Interview: Rhiannon Held

written by Carl Slaughter

R-Held-230x300Rhiannon Held is a frequent panelist at writer’s conferences. She is a archaeologist by profession. She is the author of the Silver series, an urban fantasy published by Tor. In this interview, she answers questions about character development and world building, then wraps up by sharing her take on critique groups.

 

CARL SLAUGHTER: Before discussing writing advice, let’s give writers a peek at your own stories. Especially the premise and the setting. I’m particularly interested in the fact that the werewolves in your Silver stories don’t involuntarily transform on full moon nights and are werewolves by birth rather than conversion. Isn’t that like a vampire that doesn’t suck blood, a witch that doesn’t cast spells, a dragon that doesn’t breathe fire, a mermaid that can’t swim, a zombie that’s not dead? Aren’t bite infection and involuntary transformation the age old curse of the werewolf?

RHIANNON HELD: You underestimate the diversity of the source material! If you look up the origins of the werewolf myth, you find a variety of different causes and symptoms in stories spread over time and geographic area. A werewolf could be a witch, murder, sorcerer, sinner, someone risen from the dead… They could transform with a spell, drinking from a wolf’s footprint, wearing a wolfskin belt, wearing an entire wolfskin, a Satanic ritual, rubbing their body with a salve, or†¦you get the idea! Basically, it was a monster that was whatever the culture adapting it needed it to be, based loosely on the idea of a combination of a human with a powerful predator. Most mythological monsters are like that,compare Eastern dragons with Western dragons, for example. Both are dragons, but they are different based on what their cultures wanted them to symbolize.

So when I decided to write about werewolves, I thought first about what I wanted them to symbolize, and built their characteristics from there. The infected, involuntarily-transforming werewolf has been used so often to symbolize the animal side of human nature, I felt like there wasn’t much more to say about it. In creating werewolves who were a species with their own culture, history, and religion, I wanted to symbolize the stress of belonging to one secret culture at home and one public culture at work and school, as has been the plight of immigrants and persecuted minorities all over. Essentially, I’ve done what storytellers have done through the ages: I adapted a familiar monster to tell a new story. That’s what monsters are for!

 

Q: The vast majority of creatures in fantasy novels are the classic creatures that have long since been incorporated into our culture, and therefore, unfortunately, well developed creatures. Are there any more new angles on vampires, werewolves, etc? Or is the reader appetite still strong enough authors don’t need to work at developing original fantasy creatures any time soon?

A: The seeds of half this answer lie in the one above. There are always new angles on old creatures, if you dig deep enough to make them symbolize new things. I personally think that’s the key: not trying to tweak a few of the usual characteristics of a creature, or to find a new situation to put the creature into, but really creating a new purpose for the creature. Take vampires, for example. In their current form, they tend to symbolize the temptation of pleasure weighed against the immorality or evil of gaining that pleasure. If you stay with that symbolism, and try to put the vampires in a mall instead of a castle, or have them drink blood from suckers in their hands instead of using fangs, you’re still not very original if they remain young, beautiful, and sexy. Those are the things that make the temptation symbolism work. If I decided instead to make vampires symbolize dementia and the trouble of prolonging human lifespan without also extending mental acuity, I might do something like make the vampires drain chi and memories along with it. Then they’d start to lose their self-identity as they become overwhelmed with other people’s lives. Which sounds like an intriguing idea, actually†¦

The other half of this answer is that I think adapting old creatures and making up new creatures are apples and oranges. If I want to adapt an old creature, I want to adapt an old one, and if I want to make a new one, I want to make a new one. They’re completely different processes, that you’d do for different reasons, not simply because the other one had failed. An adapted old creature allows you to use a shorthand with your reader. You don’t have to explain the whole creature, you can just explain the creature’s differences from the standard set of characteristics. Having saved all that time, you can use it build your characters, or your intricate plot, or whatever else instead. If you make a new creature, on the other hand, you’re making a choice to spend some time at the beginning of your story or novel making sure your reader is comfortable with it. Neither is a bad thing, but different stories are paced differently, and if your story idea is based on snappy, exciting action from the first page, you run the risk of killing it by doing a lot of explaining of your creature. It also often varies by sub-genre: I’ve noticed more traditional fantasy and science fiction novels, both of which are known for their immersive, detail-oriented world-building, often have their new creatures visible from the very beginning. Urban fantasy, better known for fast pacing, often has its new creatures discovered by the characters over the course of the novel. That way, the reader finds out about the creature with the characters, rather than needing all of the creature’s characteristics at the beginning.

 

Q: When do you use a fantasy creature as a metaphor, when do you use their inherent nature to develop to create a crucible or dilemma or conflict for the main character, when do they just contribute to the world building, and when are they just for fun? Does every story have to have a humanoid character or would readers respond to a story that’s all creatures? How do you develop fantasy creatures that human readers can relate to?

A: Everything’s a metaphor! Well. Most things. I happen to find metaphors fun to embed, but I don’t think they’re usually enough in and of themselves to justify a story element. So I like to write creatures for the purpose of conflict, world-building, or other story structure, and include the metaphor as a bonus Easter egg. I think if your creature is a protagonist, they do have to have internal conflict, but that’s what makes a good character in general. Their creature nature doesn’t necessarily have to be the thing providing the conflict,but it’s a useful tool for the job. Creatures can certainly be important for world-building, especially in urban fantasy. When you’re using the real world as a basis, the points of difference, like creatures, can be especially important. Finally, “just for fun”: I think fun is a category much like metaphor, in that it piggy-backs with something else, but isn’t necessarily a strong enough reason on its own. There’s a certain amount of “it’s there because it’s cool” a writer can get away with, but not a lot.

In the case of creature protagonists, I think that it’s generally a good idea to have at least one that’s human enough for people to relate to. That doesn’t mean they have to be physically humanoid. What they have to have is a set of emotions or motivations the readers would recognize. If they recognize the emotion or motivation as something they’ve felt themselves, they can relate to it and through it, the character. If your protagonist is emotionally recognizable, I think you could certainly have a story entirely about creatures. In fact, that can open up a whole suite of new plot possibilities, when you don’t have to spend space on “how does the human protagonist relate to the creatures?”

 

Q: What’s the difference between an urban fantasy and paranormal romance and does it really matter?

A: I think the difference between urban fantasy and paranormal romance is a useful one, because they provide different reading experiences. In PR, the plot elements support the romance. In UF, the romantic elements provide a little spice to the plot. A reader who wants to read PR will probably be focusing on and rooting for the romance. A reader who wants to read UF will probably be focusing on and rooting for the plot to be resolved. That sounds fairly straight forward, but now imagine swapping those two fans’ books. The PR reader gets a UF, and is disappointed and angry because the romantic couple hardly have time for a single kiss what with all the plot crises and they don’t even get a happy ending. The UF reader gets a PR and is disappointed and angry because the plot is set aside for pages at a time while the couple flirts.

The time I see PR and UF most confused is when people are observing them from a great distance based on their familiarity with fairly unrelated genre, like military SF. From a distance, smaller details are hard to see. But though cozy mysteries and police procedurals are both mysteries, that doesn’t mean your Miss Marple-loving grandmother wants to read the gory descriptions of multiple victims of a rapist serial-killer. It’s less about the specific elements than the reader experience those elements promise. Is the novel optimistic or pessimistic? Is it humorous? Is the humor cerebral or slapstick? Do we get deep into the characters’ heads? PR and UF offer fundamentally different reading experiences on that level, whether they both happen to feature vampires in the modern day or not.

 

Q: Do all female characters have to be a kick ass heroine, high priestess, chosen one, or a wicked witch? What about mothers, scientists, BFFs? Ender’s sister played a crucial role in his life, to such an extent his commanding officer appealed to her to exercise her influence over him, yet she wielded neither sword nor spell nor badge nor political authority. Do all main female characters have to be strong?

A: Who ever said those were the only choices for female protagonists? Really, any discussion of female protagonists could be greatly simplified by deleting the word “female.” Are the only possible protagonists fighters, religious leaders, chosen ones, or magic users? Of course not, even in D&D! Do all protagonists have to be strong? It depends on what you mean by strong. They have to be active, and do things instead of sitting around while people around them act. They have to be compelling to make the reader want to keep reading. They have to be well-developed so they’re like real people, instead of cardboard cut-outs reciting lines based on their single personality trait. In the past, female characters frequently fell down on all three of those things, especially the first and last. If a damsel waits to be rescued, that’s passive, not active. If she has no personality beyond the fact that she loves a man and cries a lot, she’s not well-developed.

Where I think people sometimes run into trouble is that they equate “strong character” with “physically strong character.” Male characters don’t have to be physically strong either,they can be physically weak and wily, diplomatic, charismatic, clever, persistent†¦All of those characteristics and many others can lead to an active, compelling, well-developed character, male or female.

 

Q: How do you make characters realistic but interesting? Or does every character have to be exceptionally wise, intimidatingly sinister, remarkably intelligent, unusually skilled, etc.

A: I think it’s realistic to say that every well-rounded real person has a thing or two they’re good at. Not “the best at,” mind you, but good at. In character terms, competency in at least one area makes for a better character as well. If they’re competent at something, they can apply those skills to the problems the plot is throwing at them, which draws the reader in as they cheer the character along. I think there’s even a sweet spot, which you may have noticed if you’ve watched the Olympics. Obviously people who are completely untrained can’t even begin, so there’d be nothing to see, but people who are the best make a feat look too easy, and finish it too quickly. People who struggle at little at it but triumph in the end make us watchers realize the true scope of what they’ve accomplished. Characters who are competent but not the best struggle at the problems of the story and draw readers in.

I think the trouble beginning writers get into is equating “reasonable level of skill” or “high competency” with “best ever.” Why does a character have to be the best archer in the seven kingdoms when they’re the best archer in a castle at seige? Or the third best, while the first two are covering other gates? Being the prophesized one, or the only magic user of a certain type born in ten generations, etc. is in some ways even worse than being the best ever archer. Then the character is the best ever by virtue of being the only, yet they so often have no skills at all to have earned it. I think that method of making your character special can ring hollow very easily.

Confidence can be part of a compelling character as well. Justified confidence, that is. False confidence can come across deluded or arrogant, and make the character harder to relate to. And if a character is centered and confident about every aspect of their life, they probably don’t have much room to grow over the course of a story. But if the character has some of the reasonably good skills I was talking about above, and is confident about those skills, if not other areas of their life, you have a recipe for an interesting character.

 

Q: How does a female writer get inside a male character’s head for the reader to explore and vice versa? How does an emotionally and psychologically whole author develop a broken character?

A: By remembering that, underneath it all, we’re all human beings. Any character built from a foundation of “male” or “female” or “broken” rather than “human” who happens to be male, female, broken, pessimistic, optimistic, snarky, sunny…is destined to run afoul of stereotypes. After that foundation, I think research, keen observation, and empathy definitely help. When researching, you can read people’s accounts of their own experiences, or ask people about them. Then in your daily life, if you watch how people who differ from you react to a given situation, and then imagine how they must be feeling as they react, you’re well on your way to creating a character who differs from you in a similar way. Empathy also means that you understand someone’s emotions by casting them in your own terms, rather than dismissing those emotions as strange or alien. And casting others’ emotions in your own terms can be as simple as a manner of degree. Maybe you’ve never been broken, but you’ve certainly been bruised. That means you have an in to imaging what that feeling intensified might be like. When you’re finished, you can also always get a reader like your character to look it over and tell you if you’ve missed anything.

 

Q: Can religion play a significant role in a fantasy story? Doesn’t religion take away from the inherent creature-oriented nature of the fantasy genre?

A: Is fantasy creature-oriented? I’d argue it isn’t, even urban fantasy, and especially traditional fantasy. It’s as people-oriented as all the genres, and perhaps creature-decorated, though not always. I’ve seen as much magic-decorated traditional fantasy as creature-decorated.

That aside, what’s the role of religion? Personally, I think that every culture in any genre, fantasy or not, has to have an explanation for why the world exists and why it functions the way it does. That explanation doesn’t have to be religion, it could be science, or it could be something based on the particular magic system of the world, but it’s basic human nature that we need an explanation of some kind. I think that’s what writers sometimes forget: they remove religion but they don’t put anything in its place, leaving you with a culture of people who apparently don’t care what happens when they die, for example. As an anthropologist, I simply don’t believe that. Fantasy opens up your possible explanations, though, because instead of figuring the world was created by some invisible divine force, people could know the world was woven by the spirits that everyone’s seen flitting around in the depths of the woods. The explanation can be tangible.

That said, I don’t think any part of religion or the alternate explanation has to be the focus of a story. Real religions vary through time as well as space in how much they’re part of a particular culture’s daily life. If you want to tell a story that doesn’t have much to do with religion, you can set the religion or world explanation in the background. If you want to make religion a large part of a character’s daily life but not really impact the plot, you can do that too. There’s no reason not to use it to its full potential.

 

Q: What makes a good critique group? What makes a bad critique group? Do you even need a critique group?

A: I’ll start with the last part of that. I think every successful writer needs other eyes on their work to provide another perspective. Who those eyes belong to can vary. Beta readers, first readers, leaving it up to your editor…a critique group is an excellent source of other eyes as well as brainstorming partners, but I don’t think one is necessary if you can get thoughtful perspectives elsewhere.

What makes a good critique group are primarily the same qualities that makes a good person to critique your work in general. You want them to be able to quantify their initial reactions when reading, and start the process of figuring out what caused those reactions. Sometimes their suggestions for fixing problems might be useful, sometimes they might not, but the process of identifying the problems in the first place is the really key part. A beginning critiquer might say “chapter two bored me.” A more experienced critiquer might say “chapter two bored me and I think it’s because they’re talking in one room the entire time and they never disagreed.” Any reader can react, but figuring out a cause takes skill, and either that skill or the ability to develop that skill is what you want to look for in a critiquer.

A less helpful critiquer,I won’t necessarily say bad, because even advice that’s unhelpful can be offered with the best of intentions,can be one who either praises too much, or is too harsh. Saying “everything’s good” doesn’t help a writer improve, even if it makes them feel good to hear it. Phrasing problems harshly can make the writer shut down and not hear anything the critiquer says. In that case, it’s not a matter of them “not being able to take it,” it’s a matter of failed communication. The goal is to communicate a way to improve, and the best way to do that is to phrase the critique tactfully rather than letting your frustration or negative emotional reaction run rampant. That’s the difference between “this sucked so hard I wanted to burn the manuscript” and “this had some serious weaknesses that made it difficult to read.” The former is just bleeding off the critiquer’s frustration. It’s not giving the writer any additional information.

There are a few additional considerations when it comes to critique groups versus single critiquers. A good personality mesh is necessary among everyone, which is a more complicated proposition than finding a set of beta readers you can relate to individually. I’ve seen groups that cracked jokes all the time upset someone who didn’t use humor that way. I’ve also seen groups founder because one writer was prolific and no one else could ever finish anything. None of that’s about a right way or a wrong way, just about finding people who are a good fit. And a group that’s a good fit can be worth its weight in gold to your writing.

 

I thought I’d finish off with a little bit about what I’m working on right now, in case you were curious. I’m working on revising the first book in a new series. It’s urban fantasy once more, but leaving aside the creatures this time and focusing a magical system arising from myth.

 

 

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.

Interview: David Edison

interviewed by Carl Slaughter

David EdisonSome stories are so crossed genred and so distinctive, they defy category. Try David Edison‘s richly imaginative debut novel: “Welcome to the City Unspoken, where Gods and Mortals come to die. Contrary to popular wisdom, death is not the end, nor is it a passage to some transcendent afterlife. Those who die merely awake as themselves on one of a million worlds, where they are fated to live until they die again, and wake up somewhere new. All are born only once, but die many times . . . until they come at last to the City Unspoken, where the gateway to True Death can be found. Wayfarers and pilgrims are drawn to the City, which is home to murderous aristocrats, disguised gods and goddesses, a sadistic faerie princess, immortal prostitutes and queens, a captive angel, gangs of feral Death Boys and Charnel Girls . . . and one very confused New Yorker. Late of Manhattan, Cooper finds himself in a City that is not what it once was. The gateway to True Death is failing, so that the City is becoming overrun by the Dying, who clot its byzantine streets and alleys . . . and a spreading madness threatens to engulf the entire metaverse.” The Waking Engine, the first in a series of 4, published by Tor, is not only richly imaginative, it is richly descriptive and richly detail. Edison shares his vision for the story.

 

CARL SLAUGHTER: WHY DEATH AS A THEME?

DAVID EDISON: I’ve always been disappointed with how little attention we pay to the end of our lives: we’re all born, and we all die. Birth gets so much celebration, but for most of our lives we live in collective denial, pretending that death happens to other people, and is not something we’re encouraged to talk about, let alone confront. I was raised in a pleasantly travel- and death-obsessed family, and so it was a taboo I’ve always been interested in transgressing.

 

CARL: WHY REINCARNATION AS A PREMISE? OR IS REINCARNATION THE CORRECT TERM?

DAVID: Following on the previous question, I’ve also always been disappointed with humanity’s overly-simplistic views of the afterlife,as I perceive them. Angels and harps and clouds? Bring a book. Lakes of fire? Hardly energy efficient. Reincarnation as a cockroach? No thanks. I wanted to imagine an afterlife that was as rich and complex and full of possibilities as life,or more so. Reincarnation is a fine term,but reincarnation as oneself, which gives one more time to explore and develop one’s identity than our short span on Earth.

 

CS: WHY SO MUCH ATTENTION TO THE INHABITANTS AND GEOGRAPHY AND ARCHITECTURE OF THE CITY?

DE: The City Unspoken is the biggest character in the series, and fleshing it out was a joy. Worldbuilding, character development, and immersion are all important and, ultimately, what’s the point of imagining a bizarre, baroque, filthy-beautiful city-at-the-end-of-all-worlds without exploring it? When you find yourself writing a story about a city, you best write about the city!

 

CS: WHY A HAPLESS EARTHLING AS A PROTAGONIST?

DE: I am a hapless Earthling, as are my readers! The story was always about Cooper finding the city, and coming to terms with the nature of the metaverse. From the beginning, this was a story about adulthood, about Cooper coming into his own in a world bigger and scarier than anything he’s ever known. I very much wanted our universe to be a part of this larger multiverse, which I call the metaverse,I knew from the outset that it would be a much stranger place than a traditional secondary universe.

 

CS: WHY A NEW YORKER?

DE: In many ways the City Unspoken is the spiritual antithesis of New York,if New York is the city where you can make it big, the City Unspoken is the place where you go to cease to be, in a big way. There are threads of my own experience as a New Yorker, and of New York during and after 9/11, so New York was as baked-in to the story as Earth and Earthlings. Lastly, if anyone has the skills to navigate and survive a strange new city while still remaining essentially hapless,at least at the outset,I imagine it’s a New Yorker.

 

CS: WHY SUCH A LARGE CAST OF CHARACTERS?

DE: This is the first book in a series of four,I knew that with a world this big and a palette so varied, the story would demand more depth of character development and breadth of action than I could fit into a single volume. I didn’t know it, but I was essentially writing “Epic Weird,” and the world needed to populate itself to support that arc. Take George RR Martin, for example: we’ll probably never get a huge amount of detail on the green-apple-Fossoway vs red-apple-Fossoway split, but that level of world-building makes the story so much richer.

 

CS: WHY SO MANY EARTHLINGS AMONG BEINGS THAT HAVE ASSEMBLED FROM THE VAST UNIVERSE?

DE: Well, there are only a handful, but when you’re writing about a city at the end of all worlds, and Earth is one of those worlds, then having Earthlings present is a gun that needs to go off,having set up such rich possibilities, some of them have to be fulfilled in what are, hopefully, interesting ways. I won’t go into too much detail for fear of spoilers, but Earthlings are also the ones that Cooper notices: the same way I can go to Stockholm and my eyes will find the one person wearing a Brown University sweatshirt. Sure, there are more Swedes around than Rhode Islanders, but I’ll still go home and talk about the guy wearing the sweatshirt I recognized.

 

CS: WHY AMERICAN HISTORICAL FIGURES?

DE: Following the threads of New York in general and post-9/11 New York in particular, this story shaped up to be something of an American fairytale, or nightmare. America plays a role in the story throughout the books. We read so much European-inspired secondary-world fantasy, and there is plenty of primary-world fantasy set in America, but I wanted to play with the idea of America in a semi-secondary world. Without spoilers, the narrative of America has changed and morphed and corrupted itself in some ways over the course of history, and American historical figures can speak to that directly.

 

CS: RICHARD NIXON IS THE MOST NOTORIOUS FIGURE IN AMERICAN HISTORY. WHAT’S HIS ROLE IN THIS STORY?

DE: Without spoilers, he shows the possibilities that await us in our future lives. Some other familiar faces have stayed the same, but Nixon has taken the idea of starting over and ran with it. And milked it. Once I got the image of Nixon-as-occasionally-adorable-street-urchin into my head, I couldn’t resist writing it. Who could?

 

CS: WHY THE POV OF A ROOKIE WHO IS LOOKING FOR ANSWERS RATHER THAN A VETERAN WHO IS LOOKING FOR SOLUTIONS?

DE: The Waking Engine is very much a story of adulthood and finding-one’s-way, and while I do enjoy stories with super-competent protagonists, I don’t think that would have worked here, in a world that needed so much boot-strapping and relied less on established tropes. As the first book in a series, a super-competent protagonist would have less room to grow, whereas our boy Cooper has nowhere to go but up. It’s probably not coincidental that this was my first novel, and having only published a single short story before writing The Waking Engine, I was likely more aligned with a rookie looking for answers!

 

CS: IS COOPER A CHOSEN ONE CHARACTER WHO IS DISCOVERING HE’S THE CHOSEN ONE, DECIDING WHETHER HE WANTS TO BE A CHOSEN ONE, AND FIGURING OUT HOW TO BE A CHOSEN ONE, OR IS THERE MORE TO HIM THAN THAT? FOR MOST OF THE STORY, HIS EXPLORATION OF THE CITY AND HIS PURSUIT OF ANSWERS IS PASSIVE. WHY IS HE SUCH A SLOW BREWING HERO?

DE: Cooper is figuring himself out at the same time as he’s figuring out the world into which he’s been dropped. I think the pace of his development is pretty realistic,if I were dropped into another universe, it would probably take me a few days to adjust. Given the range of time the book covers, Cooper’s development is ahead of the curve. And with any multi-book story, character development is a bit of a long con. A bonus from that decision is that the reader gets to adjust to the world more naturally, alongside Cooper.

 

CS: I CAN EASILY SEE THIS BOOK ADAPTED TO THE BIG SCREEN. IT HAS TIM BURTON WRITTEN ALL OVER IT. WHO WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE PLAY COOPER? SESSTRI AND ASHER? LALLOWE THYU AND PURITY KLOO? SOME OF THE OTHER MORE INTERESTING SPECIES?

DE: Thank you! I certainly won’t disagree! My dream cast: Tilda Swinton as the Cicatrix, Kerry Washington as Lallowà « Thyu, Emily Blunt as Sesstri and Alexander Skarsgard as Asher, Oliver Platt as Oxnard Terenz-de-Guises, Kristen Bell as Purity Kloo, Tori Amos as Alouette, and Chris Pratt or John Krazinsky as Cooper.

 

CS: ANY SEQUELS? ANY OTHER FICTION PROJECTS IN THE WORKS?

DE: Yes! The Waking Engine is the first in a series of four books. The sequel, for which the working title is The Noonday Plague, is scheduled to be published in May of 2015.

 

CS: A FREQUENT COMPLAINT AMONG GOOD READS/AMAZON READERS IS DESCRIPTION OVER PLOTTING, TOO MANY SUBPLOTS, AND TOO MANY CHARACTERS. SIMILAR EARLY COMPLAINTS ABOUT ANOTHER AMBITIOUS NOVEL. HERE’S A SAMPLE: “The author started out with a chess board, and he started moving a few of the pieces. You were hooked on to the story thinking that a winner was going to emerge through some breathtaking gameplay or at least, sleight of hand. What has happened is that the chess board has started falling off the table. All the pieces are moving uncontrollably and at random as they fall towards the ground. The author may contrive to have the board land flat on the floor with one of the kings standing all alone on the board while all the other pieces scatter and break when they hit the ground. I only wish the chessboard had fallen off a short table instead of falling off the edge of the grand canyon!” THE TITLE WAS “GAME OF THRONES.” SO YOU’RE IN GOOD COMPANY.

DE: Two things I love: good company and weddings. 😉

 

Check out what Library Journal and Booklist have to say about David Edison’s “The Waking Engine”.

 

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.

Interview: Robert Gleason

interviewed by Carl Slaughter

RobertGleasonTor executive editor and nuclear terrorism expert Robert Gleason answers questions about his novels The Wrath of God and End of Days.

 

CARL SLAUGHTER: Is End of Days a prequel to The Wrath of God? A direct prequel or an indirect prequel?

ROBERT GLEASON: WRATH OF GOD takes place 50 years after END OF DAYS. Kate Magruder, the heroine in END OF DAYS, is an 80+ old woman, and the Citadel is the only bastion of technology left in the world. A modern incarnation of Tamerlane the Earthshaker is coming down the rubble of the Alaskan Highway leaving mountains and towers of human skulls in his wake. As his consort, the Lady Legion, once tells Tamerlane: “We have made a skull of the earth, around whose throat we string not gems but dead worlds.” The Citadel is ill-equipped to confront such a warlord, so Katherine Magruder’s son, Richard,who was trained by Los Alamos scientists and an Apache shaman,opens a hole in Time. Together, they bring back George S. Patton, Stonewall Jackson, Amelia Earhart and a triceratops to combat Tamerlane in the Southwestern desert in the Battle of the Apocalypse. When Rosie O’Donnell heard that plot description, she said: “Smoke a lotta crack, don’t you, Bob?”

 

One of the main characters has apocalyptic visions. What’s the premise for this? Genetic? Paranormal? Pharmaceutical?

Kate Magruder’s grandmother was a legendary real-life female Apache war shaman named Lozen. Kate inherits Lozen’s visionary abilities.

 

Why Russia as a setup rather than India, Pakistan, or Iran? Why Islamic extremists rather than extremist religionists in Israel or America or secular nationalists in China. Or Britain, which has both nuclear weapons and a growing population of Muslims, as well as a recent history of terrorist attacks?

Russia has the most fissile explosive of any foreign power, and it’s easier to steal. If you run a nuclear forensics test on the fallout after the nuclear attacks, it will come back as Russian-made nuclear bomb-fuel. Also my rogue state wants to destroy the developed world, and Russia has enough arms to do it. So does the US. No other nations capable of hitting the world with thousands of nukes, except the US and Russia. If my rogue state wants to get the developed world to wipe itself out, it needs both Russia and US fully on board. Why did I choose Muslim terrorists? Well, actually I chose a Middle Eastern nuclear rogue state, which employs real soldiers and sailors. I fictionalized the name of the state but was thinking of a combination of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, which are close, almost inseparable allies in reality. The Saudis leadership is extremely wealthy and has a long history of funding terrorism. They even funded Pakistan’s nuclear program, still fund it, and Pakistan,among the world’s rogue states–has the most ambitious nuclear weapons program. To make END OF DAYS nuclear scenario work, you’d need a rogue state with those kinds of capabilities. (I took my scenario from Herman Kahn’s THINKING ABOUT THE UNTHINKABLE. It’s called “Catalytic Nuclear War.”)

 

Do weapons like Black Stealth Crow – “a creature of inconceivable cunning, elusive as smoke, invisible as night,” designed to evade infrared detectors, change shade in a flash, and hide in plain sight” – already exist?

The Crow exists and is called the B-2 Bomber. It was designed to assassinate the Soviet leadership during the Cold War and destroy their Control-and-Command Centers by delivering multi-megaton strikes in sequential laydown patterns. I got most of my information from some books by Bill Sweetman. Here’s a wiki-link for it.

 

Explain and describe “the no-man’s-land between nuclear energy and nuclear weapons.”

The Oak Ridge and Sandia Nuclear Weapons Labs have done studies arguing that nuclear bomb-fuel reprocessors can be built with equipment from old wineries or old dairies by as few as a half-dozen technicians. Oak Ridge claimed terrorist groups could do it. It is certainly within the capabilities of a rogue state. The two labs in separate studies said building it could take less than six months. If you have the spent fuel rods from a nuclear power reactor, Oak Ridge said you could reprocess enough bomb-grade plutonium to fuel the Nagasaki bomb. This can be a clandestine program capable of eluding weapons inspectors. (The UN’s IAEA nuclear inspectors are notoriously inept.) With such low-tech nuclear explosive reprocessors, a nuclear power reactor can become a nuclear bomb-fuel factory. Former Japanese prime ministers and defense ministers have said they opted for nuclear power primarily because it allows them to stockpile dozens of tons of plutonium explosive and has allowed them to develop technology with which they can rapidly assemble nuclear weapons if the need for them arises. That is a major secret reason why so many nations love nuclear power. Nuclear power is also said to be the nuclear terrorist’s training wheels.

 

If the material for nuclear weapons is so easy to obtain and if building and detonating the bomb is so simple, why haven’t terrorists already used nuclear weapons?

The two nuclear terrorist groups that have the greatest access to nuclear explosive,the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan and Lashkar-e-Taiba,are both in Pakistan and, as they are currently constituted, are only about seven years old. The TTP has been blowing up Pakistani nuclear installations since 2006, and in 2012 announced it wants to launch attacks on the US. These organizations were created, trained and funded by the Pakistan military and intelligence services and are far more sophisticated and better funded than any other global terrorist groups. They are really military organizations and states within the Pakistani state. Also it’s not that hard to acquire Pakistani nuclear explosive. Obama’s first Pakistani ambassador said in a Wikileaked memo that she didn’t fear terrorists stealing Pakistani nuclear explosive. She feared the Pakistani officials and the people guarding it would steal it and give it to terrorists. A significant amount of it is continuously transported in truck and van convoys to elude detection by the US and India. Terrorists could hijack the convoys. The groups aren’t very old though. Also if those groups were to do it right, they’d want to stockpile enough nuclear explosive to take out a half-dozen US cities. That would take time and planning.

 

You’ve been researching nuclear weapons for 30 years. What has that research involved?

I’ve talked to a lot of military experts, former defense secretaries, physicists, scientists, politicians, Special Forces generals and other officers. I read a million studies. I never found a definitive book on the subject though, because the so-called experts are afraid to trace the funding for nuclear proliferation/terrorism and to expose key individuals. They were also afraid of “the no-man’s-land between nuclear power and the nuclear bomb.” The experts spend part of their time working for the government and are loath to antagonize government officials. I only broke down and wrote the non-fiction book because I couldn’t commission one for the experts I pitched.

 

Have other nuclear experts corroborated your research and agreed with your conclusions?

Lots of top military officers and top government officials, including a former defense secretary and chairman of the energy committee read, vetted the book and you can see their endorsements. I sent my nonfiction book, THE NUCLEAR TERRORIST, out to a lot of experts, met and corresponded with a number of them, and no one disproved or seriously attacked anything in it. What amazed me, however, was how little the experts knew about actual nuclear terrorism activities including those groups in Pakistan we just discussed. (One of the very top guys said he know “nothing about nuclear terrorism.) They also weren’t familiar with those Oak Ridge and Sandia studies I described above. Most of the so-called experts focus on nuclear arms control among nations not terrorist groups, and the odds of terrorists stealing nuclear weapons and using them are remote. Terrorists could however steal nuclear explosive and cobble together crude but powerful terrorist nukes. Most of the experts I know don’t want to get into the no-man’s-land between nuclear power and the nuclear bomb. They work with governments and even the nuclear industry.

 

Is End of Days a warning or a prediction? Is there still hope? What can be done to avert nuclear terrorism?

END OF DAYS is a warning. If terrorists nuke us, they would very likely try to frame an innocent third party for the attack. How do you prove the innocent party didn’t do it? Terrorist nukes leave no terrorist fingerprints, and the nuclear bomb-fuel could have been stolen from an innocent country. We might well retaliate against the innocent. Also we seldom focus on nuclear theft prevention. We always focus on illicit nuclear bomb-fuel programs. Terrorist would be more likely to steal their bomb-fuel, then build crude but powerful terrorist nukes and use them. It’s easier and safer for them.

 

Bestselling authors and high ranking military and political officials have called your book prophetic and plausible and have compared it to On the Beach, The Road, The Stand, Swan Song, Left Behind, Fail Safe, Sum of All Fears, Dr. Strangelove, and even the Book of Revelation. A few have compared you to Dante, Milton, and even Nostradamus. By contrast, readers on Good Reads said it’s too long and too descriptive and has too many characters and anthropomorphic animals and weapons. How do you reconcile such drastically different perspectives on the same book?

Booklist and PW gave it starred reviews. Booklist said it was better than THE STAND and that it was “in a class by itself.” PW said it made “THE ROAD look like a stroll through the park.” LJ gave it a rave review. I received no negative print reviews. All the experts and professional writers liked it. In fact, l got lots of great fan mail and it was a national bestseller. It is, however, a long complex novel. I never have fewer than ten intertwining viewpoint chapters in the book at any time. I’ve never seen that done before in any book. I did this in part because I wanted to dramatize Armageddon,something no novelist has ever done, all the other end-of-the-world novels being post-apocalyptic, not apocalyptic. I devote 150 very dense pages,almost a third of the book,to the apocalypse and I do it through that multitude of viewpoint characters and viewpoint chapters. I needed all those viewpoint characters to fully dramatize the apocalypse. I thought that was important when I wrote the book. It may be, Carl, that I wrote a serious novel and the publisher packaged it as a thriller. Hence, some readers thought they were getting THE STAND and were surprised to get something much more complex than THE STAND. I also packed the scenes with immense amounts of scientific, geographic, political, historical, architectural, anthropological, mythological and religious detail. The serious reviews and professional authors love and admire that sort of stuff. I do make the reader work, and I guess some people couldn’t handle it. The book was a national bestseller, got the best print reviews I ever saw, so I’m not too perturbed.

 

You were prominently featured in a History Channel documentary entitled “Prophets of Doom.” Is that documentary available online?

My website has a seven-minute clip from that documentary. If the readers want, they can click onto it and see if they like it. I’m sure the History Channel website would sell them a DVD. Or they can see if HC is rerunning it. They rerun it with fair regularity. It had high ratings, and now some filmmakers are doing a documentary on me and THE NUCLEAR TERRORIST. They have excellent commercial and critical credentials, and we start shooting next month. It’s not in the can though. Hollywood is weird. Who knows what will happen?

 

Do you have any tips for speculative fiction authors who want to use nuclear weapons as a premise?

The Pentagon refuses to seriously study nuclear terrorism. Among other things, it’s complex, requires some knowledge of science, and the consequences of nuclear attacks are largely unpredictable. All you can do is develop possible scenarios. Therefore, I would try to absorb as much hard information on the subject as I could. To that end I’d read THE NUCLEAR TERRORIST: His Financial Backers and Political Patrons in the US and Abroad. I wouldn’t recommend writing anything like END OF DAYS. It was too hard, too time-consuming and too exhausting. Write something easier.

 

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.

Anime Review: Brynhildr in the Darkness

written by Laurie Tom

brynhildrinthedarknessBrynhildr in the Darkness tried very hard to make me stop watching it, probably more so than any other series I can think of in recent years. On the one hand it has a smart and likeable main character who manages to pull off being a high school student protagonist without coming off as unrealistic wish fulfillment. Ryota is definitely not that powerful and works within the limitations of being an ordinary human caught up protecting artificial witches from the secret organization that created them.

On the other, Brynhildr in the Darkness is home to gratuitous fanservice. It’s not that blatant early on, but after Kazumi joins the growing group of escaped witches, the fanservice kicks into high gear. (And there is a highly graphic death in episode 2 that was almost enough to make me stop watching, but there’s nothing else like it later on.)

Most of the series is still very much about super-powered witches; battling the ones pursuing them, protecting the ones that ran away. But after Kazumi’s introduction scarcely an episode can go by without a short scene with gratuitous (though censored) nudity that has no bearing on plot or character development at all.

And that’s too bad, because the situation the escapee witches find themselves in is a compelling one. Deemed failed experiments due to not being powerful enough, the main protagonist witches managed to escape their own termination, but they need a supply of pills from the laboratory that created them or they will die within two days of taking the last one.

The witches are all teenage girls who have been held in captivity since they were young, so what they plan to do with their limited remaining lifespans tend to be ordinary things like going to high school, hitting their sixteenth birthday, and seeing the beach for the first time. They’re very easy to sympathize with, and most of them are quite selfless when it comes to others of their kind. They know that each new escapee they add to their group reduces the length of time all of them can live since they must split their remaining pills even further.

After discovering their predicament, Ryota refuses to let them die when he can help, even knowing that he will be killed if the secret organization discovers him. Though he can’t fight, he’s very bright, serving as the group’s strategist and guide to the world in general. He convinces the witches to keep living while looking for a way to get more pills to keep them alive.

Unfortunately the greater storyline of why the witches are being created is rather muddled and nonsensical. The anime concludes a story arc, but it’s clearly a season ending rather than a series ending and the last few episodes feel a bit rushed, with two characters appearing in the epilogue with no explanation at all. (I had to read fan comments to make sense of why they were there.)

This may have to do with trying to condense too much of the manga into a thirteen episode TV series. My feeling is that the show writers took their time introducing everyone and then realized they only had 6-7 episodes left in which to conclude the first major story arc of the manga, so they skipped smaller subplots and/or super-condensed larger ones to cram anything of importance into the second half. There are even characters appearing in the two opening sequences who will not show up until the second to last episode.

This also prevents the series from having a satisfying resolution as everything that does happens feels a little pat. It doesn’t have a proper build-up and supporting characters come and go without the audience really getting a chance to know them.

Of special note is the first set of opening credits, which is not only visually striking in how it portrays the well-being of the witches versus the rest of the world, but has one of the most memorable instrumental opening tracks in recent years. When the main theme plays during an episode chills go up my spine.

Brynhildr in the Darkness is a mixed bag and that makes it very difficult to recommend, especially after seeing the second half. A lot of potential was squandered here. Despite the fanservice though, I’d be tempted to pick up the manga if it was available in English.

Number of Episodes: 13

Pluses: extremely likeable main character, compelling reason to care what happens to the cast, one of the most striking sets of opening credits anime has had in years

Minuses: mood-ruining fanservice in a story about life and death, rushed plotline in the second half, unsatisfactory resolution

Brynhildr in the Darkness is currently streaming at Crunchyroll and is available subtitled.

 

laurietomLaurie Tom is a fantasy and science fiction writer based in southern California. Since she was a kid she has considered books, video games, and anime in roughly equal portions to be her primary source of entertainment. Laurie is a previous grand prize winner of Writers of the Future and since then her work has been published in Galaxy’s Edge, Penumbra, and Solaris Rising: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction.

Interview: Vixy and Tony

interviewed by Carl Slaughter


vixytonyFilk music. Never heard of it. Neither had I until I listened the Vixy and Tony‘s mesmerizing song “My Heart Was Like the Moon.” They have won 2 Pegasus awards, one for songwriting, one for performing. Tony gives us the inside story on the Filk genre and the band.

 

CARL SLAUGHTER: WHAT EXACTLY IS FILK?

VIXY AND TONY: Filk is a type of folk music associated with sci-fi and fantasy fandom. It’s something that’s been a tradition at SF conventions for several decades. Late at night, after the rest of the convention has wound down, some hardy folks with guitars get together and play songs until the wee hours. The name “filk” started off as a typo, which stuck. The name is appropriate because it’s a slightly tweaked version of folk music. For more detail on the topic of filk music, you can look up the Wikipedia article on filk music. Some of that Wikipedia entry was written by me as a matter of fact. (Where by “me”, I mean, Tony, the one being interviewed.)

 

IS THERE A FILK ASSOCIATION WITH MEMBERSHIP, CONVENTIONS, AN AWARD, MUSEUM, HALL OF FAME, BOOKING SERVICE, ETC?

There is no single membership or association for filking. Filk is a community, rather than a club. Filkers are just people who like SF and like to write songs about their favorite books, shows, or movies. They like to gather together at SF cons and share songs. Anyone who wants to, can show up at a filk circle and participate. Filkers are very accepting and welcoming.

You can sometimes find online mailing lists or other social groupings of filkers. For instance, where we live, in the Pacific Northwest, there is a regional filk mailing list and web site called the Emerald Forest Filk Society. There is also a filk mailing list for the United Kingdom, there was an IRC channel at one point, that sort of thing.

Over time, the filking at SF conventions got to be a large enough thing, with enough people participating, that they started to become entire convention “tracks” of their own, and eventually, spun off into their own separate conventions. There are now several regional filk conventions held annually, in various places around the world. Our Pacific Northwest convention is held in late January/early February, and it’s called Conflikt.

Some of the filk conventions give awards. For example, the OVFF convention, held yearly in Ohio, gives the Pegasus awards for various songwriting and performing categories, and the FilKONtario convention, held yearly in a suburb of Toronto, has a yearly Hall of Fame awards ceremony.

 

toon_rockgodsIS FILK ON THE ITINERARY OF GENRE/INDUSTRY CONVENTIONS, FAN CLUB MEETINGS, WRITER WORKSHOPS, ETC, OR IS IT MORE INFORMAL?

Filk can be very informal, springing up organically at SF cons. That’s how it started in the first place, of course, and it still happens that way much of the time. However most SF conventions will reserve one or more rooms for filk circles late at night, and some of the more interesting conventions will have concert performances of some of the more well-known filk musicians. Our local Pacific Northwest regional convention, Norwescon, has a very active music track that encompasses filk, nerdcore and general geek music. Coincidentally, at the time of this writing, the person running the filk track at Norwescon, Dara, is also the one running the Emerald Forest Filk web site and mailing list that I mentioned earlier.

At SF conventions which host filk tracks, you will sometimes find that the panel schedule will include filk-related panels, such as songwriting workshops, harmony workshops, guitar workshops, that sort of thing. If you attend one of the actual dedicated filk conventions, then the entire convention is devoted to those things, and the entire weekend will be filled with panels, concerts and filk circles.

 

WHAT’S A TYPICAL SUBJECT OF A FILK SONG? AUTHOR, STORY, CHARACTER, THEME, SUBGENRE?

Filk songs are about a wide variety of topics which either directly or tangentially touch upon SF fandom. You can get songs which are very specific retellings of a particular book or movie, or maybe they are like fan fiction, imagining other stories in those same universes. The Vixy & Tony song “Apprentice” is one example of such a song, where we imagined a backstory for a character in the Firefly television series, and told the story through the eyes of an entirely new character.

Geek and fandom topics are also a big subject for filkers. Songs about computers are a large part of filk, as are songs about going to SF conventions, songs about being a geek (or a fan) in general, songs about mythology, or literature, or math… the list goes on. Let’s just say that filkers can write about anything they want, it’s just that we tend to write about the things we love the most: SF and geekdom.

Filk songs can be serious or funny, originals or parodies, and can encompass many different styles. Mostly filk songs are in the style of folk music, but can also range to celtic, to rock, to rap, and other styles. Although there is usually a certain specific flavor to filk that is hard to describe, anything can be a filk song if you have written the song with the intention of it being a filk song. Anyone who actively participates in filk circles and is a part of the community, anyone who self-identifies as a filker, and who intends for their songs to be enjoyed by the filk community, is a filker, and by definition, the songs they write are filk songs.

There are other genres which are very similar to filk. What separates those genres from filk is simply the association and self-identification. For instance, if you write geeky songs in other genres but you don’t attend filk circles and aren’t a part of the filk community, then they’re not technically filk songs. Nerdcore, for example, is specifically geeky hip-hop music, and you don’t usually see a lot of crossover between filkers and nerdcore artists, although some crossover does indeed occur. There is a lot of comedy music out there, very hilarious songs which can also be very geeky. But if the artist writing and performing those songs aren’t also filkers, you can’t really call them filk songs. I enjoy all of those kinds of music very much, of course, I’m a consumer of just about any type of geeky music I can get my hands on. Most filkers I know are the same way. For example, I’m a huge fan of Jonathan Coulton, whose songs are frequently enjoyed very much by filkers, so JC has a lot of fans in the filk community. But he’s not really a member of the filk community himself, and so his songs aren’t filk songs.

Parody is a very common theme in filk music, some of the most brilliant song parodies I’ve ever heard are filk songs. Some people in the filk community specialize in parody, and that’s all they do. Filkers often use the word ‘filk’ as a verb to mean that they have written a parody of another song and that their parody is intended to be a filk song, as in, “I filked ‘Horse Tamer’s Daughter'”. Sometimes people get this confused, and think that the words “filk” and “parody” are synonymous when they’re not. Though filkers do tend to write a lot of parodies, not all parodies are filks and not all filks are parodies.

 

HOW DID YOU TWO TEAM UP?

I met Vixy at Orycon in Portland, where she was performing with her husband Fishy under the band name “Escape Key”. We became good friends, and when Fishy got bored of playing the guitar, I started playing guitar for her when I could. Eventually we formed an official duo, “Vixy & Tony”, which was what other filkers had already come to know us as by that time. Vixy and Fishy aren’t their real names, by the way, they’re just Internet handles that stuck, and now all their friends know them by those names. We all live together in a big house in Seattle, where Fishy makes art for Burning Man in the garage, and I’ve set up a little home recording studio upstairs, next to Vixy’s crafting space. I’m working on our second album now, in fact.

 

WHO DOES THE SONGWRITING, WHO PLAYS WHICH INSTRUMENT, AND WHO SINGS?

For the older songs, before we teamed up, Vixy wrote everything: Music, lyrics, arrangement, all of it. But that was very hard for her, doing it all by herself, so after we teamed up, now we have a pretty good collaboration system: Vixy writes the lyrics, and then we collaborate on the music. Usually we start with a first draft of the lyrics, sometimes just a verse and a chorus, then decide upon an overall style for the song. Then I start coming up with chord progressions on the guitar, based on the desired style. She gives me feedback on the way the chords fit the lyrics, and we make changes to the chords to fit the lyrics or vice versa. She will either come up with a melody based on the chord progression, or, sometimes she will already have parts of a melody in her head, and I will write chords which fit that melody, and fill in the gaps. Sometimes I will make a suggestion to change the melody to fit the chord progression I wrote. Occasionally I’ll write sections of words or melodies myself, or provide suggestions for the lyrics in spots. Frequently we will collaborate on the verses and choruses but she will leave the bridge up to me (she calls me her Civil Engineer because I make her bridges for her).

Instrumentally, I play the guitar, Vixy plays the djembe (it’s a kind of standing drum), and we have friends who help us on other instruments. On the albums, we’ll get a wide variety of musicians to play the parts using instruments that we could never bring to a filk circle. I do all the album production, selecting and hiring other musicians where needed, in order to get the exact sound we want. Live, we’re quite different than on the albums. In live concert performances and sometimes in filk circles, our best buddies are Betsy Tinney on cello and Sunnie Larsen on fiddle. Vixy is our lead vocalist, but I will occasionally sing a little bit, and Sunnie also sings on a few songs. We try to play with other musicians wherever possible, so you’ll frequently see us collaborating with other people, mashing up our band with theirs. At Betsy’s recent party for her solo album “Release the Cello”, at one point we managed to get something like ten musicians on stage at once, all playing on the same song, all of us friends who had played together before in other combinations. Betsy’s a bit of a musical nexus, you see.

 

HOW OFTEN DO YOU PERFORM?

We try to go to at least a few conventions per year, where we can play a concert and/or participate in filk circles. Sometimes after we do a concert we are too tired to go to the filk circle that night, but we try to get to the ones that we can. In between conventions, we occasionally play at Wayward Coffeehouse in Seattle, which is SF-themed and owned by a wonderful loud Browncoat from Australia. So we probably only do about 5-10 shows a year… it’s just a hobby you see, we’ve got day jobs.

 

MY FAVORITE OF YOUR SONGS HAS MESMERIZING LYRICS, BUT I’M NOT SURE I UNDERSTAND THEM. CAN YOU EXPLAIN WHAT ALL THIS MEANS?

The song “My Love Was Like the Moon” is one of our cover tunes, it’s written by our good friend Blake Hodgetts, another filker from Oregon. Blake wrote it with female pronouns, and when Vixy sings it she usually changes them to male pronouns. It’s a fairly straightforward relationship song, much like many pop songs about relationships that have gone before it. But we cover this one because it’s particularly beautiful and expresses its sentiment in a special way. It contains extremely geeky references and metaphors about math and science (it’s the only song I’ve heard that mentions phi, the mathematical “golden ratio”), yet it’s gorgeously poetic and painfully poignant. It’s about the experience that many of us has had: being in love with someone and depending on that person, but discovering that you aren’t able to be everything that they need you to be. In the end, because you love them, you have to let them move on, and continue to grow, which they will do better without you. In our lives, as we move through different relationships, many of us have been on either side, or both sides, of that particular equation. So the song is one that usually resonates quite strongly with many listeners.

 

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.

Interview: Anatoly Belivosky

anatolybelilovskyAnatoly Belilovsky is a rising star in the steampunk subgenre. He was born in a city that went through six or seven owners in the last century, all of whom used it to do a lot more than drive to church on Sundays; he is old enough to remember tanks rolling through it on their way to Czechoslovakia in 1968. After being traded to the US for a shipload of grain and a defector to be named later (see wikipedia, Jackson-Vanik amendment), he learned English from Star Trek reruns and went on to become a pediatrician in an area of New York where English is only the 4th most commonly used language. He has neither cats nor dogs, but was admitted into SFWA in spite of this deficiency, having published stories in NATURE, Ideomancer, Immersion Book of Steampunk, Daily SF, Kasma, UFO, Stupefying Stories, Cast of Wonders, and other markets.

 

CARL SLAUGHTER: MOST WRITERS STRUGGLE TO BREAK INTO DAILY SCIENCE FICTION. YOU’VE SOLD STORIES TO THEM. WHAT APPEAL DO YOUR STORIES HAVE?

ANATOLY BELILOVSKY: A story unlocks its market the same way a key opens a door, by lining up its bits with lock pins. Some bits must match the publication’s needs , length, style, subject matter; some must, in some ineffable way, tickle the editor’s fancy. I’ve had excellent experience with DSF; they tend to publish what I like to read more often than not, and also more often than not they like what I send them. In fact, if you look at my bibliography, NATURE, Kasma, Stupefying Stories, Toasted Cake, and DSF bought 3 or more of my stories, each. That’s half of my entire output in only five markets. Granted, these are the five most flash-friendly publications, but there is also undoubtedly an excellent match between my sensibilities, and their editors’.

 

WHY STEAMPUNK? WHAT OTHER SUBGENRES DO YOU SPECIALIZE IN?

Steampunk is basically 19th century fanfic, and my homage to authors of that era who shaped my own writing: Poe, Verne, Pushkin, Gogol, Chekhov, Conan Doyle. And I’m a history buff, too, so it’s a natural fit. Other subgenres , alternate history, magic realism, humor. Or combos thereof. One of my own favorite stories will be reprinted soon by Fantasy Scroll magazine: “Hither and Yon,” wherein a nexus of alternate realities converges on… but why spoil it?

 

“KULTURKAMPF” HAS BEEN SELECTED BY THE IMMERSION BOOK OF STEAMPUNK. WHAT IS IT ABOUT “KULTURKAMPF” COMPARED TO YOUR OTHER STORIES THAT BROKE THE ANTHOLOGY BARRIER?

Must have been that immortal phrase I had my fictional Richard Wagner utter: “Fools! They seek to defeat me with Bizet!” Although at least one editor fell in love with the military rank I invented for the story, “Timpanenfuhrer.”

 

 

WASN’T “KULTURKAMPF” YOUR FIRST STORY? OR AT LEAST ONE OF YOUR EARLIEST STORIES? AGAIN, VERY FEW WRITERS SELL ANY OF THEIR EARLY WORK. HOW MUCH PREP WORK WENT INTO YOUR FICTION CAREER BEFORE YOU HIT THE PRINT BUTTON FOR THE FIRST TIME?

Not quite the first, but yes, very early. The editor of IMMERSION BOOK OF STEAMPUNK was actually one of its critiquers on the Critters workshop and asked for it specifically. “Prep work” — this reminds me of a literary agent I met once at a con almost 30 years ago. I told her I wanted to write, and about what was going on in med school – I had just started clinical rotations then. She nodded and said, “It’s all copy.” So here we are, 30 years’ worth of family, career, and other experiences later. Yes, from the viewpoint of my writer side, it’s prep work. From every other viewpoint, it’s life. A bit farther down I mention my favorite line from a Chekhov story – but it didn’t hit me how brilliant that line is, until I actually saw enough undemonstrative people under overwhelming pressure, and saw how small and subtle and poignant are the ways of their display of these pressures.

 

 

MOST OF YOUR STORIES HAVE BEEN FLASH PIECES. ANY PLANS TO INVADE THE NOVEL MARKET?

Yes! Of this I dream: to crank out my novels, see them sold before me, and hear the lamentations of their copyeditors. One of my literary heroes is Georges Simenon, he of the novel-a-week school of writing. I can pretty much manage a thousand words a week, two thousand if inspiration strikes. Now if only there were a niche for flash novels…

 

 

YOUR PROFESSION IS IN THE MEDICAL FIELD. ANY OF YOUR STORIES INSPIRED BY YOUR MEDICAL KNOWLEDGE/EXPERIENCE?

Inspired, yes: in the footsteps of Chekhov, Bulgakov, Conan Doyle (the usual physician writer suspects) in drawing upon that experience for knowledge of how people act under pressure. But I rarely write medical fiction: too many biomedical ideas get discarded because I know they wouldn’t work in real life, and can’t get past the shame of perpetrating a palpable falsehood in the one subject about which I may never be intentionally misleading , “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.” (As you can see from QUANTUM MECHANICS, I have no such trouble with other sciences.) Two exceptions – NOR CUSTOM STALE, in NATURE, and DON’T LOOK DOWN, in Daily SF and Toasted Cake, both touch upon medical aspects of aging. A lot of what happens in medicine is a lot less exciting than it sounds. As a resident, I oversaw a voodoo exorcism of a dying boy in an intensive care unit. It was a last-ditch measure that the parents asked to try, and they brought their own practitioner, and everyone agreed that it could do no harm but no one wanted to be there when it happened, so I volunteered. So this quiet, unassuming gentleman in a business suit came to the ICU, whispered a prayer, sprinkled something on the child’s forehead, thanked me and left. That was that. Total anticlimax.

 

FOR THOSE WHO HAVE NOT READ ANATOLY BELIVOSKY’S LATEST DAILY SCIENCE FICTION STORY, SPOILERS IN THIS QUESTION AND ANSWER. In “Quantum Mechanics,” a man’s life is rewritten by, guess what, quantum physics. Was it the Mexican restaurant cook or the mechanic across the street who rewrote the main character’s life? Based on the implications of the next question, I’m guessing the cook. Why is the cook’s girlfriend alarmed when the customer asks about the shark bite that took the cook’s hand, and later, sad when she manned the cash register to take the customer’s money? Did the cook lose his hand saving his girlfriend’s life? Does he practice quantum mechanics on people who ask about the shark bite and the lost hand to prove to them that their life isn’t as bad as they think, ie, he lost his hand but it was worth losing and his life is still good because he has his girlfriend?

No, I was actually thinking of the mechanic: the unseen offstage presence, the actual hand that closes the lid on Schroedinger’s box, then opens it again to reveal the new reality – or at least “good as new.” Then again, once the story is out it belongs to the reader: one interpretation is as good as any other. Subject to the same caveat, this is my interpretation , and, again, not speaking ex cathedra: Here is the cook who, yes, lost his arm saving a woman from a shark. He lives across the street from “quantum mechanics” who, for a very modest fee, can rebranch the reality to where he got to keep his arm , good as new , and the shark got to keep its breakfast. Her anxiety, in part, is from her triggered recollections, and in part perhaps from a sense of insecurity , will he, or won’t he, reconsider his decision? He knows that will never happen; the answer to: “Did that hurt?” , is for the woman’s ears: “Not that much. Not really” , meaning: I’ve no regrets about the bargain I’ve made. And maybe for them, this is the second branch? Perhaps the cook first watched her die, then, with the mechanic’s help, went back to save her, and both of them remember both realities? And, knowing this, both look upon the story’s narrator with “countenance more in sorrow than in anger?” If you will allow a small digression, let me mention what I believe to be one of the most brilliant sentences ever written. It’s from Chekhov’s “A Lady with a Dog,” from the scene where the narrator sees the eponymous, and quite attractive, lady, with the eponymous dog, and approaches, ostensibly, to look at the dog. At which point: “He does not bite,” she said and blushed. I may be reading too much into it, and be wrong, but it’s my prerogative as a reader: I think this gives a wide-open view of her state of mind, of her desire to get the narrator to come closer, of her longing for, imagining, and blushing at the thought of the touch of the narrator’s hand. Analyzing my own line in retrospect: “Not that much. Not really.” It feels like it’s treading the middle ground, between: “Not in the least!” – which would have been a palpable lie, and: “Hurt like hell!” – which would have given the woman grounds for feelings of guilt on her part, or for thinking he might trade her back at some point when the sacrifice might seem not worth the outcome. Here he is both acknowledging her feelings, and tries to assuage her. This is all in retrospect, of course. Ultimately, it seemed the right thing to say at the moment and so I wrote it.

 

YOU’VE HAD A LOT OF YOUR STORIES PUBLISHED BY PODCAST SITES. THREE QUESTIONS ABOUT PODCASTING: WERE THESE ORIGINALS OR REPRINTS? DID YOU SUBMIT STORIES TO PODCAST SITES OR DID THEY TAP YOU ON THE SHOULDER? DO PODCASTS PAY MORE, LESS, OR THE SAME AS ZINES?

One original (NIGHT WITCH to Tales of Old,) the rest reprints. I love podcasting; my writing runs to storytelling, I have to hear the story in my head before I can write it, and the podcasts I’ve been on so far have done magnificent jobs with narration and sound engineering, and given both the higher expense of audio production, and the lack of revenue stream endemic to all Creative Commons endeavors, payments have ranged from token to low-semipro. But to hear the perfectly timed musical punchline to KULTURKAMPF as produced by Cast of Wonders, or Tina Connolly’s sublime Toasted Cake interpretation of LAST MAN STANDING, a zombie story that quotes Sartre and Camus, is a pleasure that overrides all other considerations. All stories audio produced so far have been submissions; the one “shoulder tap” was for a sequel to a story previously podcast. The sequel is written and first rights sold to its original market, but the publication of that anthology is woefully delayed, and so the podcast waits for its availability.

 

 

ENGLISH IS NOT YOUR NATIVE LANGUAGE. I have a degree in journalism and 25% of my freshmen class failed their first English department writing course. So I know from experience that even most native speakers don’t have good writing skills. I teach English as a Second Language and I’ve taught several writing classes to ESL students. So I also know from experience that most ESL students, even most of the English majors, can’t write a complex sentence completely and correctly, much less a polished, understandable, interesting manuscript. Even the English majors who specialize in translation make a lot of minor mistakes. You were not raised in America and it’s much harder to learn a second language as an adult than as child. How then did you not only master English but also master fiction?

Nabokov may have been too modest (or falsely so) when he wrote, in the preface to LOLITA: “My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian language for a second-rate brand of English.” Nabokov, of course, gets the medal for best literary command of English as a second language, with oak leaf clusters for French and German in which he had also wrote published stories while living in Europe. Starting in another language can make one more acutely aware of the fine structure of English, of how English sentences work, of how it compensates for lost declensions and abandoned conjugations; of how our first language’s classics had been translated (or mistranslated) into English, and vice versa. It certainly has not deterred the many amazing multilingual writers working now , I know for certain that Ken Liu and Alex Shvartsman both acquired English far later than they did their respective first languages, but the same is probably true of a number of others. Ken Liu, Alex Shvartsman, and James Beamon belong at the top of another relevant list – writers whose advice, encouragement and critique, all dispensed with unstinting generosity, brought me much farther than I ever would have gotten without them. To quote your question — “How then did you not only master English but also master fiction?” If “master” even remotely applies, as a verb, a noun, or an adjective, to any of my writing, it is to them that the credit is due. And then there is the subject of literary translation which a whole ‘nother bag of skills altogether, which I am trying to break into with variable success – the “uptick” of “variable” being my translation of WHITE CURTAIN by Pavel Amnuel, out in the May-June 2014 issue of F&SF to very encouraging reviews (all of which say nothing about the translation, a fact I find most flattering as it means I succeeded in making the translation seamless and invisible.)

IF ENGLISH IS THE 4TH MOST OFTEN SPOKEN LANGUAGE IN YOUR AREA OF NEW YORK, WHAT ARE THE FIRST THREE?

In my neighborhood, Russian, Spanish, and Urdu. In which I say, respectively, Spasibo, Gracias, and Shukriya.

 

Note: One of Anatoly Belilovsky’s Daily Science Fiction stories is a collaboration and was published under the pen name A.J. Barr.

 

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.

Interview: Joanna Volpe

interviewed by Carl Slaughter

agent-joanna-volpeJoanna Volpe is the founder of New Leaf literary agency. New Leaf represents Veronica Roth, author of the Divergent series, now a hit movie. They also represent Leigh Bardugo, author of the New York Times best seller Shadow and Bone, which is scheduled to hit the screen in 2015. Joanna has build a stable of talented authors who share her passion for storytelling. She also hired a screen agent with an impressive resume. She has business savvy and keen editorial instinct. She has succeeded at every stage in her career. She is an agent to watch, an agent to work with.

 

CARL SLAUGHTER: MOST LITERARY AGENTS TRANSITION FROM BOOK EDITOR. YOU LEAPFROGGED THAT STAGE. HOW DID YOU ACHIEVE SUCCESS WITHOUT EDITORIAL BACKGROUND?

Joanna Volpe: Really? Many agents I know were never an editor. In fact, they come from all walks of life: lawyers, film industry, teaching, social work, etc. I do have some editorial background; I worked for a small press called Blue Marlin Publications my first year in the business. Outside of that, I’m a self-taught editor and a lot of that came from reading and writing myself. I’m a terrible writer though. But I should also note that editing my clients work is a small portion of my job, and in fact my job is to find them the right editor! So I think it’s definitely OK not to be an editor first.

 

YOU WERE COMPARATIVELY YOUNG WHEN YOU MADE THE MOVE FROM AGENT TO ENTREPRENEUR. WHY LAUNCH YOUR OWN BUSINESS SO EARLY IN YOUR CAREER? WASN’T THAT A BIG RISK?
Agents are entrepreneurs, even when they’re working for someone else. Running your own client list might as well be running a mini-business. So the leap wasn’t that difficult to make. Of course there is risk involved whenever you’re laying your own money on the line, but I knew it was a risk worth taking. I wasn’t planning on doing it so soon, but it was the right time for Nancy to take a step back, and that helped me to make the decision.

 

NOW THAT YOU OWN YOUR OWN AGENCY, DO YOU STILL HAVE TIME FOR AGENTING OR DO YOU SPEND MOST OF YOUR TIME MANAGING THE BUSINESS AND MANAGING THE STAFF?

At first it was a big (and rather difficult) adjustment, and we’re still trying to perfect the system. I hired a CFO and business manager about a year ago and it was the best decision I ever made. He is brilliant and handles most of the management so I can focus on my clients.

 

OPERATING A SUCCESSFUL AGENCY REQUIRES PLAYING AND WINNING THE NUMBERS GAME, NOT JUST BEING ABLE TO RECOGNIZE GOOD LITERARY QUALITY. HOW DID YOU MASTER THE BUSINESS SIDE OF THE EQUATION? MENTOR? NIGHT CLASSES? FINANCE MANAGER? JUST GOOD WITH NUMBERS?

How about all of the above? My parents have owned and operated their own businesses my whole life, so I grew up in an environment where work was home and home was work. My father always says that “you have to be creative to stay in the game,” and he’s absolutely right. He is the guy on-the-ground, and my mom is the bookkeeper. I helped her in the office when I was a kid, and she had me balancing my own checkbook by the time I hit 6th grade. That’s just how my childhood was. But even beyond that, I’ve had a number of mentors over the years that continue to inspire me. I also took some night classes in the NYU publishing program in 2006 and 2007, and they were really helpful. And of course, there’s my CFO. He changed the way I was looking at the Big Picture, and I’m so grateful to him for his expertise! And finally, I have a fantastic financial adviser. As you can see, success is rarely won alone.

 

QUERIES, PARTIALS, SUBMISSIONS, MANUSCRIPTS, CLIENT MANUSCRIPTS, CONTRACTS, EMAILS, PHONE CALLS, MEETINGS. HOW DO YOU JUGGLE ALL THE LOGISTICS? DO PERFORM TRIAGE OR DO YOU ALLOT CERTAIN TIMES AND A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF TIME FOR EACH TASK?

Ha! I wish I had a good answer for this one. I’m still trying to figure out the best way to juggle it, especially when you throw a lot of traveling into the mix, which is what my 2014 has been looking like. (It’s only May, and I’ve been to 7 different states and 2 countries this year!) All I can say is that I have an incredible team, and I wouldn’t be able to juggle any of it without them.

 

DO YOU STILL READ ALL YOUR SLUSH? DO YOU STILL HAVE TIME TO READ BOOKS THAT ARE NOT IN THE SLUSH PILE?

I read some slush, and I also have an assistant who reads a lot of things first. It just depends–we actually discuss it first and split it up each week. I’m desperately trying to make more time for published books that aren’t client books. It’s important for agents to read a lot and read widely so we can keep our fingers on the pulse! But it’s sometimes tough to squeeze it in.

 

DO YOU STILL HAVE TIME FOR WRITERS CONFERENCES, WRITERS WORKSHOPS, AND GUEST ADVICE COLUMNS?

I’ll do 1-2 a year of these things, but not as much as I used to. I also contribute to an awesome and informative publishing blog called Publishing Crawl.

 

“LUNCH WITH THE EDITOR.” IS THIS LEGENDARY RITUAL UNDERRATED OR OVERRATED?

Both. It’s not nearly as fancy as someone might think (though it can be, sometimes). But it’s also underrated in the fact that too many people rely on social media to interact these days! A lunch can be so much fun, and it’s still the best way to really get to know an editor.

 

HOW OFTEN DO YOU DECIDE TO REPRESENT A BOOK BUT CAN’T FIND A PUBLISHER FOR IT? HOW MANY TIMES DO YOU SUBMIT A MANUSCRIPT BEFORE FINDING A BUYER?

This truly is on a case-by-case basis, and also dependent on where I am in my career and what kind of talent is seeking me out. As for how many rounds of submissions I’ll do–usually just two, though it also depends on whether or not we’ve revised significantly again.

 

HOW MANY COPIES OF A DEBUT SPECULATIVE FICTION NOVEL COME OFF SHELF BEFORE AN AGENT SMILES? HOW MANY COPIES OF A NOVEL SELL BEFORE YOU HEAR PEOPLE SAY, “OH, SO YOU REPRESENT SUCH-N-SUCH BOOK” OR “OH, SO YOU REPRESENT SUCH-N-SUCH AUTHOR”?

This also depends! It’s not so much about the amount of copies as it is about the entire package and publication roll out. It also depends on how much a publisher paid for the book in the first place. Different things make me smile, not just sales numbers. But as for when I start to REGULARLY get praise for a book or author–that’s usually after it’s hit 50,000 copies if I had to guess. There are exceptions to this though, and I do get praise for clients who don’t hit that number as well.

 

DO REVIEWS HAVE AN IMPACT ON SALES? DO THEY IMPACT MANUSCRIPT BUYING POLICIES AND HABITS? DO YOU CULTIVATE RELATIONSHIPS WITH REVIEWERS?

They can have an impact on sales, but not always. Reviews don’t impact my manuscript representation policies or habits though. Just to clarify–agents don’t buy manuscripts. We represent the authors and the work. As far as relationships with reviewers go, I value the relationships I do have with them very much.

 

DIVERGENT RECENTLY HIT THE BIG SCREEN AND HAD A SMASHING OPENING WEEKEND. “DIVERGENT BREAKS THE YA CURSE” READ THE HEADLINE IN THE WIRE. SHADOW AND BONE IS SCHEDULED TO HIT THE BIG SCREEEN NEXT YEAR. YOU’VE GOT A SCREEN AGENT WITH SOME IMPRESSIVE CREDENTIALS. ARE YOU PLANNING TO EXPAND SIGNIFICANTLY INTO SCREEN?

Divergent opening in theaters was a thrilling experience. Shadow and Bone is still in the very early stages of development, but we’ve placed it in good hands at Dreamworks. I do have another project that starts filming next month called The DUFF by Kody Keplinger. I would love to see more of our projects break into this arena, but I also know it’s a very long and arduous journey, each and every time.

 

WHEN YOU DECIDE WHETHER TO REPRESENT A MANUSCRIPT, IS SCREEN ADAPTABILITY PART OF THE FORMULA? ARE YOU MORE INCLINED TO REPRESENT IF IT’S SCREEN ADAPTABLE? ARE YOU LESS INCLINED TO REPRESENT IF IT’S NOT SCREEN ADAPTABLE?

I got into this business because I love books, first and always. Whether or not something is more inclined to be screen adaptable is not something I take into account when considering if I should represent the author for the long haul.

 

MORE AND MORE, AGENTS ARE PLAYING THE ROLE OF EDITOR AND PUBLICIST. PUBLISHERS HAVE EDITORS AND PUBLICISTS. WHAT ARE YOU DOING THAT THEY AREN’T DOING? HOW DID YOU ASSUME THOSE ROLES? AREN’T PUBLISHERS GOING TO START CUTTING EDITORIAL AND PUBLICITY BUDGETS WHEN THEY REALIZE AGENCIES ARE TAKING ON THESE ROLES? ARE YOU GETTING A HIGHER PERCENTAGE OF SALES FOR ALL THIS WORK?

They’ve already been cutting budgets across the board, even before agents stepped up their game in these areas. If I want my clients to succeed, I need to go to sleep every night and know that I did everything I reasonably could to help them do so.

 

I’VE NOTICED IN YOUR AUTHOR’S BLOGS THAT THEY SPONSOR AN AWFUL LOT OF CONTESTS AND GIVEAWAYS AND MAKE AN AWFUL LOT OF VISITS TO SCHOOLS, CLUB MEETINGS, AND CONVENTIONS. IS ALL THIS ACTIVITY AUTHOR BRANDING, STORY EXPOSURE, FAN BASE BUILDING, OR SUPPLEMENTAL SALES? ISN’T THE POWER OF THE STORY ITSELF THE PRIMARY FACTOR IN SALES?

Depending on the author and the project and the event, it could be any one of those reasons you list, but I do think it all comes down to story exposure and fanbase building. All of the bells and whistles in the world aren’t going to make up for a bad book. So yes, I agree that the power of the story itself is essential, but unfortunately not the primary factor in sales. I’ve seen many a brilliant book go on to sell very little. I hate when I see that.

 

WHY IS IT AUTHORS -MUST- HAVE AN ONLINE PRESENCE? AREN’T THE BRICK AND MORTAR STORES STILL IN BUSINESS? DON’T READERS STILL BROWSE THE SHELVES? WHAT CAN A BLOG OR SOCIAL NETWORKING SITE DO THAT GOOD READS AND AMAZON CAN’T DO?

These questions don’t act against one another–they are all part of the whole. Are brick and mortar stores still in business? Yes–and thank goodness for them! Do readers still browse the shelves? Some do. What can a blog or social networking site do that Good Reads and Amazon can’t? Well, social media gives readers a direct connection to content creators. That’s something that would have been very difficult to do before social media existed. Why must authors have an online presence? Because of consumer expectation. But I don’t think authors need to do everything (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc). They should find the one thing they feel comfortable doing and do it well.

 

HOW IS IT POSSIBLE TO SUMMARIZE A 100,000 WORD NOVEL IN A 2 PARAGRAPH QUERY THOROUGHLY ENOUGH AND CONVINCINGLY ENOUGH TO GET OUT OF THE SLUSH PILE?

It’s possible. Every client I’ve signed has done it. It just takes practice.

 

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.

Interview: Nathaniel Lee

interviewed by Carl Slaughter

Me 2014Nathaniel Lee puts words in various orders. Periodically people give him money for this. The correlation is weak at best, but present. He lives somewhat unwillingly in North Carolina with his wife, son, and obligatory cats, where he maintains a vague sort of career that provides sufficient money to continue his writing and board game habits. Coincidentally, he is the Assistant Editor of both Escape Pod and the Drabblecast (the posts were each offered independently and without knowledge of the other). As a result, he has read enough stories about penises, serial killers, and time travel. He is also an assistant editor for the humorous anthology series Unidentified Funny Objects. Check out his blog at Mirrorshards where he does Very Short Stories. Exactly 100 words. No more. No fewer. Every day.

 

CARL SLAUGHTER: HOW EXACTLY DOES ONE WRITE STORIES EXACTLY 100 WORDS?

NATHANIEL LEE: Start writing and stop when you hit a hundred.

No, okay, seriously, flash fiction is a tricky row to hoe because here’s so little space. Microfiction almost always has to sacrifice some of the key “pieces” of a story: plot, setting, character, theme. Sometimes you shade them out in proportion, sometimes you just do away with one altogether (resulting in “character study” or “world fragment” type stories). If you can use tropes and narrative conventions to make your audience fill in the blanks for you, so much the better.

One thing that it will train you to do is absolutely and brutally trim all ornamentation. If there’s a bit of description that’s just pretty words but that doesn’t advance the core concept of the story, you’re going to feel it bulking against you like a two-liter soda in a snow jacket pocket. You’ll learn very quickly what is absolutely necessary to a story. (And sometimes you’ll find that you need those extra words; I’ve had several full short stories that grew from the fact that the 100-word story they started out as was just too cramped a space to explore them or generate their full effect.

 

HOW EXACTLY DOES ONE ACCOMPLISH THIS FEAT EVERY DAY?

Don’t ask me. I’ve lapsed. 😛 I’m down to one a week at best, now that we have a toddler, and when I do have energy to write, I’m usually working on salable short fiction. So I guess the answer is: free time.

When I’m alert and rested and ready to be creative, it takes as little as ten minutes for me to polish up a new flitterfic. It’s taken up to and over an hour, though.

 

WHAT EXACTLY IS YOUR JOB DESCRIPTION AT ESCAPE POD?
WHAT EXACTLY IS YOUR JOB DESCRIPTION AT DRABBLECAST?

At this point, they’re nearly identical. I manage our teams of slushers, making sure they get the stories and give the basic thumbs-up/thumbs-down in a reasonable timeframe, and then I filter the thumbs-up pile down to the 1-5% that make it to the editor’s desk. Other duties include whatever Norm needs me to do at the time, including emergency audio recordings, working with authors on rewrites, pestering people to send me stories I’ve read elsewhere, etc.

 

WHAT EXACTLY ARE THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THESE PODCAST SITES?

Uh, legion? Escape Pod plays it straight; we do science fiction of a fairly middle-of-the-road style, presented as stories read to you by a narrator, with brief intros and editorial comments. Drabblecast is a Weird market, liable to come at you with body horror or high-brow lit-fic or poetry or goofy cartoons, anything and everything that generates that frisson of “wait, what?” that makes a story Drabblecastian. It’s also much more of a show, if you catch my meaning, with Norm’s big personality rampaging all over every segment and putting a personal stamp on everything that happens, a bit like the old late-night movie shows with the colorful hosts. (Yes, Norm, I am explicitly comparing you to Elvira.) I feel like people listen to the Drabblecast specifically because it is Norm’s show. (Basically, Escape Pod has had four editors and at least as many hosts in its run, and they’ve all done a good job and maintained a recognizable show, but if the Drabblecast ever lost Norm, it wouldn’t be the Drabblecast anymore.)

 

HOW EXACTLY DOES ONE GET CASTED BY THESE PODS?

What, like get your stories on? Uh, well, write a really good story and then send it to us. submissions@drabblecast.org. Advanced players can sell it elsewhere first, since we do a lot of reprints, and thus get paid twice on the same piece.

The other route is to write a story so amazing that when we read it after you have (of course) published it elsewhere, we then hunt you down and demand to give you additional money for it. If you want to make sure we see it, though, best to send it in to the submissions address.

Once we’ve bought a story, we line up a narrator from our stable of volunteers and get an audio file, and then Norm does whatever he does into a microphone and he and Tom chop it up real fine and bring it to a simmer, after which it gets spewed all over the Internet.

 

WHAT EXACTLY IS YOUR JOB DESCRIPTION AT UNIDENTIFIED FUNNY STORIES?

Unidentified Funny *Objects*, please. (U.F.O. – geddit!?) [ Just testing you. ]

Anyway, for Alex I just do volunteer slushing. He has about a dozen people he uses to help filter and sort stories every year. Also sometimes he buys stories off me. (I assume he doesn’t take my slush feedback on them into account. :-D)

 

HOW EXACTLY DOES ONE GET PUBLISHED BY THIS ANTHOLOGY?

Twenty dollars, same as in town. (You send it to the submissions address: ufoeditors@gmail.com. Preferably while submissions are open, which they are not. If the money continues to roll in accordingly, I’m sure there will be a fourth installment next year. Try ’em then. :-P)

 

WHAT EXACTLY GOES ON OVER THERE AT MIRROR SHARDS?

One word, plz. Mirrorshards. [ I knew that. ] And what goes on there is I write flash fiction and post it. Also when a new story of mine comes out elsewhere, I link to it there and update my bibliography, which is a sub-page on the Blogger interface. Real authors maintain actual sites with blogs about their lives and writing habits. I periodically post bizarre surreal snippets and the occasional hyperlink. This is how you can tell I am quality.

 

WHAT EXACTLY IS/WAS YOUR INVOLVEMENT WITH THE CRITTERS WORKSHOP?

Uh, not much? When I was a wee young author, back in 2008, I joined a bunch of writing workshop groups and found out that most of them are terrible and are full of amazingly bad advice. Critters is a decent site if you need a feedback forum (and I think some fairly major names still use it), but the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty bad because your story is literally sent out to a random subset of the membership, of whom a further subset will decide to read it and critique it. I received some comically bad critiques there and at one point had someone threatening me with physical harm because I did not like his (terrible) story. It’s also very slow; you’re waiting a month or two for a critique unless you have the free time to earn the jump-the-line passes by critiquing a dozen stories a week (which I used to have but no longer do). I eventually found myself treating Critters critiques as an aggregate, where if *everyone* was saying the same thing, I’d look into it as an apparent problem with the story, but on the whole, it’s very hit-or-miss. I did meet some very nice and competent writers there as well, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that once you find a smaller group of folks whose taste you know and trust, I’d rather use that group of reliable beta-readers than trust to the whims of fate and the general Internet population. Additionally, since I now read slush for two magazines, I have a lot less energy and interest to devote to detailed critiques of random strangers’ fiction. (As King of the Slush Monkeys, I can read a terrible story and just go “No, this is crap, get out of my inbox” and I don’t have to be nice or friendly or find constructive things to say, just formal and polite “no.”)

 

EXACTLY WHAT WISDOM DO YOU HAVE TO OFFER ASPIRING WRITERS BASED ON YOUR EXACT EXPERIENCE?

Get used to disappointment? No, seriously. There are multiple orders of magnitude more hopeful authors than there are open and available slots in all paying markets combined. While it’s theoretically possible for a wunderkind to immediately flare into Guest of Honor status at all local conventions and instantly quit their day job to write fiction full-time, it is not going to happen to you, dear newbie author (statistically speaking). You’re going to have to keep head down and butt in chair, cranking out stories and improving your skills, and you’re going to have to send your stories out and get them back with form-letter rejections, a LOT, and it’s not much fun and doesn’t really pay much of anything. It’s a lot of hard work and a long, slow process, and for most people it never will become a career in the sense that it can pay the bills.

(Yes, yes, self-publishing revolution and etc. Me, I just don’t have the energy to promote myself quite that frenetically, and frankly the folks that have the skills to hack it as a salesperson and maximize their profits are often not the same folks who have the ability to make me tear up with the beauty of their prose. And even there the success stories are egregiously outweighed by the people who took a shot at it and failed so badly that no one even noticed they were trying. Browse the free and 99-cent books on the Kindle store sometime if you want to feel depressed. About yourself, about humanity, your choice.) (The self-published erotica is particularly good for the latter. My wife reads me excerpts sometimes. She likes them, but then, she is a demonic entity who feeds on human misery and draws strength from the pain and humiliation of others.)

As for actual writing advice, well, honestly, almost all of it is useless because almost all of it has at least one amazingly good counterexample, and more pertinently, what really works for one person (as writer or as reader) sounds dumb to another. I avoid statements about the nuts and bolts of writing because if you’re good enough, you can make anything sing. My advice is to read a lot, and not just idly, but actively teasing apart how and why a story was written the way it was. A good author is thinking about (or better still, has ingrained instincts about) everything down to the specific order in which the adjectives describing a character are placed in a sentence; the better you understand why each word ended up in the place it did, the better you’ll do when trying to sort different words into order yourself.

Read a lot, read actively, and keep butt in chair and fingers on keyboard. The more you write, the more you assess and revise and read and incorporate and revise and write some more, the better you will get. It’s boring, but it’s the only advice I’m willing to guarantee.

 

Note: Diabolical Plots reviewer Frank Dutkiewicz is also associate editor of the above mentioned Unidentified Funny Stories, I mean Unidentified Funny Objects, I mean, well, you know what I mean†¦

 

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.

Interview: Tina Connolly

interviewed by Carl Slaughter

tina_connolly-300x450Flash podcast site Toasted Cake was launched in 2012 by speculative fiction author, theater buff, and painting hobbyist Tina Connolly. Toasted Cake recently posted its 100th podcast. Connolly’s first novel, Ironskin, published by Tor, is a fantasy retelling of Jane Eyre and was nominated for the Nebula award. Ironskin was followed by Copperhead. The third in the series, Silverblind, is due in the fall of 2014. Seriously Wicked, a YA novel, is due in the spring of 2015. Connolly’s short stories have appeared in Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons, and many other magazines. She is a graduate of the 2006 Clarion West workshop.

 

CARL SLAUGHTER: Why did you decide to launch a podcast?

TINA CONNOLLY: Because once upon a time in 2008 or so, Rachel Swirsky asked me to narrate a story for Podcastle. Podcastle led to Escape Pod led to Drabblecast led to Pseudopod led to Beneath Ceaseless Skies led to Three-Lobed Burning Eye led to Cast of Wonders led to Strange Horizons led to Far-Fetched Fables led to John Joseph Adams & Hugh Howey’s anthology, The End Is Nigh. And so on. Basically, I got hooked.

So there I was in 2012 with a book coming out (Ironskin) and another book under contract (Copperhead) and a one-year-old boy and a new-to-us fixer house, and I said, Self, you know what would make this year even better? Podcasting a new story every single week, that’s what.

TL;DR: I be crazy overscheduled, yo.

 

CARL SLAUGHTER; How did you choose the name Toasted Cake?

TINA CONNOLLY: I knew I wanted it to be a flash fiction podcast, so I was batting around ideas that would play off of the bite-sized idea. Things like Snackcast. They were all taken. I kept brainstorming tasty -pod and -cast names, but still, all taken. Eventually I just got to things I like, like Pie for Breakfast (taken.) And eventually, Toasted Cake. (Listen to episode 32, “The Hungry Child” by Romie Stott, to hear an outro about why you should totally toast your cake.)

It has been since pointed out to me by more than one person that Toasted Cake and Tina Connolly share a set of initials. I did not do this intentionally, but I suppose my subconscious may have gotten the best of me….

 

CARL SLAUGHTER: Why restrict the podcast to flash fiction?

TINA CONNOLLY: One, because I wanted to podcast an episode every week, and that wasn’t going to be feasible with full-length fiction (not doing it all myself, anyway.)

But two, because I LOVE flash fiction, and I think it gets a bit overlooked. A really good piece of flash fiction is just a different creature than a full-length story, or a poem. (Listen to episode #13, Helena Bell’s “Please Return My Son Who Is In Your Custody”, for an outro with some of my Brilliantly Insightful Theories (TM) on what makes flash fiction work.)

The fact that I DO love flash fiction has made Toasted Cake work out really well, I think. I mean, in that you should probably only start a magazine if a) it’s filling a niche, and b) if it’s something you’re passionate about. I never wanted to become a magazine editor in particular, but boy howdy, I do love reading a piece of flash fiction each week.

 

CARL SLAUGHTER: How often do you post readings?

TINA CONNOLLY: Once a week. (With occasional misses for laryngitis.)

 

CARL SLAUGHTER: What type of stories do you feature?

TINA CONNOLLY: A few descriptors I like are weird, quirky, dark, twisted, funny, fun, literary, puzzling, bizarre, tongue-twistable, singable, patter-friendly, elocutionary, experimental, witty, and wistful.

A few of our amazing authors: Camille Alexa, Vylar Kaftan, Ken Liu, Cat Rambo, Rachel Swirsky, Caroline M. Yoachim, and I have to stop there or I never will. Most of the stories are reprints, and since they’re flash they tend to come from a few markets in particular,I notice a number of stories from Nature and Daily SF (and in the first year there were still a number from the late lamented Brain Harvest.) But I’ve also run original stories (“Zing Zou Zou” by C. S. E. Cooney, is a particularly awesome example), and stories from folks who’ve told me this is their first podcast appearance.

 

CARL SLAUGHTER: Who does the reading?

TINA CONNOLLY: Me! But while I was off on maternity leave, I had a few fantastic guest-narrators read for me: Dave Thompson, Graeme Dunlop, David Levine, and Matt Haynes. It ended up being all male voices, actually, because with three of the four of them I sent them something that I had wanted to run on the podcast but thought I wasn’t quite the right narrator for it.

 

CARL SLAUGHTER: You read for a variety of other podcasts. What type of stories do you like to read?

TINA CONNOLLY: Here’s where I post the list of descriptors I like again! 🙂 Seriously, though, what’s different about Toasted Cake is that everything I purchase has to be a) be podcastable and b) by ME. I sadly have to turn down stories that I personally like but I think I’m not a good fit for. So the stories on Toasted Cake are definitely the sort of stories that I think I will enjoy reading, and that will suit me. (But I also sometimes stretch a point and make my listeners listen to me sing, for example. 🙂

When an editor asks me what I feel comfortable with, my list usually goes something like: younger voices, alien/fey/otherworldly creatures, snarky, wistful. I’m planning to join Audible as a narrator one of these days,once the baby’s older, anyway! I would love to sink my teeth into a full-length book.

 

CARL SLAUGHTER: A number of your stories have been podcasted. Who chooses the reader for your stories, you or the podcast editor?

TINA CONNOLLY: The podcast editor does. I’ve had a lot of great podcasts run! Actually, my first exposure to Drabblecast was via hearing Norm Sherman read my On the Eyeball Floor for Escape Pod in a killer reading.

 

CARL SLAUGHTER: Toasted Cake recently reached a milestone. 100 podcasts. Can we expect any major changes or is it ‘steady as she goes’?

TINA CONNOLLY: Thank you! Yes, we did reach 100 , I’m thrilled to make it this far. (I was originally just planning to do one year, but then it picked up the Parsec award for Best New Podcast, so I thought, hmm, maybe there’s some people out there who’d enjoy hearing a little more of it… 🙂 No major changes,I plan to at least make it to 200, so there’s a good bit of Toasted Cake in store yet!

 

CARL SLAUGHTER: How does an author submit their story to be podcasted on Toasted Cake? How does someone volunteer to read for Toasted Cake? Do you accept prepackaged podcasts from the author or reader’s publicist or agent or fan?

TINA CONNOLLY: Right now I am the only narrator, although I wouldn’t rule out having another guest voice from time to time. Prepackaged podcasts is an interesting idea! I’m not sure if anyone’s doing that,at least, they haven’t contacted me with it. AFAIK, all the main podcasts, including mine, just accept submissions of stories. In text form.

I currently am doing two open submissions windows, one in February, and one in August (but not this year). Here’s the info, and I’m looking forward to the August submission period! Toasted Cake is a boutique market, which is a nice way of saying I can only pay $5. (You can also choose the option of me buying you a drink at a con, which I love as it means we get to sit down and chat a bit.) However, it is primarily a reprint market, which means you could have sold that story ten times already before sending it to me, and another ten times after. . . . Or, just come listen to the show!

Thanks for the interview, Carl, and for having me here on Diabolical Plots!

 

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.

Anime Review: The World is Still Beautiful

written by Laurie Tom

worldisstillbeautifulThe World is Still Beautiful is based off an ongoing shoujo (girls) manga of the same name. Teenage Princess Nike comes from the small and relatively powerless Duchy of Rain, and in recent years a furious warlord known as the Sun King has conquered most of the known world. In exchange for leaving the Duchy of Rain alone, he asks for one of their princesses to be sent to him as a bride.

But to show how silly this series can be, Princess Nike is declared the bride when she loses a game of rock-paper-scissors against her three older sisters, and she’s promptly shipped out of the only country she has ever known to meet the Sun King, who turns out to be a boy even younger than she is.

The first episode probably could have been cut. It didn’t exist in the manga and seems to be only there to provide some background flavor to the Sun Kingdom, and a little understanding for why the Sun King might want to marry a princess from the Duchy of Rain. The royal family members of the duchy have the ability to call the rain with song, and the Sun Kingdom is a land without rain; most of the water for their crops comes through irrigation.

Once King Livius is introduced (he appears at the very end of the first episode) the ball gets rolling, as both he and Nike are incredibly stubborn, and he has a nasty mean streak to him. When Nike doesn’t sing on command at their first meeting, because calling the rain is a sacred act to her people, he tosses her in the dungeon. But Nike being a very spirited young woman, doesn’t stay there. Calling the wind isn’t the only part of her weather related powers.

There are parts of The World is Still Beautiful that feel terribly formulaic; the rival love interest (for both leads), how Nike manages to make peace with even the worst of former enemies, and how Nike is completely incompetent at palace life (except when it really counts).

The story is not deep and mostly revolves around Nike and Livi’s growing feelings for each other despite everybody and their grandmother trying to tear them apart, but the execution is clean and Nike and Livi play off each other so well it’s forgivable.

I really like that Nike is so outspoken. She’s not a delicate princess and what comes to mind just as frequently comes out her mouth, even if it gets her in trouble. And once she decides that she really is going to marry Livi, she isn’t about to let anyone else take that away from her.

Probably the two most problematic parts of their relationship are 1) Livi looks really young (though he’s voiced by an adult man and sounds like it), which makes scenes where he’s undressed a little squicky and 2) even though Nike mellows out Livi, he is still the Sun King and that cruel streak pops now and again. He never directly hurts her, but there’s one point where he threatens to burn her homeland to ashes because he catches her in a situation where it looks like she might have been unfaithful, and I don’t think he was joking.

Aside from that, their relationship revolves around Nike learning how to behave herself as the future wife of the Sun King (they don’t actually marry by the end of the series) and Livi learning to love life and see the world through the eyes of others. Their relationship is pretty chaste with just the occasional kiss, usually accompanied with a lot of blushing, making it (barring a really out of place rape joke in the skippable first episode) suitable for pre-teen viewers. Though there is brief nudity, it’s not sexual in nature and is played for laughs.

Later episodes of the series take us to the Duchy of Rain, which is of a rainy southeast Asian design as opposed the obvious European one of the Sun Kingdom. The story arc there is a nice way of affirming Nike and Livi’s relationship, though I think the final episode’s pacing was strangely off, like the writers found themselves with an extra 15 minutes of footage and didn’t know what to do with it.

The World is Still Beautiful isn’t an anime for the ages, but for those looking for solid girl’s anime that isn’t based on a dating game, this isn’t a bad bet. It’s equal parts silliness and actual drama, and when Livi isn’t a complete jerk (which is actually most of the time) he’s fun to watch.

Number of Episodes: 12

Pluses: romantic leads play off each other well, beautiful costume design in the Duchy of Rain, Nike is a girl who knows how to take charge of her destiny

Minuses: Livi’s actions may cross the line depending on viewer’s sympathy for jerk romantic leads, Livi looks like a ten-year-old making for uncomfortable viewing, a little formulaic

The World is Still Beautiful is currently streaming at Crunchyroll and is available subtitled.

 

laurietomLaurie Tom is a fantasy and science fiction writer based in southern California. Since she was a kid she has considered books, video games, and anime in roughly equal portions to be her primary source of entertainment. Laurie is a previous grand prize winner of Writers of the Future and since then her work has been published in venues such as Galaxy’s Edge, Crossed Genres, and Solaris Rising: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction.