite as much a lot as I would have liked.
But, so, I wanted to write that, but then I thought, “OK, what about, you know, let’s make it a little bit weirder. You know, what if the idea of, you know, this, how will we people upgrade ourselves and what sort of modifications would we make?” And then I thought, “You know, what if the modifications we made were from the DNA of aliens, how would that work, and how would we grant ourselves with alien, you know, biometrics or whatever?” But then I thought, “Let’s make it a little bit more interesting. What’s the cost of that? Surely there has to be a cost.” And the cost was that it’s a drug and it makes you addicted to getting an adrenaline spike. It makes you addicted to your own body chemistry. And so, then I started developing the idea of a brother, of two brothers who had a very good relationship but then were estranged, and then started developing that relationship slowly as I wrote the book. But yeah, I am definitely a character-driven author. I am not a plot sort of guy. So, I definitely did combine the idea of this alien DNA with the idea of these two brothers and just mashed them together and just sort of went on from there.
Well, what did your planning process look like? You talked about developing the characters, as you wrote. Did you do a lot of outlining ahead of time or just…what did that look like for you?
That’s a pretty good question. I’m most fascinated by this question, as well, because it’s very hard to tell when you see a finished product, knowing what went into it.
And I get a lot of different answers.
Yeah, yeah. In my case, I outlined the broad strokes of it. I knew that I wanted to have this to happen and I wanted the antagonist to be doing this, and I wanted this sort of resolution midway, and I wanted to have this sort of scene, and I wanted to have this sort of arc, but more or less how I got slithered in between that, I pretty much just wrote on the go. But as I did that, I more or less figured out, “OK, this is not what I want to do.” And one of those things was one of the side characters. I’m like, “OK, I haven’t quite gotten his voice down. I haven’t quite gotten his approach, his personality,” and in order for me to write a character, I have to know the sort of person they are because who they are influences the behavior, the relationship, the dialogue. And I can’t just…you know, if I don’t get a concrete answer, it’s going to be wet clay. And so I went back a little bit and did a bit of character tweaking, but more or less, I just went, you know, started going from point to point and just weaseling my way through those points, deciding, “OK, this has happened, OK, how are they going to get to the next point?” And I just rocked up one day and decided, “You know, OK, they will do this, they’ll go here, they’ll do that.” But the broad strokes of the narrative, the big anchor points, were definitely outlined. And I think that comes from film, of all things, because I’ve said, I’m very inspired by film. And one of my favorite sort of films are films where I feel like the director has a very tight control over the narrative, over every shot, over every scene, of the emotion that you’re expected to get from every point in the film.
Like, I’m a very, very big fan of something like a film, like, for example, the film There Will Be Blood with Daniel Day-Lewis. You know, that film is so incredibly tight. You just know that every, behind the camera, he was in absolute control. Like, a director like Martin Scorsese or Christopher Nolan or Denis Villeneuve, you get like something like Blade Runner 2049. Like, this is what they want to do, and this is how we achieve this…they achieved exactly that. And so that sort of thing that I enjoy doing, being able to control my narrative.
Unfortunately, the human brain sometimes has other ideas. And as I’ve discovered with writing book two, and outlining book three, sometimes that doesn’t always go to plan. And so, sometimes being able to adapt and figure out, “OK, this is actually what I want to do.” I mean, you get to a certain point in the narrative, and you’re like, “Actually, my characters don’t want to do this. Well, I don’t want to do this.” Or, “I could think of something better.” And you have to adapt. You have to be able to go along with it. And I refuse to write anything that I don’t want to write because I feel like, “OK, the narrative needs it” or “this is what I planned.” I can’t do that. I need to be able to write something that I feel is what I want to write.
What does your actual writing process look like? Are you a fast writer, are you a slow writer? Do you use parchment under a tree in the backyard, or do you go to a coffee shop? How does it work for you?
No, I siphon the lifeblood of other authors’ dreams, and I distill that into pen and paper.
I should try that.
Well, I’m pretty sure that girl from university, I’m pretty sure she was doing that. No, what I do do is, I am a fast writer. I can do three thousand, four thousand, five thousand words a day. When I was writing Stormblood, that’s the sort of mileage that I was pounding out. I was doing approximately four thousand words a day. Sometimes only a few thousand of those words were good. Sometimes I would write a thousand words and all of them were good. I wish those days happened more frequently than they do.
But no, I do typically go to cafes because I have a studio apartment and I have a lot of things, all my books, all my games here, and a multitude of distractions, either from my dog or my family or anything else that comes along, take me away from my little world. And so, being able to go to a cafe…you know, for some reason being around screaming children and coffee and, you know, waiters and whatever, for that reason, somehow helps me to cope. You know, if I eat, it doesn’t matter what it is. If I’m away from home, I can write more easily than I can when I’m at home. And so, being able to go down to a beachside cafe near where I live and pound out three thousand, four thousand words, I go to the pub, pout out a few words there in the afternoon, it really does help me distill what I need to do. Editing is a little bit more tricky because I’m, as I said, I try to be in control of my craft, and so, being able to be at home and on my big monitor, I think, helps me more specifically. But being able to get out the raw words, nothing gets it out like I do when I’m going out to a cafe or going somewhere public. It really just helps me get those words down. And sometimes that’s just what you need to do, is to make a fiction work.
Yeah, I ask a lot of authors that, obviously, and I personally like to write outside somewhere when I can, hasn’t been a lot of that recently, but one of the things that I have found, and other authors have mentioned this to me, is that they’re fine with the wash of sound from a busy place but if you get a sort of a quieter place, but there’s somebody sitting close to you having a conversation with somebody else, those words can really interfere when they’re writing. At least, I find that. Are you able to just tune all that out in the background no matter what’s going on?
No, I definitely agree. Like, unless everything is so cluttered that it turns into a white noise, no, I can’t. If someone is having a conversation right next to me, it does filter in. I do have a very nice pair of noise-canceling headphones that I make very, very good use of.
That’s when I listen to music. Instrumental music, though, because words in the music are the same problem.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly the same. So I’ve just got this massive playlist of, you know, soundtracks, Hans Zimmer and John Johnson and Brian Eno and all these other great artists and great music soundtracks that really help me distill the sort of thing that I’m trying to write. It’s very, very useful.
You mentioned editing, so what does your revision process look like? Do you write straight through and then edit from start to finish? Do you do a rolling revision as you go? How do you work?
That’s an interesting question because working with an editor is far different than it is working, editing, self-editing your own project. And my editor is Gillian Redfearn at Gollancz. She edits Joe Abercrombie, Richard Morgan, Alastair Rennolds, Joe Hill, a bunch of other fantastic writers. So she very, very much knows her craft. So, the way that we did Stormblood one was that we edited the first half of the book once. Because we did structural changes. And so, she edited the first half of it, I went back, did my editing, made those changes. She looked at it, saw the sort of changes that I had made, and then edited the second half of the book to apply the ripple effects from the first half. So basically, the things that changed in the first half she then helped edit with those changes in mind for the second half.
And so, she basically edited the first half of the book twice, basically. And so, I’ve actually had to keep that in mind when I am writing, doing my editing, I’m thinking, OK, I kind of look at it as a concentric circle. “OK, what’re the big structural things that I’ve got to change? Is it character? Is it worldbuilding? Is it, you know, the big plot revelations.? What are the big things I’m changing?” You know, I’m not preoccupied with small things like one scene or, you know, chopping down an action scene, or at least I shouldn’t be. I’m trying to think of the big things. “OK, do I actually need an action scene here?” Because you can edit your life, your heart out of a scene, and this is actually applicable for something that I just did in book two. I had all these different plot points going on in those one scene that was taking up a lot of time, and it wasn’t getting too much. And so I’d wilt it down and wilt it down and wilt it down and chop it back, chop it back and chop it back, and it came to the point where I realized, “OK, this is getting me absolutely nothing. I’ve got three action scenes in one hundred or so pages. Why don’t I just chop two of those out and just make one big action scene, and that way I can stack on the tension instead of being a stop-start, stop-start sort of approach.” And being able to do that, being able to look at the whole thing in my head and being able to see, “OK, this is what I need, this is what I don’t need,” helps a lot as opposed to going in and picking up minute details, because I’ll do that forever. Honestly, my editors need to pry the final book away from my cold hands because I’m just, “Wait, no, no, no, there’s one word, I’m not sure to call it a spacecraft or ship. I’m not sure to call it a warp drive or hyperspace. Just let me change it, one thing.”
And so being able to look at the big picture really does help. I mean, to be able to say, “OK, I’m not going to be too preoccupied in this line of dialogue from this character. I’m going to be preoccupied with, is this what I want the background to be? Is this what I want their approach to these, is what I want their arc to be. And that really helps, being able to look at the big picture and hold the big thing in my head. It’s a great help. And being able to do that helps me, you know, really self-interrogate, I guess, the sort of book that I’m trying to write. And even if it’s a waste of time, even if you’re like,”OK, I’ve spent a whole day looking at this character. Yes. I’m happy with the way…I don’t want to change it.” That reaffirms in your mind. “Yes, I’ve made the right decision. This is what I want. And that can be a really good thing.”
You mentioned in your acknowledgments quite a few beta readers. Where do they come into the process?
They came in by telling me, not what I wanted to hear, but what I needed to hear. And yeah, they…one of the best comments I got was from a writer called Gemma Anderson, or she writes under G.V. Anderson, and she said to me, and she’s a writer on her own, she’s won a World Fantasy Award, she’s brilliant. And she said to me, “Your characters, these two main characters, they always clash professionally. They never clash personally. What they argue about is always about the job. It’s never about each other or about each other’s attitudes.” And so, that really helped me separate that when I’m writing characters. OK, are these people just arguing because of a small office problem, or are they arguing because of a big character flaw? And that really helped me shift, I guess, from plot to character, and I always try to get my books as character-driven as I can, And so that really, really helped. And so basically they all did help, you know, help me, you know, understand, come to an understanding of what works, what doesn’t work. And beta readers are always going to disagree. They’re always going to give you conflicting information, which is absolutely fine. But being able to hear from a bunch of people, “OK, this is the sort of thing I like. This is the sort of thing that I think works well,” I think that is more helpful than simply, “OK, well, I didn’t like this, or this isn’t working.” Being able to see, “OK, what’s ticking people’s boxes,” I think that’s a really good way to find out what’s working in your book.
How did you find your beta readers?
Well, I knew a few of them, from Starship Sofa partially, from a few other things, but I did, I emailed a few of them or told a few people, “Hey, I would like to do a beta reader swap,” and I read some of their books and they read mine and, yeah, they just, that’s basically how it happened. There’s no lottery, alas, there were not people clamoring to read my scribblings, it was just me reaching out to some people that I knew and asking them, “Hey, want to read my book?” And not all of them ran away screaming for the hills. So they’re the ones that didn’t run away screaming for the hills.
So the book came out in June. It’s your first novel. What was the experience like for you to get that first book and see it in print?
Oh, exhilarating. I mean, it was probably the worst time in the world to be having a debut novel.
Not great.
Yeah, well, you know, COVID, but case in point, the hardback got canceled for my book, but the reason it got cancelled is because Goldsborough Books, a very, very nice independent seller in London who collects first-edition, signed hardbacks and gives them sprayed edges, so they’ve got everything, they’ve got a signed edition of Catch-22, they’ve got all the signed editions of all the James Bonds, every major author pretty much gets, you know, a hardcover signed with them. Like, you know, I think I’ve got a very nice hardcover from Joe Abercrombie, and some of them are still going up for, like, five thousand, ten thousand pounds, for a first edition. Anyway, so, I got 250 copies from them, they decided to take 250 hardbacks, and I got a very nice, gold-sprayed edges. And so, they sold out within a week, 250 copies sold out in hardback, the week before the book had even come out officially, and according to my agent, that’s incredibly rare to happen for science fiction, although that happens all the time for fantasy, but less so for science fiction, apparently. But that was quite a shock to realize, “OK, wow, there is actually an audience,” because it’s impossible to gauge how many people actually know about your book, how many people actually know what people are interested in. And so, that was quite a bit of a shock
But nothing, I think, compares to being able to get that package and being able to open it up and see, you know, your name on the cover and all your words written in these pages. It was exhilarating. But being able to go out and see, go to the bookstore and actually see it in the wild, see it ready for purchase and see people walking past it, that is another thing entirely and being able to see who your neighbors are as well as quite interesting. My actual neighbors, I have pretty good neighbors in my name. I’ve got John Scalzi, Neal Stephenson, Tade Thompson, and Adrian Tchaikovsky and some little known hack called Tolkien. I imagine he’ll be quite big someday. That is more or less my neighbors, depending on what’s in the bookstore. But, yes, that’s quite fun.
As somebody with a last name of W, I tend to be on the very bottom shelf, which is always annoying, but I’m down there with Ted Williams. So that can’t hurt.
No, no, no, definitely not. But yeah, it is quite fun to be able to go there and say, “OK, it’s actually a real thing now,” because the way the industry works is you don’t actually know if anything is going to go pear-shaped at any time, but being able to see, it’s in the wild, it’s a real thing, it’s in people’s homes, people can buy it and read it. It feels real, feels done, like, this is a book that’s part of science fiction canon. And we’re all readers, and so to be able to know that you’ve contributed to that canon, you’ve actually contributed to literature, is quite amazing.
Well, that kind of segues nicely into my other reverb question, the big philosophical questions, which is really, why? Why? Why do you do this? And also, you know, this podcast is called The Worldshapers, and I often say that, you know, it’s a lot asking any fiction to actually shape the world, I think very little fiction has had a huge impact on the world as a whole. But you’re shaping readers in some fashion with your fiction. So, why do you write, and what do you hope your writing, what impact your writing will have on readers?
I write so the lambs stop screaming. No, no, no. I write because I enjoy it. I do actually enjoy the process of getting those words down. I enjoy being able to create something that didn’t exist and being able to transplant that idea of, something that prior to me sitting down and putting words to it, didn’t exist. It wasn’t a thing. And being able to have it be concrete and being able to put that in other people’s heads, is something that I quite enjoy, and being able to impact people is even better. But to answer your question, I’m getting a lot of people, quite a lot of people saying to me how much, how touched they were by the portrayal of brotherhood in my book, and how much they, you know, really felt for the main character and his feelings and how heartbreaking that relationship, that deteriorating relationship was with his brother and how heartwarming it was to see him gaining that relationship with his fellow soldiers and his friends and being able to see it slowly built up.
And that’s something that’s quite special to me, because in a lot of fiction, especially between men, I think there’s a lot of…it’s very rarely platonic, it always seems to be sexualized, and a lot of fiction as well, even between men and women, automatically, it seems to be sexualized or automatically seems to be building up to a romance. And my point–and that’s great, you know, and there’s definitely romance in my book, but I do come from a perspective of friendship, of brotherhood, of, you know, really doing what you can for your friends, no matter how much it hurts, and being able to see that it worked, that I actually…that’s something that appeals to me very much, of being able to see that my stab at it, that my attempt of portraying brotherhood and showing the heartbreakingess of it and showing the highs and lows and the benefits and being slowly built up and what it means to people and how, you know, guilt influences people and how people try to get redemption and go out of the way for forgiveness, just so the people that matters to them, that they can build that relationship back. You know, that’s a very messy and sticky, you know, sort of topic, and being able to see so many people have reached out to me saying how much this meant to them, is…it’s great. I mean, that’s all I could want. I mean, I could have people tell me the worldbuilding is good, the plot is interesting, I didn’t see this coming, but really, at the end of the day, if I can, if some people say to me, “These two characters, the emotions that they were feeling, I felt them, and it touched me.” You know, that’s all I can want.
And we are getting close to the end here, so what are you working on now? Obviously, book two and book three in the trilogy.
Yeah, book two and book three. Book two is done in the sense that the words are on the page. Not all of them are in the right order yet, but I am working on that. And I’ve just been talking about it with my editor. I’ve been slowly outlining what I’m going to do in book three, which is a little bit scary. I mean, when I first got the deal, way back in, like, 2018, when we could still go outside, I never, it didn’t cross my mind that I’d be writing a trilogy, because I try to just write my books as a singular product. So, now that I actually I’m sitting down thinking, “OK, I’m going to do that in book three, I’m going to have that plot thing happen in book three,” it’s quite a different feeling, I think. And so, that’s what I’m kind of doing now, really sitting down and distilling that, you know. But it is a slow process, it is happening slowly, but it’s keeping me out of trouble. So, that’s always good.
And have you thought beyond this trilogy to what might come next?
No. No, I’m not allowing myself to do that, I’m just working on this now, I mean, I have ideas, of course, I’ve got plenty of ideas. Not all of them are worth, most of them aren’t worth the page they printed on, and since mine are in the computer that’s absolutely none at all. But I am, of course, you know, always having things churning on back in the mental percolator, but not at the moment. I’m just really focusing on making these the best books that I can. I mean, even if I never get to write another trilogy, I just want to make sure that these count. So this is where all my attention is going.
And Szal is S, Zed, A, L. Do you say zed in Australia like we do in Canada?
We say zed, yeah, not zee, not like Americans, you know, we are from English descent.
S, Zed, A, L. Well, thanks so much for being on The Worldshapers. I had a great time talking to you. I hope you enjoyed it.
All right, thank you very much, and thank you very much for checking out Stormblood as well. I really do appreciate it.
Well, I’m looking forward to finishing it. I found the writing really driving me forward and very rich and very descriptive and great characterization and all the stuff I like. And I’m a big fan of space opera. In fact, one of my proposals to DAW right now is for a space opera. So, yeah, so I’m looking forward to finishing it and then carrying on and reading the rest of the trilogy as it comes up.
An hour-long conversation with Adria Laycraft, author of Jumpship Hope (Tyche Books), freelance editor, and wood artisan, an Odyssey Writers Workshop alumna whose short stories have appeared in various magazines and anthologies, both online and in print.
Now, I say I feel like I’m kind of an honorary member of the IFWA, because we’ve known each other for a long time through conventions in Calgary, and so, although I’ve never, you know, really been a member of the organization, I’ve been part of the Writers at the Improv that that group does every year, for many, many years now.
That is so much fun, Writers at the Improv.
I’ve done it a couple of times as a program. In fact, I did it when I was writer-in-residence at the Regina Public Library, and I did it again this year at the Saskatoon Public Library. Except I didn’t really have anybody show…it was just before everything closed down and I think people were a little iffy. All I had was an English As a Second Language class, and none of them wanted to compete. So what I did was, I just took words from them…because for those…I guess I should explain…Writers at the Improv is like any improv, you get words in the audience and you write a story using those words. I wrote a story on the words that they gave me. So that was kind of fun for me. It wasn’t quite the usual kind of a process, though. But anyway, enough about me. You’re actually here to talk about you. So, we have known each other a long time and you’ve been a writer all that time that I’ve known you. So, let’s take you back into the mists of time, as I like to say. How did you get interested…well, first of all, in science fiction and fantasy…and in writing? Which came first, or how did those two things come together for you?
Well, I can…of course, that’s why my phone rings…I have definitely been a reader and a fan of science fiction and fantasy since before I could even read. According to my mom, I demanded to be taught how to read before kindergarten because I was tired of waiting for people to have time to read to me. So, I’ve always been a reader. I read The Lord of the Rings at age eight for the first time. And I reread it several times, and launched me into reading Heinlein and stuff that I just hadn’t even thought I was old enough for yet. But always, always been a very avid reader. And then, somewhere along the way, when I realized I had to have a job in the big wide world, I realized that that writing the books that I loved so much could be a thing.
Well, you studied…well, first of all, you grew up in Calgary, I presume, or is that correct?
Northern Alberta.
Northern Alberta. So when you went to…when you were in school, did you start writing stories and sharing them with your friends and that sort of thing?
Yeah, and I was attempting to write novels at that point. I was still uncertain about short fiction, but I was always a book lover and I was attempting to write at that time. But being a sensible girl raised by sensible parents, I thought that I should go to journalism school and get a job that I could write for a living and maybe get a paycheque.
Yes, and that’s exactly what I did, because in high school I wrote novels and short stories and I knew I wanted to be a writer. And then I looked at it and I said, “Well, you can’t make a living as a writer,” and I went into journalism for that very reason, so I’d be doing something where I would be I would be writing. And, you know, it wasn’t what I wanted to write necessarily, but I thought it’d be useful. So, did you find that useful, your journalism training, and then the work you did there? Did that help with the fiction writing later on?
I got told several times, both in photojournalism and in the writing classes, that I was on the wrong side of the tracks. So, anyone from Calgary knows that SATE is on one side of the C-train tracks and the art school, ACAD, is on the other side of the tracks. And so, I actually had a couple of instructors tell me, “You’re on the wrong side of the tracks. You should be in art school.” And, of course, I fought that and graduated with honors and worked as a freelancer. I’ve been published in several magazines and newspapers, especially around Alberta. But it didn’t take me very many years before I realized that there might possibly be more truth in the fiction I wrote than in the journalism, and I decided that it was time to step away from that and focus more on the fiction, which is where my heart was.
I still find…and, yeah, I was kind of there, I mean, I, I did journalism and I, you know, for eight years I worked for a newspaper as a reporter and then as editor of the newspaper, and then I was a communications officer for the Saskatchewan Science Centre. All that time I was writing fiction, but I did find that the mere act of having to put words on paper is helpful, no matter what kind of writing you’re doing, that the discipline of writing helps you write. Did you find that, as well, that there was some benefit in all that nonfiction when you got around to focusing on fiction?
Sure. Definitely. And just even, as you say, words on the paper, but even the act of it, the physical act of putting words on the paper, the more you do it, the easier it gets to get started. And that seems to always be the hang-up for everyone, is getting started.
Well, I often say that as a newspaper reporter, you don’t have the luxury of not writing because the newspaper is going to come out and there have to be words in it to go around the advertising. So, you have to provide those words. So, I did find it a very useful side of writing. But all that time I was writing fiction. Were you writing fiction even while you were working mostly as a non-fiction freelancer?
I was, sporadically. I also spent several years chasing wildlife photography and sold a bunch of pictures to magazines and postcards and calendar companies and all kinds of neat things, back in the day where you still had to mail the slides physically to the company. And so, I was writing and always reading, but it was a little sporadic. I chased a lot of other interesting things. And I think that just lends itself to good fiction, too.
Well, you have to have something in the tank that you turn into words about other things, I think. And that’s another thing that I found writing nonfiction is that, you know, it broadens your horizons a little bit from focusing just on the stuff that you make up. It exposes you to other things. So when did…
Kind of like reading outside your genre will sometimes open your mind up to things you wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.
Yeah. Well, you did mention the imaginative Fiction Writers Association. When did you become involved with that excellent writing group?
Oh, I became a member…I believe it was ’96, or ’97. And my very first ever short story critique was performed by Randy and someone else who I don’t remember anymore.
That very first one? I mean, I was just in my mid-20s, it was the first time I attempted short fiction, I hadn’t even really read anything. The story was atrocious, and Randy did his best to tell me so in the kindest way. But it was quite an experience. And it was…it brought me back actually to the journalism-school days when, you know, you would have to write and write and write your assignments and then have them trashed. But it was very eye-opening and I learned a lot. And IFWA has, through the years, brought me so much, just…it’s hard to even express my gratitude because it’s so big.
Well, it’s good to hear because, you know, I’ve talked to a lot of authors and I always ask about their formal training, and that was, in your case, the journalism, but also if you can find a good writers group. And some of us have never had a handy writers’ group. And then there’s people who’ve been in writer’s groups, but they were not helpful. So it’s nice to know that there’s one out there that really works.
And IFWA has had its ups and downs, I mean, we became so big that the only way to be helpful and manage the numbers was to have splinter groups. And I was involved in one of those–well, a few of those splinter groups–but one in particular that went on for several years. And that kind of small focus can…that’s where you really get your value, is if you can find just a…usually between six or 10 people seems to be ideal…and you share work amongst you and you focus on one person’s work at a time. And, oh, my goodness, you can make leaps and bounds of progress that you just simply wouldn’t have been able to without them.
So when did you start selling short fiction?
That would be after attending the Odyssey Writing Workshop out in New Hampshire. Odyssey, we used to jokingly say, is a lot like Survivor because it is six weeks long. But we used to joke that it’s like Survivor, but you can’t vote anyone out. And it’s 16 students that critique each other and take courses and classes and workshops and do assignments for six weeks. It’s an MFA-equivalent course that’s crammed into a very short amount of time and it’s very intense. Because of that, the requirements for that course, I had to really get into short fiction a lot more than I ever had before. Even though I was a member of IFWA coming up to that time, Odyssey was what really got me looking at short fiction, reading it, writing it, really exploring it. And it was just shortly after that. So, my roommate got her first short story sale while we’re there. And then I got my first one shortly after, and it was written while I was at Odyssey.
When was that first one and what was it?
So let’s see. That was 2006. Oh, my goodness, I can remember the story, ‘course the title runs right out of my head. And it was published in a little online journal. It was a Christian journal, I believe. Just a small thing. But, of course, being the first one, I was really excited.
Yes, it’s…I was in…where was I? I was in Zurich, of all places, on a choir tour with my university choir, which I had gone back to as an alumnus just a few years after I graduated and I got a, you know, a mailgram, because we didn’t have email in those days, an aerogram from my mother telling me that I had sold a short story. So I still remember that very clearly. It wasn’t science fiction, either, that first one. But it was my first short story. So, yeah, you always remember the first one, that’s for sure.
Yeah.
Now though, you have…your first novel has come out. When did you start focusing or thinking about novels, or were there some unpublished ones in there before you published one? How did that work out for you?
There are several unpublished novels in my history. I, like I said earlier, love, love book-length fiction. I love the ability to just really immerse yourself in that world and those characters. And personally, short stories just aren’t long enough to really have the same impact on you. So, yeah, there’re a few novels sitting there that still need to find a home. The interesting thing is, Jumpship Hope began, as well, at Odyssey. We had an assignment to write up a flash piece, which I’d never heard of before. So here I was, already struggling with writing short stories because I wasn’t used to being so brief, and now I had an assignment to write flash fiction, a thousand words or less. And it was to be read out loud in public at a bookstore. It had to be five minutes or less. So that scene was actually inspired by my roommate, she said, “Just take one impactful moment and turn it into a story.” Just one. She said if you try and put too many moments in, then you won’t have flash fiction. So I took an impactful moment and turned it into, you know, threw it onto a spaceship. And, of course, immediately saw everything that led up to that moment and everything that came after it, and I had to write a book.
Well, this seems like a good place to give a synopsis of said book. So…without giving away anything you don’t want to give away...
Jumpship Hope is about first contact. And, of course, you know, that wonderful space-opera thing of being able to jump or fold space. And it’s an adventure about, you know, learning what we stand for. And it deals with humanity in a time where Earth has become pretty unlivable, and they’re trying to survive in orbit, on the moon, and on Mars. And things aren’t going so great, of course, because that makes good fiction.
And, you talked a little bit about how it came about, coming out of this this flash fiction. What was the impactful scene that you wrote that then triggered the rest of it? Or will that give something away?
Well, the impactful scene is very much that mirror moment in the middle where our hero, Janlin Kavanaugh, stops being chased and starts chasing. It’s where she puts her foot down and she says, “I’ve had enough and I’m going to make some changes.”
Well, how did you go about planning out the novel? Are you a detailed outliner…are you a pantser or a plotter, is the usual way to say that…?
Right. I’m a bit of a pantser, but I’m a bit of an organized pantser. I like to sail in the first 20, 30 thousand words, just feeling my way around. And then I will start plotting more and making sure that the pieces that I want are in place and in order. And then that gives me more confidence to move forward without running, you know, too many detours. Yeah. That would be it.
So what do you end up with in actual pre-writing, like a 400-page synopsis or a paragraph scribbled on the back of an envelope? What did it look like?
I usually end up with, when I’m still getting that first thirty thousand, then I usually end up with a lot of random scenes from all over the place in a scribbled notebook. And then, that’s when, at that point, I need to step back and say, “What’s important? Where am I going with this?” And that’s when I’ll start planning and I’ll start doing a proper outline. Having learned so much about story structure and fiction elements and plotting, I understand the importance of backing up in that moment and taking a look and making sure that I’m focusing on what I really want to say and not just one thing after another.
Well, other than that impactful scene, what was the impetus for telling this particular story? Where did the, you know, where do you get your ideas? That’s the other cliché we ask. And how does that, you know, this is for Jumpship Hope, but, you know, you’ve written short stories as well. What is your general sort of idea-generating process?
Mm hmm. Usually, there is an endpoint. That’s pretty clear. And it’s all about finding out what happened to end up at that point. Without an endpoint…and I actually read an interesting article not long ago about a triangle setup where, if you understand the inciting incident and you understand your mirror moment in the middle, and you understand the transformation at the end, once you have those three pieces, you can just go ahead and fill in what’s needed to get there to those points. So…I’m sorry, I lost track of the question.
Well, when you’re coming up with the story, how does it start for you? Does it start with like an image or a character or a plot idea or what’s typical for you?
It’s often a scene with the people and the dialogues coming to me. I can hear the characters, I can see the scene, I understand the tone and the emotion that’s taking place. And those scenes are what become this notebook full of scribbled bits and pieces that I then have to string together and bridge with more prose to make it a readable novel.
What’s your actual writing process? Do you write, you know, in long bursts or short bursts or in your office or off in a coffee shop or on a piece of parchment under a tree with a quill pen? How do you write?
Do you know, I really miss coffee shops. I used to write in coffee shops all the time when my kid was little. It was my way of being able to step away from the house, being an at-home mom and a freelancer working from home, right? But these days, I’m usually on the couch with the laptop or the notebook on my knees. I tend to write in spurts, so I’ll do an hour, take a break, another hour, take a break…but I also tend to take a whole day and just focus on the novel and not try to look at other jobs, like the editing jobs that I may be on that day, or that at that time. So I try to just let the book fill my head for that day and then I can maybe set it aside and take a few days to do all the other life-stuff. So it’s kind of…I work in spurts and then I take breaks.
Are you a fast writer or a slow writer?
I’m pretty darn fast. While I was in between the journalism years and getting the novel published and becoming a freelance editor, I ran my own freelance copywriting business. So you learn, just like with the journalism, you learn to write fast. You learn to get words down on the page and you learn to meet deadlines, which, I’m very sad to say, I missed the deadline with the sequel to Jumpship Hope.
Well, deadlines. I always remember, I think it was Douglas Adams who said that, “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they go by.”
Yes, that’s an awesome quote!
So, once you have a first draft, what’s your revision process look like? Or do you do, like, a rolling revision and it’s all polished when you get to the end of that draft? Or do you go back to the beginning and do it all from the beginning? How does that work for you and what sorts of things do you find yourself working on in the revision passes?
Well, with that messy, rough first draft, I tried to just keep plowing forward, though sometimes it is important to step back and look at what you’re doing. But I try to keep pushing forward until I get to the end. But especially since I’ve become an editor over the past five years, I find it very difficult to take the editor hat off and just write. So it’s…some of the biggest discipline I’ve ever had to have is now to be able to just say, “Stop worrying about the editing, stop trying to make it perfect right now, it’s just a first draft. Get to the end.” And then, once that first draft is done, as you come back to the beginning, then I get to put my editor hat on, and I feel much more confident and equipped, better equipped, to do a good job.
Well, I was going to ask you about the editing. Have you found that editing…t sounds like you’ve found that editing other people’s work helps you to look at your own critically. I certainly find that.
It definitely does. And I really enjoy it. It can be incredibly monotonous, and of course, anyone can edit for themselves to a certain degree, but I know for myself, even as an editor, I need other people’s eyes on the work. When it’s your muddle and your head’s just too far in it, you often can’t see it from the same perspective as someone else can for you.
So, what to do when you get to that point? Do you have beta readers or do you bring in an external editor or how do you like to do that? Or critiquers?
Yeah, yeah. I’ve got a couple of wonderful beta readers and some author friends who are always happy to exchange manuscripts. So then, I can help them without them feeling like they should be paying me because that’s my job as well. And they get to help me and we just get to do it as friends, which is wonderful, and very talented people that I call friends. I’m incredibly blessed in that way. And then, of course, with the particular work in progress, my publisher is waiting for that, and they will do a wonderful editing job for me there.
What sorts of things do you find yourself having to work on, both in revision, and then when somebody else looks at it, are there sort of consistent things that you find you have to spruce up?
Mm hmm. Consistent, yeah…on all levels of editing, there are things that every author has, like tics, I guess? Bad habits. One of mine is the word “very.” So, I will actually go and do a seek-and-destroy that one. There’s a few others on my list that are pretty bad, but that one is always number.
I actually thought for a minute you said the word-fairy, like the word-fairy, like this fairy that flies around and gives you words or something, not the word “very.”
Oh, a word-fairy!
A word-fairy would be a very good thing. Put your manuscript under your pillow and the word fairy comes and fixes it all up.
Ed, that’s a great idea.
I’m going to have to write that story!
Yeah. We need some word-fairies! Yeah, no, it’s a word “very.”
Yes.
V-E-R-Y. That one gets me. Apparently it’s my way of trying to…often I mark them and I’ll go through. A lot of times you can just take them right out and it’s fine. But sometimes it’s because I simply have not taken the time to do good word-choice thinking, right? To really think it through and get the right word instead of ones that need the word bury in front of it.
Yeah. And that’s something as writer-in-residence, that’s actually–which I just finished at the Saskatoon Public Library–I found myself pointing out to other people, You know, don’t use a weak verb with a modifier if you can find a strong verb, that sort of thing.
Yes.
Or a weak noun with a modifier.
The other one that I’m often catching and other people’s work, which I now catch as I’m writing, is instead of saying what something is not, say what it is. So instead of saying, “That’s not bad,” say, “It’s good.” And if those words don’t seem to cut it, then you’re not choosing the right words.
And the other one that I catch myself and I do this–it’s not a search to replace, but I often do a search for passive voice like was and had and things like that, and see if there’s some way to turn that one around as well. And that’s another one I often point out to people.
It just makes the writing so much more powerful. We don’t realize…I guess it’s kind of like that quote that good, easy reading is really hard writing?
So, when you got to your editor, your publisher, which is Tyche Books, what was the editing process like at that side of things for you? How do they approach editing?
I was pleased to see that they approach their editing very much the same way I do. Lots of comments and suggestions and track changes, so that I could go through and approve, accept, or reject, because like I tell my clients, it’s your story and you should always have the final say. So, I was really happy to see that I got a chance to look through the suggested changes and give my own feedback on that and make the changes I wanted or, you know, deny the changes that I didn’t think were appropriate. So, that pretty important. I know there’s been other Canadian authors that have had to fight things like Canadian spelling and things like that.
Yeah, that’s always a tough one for me, because my publisher’s in the U.S., but I have my own little publishing company where I adhere to Canadian spelling, and I’m constantly having to do a check on spelling to make sure I’ve either not used it for the American publisher or I’m using it in the stuff I’m doing myself or the Canadian publishers I work for. So, half the time, I’m not sure. And then I was just editing somebody else’s manuscript and they wanted UK spelling, which is not quite the same again. But there’s some software tools to help you with stuff like that. And I did want to ask you about editing, since we’re talking about it. How did you get into freelance editing?
Being a journalist and a freelance journalist for many years and then a freelance copywriter for many years, I was always really interested into getting into editing as well for fiction, because that’s my first love. And for a long time, I simply didn’t feel qualified. I wanted to make sure that I really did know my stuff. I actually took some courses and brushed up on my editing and grammar and a whole bunch of other things before I hung my shingle out. I really wanted to be sure that if I was asking people to pay me for my time, that they were going to get a good return on investment. So when I did go ahead and start doing that, my first couple of jobs were with IFWA members, actually, and that really helped me gain in my confidence and get started. It sounds like a really easy job, and I love to say, “Pinch me, I get paid to read for a living.” But like I said earlier, it can be incredibly tedious and monotonous and almost meditative at times. And it’s certainly not easy.
No, it’s not. And I do it, too.
It’s hard work.
Yeah, it is. And it does…well, and of course, basically, as the writer in residence I was editing, I was taking up to 3,000 words at a time, and I would go over that with a fine-tooth comb and then I would meet with people for an hour. And I met with some 70 individuals over the course of my time there. And there’s a song from My Fair Lady that kept running through my head, which is, “Words, words, words, I’m so sick of words. I get words all day through, first from him, then from you. Is that all you blighters can do?” It’s just the perfect editing…not ht it means in the context of the musical, but it’s the perfect editor’s song!
It’s the perfect editor’s song. It really is. And unfortunately, in these past years that I’ve been working as an editor, I actually stepped away from writing for a little while. And I don’t read as much as I like to. My to-be-read pile has gone completely nuts because I keep buying books. And when you read all day at the end of the day, you want to do almost anything else.
Yeah. It’s an occupational hazard, I think.
I think so.
The other thing about editor–you may have heard this, having worked in journalism, but my publisher at the Wayburn Review once put it one of his columns as a joke: “Editor is actually an acronym, it stands for Expensive Dummy in the Other Room.”
Yeah.
I think he meant it as a joke.
Oh, here’s hoping.
He didn’t fire me, so it could have been too bad. So, how has the reception been to Jumpship Hope? Have you…you know, are people enjoying it?
Yeah, it’s been really great. And I’ve had some surprising feedback. In fact, just last night I got the message from my auntie and she said, “Adrià, I don’t usually read science fiction, but you had me right till the end and I can’t wait for the next one.” So, it’s lovely to hear things like that, especially when you’re, you know, neck-deep in the sequel and you’re doubting everything.
Yeah, well, that’s sort of the middle part of the book when you’re just, you’re not sure. I had something like that from my father once. One of my first…I guess my first novel. And he actually, he did read this kind of stuff some, and he read it and he actually said to me, “When did you learn so much about human nature?”
Oh, well, that’s nice. That’s actually a really good compliment.
Yeah. I thought it was, too.
Yeah!
So you mentioned that you are working on the sequel…?
Jumpship Dissonance. And the final book, which is also getting little bits of scribbles, just as I try to sort everything, is Jumpship Freedom, and that will create the trilogy.
Is there a set release date for these, or is it a little amorphous yet?
Jumpship Dissonance was initially set to launch at When Words Collide in 2020, but 2020 isn’t going so well, and I missed my deadline anyway, so we’re shooting for 2021.
I was hoping to launch a book at When Words Collide, as well. So, yeah.
Yeah, it it’s going to be a fun one. Online.
I wanted to ask you as well about the woodworking because it’s interesting that creative people are often creative in more than one way. You mentioned the photography, which you focused on–ha ha!–focused on it for a while. So where did the woodworking side of things come in?
Now, that’s a fun one because, yes, creative people do often have a lot of things that they want to try, at least. And a lot of creatives will have many talents. But I struggled for a long time wanting to learn how to carve and just feeling like I should just get my butt in the chair and keep writing because that was the focus, that was my hobby. You know, I had work and parenting and yada-yada. But a few years ago, actually, when I backed off from the writing and the reading and I was doing more and more editing, I needed something else that took me away from the screen and the words and allowed me to work with my hands. So, I took a class at Lee Valley and then another one a few years later at Black Forest Wood Company. And I just absolutely fell in love. Woodcarving has a certain soul to it, like nothing else I’ve ever met. And I’ve always been a big nature girl, I love being in the trees. So it doesn’t surprise me that I like to carve wood. And I just kind of gave myself permission to go ahead and play and have some fun. And it’s really taken off for me. To me, it’s part of my soul-survival kit, if that makes any sense.
What sorts of things do you carve?
I’ve tried all kinds of neat things. I carve a lot of what’s known as cottonwood bark, which is the thick bark that grows on balsam poplar trees. And it’s very soft and forgiving. It’s really easy for beginners to play with and it has a beautiful grain. It’s known for those little fairy houses, you know, carved out of the bark? That is usually cottonwood bark. And it’s carved, you know, the faces, like the old man with fear and the mustache, wood spirits. One of my favorites is a whale tale that I carved, that I wear as a pendant. And one of my favorite, favorite subjects to carve is Celtic knots and weaves.
So it’s all a form of creating something from…not exactly nothing, but shaping materials into something else, which I think is a, as you might guess from the fact this podcast is called The Worldshapers, is actually a metaphor that I like, that we don’t really create things from nothing, but we take the material that we have inside us and we we shape it into stories and into new creations. So, woodcarving is very much a good metaphor for that.
It’s funny that you would put it that way, Ed, because I actually noticed one day that as an editor and a woodcarver, it’s all about taking things away.
That’s true. I guess that’s true.
I actually am a little jealous of sculptors because they add the clay until it’s right. Whereas a woodcarver, or a stone carver, has to remove material until it’s right.
Well, that’s Michelangelo’s famous thing, it’s attributed to him, that, “How do you carve David? Well, you get a piece of marble and you cut away everything that’s not David.”
Not David. It’s that simple. Very simple. Just like writing. You just put some words on the page. It’s that simple.
You could say that we’re starting with the entire English language and we just take away the parts of it that we don’t need for the specific book. So, it’s all in how you look at it.
Right. Exactly.
Well, then, on the big philosophical side, why do you do this? Why do you tell stories? Or why do you think any of us tell stories? And why, in particular science fiction and fantasy stories?
Oh, we desperately need them. Science fiction and fantasy has given an outlet to talk about things, in all of our history, has given us an outlet to talk about things that weren’t supposed to be talked about. And we could hide underneath the the the wizards and the spaceships, but we could still tell a story about people. And for me, life’s not worth living if there’s no story. So how philosophical is that for you, Ed?
Where do you think that impulse comes from, for human beings to tell stories? Because we’ve been doing it our whole existence.
Well, it’s so important for us to work out what happened and to help us to think it through and decide how we really feel about it after initial reaction, which is, you know, usually either fear or celebration. But I think stories also help us to share information with those that maybe weren’t able to be on the scene for that moment. Right now, in our world as it is, which is a pretty scary one, we’re seeing a huge uprising like, possibly like none before, and I’m really hoping it is, it will be like none before. And that, of course, is around the Black Lives Matter. And, it’s… I’ve spent a lot of time on Facebook and other media sites reading and reading and reading people’s accounts and their firsthand stories of being black and living in America and what it looks like every day and what it feels like every day. And without those stories, how can someone like me in privilege and safety understand why they need to get so upset right now? So we need story. Without story, there’s no understanding.
Well, and I mentioned that this is called The Worldshapers. It’s probably too grand to save that any one story shapes the world in any significant fashion. But do you hope you’re at least shaping your readers in some fashion through your stories?
Oh, that’d be great. Do you know what would be great? Star Trek. A lot of the great ideas that they came up with have now come to pass. Like, the little communication devices seem an awful lot like flip-phones. It would be really great if someday we really can get in a jumpship and fold space and visit other solar systems. And if I inspire the little brain that’s capable of figuring that out, then that would be really something. But I’m not sure that I have that kind of power, I just like to tell a good story.
So you mentioned what you’re working on. Do you have any short fiction in the works or anything on that side of things?
No, I don’t. I haven’t spent a lot of time with short fiction recently, although I am reading Rhonda Parrish’s Earth anthology, the one with the golems and giants? It’s really god.
I think most of are either novelists or short story writers, and although we might do both, there’s one we tend to gravitate to. And certainly, in my case, it’s always been the longer stuff. I don’t write…I finally put out a collection of my short stories and I had to go from my first short story sale in the ’80s up until last year in order to have enough to make a collection. Not a huge short story writer for sure.
Well, how many stories did it come to that?
Twenty-two, I think. But there were at least three of them that hadn’t been published before. So they were one that I included that way. So actually published short stories? I wouldn’t think I’m more than about 20 in my entire career.
Well, I know that book exists and it’s on my wish list but I don’t own it yet.
Yes, please, please do buy it. Everybody listening now, please. Paths to the Stars. Shadowpaw Press. Twenty-two short stories by Edward Willett
It looks amazing and I can’t wait to read it.
So, where can people who would like to know more about you find you online?
AdriaLaycraft.com Is a quick way to find me. And I do have a Facebook account that I’m pretty regular on. Other than that, I try not to spend too much time online. Oh, but you can definitely go to the Tyche Books website. Not only do they have amazing authors and amazing books, you can get your favorite Tyche Book on a travel mug and they’re really nice travel mugs, a sweater, a hoodie, a sticker, a poster, a wall hanging. They’ve got it all.
And the YouTube channels you mentioned in the bio?
Oh, yes. You know, it would be really great to have a YouTube channel about writing, but it’s kind of a boring thing to film.
That’s why no, you know, writing competition TV shows. This week, the contestants will type!
Exactly. But Carving the Cottonwood is the first YouTube channel I started, and it was my way of giving back…so many YouTube channels about carving are just people learning and showing what they’re doing. And I was able to learn from them as I was, you know, figuring out how to do this, so filming myself is now my way of giving back to those people and to inspire those who would just like to give it a try. Now, the Girl Gone Vagabond channel, it did get renamed. It’s called Girl Gone to Ground. And it’s going to be now a focus on me finding a little piece of land out here on the West Coast and building a little cabin and a garden and a woodshop. And it should be a lot of fun to see how it works out.
People can find those just with a search on YouTube, I presume.
Yes. You bet.
All right. Well, thanks so much for being on The Worldshapers, Adria. I enjoyed that. I hope you did?
Oh, I did. Thank you so much for inviting me, Ed. It’s such an honor.
And hopefully we’ll see each other in Calgary again one of these days, if nowhere else.
Maybe not this summer, but I’ve really got my hopes set on next summer.
An hour-long conversation with Bryan Thomas Schmidt, national bestselling author and Hugo-nominated editor of adult and children’s speculative fiction whose debut novel, The Worker Prince, received Honorable Mention on Barnes & Noble Book Club’s Year’s Best Science Fiction Releases and whose short stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies and online.
Bryan Thomas Schmidt is a national bestselling author and Hugo-nominated editor of adult and children’s speculative fiction whose debut novel, The Worker Prince, received Honorable Mention on Barnes & Noble Book Club’s Year’s Best Science Fiction Releases, and whose short stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies and online and include canon entries in The X-Files, Predator, Joe Ledger, Monster Hunter International, and Decipher’s WARS, amongst others.
As a book editor, he was the first editor on Andy Weir’s bestseller The Martian and has edited books by such luminaries as Alan Dean Foster, Tracy Hickman, Frank Herbert, Mike Resnick, Todd McCaffrey, Jean Rabe, and more. His anthologies as editor include Infinite Stars and Predator: If It Bleeds for Titan Books, Shattered Shields with co-editor Jennifer Brozek, Mission: Tomorrow, Galactic Games, Little Green Men–Attack! with Robin Wayne Bailey, and The Monster Hunter Tales with Larry Correia, all for Baen; Space Battles: Full Throttle Space Tales #6, Beyond The Sun, and Raygun Chronicles: Space Opera For a New Age for various small presses, and Joe Ledger: Unstoppable with Jonathan Maberry for St. Martin’s Press. He lives in Kansas City.
The (Lightly Edited) Transcript
So, Brian, welcome to The Worldshapers.
Thanks for having me. Good to be here.
We’ve met a couple of times at conventions here and there, I think. And of course, you live not too far from Kansas City. So, I was down there for the Kansas City Worldcon, and I think I probably said hi to you sometime during that weekend.
You did. I think…weren’t your daughter or your wife with you, or both?
Yeah, they were both…I was just telling you before we started that I have family not too far from there. My mom was born in Butler, Missouri, about, I don’t know, 50 miles from Kansas City, a small town, and Adrian, Missouri, is right down there, too. And that’s where she grew up and went to school. And that’s the birthplace of Robert A. Heinlein. So, while I was there, I actually went down to Butler, and they have a library there, Virginia Heinlein’s name is on it, and they have a collection of Heinlein books. And so, I actually donated some of my books to them and signed them while I was down there. So, that’s kind of cool.
But anyway, enough about me. So, we’re going to start with, as I always say to the guests, taking you back in time. How did you first get interested in…well, first of all, in science fiction, and then in writing it? It’s not necessarily the same thing at the same time.
Well, my interest in writing came first, because…my mom likes to say I never played with a toy the same way twice, because I could always imagine new scenarios for the toys. And so I was creating storytelling even as I played. And so I kind of had a natural inclination towards storytelling. So, I started writing basically fanfic of some of my favorite children’s books, you know, when I was in kindergarten and, you know, doodling around before that, but by third grade, I was writing with a partner doing like little books in some of my favorite series.
What were those favorite series?
First Scholastic edition of The Littles, 1967
Well, like, for example–I’m trying to remember, I forget the author these days, but—it’s The Littles. They were books about little people that lived in the walls. They had tails and they had, you know, they would fly paper airplanes, and little, you know, contraptions they made out of things, and they lived in the walls. And there was a whole popular series of Littles books. That’s the one I remember that we were writing stuff for. There were other things, but I don’t remember off the top of my head what they were. But that was kind of my first thing. And then, when I got into sci-fi was when I saw Star Wars, and that’s what really…Star Wars: A New Hope really made me look at things differently. I was always into space. All of the NASA launches and the different missions. In fact, my grandma kept a scrapbook, which I now have, of all the news clippings from all the history of NASA until she died. And so, we have, up through the middle of the space shuttles, we have clippings from all that period, all the way back to the very first, you know, Mercury astronaut program and everything. It’s really cool stuff. And so, I’ve always been a fan of all of that, but Star Wars took it to a whole new level and made me think about it in a whole different way. And then I got into Star Trek, the original series, which was rerunning every night and was in competition with dinner, much to my mother’s chagrin, and Space: 1999 and so on and so forth. And that’s what really started it. But, of course, naturally, I combined my desire to tell stories with my science fiction, and it kind of went from there.
So, when did…when you were writing all this stuff, were you sharing it with other people? I always ask that question because I found for myself that when I started sharing my stories when I was writing them in high school and so forth, and I found out from that that people actually liked my stories, and that was one thing that eventually pointed me toward the, you know, doing writing professionally. Did you share?
Well, yeah. I don’t remember who all besides my family I shared them with, but I know I shared ‘em. Some of them, eventually, I entered into a writing contest, creative writing, in school. And I won some awards. And so, that was an encouragement because, like, I can really do this, you know, they’re judging me the best in the contest. I may have something here. So, yeah, I did share. Back then, I was also doing music a lot, and I shared my music a lot more publicly than I think I did my writing, though occasionally, different things would happen with writing. But the music I definitely performed in public, so…
You’re a singer or instrumentalist or both?
Singer, piano player, songwriter. I played banjo, I played guitar a little bit, and eventually took up hand percussion, but I mainly was known for piano and vocals and songwriting.
I always ask that question, because I’m a singer and did that kind of stuff, too.
Yeah. Yeah. I have several albums out.
Well, I can’t say that.
I toured, I had stuff on the radio, and I toured and did all that stuff, too. So, it was a whole other life before I settled down to writing books.
Now, when you got to university, you didn’t actually study creative writing, did you?
No, I studied…at first, I was a music major, because music had been the area where I’d had the greatest success up to that point. And they wanted me to learn classical and they wanted me to write classical, and I got really frustrated, so I ended up switching to the English department and pursuing writing. And I still have mixed emotions about that. I mean, they didn’t really…you know, “you’re not a composer because you don’t write classical music.” Well, lady, people are asking me to sing my songs everywhere I go, and you told me your own husband doesn’t like your compositions, so I think you call him me “not a composer” is kind of a little ironic. That was kind of my response, which didn’t go over well. But anyway, I went into the English department and then ended up deciding I wanted to pursue screenwriting and transferred and finished my college in California doing screenwriting and then went into TV and film. And so, writing kind of took over. But at the time, of course, it was scriptwriting, which is a different animal than prose writing.
I’m always interested in that, as well. So, the scriptwriting that you did…when you did start writing more prose, did you find benefit from having been a scriptwriter?
Well, my dialogue was really strong. I’ve always been really good with dialogue because scripts rely so much on dialogue. When it came to writing all the visceral stuff and the descriptions, that’s where I had to struggle, because I really had to figure out how to describe stuff in the amount of detail I’d never had to deal with before. And that was part of the struggle. But I was writing scripts in high school, really. I created my own TV show when I was, like, in eighth grade and wrote, like, fourteen episodes. And I was writing scripts for my favorite shows and all that kind of stuff. So, you know, I was always doing scriptwriting alongside whatever prose I did.
I want to go back to the studying writing at university, I’ve asked many writers about that, some who have done it, some who haven’t done it. And I get a very mixed bag as to how helpful it was. What was your reaction to the actual creative writing part that you studied at university?
Well, I didn’t have any particularly bad experiences, but I think that what I was trying to do definitely was pushing the envelope as far as creativity with what they were expecting me to do. I always put a twist on everything. There was always some kind of weird…it didn’t have to be science fiction necessarily, but it definitely was a twist. I had to…even with screenwriting, I had to write a newscast for a class. And so, I wrote humorous news stories, but delivered, like, straight. You know, at the time, this will totally date you, but I remember one of the reports was about, you know, heavy winds at the Wichita airport, and you see pictures, video of the planes flipping over and all. You know, so underemphasizing things, you know. “The entire session of Congress had to be cleared today because Vice President Quayle passed gas in session.” You know, that kind of thing was the kind of stories that I would come up with, and they were delivered deadpan, you know? And so, I think some of my teachers were like, “I’m not sure you’re taking this seriously or not.” I was like, “I am, it’s just like, I like to have fun with it while I’m doing it.” So, you know, the humor that people now see in things like Simon Says, I’ve always been doing that. I mean, that’s just kind of where I came out. You know, shows like Hill Street Blues that mixed humor with drama were always my favorite types of shows, anyway, so those were kind of the things that I modeled myself after.
So, you were writing scripts, but you did several things along in there before you really started focusing on the prose side, didn’t you?
Yeah. I mean, I did the…I was doing the music thing, and then I ended up going back and getting a master’s degree in seminary and doing…starting a nonprofit that taught leadership development in the arts, and went over to Africa and Brazil and Mexico and various places, and helped train leaders. In fact, in one denomination in Ghana, West Africa, I would say seventy percent of their music leaders today are people I trained. So…I mean, Ghana is the size of Oregon, so, you know, take it for what it is, but…you know, it’s one denomination out of, you know, hundreds. But still, you know, it’s kind of an accomplishment to have had that kind of impact on a particular group of people. You know, we’re talking about forty, fifty people who are kind of my progeny over there, they’re doing their thing, that I was able to train and have gone on to success. And so, a lot of those experiences that I got out of that have, of course, informed my writing.
One of the reasons I went and did all that is, when I was doing screenwriting at first in Hollywood, you know, I kept getting, “Your stories just a little too plain, a little too cliché, a little too, ‘we’ve seen them before.’ You need to get more life experience to write from.” So, I ended up going up and doing a concert tour, when I did my first album and left Hollywood behind. Quit my job—I was working for a company that did documentaries for History Channel and A&E and a bunch of different stuff, doing all these different shows, Biography was one of them. And I left and went on tour as a musician, moved back to live in Kansas City with my sister, and ended up doing the music thing, going to seminary and then going off and doing ministry for a while and doing these leadership-development training things, and then found my way back to prose, you know, after a decade of that. So, it was kind of a roundabout way that I came back and started writing novels as opposed to, you know, screenplays and songs and other things. But I started my first novel in about 2007, 2008.
And is that the one that was The Worker Prince which was published in 2011?
No. That was 2009. The first novel’s unpublished. And may never be published.
I have a few like that.
Yeah, it’s…yeah, I mean, I like the story and the concept, but, man, I was not up to pulling it off. Worker Prince is interesting because Worker Prince went through more rewrites than any book I’ve ever done to get where it was, and then, of course, we did a second version of it when it was picked up by a new publisher after the first publisher kind of went belly-up in the middle of releasing the books. So, I got a chance a few years later to put them out again and release the third book in the series. And I rewrote the first two and fixed a lot of things because my prose had advanced back far enough I felt like, you know, this was a chance to really write some wrongs, so to speak, and put it out there. So, there’s two versions of the story out there, too. So, yeah, Worker Prince was my first published novel. And that trilogy, actually, the Saga Of Davi Rhii, is actually gonna be re-released this summer, God willing, from my Boralis Books imprint and be out in hardback for the first time.
The Saga Of Davi Rhii
So, that’s your own imprint, Boralis?
Yeah, I’ve got my own imprint now that I do a lot of these novels and stuff with. I’ve also sold a novel to another publishing company, as well, and I still do anthologies with some of the other publishers and, you know, my novels are out there, but it’s just, you know, there’s so many advantages to doing it yourself these days, but I’m kind of becoming more hybrid.
Yeah, me too. I’m published by DAW, but I have my own little press, too, Shadowpaw Press, which I’m putting stuff out through for sort of the same reason, one of which was a story that came out and I went back and rewrote it. It was kind of nice to go back and fix some things in that old book.
Yeah, I mean, sometimes you realize…I mean, there’s a point where I say, you know, people ask me, “Oh, you’re going to put out Worker Prince again? Are you going to do yet another version of that?” No, I’ve done that. And I can look at it and probably nitpick it to death right now, based on where I am as a writer right now, because I feel like the John Simon books, which is my current series, is way advanced ahead of where I was with the Worker Prince series, but at a certain point, you’ve got to let your writing stand. And I think, you know, I got a chance to do the books I wanted to do, and that was the only reason that I did the rewrite the first time on that series, because I’d had a publisher pressured me to go one direction with it and various things, and it was new, and the next publisher was just like, you know, “Give me the best books you can,” and I was able to just go back and make it what I wanted it to be rather than what somebody else was telling me it needed to be. And so, that’s why I did it. And, you know, I think there are…it is certainly fun to go back and explore your writing. Sometimes it’s painful to go back and explore your writing.
I’m actually…I have a copy of the first novel I wrote in high school, The Golden Sword, which was later rewritten as The Silver Sword when teenage me realized you probably could even pick up a sword that was made out of gold. And I’m going through it because it’s interesting. And I’m tempted to throw it up under a pseudonym on Amazon just to see what happens. The scary thing is, what if it sold better than my current stuff? That would be so horrifying.
Well, you know, the one thing…there’s good and bad about the whole self-publishing movement. The bad is that people can throw up any crap they want. And I don’t say that as an indictment of what you’re talking about here with yourself, but I’m just saying, unfortunately, there’s a lot of crap out there being published, and some of it is actually successful. And so you never know. Your book might come out and it might, you know, be a hit. You can’t look at it as an indictment of quality anymore. I mean, you want to put out the book that you’re proud of that best represents you under your name, and you absolutely can be proud of that. But, you can’t look at anybody else’s success as a measure of your own because there’s just, you know, they might be a marketing genius who writes like crap, you know?
Yeah, I think there’s definitely some of those out there.
Yeah.
You’ve done quite a bit of editing. How did that get started?
Well, the editing came about because I found that I had a really good ability to communicate with writers. I’ve always been a communicator. I like teaching, and I like helping people. And I got an opportunity to do one of those gratis anthologies called Space Battles, where everybody basically was donating a story, and that was my first chance to see what it was like. And at the time, I was being mentored by Mike Resnick, who was a big anthologist. And Mike was encouraging me with anthologies, and I was really starting to say, this could be a fun way to get to work with some of my writing heroes, and give new writers a chance to work with their heroes, and it’d be kind of a big collaborative thing. So, I started doing that, and then in the process started doing some freelance editing and ended up doing novels and other things, as well. And eventually, you know, my fourth anthology or something like that was Shattered Shields, which I did with Jennifer Brozak. Well, Jennifer grew up with Andy Weir, and Andy Weir wrote The Martian. And I was sent The Martian because Jennifer didn’t want to edit her childhood buddy. She felt it wasn’t wise to work together.
Probably true.
First edition of The Martian by Andy Weir
So, I got Andy Weir’s The Martian, and I was the first editor on it, before it ever went out, and worked with him on it. And later he did…you know, I’m always proud of this, and I always remind him of this, and he freely admits it, but the stuff that he refused to do for me when he was paying me, Crown made me do. So, you know, I edited it, and I told him he needed to, you know, “You need to describe NASA. You have all these scenes with NASA. You need to describe the sets.” “Well, everybody knows what NASA looks like. I don’t need to describe mission control.” “Like, yes, you do.” “No, I don’t.” So, he didn’t describe mission control. You go back and read the final book, and yes, he did, because Crown told him to do it. So, there were a lot of things like that, that…but when, you know, when you’re a freelance editor, you work for the client. If the client’s the author, they can basically overrule you. And, you know, that’s why I started…I have a rule where it’s in my editing contract that, you know, you can only put my name on your book as editor if you really want to put my name on it, if you have my permission, because there are certain books that I’m just like, “Yeah, I edited that. But they didn’t listen to me, and I don’t want my name on it.”
That sounds like a good plan. I’m doing some freelance editing, although it’s anonymously at the moment, but yeah, that’s a good idea. I’ll remember that.
Well, I mean, it’s…the thing is that, especially as I became more and more known as an editor rather than as an author, which is ironic because I always think of myself as an author, but because of the success I had as an editor between Andy’s book and then a bunch of anthologies and different things, and I reached, you know, national bestseller status and a lot of things before…with, you know, editing than I did as an author, you know, I started to really worry more about my reputation as an editor and the value of that. And people started to come to me, want me, because they wanted the editor of The Martian to work on their book. So, it started to become the kind of thing, well, I need to protect this and make sure the integrity is there, integrity has always been important to me, and make sure that it actually has maintained some value. And so, that’s when I started thinking about the fact that, you know, I had people trying to slap my name on the book and then when they put their book out, and they got bad reviews on Amazon, they would comment on the reviews and say, “Oh, that’s the editor’s fault.” And I would have to go in and send them a cease-and-desist letter or risk having to come in on Amazon and say, “No, we told you to do it. And I can print…I’ll put a blog post up and show everybody where we told you to do that.” And I didn’t want to get in those kinds of battles, so it ended up just being easier to just, you know, make it a policy and just let people know in advance than to try to have to deal with that.
Do you find editing…I’m currently writer-in-residence at the Saskatoon Public Library, working with a lot of writers…and I do find that working on other people’s manuscripts helps me see flaws in my own. Do you find that to be the case as an editor?
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s…I always am finding stuff that people do that I think, “Oh, that’s a great description. I need to memorize that turn of phrase, because I could use that. I’ve never seen that before. That’s something that I can incorporate into my own dialogue, internal monologue, that would be something I could use.” Or, you know, some way that they’re doing things that is unique. And, yeah, I’m always finding things. You know, I always tell people the reason that I did so many drafts on The Worker Prince is, I was learning craft.
And I literally did a sartorial draft. People said to me, “None of these people are wearing any clothes. You never mention clothes, the entire book. Where the hell…what, are they naked? What’s the deal?” So I did a whole draft where I did nothing but address what people were wearing. Because I literally hadn’t…because I don’t think about clothes, because I’m not fashion-conscious. Anybody who’s ever seen me in public knows that. I don’t…so, I didn’t even think about it, you know? So, I had to go back and actually write what I call my sartorial draft, where I did nothing but put people in clothes throughout the entire book, you know? And I would do drafts on, you know, a particular character’s dialogue or a particular subplot or, you know, “You didn’t do enough description. So you need to do a descriptive draft,” you know? Now, a lot of that stuff, I can do it two or three drafts, and it’s all part of the process. But at the time, I had to focus on specific aspects of craft and go back and do a draft because I was learning it.
And I think that’s where… people talk about the writer’s journey. People get, you know, some people get annoyed by that. You know, it sounds cliché, but the reality of it is, you’re building your toolbox, and eventually, you can use more than one tool at a time. But when you start out, you can’t use a saw and a hammer at the same time. Well, most of the time you can’t really use a saw and a hammer at the same time that I can think of, anyway, but you get my point. My point is, you know, you’re gonna have to…you learn how to use the tools one at a time, and then you can put them all together. And you get to that point where you can…I’m sure you’ve experienced something similar, where you can eventually, you know, you’re thinking about all the different things at the same time, theme and, you know, all those kind of things. But at first, I literally had to think, stop and think about them individually in some cases.
Well, you’ve mentioned process, and that’s what we’re going to talk about now. So, talking about your creative process, but first, we’re going to use these Simon…John Simon thrillers, right?
Yep.
We’re gonna use those as the example. So, maybe we should start with a synopsis of at least the first book, or both, whatever you can do without giving away too much.
Well, the John Simon thrillers are a near-future, 2029 Kansas City noir detective series. They’re about a top Kansas City Police Department veteran detective, an eighteen-year veteran, who, when his partner is kidnapped, has to team with the only witness. The problem is, that witness is a humanoid android, and he hates technology. So, this is the only guy that can maybe help him find his partner, and so he reluctantly teams with him. And thus a beautiful friendship and partnership is born. And basically, that’s the whole premise of the series. Now, what happens in Simon Says is, they’re investigating some people who are using art to transport secret documents, and I won’t say how, but it’s very, you know, there’s a whole technical aspect to it. It’s very, very sci-fi, and so on and so forth, and all that’s going on.
So, that’s book one. Book two, they’re dealing with terrorists who want to blow up some major tourist site in Kansas City. Book three, which I’m finishing right now, there’s an outbreak, somebody sabotaged a bunch of androids, and they’re behaving against programming. And so, that threatens the status of Lucas George, which is John Simons’s partner, the android, you know, threatens his status on KCPD, and so it becomes this whole personal crisis for him. So there’s…that’s kind of…I don’t know if you wanted more in-depth of a synopsis, but that’s kind of the gist.
Well, hopefully that piques people’s interest. So, what was the seed that…you know, I hate the cliché, “Where do you get your ideas?”, but it’s still a legitimate question. What was the seed from which these stories grew? How’s that?
Well, it’s funny because, actually, Simon Says started out as a screenplay, and it’s something I wrote in the ‘90s. And it’s interesting, because I wrote it and it wasn’t…it really wasn’t strong enough, but it was my buddy cop story, and it was written and set in Miami because I was a big Miami Vice fan. So, for whatever reason, I decided to set it in Miami. I also had just made a trip to Miami, and I could do research to write it off of. And it was about this tough, macho LA cop who has to team with an HIV-positive snitch to solve his partner’s kidnapping. Well, he, of course, is a little bit homophobic, a little bit weirded out by the HIV thing, which was very common back in the ’90s when HIV was new. And so, I wrote the storyline, and there was an art-dealer storyline, but it was very, you know, everything ended up being about drugs, and it was very…what I got from people was, “We’ve seen it before. It’s too cliche.” So, I liked it because I had come up with all these really cool scenes and action and the humor and the banter I really liked, but, you know, nothing ever happened with the screenplay.
So, when I decided I wanted to do something different after the Worker Prince series, the Davi Rhii series, I was looking at things, and I said, “You know, I really love cop stories.” I started pulling out Simon Says out of a box, and re-read it, and I said, “You know, I bet you I could do something with this, but I really need to rework it.” And so, I took it, and I said, “Well, you can’t do the HIV storyline now because people would hate this guy because they’d think of him as homophobic,” and it’s a whole different environment for it, so what could I do? I could make him technophobic and put him with a robot and turn it into sci-fi. Perfect. So that’s the genesis of it, really.
Okay, then. So, on a more general term, where do ideas for stories generally come to you from? That was pretty specific on that one.
Well, it kind of was, yeah. I’m sorry if you were looking for general, but generally speaking, I just, I don’t know, a news story? You know? I got one the other day that…there was a news story on, and I got this idea for this thing, and I wrote it down, said, “This is something I could do something with.” And, you know, I mean, that kind of thing happens all the time. Or I’ll…even a line in the song, or somebody’ll make some comment, or something will happen, I’ll get all these things. I mean, with this John Simon series, the plots for the future books come from the police blotter or from stories that I hear from the cops when I’m doing my research, a lot of times, where I’ll take it and put some kind of a sci-fi twist on it or some kind of a different twist on it. I’m always trying to do something. I mean, these guys are not homicide cops, they’re property detectives, which ironically, they end up investigating homicides and other things in the process of investigating property crimes, which kind of stretches the reality a little bit, but that’s what they end up doing. And that’s because I wanted to show other areas of policing besides just the usual homicide cop, you know, the murder detectives. So, I actually get to show them doing other kinds of investigating besides just murder. So it’s kind of, you know, the rebel in me wanted to do something different?
Well, you mentioned research. How much research do you do on these, do you have to do on these?
Well, I mean, I all-night ride-alongs with the Kansas City PD, you know, two or three times a year, where I literally go out all night long in the roughest neighborhoods of Kansas City and do ride-along. ’Course, none of that’s going on right now because of the fact that we’ve got the Covid crisis going on. I normally would be doing one right about now, because I’m getting ready to start book four and I always do ride-along in between books. So, I do both. I also have several friends now on the department.
I go to actual locations because I’m writing in Kansas City. I actually go and take pictures of locations. I listen and make notes, “What do I hear? What do I smell? What do I see?” so I could describe them well. And I will talk to people about the history of Kansas City and do various things. I did a whole tour of Kansas City and recorded it one time for three hours with this guy who was an expert on the history of Kansas City, so I could get a whole sense of the city. I am constantly talking to police about various, you know, things that are going on. “What’s the latest?” You know, my nephew’s a cop, too, but in a different department, so I hear from him. And, you know, “What kind of cases have you had? What kind of interesting things? What’s going on with your department”, those kinds of things.
So, I mean, you know, I’m doing that kind of research, and I’m also doing research on tech, you know, to keep up with my android storyline and whatever tech I can come up with for police tech. What’s the future of policing going to look like, and what kind of tech can I come up with that I can build stories around.
When it comes to building the stories, what does your planning/outlining process look like? Do you do a detailed outline? Do we wing it a bit? How does it work for you?
You know, I’m traditionally a panther. The first book, I wrote 110,000 words in six weeks, which was incredibly fast for me, but I cheated because I had a screenplay. I had 50,000 words already written. And I basically, I didn’t use all of them, but I had a hell of a lot that I could use and rewrite. And so, I kept a lot of sections of dialogue, but I reworked a lot of things. So I was able to, you know, cheat and write that book faster because I already had a basic structure, an idea. I just was, you know, building around it and making it better and stronger. The second book, you know, took me a lot longer. So, generally, what I do is, especially if I’m building a sequel is, I’ll map out what I call the TV Guide pitch line for each plot, the main plot and the subplots. And then I do a synopsis, which is just a short one-page thing, four or five paragraphs max, where I lay out, “This is what the gist of the story is.” And that’s what I work from.
And as I go…I work in Scrivener, I have a template for these books that’s already broken down into a chapter with three scenes per chapter. There’s chapters that have more than that, but I just have a base template with three scenes already laid out, empty scenes that I can do. So, I will make notes in there or in a research document inside Scrivener, I’ll make notes about ideas I have for later scenes or characters or whatever and where I think they’re going to go and where they’re going to fit in the story, and I’ll start putting things in that as I write, as they occur to me, but I basically kind of work that way. I don’t really do a lot of detailed outlining.
What does your actual writing process look like to you? I mean, right now everybody’s stuck at home. Do you normally write at home? Do you go out somewhere? Where do you like to work?
You know, I’m one of those lucky guys that can work anywhere, but I generally work at home. But, I have an office in my home, I’ve got, literally, I’ve got a copy machine and printers and file cabinets. And it’s, like, if you walk in there, it looks a lot like an office in some office building. And it’s, you know, right across from my bedroom. So literally, I could walk over there in my underwear. But it’s going to work. And I usually try to keep set hours when I write and set hours when I edit. And I fit my social media marketing around all that. And then, you know, I sit down, and I write, and I try to, I have to get, you know, 2,500, 3,000 words a day, depending on what day, what project I’m doing. You know, sometimes I only do 1,800 words a day, sometimes I do twice that. It varies, but I have to at least get significant progress done. And that’s pretty much my process. I work, like I said, I work in Scrivener and my first draft with, you know, various other support documents where I need them. I always have the Internet open so that I can do research because I’m always doing Wikipedia stuff or Googling or, you know, checking the department charts for the KCPD, or, you know, checking my photos from my locations.
I’ve done, you know, I literally do location scouts. I use the Kansas City film…what is it called?…the Kansas City Film Office has their own online database of locations in Kansas City. I use that all the time to find locations that I haven’t thought of that would be perfect for my stories. Because I’m really…I mean, the thing about Kansas City is, you know, I really want to capture unique features of Kansas City when I’m writing. And also, I want the most interesting and appropriate setting for each particular scene. You know how, as a writer, know how important it is to pick the right setting, to get the mood and the, you know, the level of tension and whatever you want and give your characters the right busyness around them to create the right ambiance for a particular scene to work most effectively. And so, I’m always looking at that while I’m writing. So, all of those kind of things.
And then, I just write. I also keep a bunch of screens of movie quotes and TV quotes open because Lucas George, one of his things is him trying to become more human. You know, John Simon’s precocious fourteen-year-old daughter convinced him that he needed to start quoting cop movies. So, he quotes cop movies, and he quotes them comically because he doesn’t quite understand the context yet. So he’s misquoting…well, he’s quoting them correctly, but in the wrong place at the wrong time. And so, I always have to have those open so that I can find new quotes to throw in for them. And he’s getting a little bit better at it as he goes, of course, as he figures out better comic timing and what’s appropriate, but I milk a lot of comedy out of the series because, you know, it’s very gritty, it’s very noir, it’s very gritty. It’s, you know, there’s a lot of cursing, it’s very realistic. It’s very much written and modeled after my experience riding along with cops, what I heard, what I saw. So, you know, there’s violence, there’s shootouts. There’s all…
I mean, the first night I did a ride-along I saw, I went back to the same location twice for two different shootings. I rode to the hospital with a gunshot victim. We stayed in the ER with him. We watched a woman chasing her brother down the street with a knife. I mean, I saw all this violence and stuff in front of me. So it’s not like…I mean, I’ve seen it. You know, I’ve seen meth addicts recovering in the ER, you know, and see what they’re like. And I mean, it’s just. I try to capture that in it because I’m trying to pay tribute to the difficulty of what it is to be a cop and the challenges they face at the same time as I’m telling my stories. So, I have all of that mixed in with the humor because, you know, humor breaks it up, and just when it gets so tense and so dark that you just, like, it’s unbearable, you can break it up with humor and give people a chance to breathe.
Once you have your completed first draft, what does your revision process look like? Do you do multiple drafts, or how do you work?
Generally, my revision process at this point is that I send it to an editor and a proofer. My first proofer. And the editor gives me extensive notes, the proofer just goes through and does prepare. That way, they both catch different stuff. And then, when I get that back, I do a rewrite and I will…which is what I’m doing right now on book three. He’s like, “Oh, this didn’t quite work. You mentioned this, you described this earlier, you don’t need this description here, but you need description here, here and here. You need to go figure this…this logic flow doesn’t work,” that kind of stuff. So I’m working through all that stuff, and I’m doing a rewrite and polish.
And I remember stuff that I didn’t do. For example, in book one, there’s a lot of song references throughout the book of futuristic songs that they’re listening to. Well, I forgot about that for much of book two, so in book three, I’ve tried to put those back in. So, I’m doing a pass where I literally go through and make sure I’ve done that. You know, different worldbuilding things that maybe I forgot about because they weren’t caught in the story, I have to go in and build them in because they’re part of the world and I have to make sure I touch on those kind of things.
And then it goes to another set of proofers and then the formatting guy, and he does the widows and orphans and the formatting, slides it on the template, and then we publish it. So that’s pretty much the process. All of that together takes about three months from the time I finish the first draft.
You don’t use, you don’t have any beta readers like some people like to send their work to ahead of time?
I don’t really use beta readers. The main reason is because I never really found good ones that I could trade with. And I spend so much time running my story…if I have story problems, I’m on Facebook Messenger talking to one of my writing friends about it. Like, I have…like, I mean, with this third book, Martin Shoemaker has been a great help to me. And he’s taken…we broke down the whole story and talked through different aspects of it, and he’s suggested stuff. And just by him suggesting stuff, it’s triggered me, and I’ve made my decisions and gone off and written my story. And he’s reminded me of stuff that I needed to cover that I ended up, you know, making it…so, I kind of beta it that way instead of beta-ing it by sending it out, you know, to beta readers and waiting months and months. But that’s just kind of my process.
I was just gonna say I’ve never used beta readers, mainly because I’ve never lived anywhere where there is anybody but me who is writing. So, yeah, like, my editor is the first person that sees it.
Yeah.
I was also going to ask, since you have talked about doing the ride along with the police and everything, I want to know what the overall reaction to the books has been generally, but I’m particularly interested in if the cops like them.
Well, I mean, they’re still friends with me. And they’re very supportive and cheering me on. To be honest with you, the response I’ve gotten from the cops has been really supportive. They’re really, they’re kind of proud of the books because they really feel like I represented the department well. I mean, I put them…I don’t make all cops out to be bad guys, and I don’t…I mean, it’s a real different environment nowadays for…everybody jumps on the cops all the time on the Internet and all over the place. Whenever there’s anything, any incident, you know, cop-involved, there’s people out there going, “Oh, the cops are abusing their power again, and they don’t even know all the facts.” And that’s why I always say, “Well, let’s wait and get the whole story before we decide whether the cop behaved badly,” because there are cops that do cross the line, and there are cops that behave badly. But there are also boundaries the department sets that don’t always look like they’re legit to the public, but they’re going to hold up in any court of law, whether you like how it looks or not. So, all of these things are kind of…it’s…and I know. A lot of people will hate that, but that’s the way it is.
And the reality is, you know, the cops have been happy with the fact that I have not…I dealt with the fact that they have to deal with those perceptions at the same time. I also, I mean, I’ve had corrupt cop characters in my stories, it’s just that I show all sides of it. So, they’ve been happy with it is basically the answer to your question. And I’ve been, I’m proud of that, because I’ve had a lot of people who know about policing read it and say that I got, you know, I obviously did my research and got it mostly right. So…I mean, I push the boundaries so that there’s things that I for storytelling, I just take a leap. Plus, I’m setting it in the future, so I can kind of, you know, play with some things when I want to.
Yeah, we don’t actually have android cops yet. So there is that.
Well, yeah, it’s not just the android cop thing. I have my cop living outside the jurisdiction, which totally is not allowed right now, but I know a tricky way I came up for him to do it, and they’re like, “Oh, that would never fly.” And I’m like, well…and then literally, literally recently they’ve been talking about changing that rule. So here I came up with it now, now it’s like it could actually be a possibility.
There’s another example. I came up with the idea of…it was a joke that one of the cops told me where he said, you know, he would sometimes take a fingerprint, take a suspect, and put his finger on a cellphone and say, “I’ve taken your fingerprint, and I’m running it through a database,” to scare a particularly dumb criminal that he was dealing with right? And I put that technology in my books, and now they actually have it. It is the latest tech. They literally have fingerprint scanners they can use in the field and instantly run your fingerprints. So, it’s, you know, there’s a lot of tech like that.
I also have a thing with media drones where, you know, there aren’t reporters on the scene near as often as there are drones, you know, that are literally media drones with cameras that are like, flying past the police tape and getting in the face of the cops, asking questions, you know, and the cops are annoyed by them. I think that’s where we’re going with the media, I really do. I think we’re going to see that, you know, in the next ten years. So, it’s…there’s lots of things like that that you do have to stretch the boundaries, but some of them end up coming true, which is kind of fun.
I’m also interested that it’s set in Kansas City. It’s not a place that I have read a lot of near-future science fiction set. It’s usually going to be New York or Los Angeles or somewhere like that. Did you just want to show off your hometown more or less?
Well, you know, like I said, the original story was set in Miami, and then there was this LAPD thing. And I, you know, what I originally decided was I needed to do it somewhere where I could actually do the field research. If I was going to write near-future, I had to make it real, which means I had to be able to go to places and, you know, actually, you know, I mean, I use Google Maps when I’m writing them, and then I literally go drive the route And I literally go…say, I set a scene here, and I did this, I want to go drive that route. And I’m going to see what I see, and I’m going to go back and fix it, so that somebody reading this book who actually drives that route will say, “Yeah, he got the landmarks right.” I mean, that’s the kind of detail I care about. So, I try to do that as much as I can. I don’t do it all the time, and there’ll be some people who catch me on it, and I know they will, now that I’ve said that. But, you know, I try to do it as much as I can because…and so, that’s why I did Kansas City, because that’s where I am. If I’d been in St. Louis, I’d probably have set it there.
And also, you know, LA and New York, that’s where everything’s set. Everything’s set there, and there’s reasons for that, and so on and so forth. LA, New York, and Chicago are the main ones. But I kind of just felt like Kansas City was a unique area where I could explore things. And it actually has a pretty interesting backdrop. I mean, there’s ties…I don’t know if people know that, you know, the mobsters in Godfather and the mobsters in Casino all had…you know, those kind of people, the real-Life models for them all had ties to the Kansas City mob, for example.
Apparently, my great uncles on my father’s side were mobsters in Kansas City or had some connection to it, because he had memories of them and their female hangers-on coming out and hiding out at the farm where he was growing up in their big black cars. He had memories of that.
There you go. Well, you see. So I mean, yeah, there’s actually really interesting history, and there’s some really cool stuff that, you know, besides crime that went on in Kansas City, too. I mean, we have the World War One museum, which is fantastic, we have, you know, some really world-class art museums. And there’s lots of different…steamboat museum and lots of different areas and things that have…and there’s also a whole series of caverns underground from where they were doing sandstone mining and limestone mining. And so, like book two, one of the major settings is this underground cavern that goes under Worlds of Fun and Oceans of Fun, which is a big amusement park here. And those are real. And I actually went to them. I went inside them. You know, I mean, they’re actually, it’s real. There’s one that’s, like, five miles long that’s real, that is so big that semi-trucks can drive inside it anyway.
Well, it’s …I have to say, I use Kansas City and one of my books, but only as a place with, I believe, the actual city had been wiped out, and this one had been built on top of the ruins, if I remember how it worked. Anyway…that was the book where I killed the population, most of the population of the world in a plague. So, I’m hoping that one doesn’t come true.
Well, yeah. Thanks for that little deja vu there, Ed.
So, we’re getting close to the end here. So, I want to move on to the big philosophical question, which is basically, why do you do this? Why do you write? Why do you think any of us write? And why do you like to write this kind of stuff in particular?
You know, I like to write stories that would make me entertained, first of all. My mind is always coming up with crazy stuff, from the silly song-lyric twist that I sing to my dogs, to just the craziest wisecrack ideas that come out of my mouth or my head when I’m walking around town. And so, I need an outlet for that, number one. Number two, I’m a good storyteller, and people respond well to my stories. So, that’s been going on since I was a kid. So, I enjoy the response of others to my work.
On another level, I also, you know, am a deep thinker in a lot of ways and there are a lot of things that I care about, and I find ways to talk about the human condition and some of the issues we’re dealing with in the context of a story without doing it in a preachy way. I think one of my biggest beefs with a lot of sci-fi these days is so much of it is so in your face with its politics and its philosophy, to a point where I lose the enjoyment of the story. I try not to write that way, and hopefully, I don’t. I kind of let the characters…I try to represent multiple views and let people just decide for themselves where they’re going to go with it, because that’s what I enjoy reading more. So, there’s…to the degree that there’s any message, it gets worked out..
For example, in The Sideman, book two of John Simon, I dealt with his ex-wife having bipolar. Well, that’s a real-life experience, right? I had…my ex-wife had bipolar, and I basically was writing verbatim scenes out of my experience with her, with him and his ex-wife. And that was a way to show people mental illness in its reality. How does it affect people? What’s it look like? And make people more aware of it without preaching to them about good or bad, but just educating them.
On a larger scale, where do you think the impulse for human beings to tell stories comes from? Why do any of us tell stories? I’m sorry, one second.
Why do any of us tell stories? I think there is…well, I don’t want to get religious on you, but I do believe there’s something larger than ourselves, and I think that we see that in the way that the universe is, because there are things that we can’t explain, which is the whole process of scientific discovery, trying to understand and explain them. And I think that our desire to understand that and sometimes to control it is not filling in all the gaps as fast as we’d like, so sometimes there’s room to tell stories around it. I think part of the reason we tell stories is because we have something to say. I think also because there is something entertaining and fun about vicariously living through other people.
You know, one of the things you asked about, what the cops think about my stories, one of the things they say is, “Thank God none of my shifts are that action-packed and wild.” You know, what these guys go through is an extreme of what most cops go through. But if I wrote what it’s like to have a real shift, you know, too closely., people would be bored stiff, because literally, I think we…for example, there was one night, and I’m talking like, you know, twelve hours in the police car doing a ride-along, or ten hours or something, anyway. We’re riding along, and we didn’t have any calls from eight, nine p.m. up until one in the morning or two in the morning. And then we had two, three hours of nonstop calls, and then we were off-shift. And it literally was racing, lights and siren, across town from one call to the next call to the next call.
It sounds like the old definition of military life, long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of terror, brief moments of terror.
Yeah, pretty much.
So what are you working on now?
Well, like I said, I’m working on Common Source, which is book three of the John Simon thrillers. I’m about to do rewrites on a book called Shortcut, which is a book that’s sold to Hollywood as a near-future hard science fiction, my first hard science fiction novel. I actually wrote it with the help of two scientists who did real science for me and then extrapolated from that fictional science to make the story work. So there’s actual scientific papers written that I have that are like part of my arsenal of data for the book. And I’m going to be doing a rewrite on that, and then I am putting together an anthology to fundraise stuff for the coronavirus effort, and that will be coming out, that’s a rush effort, going to put that out as soon as possible, and then working on a couple of other anthology projects as well and getting ready to put the Davi Rhii books out in new versions, as well. So, I’ve got a few things on the plate.
It sounds like you will be busy enough.
Yeah.
Now, if somebody wants to keep up with you online, where do they find you?
Well, @BryanThomasS, Facebook.com, @BryanThomasS, twitter.com. And then you can look at BryanThomasSchmidt.net on the Internet as well. Or @BryanThomasSchmidt on Instagram. So, those are all the places where you can find me, generally. And then, you know, whenever we open up the world again, I’ll be at a few conventions. I usually do Comic-Con in San Diego at least every other year. That’s my big one. And then, I’m at various regional conventions around the country whenever I can, as well.
Yes. Well, I hope we all get to go back to those. I had some I was planning to go to I guess I’m not going to or places I was going to sell books I guess I’m not selling books, and all that kind of fun stuff.
Yeah, we all had that, unfortunately.
Yeah, exactly. So, thanks so much for being on The Worldshapers. I really enjoyed the chat. I hope you did too.
