Today’s new story is on Tor.com: Points of Origin. For those of you who managed to find the copy of Analog that had “Blue Ribbon” in it, it’s the same universe, but none of the same characters, so there’s no requirement of reading one for the other or vice versa. And it’s got grandparents and ice skating and rocks. Oh, and Mars. And the Oort Cloud. And stuff.
Go, read, enjoy!
One of my besetting sins as an author–not as a writer, that’s different–is that I have a tendency to leave things too much in the rearview. It takes some effort not to regard something I wrote last week with a baffled air of, “That? But that was last week, let me tell you what I’m working on now.” Since what I’m working on now is, by definition, not something that is finished and visible, this is not a functional approach to sharing one’s work with the outside world.
Short story collections are even less functional if you’re not able to talk about things you used to be doing. They have to pile up! And while they are piling you are doing something different.
In this case, my ebook collection of children’s stories from Tired Tapir Press is now a shiny new paper edition. It’s called Dragon Brother, and it’s got a shiny new cover by a local young artist with a comics specialty whose style is perfect for the youth content of the stories. So…yay new edition, yay new cover, yay book!
Here’s my new short story in Nature, The Many Media Hypothesis. And here’s the blog post I wrote about the story behind the story.
The formatting they use makes it really easy to see that this is my ninth Nature story. Huh. The time does fly when you’re having fun entertaining the other nerds. I love my job.
I sent Max Gladstone a list of interview questions a little over a month ago for his blog tour. Now here we are with his answers!
First: Happy Birthday!!!
Hey, thanks, Max! It’s a pretty good way to celebrate.
1. How do you like to balance secondary world inventions with historical cultural references in your worldbuilding?
Cirque de Soliel style, that is, on the shoulders of a broad buff dude who’s himself standing on a board on top of a piece of PVP pipe on top of a beach ball.
Seriously though, I try to be honest with myself about how much my conceptual apparatus draws off history and text. If characters in my books use something like scientific reasoning, something like science probably exists in their world; modern writers tend to assume people have used the scientific method from time immemorial, and it just ain’t necessarily so. If one of my characters discusses Proustian memory, madelines and such, someone like Proust probably worked in the world of the books. I don’t tend to make a big deal of these textual references, but I try to flag them in passing, enough that someone who catches the reference will know the easter egg was planted intentionally.
The larger cultural-structure stuff balances in other ways. In research I lean into mythology, religion, and ritual, and try to envision how different material conditions would affect the myths, and vice versa.
2. What are some of your favorite inspirations outside the field of speculative fiction? Nonfiction, other art forms, etc.?
Nonfiction, definitely—I love academic writing for its power to dig beneath gross generalizations, though sometimes it ends up building other gross generalizations along the way. Sociology and anthropology, especially, have been vital resources, opening new conceptual directions; James C Scott’s Seeing Like a State (I love James C Scott–M) and Michael Taussig’s The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America have been particularly important, though I also draw heavily off primary source reading. In terms of just raw linguistic inspiration I find poetry invaluable.
Outside of that, I draw a lot of inspiration from movement—I have a martial arts background, so I connect with that approach to tempo, distance, and power more immediately than I do with the approach of, say, choreographed dance, but in recent years I’ve become more interested in dance through fight choreography, which really is a form of dance, and through partner dancing, which uses many of the same principles as sparring from another direction. In general, there are few more breathtaking and inspiring experiences than watching a master move, whether she’s climbing a wall or running a mile or lunging an epee or kicking somebody in the face. Or lofting a ball over a goalie’s head from the half line to score a hat trick in the first fifteen minutes of a Women’s World Cup final. For example.
3. As of writing these questions, I haven’t gotten a chance to read Last First Snow (hint hint, Tor Publicity) (later note: as you all now know, they came through! yay!). I know from the blurb that it features characters from earlier books but is set earlier in the world’s chronology than anything else. What were some of the pitfalls and opportunities in writing characters as their younger selves?
The potential pitfall of dramatizing backstory, I think, is that I, the writer, will embrace the sense of inevitability the character’s memory lends to their own traumas and bad decisions. If your readers think, well, of course, it had to be this way—there was no other option—then what use is the story? Where’s the drama?
But that pitfall is also an enormous opportunity! I wanted to revisit some of my favorite characters earlier in their lives and break them open. When we meet Elayne Kevarian in Three Parts Dead, or Temoc in Two Serpents Rise, for example, they’ve made a lot of hard choices, and in order to live with themselves, they’ve constructed narratives that lead inevitably to those hard choices. In memory, we seldom force ourselves to consider that our lives could have gone differently. Writing this book gave me a chance to belie that—to show the choice structures and turning points, the moments of akrasia and revelation that set characters on their paths.
4. Was there anything in writing _Last First Snow_ that made you ridiculous with excitement, or was it a pretty even-keel book for you?
Everything about this book was exciting. Seeing Elayne! Seeing the King in Red! Seeing Elayne argue with the King in Red about negotiation practices! Temoc! Temoc and Caleb! Actually meeting Mina, Caleb’s mother, who’s been off camera thus far! Discovering the Skittersill Rising, and digging into how it was misrepresented by orthodox Dresediel Lex history! And then, god, the ending, when [REDACTED]! That was the most exciting of all.
My synopsis for this book would contain a lot of exclamation marks.
5. You’re answering these questions before your epic book tour with James Cambias, Elizabeth Bear, and Brian Stavely. Do you have some predictions for that tour, which wraps up today? Whose Pathfinder character will leave the largest swath of destruction behind them? Who will find the best maple-syrup-related food product in Vermont? Who will have the snappiest tag line for signing their book?
Pathfinder Destruction Swath: Bear. No question.
Best Maple Syrup Food Product: Jim will put in a strong initial showing with his discovery of Maple Nachos, but I think Brian will clinch this one with his discovery of Maple Irish Lace. Oh. You said food product. Jim, then. Maple Irish Lace, I mean, you could eat it, but you’d waste all that knitting! It’s hard to spin maple into yarn. Marissa. Hard!
Most likely to club a moose over the head: Probably Brian.
Snappiest tag line: Definitely not me! I tend to freeze up, look at people with deer-in-headlights expressions, and then scribble “Thank you for reading” and my name. Novelists are probably not the best people to seek out for on-the-spot wit. This novelist, anyway.
Evil Girlfriend Media has my story about gnome genomics up on their homepage: Draft Letter on Research Potential Suggested by Recent Findings in Gnome Genomics, by Simsoran the Frequently Cited, Reviewed by Artamixiana the Cantankerous. Go, read, enjoy! I’ll try to get a permalink to it later.
Strange Horizons has published a new science fiction short story of mine, It Brought Us All Together. Go, read, enjoy!
(Fungus. Funnnnnguuuuuus.)
Here’s one from the archives today:
The Troll (A Tale Told Collectively)
“Because Aunt Margit knows that the stories must be told.”
Today the nice folks announced the Table of Contents for Year’s Best Young Adult Speculative Fiction. Scroll down…no, farther than that…yep! There’s me!
I am particularly pleased because this story, “The Stuff We Don’t Do,” originally appeared in Nature, which is not one of your typical markets for YA, but I really do think that the story has teen appeal. Also it makes me happy that the editors, Julia Rios and Alisa Krasnostein, are casting a wide net when they’re thinking about the definition of YA and/or what might appeal to a teen audience. Teens are smart; they deserve YA editors who treat them that way.
One of the questions that novice writers ask established writers a lot–like, really a lot–is what to do if your editor asks for a change you don’t want to make. I think they may ask it so often because they’re not satisfied with the answer we give, which is basically, “Well, decide how important it is to you and do it or don’t do it, accordingly.” In some ways it feels like they’re asking for reassurance of a just universe–that writing the book the best way you know how will turn out to have been the right thing in a way that is recognizable to everybody, or that there is a magical incantation you can do to have control without responsibility. And neither of those things is true. Control and responsibility go hand in hand, and very smart people can completely disagree on how a story should go. These are things to roll with, and you can’t really tell what someone else will come up with and how much it will matter to you until you’re in the middle of it, so there’s no closed-form answer. Make the changes or don’t, remembering that it’s your name on the cover.
But honestly, there’s a reason this is a novice question, and it’s because it’s about controlling other people. Almost all the novice questions are about controlling other people. How do I make sure that people imagine what I’m imagining, exactly? You don’t. How do I make sure that my story/book/poem/whatever doesn’t get lost in the shuffle before it even gets read? You don’t. And so on.
The journeyman and pro questions are about controlling your own efforts. I think a bigger problem than, “What if an editor wants me to do something with a story that I don’t want to do?” is, “What if my past self wants me to do something with a story that I don’t want to do?” Because that past self–that selfsame self–sometimes gets published. And then you’re stuck. Never mind working to editorial specification! You have to work around the limitations that that idiot kid (=you two years ago) put on your characters and plot. And you will see brilliant, amazing authors thrashing around trying to figure out a way around this problem. Long series are the absolute worst for follow-on consequences that you brought on yourself, that you can’t blame anyone else for–and that you still need to try to weasel out of. And yet the entire process of writing narrative is one of choosing and accepting the consequences of your choice.* Ramification is the name of the game. Try to skip out on that, and you’ll skip out on the reader’s trust and attention along with it. And yet argh, that one thing, if only it wasn’t set down in print!
*This is why it can be so difficult to write narrative while depressed, or one of the reasons. Layered on top of all the stuff that’s first-order stuff, you are making a choice per word and then more choices about going back and changing stuff so that it fits the larger scale. Writers with clinical depression have all the respect in the world from me.
I know a bunch of professional writers who joke about our “mean bosses” or our “incompetent bosses” or variations on this theme. We’re never, ever talking about editors. Editors aren’t our bosses. We are our own bosses. We are the ones who decide that character A should really be an only child when we desperately need her to have grown up with a brother in book three; we are the ones who leave a major villain alive so that the reader expects that villain will get dealt with when we are SO BORED with that villain in book six. Nobody teaches writers all sorts of useful skills, but management as self-management is one of the huge ones.
I have a new story, Out of the Rose Hills, in today’s issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Go, read, enjoy!