Trevor Quachri Interview

interview by Carl Slaughter

Trevor Quachri photoTrevor Quachri recently took over from longstanding Analog editor Stanley Schmidt. Science fiction writers want to know what changes, if any, to expect. They also want to know how, exactly, to sell their stories and how to avoid getting their stories rejected.

 

CARL SLAUGHTER: Will you read every submitted story or assign slush readers?

TREVOR QUACHRI: Every submitted story is pretty absolute, but the overwhelming amount of time, yeah, I’m going to be the only person reading the slush. Stanley Schmidt read all the submissions himself, and that’s something I want to continue, as much as I’m able. I know that’s the opposite of how most other magazines do it, but it’s tough for me to really feel like the magazine reflects my vision or tastes if I’m not actually looking at the majority of stories that come in. That said, I also know that right out of the gate I’m nowhere near as fast as someone with thirty-four years of experience under their belt, so if I’m not quite to where I can do it all yet, I’m also not above accepting a little help for a bit.

 

CS: How far into a story do you go before you decide not to continue reading? How far into a story do you go before you decide to read it til the end?

TQ: It depends on the story. There are three major questions I’m constantly asking myself as I work , 1) “Is this readable? 2) Where’s the science? 3) Does the science hold up?” — and how far I make it depends on the answers I’m coming up with. If it’s not readable, I don’t get far at all. If it’s readable, but I can’t find the science, I’ll make it further in. If it’s well written and the science is there, then I’ll read the whole thing. Length is also a big factor. For obvious reasons, I’m much more likely to give a 5,000 word short story the benefit of the doubt than I am to make myself stick with a 22,000 word novella that’s still not working for me at the half-way point.

 

CS: Science fiction is about the exploration of science, but it’s also about the implications of science. How much emphasis do you place on the technical aspects of a story and how much emphasis on the human element?

TQ: Good science fiction has both elements working in concert, hand-in-hand, building off one another. If your story would still work if you largely excised one aspect or the other, you’re either writing bad science fiction or good lit-fic. So a story where one is emphasized to the exclusion of the other is going to be a tough sell for me.

 

CS: How much of a chance does a new writer have with Analog and how much of an edge does an established writer have?

TQ: The primary advantage an established writer has is that I’m probably going to read them slightly sooner. Otherwise, that’s about it. Much of an established writer’s “edge” is just a matter of them behaving professionally, having a sense of what I’m looking for, and being persistent. Any newcomer can handle that.

 

CS: Do you automatically publish stories submitted by Analog regulars like Brad Torgerson and Carl Frederick? How often do you reject a story by an author familiar to Analog readers?

TQ: This is probably a better question for the authors, but the short answer to the first part is “Heck no.” They have to earn their spot, just like everyone else. Even the Analog regulars who have sold to me have racked up their share of rejections from me, too. Part of an editor’s job is to say, “This isn’t good enough; I think you can do better,” and it doesn’t do anyone any favors to spare them from that.

 

CS: How many stories per year are by unpublished writers? How many by writers new to Analog readers?

TQ: Well, I haven’t actually put out a year’s worth of issues yet, so it’s tough to say exactly. I’d guess anywhere from a quarter to a third are from unpublished (or mostly unpublished) writers. Established writers who haven’t previously appeared in Analog are the smallest group, after regulars and new writers, in that order. They probably only make up ten percent or so. That’s not a conscious decision on my part; I think most people who are already selling regularly just don’t branch out all that much.

 

CS: Will winning Writers of the Future or some other prestigious award get an author a foot in the door with Analog?

TQ: The way I do things right now, I really only look at the cover letter (where most people list their bona fides) after I’ve actually read the story. So I already have a pretty solid sense of whether or not the story works by the time I even see an awards list. If all the accolades seem inconsistent with what I thought, I may go back and give the story another quick once-over to see if I missed something, so awards can act like a little bit of a safety net, but that’s about it.

 

CS: What subgenres and premises are you especially interested in and which definitely don’t excite you?

TQ: Editors hate being specific about this kind of thing, because it means we’ll see a million bad stories about the subject that we said interested us, and all the good ones with premises that haven’t historically appealed to us (but conceivably still could) will go elsewhere. Broadly, I’d love to see more stories that push the boundaries of what people think of when they hear “hard science fiction.” Hard SF has a very specific image, both among people who love it and people who hate it, but I think that image can be reductive. So anything that challenges that image is the kind of thing that will get my attention. Atypical characters and settings and under-represented disciplines like neurochemistry or immunology or paleontology or metallurgy (or, or, or†¦) are all good ways to do that. I joked in a recent editorial that the season two episode of Breaking Bad where Walt and Jesse get stuck in the desert and they use SCIENCE! to save themselves is the best hard SF I’d seen on TV in years. I wasn’t entirely serious, but it’s also not entirely off base, either. Yes, it’s lacking the imaginative elements that are vital to our genre, but the science is both relevant to the story and accurate, and those are really the most important rules of hard SF, as I see it. Beyond that? Surprise me.

 

CS: How much weight do you give to strong writing and how much to strong science?

TQ: This is another answer that really depends on the story in question. Optimally, it has both to a sufficient degree that I don’t have to weigh them against each other. I’m definitely more capable of polishing the writing of a story with a strong scientific foundation than I am trying to completely overhaul a well-written story with an entirely different scientific rationale. Details can be corrected, but if the whole story is predicated on something that we know just won’t work, there’s only so much to be done. I’ve often compared science fiction (hard SF in particular) to other specialized genres like kung fu movies. If you get a well-acted, well-choreographed movie like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, that’s great. But even questionably translated kung fu movies are successful in what they set out to do if they deliver great fight scenes. Without those, you’re just watching a Chinese soap opera. Hard SF has a similar relationship to science. That’s more of a broad philosophy than a rule, though: we also published Dune, which isn’t exactly the epitome of hard SF. I believe there should always be room for something like that at Analog.

 

CS: What can aspiring writers do to improve their chances of getting out of the slushpile?

TQ: Probably the single most common problem I see with otherwise good stories is that they’re too often the wrong length for what they’re trying to accomplish. Either they’re too short to properly develop the elements that are supposed to have gravitas, or they’re too long, full of padding that isn’t easily snipped, bloating a story that could otherwise have been elegant. Get in, tell your story or deliver your idea, and get out. From a more practical standpoint, while I do need some long stories, I need proportionately more short stories, and your odds are better if you’re closer to that end of the spectrum. I can definitely afford to be more adventurous with a 3,500-word story than I can with 17,500 words. So start out small. Less seriously? Stop automatically giving children names like “Timmy” or “Jimmy” or “Billy,” like they just stepped out of an episode of Lassie. That signifies “The Future!” to a reader about as much as character names out of Lovecraft (“Wilbur” or “Barnabas” or “Danforth” or “Randolph”) would have to a reader in 1975.

 

Carl_eagleCarl Slaughter is a man of the world. For the last decade, he has traveled the globe as an ESL teacher in 17 countries on 3 continents, collecting souvenir paintings from China, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, and Egypt, as well as dresses from Egypt, and masks from Kenya, along the way. He spends a ridiculous amount of time and an alarming amount of money in bookstores. He has a large ESL book review website, an exhaustive FAQ about teaching English in China, and a collection of 75 English language newspapers from 15 countries.

His training is in journalism, and he has an essay on culture printed in the Korea Times and Beijing Review. He has two science fiction novels in the works and is deep into research for an environmental short story project.

Carl currently teaches in China where electricity is an inconsistent commodity.

Kevin J. Anderson Interview

interview by Carl Slaughter

KevinProBioKevin Anderson is the author of numerous Star Wars novels. He is also the coauthor, with Brian Herbert, Frank Herbert’s son, of 12 Dune novels. He most popular original series is Saga of Seven Suns. His novel Assemblers of Infinity, which was serialized in Analog, was nominated for a Nebula award. 51 of his books have been international or national best sellers, 40 of them on the New York Times bestseller list. He has had 23 million books published in 30 languages. His most recent novels are Enemies and Aliens, about the first meeting of Superman and Batman, and The Last Days of Krypton, a Superman prequel. He is a Writers of the Future judge and participates in Mike Resnick’s anthology mentor series, Stellar Guild. He is working on Saga of Shadows, a prequel trilogy. He is married to author Rebecca Moesta, with whom he has coauthored a horror comedy series. Carl Slaughter interviews Anderson for Diabolical Plots.

Check out Kevin’s websites at:
http://www.wordfire.com/books/ebooks
http://kjablog.com/

 

CARL SLAUGHTER: Why is it significant that Batman and Superman meet? Does Batman need Superman? Does Superman need Batman? Why the mid 50s? Why Lex Luthor but not the Joker?

KEVIN ANDERSON: Not only are they both icons, but they are two sides of the same coin, both “heroes” but with very different approaches. By playing one against the other, I could explore the differences more clearly. Each is convinced in his own methods, but I loved playing them against each other. I wanted to do the first meeting of Batman and Superman. If I set it in the modern period, I couldn’t figure out how to make it seem believable. But in the 1950s, that gave me a whole new playground to run around in. That was a time for Lex Luthor to shine, like a mix between a super-villain and Mad Men. Honestly, I don’t think I ever considered using the Joker; he seemed too out of control!

 

CS: Why delve into events on Krypton? Don’t we already know what happens? Hasn’t it already been discussed in the comic books and movies? Krypton is about to explode, so Jorel’s father sends him away from Krypton to save him and to Earth to help us. Or is it more complicated than that?

KA: I made my mark on the genre by writing big SF epics. I wanted to treat the grand planet of Krypton as the basis of a great epic, like the Last Days of Pompeii. I would argue that we know almost *nothing* about what happens on Krypton. Why does the planet explode? Why does such an advanced planet have only one spaceship? And why is it only “baby sized”? What about the Phantom Zone? The rise of General Zod, how Argo City survives under its dome, how Brainiac steals the city of Kandor? All of these hints are given, but the whole story was never pieced together. THE LAST DAYS OF KRYPTON tells the whole sweeping story,

 

CS: “Horror humor” sounds like a contradiction of terms. How can scary be funny and how can funny be scary? Does “horror humor” mean the story is laced with funny one liners, like a slasher saying to his victims after he cuts them up, “May you rest in pieces”? Or are the horror DNA and the humor DNA fused? Give us an example.

KA: Horror and humor have been used together very successfully for a long time. Look at Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Army of Darkness†¦and more recently, Shaun of the Dead, True Blood/Sookie Stackhouse. My Dan Shamble, Zombie PI stories are more like corny spoofs, Mad Monster Party, Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, but I fell in love with the characters so much when I was writing them, I would love to keep working on the series.

 

CS: How does an aspiring writer get into franchise writing? For screen, print, and comics. Do you have to submit outlines to a managing editor who zealously guards the franchise’s reputation? Are the tie in/spin off plots and characters allowed to differ significantly from the original canon?

KA: The problem with giving advice is that the publishing world has changed so dramatically, my experiences are no longer relevant. Most important, I didn’t “break” into the field,I was asked. Lucasfilm approached me because they had read my work; it wasn’t something I had planned ahead of time. And on the basis of my Star Wars successes, I got offered many other jobs. I don’t know how somebody can do it on purpose.

 

CS: Your career has been heavy on novels and heavy on series. Why not short fiction, why not original fiction?

KA: I’ve published over a hundred short stories, but my heart is really in the novels. That’s the canvas my imagination likes to paint on. When I come up with a great idea, do all the huge world building, the stories keep suggesting themselves. I like to stay with characters I have created, in universes I have built. The vast majority of my published work has been original fiction†¦or do you mean “standalone novels” by your question? If I come up with a story and characters, I usually can’t limit it to a single novel.

 

CS: True or false: A hard science story stands a better chance of getting selected by Writers of the Future?

KA: False.

 

CS: You’ve had 40 books on the New York Times bestsellers list. Did this record start before or after the first million words a writer allegedly types before achieving publishable quality?

KA: I’ve had 51 national or international bestsellers; twenty or so have been on the New York Times. My first bestseller, JEDI SEARCH, was my seventh or eighth published novel, each one 100,000 words or more†¦so I wasn’t quite at the million-word mark, but close. I was still practicing.

 

CS: What are the biggest mistakes aspiring writers make and what are the most important things aspiring writers should do?

KA: They think their writing is perfect and don’t listen to advice. If your book has been rejected 20 times, maybe there’s something wrong with it, rather than “publishers don’t understand my genius.” Also, don’t keep writing and rewriting and rewriting your first novel. Write the next one. Then the next. Then the next. That’s how you learn the most. Put in those million practice words!

 

CS: What’s the motivation for such a busy author to work with an unestablished writer for comparatively little pay? Is the purpose of the project to help them improve their writing or to help get their name out there? What’s the mentoring arrangement. Do they write a story and you help them revise it or do you write it together and share a byline?

KA: For “TAU CETI”, when I was approached to launch the Stellar Guild, I had an idea for a story that had fascinated me for a long time, but I knew it was only a novella length, not something I could expand into a full novel. And novellas are notoriously difficult to publish, so most of us just veto them in our creative brain. So it seemed like a great opportunity for me to write the story I wanted to do, and also give an opportunity for one of my friends and writing students, Steve Savile. (Of course, Steve wasn’t entirely a newbie, since he had been quite successful on his own.) I wrote my novella and gave it to Steve as I drafted it so he could start thinking of a related follow-up story. In fact, since Steve has been fascinated with how i write with a digital recorder, I sent Steve my raw audio files as I dictated him, so he could really see the rough versions!

 

Carl_eagleCarl Slaughter is a man of the world. For the last decade, he has traveled the globe as an ESL teacher in 17 countries on 3 continents, collecting souvenir paintings from China, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, and Egypt, as well as dresses from Egypt, and masks from Kenya, along the way. He spends a ridiculous amount of time and an alarming amount of money in bookstores. He has a large ESL book review website, an exhaustive FAQ about teaching English in China, and a collection of 75 English language newspapers from 15 countries.

His training is in journalism, and he has an essay on culture printed in the Korea Times and Beijing Review. He has two science fiction novels in the works and is deep into research for an environmental short story project.

Carl currently teaches in China where electricity is an inconsistent commodity.

Interview: Tom Greene

interviewed by Carl Slaughter

tomgStrange Horizons editor Julia Rios, in an interview with SFWA, said of Tom Greene’s “Zero Bar,” published last year: “It knocked my socks off because it brought up so many things I’d experienced in my own life.” Greene recently sold “Another Man’s Treasure” to Analog. Greene has a Bachelor in English, a MFA in creative writing, and a Ph.D. in English literature. But he struggled for thirty years to discover why his stories were being rejected and how to write marketable fiction. In this interview with Diabolical Plots he explains what he learned in the process. “Zero Bar,” probably Greene’s best story, was significantly revised at the request of the above mentioned Rios. Greene explains why he didn’t have a knee-jerk reaction to these suggestions. He also shares some profound insights into why vampire stories are so popular and why the vampire myth has endured in fiction for so long.

 

YOU TRIED FOR 30 YEARS TO WRITE MARKETABLE SCIENCE FICTION. YOU SAID YOU DISCOVERED ONLY A FEW YEARS AGO HOW TO WRITE WHAT SELLS. WHAT DID YOU LEARN AND HOW DID YOU ADAPT?

Well I started trying to write science fiction and fantasy back in about 1984, and I got my first actual sale in 2011 and my first SF sale in 2012. That’s all year after year, hundreds of rejections. And for all those years I was completely clueless about why no editor was interested in what I wrote. My teachers and family members seemed to like my stories, and I was good enough to get into and graduate an MFA program, but no publications. Not even one.

So I did what a lot of newbies do and blamed the industry, as if there’s some kind of conspiracy of publishing insiders striving to keep new writers out (actually the truth is that most editors are desperately looking for talented new writers).

Some people tried to help me, but I wasn’t ready to hear those lessons because I didn’t accept that the problem was with my stories. So I rejected any suggestion that it was my writing, and I became the stereotypical sulky, failed writer and wore a beret and smoked clove cigarettes and drank a lot of red wine at parties.

What was actually happening is that for the first 25 years or so, I was writing stories about characters who weren’t very interesting doing things that nobody cared about. I think a lot of newbies fall into the same trap: unlikable characters in linear plots. Sometimes I had good ideas, and sometimes not, and it wasn’t that the stories were always bad, but even the best ones just weren’t interesting for most readers to read. So editors would send them back with comments like “some good ideas, but not for me,” which was puzzling.

The turning point came when I heard about Critters and joined in about 2008. I’m not the first one to say this, but the really great thing about online workshops is not that you get to read some good fiction, but that you get to read a lot of bad fiction, fiction that is as bad as your own. So after the thirtieth or fortieth time that I had to read a story about characters who weren’t very interesting doing things that I didn’t really care about, it dawned on me and I was like, “Hey, these are just like the stories I write!”

Some of us are just slow learners I guess. In a way, It’s a really good thing I didn’t make a sale in all those years, because that would have just reinforced the error.

 

THE OPENING SEQUENCE AND ENDING OF “ZERO BAR” WERE SIGNIFICANTLY ALTERED BY STRANGE HORIZONS. WHAT HAPPENED IN THAT PROCESS?

My wife is a professional editor, so I was lucky enough to go into the situation already knowing what editors actually do. Editors are not gatekeepers or adversaries to writers (it seems many writers tend to think this way). The editor is the person responsible for making the publication as good as it can be in terms of what their readers want. Good fiction editors read a lot, and they get constant feedback about the choices they make from a huge group of readers. So that gives them expert insight into what makes stories work for their readers.

Also I worked on and off over the years as a curriculum and technical writer. Nothing teaches you how to not be ego-invested in your work like writing manuals for bank software. Professional writing is all collaborative, so you work with editors and marketers and graphics designers and so on. Primadonna writers don’t last long in that environment. You learn quickly that the person who wrote the document is just one voice in making the document work,and usually also not the most important voice.

So in fiction, it’s like the author is the expert on his or her vision of what the story wants to be, and the magazine editor is the expert on the audience and the characteristic voice of that particular publication. So you work together to make the story the best story that it can be for that particular audience and publication.

So when Julia Rios, my editor at Strange Horizons for this story, offered to give me feedback and make suggestions for improvements to my piece, my reaction was more like, “Wow, so you’re going to offer me a service that I would ordinarily have to pay hundreds of dollars to a freelance editor for, and then you’re going to pay me? Cool.”

The process was very much like what would happen in any professional writing environment. My editor sent me notes on where she thought things weren’t working, and I rewrote those parts (actually I typically write multiple alternate versions of fixes and send them all). Then we’d go back and forth with more changes until we were both satisfied. It was hard work, but in my opinion the story is much improved. If anything, Julia was much *more* respectful of my opinion than I’m accustomed to from non-fiction writing.

 

DID YOU WRESTLE WITH THE THOUGHT THAT THIS MIGHT BE YOUR MOMENT AND THAT YOU MIGHT HAVE TO COMPROMISE TO REACH A PRO MARKET?

After my Critters revelation about why my stories were failing, making the changes necessary to reach a pro market didn’t feel like a compromise. When I’m the reader, I like to read stories that are engaging. So as a writer, the last thing I want to do is burden other readers with stories that they don’t care about.

So far at least, I get to keep my ideas, my themes, and my message (if any) in my fiction without compromising. The changes I’ve been working on learning are in putting my own conceptual stuff into a story that people might be actually interested in reading.

 

YOU LECTURE ON THE VAMPIRE GENRE. SHARE SOME INSIGHTS WITH US.

There are a lot of precursors out there and some controversy, but the completely modern version of the vampire myth was actually invented by Stoker right at the end of the 19th century, and it was one of those magical moments in the history of genre fiction when some random guy (he was actually a theater manager, not an author) just happened to strike on exactly the right symbol to represent exactly what people were afraid of in his society at that time. The British Empire was coming apart, there was a lot of free-roving anxiety about the growing independence of women and the diminishing role of the aristocracy, the anonymity and social isolation of growing cities, the influx of foreigners into London†¦ So a supernaturally-powerful aristocrat from a foreign country who preys on women by sexually liberating them and lurks around city streets–it’s just exactly right.

It’s the same kind of thing we see whenever some new genre hits it big–cyberpunk representing the fears about the Internet that people had in the 80s, all those giant bug movies in the Cold War, Steampunk now, and so forth.

The thing that’s unusual about vampires, though, is that the myth has a kind of persistent flexibility that allows it to speak to people across a variety of generations with only some minor changes. So vampires remain popular because their mythology can be repurposed to fit whatever people are currently afraid of. So, Eastern-European aristocrats in the 1930s, Hippie Atheists raise Dracula in one of the Hammer films from the 60s, Anne Rice and her AIDS-era handsome male vampires lurking around the alleys of New Orleans in the 80s, waves of illegal vampire immigrants invading human society in the True Blood series…

Don’t ask me in a short interview to explain Edward Cullen, though. I could write a whole monograph on that one. Probably I should.

 

YOU HAVE A BACHELOR IN ENGLISH, AN MFA IN CREATIVE WRITING, AND A PH.D. IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. HOW DID YOUR ACADEMIC BACKGROUND AFFECT YOUR VIEW ON WRITING FICTION? WHAT DID YOU LEARN THAT HELPED AND WHAT DID YOU LEARN THAT YOU HAD TO UNLEARN?

The major advantage of formal education in literature for me was that it forced me to read a bunch of stuff that I never would have picked up otherwise, the canonical works of literature in English. I don’t have the kind of personality that would have resulted in my reading Milton or Richardson or Sterne without a deadline and a paper hanging over my head.

Being exposed to all that stuff really does change your brain, I believe. It really does shape your sense of aesthetics and your understanding of history and culture in the English-speaking world and the big themes that authors have been dealing with since the invention of writing. But also it broadens your sense of what is possible and what has already been done, seeing what other people have done.

But of course we’ve all seen the studies that show that the more school you attend, the worse you do on creativity tests. It’s impossible to know if I would be more creative without it, I guess. But I did always prefer to focus on the wonky, forgotten corners of literary criticism: folklore, magical realism, Jungian psychology, vampire myths, men’s fraternal organization, semiotics, Victorian adventure fiction. I had good teachers early-on who taught me that you can carve out your own space in literature studies and you don’t have to
write another tired old paper on “Hamlet’s left toenail” as one of my teachers put it.

When I draft fiction, I try to follow my emotions with where I think things should go. But it happens pretty regularly that when I’m revising afterward, that I’ll have an intellectual insight, like “Of course she needs to spill the ink on her hands in this scene, because that’s what happens in Perrault’s ‘Bluebeard’ and the ink represents blood.” So I think it helps the ultimate shape of the way things turn out, and hopefully doesn’t interfere too much with the creativity.

And the education, of course, allowed me to go into teaching, which is not only my dream job, but also actually rewards me with extra time and resources when I successfully do my creative writing work.

My MFA in creative writing I have to treat separately because, for me, that experience was a failure in a lot of ways. I mean, I was not the best student either because I was still in a place with my writing where I wasn’t ready to hear that the problem was with me. But also, it seemed my program wasn’t set up to teach me a lot of basic fundamentals of writing that might have helped me. And my program focused primarily on mainstream, literary fiction while I was doing much more speculative stuff. So most of my colleagues’ comments in workshops started with the phrase, “Well, I don’t really read science fiction, so…” and that just reinforced my belief that I was misunderstood, rather than that I needed to change things about my writing.

It was mostly pure luck that Samuel R. (Chip) Delany happened to be teaching in the Comp Lit department at my MFA school, and that I was able to persuade him to sponsor an independent study for me, and then later to be my thesis advisor. I learned a lot from him.

So I usually warn people to modulate their expectations about MFA programs. As a speculative fiction writer in a mainstream literature program, there was a constant tension for me during those three years between the pressure I felt to write for the grade in the workshop (i.e. realistic fiction) versus where I felt my fiction ought to go. Then afterward, because of my bad experiences, it took a couple of years to really find my direction in writing again.

 

YOU WRITE ABOUT VAMPIRES AND ZOMBIES, BUT YOU ALSO DO SCIENCE AS IT AFFECTS SOCIETY AND SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS AND PERSONAL DECISIONS. “ANOTHER MAN’S TREASURE” SOLD TO ANALOG, WHICH EMPHASIZES HARD SCIENCE. DO YOU HAVE A SPECIALTY / PREFERENCE?

My favorite stories to read are the ones that are kind of mythic: that is stories about individuals confronting experiences that are transformative or unknowable on a scale that’s outside of the normal human realm. Orpheus in the underworld, or Psyche and Eros. It’s possible to do this kind of story in a realistic setting–“Moby Dick” or “Heart of Darkness.” But science fiction, fantasy and horror give you a bigger canvas and more colors to play with in constructing mythic-scale stories.

Scholars who write about SF agreed a long time ago that science is the symbolic magic of the technological age–that science serves the same function in SF stories that flying carpets and magic potions serve in fairy tales. Similarly in horror, there’s a wide consensus that zombies are closely associated with the plight of anonymous industrial workers, and vampires have represented a whole slew of cultural fears from Stoker’s original British Imperial anxiety up through the current rash of sparkly abstinence-vampires.

So on some level it’s all myth-making. Rewriting fairy tales with new symbols, and I feel pretty feckless about using whichever symbols I think will work.

I do really like hard SF, though, and I always give those ideas priority when they come up (which I wish were more often). I feel like the whole Enlightenment idea of rationality as the solution to human problems is both important and endangered. So anything that expresses that ideology in a positive way is maybe part of the way forward.

 

ANY NOVELS IN THE WORKS?

Like most SF fans probably, I have tons of accumulated notes on some settings for possible novels, and I hope to get there eventually. But I still feel like I have years of hard work ahead of me on the rudiments of storytelling in short fiction before I’ll be ready to seriously take on longer projects.

 

ADVICE TO ASPIRING WRITERS?

I can tell you what seemed to make the biggest difference for me (in chronological order).

1. Accept that if none of your stories ever get published year after year, it’s almost certainly a problem with your writing. Join an online workshop (I like both Critters and Online Writing Workshop ) and read all the weak stories to find out what is weak about your own stories. Pay particular attention to critiques from people who tell you why your stories suck, because they are trying to help you.

2. Get away from the idea that your stories fail because of language problems. For many years, I thought that tweaking my words around or writing in the “style” of this author or that author would make my stories publishable. But a failed story can’t be made to work by changing the language.

If the story is good and the writing is competent, nobody really cares about the style. Something that happened to me after my big revelation is that I started simplifying my language. Something we learn in technical writing: to be simple and clear is hard work. I think it was a big improvement, stripping away the verbal distractions and focusing on the story.

Also, actual language problems are amazingly easy to fix. Pick up a copy of Browne & King’s “Self Editing for Fiction Writers.” This book explains in specific detail about the amateurish mistakes that we all make as newbies, and how to clean them out of your prose. Browne & King are freelance editors who do this stuff for a living. I’m teaching a creative writing class at my college this Fall, and this is the textbook for the class. This is the book I wish I’d had when I was 17 and decided to try to be a fiction writer.

3. Work on diagnosing and fixing the specific problems that make your stories fail. My stories were all about unlikable characters (when readers say “unlikable” they actually mean flat or uninteresting) going through the motions of linear, contrived plots. I used to put all my focus into engaging the intellect of my readers, and paid no attention to engaging the reader’s emotions.

The best book that I’ve found specifically about how to engage reader emotions is Donald Maass’s book “Writing the Breakout Novel.” Maass is not an author; he’s a literary agent. Therefore he really knows more than most authors about what readers enjoy, and explains it very clearly and in practical terms. Maass makes a persuasive argument that if you want to engage reader’s minds, you have to engage their emotions first. This is what I wish somebody had told me in my MFA classes.

4. This isn’t true of everybody, but for me, I have to write every day. No exceptions. Holidays, traveling, birthdays, puking up last night’s hangover– If I miss even one day, it takes me at least two or three days to pick up the thread of where I left off.

When I write every day, this really helpful thing happens where my brain continues working on what I’m writing during the downtime. So if I stop writing on Tuesday because I don’t know what comes next, it cooks around in my unconscious for 24 hours so that when I sit down Wednesday, I typically know what’s supposed to be next. If I wait until Thursday, it’s gone.

I used to think that I didn’t have time to write every day. Over many years of not getting very much written, I discovered that you *never* have enough time to write. Waiting for that ideal job or that vacation or that relative to die and leave you a trust fund doesn’t improve the situation any. I sincerely believe that if I won the Powerball today and quit my day job, I still wouldn’t feel like I had any time to write. The only way to get enough time to write every day is to actually write every day. Somehow, when you actually do it, the other stuff that used to fill that time magically becomes less of an issue.

When you write every day, the economy of scale really gets on your side. If I had started writing every day 30 years ago (instead of 3 years ago) even at my current slow rate of about 750 words a day, that’s over 7 million more words that I would have written by now. Most of it would have been crap, but the nice thing about writing is that even writing crap helps you write better as long as you learn from it.

And a final word: Probably the advice you most expect from somebody who started finally getting some things published after 30 years of failure is something like, “Be like me, and don’t give up.” But actually, my best advice is, “Don’t be like me! Wasting years of writing time.” If your stories are not getting published, then there’s a reason for it, and the most likely reason is that your stories aren’t good enough to publish. Figure out why, and fix it now.

 

Carl_eagleCarl Slaughter is a man of the world. For the last decade, he has traveled the globe as an ESL teacher in 17 countries on 3 continents, collecting souvenir paintings from China, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, and Egypt, as well as dresses from Egypt, and masks from Kenya, along the way. He spends a ridiculous amount of time and an alarming amount of money in bookstores. He has a large ESL book review website, an exhaustive FAQ about teaching English in China, and a collection of 75 English language newspapers from 15 countries.

His training is in journalism, and he has an essay on culture printed in the Korea Times and Beijing Review. He has two science fiction novels in the works and is deep into research for an environmental short story project.

Carl currently teaches in China where electricity is an inconsistent commodity.

Interview: Ken Liu

interview by Carl Slaughter
introduction by David Steffen

ken_liu_small

If you’ve kept up with science fiction publications in the last few years, you’ve probably at least heard the name Ken Liu. Dozens of his stories have been published just in the last couple of years in the biggest and best SF publications out there today, including F&SF, Analog, Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, Daily Science Fiction… The list goes on and on. He won the Hugo for “Mono No Aware” this year. He won the Hugo and the Nebula for “The Paper Menagerie” last year, one of my personal favorite stories I’ve read in years. I just read a fun story by him on the Drabblecast titled “The Call of the Pancake Factory”, about a representative of a certain supercorporation amusement park happening to cross paths with a cult of Cthulhu–great story. He’s on a roll, and showing no signs of stopping. He’s a great writer and you should check out his work if you ever get a chance to read it.

 

You’ve been getting an awful lot of stories published the last few years. Did you build up an archive or have you just been a really busy guy lately?

For the longest time, I wrote very slowly, and so there never really was much “inventory.” But I’ve been writing at a somewhat steady, faster pace for the last four years. The more I write, the more ideas I seem to have. So that has worked out well.

 

How do you maintain quality and quantity? Natural talent, hard work, long hours, disciplined lifestyle, or some combination?

I think over time, I’ve learned to do a better job of picking out which story ideas seem cool but won’t work, which ones are good for flash pieces, and which ones are good for longer development. That has helped to reduce the number of stories I have to trunk.

I’ve also learned to work better under deadline. Knowing how long it takes me to finish a story and polish it to the point where I’m satisfied with it builds confidence, and that makes it easier to take up new projects and plan them into my schedule.

 

What’s your day job? How do you find time for family, the office, and the keyboard?

I used to be a programmer, became a corporate attorney, and now I work as a litigation consultant for high-tech patent cases, which sort of combines my areas of expertise. It’s very interesting, stimulating work, and probably helps with giving me story ideas.

I have two young children at home, ages 3 and 1. As anyone with young children knows, they severely constrain your writing time. I’ve learned to be better about time management and use the little writing time I do have more efficiently. For example, I try to do some drafting on my commuter rail ride every day.

I can’t say I’ve got it figured out. My novel revisions are going much more slowly than I’d like, partly due to the lack of uninterrupted writing time. But plenty of writers have figured out such a balance before, I just need to keep on working on my process and improve it.

 

Some author’s sell to the same two or three markets or half a dozen markets. You’ve been selling to every market under the sun. What’s the explanation? Diverse material? Looks better on your resume? Just like to shop around?

I enjoy working with different editors. Every editor has taught me something new. And I do write a wide variety of stories, so some stories might be a better fit with F&SF while others might work better at Analog. Not every editor likes everything I write.

I also like being exposed to new readers through new markets, so being published in multiple markets has worked out well for me.

 

You’ve been winning and being nominated for a lot of awards. Mike Resnick said about awards, “When you walk out of the convention, nobody on the street knows who you are.” This in contrast to, for example, the Oscar. How has winning famous awards affected you personally? How has it affected your career? More sales? More fan mail? Invitations to speak at conventions? Requests for interviews?

I can’t say it has affected my personal life significantly — I did get a lot of congratulations from my friends and co-workers, which made me very happy. I think the stories that were nominated got more readers, and of course I’m happy about that.

Career wise, since I don’t have a novel, I can’t point to any concrete sales boost from the awards. I do think some of the translation deals I’ve gotten were due to the awards — if nothing else, they help with name recognition, especially overseas.

Unless people ask about the awards though, I just don’t think about them much. I’m very grateful to have been nominated and to have won some of them, but what keeps me writing isn’t the desire for awards, but to write stories that I want to read myself.

 

You’ve been concentrating on short stories. What does the novel horizon look like?

I’m working on a novel, an epic fantasy of sorts, set in a secondary world created by my wife and me together. The setting is an archipelago, and there are magical creatures, gods, and lots of fanciful machines based on ancient Chinese mechanical engineering. The plot is loosely adapted from the historical legends about the founding of the Han Dynasty, and some of the cultural aspects are derived from classical East Asian elements.

The first draft is done, but there’s a lot of rewriting left still.

 

What about the screen market? Any queries to or from Hollywood to buy or write scripts?

I do like scripts, and want to get better at writing them. But there’s not much of a market for them unless you’re in Hollywood, so, for now, I’m focusing just on narrative fiction.

 

What’s the market like for science fiction in China? Aren’t they more into traditional fantasy? You know, beings with magical powers. Personification of animals, like the famous Chinese novel, “Journey to the West.” (Or is it more accurately translated, “The Journey West”?) Is there a market in China for traditional science fiction? Biotechnology, space travel, etc.

I’m not an expert on the Chinese science fiction market, but from what I’ve seen, science fiction does very well there. Of course, China is a very big country, so even if only a small percentage of readers are interested in science fiction, the absolute numbers are going to be big. Liu Cixin’s Three-Body trilogy, for example, sold some 400,000 copies, and that’s a hard science fiction first contact story. (I’ve been engaged to translate the first book of the trilogy, The Three-Body Problem, into English, and Tor Books will be publishing the book in the US in 2014.)

A lot of my writer friends in China — in science fiction, fantasy, and slip-stream — seem to have many more readers (even if they don’t all have novels out yet). And even my own stories, translated into Chinese, seem to have generated more feedback than they received in English. So I’d say the market is very healthy, overall.

 

Besides China, how are overseas sales going?

I have a Japanese collection coming out from Hayakawa Publishing in 2015, and I’ve sold a few reprints to markets in France, Spain, Italy, and other countries. Sometimes I get a chance to work directly with the translators, and that’s always such a pleasure.

 

You have all your stories critiqued on the Critters Online Workshop. How has that affected your writing and your sales?

I haven’t used Critters for most of my fiction for a while now. Over time, I’ve developed a circle of beta readers (several of whom I met through critters) whose opinions I trust, and it’s just more efficient to get their take than to go through critters, especially when I’m under tight deadlines.

I think Critters taught me, above all, how to figure out which critiques are helpful and which ones are not. When you’re relatively inexperienced as a writer, there’s a lot of benefit to getting a wide range of opinions because they help you figure out who your target audience is. Learning to ignore opinions from people who aren’t in your target audience is a difficult lesson because our natural tendency as writers is to try to please everyone. But that’s impossible, and it’s better that you learn this lesson earlier rather than later.

 

Any advice for aspiring writers?

Listen when other writers share their process and try their techniques out, but don’t be surprised when most of them don’t work for you — but also be prepared for the possibility that a few will. You won’t know which is which until you try them though.

 

Carl_eagle

Carl Slaughter is a man of the world. For the last decade, he has traveled the globe as an ESL teacher in 17 countries on 3 continents, collecting souvenir paintings from China, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, and Egypt, as well as dresses from Egypt, and masks from Kenya, along the way. He spends a ridiculous amount of time and an alarming amount of money in bookstores. He has a large ESL book review website, an exhaustive FAQ about teaching English in China, and a collection of 75 English language newspapers from 15 countries.

 

His training is in journalism, and he has an essay on culture printed in the Korea Times and Beijing Review. He has two science fiction novels in the works and is deep into research for an environmental short story project.

 

Carl currently teaches in China where electricity is an inconsistent commodity.

 

Interview: Mike Resnick

interview by Carl Slaughter

Mike Resnick recently launched 2 new projects. Stellar Guild, an anthology series, and Galaxy’s Edge, an ezine. Diabolical Plots asks
who, what, when, why, and how.

CARL SLAUGHTER: You did these type of projects in the 90s and launched a lot of careers. Why again? Why now?

MIKE RESNICK: This field has been phenomenally good to me over the years. I can’t pay back — everyone who helped me is either dead or rich or both — so I pay forward.

CARL: Will these 2 project continue indefinitely, with you turning over the editorship to someone else, or will you shut them down after you’ve accomplished certain goals?

MIKE: That’s up to the guy who pays the bills, but I don’t believe he plans on halting either project in the foreseeable future.

CARL: The magazine stories are free. What’s the business model for a free, online magazine?

MIKE: That’s a publisher question. I’m just the editor. I assume that being free online serves multiple purposes: it lets me recruit new
writers he may want to work with in the future, it advertises many of his books and projects (like the Caribbean cruise workshop) in its
pages, etc. And I should add that although it’s free online, we’re actually selling a surprising number of copies of the Kindle, Nook and
paper formats. And as each new issue comes online for free, the prior one is accessible only for a fee.

CARL: Speculative fiction is a big umbrella. Which subgenres will you emphasize and which will you exclude?

MIKE: I like science fiction. I like fantasy. I like humor. I like odd and offbeat. I have no interest in horror.

CARL: What percentage of stories will be original and what percentage will be reprints? What percentage of stories will have recognizable bylines and what percentage will be new names?

MIKE: We’ll be running 5 new stories and 4 reprint stories and/or novelettes each issue, so it’s 55% new, 44% reprint, and 1% left over.
The new stories will be by newcomers, or journeymen whose names aren’t well-known yet. The reprints will be by major writers whose names on the cover will theoretically keep us in business. We’re also running a science column by Greg Benford, a book review column by Paul Cook, and an anything-he-feels-like-writing-about column by Barry Malzberg. And my editorials seem to go a few thousand words each. Oh, and we serialize a novel each issue, we run a novel excerpt from the publisher’s list each issue, and we run a short story from one of the
publisher’s available collections each issue. Like the old Lucky Strike commercials, we’re firm and fully-packed.

CARL: How does the protà ©gà © thing work? Does the protà ©gà © write a story and the veteran help with revision or do they both write a story on a similar theme?

MIKE: I contact a superstar and assign him/her a novella. Then a protà ©gà © (of their choosing, not mine) will write a novella or long
novelette that is a sequel, a prequel, or just set in the same universe — and share cover credit. And when you’re a newcomer sharing cover credit with Mercedes Lackey or Larry Niven or Kevin J. Anderson or Robert Silverberg or Harry Turtledove or Nancy Kress or Eric Flint, it’s got to give your embryonic career a lot more of a boost than selling half a dozen stories to the usual markets.

CARL: All the established authors you contacted initially declined to participate. When you informed them the project would involve working with a protà ©gà ©, they all immediately reversed their decision. Why is working with a protà ©gà © such a motivation?

MIKE: For the same reason I work with beginners: to pay forward. I just ran through the names of the senior partners on these books. Most
are contracted years ahead, most make far more than we can pay…but the moment the philosophy of the line was explained to them, each of
these talented and truly generous writers instantly agreed. I should add that the very first Stellar Guild book to come out — Kevin
Anderson’s and Steve Saville’s TAU CETI — just won the very first “Lifeboat to the Stars” Award, which carries a 4-figure cash prize with it.

CARL: An important question for aspiring writers. Are submissions open?

MIKE: No, but I hope to open submissions soon. Maybe 3 or 4 months.

Carl_eagleCarl Slaughter is a man of the world. For the last decade, he has traveled the globe as an ESL teacher in 17 countries on 3 continents, collecting souvenir paintings from China, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, and Egypt, as well as dresses from Egypt, and masks from Kenya, along the way. He spends a ridiculous amount of time and an alarming amount of money in bookstores. He has a large ESL book review website, an exhaustive FAQ about teaching English in China, and a collection of 75 English language newspapers from 15 countries.

His training is in journalism, and he has an essay on culture printed in the Korea Times and Beijing Review. He has two science fiction novels in the works and is deep into research for an environmental short story project.

Carl currently teaches in China where electricity is an inconsistent commodity.

Interview: Karl Bunker

interview by Carl Slaughter

Karl Bunker sold “Gray Wings” to Asimov’s a few months ago and followed it almost immediately with “The Women From the Ocean.” One the heels of his first two stories to Asimov’s, he sold “This Quiet Dust” to Analog. Three stories to the two leading science fiction magazines in rapid succession. Has he arrived? Diabolical Plots inquires about this and more.

 

YOU’VE JUST SOLD 2 STORIES ALMOST BACK TO BACK TO ASIMOV’S, FOLLOWED BY YOUR FIRST SALE TO ANALOG. DO YOU FEEL YOU’VE ARRIVED?

Well, the amount of success I’ve had so far certainly seemed like a fantasy back when I started writing. But I haven’t received any awards yet — no Hugo, no Nebula, no Pulitzer, no Nobel — so I feel like I’ve still got a lot of “arriving” to strive toward and fantasize about.

 

YOUR TWO ASIMOV’S STORIES ARE CHARACTER ORIENTED. YOUR ANALOG STORY IS SCIENCE PREMISE ORIENTED. YOUR INTERZONE STORY IS HALF ALIEN AND HALF FABLE. YOUR FAVORITE OF YOUR STORIES IS THEME ORIENTED. WHICH SUBGENRE IS YOUR BEST? WHICH DO YOU PREFER? WHICH DO YOU PLAN TO EMPHASIZE?

I guess most writers would say this, but I like stories about people — about human feelings (though it may not be “humans” who are doing the feeling). But I’m also drawn to old-fashioned gosh-wow, sense-of-wonder science-fictional ideas. SF lets us writers come up with strange and wonderful situations, and then look at how people (human or otherwise) might react to those situations. It’s that latter part that makes a story worthwhile, in my opinion. My upcoming Analog story is unusually idea-oriented for me, but even with that one I see the core of the story as being about feelings — about hope and curiosity and love overcoming fear. In terms of sub-genre, I’m drawn to post-singularity as a theme, but of course post-singularity stories are hard to write, since (by definition) they’re about a future that can’t be straightforwardly extrapolated.

 

WAS IT EASIER FOR YOU TO GET OUT OF THE SLUSHPILE AFTER WINNING WRITERS OF THE FUTURE? WAS IT EASIER FOR YOU TO GET ON THE RADAR AT ASIMOV’S AFTER SELLING TO INTERZONE, EASIER TO GET ON THE RADAR AT ANALOG AFTER SELLING TO ASIMOV’S, ETC?

The answer to both questions is “I don’t know.” Ideally of course, I’d like to think that I made more sales as I went along because I was learning to write better, and that’s the end of it. I know that when I’m looking for a story to critique on Critters, I try to find something that looks like it’s going to be interesting and well-written, and as I scan through the first few paragraphs of a batch of stories it’s easy for me to make that judgement without being distracted by whether or not I recognize the author’s name. So I assume professional editors can do the same. But there’s no way to know what goes on in the minds — and perhaps the subconscious minds at that — of editors, so my opinion is that it’s best not to worry about that.

 

HAS IT BEEN EASIER FOR YOU TO GET A COMPLETE READ WITH FUTURE STORIES AFTER SELLING TO AN EDITOR? HAS IT BEEN EASIER TO SELL TO THE SAME EDITOR ONCE THEY’VE PUBLISHED YOU? HOW MUCH FEEBACK DO THEY GIVE YOU FOR REJECTED STORIES?

After selling a couple of stories to F&SF, it appears that I can count on a personal reply from Gordon Van Gelder. With Sheila Williams at Asimov’s, I got a lot of wonderfully encouraging personal responses from her before she ever bought anything from me. Now that I’ve sold them a couple of stories, she doesn’t have as much praise and encouragement for me, either in acceptance or rejection notices. So that’s kind of funny; I guess she figures that I’ve “arrived,” as you put it, and so she doesn’t have to coddle me any more. With Analog, I never got anything other than form rejections up until I sold a story to them. I haven’t had anything to submit to them since that first sale, but I’ll be curious to see if I still get that (rather insulting, IMO) “how to write SF for dummies” form rejection of theirs.

 

SO FAR, YOUR CAREER HAS EMPHASIZED QUALITY BUT NOT QUANTITY. DO YOU GET WRITER’S BLOCK, DOES IT TAKE LONGER TO FINISH A STORY, DO YOU REVISE MORE, OR DO YOU JUST HAVE LESS TIME TO DEVOTE TO WRITING THAN YOU’D LIKE?

I do suffer from a sort of low-grade chronic writer’s block. In all of 2012 I think I finished only two stories and sold one. I’ve been a lot more productive so far this year, but I don’t think I’m “cured” of writer’s block yet. It may be that writing will always be slow and painful for me. At a rough estimate, I’ve probably finished fewer than 30 short stories in my life.

 

ALL YOUR STORIES ARE SHORT FICTION. ANY NOVELS IN THE WORKS?

I don’t have any novels in the works, and i’m not sure I ever will. It’s perhaps a misfortune of mine that I have a tremendous love and respect for the short story as an art form — more so than the novel. I much prefer reading short stories to novels, and the prospect of writing a novel feels to me like a horrible grind of a chore that stretches off to infinity. And that’s too bad, because it’s awfully rare for an author to make a name for him/herself solely from short stories.

 

RELATIVE NEWCOMERS LIKE KEN LIU AND LEAH CYPESS, AS WELL AS VETERANS LIKE IAN CREASEY AND CARL FREDERICK, RUN ALL THEIR STORIES THROUGH THE CRITTERS WORKSHOP, EVEN AFTER WINNING A HUGO/NEBULA. SOME OF THEM MAKE MAJOR REVISIONS BASED ON THE FEEDBACK THEY GET FROM CRITIQUERS. WHAT HAS BEEN YOUR EXPERIENCE WITH WORKSHOPPING?

I sometimes wonder if I’ll ever reach a point where I feel that critique groups are superfluous for me. I know I still learn a lot every time I put a story out for critique, and critiques have often saved me from embarrassing blunders. They’ve also sometimes convinced me to completely rework a story, or to give up on one, and even on one occasion to believe in a story that I was ready to call a failure and give up on. And I still feel that I have a lot to learn from writing critiques, and a lot to learn _about_ writing critiques. All parts of the process — reading something with writing a critique in mind, writing a critique, reading and making good use of critiques about one’s own work — all of these things are complex and difficult skills in themselves, and there’s a lot to learn and know about all of them. Of course I often get “bad” critiques, where I feel that the critiquer is just totally clueless about how to read, or how to read for a critique, or how to think about writing, or how to write a critique, or all of the above. But for the time being anyway, it’s hard for me to imagine giving up on critique groups.

 

IF YOU COULD TRAVEL BACK IN TIME AND TALK TO YOUR YOUNGER SELF, WHAT ADVICE WOULD YOU GIVE YOURSELF ABOUT WRITING?

I can’t really think of any advice to give my younger self. Writing was something I had to learn — and still am learning — and I think I’m doing okay with that learning process. On the other hand, I’m quite shockingly old to be a “new” writer, so perhaps it would have been good for me to start working seriously at writing several decades earlier in my life. At least then my fans (if I ever have any) will have a longer body of work to look forward to. But on the other other hand, it’s good to be working on something new in one’s life, regardless of one’s age.

 

IF YOU DON’T HAVE ANY ADVICE FOR YOUR YOUNGER SELF, WHAT ABOUT OTHER BEGINNING SF WRITERS? ANY THOUGHTS FOR THEM?

Perhaps one thing: For god’s sake, don’t just read within your preferred genre. For SF writers in particular, I would wish that they would read literary fiction, and learn to appreciate and love it. It’s my feeling that that’s how real quality and richness will be brought into the genre, and into each writer’s writing

 

Carl_eagleCarl Slaughter is a man of the world. For the last decade, he has traveled the globe as an ESL teacher in 17 countries on 3 continents, collecting souvenir paintings from China, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, and Egypt, as well as dresses from Egypt, and masks from Kenya, along the way. He spends a ridiculous amount of time and an alarming amount of money in bookstores. He has a large ESL book review website, an exhaustive FAQ about teaching English in China, and a collection of 75 English language newspapers from 15 countries.

His training is in journalism, and he has an essay on culture printed in the Korea Times and Beijing Review. He has two science fiction novels in the works and is deep into research for an environmental short story project.

Carl currently teaches in China where electricity is an inconsistent commodity.

 

To Critique or Not to Critique: Kristine Kathryn Rusch Weighs In

interview by Carl Slaughter

KKRWorkshop instructors Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith take a different approach to coaching writers:

“We do critiques at first because people want them. We time the critiques and give rules:

  • If you liked this and would have bought it as an editor/reader, then say that and nothing else.
  • If it’s not your genre or your kind of story, say that and nothing else.
  • If you would like it and would buy it if x, y, and z were fixed, then say that.
  • And say what you believe is strong about the story. No grammar nits.
  • You have only one minute in which to say all of this. If you go over, you get cut off. If you’re under, that’s good.

Then we teach them how to read like editors/readers. If they don’t get caught by the beginning, they don’t have to keep reading.

They’re done. They can move onto something else.

From that point, the “critiques” are this:

  • “Stopped at page 1, paragraph 2”
  • “Read until page 10, liked it, then stopped on paragraph 3 because the character did something unbelievable.”
  • “Read it, liked it, not sure I want to buy it.”
  • “Read it, liked it, but not enough to buy.”
  • “Read it, loved it, will buy it.”

And that’s all.

Dean and I will then interpret,if everyone stops on paragraph two, there’s clearly a problem with the opening, but if people fade out,some stop on page 10, some on page 5, most on page 7, then the pacing is off, etc.

If we hated the story, but 3/4 of the class loved it, we don’t critique it in depth, because all that writer has to do is mail the story, and 3/4 of all readers who like that kind of story will probably like this story.

We have great success with this method because it mimics the real-world way people read.”

 

Carl Slaughter: Much if not most of this is in direct contrast to other workshop strategies and rules. For example, at Critters, the largest and oldest online speculative fiction workshop, the minimum word count for getting full credit is 200. Longer critiques and detailed critiques are encouraged. They even offer a Most Productive Critter Award for people who crank out the highest volume of feedback. Clarion, the Harvard of onsite workshops, devotes a large portion of its schedule to peer critiquing. At Odyssey, 50% of classroom time is peer critiquing: “Everyone in the class learns to become a top-notch critiquer, providing insightful feedback on your work. Workshopping sessions are designed to maximize their helpfulness.” How did you arrive at conclusion that brief peer critiquing is better than the longstanding and almost universal practice of extensive peer critiquing?

Kristine Kathryn Rusch: I am an editor, and I know what an editor’s job is. The editor must find something that readers will like and buy. Readers don’t care if a comma is missing on page 64. Readers want to know if the story is good, if the characters are memorable, and if the book pulls you all the way through to the end. When you reach the end, do you want to read the next book. If not, then your book failed. It’s really very simple.

If you look at the history of peer critiquing, you’ll see that it came out of the university system. The man who “invented” it later repudiated it. It’s a way to keep students busy without doing much work yourself. Now it’s become this monster that destroys writers and builds up critics rather than helping writers.

If critiquing were so important, then great writers of the past would have come out of workshops rather than out of their own practice and enjoyment of great fiction.

 

CS: Jeanne Cavelos, former senior editor of Bantam Doubleday Dell, is director of the Odyssey workshop. She says, “You should not apply unless you are ready to hear about the weaknesses in your writing and ready to work to overcome them †¦ We target those weaknesses one by one and work to conquer them †¦ In critiquing stories, I give the same unflinchingly honest, concrete, detailed feedback that I provided as a senior editor.” But you were an editor too. You were the editor of a leading magazine for 6 years. You said you shared that view back then, but now you believe in emphasizing strengths. How did your view evolved?

KKR: I have spent the last ten years teaching professional writers how to save their careers. Most careers fall apart for two reasons: 1) a lack of understanding of business and 2) a lack of belief in your own voice. Workshops destroy voice and make a writer doubt. I have “repaired” so many writers who went through decades of peer critiques. Those writers stopped listening to “what’s wrong,” started learning what they did well, and began to sell their work again. Hell, most of them started writing again, because peer critiques had frozen them and made them stop writing altogether.

 

CS: OK, so you’ve got a system for establishing popularity. What about recognizing literary value. From “War of the Worlds” to “Harry Potter,” many classic stories were initially rejected by leading editors. Some were rejected several times, “Dune” being the most famous example. Suppose the census of the workshop critiques is to pan what turns out to be the next “Flowers for Algernon.”

KKR: Oh, the art question. It’s so silly. Readers determine literary value. They always have. They pass memorable works to their friends and then to the next generation. If you don’t have readers, your work will never have literary value. It’ll never get passed on. So popularity and literary value are related. Do most popular novels get read 100 years later? No. Were all novels we read 100 years later popular in their day?

Most workshops do pan works that will become popular, because those works are based on voice and vision, something peer critiques destroy. You cannot write by committee. You cannot learn to write from a committee, particularly one that reads critically.

Readers read for enjoyment. Writers in peer critiques do not. So they automatically misread a story when it’s presented to them.

 

CS: Your workshops are 4 days and 8 days, whereas others are several weeks. Why only a fraction of the usual time?

KKR: Because working writers (and people with day jobs) don’t have several weeks to devote to a workshop. Only students and retired people do. When Dean & I teach workshops, we look for people with drive. People with drive generally can’t take a summer out of their lives to sit around and chat about literature. In fact, people with drive get bored at such things.

We structure our workshops to appeal to people who have the drive to succeed, the willingness to work hard, and the ability to learn.

By the way, even though our workshops are shorter than the other workshops, we force our students to write more. They write tens of thousands of words at our workshops. At the others, they might write a story or two.

 

CS: Do you and Dean provide verbal or written feedback or both? How long are your written critiques? How long are your written critiques?

KKR: We provide some verbal and written feedback. We tell writers they can ignore everything we say. We never write more than a paragraph on the back of a manuscript. We also write and mark what’s good about the manuscript.

 

CS: How much time do the workshops devote to feedback versus revision?

KKR: We don’t believe in revision. That’s a waste of time as well. Write the next story. No musician becomes good by going over the same piece of music at the expense of all others. We move the writers forward, asking them to write new material while keeping in mind what they learned about the old material.

We spend a lot of time debunking the “revision” myth. You cannot fix a broken manuscript. The manuscript is not the story. If you like the story and it didn’t work, then you must start from scratch and write it all over again.

 

CS: What portion of your feedback is devoted to structure, clarity, character development, etc? How much macro focus and how much micro focus?

KKR: All of it focuses on the story, character, and voice. None of it focuses on the words.

 

CS: Stanley Schmidt once said, “The first sentence of a story usually tells me whether I’m in good hands.” Sheila Williams said, “Get my attention in the first paragraph.” Mike Resnick said, “Put everything you’ve got into the first page.” The cutoff for the Hatrack workshopis 13 lines. How much of your workshops are devoted to opening sequences?

KKR: We don’t waste time on sentences or words. I really can’t emphasize that enough. Nor are the above comments from Sheila, Stan & Mike about words. They’re about how fast the writer takes the reader into the story and away from the real world.

 

CS: Is this practice even a good idea for editors and authors alike? How many good stories have been rejected because the first impression wasn’t awesome?

KKR: None. If the opening isn’t good, the story isn’t good.

 

CS: Are your workshops for short fiction, novels, or both?

KKR: It depends on the workshop.

 

CS: What are the most common misconceptions writers have and how do you address those misconceptions?

KKR: That words and critique are important. Story and business will give them a career. Focusing on one manuscript won’t help at all. Most workshops teach writers how to write one beautiful story. Most do not teach writers how to have a career. Yet writers want a career, and they’ve just wasted their precious time learning stuff that will hurt their careers rather than ever help them.

 

CS: What are the most common mistakes writers make and how do you address those mistakes?

KKR: They don’t learn how to write fast, how to write a lot, how to practice, and how to tell a story. That’s craft. But the biggest mistakes they make are ignoring and refusing to learn business. It doesn’t matter how well you write. If you can’t tell a story, your work won’t sell. If you can tell a story and don’t know business, someone will take advantage of you. It happens all the time.

 

CS: Do you advise writers to submit stories indefinitely or do advice them to put a story on the shelf after half a dozen or so rejections?

KKR: Keep submitting. Or self-publish.

 

CS: Do you ever tell a writer to adopt a different vision for a story? As in, “This story would be better/more marketable if you took it in a fundamentally different direction?” At what level of revision does the story cease to be the writer’s story and become the instructor/editor’s story?

KKR: Never. Never, never, never, never. That’s horribly destructive.

 

CS: Do you ever completely rewrite a passage or scene for a writer?

KKR: No.

 

CS: Is there a place for telling an author, “This story is fundamentally flawed. It has no hope. Abandon this project and move on to something workable.”?

KKR: God, no. And anyone who says that should never be allowed near writers again.

 

CS: Is there a place for telling someone, “You’re not cut out to be a writer.”?

KKR: Who voted that critic God? No!!!! That’s horrible. Again, that person should never ever ever be allowed near writers again.

 

CS: What about your new online workshop for beginners. How will that be organized? What skills do you teach? How many stories do they submit? How many times do they revise the same story?

KKR: They’re craft workshops. The writers learn new tools. They become aware of the tools. They do not submit stories. They do not revise stories (see above). They certainly do not waste their time revising the same story.

 

CS: The Clarion website says one third of participants get published. Odyssey cites a success rate of 56% of graduates. Critters has an announcements page for critiqued stories that get published. Do you keep statistics for stories that got critiqued in a workshop and later got published, or writers who participated in a workshop and later got published? How do you, and potential students, know your new approach works?

KKR: We don’t take credit for our students’ successes. We provide information. If they want to use that information, that’s their business.

 

CS: Now that you’re conducting your own workshops and now that you’ve adopted a different workshop philosophy/MO, does this mean you won’t be participating in other workshops?

KKR: No one asks any more. We tried teaching our way at Clarion in 1992 and got banned. I suspect others don’t want us either.

 

CS: What do you recommend for writers who can’t afford a workshop, can’t travel, can’t take time off from work, haven’t been able to beat the competition for a workshop seat, and so on, and therefore don’t have the advantage of personalized feedback from experienced writers and editors?

KKR: Stop stressing about it. You’re probably better off not going. Write a lot, practice new techniques, mail everything you write even if you think it’s bad, and keep at it. Learn business. You’ll be a success eventually if you do all those things.

 


Carl Slaughter is a man of the world. For the last decade, he hCarl_eagleas traveled the globe as an ESL teacher in 17 countries on 3 continents, collecting souvenir paintings from China, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, and Egypt, as well as dresses from Egypt, and masks from Kenya, along the way. He spends a ridiculous amount of time and an alarming amount of money in bookstores. He has a large ESL book review website, an exhaustive FAQ about teaching English in China, and a collection of 75 English language newspapers from 15 countries.

His training is in journalism, and he has an essay on culture printed in the Korea Times and Beijing Review. He has two science fiction novels in the works and is deep into research for an environmental short story project.

Carl currently teaches in China where electricity is an inconsistent commodity.

Interview: Carl Frederick

interview by Carl Slaughter

CF1Nebula nominee, frequent Analog byliner, Writers of the Future first place award winner, 2 time Phobos Fiction Contest winner, 6 time Analog Readers Choice Award winner, Odyssey graduate, and longtime Critters member Carl Frederick is camera shy. As you can see from the photo, even his pet cat is shy. He likes cats and dogs and they are prominent characters in many of his stories. Frederick is known for his hard science stories. He’s had 40 plus short stories published in Analog. Lately, without letting up on the hard science stories, he has delved deep into character driven stories and even literary science fiction. Or rather, stories with strong character development well blended into the hard science element – and vice versa.

 

CARL SLAUGHTER: Is “Trojan Carousel” your first novel?

CARL FREDERICK: It’s the third or forth. I’m not sure. And as for my first two novels, I’d sort of like to forget that I’d written them. They say a writer needs to write a half million or so words of crud before the good stuff can get out. I think I’m well past that number now.

 

TOSHIBA Exif JPEGCS: The main characters are boys in a science school. Does this mean YA is the target audience?

CF: Partially, yes.

But the Harry Potter books were a sea change. Up until then, books with kid protagonists were indeed read by adults, but with a sense of embarrassment. Now, post Potter, adults can read such books even in public places. So ‘Trojan Carousel’ is also aimed at adults who might like reading about kids.

Most of my short story output has gone to Analog Magazine which is not generally perceived as a YA magazine. But I believe it is. Most of the stories therein have the sense of wonder, the avoidance of bored cynicism and sophistication, the optimism, that IMO characterizes the world view of kids.

Thinking about it now, I guess I consider ‘Trojan Carousel’ a book for bright kids or for physicists (who in many ways are like bright kids).

 

CS: Why a novel about preteen boys?

CF: Richard Feynman speculated that if kids were introduced to quantum mechanics concepts at an early age, they might (unlike physicists in general) be completely comfortable with those concepts. Exploring that idea is one of the thrusts of the novel.

 

CS: The adults are minor characters. Why not have them more involved in the plot? Why not have them more involved in the lives of the boys?

CF: I wanted the book to have something of the flavor of ‘Lord of the Flies’: Kids’ lives unconstrained by adult supervision/control. I also wanted the book to reflect the ‘school story’ genre. Arguably the finest example of same might be ‘Stalky and Co.’ by Kipling–one of my favorite books when I was a kid. The three boys in ‘Trojan Carousel’ who are dorm-mates parallel the three study-mates in ‘Stalky’.

 

CF2CS: Identify the themes of the story and explain, without major spoilers, how those themes are addressed.

CF: Outwardly, the book is about kids (aged twelve or thereabouts) in two schools on one campus: one (The Amdexter School) a traditional posh faux British boarding school and the other (The Feynman Elementary School for Advanced Physics) is for super-bright science and math kids. The two school populations coexist on friendly terms at the start. But then due to a clash of cultures, things gradually turn bad, leading to a war between the boys of the schools.

The subtext is modern science and how we interpret it, and also on the nature of scientific inquiry.

I acknowledge that this is a poor answer to your question. But I think an author is the very last person to consult about the themes in his writing.

 

CS: One of the main characters dies. Why is this necessary?

CF: Oh, gosh. I tried very hard not to kill him. But I couldn’t make the book work with him remaining alive. And his death allows the protagonist to deny the death somewhat in the way of ‘Schrà ¶dinger’s Cat’, i.e. he’s not dead (or alive) until observed as such. That interpretation, by the way, is not what Schrà ¶dinger intended. He proposed the cat paradox to show that in some instances quantum mechanics gave unrealistic answers. He considered that a problem with the science.

 

CS: Science exercises are sprinkled throughout the book. How do these science exercises serve the story?

CF: They’re not exercises, exactly. And they’re at the back of the book. In a number of chapters, when the reader gets to the end, s/he can continue the science discussion in the chapter by going to the back of the book where the chapter continues. Or one can skip the back of the book and simply continue with the story. The ideas of quantum mechanics are interwoven throughout the novel, and I wanted the reader (if desired) to be able to appreciate those ideas–to appreciate the wonderful and beautiful weirdness of quantum physics.

 

CS: You’re known for your hard science stories. Why not a hard science novel?

CF: I think it IS hard SF, maybe very hard SF. I consider much of what is called hard science fiction to be actually science engineering. I don’t see many science concepts in SF and I wanted ‘Trojan Carousel’ to be about science. I think the novel after ‘Trojan Carousel’, ‘Wizards of Science’ is much more in the traditional mold of a hard SF novel.

 

CS: Lately, you’ve been writing more character oriented stories. What’s the explanation for this and will the trend continue? Have you had any success marketing these types of stories? Any success marketing “Trojan Carousel?

CF: In addition to doing physics, I’m also an engineer in the fast moving electronics industry. And compared to high-tech industry, book publishing is very slow. I’d say even compared to the movement of glaciers, book publishing is slow. I don’t have the patience for it. So I’d decided to self-publish e-book versions for Kindles and Nooks. The problem there is getting noticed. I found I didn’t have the stomach for self-promotion that self-publishing seems to require. My e-book sales therefore, are not exactly stellar. Occasionally nice things happen though. Last year, after one story of mine in a series came out in Analog, someone in Germany found the other stories in the series in the Kindle version. S/he bought them and a few hours later, bought one of my novels. By the next morning, s/he’d bought everything I’d written. And a few days later came another sale (presumably to another person) from Germany. But there it stopped. No chain reaction, unfortunately. But it was neat finding I had a fan.

In general though, I think most of my sales come from people stumbling on my titles. My best selling title is a short story collection, ‘SF++ Science Fiction Stories for Linux Geeks’. I rather imagine the buyers had been looking for technical books about Linux.

I’m considered a successful sf short story writer. But ‘successful short story writer’ is rather an oxymoron. Very few can make a living doing it. I guess I write because I want to be read, not to make money from it–although some money would be nice.

To answer your question about marketing ‘Trojan Carousel’: very little success, mainly, I think, because I don’t do any marketing.

 

CS: Most of your stories are in Analog. The longtime editor of Analog recently retired. Will that affect your relationship with the magazine? Will you branch out into other markets?

CF: I know and like (and have long worked with) the new editor. So I hope my relationship won’t change. But the previous editor, Stan Schmidt, is a physicist, as am I. And I believe we physicists think differently and have different reading tastes than ‘civilians’. So the new editor’s reading preferences might be less similar than previously to my writing preferences. I hope I’m wrong.

As to new markets, I admit that yes, I am looking for them.

 

CS: Any more novels in the works?

CF: Several. I’m working on one now, ‘Duplex Alpha’. It posits that world and science problems have become too complex to be addressed by the human brain. But evolution has come to the rescue by bringing forth a new type of identical twins who (by their ‘twin language’) can to a large degree think as one (an extreme example of ‘two heads are better than one’). They are feared and oppressed by the establishment.

I also have the sequel to ‘Eridion’ (a space opera) in the works.

 

CS: Do you run all your manuscripts through the Critters Workshop? How does the feedback affect your revisions and how do the revisions affect the marketability of your stories?

CF: I rely heavily on Critters and run all my short stories through the workshop. I rewrite heavily based on the critiques and believe that, in all cases, the rewrites have resulted in greatly improved stories. I do weigh the critiques based on the critiquers. Some of the critiquers hate everything and seem to just like to tear down writers and writing. Some seem to have just started learning English. Some write absolutely incomprehensible critiques. But most are terrific. And many find ideas in my stories that I didn’t even know about. I don’t know what I’d do without Critters. I write individualized thank yous to every critiquer of my stories.

And speaking of thanks, thank you, Carl, for giving me the chance to discuss ‘The Trojan Carousel’. Because of the (optional) back of the book chapter continuations, I regard the novel as something of an experiment. I’m very fond of the book and still, when I think of the aforementioned death, my eyes tend to mist over.

While yes, it would be great if people bought the e-book (or any of my books) for Kindle from Amazon, I’m more concerned with readership than with income. Accordingly, if readers of this interview want copies, I’d be happy to provide them by e-mail. Readers can go to my website, click on e-books and further click the book title and then click on the ‘e-mail for free copy’ button.

 

Carl_eagleCarl Slaughter is a man of the world. For the last decade, he has traveled the globe as an ESL teacher in 17 countries on 3 continents, collecting souvenir paintings from China, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, and Egypt, as well as dresses from Egypt, and masks from Kenya, along the way. He spends a ridiculous amount of time and an alarming amount of money in bookstores. He has a large ESL book review website, an exhaustive FAQ about teaching English in China, and a collection of 75 English language newspapers from 15 countries.

His training is in journalism, and he has an essay on culture printed in the Korea Times and Beijing Review. He has two science fiction novels in the works and is deep into research for an environmental short story project.

Carl currently teaches in China where electricity is an inconsistent commodity.

 

Interview: Dean Wesley Smith

interview by Carl Slaughter

Most people who comment on the changing publishing landscape concentrate on the problems. Bestselling author and blue chip workshop instructor Dean Wesley Smith has a can-do make it happen attitude and concentrates on solutions. And unlike self proclaimed experts, he’s a proven success. The business model he blogs about on his website and teaches in his workshops isn’t theory. He sells books with that business model. Lots of books. At a profit. In this interview with Carl Slaughter, he plays myth buster for writers who have reservations about making the transition from print publishing to electronic publishing and from traditional publishing to self publishing. At http://www.deanwesleysmith.com/, he dispels conventional wisdoms on a regular basis.

 

MYTH: How can an author sell books without the massive marketing apparatus of a publisher? It’s logistically impossible to make contact with bookstores all over the country. Nor can they afford advertising in national magazines.

 

FACT: Well, that’s a huge myth. Of course any indie publisher can get into bookstores and actually, it’s fairly easy and not very expensive. And no, it’s not impossible to make contact with bookstores all over the country. In fact, it’s easy. One way to even find out about how to do that is just go to the ABA (American Booksellers Association) website and you can download their bookstore lists state by state for free. And by joining the ABA as a publisher (about $300 per year) you can join into their programs such as the different box programs, get electronic proofs to bookstores and so much more. But of course, this takes doing print books as well as electronic. And Kobo will be going into all the indie stores with electronic books shortly. Also, you can get to the major chain stores as well, just takes a little more research. But first a publisher has to get past the myth that it’s impossible. It’s far from impossible.

 

MYTH: With a SmashWords type strategy, there are editors, no reviewers. No vetting or evaluation process. This means every author could post every one of their stories. With such a massive number of stories available, how can readers find my story, how can my story stand out among so many others?

 

FACT: It’s a bogus fear. In fact, it’s now easier to find books online than it ever was when readers had to go into bookstores. The key for writers is just to keep writing better and better stories and let the fans spread the word for you. The more quality stories you have available to readers, the more they will find you. But it takes time to build that kind of readership. If you expect it within a year or less, you will be setting yourself up for disappointment.

 

MYTH: To sell books online, you have to use a credit card or PayPal. These services charge per sale. If one person buys 10 books, that’s not a comparatively steep service expense. But if 100 people buy one book each, you’re paying that fee 100 times. How does that factor into the ebook/self-publishing business model?

 

FACT: It’s called a “cost of doing business” and it’s very, very minor. And only comes into play if you are selling off your own web site, which most should not do at first.

 

MYTH: How much can you charge per customer for a short story? 50 cents? One dollar? At that rate, can you make as much as selling the same story to a magazine or anthology?

 

FACT: You get 65 to 70% of all money from any distributor like Amazon or B&N. And most of the people I know sell short fiction for $2.99 per story.

 

MYTH: All that time spent formatting your story is time spent clicking on a browser instead of time spent typing on a keyboard. All that time spent on bookkeeping is time spent tapping on a calculator instead of typing on a keyboard. A writer who isn’t typing is a writer who isn’t making money. How do you weigh routine maintenance time against the time spent writing 2, 3, 4 stories?

 

FACT: This is a serious question that all writers must deal with. Before the electronic world, there was always business time sending off manuscripts and dealing with editors and agents. But the key is always go back to writing when in doubt. My friend, Scott William Carter has a great test when he looks at doing production vs. writing. He calls it his WIBBOW test and he asks it about everything. (Would I Be Better Off Writing?) When you ask that, you tend to do the business and production stuff at odd hours when you wouldn’t be writing anyway.

 

MYTH: How much are customers willing to pay for an ebook if they know the production cost is only a fraction of print books?

 

FACT: What does production costs have to do with anything? If you sent a book to a publisher, they must pay overhead, they must pay editors, they must pay copyeditors, and production for the electronic and for the covers. The only production you are talking about is printing and shipping costs. Those are the only things that vary at all. A $15.99 trade paper should have about a $7.99 electronic book. That feels fair to readers and works fine for authors as well. And covers publisher’s costs just fine. It is a huge myth that there are no costs to electronic books. A huge myth. Costs are less, yes, but there are costs.

 

MYTH: Suppose the next electronic book display technology goes through a revolution and the Kindle type gadgets go the way of 45s, 78s, reel to reel, 8 track, and floppy? Then you’ve got to reformat all your stories for the new technology. If you ¹ve got a publisher, you just keep writing and let someone in New York handle format issues.

 

FACT: Even if there isn’t a formatting revolution in the near future that renders your current formatting obsolete, doesn’t every website and ever gadget have its own formatting requirements? This question would take an entire class to answer. It’s called staying up with the field of changes. Nature of the beast of being a professional writer. Things are going to change. If you don’t stay on top of the changes, you end up not selling and getting left behind. And also your question assumes that traditional publishers would stay up as well, and that has been proven false in the last three years.

 

MYTH: Suppose my name isn’t Dean Wesley Smith and I therefore don’t have an established reader base. How do I draw traffic to my site?

 

FACT: Why would you want to? I tell writers who come to workshops here to have a static web site and only change it when they have a new book or story to tell their fans. That’s all you need. Blogging and all that crap is far too much work.

 

CARL: Share some success stories. Writers who followed the advice from your blog, seminars, and books and became commercially successful.

 

DEAN: Oh, wow, I don’t take credit for anyone’s success. Success in this business comes from writing and keeping at it for a long time and working to keep learning. Anyone who got successful from anything I said was because they worked hard and wrote hard. My advice is just more of a suggestion to go in a direction. The writer must go and do that work. And no writer is the same, no career the same. So I would never, ever think of taking credit for anyone’s success.


Carl Slaughter is a man of the world. For the last decade, he has traveled the globe as an ESL teacher in 17 countries on 3 continents, collecting souvenir paintings from China, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, and Egypt, as well as dresses from Egypt, and masks from Kenya, along the way. He spends a ridiculous amount of time and an alarming amount of money in bookstores. He has a large ESL book review website, an exhaustive FAQ about teaching English in China, and a collection of 75 English language newspapers from 15 countries.

His training is in journalism, and he has an essay on culture printed in the Korea Times and Beijing Review. He has two science fiction novels in the works and is deep into research for an environmental short story project.

Carl currently teaches in China where electricity is an inconsistent commodity.

Interview: Kristine Kathryn Rusch

interviewed by Carl Slaughter

Kristine Kathryn Rusch has vast experience and enormous success as an author, editor, and publisher. She also has a lot of experience as a workshop instructor. As an editor, she has a strong background in magazine and anthologies. She was editor of F&SF magazine for several years and was publisher and editor of Pulphouse’s Hardback Magazine. Her latest project is Fiction River, a new anthology series.

 

Carl Slaughter: First, let’s talk about anthologies. What gap do anthologies fill that magazines cannot?

Kristine Kathryn Rusch: Anthologies can focus on a single topic or can take risks that a magazine cannot. A magazine is responsible to its readers and its advertisers. An anthology has no advertisers and builds its readership on its topic and the table of contents alone. That allows for a lot of freedom.

 

Carl: Tell us about Pulphouse. Was that your first experience with anthologies? What did you hope to accomplish? How successful was it, from an editor/publisher standpoint and from a fan standpoint? What ultimately happened to it?

Kristine: Well, do you have a few years? We can talk about this.

First Pulphouse: the Hardback Magazine was an anthology series of twelve issues. Pulphouse itself was a publishing company that my husband Dean Wesley Smith and I started. So I assume, when you ask about Pulphouse, you mean the anthology series. The answers to your questions are very different if we’re talking about the publishing company.

So the Hardback Magazine was my first experience with fiction anthologies. I’d edited a lot of nonfiction “anthologies” in the form of radio programs.

We did an issue zero “a blank book” to show bookstores we were serious, to practice the form, and to get the bugs worked out before the first issue. I mailed a copy of issue zero to every major name I invited into the anthology, and got all of them to submit stories, including people like Jack Williamson and Kate Wilhelm, who never worked with start-ups. I also got a Harlan Ellison story which was unusual, something I didn’t know at the time.

The anthology series’ reputation just went up from there. Everyone who wrote wanted to be in it, and everyone who heard about it wanted all twelve issues. It was a limited run series, and when we reached the end of the run, we were done. Twelve issues, which we are still very proud of, and whose reputation grows as each year passes.

 

Carl: What lessons did you learn from the Pulphouse project and how will you apply those lessons to Fiction River?

Kristine: Again, I’m assuming you’re asking about the anthology series and not Pulphouse Publishing. Because, again, the answers would be very different.

I learned how to edit fiction from Pulphouse and how to manage fiction writers, which is a real trick. I then went on to edit The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, where I learned even more.

Because we built everything from scratch at the Hardback Magazine and I had to revamp everything at F&SF, Dean and I knew how to set up Fiction River. We know what we want from each issue, how we will accomplish it, and what it will take, both financially and editorially. We did not know that with Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine.

 

Carl: Why raise funds through Kickstarter instead of seeking corporate backing or self-publishing?

Kristine: Let me stop laughing first. Corporate backing? Seriously? Do you mean selling the anthology to a traditional publisher? I’ve done that too, and it’s not pretty. They want only J.K. Rowling and Stephen King, not new writers, and they don’t want to pay anyone anything. Then they’ll edit the content themselves and kick out stories that might build a reputation or win an award. I will never, ever, ever work with traditional publishing again on an anthology. If I want to do something with my vision, then I’ll do it on my own. Oh, wait! I am.

I don’t understand why going through Kickstarter makes self publishing impossible. Do you mean self-funded? Again, I’ve done that before (see Pulphouse) and that way lies madness. Bookstores pay on 90 days if they pay at all, and distributors want a huge cut. E-books bring in money but 60 days (minimum) after publication. So paying authors and paying for the production becomes a dicey proposition in the best of times.

Dean and I could do that and were thinking of it, but ultimately, we decided to use Kickstarter. As we said in our Kickstarter pitch, we wanted to gauge interest in the project. We can think the project is great, spend a fortune doing it, and have no one buy the books.

What we learned with Kickstarter is that we have an even bigger audience than we thought. And that’s extremely worthwhile. We’re even more excited about the project now that the Kickstarter was successful.

 

Carl: Many anthologies use a lot of reprints. Fiction River will be entirely original material. Why?

Kristine: We’ll do reprint anthologies as a separate line of anthologies down the road. But readers deserve new fiction, instead of reading the same five stories over and over again. I’ve written stories that have been reprinted a dozen times and even better stories that no anthologist has picked up, mostly because they don’t know the story exists.

When we do reprint anthologies, we’ll have someone dedicated to the anthology series who will find the stories that we need. We had someone in mind, but we lost him last year, and that put the project on the back burner.

 

Carl: Will Fiction River be strictly speculative fiction or will it include other genres? All subgenres of speculative fiction

Kristine: With the exception of F&SF (a rather large exception, I grant you), I have never edited anything that limits itself to one genre. I find that uninteresting in the extreme. I write in every genre, I read in every genre, I edit in every genre. The first Fiction River Special, which will be out in a year, will be a crime anthology, with stories from many genres, stories that feature a crime. So I suppose you could call it a mystery anthology, but that’s not really accurate.

In our first year, we’ll have a fantasy anthology, an sf anthology, a romance anthology, an urban fantasy, a crime (mystery) anthology, and one other as yet undetermined. I suspect that the next year will be just as eclectic.

 

Carl: What’s the business model? Will Fiction River be print, electronic, website, Kindle? Will it be a periodical or a series, do we look for it on the magazine rack or the book rack? Set expiration date or indefinite? How much will it cost?

Kristine: Fiction River is an anthology series, with a regular schedule. A hybrid, if you will. It will come out in print and ebook editions, with some website activity, a bit of audio, and a few other things. You’ll find each edition on the book rack, with no pull date. But like a magazine, you’ll be able to subscribe. The price varies depending on what you want. An e-book? That’s one price. A print book with the ebook bundled in? Another price. A year’s subscription to the ebook? A third price. And so on.

Carl: How has the internet and epublishing had an impact on the anthology market?

Kristine: Not as much as you’d think. Mostly the impact has been on actual magazines. There are more magazines now than ever before.

 

Carl: You’ve done magazine and you’ve done anthology. Which do you prefer?

Kristine: I prefer anthologies. They’re limited and they don’t interfere with my own writing career.

 

Carl: Finally, a tip for aspiring writers. Which has more opportunities for breaking in, anthologies or magazines?

Kristine: Magazines. The editors read slush and are always looking for new writers. Anthology editors rarely do.

 

Carl Slaughter is a man of the world. For the last decade, he has traveled the globe as an ESL teacher in 17 countries on 3 continents, collecting souvenir paintings from China, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, and Egypt, as well as dresses from Egypt, and masks from Kenya, along the way. He spends a ridiculous amount of time and an alarming amount of money in bookstores. He has a large ESL book review website, an exhaustive FAQ about teaching English in China, and a collection of 75 English language newspapers from 15 countries.

His training is in journalism, and he has an essay on culture printed in the Korea Times and Beijing Review. He has two science fiction novels in the works and is deep into research for an environmental short story project.

Carl currently teaches in China where electricity is an inconsistent commodity.