It is with an equal helping of bittersweet melancholy and bright-eyed excitement that I am announcing the closure of A Dribble of Ink today.

A Dribble of Ink first opened in 2007, when I was a freshly graduated web development student, and in the intervening years has turned into the most passionate and rewarding professional and personal project of my life so far. The energy and enthusiasm I poured into A Dribble of Ink was rewarded in 2014 when I won a Hugo Award for “Best Fanzine,” an accolade that’s still sinking in, and in the many, many people who have read and commented on the news bits, reviews, interviews, essays, and more that have been posted here.

However, in the past year, since the birth of my daughter and the release of my first book, Tide of Shadows and Other Stories, my personal and professional goals have begun to find themselves at odds with the time and attention it takes to run an SFF publication to the standard I expect of myself and A Dribble of Ink. I want to focus more on writing fiction and, even more so, on spending time with my growing family.

I can’t tell you how many people I spoke to at LonCon 3 who said something along the lines of: “Hey! I love A Dribble of Ink, but, dude, you need to write more yourself!” So, I’m taking those words to heart.

Fun Stats

• Since 2007, over 1.6 million people have read A Dribble of Ink, generating 3.7 million pageviews.
• The most popular posts are:
  1. “We Have Always Fought: Challenging the ‘Women, Cattle and Slaves’ Narrative” by Kameron Hurley (Hugo Award Winner);
  2. A map of Middle Earth as you’ve never seen it before; and
  3. Shockingly, Christopher Tolkien hates the Lord of the Rings films.
• Other notable posts include:
  • My review of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug;
  • A spotlight on the art of Veronique Meignaud;
  • Women fighters in reasonable armour;
  • My review of Avatar: The Last Airbender;
  • “It’s Amazing the Things We Know, That Are Actually Wrong” by Kate Elliott;
  • “Concerning Historical Authenticity in Fantasy, or Truth Forgives You Nothing” by Daniel Abraham;
  • “They Are Not Ghosts: On the Representation of the Indigenous Peoples of North America in Science Fiction & Fantasy” by Maureen Kincaid Speller;
  • “Gene Wolfe: The Reliably Unreliable Author” by Chris Gerwel;
  • and many, many more.
• And, of course, the height of the site’s journalism:
  • Tar Valon looks like a vagina.
• Aside from myself, 73 different writers have published at least one article or review on A Dribble of Ink. Each and every one of them have been integral in keeping this blog interesting, relevant, and diverse.

Thanks

I would like to thank, of course, all of my lovely readers—those who have been with me since the start, and those who have just discovered A Dribble of Ink—and all of the incredible people who have collaborated with me over the years to make A Dribble of Ink one of the most popular science fiction and fantasy watering holes. The success of this venture far exceeds even the wildest dreams I had when I published my first post.

I would also like to pay special thanks to a few people in particular: Foz Meadows, for her inspiring and incisive reviews, which have made A Dribble of Ink a much richer publication; Justin Landon, for his endless advice and friendship; Kameron Hurley, for her hand in bringing tens of thousands of new readers to A Dribble of Ink thanks to her Hugo-winning essay; Anne Perry, Jared Shurin, Thea James, and Ana Grilo for pushing me to be bigger, better, and smarter; and The G., founder and Editor of Nerds of a Feather, for instilling me with confidence that the SFF blogosphere is in good hands.

What’s Next?

Just because A Dribble of Ink is closing doesn’t mean I won’t be around—in fact, I’m writing more than ever. Which is, like, the point, right? I’m a regular contributor to the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, I’ve got an ongoing series on Tor.com, publish regularly on Medium, and I plan to keep both my Twitter and Facebook feeds alive and vibrant. I also have several unannounced things that should come to light over the next several months. One door is closing, but many more await, open and inviting.

So, adios, and thanks again for all the wonderful years and opportunities. I won’t forget them.

The post So long, and thanks for all the books appeared first on A Dribble of Ink.

Juxtaposition is one of the most powerful tools in a writer’s arsenal

One of my favourite novels is Cao Xuequin and Gao E’s Dream of Red Mansions, which has nothing we would recognise as a plot by modern standards: it follows the “twelve beauties of Jinling”, the main characters of a decaying household in China under the Qing dynasty; and juxtaposes and contrasts their experiences to achieve a powerful and moving tapestry of narratives that speak both to the female and human experience.

This act of juxtaposition is one of the most powerful tools in a writer’s arsenal, and one that I’m particularly affectionate towards. A common example is dichotomies for characters: X being a foil for protagonist Y, or the opposites antagonist/protagonist, hero/villain. I prefer to think of it in terms of contrasts, to decentre the story—I go for moral ambiguity very often, and therefore my fiction tends to function in terms of POV characters rather than heroes.

The first use of juxtaposition is to create calls and answers within a work: characters that might be mirror images of each other, heightening and highlighting both similarities and differences between them. One effect I particularly like is going for multiple pairs. In my novel The House of Shattered Wings, I contrast Selene, the head of House Silverspires (the main magical faction in the ruined Paris of the book), with her lover Emmanuelle: Emmanuelle is gentle and motherly where Selene is harsh and to the point. But I also contrast Selene with Madeleine, the House alchemist—where the former navigates currents of power and shows a decisive face to the world heedless of the turmoil within her, the latter wears her heart on her sleeve, and has a tendency to sentimentality and decisions that Selene views as foolish. In turn, Emmanuelle and Madeleine share the common point of drug addiction, with the difference of it being in the past for one and in the present for the other. And so on for many of the characters of the novel: they act as foils for one another, never quite in the same configuration, and this network of contrasts and similarities is what gives the universe heft and depth (at least as far as I am concerned!).

A slightly different trick I use is having nested opposites and reversals: my tag line for the book is “beauty in the ruins”, and I use the fascination and surprise that comes when you expect something in line with a given setting, and find instead its complete inverse.

A lot of these reversals are spoilers, but to take just an early example: the Paris of the novel is completely devastated, its monuments ruined and blackened, its magical factions at each other’s throat, fighting for depleted resources; and the House of Hawthorn is a faction emblematic of this new order, ruthless and never hesitating to kill. And yet, its grounds are still beautiful; and its gardens are green and watered and a pleasant place to wander in…

The last and most powerful use of juxtaposition is that it allows for thematic spread. Fiction, like many human endeavours, strives to reproduce the infinite complexity of real life, but is always inherently reductive: out of all the stories we can tell, we have to choose only a few; out of the myriad people we could follow through the course of a book, we can only touch on a handful.¹ For me, this runs the risk of simplistic answers to complex themes: presenting only, say, two points of view on matters such as colonialism, for instance, eludes the diversity of reactions that historically occurred; and risks having the reader take away a simplistic image. On the other hand, having multiple points and counterpoints around the same theme strengthens it for me, by presenting as much as possible to the reader, and letting them, in the end, make their own decisions on which point of view they’re more sympathetic to.

Buy The House of Shattered Wings by Aliette de Bodard: Book/eBook

One of the themes of The House of Shattered Wings is the necessity of survival; and what people will do to survive in an environment with scarce resources. I deliberately chose characters and factions with very different attitudes to this: House Silverspires, the faction that is the focal point of the novel, believes in doing whatever is necessary to survive, and many of the characters that belong to it share that attitude to some extent (Selene, the current head of the House, draws the line at some actions that she feels are going too far, such as giving up an innocent to a horrible death; her predecessor Morningstar had no such compunctions). By contrast, its rival, House Hawthorn—outwardly ruthless and without scruples—refuses to abandon its own as a matter of principle. Other characters have different attitudes: former conscript Philippe, a foreigner in France and an outsider to the House system, merely wants to be left alone, and refuses to make any compromises that would bring him in collusion with a House—and yet, of all the characters, he is the one who readily commits an atrocity that will haunt him later.

This is why I like juxtaposition, and how I use it to create mood and characters as well as move the plot forward—the resulting novel is deeper and more haunting because of this underlying structure. At least, I hope that worked out: if it didn’t, I’ll still be happy with paying homage to Dream of Red Mansions and other Chinese/Vietnamese classics—no mean inspiration for a book!

The post “Beauty in the ruins” by Aliette de Bodard appeared first on A Dribble of Ink.

The Pithy Version

1. Decide you really enjoy spending quality time with spreadsheets.
2. Spend 150% more time sending email than you planned. You are now a professional emailer.
3. Come up with an awesome mascot as an off-the-cuff joke to your designer.
4. Love short SF/F. A lot. To the point of unreasonableness. Recommend and promote the stories you love in other venues for years, so people begin to trust your exquisite taste.
5. Make peace with the notion that you will not be up to date on any of the latest TV series or films.
6. Develop a stubborn streak (if you don’t have one already).
7. Work as a submissions editor, or an associate editor, or just buy an established editor a drink or an appetizer so you can learn more about what they do.
8. Learn about taxes.
9. Learn about running small businesses.
10. Learn about ebook formatting. In a minimum of 3 file types.
11. Learn to lie about deadlines to contributors. Always.
12. Have a plan B, C, D, and E for when things inevitably fall apart. Probably F, just in case.
13. Buy plenty of bourbon and/or chocolate.
14. Publish an issue you’re proud of featuring your best work, but always strive to make the next issue even better.
15. Another 712 things we’re trying to remember. We know we wrote them down somewhere.

The Less Pithy Version

When we decided to Kickstart our own magazine, Uncanny Magazine, we’d been building up the skills to do it for many years. We had worked as editors on several nonfiction anthologies and Apex Magazine. We felt we knew how to edit a magazine that would be special based on our vision and previous successes (award nominations and increased sales wherever we were). We quite successfully Kickstarted an anthology, Glitter & Mayhem, with John Klima, who had some Kickstarter experience already. We learned a lot about Kickstarter from that project, but it’s always a challenge to move from a one-and-done project model to an ongoing magazine. We talked to magazine editors and publishers about how they did things, including John Joseph Adams, Christie Yant, Neil Clarke, Sheila Williams, C. C. Finlay, Irene Gallo, Julia Rios, and Sonya Taaffe. We talked to authors like Tobias Buckell, who has done some excellent analysis of how to Kickstart a project.

Tobias has three things he believes make a Kickstarter successful:

1. An intriguing product
2. Created by an entity that has proven it can deliver it
3. Created by an entity that has a following (or publicity reach)

Stunning cover art, passionate SFF fiction and poetry, gorgeous prose, and provocative nonfiction

We felt the concept of Uncanny Magazine—stunning cover art, passionate science fiction and fantasy fiction and poetry, gorgeous prose, and provocative nonfiction by writers from every conceivable diverse background with an emphasis on making the reader feel —made the product intriguing. We had established a track record through our other projects, delivering what we promised on time. And finally, we had already developed a certain social media presence (Lynne had even co-authored an academic book on the subject for special collections librarians).

We tried everything we could to succeed with our first Uncanny Magazine Kickstarter. We created a careful budget, brought in contributors who represented what we saw as the magazine’s mission, created nifty backer rewards, and most importantly, surrounded ourselves with a magnificent team to make the magazine as spectacular as possible. Our Managing Editor Michi Trota was a Managing Editor in her day job and possessed many skills complementary to ours. Our Podcast Editors Steven Schapansky and Erika Ensign had tremendous amounts of successful podcast production experience, Deborah Stanish has been a fantastic interviewer on podcasts and at conventions, and our readers Amal El-Mohtar and C. S. E. Cooney were well-regarded for their readings.

We absolutely couldn’t have done it without the help of dozens of other friends and colleagues, too. They created art, offered generous backer rewards, filmed and edited our video, boosted our signal, and generally provided all kinds of cheerleading and logistical support that was hugely important to our success.

We bought URLs and set up social media accounts on multiple platforms. We hired Katy Shuttleworth to develop the Space Unicorn mascot and Uncanny wordmark, came up with the moniker of the Space Unicorn Ranger Corps for our backers, and did a million daily ridiculous things involving costumes, drawings, guest blog posts, and other silly Internet tricks so we could keep talking about the Kickstarter without repeating ourselves too much. The Kickstarter, once launched, was wildly successful. What looked like instant success out of nowhere — we hit nearly $10K on our first day and hit every stretch goal by the end of the campaign — was the result of months of planning and laying groundwork.

Art by Carrie Ann Baade

We really didn’t anticipate how much of our lives would be devoted to nothing but Kickstarter for a month.

What we really didn’t anticipate was how much of our lives would be devoted to nothing but Kickstarter for a month. The entire Uncanny Magazine team pitched in, and we essentially worked around the clock to keep things from losing momentum. But we had no time to be exhausted.

Once the Kickstarter was over, the real work began, including working with our excellent web developer Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios to create our website from scratch, setting ourselves up as a small business, wrangling bank accounts, taxes (get an accountant!), contracts and payment methods, and the like. We found submissions editors. We figured out how we wanted our monthly podcast structured, and we worked with our producers to get it set up for distribution.

Eventually, we even got to open to submissions and select content for the magazine.

After which there was the ebook-creation learning curve (3 different formats!), and getting set up to sell subscriptions through Weightless Books and single issues through major ebook retailers, all of which had slightly different format and submission requirements that needed to be met. Plus we reached out to advertisers.

In our copious spare time, we worked on putting together our backer rewards, and getting them out to our backers. We promoted the magazine, set up a Patreon, solicited advertising, did a subscription drive, and put out 5 (shortly 6) issues of the magazine on time.

Subscribe to Uncanny

We are very, very proud of the work that we’ve put out in Uncanny Year One. We think it’s some of the best work we’ve ever produced. We’d very much like to keep going. More than that, we think we can do even better. We’ve learned a lot, and know we can keep improving.

So, we’re doing another Kickstarter to fund Uncanny Magazine Year Two— this time for much less money than last year. As we keep expanding our other revenue sources, we would like to run smaller and smaller Kickstarters until we don’t need them anymore. Though we think we could use this model for many years to come, we would like to watch some TV in August one of these years.

The Space Unicorn Ranger Corps is always recruiting, and we are extremely grateful for all the support we’ve received. We believe in this glorious SF/F community and want to add more art, beauty, and kindness to it. Thank you, Space Unicorns, for making that possible.

The post “How to Kickstart Your Own Magazine in 728 Easy Steps” by the Uncanny Editors appeared first on A Dribble of Ink.

All of which is a way of saying that both The Thousand Names and The Shadow Throne are excellent books – and I have similarly high hopes of the recently released third volume, The Price of Valour – and that you should go read them immediately. But what I really want to talk about here is Wexler’s excellent and varied characterisation of women, and why it throws into stark relief just how many other writers in the same genre fail to pass the seemingly reasonable benchmark of Treating Ladies Like People.

Specifically: in fantasy novels whose settings are based, whether loosely or closely, on real periods in human history, there’s a tendency to privilege sexism and homophobia, among other forms of bigotry, as cultural defaults, their presence an unquestioned facet of the worldbuilding. As such, whether consciously or unconsciously, the writers of such stories have a commensurate tendency to either severely limit their female characters to occupying traditionally feminine roles –  frequently in such a way as to limit their impact on the narrative, to say nothing of their agency – or to make a Big Honking Deal about how a girl! is doing! masculine things!, usually with a side-order of Special Snowflake internalised misogyny about how this makes her not like other girls, because liking dresses is stupid, and she just wants to fight like a man because (the implicit, simplistic logic goes) that means she’s better.

In both instances, the end result is the same: a glut of female characters whose presence in the story is defined either wholly or predominantly by their relationships with men, and a marked lack of women interacting with other women. If the story restricts women to exclusively feminine spheres – and if, as is often the case, the author deems those spheres to be of little narrative interest in their own right – then even when women have ample opportunity to interact with one another, it goes undepicted; but if, on the other hand, the story includes only a few, exceptional women within masculine spheres, then the chances are that we’ll never see them talk to each other, either – or if we do, they’ll be competing for male attention.

Far too many fantasy novels have this problem, because all too often, even by well-meaning authors, it’s excused as a necessary consequence of the setting. Never mind that the decision to write about a sexist culture was theirs in the first place, which makes this justification rather like arguing that there’s no possible way to break, bend or alter the rules of a game that they invented, even when they’re the only ones playing, as though they could never have made any different choices; the sexism exists, they say, and therefore their female characters must be either unimportant, exceptional or isolated from each other, and preferably all three at once.

It’s a problem that predominantly affects male authors, not because men are inherently sexist or unsympathetic or bad at writing or any such rubbish, but because we live in a culture that relentlessly privileges male narratives, and especially straight white male narratives, over everything and everyone else, such that there doesn’t even have to be any malice in the action: it’s generations worth of monkey-see, monkey-do, absorbed from childhood onwards about the right way to tell a story, and if you’re someone who’s never felt the imbalance of it on a personal level –  if you’ve always seen yourself depicted in multitudes, never as an absence or a stereotyped minority, and have therefore never felt that reflexive flash of anger at the dissonance between who you are and what the hero looks like – if, in other words, you’re a straight white dude – then you’re at a much higher risk of simply not realising that such absences are a problem, because they’ve never negatively impacted you, and are therefore much more likely to perpetuate them in turn, whether consciously or not.

Art by Maciej Kuciara

But Django Wexler – despite having chosen to write about a male-dominated military in a sexist culture; despite being, to the best of my knowledge, a straight white dude – doesn’t do this. He writes women who talk to each other, women who are complicated and real and flawed and sometimes queer and sometimes not; women who feel to me like actual goddamn people, their expressions of femininity as nuanced and complex as their relationships, and this should be such a fucking low bar for books of this ilk, by writers like him, to hurdle, and yet the number of failures I’ve seen still far exceeds the successes. It’s not just that Wexler is an exceptionally good writer, period; after all, there are plenty of otherwise technically and thematically accomplished classics that persist in treating women as aliens who exist to either get knocked up or knocked down by the male protagonists. It’s that he’s writing as someone who clearly understands that the widespread acceptance of sexism doesn’t stop women from being people.

By which I mean: the most pernicious myth about cultural sexism is that women have only ever had a simplex, binary response to it, as if we either stay wholly inside the lines that patriarchy has drawn for us, or else inhabit specifically masculine roles as exceptional outsiders. Not only doesn’t this accounting allow for flexibility in women’s roles – as though, to pick just one historical example, the same woman who faithfully keeps house for her merchant husband might never take over his business as a widow – but, far more importantly, it doesn’t allow for flexibility in women’s thoughts. A woman who loves her husband and her domestic duties might nonetheless chafe at laws that restrict her legal rights without ever wanting to pick up a sword, just as a childless woman who excels at swordsmanship might nonetheless have a great respect for mothers. This attitude leads to a situation where, at base, women are portrayed as having only one of two reasons for their behaviour – that they accept the rules of patriarchy, or else reject them utterly – which in turn means that such female characters lack a complexity of motive. Following this logic, for instance, a girl who runs away to join the army must never have wanted to do anything else, because her whole persona is defined by Fighting Sexism; accordingly, there can’t be two such characters in the same story, because under this system, they’d essentially be the same character.   

But in The Thousand Names, Wexler’s Winter Ihernglass – a woman who joined the army while pretending to be a man – did so, not to fulfil any lifelong dreams of soldiering, but to escape her specific, unpleasant circumstances, while another disguised woman under her command is revealed to have signed up after being explicitly inspired by rumours of Winter’s example. Following this pattern, in The Shadow Throne, a group of girls follow the example of both Winter and Jane – their nominal leader and Winter’s lover – to fight in turn, their decision a direct response to the context in which they find themselves. Even when taking similar paths, Wexler’s women remain distinct and complicated, because their motives are guided by their individual personalities, and not because they’ve been scripted to act in ultimate reference to what they think of men.

Art by Ben Wootten

Which is the other important thing about Wexler’s characterisation: the many and varied reactions his male characters have to the women in their midst. Again, in more simplistic stories about sexist cultures, there’s a tendency for men to treat women in binary, simplistic ways: either they’re accepting of women in non-traditional roles (good guys), or they’re overtly hostile to it (bad guys), with the only complexity coming from whether or not the guy in question wants to fuck the girl in question, assuming she’s not a relative. The problem being, I suspect, that as the men writing these novels have never had the experience of being a woman who’s had to deal with sexism and haven’t bothered to ask about it, they’re defaulting to their own perception of how things work when they’re around to see it: namely, that misogyny is either so overt as to be unmistakeable (bitches should get back in the kitchen and make me a sammich), or else completely non-existent (some of my best friends are women!). The exception here, if there is one, tends to come from traditional quarters, wherein old-school chivalry is conflated with good manners without ever really articulating or disentangling itself, and tends to come out in the kind of male characters who’ll hesitate to hit a highly competent female assassin because she’s a woman, the actual reasoning behind ‘good men don’t hit women’ be damned.

What this neglects, in other words, is the existence of microagressions, and the idea that men can have sufficiently complicated relationships with women – and with the idea of women – that the question of how they’ll respond to an individual lady acting beyond her cultural remit isn’t a cut-and-dried question of misogyny, but rather one of context. As such, it’s not just Wexler’s women who benefit from his decision to include them in the narrative, but his men, too – because they, just like real guys, are allowed to have complex reactions to women, instead of being shoehorned into the binary boxes of Sexist or Saint.

Which is part of why Wexler’s books have struck such a chord with me: they’ve helped me to identify a bugbear I didn’t realise I had. Growing up, I was often referred to as a tomboy: I had female friends, but I hung around with guys a lot, too, and often preferred to do stereotypically masculine things in a way that was remarked upon. As such, from the day I started primary school, when I tried to sit down at a table full of unknown boys in my very first classroom, only to have them all get up and move to a different desk because girl germs, I’ve become well-versed in the many types of male reaction to women who enter their spaces.

Yes, some boys never questioned my presence – championed me, even – while others did the traditional sneer-and-slur. But in between those extremes has always been a fascinating range of variation, and one I’ve seldom seen portrayed with any degree of accuracy in novels, in the sense of being the default: an unpredictable, ever-shifting variant that women in male-centric environments have to deal with all the fucking time. Some guys warmed up to me as a person and a friend, but would still make endless cracks about which of our mutual male friends wanted to date/kiss/fuck me. Some guys bullied me relentlessly at school, but defended me fiercely from bullies who came from elsewhere, because I was, in some sense, theirs. Some guys crushed on me quietly, then got angry when I failed to interpret their friendship as an effort at romance. Some openly valued me for being not like other girls, but still made jokes about how I was typically feminine. Some questioned my presence in otherwise all-male groups, but were perfectly civil; some saw me as a potentially disruptive element, not because we didn’t get along, but because they worried the potential drama of multiple male friends being interested in me would cause a rift. On and on and on.

Buy The Shadow Throne by Django Wexler: Book/eBook

And in Wexler’s books, this complexity is reflected in the male characters. Marcus, who we otherwise view as a good man, is a benevolent sexist: chivalrous in a way that leads him to devalue female competence through a desire to protect women as special. Janus, though he champions Winter and other female soldiers, does so, not due to any special feminist sentiment that we can see, but because he’s a fierce pragmatist, willing and able to recognise talent – and to put it to use – however it presents itself. The men who accept Jane’s authority in the Docks still want their daughters to stay at home, because recognising Jane’s specific value doesn’t translate to championing all women in all spheres. The university students Raesinia consorts with unquestioningly treat her and Cora as equals, but Duke Orlanko, despite employing many talented female spies, never considers that Raesinia might have a will of her own.    

In short, and in addition to everything else that recommends them as excellent reading material, Wexler’s books are a masterclass on how writing a sexist culture – and sexist men, even – doesn’t have to restrict the significance and range of your female characters. So go forth, everyone: read them, enjoy them – and, if possible, learn from them. Because god knows, I’m tired of reading about women with all the individuality of Duplo bricks.

Also, queer ladies being awesome. Yes please: more of this!  

The post Fight like a woman appeared first on A Dribble of Ink.

Running a food-oriented interview series makes me think really hard about food in every book I write, including Updraft (Tor 2015), because I don’t want to suddenly have a cow-based product (like milk) appear in a world that has not seen a cow in forever, and where a cow would have to scale a sky-high tower made of bone to get that milk there. NO that would be bad and has never happened, ever. (Thank you again, brilliant copy editor Ana Deboo, for, ehrm … Completely Unrelated Reasons.)

So when Aidan asked, I began to think about those Fantasy Foodies who get it right — and who make our mouths water in the process. Here are thirteen¹ of my favorites (there are many more, but the list grew unmanageable), in alphabetical order, and I’ve given you some amuse-bouche quotes to go with them.

Saladin Ahmed

In Saladin Ahmed’s collected stories, Engraved on the Eye, and his novel Throne of the Crescent Moon, the character Adoullah — a ghul hunter — is a tea aficionado, but we also witness his skill at marketplace bartering (through the inexperience of his assistant) and the messes he makes when he eats. Ahmed often uses food and access to food to delineate political and economic status. For instance, Ahmed described a scene from one of his short stories to Cooking the Books like so:

“Haggling is still the way in a lot of the world, and across a vast majority of the past. Adoullah knows that he can go out with this many coins and can expect to come back with this many vegetables of this quality.  Rashid comes back with wilted half-full baskets of vegetables and Adoullah looks at him like, “You’re an idiot.”  That says a lot about class and food and economics.”

Natalie Babbitt

The role of food (and water) in Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting is subtle, and important. It builds community and family. Some lasts forever, some does not. But (brought to my attention this year by Rose Fox, and I thank them for it) her short novel The Search for Delicious is something else again — a kingdom torn apart by the need to define the word “delicious” universally.

“But then we got to ‘Delicious is fried fish’ and he said no, I’d have to change that. He doesn’t care for fried fish. The General of the Armies was standing there and he said that, as far as he was concerned, Delicious is a mug of beer, and the Queen said no, Delicious is a Christmas pudding, and then the King said nonsense, everyone knew the most delicious thing is an apple, and they all began quarreling.”

Elizabeth Bear

With her line-of-supply discipline, her willingness to go to the ground for food information, and her amazing skill with mixology, Bear’s books serve food that is substantive and delightful. In her latest, Karen Memory, what the title character eats carries many details about the world of the steampunk Pacific Northwest. About the food in Range of Ghosts (Eternal Sky series), Bear said on Cooking the Books:

Cooking a marmot goes something like this: ‘First, catch marmot.  Skin marmot and remove meat from the carcass.  Then put the edible offal and meat back inside the skin and sew the skin shut.’ In modern Mongolia, they sew the skin shut with wire.  A hundred years ago, they would have used some sort of twine or tendons.  Then you take a blowtorch or acetylene torch, and blowtorch it until it’s crispy and blackened.  You have marmot stewed a la blowtorch – you serve up the insides.  In Range of Ghosts, they bury it in the coals of their fire to cook it.

When I’m doing research for a story, there’s that moment in the research when I stumble across something so completely wonderful – I remember coming across this marmot cooking technique, and I knew that I had to put it into the story, as long as it didn’t distract from the narrative. (read more)

(… I still get searches for “mistress marmot blowtorch”. True story.)

Aliette de Bodard

I’ve said publicly a number of times that when de Bodard talks about food in her stories, watch out. She feeds her audiences complex world information and characterization details by the spoonful. This is especially true of her latest book The House of Shattered Wings (Roc/Gollancz 2015), where she ties food scarcity to the ability to procure rare foods as an intimidation tactic. Don’t miss de Bodard’s regular feats of cooking on her blog. Of special notice right now, Aliette’s Cooking the Books roundtable with Zen Cho and me, where she shares her recipe for TÔM RANG THỊT BA CHỈ (Grilled Shrimp and Pork Belly) .

Wu Long tea: those teas are carefully prepared by the tea masters to create a range of tastes and appearances. The brew is sweet with a hint of strength, each subsequent steeping revealing new nuances. – From Three Cups of Grief, By Starlight (Clarkesworld)

Steven Brust

First, what you need to know is that Vlad Taltos is a cook, and a darn fine one. Well you also probably need to know that Vlad’s an assassin, but that’s not important, nevermind! Have a sit down and try the goulash! Brust’s recipes from Dragaera have been tested in the Food through the Pages kitchen. He’s also visited Cooking the Books and talked about his writing and his cooking processes. He says: “The parallels between food and writing are so obvious and clear. It’s hard to talk about them because they’re inherent.”

Beth Cato

From herb magic, to cheeses, to the types of foods served aboard an airship and beyond, Beth Cato’s clockwork empire takes steampunk cookery to new levels. Cato is a member of the Holy Taco Church (with Jaye Wells, Chuck Wendig, Kevin Hearne, Delia Dawson and many others) and a fantastic cook. Check out her blog Bready or Not for proof. From the first chapter of Clockwork Dagger, Cato issues a warning that she may be made of magic and steam, but she’ll pull absolutely zero punches when her heroine Octavia Leander risks her life to save a puppy. She hands it back to its young owner in the excerpt available at Tor.com:

“The girl lowered in a clumsy curtsy. “Oh, thank you, ma’am,” she said. “Now we won’t go hungry tonight and Pa won’t beat me or nothing.” Her eyes shone, bright and happy.” (read more)

Beth’s latest book is The Clockwork Crown (Voyager, 2015).

Robin Hobb

Rosehip preserve, elfbark tea, nettle tea, wintergreen berries…. All of Robin Hobb’s books are flavored by her familiarity with both kitchen and farm. Hobb’s character Fitz (Farseer Trilogy) observes early that food tastes better the closer you are to the kitchen. Unfortunately, he observes this while seated at a courtier’s table, staring at cooling food.  Hobb’s foods have been turned to recipes by Food Through The Pages, and she spoke with me in 2014 for Cooking the Books:

“It is, of course, inevitable that we judge the status of characters or people by if they are seated below or above the salt, if they eat in a pick-up truck at a drive-thru parking lot or in a restaurant with a maître d. But I think that details like that just naturally fall into place in a tale, as do descriptions of dress or the room where one sleeps.” – Robin Hobb, from “Magic Needs to be Fed: Cooking the Books”

Nalo Hopkinson

When I first interviewed Nalo in 2012 for the Strange Horizons Cooking the Books Roundtable (along with Elizabeth Bear, Scott Lynch, and Gregory Frost), she reminded me of the food in “Goblin Market”, and how the tastes sang. She also said that real food is often stranger than fantasy food:

“Real food is where I tend to get inspiration because I don’t think I can dream up anything stranger than what people actually eat. Talking about things that many people wouldn’t eat, but actually have—mannish water. Also an aphrodisiac. Mannish water is a soup made with all the parts of the goat that you usually don’t eat….” (read more)

Hopkinson’s second job, aside from writing amazing novels like Sister, Mine (Grand Central, 2013), The Salt Roads (Open Road, 2015) and Falling in Love with Hominids (Tachyon, 2015) is making people hungry on twitter.

N.K. Jemisin

From her short story “Non-Zero Probabilities,” to The Killing Moon (Orbit, 2012) and beyond, Jemisin plays with food and taste like an expert chef. Take a look:

“On the platter lay a profusion of delicacies for the taking: crisp vegetables flecked with hekeh-seed and sea salt, balls of grain held together with honey and aromatic oil, medallions of fresh fish tied into bundles around wine-soaked raisins. And more, each arranged in neat rows of four — forty in all. An auspicious number by Gujaareen reckoning.” (more)

(I can’t wait to read The Fifth Season (Orbit 2015).)

Diana Wynne Jones

The author of The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, Howl’s Moving Castle, The Chrestomanci Series, The Dalemark Quartet, and much more, Jones is the patron saint of fantasy food for encouraging writers to venture beyond stew and waybread, into exciting realms like Vegetables and Things That Don’t Require Twenty-Four Hours To Cook While On A Quest.

STEW: … Given the disturbed nature of life in this land, where in CAMP you are likely to be attacked without warning.. and in an INN prone to be the centre of a TAVERN BRAWL, Stew seems to be an odd choice as a staple food, since, on a rough calculation, it takes forty times as long to prepare as steak…. (From The Tough Guide to Fantasyland)

Norton Juster

Juster is on this list for this reason: Subtraction Soup and the Word Market from the Phantom Tollbooth. After all these years, I can remember Milo eating his words and feeling hungrier after his meal with the mathemagician and so yes, Juster goes on this list.

“These are for people who like to make their own words,” the man in charge informed him. “You can pick any assortment you like or buy a special box complete with all letters, punctuation marks, and a book of instructions. Here, taste an A; they’re very good.”

Milo nibbled carefully at the letter and discovered that it was quite sweet and delicious—just the way you’d expect an A to taste. (From The Phantom Tollbooth)

C.S. Lewis²

The Narnia series is filled to the brim with food – from Mr. Tumnus’ tea and the Beavers’ feast, to dining on the Dawn Treader. There are several Narnia Cookbooks.

“The Queen let another drop fall from her bottle on to the snow, and instantly there appeared a round box, tied with green silk ribbon, which, when opened, turned out to contain several pounds of the best Turkish Delight. Each piece was sweet and light to the very centre and Edmund had never tasted anything more delicious. He was quite warm now, and very comfortable.” from The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe

Buy Updraft by Fran Wilde: Book/eBook

Shveta Thakrar

Her Kaleidoscope color vampire eats color. Her poem “Shadowskin” (Strange Horizons 2015) explores the if/then of foods and how one cultures’ food can erase another’s. And Thakrar’s cooking skills are readily apparent in the succulent sensory overload that is The Rainbow Flame (Uncanny Magazine 2015). Keep an eye on this kind of food writing, for example:

“The sweet–tart mango dribbled cool juices over her eager lips, while the plump cherries burst between her teeth. Rupali imagined consuming a heart, then broke off mid–chew. Would that thought be taken from her, too?” (more)

Who are your favorite foodies?

The post “A Fantasy Foodie Bakers’ Dozen” by Fran Wilde appeared first on A Dribble of Ink.

Previously on “Anatomy of a Sale,” I made my first short story sale and then had no luck for almost five months. But then I made sale after sale after sale, I got an anthology invite, and I was asked to be Assistant Editor of a magazine. Things were happening!

And then nothing happened for a couple months.

Sale #5 – “Marcie’s Waffles Are the Best in Town”

Last June several of us Bay Area writers formed a small community on Twitter, dubbed #baywriters by Christie Yant (who is not in the Bay Area but is generally a positive influence on writers). We organized writing sprints, and one night when we were getting ready to write 1000 words in half an hour, I asked for a prompt. I got this.

Sometimes a bizarre Twitter prompt turns into a silly story about a psychic alligator, and sometimes it turns into an emotionally devastating story about a woman in a post-apocalyptic diner. I cranked out a first draft (826 words) that night.

And then I didn’t touch it for six months. I worked on other projects, but in the back of my head, I knew that I had a viable, compelling piece there that I wanted to revise one day. Normally I don’t wait so long to revise because it can be hard to recapture the voice and the world, and I may have lost my initial grip on the narrative, but I was very pleased to be able to come back to this piece in January and whip it into shape over the course of a month.

“Marcie’s Waffles Is the Best in Town” is my fastest sale since my first, selling on its third time out, and it illustrates what I was saying above about personal rejections.

The first market rejected the story because they felt that it relied heavily on characterization, but they didn’t connect to the characters as much as they should have, and they wanted it to be longer to have more emotional impact.

The second market specifically said that the characterization was well done, particularly for a story this short. (As a note, this was also my first personal rejection after a string of forms from this market, so I considered it a small victory.)

This is why it’s dangerous to revise in response to personal rejections: each slush reader and editor has different tastes and will react differently. Believe in your story.

By this time, I was at a point where I had multiple stories in submission, and since most markets don’t take multiple submissions, that limited where I could send the story next. I went down my list, and I identified Flash Fiction Online as the next open market and the one I felt was a good fit.

Thirty days later, I received an e-mail that the editor would love to buy it…if I were to make some revisions. My first rewrite request! I asked for the feedback, and the major thing she wanted me to do was better foreshadow an abrupt shift in the main character’s behavior.

So…so you’re saying I need to improve something about the characterization.

I made the requested changes and ran it past a few readers before resubmitting, and it was accepted, less than three months after it went out into the wild.

Lessons Learned: Twitter provides the best writing prompts! Don’t make knee-jerk revisions in response to personal rejections, but do make requested revisions if an editor wants to buy your story! I was able to identify a point in the story that I had thought was foreshadowing and strengthen it. And as your submissions become more robust, be aware that it’s more likely for your markets to be tied up with other stories, but unless you are a prophet with the uncanny ability to know that a market is guaranteed to take your story, just move on to an open market. Any market you send to should be one you would be happy to have take your story.

Sale #6 – “The Robot Who Couldn’t Lie”

Sometimes I ask Twitter for writing prompts, and sometimes I accidentally give myself one. On June 11, 2014, I made a stupid joke.

I decided I needed some change in my life so I swallowed these quarters. — Sunil Patel (@ghostwritingcow) June 11, 2014

It was not a very popular Tweet! But a couple weeks later, for reasons unknown, perhaps because I thought it was better than the Twitterverse, I used it to start writing one night, and suddenly the robot who couldn’t lie came into existence. The idea took over my brain, and I had a first draft by mid-July. This story also sat a fair bit; I didn’t revise it until late August, and the feedback on that second draft caused me so much angst I didn’t come back to it until mid-October. The impetus? The Fireside submission window (the same one I sold “Sally the Psychic Alligator” during) was closing at the end of the month, and I needed something to submit.

Like “Marcie’s Waffles,” “Robot” ended up at Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show at the time it did because it was the next story-market combination that was available to me after my fifth rejection. It was my 73rd submission, whereas “Marcie’s Waffles” was my 89th submission, yet the acceptance came one day after it. I queried after 90 days per the submission guidelines, and the editor could have sworn he’d accepted my story long ago!

Lessons Learned: Anything you say on Twitter may be turned into a story in a court of law. Markets with limited submission windows are great for artificially imposing deadlines on yourself. Do not be afraid to query after a reasonable amount of time!

Sale # 7 – “The Attic of Memories”

Cat Rambo teaches a number of online writing workshops, and since I was writing a lot of flash fiction, I took her flash fiction workshop, a two-hour course on May 4, 2014. One of the exercises involving mixing and matching clauses to generate prompts, and I ended up with “If you were the only person left on this space station, my attic would be in trouble.”

Causality broke down into a black hole with that sentence, but I had to write something, and the only way to make that sentence make sense was if a dude really needed to collect a memory for his attic. Because of course.

After the workshop, the classmate who had saddled me with that ridiculous prompt issued a mutual challenge for us to write first drafts that afternoon. I sat down and wrote a first draft based on that attic of memories. It was about a completely different character and had a completely different tone, but the idea came out of that exercise (the same exercise, by the way, that produced Nebula winner “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love”).

I revised the story in June in order to have something to submit to the Fireside submission window (this is a recurring theme, you might notice). It’s one of my strangest stories (it’s about a sentient attic!), and some people described it as slipstream-y, so I knew it might have a tough time finding a home. It got several nice personals, though, and made it all the way to the editor-in-chief’s desk at one market, but every time it came back, I just sent it right back out. After eight rejections, it was finally accepted by Fantastic Stories of the Imagination on May 19, 2015, over a year since the attic of memories popped into my head.

Lessons Learned: Writing workshops can be very valuable for generating new material and connecting with other writers who will pressure you to write a story that will end up selling. The more challenging a writing prompt is, the harder your brain has to work to come up with a unique solution, and this will likely be more rewarding.

Sale # 8 – “A Partial List of Lists I Have Lost Over Time”

One of the best things a new writer can do is join Codex, a community of neo-professional writers who offer advice, support, and encouragement to each other. Membership requirements are more diverse and less exacting than SFWA’s, but in general, you may join after your first pro sale to a qualifying market. While the people themselves are wonderful, a key benefit comes in the form of frequent contests, whose main goal is inspiring you to produce new work.

This year, I participated in the Weekend Warrior contest, which forced me to write a new flash piece (maximum 750 words) every weekend for a month. Vylar Kaftan provided the prompts, which for the last weekend of January included a list of interesting and evocative titles to choose from. “A Partial List of Lists I Have Lost Over Time” grabbed me because I had been wanting to write a humorous flash piece and one in an unusual format, and I enjoy list stories, so how could I resist an amusing title that suggested a list story made up of lists. Before I staked my claim on that incredible title, however, I brainstormed to ensure I could do it justice. A mad scientist in conflict with their duplicate from another dimension? Sure, that sounded good. It was a challenge to write, but it was my best received story in the contest—the other good thing about contests is a huge amount of feedback from different perspectives, so it’s like a writing workshop as well. (Several people did not find the story funny. I ignored them because many people did. Humor is subjective, after all.)

I ended Weekend Warrior with four flash drafts, and I prioritized “Partial List” to revise because it appeared to be the strongest one. Using people’s feedback along with the ability to expand to 1000 words, I tweaked the core narrative and made the lists even funnier. It’s a story where the story happens in between the lines, so I struggled to make it comprehensible to beta readers, who all had different interpretations, despite heaping praise upon it (I actually requested a couple beta readers to be mean to the story because I knew there had to be room for improvement). Finally, I gave up and submitted it to what I considered the perfect market for it, based on the sort of stories they published.

Rejected. But it was my first personal rejection from that market! I got a highest-tier rejection from the next market too, another market I expected it to sell to given my knowledge of the editor’s tastes. For the third submission, my options were limited because I had stories out at various markets (hilariously, three of the stories that were out at the time I submitted sold). I settled on Asimov’s because, through Codex, I had learned that Sheila Williams was burning through slush like wildfire: what was usually a 40-day market was suddenly a 4-day market (“The Attic of Memories” had just racked up its own 4-day rejection). Submission Grinder data bore this out, so I figured it would be a quick rejection and I could move on to the next market.

Here are two relevant excerpts from the Asimov’s submission guidelines:

We seldom buy stories shorter than 1,000 words

and

Serious, thoughtful, yet accessible fiction will constitute the majority of our purchases, but there’s always room for the humorous as well.

A humorous flash piece was the longest of longshots, especially given that the market had under a 1% acceptance rate on Submission Grinder. But the editor who had given me an encouraging personal rejection for “Sally the Psychic Alligator,” a humorous flash piece? Sheila Williams. I had nothing to lose but 4 days. Don’t self-reject.

Imagine my surprise when 55 days later, Sheila responded with a request for me to clarify something about the ending (I confirmed that she was one of the few people who followed the core narrative as I had written it, to make sure I could address her question correctly). As with my previous rewrite request, I quickly made a fix and showed it to beta readers old and new before sending her the revised version. More than a week went by, which worried me because my last rewrite request had been accepted faster. But on June 23, 2015 (the day “The Merger” was released, which made that quite a day), she accepted the story as long as I made one minor change, which I was happy to do because Asimov’s.

I had sold a 985-word kale joke to Asimov’s.

Lessons Learned: Join Codex! Think of Codex as all the data you can get from Submission Grinder but with actual people attached. It’s a useful resource, and contests ensure you’re writing new things to submit. When you challenge yourself, you produce your best work. Get to know editors’ tastes. Make fun of kale?

Sale # 9 – “Girl in Blue Dress (1881)”

Before Loncon last year, I visited Paris for the first time. In the Musée d’Orsay, I saw many generically titled paintings of women and wondered about their subjects. What about a flash piece from the perspective of one of them? I wanted to be an amazing cliché and write a story in Paris, but all I managed to do was sketch out my idea. At least I had been inspired in Paris!

A few days after returning home, I banged out the first draft. I wanted to write the prose equivalent of an Impressionist painting, but, as usual, what hit the page didn’t reach the aspirations of my mind. When I cleaned it up and sent it to my writing group, however, they said it was the best thing they’d read from me, the piece they connected most with emotionally. A couple drafts later, I had something submittable, and it began making the rounds on September 21, 2014.

Because my story was about a painting, I wanted to sell to a market that did art, or at the very least provided an accompanying image. I shuffled around my normal order, even taking a chance on Tor.com (don’t self-reject!). The markets I thought it was most suitable for content-wise didn’t think it did enough with the concept, which was fair, as it was a very short piece, more of an idea than a story. While it was making the rounds, I sold “The Attic of Memories” to Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, which is also more of an idea than a story and has a similar focus on evocative, slightly surreal imagery. “Girl” just might be up Warren Lapine’s alley.

It was.

Two months after selling to Warren, I sold to him again on July 29, 2015. This was my first sale to a repeat market, and it was also my best response to an acceptance. Behold:

Sunil, I’ll be honest and tell you that I didn’t think I was going to buy this one at the halfway point, but I kept reading because it was short and I like your work. And then, of course, you nailed the ending. I’d like to use this in an upcoming issue. I’ll have a contract and check out in a few days.

Warren

I replied:

Warren, I’ll be honest and say that I thought this was a rejection but I kept reading because it was short and I like your work, and you nailed the ending.

Very happy to sell to you again! I am fond of this story.

Best regards,

Sunil Patel

Warren had rejected two stories of mine before accepting “The Attic of Memories,” so whether or not he had read any of my other published work, he was familiar enough with me to trust me to the end. (And I was familiar enough with him to trust he’d take my cheeky response in kind.)

As a bonus, Warren pays fifteen cents a word! Guess that Musée d’Orsay admission paid for itself, and then some.

Lessons Learned: Know your market, know your editor! If an editor has bought from you already, they may look past an opening that doesn’t grab them to get to the ending that seals the deal. If an editor has rejected stories of yours already, they may also do this! Build and nurture relationships with editors. Go to Paris?

Reprint # 1 – “The Merger”

Wait a second, “The Merger”? Didn’t we cover that story already? We did! I sold it to The Book Smugglers, and they paid me a lot of money, and I was very happy. But the beautiful thing about short fiction is that you can sell stories more than once. Or “sell” them.

Here’s the deal: when I got my Book Smugglers contract for “The Merger,” they asked for exclusive audio rights in addition to print and electronic rights. They had not done podcasts for the last season’s stories, and they had no definite plans to podcast this season’s stories, but they wanted to in the future. One thing I had learned about contracts was not to give up rights that wouldn’t be exercised, so I asked to retain audio rights, with the caveat that if they did make concrete plans to podcast, of course we could revisit those rights then because I, too, wanted this story to be produced in audio. It wasn’t as if I intended to submit the story to podcasts before I could sell it as a regular reprint anyway, but I wanted to keep my options open. What if an exciting opportunity came along?

Then in June I learned via Codex that Hugo-winning podcast StarShipSofa was accepting submissions for the first time ever. Normally they solicit reprints, so this was a big deal! Although they don’t pay, they’re one of the rare cases where “for exposure” is worth it, thanks to their reputation and legions of listeners (over ten thousand downloads a week!). Unlike most podcasts, however, they had one restriction: the story could not have appeared in audio previously. The submission window was a mere two weeks.

What if an exciting opportunity came along?

This was exactly the situation that warranted keeping audio rights: StarShipSofa was only asking for audio rights—the text would not be printed online—and so the fact that “The Merger” was still under print and electronic exclusivity didn’t matter. Even though I was confident I had interpreted the terms of the contract correctly, I e-mailed the Book Smugglers to make sure they were okay with it, and they gave me their blessing to submit away.

On June 22, 2015, the day before “The Merger” was officially published—though it had been available as an ebook for a week—I submitted it as a reprint. The Grinder was reporting some very fast acceptances, so I was secretly hoping to sell the reprint before the story went live because that would have been hilarious. Alas, no. But just before midnight on August 5, 2015, I received an acceptance for my first audio reprint! Technically not a sale, since I got no money; technically not a reprint, since there would be no printing; definitely audio, since it’s a podcast.

This is the brave new world of publishing.

Lessons Learned: Read your contracts carefully and negotiate wisely. Keep rights that won’t be exercised. The reprint market can be hugely beneficial and sometimes even profitable (people have sold reprints for more than they received for the original sale), so make sure the exclusivity and rights granted work in your favor. And while it is not necessary, it’s a courtesy to confer with editors before submitting a reprint if exclusivity has not ended. Keep your ears open for exciting opportunities!

When it comes to statistics, there seems to be little pattern, if any, which goes to show how erratic and unpredictable the submission game can be: pairing the right story with the right editor at the right time is mostly providence shining upon your submission strategy. A story can take months to sell or a year to sell. Though I, personally, have a weird sweet spot around 8 rejections such that now I eye any story with 8 or more rejections and wonder what’s going wrong, sometimes it can take dozens of rejections before a story sells.

Some trends do emerge, however. Twitter has been invaluable in my writing career, both in keeping me apprised of submission opportunities and inspiring my work. For some people, it can even directly lead to a sale. Writing workshops of various kinds (and conventions) have also proven useful, both in improving my work and getting submission advice from colleagues. Using limited submission windows as deadlines to finish revising stories, despite never having worked for those particular submission windows, results in a finished story, and that’s more important.

And, most importantly, those two magical words, the simple piece of advice every writer should carry with them: don’t self-reject.

As Assistant Editor of Mothership Zeta, I’ve gotten to see the other side, and honestly I have no idea how I made any sales at all. It’s a miracle that any story stands out among hundreds of submissions. I’ve sent more rejections in the last month than I’ve received in all my time submitting stories. I’ve rejected beautifully written stories that weren’t right for us. I’ve rejected perfectly good stories that I’m sure will find homes elsewhere. But one of my favorite things is when an author receives a rejection and then submits a new story. Each story is another chance to make that story-slusher-editor-market magic happen. I’ve fallen in love with several stories, and I am always chasing that feeling. And I can’t get it if authors don’t send in their stories, if they don’t keep trying with everything they’ve got.

I’m Sunil Patel, and these are my first nine sales (and one reprint). If you’re just starting out, may my experience make yours even smoother and more fruitful. If you’ve been in the game a while, I hope you’ve learned something. Truly, there is no Big Secret to selling short stories; there are only two things you need to do, and the more you do them, the more you increase your chance of selling.

Write short stories.

Submit short stories.

The post “Anatomy of a Sale, Pt. 2” by Sunil Patel appeared first on A Dribble of Ink.

Now, I am hardly seasoned (I just got here! is my constant refrain), but I want to be a knowledge conduit. In this post I will examine each one of my sales and provide statistics and numbers, dissecting the process to extract vital information that you can use in your own career. But more than that, I hope that my experience can be both inspiring and comforting: a bibliography does not tell you how many times a story was rejected, how long a story took to sell from its inception (either idea or first draft), how many submissions the writer made. If you are a new writer, if you are about to begin submitting to magazines, you should be aware of these things. I made my first submission in December 2013, but I did not begin submitting in earnest until March since, well, I didn’t have more things to submit! Since then, however, I’ve been submitting constantly. Come with me as I break down the mystery.

Sale #1 – “The Gramadevi’s Lament”

My first sale came about because I happened to be on Twitter at just the right time. On March 26, 2014, editor Jaym Gates Tweeted about a hypothetical anthology.

Thanks to @BBolander, we’re tossing around an anthology based on creepy forests and forgotten towns. Who’d be interested?

— Jaym Gates (@jaymgates) March 26, 2014

Who’d be interested? I’d be interested! In fact, I had recently been itching to write a horror story, so this opportunity was quite opportune. Jaym e-mailed people who were interested with basic guidelines and told us to feel free to pass on the information, though there would be no public announcement yet.

I began brainstorming, using the Internet and my grandmother as research for a story about a gramadevi, the village spirit in India. Whatever everyone else was writing about, I figured they wouldn’t be writing about that. I had a first draft done on April 10.

By the time submission guidelines were publicly posted on May 9, I was already working on Draft 4. I’d gotten a monthlong headstart.

I completed the final draft (Draft 5) on May 21 and submitted it the next day.

(A quick aside on my writing process. Typically, my final draft and my first draft are not drastically different. I write a first draft, and then I polish it into a second draft that more closely resembles what the story is supposed to be and begin sending to beta readers. Usually after three or four rounds of revising in response to comments, I feel that I have gotten the story as good as I can possibly get it, and that is when it goes into submission. Every writer has a different process, though, so do what works for you!)

My cover letter was sparse:

I have attached my submission for Genius Loci, “The Gramadevi’s Lament,” approximately 2800 words. Thank you for your consideration.

I did not call any attention to the fact that I had no publication credits. I did not list the stories I had published in my high school literary magazine. Here is my story, thank you. For more guidance on cover letters, see Christie Yant and Rose Lemberg.

I kept up with Jaym and other writers who had submitted to the anthology, so I was aware that, bafflingly, I survived the first round of rejections, and then the second round of rejections. On July 21, 61 days after submitting, I received my very first short story acceptance.

“The Gramadevi’s Lament,” a story I wrote specifically for this anthology, was only my 9th submission, and although it was never rejected, by the time it sold, I had gotten 18 rejections for other stories.

I do not recommend that your first sale is a story that sells to its first market because then you think that is the only way you can sell a story, that a story must sell immediately or it will never sell. As the rest of this post will attest to, that is far from true.

Lessons Learned: “Be on Twitter 24/7” is not the most helpful piece of advice, but I can’t overstate how important Twitter has been to my career. Editors are on Twitter, and they connect with writers, and you can find out about many submission opportunities. Anthologies in particular are great because they provide story seeds and inspiration, though the downside to writing a story for an anthology is that if it’s particularly niche, it can be hard to sell to other markets afterward as fellow rejectees flood submissions with stories about cyborg vampires.

Sale #2 – “Sally the Psychic Alligator”

In February 2014 I decided to try writing a flash piece every day. As I said, I had very little to submit! While I didn’t reach that goal at all (I wrote…5), it was a worthy project, as I got two sales out of it. On February 4, I asked Twitter for a prompt. A friend replied with this image.

Portland seemed like the kind of city that would have a missing alligator. I began writing, and somehow the alligator became psychic, and I finished the piece the next day.

And then I let it sit, because I had just written a story about a psychic alligator, and that was ridiculous, no one was going to buy that. Also my focus that month was generating as many first drafts as possible. A couple months later, however, when I needed a story to workshop for Cat Rambo’s Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction Workshop at the end of April, I pulled it out and gave it a polish. I took workshop comments to heart and had a third draft in early June, and then I let it sit again for reasons I cannot explain. I think I still didn’t believe anyone would buy it; it was humorous science fiction, which is usually a hard sell. A month later, I changed one adverb and decided it was ready to submit, and I sent it out to a reputable pro market.

To my complete surprise, it came back with a personal rejection. It was “cute” but not right for the market, and the editor looked forward to my next submission. That was encouraging!

Why did I submit to a pro market first? How did I choose where to submit to next? An interlude!

Mary Robinette Kowal, who’s won more awards and acclaim for her short fiction than any writer could ever dream of, has a concise and robust way of evaluating markets: pay rate, size of audience, and shininess.

• Markets are categorized by pay rates: pro ($0.06/word or more), semi-pro (a per-word rate less than pro, but at least $0.01/word), token (a non-zero amount of money regardless of length, less than $0.01/word), and free (zero dollars). You may choose to target markets that will pay you more because you like money. This is perfectly reasonable and I encourage it because money buys you ice cream.
• Size of audience relates to eyeballs, and there is often a direct correlation between pay rate and size of audience: long-running pro markets like Asimov’s and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction reach lots of readers, whereas an obscure literary magazine that pays nothing may not be read by more than your friends and family.
• Shininess is a catch-all for any intangible reason you like a market. You like the site design. It’s prestigious and tends to show up on awards ballots. You grew up reading it. As an example, even though Shimmer doesn’t pay pro rates, I submit to them ahead of other pro markets because of shininess: I have enjoyed many stories in the magazine and would love to be published there.
• There are other important factors to consider. What is the market’s response time? I always recommend throwing any new story into the Clarkesworld Reject-O-Matic because they respond so quickly that you lose little time in giving them a shot. Does the market frequently give personal rejections? Shimmer gives very kind personal rejections, which is another reason I enjoy submitting to them.

A word on personal rejections: they are a mixed bag. Some can be encouraging, if they praise the story but indicate that it’s not right for the magazine. Some can be helpful, if they point out flaws in the story you didn’t see. Some can be discouraging, if the criticisms hit harder than expected. Some can be bewildering. But treat any comments in a personal rejection the same way you would treat a comment from a beta reader: if you agree with it and think acting on it would improve the story, go ahead. Otherwise, leave your story alone.

How do you get all this information about markets? By using one of the greatest, most useful, free tools for a writer: Submission Grinder.

Submission Grinder, created and maintained by David Steffen as a free alternative to Duotrope when it went paid, allows you to track your submissions, identify appropriate markets for your stories, and, through user-reported data, learn average response times, acceptance rates, and percentage of personal rejections, among other things. It’s an indispensable resource. The aforementioned Duotrope can provide more in-depth data from a different user pool, but it requires a fee; some writers use both for a more comprehensive picture of markets. Ralan.com also posts information on markets, including helpful tips from users that you won’t find on the submission guidelines.

Using a combination of all of these factors, I make a list of markets I will submit a story to, generally ordered by where I think the story has the best chance of selling. But the list gets tweaked for each story. For instance, I had one story I thought would benefit from having art, so I submitted it to markets that did art first.

Here’s the number one rule of submitting: don’t self-reject. It’s advice Rose Lemberg gave to marginalized writers—who tend to self-reject more than your confidently privileged individual—but it applies to all writers. As long as your story meets the submission guidelines (genre, word count, not specifically excluded [“hard sells” are just that, nothing more]), let the editor decide whether to accept your story. You don’t think you’re “good enough” for pro markets? I certainly didn’t think I was good enough to be in an anthology with authors like Seanan McGuire, Ken Liu, and Cat Rambo, but I submitted anyway.

Submit anyway. Don’t self-reject. Start at the top and work your way down, however you define those directions.

Although I let “Sally the Psychic Alligator” sit for months between drafts, once I began submitting it, I never let it sit between submissions. Every time a rejection came in, I sent it out to the next market that was open. Once I did skip the line to try a semi-pro market that I thought would be a good fit (I still didn’t really believe it would sell to a pro market) but they didn’t bite. My writing group has a game where you get a point for each submission and a point for each rejection, but an acceptance sends you all the way back to zero. This encourages you to keep submitting and racking up rejections and points, because the higher your score, the more you’re in the game. (I was almost mad to get an acceptance because I was gunning for a triple-digit score.) You can play your own game on Sink or Submit!

Fireside opened up for submissions in October, and I strategically chose two markets with quick response times to rack up a couple more rejections before the submission window closed at the end of the month. By that time, the story had been rejected 7 times. Amusingly enough, one of those last two rejections was the only personal that gave specific criticism beyond “not right for us,” but I shrugged it off and didn’t change a thing.

On December 2, I received an acceptance. When the rest of the stories bought during that submission period were revealed, it became clear that of course “Sally the Psychic Alligator” had found the perfect home alongside stories like “Fluffy Harbinger of Death” and “Betty and the Squelchy Saurus.” When I read more of the flash fiction in the magazine, I saw that I was wrong in my assumption that no pro market would buy a story about a psychic alligator: this was totally that market, and I just had to wait until it was open.

Lessons Learned: Don’t self-reject! It is not up to you to decide whether someone will buy your story; that’s the editor’s job. Also keep an eye out for magazines that have limited submission windows. I had already had one flash piece rejected by Fireside, and this second time, I selected one that had more of a plot to it, per their guidelines. Know your market.

Sale #3 – “Stranger”

During Flash Fiction February, I knocked out a piece of microfiction about a girl who finds a strange creature in her bedroom at night. It was very short, with a nice punch at the end, but I didn’t think much of it.

When I got a reading slot at FOGcon in March, I chose to read several flash pieces, including the aforementioned “Sally the Psychic Alligator” and this one. After the reading, Cliff Winnig came up to me and told me to submit it, as is. At the time, I had only made one submission, so I was baffled and scared. I asked my friend Seanan McGuire’s advice, and she told me to cut one word. I argued and she insisted. I listened. (I think it could have stayed, but at least this way it looks like I did some revision.)

“Stranger” presented a unique challenge because it was 329 words, which narrowed the market considerably. I looked for magazines that specifically published microfiction, bouncing between pro markets, semi-pro markets, and token markets depending on who was available to submit to. I received nothing but form rejections until I finally got a very detailed personal rejection with comments that, while insightful, would have changed the shape of the story. I was confident that someone would want it just as it was.

While I use Submission Grinder to track my submissions, I also use it to discover new markets. The home page has the most recent rejections and acceptances, and one day I clicked on a market with a catchy name, Saturday Night Reader. I really liked the website design (shiny!) and put it on my list as an option. On a whim, after eight rejections, I sent “Stranger” to SNR and received an acceptance in 12 days. Although they only paid $5, for a story that short, it worked out to semi-pro rates!

Despite being my third sale, it became my first publication, going up in March, and it was also my first print publication, featured in the Summer issue of the magazine. My name was on the cover!

Lessons Learned: Sometimes self-reject? I didn’t have high hopes that this story would sell to a pro market because it was so short and not creatively daring enough to make a splash. Instead I was looking for markets that took stories that did what mine did, and I was less concerned with payment as I was with fit. But the real lesson here is to listen to the advice of more experienced writers: I don’t think I ever would have submitted this story if Cliff Winnig hadn’t told me to. He saw in it what I didn’t, just like the editor who finally bought it.

Sale #4 – “The Merger”

In the fall of 2013, I began writing a funny story to deal with the stress of going through a corporate merger. It was called, astoundingly, “The Merger.” The premise was simple: alien possession as corporate merger. I wrote it over the course of several months, even taking time during Christmas vacation to bang out a few words each day. Even while on a cruise. I wanted to submit it to the FOGcon writing workshop, and the deadline was January 31, 2014.

The draft I submitted to the workshop was about 7500 words, and it was essentially my first draft with a bit of a spit-shine. It was well received. Ellen Klages, professional writer and leader of our workshop, thought it was close to salable already, but it was too long for a humorous piece. She thought I should cut it down to 4K or 5K, which I didn’t think I could do. Right after the workshop, however, I went to dinner and a friend told me about Unidentified Funny Objects, an anthology of humorous science fiction and fantasy stories. The perfect market, and the submission window was open till the end of the month! Their limit was 6K, so now I had a real incentive to cut my story down. I lopped off 2K and added 100 words to have a leaner, 5.6K version to revise. The final version ended up 5.9K, and I happily submitted it to the anthology only to get a form rejection within 3 days.

Out of all my sales, “The Merger” is the only story I let sit more than a couple days between submissions. It did collect rejections for months, but at one point I held it for a month because C.C. Finlay was doing a guest issue for Fantasy and Science Fiction, and his submission window was only two weeks. I didn’t have any pro markets I could count on to reject me in time, so I waited. I held it again after receiving one of Finlay’s legendary personal rejections, mulling over whether to act on any of his comments. I had met an editor at Worldcon who said I could submit the story directly to her, so I wanted to make sure it was in tip-top shape. In the end, I made some minor changes, but I believed in my story as it was, on a macro level.

In the fall of 2014, The Book Smugglers were accepting submissions for their First Contact season until the end of the year. Up until May 2014, I only knew The Book Smugglers as a book review blog, but I followed them on Twitter, so I became aware of their foray into publishing. Based on their selections for the Subversive Fairy Tales season, I knew they were publishing interesting, challenging stories. The guidelines for First Contact said they would consider traditional alien stories, but they were also looking for more creative takes on the idea of First Contact. “The Merger” was nominally about First Contact: man meets alien. It didn’t explore the idea of First Contact in any meaningful way, though. Still, it fit the guidelines! Technically.

I almost didn’t submit to The Book Smugglers because my story was still with the aforementioned editor. I had never received a confirmation e-mail, so after a few months, I began to worry that she hadn’t received it, so I sent a cautious query in December. She had received it but hadn’t taken a look at it. A week later, though, she sent me a kind rejection. Did my query shake that rejection loose? If I hadn’t said anything, would it have come too late for me to submit it to The Book Smugglers? These are the questions that keep a writer up at night.

Because I immediately submitted this octorejected story to The Book Smugglers, and 43 days later, over a year since I finished the first draft, they accepted it. Not only that, but their acceptance specifically mentioned what they loved about the story, and they were what I loved about the story.

The Book Smugglers, as a market for short stories, did not exist when I started writing this story. They did not exist when I finished the first draft. They did not exist when I finished the final draft. They came into being while I was submitting, and they were the perfect home this story was waiting for all along.

Lessons Learned: DON’T SELF-REJECT. I fully expected a rejection because I did not think this story was what they were looking for. Well, what do I know, I’m not them. Listen to experienced writers; even though The Book Smugglers would have looked at a 7.5K version of the story, the shorter version was a stronger story (especially since I took further suggestions from Ellen Klages). An editor won’t yell at you if you query after a reasonable amount of time. Don’t give up on a story if you can’t find the right market because the right market may not exist yet.

Solicitation – Upside Down: Inverted Tropes in Storytelling

A mere four days after making my fourth sale, I received a startling e-mail from Monica Valentinelli. She was co-editing an anthology with Jaym Gates, and they…wanted me to contribute to it.

Not coincidentally, this invitation came after Jaym and I had completed edits for “The Gramadevi’s Lament.” I had proven myself to be easy to work with, which doesn’t mean complacent: I pushed back on several suggestions and only made changes I felt would actually improve the story. I had also asked for several changes to the contract before signing. And for the low, low price of not being a dick, I became part of a list of authors in an anthology announcement.

The editors have already approved my first draft as both “not sucking” and “sufficiently fitting the theme of the anthology,” so assuming my final draft meets with their approval, I will have another sale.

Lessons Learned: Don’t be a dick. You’ve likely noticed that anthologies by the same editor frequently have some of the same authors, and this is because they have built a good relationship with that editor. They have proven they are reliable and easy to work with. Don’t be a pushover, but act with professionalism, and you never know what opportunities will just pop into your inbox.

And speaking of professionalism, it was that quality Mur Lafferty noted in me when—a mere twelve days after my first solicitation—she asked me to be Assistant Editor of Mothership Zeta, a new SFF ezine.

Within two weeks, I sold my favorite story, received an invitation to be in an anthology, and became the kind of person who is asked to be Assistant Editor of a magazine. The tides were turning. Everything was coming up Sunil.

Or was it???

(It was. I thought it would be more exciting if I pretended I crashed and burned after this, but I already said I made nine sales, so you know there are five more to go. Foreshadowing. See? I’m a writer!)

But as any writer knows, it’s not the destination that matters, it’s the journey. Continue the journey with me tomorrow!

Read “Anatomy of a Sale, Pt. 2” >>

The post “Anatomy of a Sale, Pt. 1” by Sunil Patel appeared first on A Dribble of Ink.

Via their blog, Harper Voyager announced today that Becky Chambers’ critically-acclaimed science fiction novel, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet will be coming to the United States this year. It was acquired by Kelly O’Connor, Assistant Editor at HarperCollins Publishers. Chambers initially self-published The Long Way after a successful Kickstarter campaign, and eventually saw the novel nominated for a Kitschie Award. After that, traditional publishers began to take notice. In addition to Voyager, Hodder & Stoughton is publishing Chambers’ novel in the UK.

“We can’t wait to get this into readers’ hands,” O’Connor told me. “We’ve had The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet on our radar for some time, and jumped at the chance to publish it again in the US. This story is space opera at its finest, but also so much more! Becky does a fabulous job of touching on important themes like family, diversity, and identity.”

I’m disappointed to see Voyager re-using cover art assets from the self-published release, rather than following Hodder & Stoughton’s lead and producing a new, original cover for the book (I mean, check out the UK cover! Gorgeous!), but a tight production schedule and (initial) digital-only release necessitate some concessions.

Coinciding with Hodder & Stoughton’s hardcover release in the UK, Voyager will release a digital edition of The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet on August 13th, just a few weeks from now, followed by a paperback release in Summer 2016.

The post Voyager bringing Becky Chambers’ <em>The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet</em> stateside in 2015 appeared first on A Dribble of Ink.

But Abomination is remarkable for more than just the words between its pages, but also its road to publication, via Inkshares, a new publisher who offer authors a unique way to engage with their audience.

I caught up with Whitta to chat about his new novels, Inkshares, and what he learned from writing a Star Wars film.

The Interview

Aidan Moher: Hello, Gary! Abomination is a weird, horror-filled medieval fantasy set in an alternate history version of England where magic still lives in the open. What can readers expect from Whitta’s England?

Gary Whitta: A big part of the fun of writing this book came from mashing up real history and fantasy. The Dark Ages is just such a fascinating period in history, and it’s fertile territory for a little bending and re-shaping because the historical record during that period is really spotty, there’s so much historians still don’t really know for sure. So I thought it was a fun opportunity to say, “Well, who’s to say there weren’t insane wizards and abominable monsters running around back then?” But even without the fantastical elements, it’s just such a rich backdrop. We’re talking about a time when England didn’t even formally exist yet as a unified nation, it was a bunch of different kingdoms and a huge swath of territory known as the Danelaw which is where the Vikings who had been invading England for centuries eventually settled. If you look at a map of the British Isles around that time — we have one at the front of Abomination — you recognize the shape of the country, but the borders are so different, the country essentially split into two halves occupied by the native Anglo-Saxons and the Nordic invaders, that it almost seems like a fantasy kingdom.

Aidan Moher: Since its early days with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, to the enormous uproar in the ’80s, Modern Fantasy has been enamoured with Medieval England as a backdrop. Why is it such an appealing setting for fantasy writers?

Gary Whitta:I think because it allows us to create these fantasy worlds that don’t really seem like they’re that far removed from our actual history, and so they seem more believable in a sense. You can watch a few minutes of a movie like Excalibur or Kingdom of Heaven and not know right away if you’re watching a fantasy story or a historical tale. And the medieval era has become such a romanticized period of history — even though it was thoroughly miserable for the great majority of people who lived through it — that it’s been attracting both fantastical and historical storytellers ever since.

Aidan Moher: The Abomination Inkshares campaign included this wonderful hook: “Some believe that the true history of this dark age was deliberately concealed by its surviving scholars.” How does Abomination play with the idea of history being rewritten and concealed by victors and biased scholars?

Gary Whitta: Yeah, that’s a little passage we have at the front of the book, kind of like the introductory crawl of text you sometimes see at the beginning of the movie. The idea was to plant the idea that this is a story set during a real historical time and place, but an alternate version of that history where you don’t really know what might be possible. The Dark Ages are called that not just because they were very grim — although they certainly were — but because they’re kind of a dark page in history where a lot of information has been lost forever because so much of the written word was destroyed during that time and illiteracy was rampant. People were too busy just trying to survive the aftermath of the fall of the Roman Empire to worry about writing much down. So the idea that this story took place in one of those gaps in history, and that it was so horrible that the scholars and historians of that time had made a deliberate choice not to record it, felt like a compelling hook.

Aidan Moher: Abomination is your first novel, but you’ve written several screenplays that fantasy and science fiction fans will be familiar with, including The Book of Eli and Star Wars Anthology: Rogue One, and been involved with narrative-drive videogames, including writing an episode of Telltale’s Walking Dead series. How has working across various narrative mediums helped you to develop as a writer and storyteller?

Gary Whitta: I think each time you change mediums you have to go back to the beginning, to some extent. I don’t think the fundamentals of what makes a good story change too much from one medium to another, but how that story gets told is vastly different in a movie than it is in a book or vice versa. That’s why adapting one into the other is often so difficult. Originally my plan was to write Abomination as a film because that’s where I have the most experience, but the demands of the story took me down this other road instead, and so I found myself kind of having to kind of learn a second language, because that’s really how it feels when you move from one medium you’re familiar with to another where you’re a complete neophyte. While I knew that writing in this different form would give me the freedom to tell the story outside of the constraints of a typical screenplay structure, it also meant that so much of what I spent years learning about screenplay structure no longer applied. So it was scary, but I think it worked out in the end.

Aidan Moher: Your screenplays, including After Earth and The Book of Eli, tend to be science fiction epics. What drew you to fantasy for your first novel?

Gary Whitta: It’s more a question of fantasy drawing me to my first novel. I’ve always wanted to tell a big fantasy story. The problem is that while sci-fi is a tremendously popular genre in the movie industry I work in, fantasy is a much, much tougher sell. Think about it: how many big fantasy movies are there really these days, other than those that are based on bestselling books? The idea of trying to sell Abomination to Hollywood as an original fantasy film just felt like a non-starter commercially. But I knew that I could write it as a novel and self-publish it if need be, and that it had a chance of finding an audience that way.

Aidan Moher: One of the most interesting things about Abomination is that it’s being published by Inkshares, a service that uses a Kickstarter-like pre-order system to determine which books they’re going to pick up for publication. Inkshares seems like it’s a great place for writers who already have a built-in fanbase. As someone who’d never written or published a novel before, can you describe your experience with Inkshares?

Gary Whitta: The Inkshares experience has been brilliant. I originally got some resistance from the traditional publishing houses, who told me that they liked Abomination but didn’t quite know where it would fit in their catalog, I guess because it is this kind of gnarly mashup of different genres; a bit of fantasy, a bit of historical fiction, a bit of horror. Okay, a lot of horror. So I was looking into self-publishing it via Amazon when I heard about Inkshares and I really loved their approach, it combines, I think, a lot of the freedom and autonomy of self-publishing with the benefits of a traditional publisher.

Aidan Moher: Would you recommend Inkshares to other first-time novelists?

Gary Whitta: Yeah, definitely. When I was first looking at Inkshares, I asked Daniel Wallace, who wrote Big Fish and had just published a children’s book with Inkshares, what his experience was like and he was just gushing with praise. If they’re good enough for Dan Wallace they’re good enough for me. I’ve since had other authors ask me about Inkshares and I’ve been happy to tell them the same thing Dan told me.

Aidan Moher: Star Wars Anthology: Rogue One is coming out next year, which is certain to be a big year for you as a screenwriter. Any more novels planned?

Gary Whitta: Yeah, I’d love to write another one, whether it’s another book in the Abomination universe or something totally different. I’ve got ideas for both. My main reason for hoping that Abomination is successful is that it would grant me the opportunity to write another book and perhaps open up a second front as an author beyond screenwriting. Writing for Hollywood is always a thrill but it’s also a business that is often brutally indifferent toward writers, and so the idea of having another avenue to tell stories where you perhaps have more creative autonomy is very appealing.

Aidan Moher: How do you balance being a novelist and a screenwriter?

Gary Whitta: I’m still figuring that out! Ask me again in a year or so.

Aidan Moher: Can you recommend any books or movies that readers might enjoy once they’ve devoured Abomination? Any particularly influential works?

Gary Whitta: I think if there’s any one author that really inspired me to give this a try, it’s Patrick Rothfuss. His two books, The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man’s Fear just blew me away. If you haven’t read those books yet, go do that now.

Aidan Moher: Thanks so much, Gary!

Gary Whitta: Thanks to you! If anyone out there reads Abomination and wants to let me know what they thought of it, I can be found on Twitter at @garywhitta.

Abomination is available to purchase on Amazon and directly through Inkshares.

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The plot is basic. A spacecraft drops by the school of one high school gamer, Zack Lightman, and tells him what absolutely every gamer wants to hear: Aliens are about to attack Earth and a secret military organization has shepherded video games, movies, novels and television shows to help attune humanity into fighting back against the alien invaders. On top of all that, Lightman’s one of the top gamers in the world, and that because of his scores in Armada, he’s one of the last best hopes for humanity. He’s brought to a secret base on the Moon, where he meets his long-lost (and presumed dead) father, who’s helping to oversee the counter attack.

I enjoyed Ready Player One quite a bit: it was a fun read that had some neat recursive things going for it: it was a book about a video game that relied on the tropes and conventions of real-world video game history, and it worked well enough. Armada is a pretty far cry away from this, going through a story that’s essentially a rehash of Ender’s Game and The Last Starfighter. Hardly a sentence goes by without Cline dropping a reference to something from the 1980s, and as it becomes more cringe-worthy, it feels as though Cline is simply stuck in the past, unable or unwilling to grow beyond geek-man-child stage and reenter the present.

The problem with Armada is that it’s absolutely, fucking terrible.

There’s the story of a geek guy meeting a geek girl, where he interrupts her when she expresses an interest in Star Wars or Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica and interrogates her on the minutia of the world. I’ve seen it happen before (hell, I’ve probably done it myself), and it’s just flat out not good for any sort of community. There’s the personal stories of that one lone geek at high school who gets picked on or slammed into a locker for carrying around a Star Wars novel, D&D Manual or Magic: The Gathering Cards, and how the stories that they read carried them through those dark times. Never mind that High School isn’t some sort of fantasy quest to be metaphorically endured, I sometimes wonder about the widespread validity of those stories, or if it’s just a story that we tell ourselves as part of our collective nerd mythology. As books like this and shows such as The Big Bang Theory have demonstrated (not to mention my hometown, where you can spot shirts of Superman, Flash and Green Lantern on the local rednecks) Geek stories appeal to just about everyone, especially now. I think it says more about the high school kid with problems getting along with his classmates and less to do with the kid who blew through Ender’s Game for the tenth time.

Within this archetype story, we always complain that we wished that there were more people who were into Star Wars, D&D and McCaffrey’s Pern novels, but when it comes to the end of the day, we seem to filter out the people who we don’t perceive as being good enough, unless their interests and backgrounds line up perfectly with our own. I’ve seen many people get worked up over the quality of other costumers at conventions and how they’ve only jumped on some sort of bandwagon because science fiction and fantasy movies dominate the box office.

I want as many people as possible to read/watch/enjoy science fiction and fantasy, so that we can have a richer community of fellow nerds.

Some people might be attracted to it because it’s popular and because they saw a film/book/game that looked cool with plenty of people watching/reading/playing it. But so what? Why do you need to be born in the mid-1970s to properly appreciate standing in line for Star Wars or ET? Are you really less of a fan of The Lord of the Rings if you saw the films in the theaters and rushed to the store to pick up the books because you enjoyed it so much? Personally, I want as many people as possible to read/watch/enjoy science fiction and fantasy, so that we can have a richer community of fellow nerds.

This isn’t a good book on a story side, by any stretch of the imagination. Where Ready Player One was entertaining and goofy, this just got tedious and annoying to read. The references had a point in the story – it was a hunt for Easter eggs. Here, they’re just annoying and don’t really serve any point other than to establish, over and over again, that Lightman (read: Cline) is a nerdy kid. We get that from the first couple of pages. Armada feels very much like Cline trying to find some way to make a nerdy adolescent existence mean something greater than it really is. But in doing so, he sets out to define what exactly a geek is, and that vision is limited only to the references he lists off, which is a pretty limiting list of things: science fiction / fantasy did some pretty cool things in the 1990s/2000s, but you would hardly guess it from what Cline/His characters list off.

I really despise this manufactured image of a geek-man-child and related stories, as much as I’m made uncomfortable by the people who rush to fill the role. Armada is a book that rushes to fill that role, and in doing so, it ignores just about everything that makes a book readable: likable characters, a plot that makes sense (seriously, the ending is a pretty spectacular failure), and good supporting characters and elements that support the story rather than prop it up. When it isn’t cringe-worthy to read, it’s Picard-facepalm worthy when it comes to actually being a good story. Any novel that ends with (SPOILERS) something completely out of left field along the lines of ‘and then the aliens came and cured cancer, entered us into an intergalactic hegemony and then everyone lived happily ever after the end’, you’ve got a serious fucking problem. Maybe Cline is doing something more clever – subverting the tropes of video games to pull out a satirical work of fiction that makes us think differently about the genre. If that’s the case, you’d never guess under the weight of its failure of characters and story.

Buy Armada by Ernie Cline: Book/eBook

This is wish-fulfillment fiction, through and through, from the situation Lightman finds himself in to the few constructed, idealized women who appear in the book. Wish fulfillment isn’t necessarily bad: what person playing a video game hasn’t wanted to save the world? But how many people use it to define their existence? Lightman, in saving the world, has his many hours validated. He even puts in a scene at the end where his accomplishments are acknowledged by the high school bully who beat up on him!

Armada would work perfectly if there was some recursive thing about it that made all the references make sense. There’s been plenty of books / movies like this that went heavy on the nostalgia: John Scalzi’s Redshirts comes to mind, along with Austin Grossman’s fantastic novel You or even movies like Galaxy Quest. But the thing that made those books / movies excellent aren’t in Armada: it’s just an annoying, tedious read that made me want to throw the book across the room when I finished it.

This review was originally published by Andrew Liptak on his personal blog.

The post Armada is fucking terrible appeared first on A Dribble of Ink.

Via the Barnes & Noble Sci Fi & Fantasy Blog, Angry Robot Books and Kameron Hurley revealed the cover art for Empire Ascendant, the sequel to 2014’s The Mirror Empire, and one of my most anticipated novels of the year. As is typical for Angry Robot and artist Richard Anderson (responsible for many great recent covers, including “The Builders” by Daniel Polansky, The Last Mortal Bond by Brian Staveley, and Time Salvager by Wesley Chu), it’s absolutely gorgeous.

“I was floored when I got the sketch for the cover of Empire Ascendant, and blown away by the final version,” Hurley told Joel Cunningham of the Barnes & Noble Sci Fi & Fantasy Blog. “It’s an extraordinary piece of art that perfectly captures the high stakes of the book and its key characters.”

“[I wanted] to contrast the massive, cold, army invading, with the calmness and strength of the two main characters at the table,” Anderson added.

About the Book

Loyalties are tested when worlds collide…

Every two thousand years, the dark star Oma appears in the sky, bringing with it a tide of death and destruction. And those who survive must contend with friends and enemies newly imbued with violent powers. The kingdom of Saiduan already lies in ruin, decimated by invaders from another world who share the faces of those they seek to destroy.

Now the nation of Dhai is under siege by the same force. Their only hope for survival lies in the hands of an illegitimate ruler and a scullery maid with a powerful – but unpredictable –magic. As the foreign Empire spreads across the world like a disease, one of their former allies takes up her Empress’s sword again to unseat them, and two enslaved scholars begin a treacherous journey home with a long-lost secret that they hope is the key to the Empire’s undoing.

But when the enemy shares your own face, who can be trusted?

The Mirror Empire was one of my favourite novels of 2014, and, no pressure, I expect the sequel to continue Hurley’s trend of pushing the boundaries of epic fantasy. Empire Ascendant will hit shelves on October 6, 2015 and is available now for pre-order.

The post Cover Art for <em>Empire Ascendant</em> Kameron Hurley appeared first on A Dribble of Ink.

Zhuangzi and Huizi cross a bridge over the Hao river. Minnows dart below, silvery and swift. Zhuangzi leans so far over the railing he almost falls. “They swim about so freely—they go wherever they like. That’s happiness, for a fish.”

Huizi crosses his arms; he realizes he’s wrinkling his silk gown, and crosses his arms differently so the gown’s sleeves hang smooth. “You’re not a fish,” he says. “On what basis do you claim to know what fish like?”

Zhuangzi turns back and raises one eyebrow in that way he knows pisses Huizi off. “You’re not me. On what basis do you claim to know what I know?”

We’ve all been there.

We sit across from a friend or an enemy at dinner, standing beside an acquaintance in a bar, we lean against a con party wall, we walk side by side along the river with a lover or a friend. Maybe the conversation skidded out when one of us mentioned unions or the inheritance tax, expecting reflexive “oh sure” agreement and finding a defensive, pointed entrenchment; maybe we’re talking about our feelings and they’re not listening; maybe they said something we find unconscionable, or the other way round. And we feel that hot pressure behind our forehead, because they are just… not… getting it.

We’re homo sapiens on paper, but sapientia’s worth squat without communication. When the first proto-human had her first thought, she looked around for someone to share it with. How many times do you think we, as a species, got that far without reaching the next step—without managing to say “Hey, check this out?”

Cognition research suggests that animals do a lot more of it, cogitating I mean, than we used to think, which won’t surprise anyone who’s tried to keep a poodle in their back yard, so it’s hard to say when that leap happened. We made it back when we were habilis, if not earlier. (And we’re not the only ones who did—whales have languages and dialects.) But still, every once in a while I think about those occasional isolated nodes, the stars that burned before there were other stars to shine against. Think about the loneliness of having a thought and not being able to pass it along.

And we go back there again and again—at the table, at the bar, near the wall, by the riverside, and for all our hundreds of thousands of years of practice, the gap from mind to mind seems uncrossable.

How do we talk to one another?

I wrote a book called Last First Snow, which is out now. It’s a fantasy novel about zoning politics, human sacrifice, and parenthood. There are battles of sorcery and wits and fists; there’s love and loss, tragedy and redemption; there are schemes and feathered serpents in abundance. Plot we’ve got, quite a lot, as the man says. But it’s also about how hard it is to talk.

The once-human wizards who rule the city of Dresediel Lex want to tear down an (in their eyes) decrepit district, an eyesore, a relic of the days when Dresediel Lex was ruled by gods now dead. The rebuilt Skittersill, they say, will be better—safer, more modern, easier to defend, more valuable, enticing to industry.

The people who live there now, don’t feel that way. For them, the Skittersill’s where they were born, where their parents were born, where their children will be born. It’s the place they work. When they come home, they know everyone on the block. That’s what makes it good. So when a bunch of wizards show up claiming they know what will make the Skittersill better…

Both sides are right, from their perspective. For the wizards—the Craftsmen—the Skittersill’s in a bad state, and must be improved. For the people who actually live in the place, “improvement” looks a lot like destruction. On a literal level, the two sides speak the same language, but the words they use mean different things. In a way that makes communication even harder than if they simply spoke different languages—if one side spoke German and the other Swahili, they’d pretty quickly cotton on to their need for a translator.

Instead, they face one another across a protest line, and struggle to find common ground before they’re forced to fight.

We built science to communicate; science is, among other things, a system of definitions and relationships clear enough that scientists can, much of the time, understand what other scientists are saying. The requirement—well, it’s not really a requirement, let’s call it the notion—that scientific experiments should be repeatable boils down to the idea that a statement we think is true scientifically, should be true for everyone.

You can do a lot of cool stuff when you have a body of statements that are hold true for everyone. Since calculus and chemistry and aerodynamics work the same for everybody, we can build rockets and semiconductors and particle accelerators. Moving mountains—literally moving literal goddamn mountains—becomes trivial.

In fact, this is so helpful that we tend to assume, as a culture, all statements are scientific, which is to say, universally true. “I’m angry about this,” our friend says, and we think he means, “you should be angry too, in the same way I am,” and say “Well, I’m not,” and he hears, “You aren’t, not really.”

And then he really is.

What better options do we have?

Huizi is not amused.

“I am not you,” he replies to Zhuangzi. “Of course. So I don’t know what it is to be you. But I do know that you’re not a fish. My point remains: how do you know what fish like?”

Zhuangzi is a philosopher of freedom and play. Zhuangzi tells the story you may have heard about the useless tree—too thin to make beams, too gnarled to make boards, too ugly to carve, its fruit too sour to eat. Which turns out okay for the tree, in the end, since no one cuts it down or harvests its fruit! So, says Zhuangzi, what’s wrong with being useless?

Zhuangzi teaches through stories, which makes him a philosopher after my own heart. He doesn’t so much wrap philosophy in jokes as tell jokes that are, at the same time, philosophies.

Huizi is a real philosopher, too—a teacher of rhetoric, propositional logic, and paradox. “His writings would fill five carriages,” says one contemporary account, but none of those writings survive. He’d likely be closest, in modern philosophy, to a dialectician or maybe a sophist.

The story I’m telling here’s from Zhuangzi’s body of work; Huizi, in classic sophist mode, presses Zhuangzi on his definitions, on the origins of his knowledge and the basis for his claims. When Zhuangzi tries to spin his arguments, Huizi presses further. He wants clarity, dammit.

Zhuangzi turns back to Huizi and leans against the rail. Golden light falls between them.

“Ah,” says Zhuangzi. “But that’s not what you asked first. You asked me on what basis I claim to know what fish like. I claim to know it—“ and he stamps the planks underfoot—“on the basis of this bridge, over the Hao River.”

That’s where the story ends, as written—that quick zinger, Zhuangzi turning Huizi’s own argument against him through fast grammatical footwork and a textual loophole.

We don’t see Huizi’s reaction. Maybe he doesn’t get the joke. Maybe he doubles down, says that Zhuangzi’s just dodging the question. Maybe he decides, I don’t want to talk with this guy any more. He doesn’t speak my language. Huizi could go back to his own disciples—people who agree with him about how to talk, and how to argue, about what counts as known and what unknown.

I strongly suspect this is how the story ends:

Huizi laughs.

Huizi shows up throughout Zhuangzi’s writing, generally arguing with the teacher himself. They rarely agree. They poke fun at one another, they bend and subvert one another’s ideas. Zhuangzi gets the best of his rival most of the time, but that’s to be expected. Zhuangzi, after all, is the one writing the book.

Later in life, passing Huizi’s grave, Zhuangzi says, “Since you died, Master Hui, I have no material to work on. There’s no one I can talk to any more.”

While Huizi’s mentioned frequently in contemporary accounts and indexes of philosophy, those “five carriages” worth of teachings have not endured. His thought survives only in Zhuangzi’s writing—which includes the ten paradoxes Huizi taught his students, and this story about the fish, one of the most enduring vignettes from Zhuangzi’s own philosophy.

These two spoke very different languages, but they seem, at least, to have been able to talk with one another.

Buy Last First Snow by Max Gladstone: Book/eBook

Laughter isn’t always the answer. Sometimes we have to stand up for ourselves, or for our friends. Sometimes we need to push.

But the point of the dialogue over the Hao isn’t that humor is the only response to tension—it’s that language is a fundamentally imperfect instrument. It squirrels around us and wriggles out of our grip. The more convinced we are of the completeness of our language, of our argumentative style’s sufficiency in all situations, the more brittle that language, and the more it serves as a wall. We lean on our certainty in uncertain situations, rather than understanding the limits of our knowledge; we hold our words like torches before us, and in that process, we burn others—and ourselves.

If we’re lucky, we realize it in time.

We’re not always lucky.

The post “Happiness for a Fish” by Max Gladstone appeared first on A Dribble of Ink.

Yesterday, via CBC Books, Guy Gavriel Kay revealed new details about his upcoming novel, The Children of Earth and Sky, including its setting. Kay has a penchant to explore human history while building his fantasy worlds, delving deep into our planets’ myriad cultures and histories, and turning the stories we know slightly towards the fantastic. Fans always have fun speculating, so where’s The Children of Earth and Sky drawing inspiration from? The Mediterranean regions of Europe during the Renaissance.

“In The Children of Earth and Sky Kay returns to the familiar territory established in several earlier works,” said Oliver Johnson of Hodder & Stoughton, the novel’s UK publisher. “[It’s] a reimagining of the melting pot of the medieval Mediterranean. In his hands well-known places and events are transformed into the wonderful and strange through the lens of fantasy, and brought to life with brilliantly drawn characters and the most graceful of styles, which will seduce his many fans and new readers alike.”

The Barnes & Noble SciFi & Fantasy Blog revealed the first look at the novel’s plot, which sounds lovely:

The bestselling author of the groundbreaking novels Under Heaven and River of Stars, Guy Gavriel Kay is back with a new novel, Children of Earth and Sky, set in a world inspired by the conflicts and dramas of Renaissance Europe. Against this tumultuous backdrop the lives of men and women unfold on the borderlands—where empires and faiths collide.

From the small coastal town of Senjan, notorious for its pirates, a young woman sets out to find vengeance for her lost family. That same spring, from the wealthy city-state of Seressa, famous for its canals and lagoon, come two very different people: a young artist traveling to the dangerous east to paint the grand khalif at his request—and possibly to do more—and a fiercely intelligent, angry woman, posing as a doctor’s wife, but sent by Seressa as a spy.

The trading ship that carries them is commanded by the accomplished younger son of a merchant family, ambivalent about the life he’s been born to live. And farther east a boy trains to become a soldier in the elite infantry of the khalif—to win glory in the war everyone knows is coming.

As these lives entwine, their fates—and those of many others—will hang in the balance, when the khalif sends out his massive army to take the great fortress that is the gateway to the western world…

“Since the 1984 publication of The Summer Tree, […] Guy Gavriel Kay has been recognized as a leading voice in fantasy, writer of books filled with lush prose, vivid characters, and intricately considered worlds,” says Joel Cunningham of the Barnes & Noble SciFi & Fantasy Blog. Any time Kay announces a new book, it immediately jumps to the top of my list of most anticipated novels, and Children of Earth and Sky is no exception.

Children of Earth and Sky will hit stores on on May 10, 2016 by New American Library (US) and Penguin Canada (Canada), and on May 12, 2016 from Hodder & Stoughton (UK).

The post Guy Gavriel Kay reveals cover and first details about <em>Children of Earth and Sky</em> appeared first on A Dribble of Ink.

Updraft is a novel about family and privilege, succeeding through an almost overwhelming sense of empathy and courage. The novel’s protagonist and narrator, Kirit Densira, is a plucky youngster who idolizes nobody more than her mother Ezarit, one of the bravest traders in the bone city. Like her mother, Kirit is a boundry pusher, a trait quickly landing her in trouble with the Singers — the magic-wielding, iron-fisted governing body who rule from the Spire, a monolithic tower at the centre of the city. Kirit’s unending drive to upset Singer traditions, and to spill their secrets, is the lynch pin for the novel’s frenetic, politically-charged plot.

Kirit’s motivations are linear throughout most of the novel: earn her wings, become a trader, stay alive long enough to discover the secrets of the spire. They’re mostly selfish, rarely empathetic. Those that surround her, however, are full of secrets and labyrinthine desires: Nat’s dogged determination to find his father; Wik’s desire to save his city; Tobiat’s concern for a community that cast him away; Civik’s open rebellion against greater powers. Where Kirit is the eye of a storm, those around her are a maelstrom of ambition. Wilde uses this contrast to pull readers through the story at a nice clip, while also providing commentary about the political and inter-societal relationships of the various small communities facing poor odds of survival. Wilde never passes judgement on her characters. Some people just want to live another day, some want to fight for a brighter future.

Similarly, Wilde plays in a wonderfully unique playground, but resists the urge to pore over every detail of her world. So many secondary world fantasies become obsessed with their worldbuilding to the point of self-indulgence — like a tabletop RPG codex with plot and character as an afterthought. No so with Updraft. Wilde’s worldbuilding is tight and economical, doled out to readers only as necessary — always supporting the plot or providing motivation for the characters. There’s no infodumping, no exposition about the long, storied history of this or that, just a vibrant world full of living people. Wilde’s restraint is astonishing, and sets a benchmark for other writers of secondary world fantasy.

Art by Singhooi Lim

When the night is darkest, humanity shines bright.

Unexpected in all of this is the way that Wilde weaves post-apocalyptic tropes throughout her fantasy world. As readers, we don’t know what came before — outside of vague, horrified references to a war that chased humanity from scorched earth below. As one might expect, such an environment is scarce of resources. There is little agriculture, and livestock is a thing of the past, and even living space is finite—as the bone towers grow, the lower levels are filled out by new bone, forcing residents ever upwards. Wilde draws a deft picture of a society that must fight for every inch of its survival in an unkind world. It’s easy to assume that such a society would foster greed and violence — and these traits are powerful among the bone towers — but there is much love and empathy to be found, too. When the night is darkest, humanity shines bright.

Extending from this is Updraft’s handling of flight. It’s such a temptation for genre writers to delve deep into the aspects that make their world unique — to pick apart the details until there’s nothing left but scattered appendices and fingers worn bloody. Like world-building, however, Wilde shows restraint when introducing readers to flight in Updraft. Wilde doesn’t want you to think flight is special. It’s normal, part of every day life — only glorified by the young citizens nearing their flight test, like teenagers waiting to get their drivers licence. Despite being everywhere — ubiquitous to the plot of the novel, and ingrained in every facet of its narrator’s personality — it’s never overbearing. Instead of wasting words on the mechanics of flight, Wilde focuses on her plot and characters, letting reader piece together an understanding of how flight weaves its way through the personal lives and societies of the towers.

Flight is a symbol of freedom, but — with scalpel-like precision — Wilde deconstructs this symbol, slowly replacing it with a bitter realization that flight, and all its associated privileges, can also be a powerful tool for oppression. Wilde earns her stripes by introducing readers to Kirit while she’s in the throes of anticipation of gaining the privilege to fly, to become an apprentice to her mother. It’s difficult not to be charmed by Kirit’s enthusiasm, but Wilde is ruthless in the way she pits the reader alongside Kirit as she begins to realize that flight is a tool, and, like any tool, can be misused by ill-intentioned hands.

This same courtesy is extended to the novel’s light use of magic — called Singing. Fran layers these unique elements into her book in a way that feels natural, organic, and always respects the reader’s ability to trust her as a storyteller. Readers looking for deep, mechanically complex explanations of flight and Singing — an undeniable draw for a lot of fantasy readers — will be disappointed, but there’s hardly time to think about it as you’re whipped through the novel’s plot at riveting speed.

Buy Updraft by Fran Wilde: Book/eBook

Updraft is a strong debut from an author with a lot of wind under her wings.

However, that speed comes at a cost. The middle sections of Updraft follow Kirit’s trials and educations to become a Singer. But, unlike Rowling’s Harry Potter or Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind, which also use tried-and-true fantasy trope of thrusting a naive youngster into magic school, Kirit never seems to earn any of her advancements. In fact, major achievements, like discovering and honing her ability to use echolocation, are gained in a single chapter, and never falter when she needs them most. Kirit is never portrayed as exceptional, which is one of her selling points as a character, but the speed at which she catches up and surpasses her classmates (some of who have been training for years) feels forced and sometimes unbelievable. The plot moves by so quickly at points that it feels like Kirit’s agency is replaced by the overseeing hand of God. It’s unfortunate, given the strengths that this pacing lends to other sections of the book, but the trade-off means some sacrificed depth for a novel that’s nearly impossible to put down.

Excelling on its complex characters, a richly imagined fantasy world, and a penchant for subverting tropes, Updraft is a strong debut from an author with a lot of wind under her wings. Like her protagonist, Wilde never lets off the gas, and, from the very first page to the last, Updraft remains an addictive, mile-a-minute adventure.

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Set in Golarion, a sprawling world with so much depth that even the most jaded fantasy reader is sure to find something that interests them, Pathfinder is so much more than just a tabletop RPG — it’s a setting for some of the best Sword & Sorcery novels being published today. With names like Tim Pratt, Max Gladstone, Liane Merciel, and Howard Andrew Jones attached, the Pathfinder Tales line of novels offers great adventure, magic, and pedal-to-the-metal action from some of fantasy’s most exciting writers.

So, I caught up with James L. Sutter, Executive Editor for Paizo Publishing and a co-creator of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, to chat about Pathfinder, being a novelist, building a world, and encouraging gamers the world over to become storytellers in their own right.

Aidan Moher: Welcome, James! Can you introduce yourself for those not familiar with your work as a novelist and editor.

James L. Sutter: “Hey Aidan! My name is James L. Sutter, and I’m probably best known as a co-creator of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, as well as the Executive Editor for Paizo Publishing, where among other duties I’m the acquiring editor for the Pathfinder novel line from Tor and Paizo. As an author, I’ve written two Pathfinder novels — Death’s Heretic and The Redemption Engine — as well as a bunch of short stories published in places like Machine of Death, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Podcastle, etc. I’ve recently started doing some comic writing as well, for Dynamite’s Pathfinder series. On a non-literary note, I also really enjoy writing and performing music, and have played in a wide variety of projects from punk and metal to folk and musical theater.

“And since we’re doing this conversation-style, I’m going to ask YOU a question: When writing an introduction like this, do you think an author should include awards and accolades? If I were writing one for somebody else, I absolutely would — gotta tell the audience why this interview is worth reading — but doing it for myself makes me feel like a tool. As a *HUGO AWARD WINNER* — cue beam of light and angelic choirs — what do you recommend?”

Aidan Moher: Well, I wear my Hugo Award on a platinum chain around my neck — Flavor Flav-style — so, that tells you all you need to know about my perspective on awards. If you got ‘em, flaunt ‘em. Life’s too short for humility.

James L. Sutter: “The only reasonable choice! Yeah, I’ve been fortunate enough to win a bunch of game design awards over the years for my work on Pathfinder, but the thing that meant the most to me was when Death’s Heretic got chosen as #3 on Barnes & Noble’s list of the Best Fantasy Releases of 2011. It later was a finalist for the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel and an Origins Award as well, but that B&N article was the first moment I could finally let out the breath I’d been holding since I started writing the book.

Aidan Moher: “I was using the office printer to print out some short stories I’d written, and Publisher Erik Mona found them and read them, and promptly assigned me a book, pointing out that it wasn’t conflict of interest if I didn’t have any say in the matter.”

James L. Sutter: “See, I’d never planned to write a Pathfinder novel. I felt like signing myself for a novel was cheating — how could I know if I actually deserved it? But then one day I was using the office printer to print out some short stories I’d written, and Publisher Erik Mona found them and read them, and promptly assigned me a book, pointing out that it wasn’t conflict of interest if I didn’t have any say in the matter. So I wrote the book, but was still extremely anxious about how it would be perceived. So when it ended up on a big-name best-of list with folks like Pat Rothfuss and Terry Pratchett, it was this huge moment of vindication. I could finally let myself believe, ‘Okay, maybe I did deserve that novel contract.’

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned about writing, it’s the importance of both humility and hubris. You need the humility to learn from those around you (and, you know, not be an ass), but also the hubris to refuse to internalize rejection, to believe that your stories are worth telling even when there are a thousand more accomplished authors out there.”

Aidan Moher: It’s interesting that you’ve won or been nominated for awards for both novel writing and game design. How do those two aspects of your job intersect? Do they conflict in any way?

James L. Sutter: “They intersect all the time — they’re essentially the same thing with different techniques, like playing guitar vs. bass, or painting watercolor vs. oils. In both of them, you’re trying to build a compelling world, memorable characters, an interesting plot. It’s just that when you’re writing an adventure, you don’t have the luxury of choosing exactly what the protagonists do. You have to prepare for more contingencies.

“As I recently wrote about on the Tor blog, most of what I know about world-building I learned from game design, working in close concert with some of the best setting designers in the business. They taught me that it’s always more interesting to ask questions than to answer them (though maybe not to the LOST extent). They showed me the power of the unexplained allusion, the importance of regimented magic systems, the joy of moral ambiguity, how to write an article where literally every paragraph is an adventure hook, etc. They also taught me how to be creative under pressure, which is invaluable — some of my best work has come from knowing I had a thousands words to fill and an hour in which to do it…

“For conflict — yeah, writing tie-in can be frustrating when you wish a rule worked differently, or you have to bend your ideas to incorporate someone else’s, but it’s also a blessing to get to create art as part of a team with people you really respect. And there’s also the time conflict — I’d be a much more prolific game designer or novelist (or bassist or guitarist) if I could just pick one and focus! But probably my favorite interaction between the two these days is when I run into a novelist I really respect for the first time — someone who’s just oodles better and more popular than I am, like Brandon Sanderson or Patrick Rothfuss — and while I’m trying not to geek out, they go ‘You’re one of the Pathfinder guys! I love Pathfinder!’ I won’t lie, that’s pretty great.

“Actually, I think that speaks to a larger idea, which is that it’s fun and useful to be more than just one thing. A piece of advice I have for new authors at conventions is: it’s one thing to define yourself as a writer out in the regular world, but when you’re at a convention where *everyone’s* a writer, it’s not very memorable. Other writers are probably more interested in hearing about your band or your cats or the funny story about the time you got caught in the bus door or whatever.

“God, I’m getting long-winded, aren’t I? Quick, Aidan! More questions! Stop me before I digress again!”

Aidan Moher: The Pathfinder Tales tie-in line features a wide range of authors, from newcomers like Josh Vogt and Wendy N. Wagner, to Hugo Award winners like Tim Pratt. I imagine it’s a lot like wrangling cats.However, despite the chaos, one of the things I like most about the Pathfinder Tales is that they all manage to have their own distinct voice, but also feel familiar and grounded in the same world. You have a hand in laying the groundwork for the world and its rules, which helps you with your own novels, but how do you work with your authors to ensure that their voice isn’t lost in the pre-established world of Golarion?

James L. Sutter: “I think the biggest thing is that I’m giving them *just* the world. When it comes to characters and plots, I make the authors generate those themselves, on the theory that they’re going to be more excited about ideas that are theirs from the start. While I wave them away from some ideas, and help them mesh their work with the world, we created the setting to host any kind of story, and they bring me mystery, horror, romance, black comedy, sword & sorcery…

“Of course, the authors are in some ways limited by the setting, in that the stories they tell need to work within the rules we’ve established — but remember, Earth is also a setting, with its own assumptions and defaults. If you were reading straight-up historical fiction, and suddenly gravity stopped working for a minute, or a tiger grew wings and flew across a lake, that’d knock a lot of readers out of their suspension of disbelief. Our game rules are the same way — an attempt to mimic the laws by which this fantasy world operates. And while working within that framework drives some authors nuts, others really enjoy it, as in addition to being able to outsource the work of worldbuilding (allowing the author to focus more on plot and character), constraints can breed creativity. Having well-defined magic systems make it hard for characters to simply magic their way out of every problem.”

Aidan Moher: It sounds a bit like they’re the historians of Golarion. They can see the sweeping vistas, some towns dotting the fields, they know the recorded history, but it’s up to them to delve into the stories, to search for the truth of what really happened and fill in the murky details.

James L. Sutter: “True! The novels aren’t histories, per se — they’re assumed to be happening ‘now’ in the setting — but the filling in the details aspect is spot-on. Through the novels, we get to experience the world firsthand, in ways game books alone don’t allow. It’s the difference between reading a travel guide and visiting yourself. Our authors sometimes invent whole new locations, but just as often they focus on the smaller brush strokes — the sights, the smells, the people you meet on the street — that make a setting much more personal and real.”

Aidan Moher: I’m really interested in your comment about how some of the constraints of writing within a pre-established world can actually breed creativity, rather than stifle it. For me personally as a writer, worldbuilding is, by far, the most difficult part of writing a secondary world fantasy. I want to get right into the nuts and bolts of the book: the action, the characters. Can you expand on this — perhaps from both your perspective as an author and an editor?

James L. Sutter: “You’re not alone — worldbuilding is in many ways a separate skill from storytelling, and a lot of authors find it difficult. I feel like, in SF&F particularly, books are a triangle of plot, character, and setting, and you can usually get away with having one weak side as long as the others are strong. (For example, I’d classify a lot of classics as falling into the “plot + setting” bin — you don’t read Tolkien for the characters’ complex inner lives.) But my point being: there are a lot of authors out there who are aces at plot and character, but come up with worlds that feel flat. For them, writing in a shared world is a huge advantage, because that third leg is being held up by a whole team of specialists.

“As an author, I find constraints really helpful in combating the Terror of the Blank Page. If you ask me to write a story — no specifications, just whatever I want — I’ll be paralyzed with options. All the possibilities will try to rush through the door at once and get stuck, cartoon-style, leaving me with nothing. But if you say “Hey, I need a story about lycanthropes in space,” I’ll have the manuscript for you on Monday. Like an oyster, I need that grain of sand to get me started before I can make a pearl*.”

“Shared-world work is full of that. With both of my Pathfinder novels, my outline started as a list of locations, monsters, and ideas from the setting that fascinate me. The plots and the characters were all the result of me asking myself “Alright, how can I tie together as many of these as possible together?” As an editor, I encourage my authors to do the same thing — if they come to me with a specific story type or character already in mind, that’s cool, but if not, I have them flip through our setting guide and bestiaries to see what sparks them. Inevitably, they come back with a dozen wildly different ideas they want to explore.

“(*Please note: “pearl” sounds arrogant when talking about my own work, but I mean it in the “congealed mollusc spit” sense.)”

Aidan Moher: I’ve been poring over the Inner Sea World Guide for weeks now, drawing inspiration from it as I brainstorm ideas for both short and novel-length fiction. I’ve found it fresh, invigorating, because Golarion is filled with so many ideas, never hampered by a preconceived notion of what a “fantasy” world should be. (There’s spaceships and mecha!)

It’s tough to create an entire world out of thin air, but one of the things that attracts me so much to Golarion, especially this early in its lifespan, is that while it’s expansive, enormous, there are still so many undiscovered corners. The map for a country like Varisia, for instance, is as dense and complex as those found in many of the most popular epic fantasy series, and it’s only one of dozens of countries in the Inner Sea Region (the main part of Golarion where the Pathfinder line is set). Other countries are huge, but only have a small scattering of towns and landmarks.

I know Josh Vogt, who debuted as a novelist with Forge of Ashes, was excited to explore the Five Kings Mountains, and had a hand in filling out the details for one of its major cities.

Do you find that some writers are more keen to face the “Terror of the Blank Page” than others — being more ambitious when it comes time to choose the setting for their story? Do you encourage new writers to adventure somewhere in Golarion that isn’t covered by one of the other authors?

James L. Sutter: “Absolutely — it all depends on what the author’s interested in. If I get an author who I know is great at worldbuilding, I’ll encourage him or her to set their story in a place we haven’t touched much yet, so that they can have a freer hand in developing that location and introducing details. If, on the other hand, an author isn’t as into that, and has given me an indication that they can handle really digging deep and learning the canon, then I’m happy to let them play in more established and recognizable locations. Perhaps contrary to what you might expect, it’s actually harder for me to find folks I trust to work in the most detailed places, because I have to do all the fact-checking on the novels myself, and if an author isn’t extremely meticulous, it means more work for both of us! If somebody’s going to write in, say, Korvosa or Westcrown — cities that readers are already really familiar with — they need to be prepared to approach the setting material with the same dedication as if they were writing historical fiction. Any sloppiness is going to instantly jump out at the audience.”

I’ve always felt that when you’re designing a setting, the questions are the point.

Aidan Moher: On the flip side, where’s the line between over developing Golarion to the point that it impedes on the creativity of gamemasters?

James L. Sutter: “I’ve always felt that when you’re designing a setting, the questions are the point. Details are cool, but it’s the half-explained things, the allusions and deliberate mysteries, that keep people awake at night wondering. Those are also the opportunities for game masters to tell their own stories. So our motto at Paizo has always been “Any time you answer a question, ask two more.” There will always be a fan for whom that’s unsatisfying — the people who feel like they need every answer in order for the world to feel real — and we’ve got parts of the world explicitly for those people. But as a reader, a writer, and a gamer, I want my imagination sparked so that I can make up my own answers, rather than just being handed all of them in a cohesive encyclopedia. A setting with no mystery is dead to me.

“The unexplained and undiscovered is also a key part of my world design process. I enjoy building things organically over time, so by dropping in random allusions the first time I write about something, I give myself easy starting points when I want to expand on that topic later. Kaer Maga — the anarchic, Mos Eisley-style city that’s one of my pet regions in Golarion — was one of the first and best examples of this. When I first introduced the city, I had extremely limited space, so I just threw in a bunch of proper nouns with hints at what they might mean. Bloatmages covered in leeches. Sweettalkers who sew their own mouths shut so as not to blaspheme. Wormfolk. The mysterious warriors of the Iridian Fold. People would constantly ask me about those things, and I would smile and wink despite having no idea what they were. Which of course got my imagination rolling, and eventually led to a full setting sourcebook, various adventures, my novel The Redemption Engine, and so on. Leaving yourself threads that aren’t tied up neatly is a gift to Future You — both a creative boost and job security.”

Aidan Moher: You just gave an answer, James. So, it’s time to pony up two more questions.

James L. Sutter: “Oh jeez! Hoisted by my own petard! Umm…

“As a reader, what do you most like to see in tie-in fiction? If you don’t currently read it, what would make you consider picking up a tie-in novel?”

Aidan Moher: To answer your second question first, I don’t read a lot of tie-in fiction, outside of the books that have broken into the pantheon of popular SFF — like R.A. Salvatore’s early Drizzt novels. Like many readers, I’ve been steered away from tie-in fiction by two (unfair) reputations: 1) they’re not good, and 2) they’re only for hardcore fans of the associated IP. However, lately I’ve been reading a lot of the Pathfinder Tales — spurred by news that some of my favourite genre folk like Max Gladstone and Sam Sykes are going to be contributing novels to the world — and I’ve quickly realized that those previous perceptions were (predictably) misguided.

This brings me back around to your first question: What do I enjoy about tie-in, and particularly the Pathfinder Tales? The mixture of familiarity and diversity.

Tie-in fiction offers a wonderful blend of something familiar and something new. As a reader, I enjoy being taken on adventures to new lands, but I also like visiting places that I’ve been before. So, I can turn to a place like Terry Brooks’ Four Lands (from the Shannara novels) — going there is like being welcomed home after a year abroad. At the same time, however, I quickly get sick of reading the same authors over and over again. I love the Four Lands, but grow irritated by Brooks’ repetition of storyline and plot devices. It’s not long before I get tired of the Four Lands, not because they’re boring, but because I’m constantly fighting the desire to move onto a different voice.

The Pathfinder Tales offer a terrific balance here. I’m becoming very familiar with Golarion — already have my favourite cities and cultures — but there’s always something new to explore because the world is so huge, so deep, and each author brings something new to the table. Looking for something introspective or contemplative? Wendy N. Wagner’s Skinwalkers is just the thing. Want balls-out action and humour? Try Tim Pratt’s City of the Fallen Sky. I love when I’m reading something by one author, and they mention a country or adventure that I’ve read about in a different book by a different author. I love that I can explore one world through the eyes of so many creative people.

In fact, this approach to world building, creating a place of vast potential, where no country is the same, and each exotic corner offers something for the reader to discover — a new magic, new cultures, new adventures — has had a huge impact on my own approach to world building. I want a playground with limitless boundaries, where anything can happen. This allows a writer to explore all sorts of stories without boundaries.Now who’s being long-winded?

James L. Sutter: “I’m going to steal that note about multiple authors keeping a setting fresh. That’s spot-on.”

Aidan Moher: Say I’m a new author, freshly born into the Paizo family and about to begin work on my first Pathfinder novel. Take me through the process.

James L. Sutter: “To backtrack a little, first an author has to get in the door. Part of my mission for the line is to only get the best possible authors for these books, which means that competition gets steeper every year… you’re competing for schedule slots with those same authors you mentioned earlier.”

Before I started editing novels, I was terribly intimidated — how could I possibly write a story that long?

Aidan Moher: I’ll admit that this first drew me to giving the Pathfinder Tales a look — with authors like Tim Pratt (who’s won a Hugo Award!), Liane Merciel, and Howard Andrew Jones involved, I knew Paizo took their universe seriously, and the addition of upcoming novels from Max Gladstone and Sam Sykes pushed me over the edge. There’s nothing like seeing a bunch of great authors excited about a new IP, and I haven’t looked back since.

James L. Sutter: “There’s no open submissions — please don’t write a Pathfinder novel on spec! — but authors who’ve had some pro-level sales are welcome to email me with a writing sample, meaning a couple of short stories or chapters from a novel. I don’t require that it be sword & sorcery specifically — I’m a firm believer that a great writer can hop between genres. But if I feel like the author’s skill and style is a good fit, then they’re “in” — but the work is just beginning.

“The first thing we do is pitching. I encourage authors to send me a shotgun blast of at least half a dozen ideas of just a few sentences each — “Character X does thing Y in nation Z.” That allows me to quickly nix any that I don’t like, or that are too close to things we’ve already done or have on the schedule. Sometimes pitching can take several rounds before something intrigues me enough to give the go-ahead. I’m also happy to have authors pitch me parts of an idea — say a character, or a type of story — and to work with them to craft the right pitch together. So if an author comes to me with a cool character concept, I can help match it to the right region or organization within the world.

“Once we’ve got the right pitch, I have them write up a short outline — a few paragraphs. That’s often the point at which I take it around to some of the other senior managers and continuity folks at Paizo and make sure everybody’s on board. If they are, I have them expand it to a full chapter-by-chapter outline, usually about 5,000 words, which shows every twist and turn of the plot, any magic or monsters that are key to the story, etc. Only when *that’s* approved is a novel officially greenlit.

“This might seem really elaborate, with so many rounds of feedback, but in a project like this, I need to be able to vett as much of the novel in advance as possible. Tie-in has a lot of potential pitfalls, and if an author’s misunderstanding of how a given spell works breaks the plot, I’d rather have them revise a few thousand words of outline than 90,000 words of manuscript. So far, the policy’s worked pretty well.

“Once an outline’s greenlit, the author’s free to write. In general, I let the authors set their own deadlines — some people can turn a novel around in a few months, others need a year or more, and I’d rather give a book a later release date than have it feel rushed. How much an author and I interact during the writing is up to them — while some know the rules and world inside and out, most email me pretty regularly with questions, and I answer them and make sure they’re provided with the most pertinent sourcebooks for the topics they’re writing about.

“When the novel comes in, I go through it with an eye toward both rules/continuity and story development, then send the author revision notes. When the revised manuscript comes back, I edit it (along with Paizo Senior Editor Chris Carey), we get it all laid out and prettied up, then ship it off to Tor for production.”

Aidan Moher: From a more personal perspective, what were you able to take from the experience of writing your first novel, Death’s Heretic, into writing your second, The Redemption Engine?

Buy Death’s Heretic by James L. Sutter

James L. Sutter: “Confidence and fear. The former came from the fact that I had empirical proof that I could, in fact, write a novel. That’s worth a lot. At the same time, I had a terrible fear of what I call Sophomore Album Syndrome — Death’s Heretic had gotten some nice accolades (hooray!), but how could I have any assurance that I could repeat that magic trick? As my wife is fond of reminding me, when I finished The Redemption Engine, I said, “Well, I don’t know if it’s great, but it’s at least good — and it’s done.” (As it turns out, the audience has near-universally declared it better than my first book, so I’m pretty sure there’s a lesson there.)

“But to dig a little deeper into that confidence part — I think that seeing a book all the way through its life cycle erases a lot of the mystery from the process, and that’s a huge boon. Before I started editing novels, I was terribly intimidated — how could I possibly write a story that long? But then I spent a few years looking behind the curtain — helping authors craft pitches and outline stories and patch up broken manuscripts — and realized that books don’t spring fully formed from your head. You assemble the bits and pieces, and sometimes a part’s missing or wrong and needs to be replaced, and suddenly this doesn’t seem like the Great Mystery of Art, but rather a craft you practice. That gave me the confidence to start Death’s Heretic, and knowing that I could finish Death Heretic gave me the confidence to plug away at The Redemption Engine, a thousand words at a time, for the two years it took to complete.

“One note about that, though. I wrote a bit on Chuck Wendig’s blog about things I learned writing The Redemption Engine, but I want to reiterate the most important one, which is that at some point I’m going to die. And when I die, it won’t matter if I’ve published one book or a hundred, because I’ll be dead. That realization, while morbid, really helped free me from the frantic race to write as much as possible. Writing professionally is an awesome job, but it’s still a job, and that old adage about how nobody dies wishing they’d spent more time at the office still applies. So I encourage everyone to look askance at the advice that says writers must sacrifice for their art. As soon as I gave up that constant nagging voice saying “I should be writing” and allowed myself to wholeheartedly embrace other activities and adventures, I started enjoying life a lot more — and found that I still got almost as much writing done.”

Aidan Moher: How does being the series editor affect your approach to writing your novels? Do you get carte blanche approval to do whatever you want? ;)

James L. Sutter: “If only! While it’s true that being one of the setting’s creators means I’m generally trusted to play with the most beloved toys, I’m still absolutely beholden to my colleagues and the audience, and I take that responsibility seriously. For instance, in The Redemption Engine, the heroes spend a lot of time in Heaven and Hell, both places that Paizo Editor-in-Chief Wes Schneider is deeply invested in, so he and I spent a lot of time talking about them. And Creative Director James Jacobs and I have a long-standing and good-natured argument about the alignment system, primarily because I love to subvert it and introduce moral ambiguity. So when I decided to put angels and devils in my relativist blender, I knew that I’d need to craft things just right to make something that felt good to both of us. And of course, I don’t edit or develop my own novels — my colleagues have been more than happy to step in and hold my feet to the fire!

“But yeah, all of that aside — it’s really fun to get to cherry-pick creatures and locations that I’ve created, as well as those of my colleagues. My novels tend to start out as questions about the setting — ‘What does it mean to be an atheist in a world where gods are empirically real?’ ‘What are the moral implications of magically turning an evil person good?’ — and then quickly become an effort to shove in as many toys as possible. Did that central question of Death’s Heretic *require* a planes-hopping adventure full of snarky psychopomps and singing chaos snakes and robot cops and gravity-reversing jellyfish? Of course not. But those things are awesome, and I figure that the best way to ensure an audience has fun reading a book is for me to have fun writing it.”

Buy The Redemption Engine by James L. Sutter

Aidan Moher: It strikes me that your many roles at Paizo — editor, author, world designer, gamer — revolve around collective, collaborative storytelling. What are your thoughts on collaborative storytelling, and its effect on linear (novels) and non-linear (RPG campaigns) narratives?

James L. Sutter: “Collaborative storytelling — collaborative anything, really — is a blessing and a curse. While it’s easy to get exhausted or frustrated by having to advocate for your ideas or accommodate others’, I find that as long as you’ve got the right crew of collaborators, the final result is always better than the individuals could create on their own. I encounter that all the time, whether it’s working with my colleagues to continue building the Pathfinder setting, advising authors on ways to patch holes in their novel outlines, or simply getting feedback from friends on my own stories.

“RPGs are collaborative storytelling in its purest form. Everybody gets to contribute, and the story can go anywhere. That’s the fun — that sense of opportunity, the chance for everyone (including the Game Master) to be surprised. At the same time, there’s a reason why direct adaptations or journals of RPG campaigns rarely make good novels: they’re meandering, full of dead-ends and side treks that were fun in the moment but of limited interest to those not playing — in other words, they’re non-linear, just like real-life. As humans, we live non-linearly, so we tend to want our stories to be linear — it’s that idea that there’s a point to things, or at least a climax, that keeps us engaged.

“Man, good thing we’re reaching the end of the interview — this is getting pretty meta. Thanks to everyone who made it this far in James and Aidan’s Story Philosophy 101 — office hours are 11:00 to 7:00 on Twitter, and your term papers will account for 100% of your final grade.”

Aidan Moher: It was a pleasure to have you, James. I won’t mention to your readers that this interview is almost long enough to count as a novelette.

James L. Sutter: “That’s okay — blog posts are paid by the word, right?

*someone passes in a note from off-camera*

“Wait, really? How come there are so many bloggers, then? The internet is so confusing!”

Aidan Moher: Now, excuse me while I wander off to badger my friends into starting up a new Pathfinder campaign. There’s a gravity-reversing jellyfish who needs dealt with.

James L. Sutter: “Thanks again, Aidan! This was a blast!”

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