Nebula Awards Interviews

Richard Bowes 2009

2009-07-07T23:56:00-06:00

Richard Bowes is nominated for his novelette “If Angels Fight”.

Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. When you were a kid, did you ever imagine that you’d be a writer?

Writing wasn’t that alien a career when I was growing up. My father was an editor and ended up writing high school textbooks. My mother wrote for TV in Boston in the 1950’s. A couple of her uncles were well known Irish authors. One of them was Liam O’Flaherty who wrote the Informer.

I’d had a lot of problems in school - dyslexia among other things. If something really interested me I’d read it compulsively. Otherwise it was slow torture. But I could always talk and always write - express myself in words.

When I was in my late teens I decided that I wanted to write and my parents were good with it. There was no immediate way they could see me getting killed writing - unlike some of my other interests. Unfortunately once I decided to write, I froze and couldn’t write at all.

I’d flunked out of the first college I’d gone to. At the next one I took a writing class and the teacher Mark Eisenstein was great at getting blocked kids started. Years later I wrote a novella called “My Life in Speculative Fiction” about that time and that experience. It’s in my collection Streetcar Dreams and Other Midnight Fancies and in an earlier out-of-print collection Transfigured Night and Other Stories.

What made you finally take that plunge into writing professionally?

When I think of someone writing professionally, I envision her/him making a living at it. When I got out of school and moved to Manhattan I was twenty-two and for a few years I worked as a fashion copywriter in the Garment District. Outside of that time, I’ve never made a major part of my income writing.

What’s the biggest hurdle you had to overcome before getting published?

My lifestyle: after college there was a long period where I wrote almost nothing. I was young I was gay in New York. I had major drug and alcohol problems. I was busy. After a while I got things together and a while after that I started to write Spec Fiction. The SF first novel I completed sold quite quickly and I thought it was all going to be a piece of cake.

What’s the appeal of speculative fiction?

It’s where I was lucky enough to find people willing to buy my work and to read it. Spec fiction has the last of the viable short fiction markets. Short form work gets reviewed, talked about, given awards, anthologized. About twenty years ago I started writing short stories. I’ve written forty-two of them in the last twenty years. All but the first one I wrote have been published and even that got cannibalized.

What’s the best piece of advice you received from Mark Eisenstein?

Write what turns you on. Nobody is going to be interested in what you write if you aren’t.

What was the inspiration for your Time Ranger stories?

History: it drove my father crazy that I learned all my history from historical novels and Time Travel/Alternate Reality Spec fiction. Some serious history books I find very readable but most of them are deadly. From the Files of the Time Rangers is kind of my historical novel.

It’s a mosaic novel - made up of short stories as is my earlier Minions of the Moon. A lot of the stories were my attempts at different forms. One that made the Nebula short list a few years ago, “The Ferryman’s Wife” was my version of a 1950’s John Cheever/New Yorker story set in the suburbs but with Time Rangers, Greek Gods and an 18th century English Noblewoman thrown into the mix.

In Jeffrey Ford’s interview with you, you mentioned that you used to write rules for board games. What was that experience like?

Well, a lot of it was good, clean fun and sometimes the money wasn’t at all bad. We did commercial games (sold in stores) and promotional games (ones companies used to push products, ideas etc). I learned a lot about plotting and multiple viewpoints. Board games from Monopoly to Dungeons and Dragons are closer to dramas than short stories or novels.

Did you encounter any difficulty writing your “If Angels Fight” story?

It was a struggle - they all are. The year I wrote that novelette I only finished one other story. The parts set in 1950’s Boston - the scene on the river ice, the moment when young senator Kennedy visits his aunt on her birthday and the rest - came from memory and were pretty easy. The present day material and the time lines were harder.

What’s the most difficult aspect of being a writer? The most rewarding?

I wrote about this in a piece published last year called, “I Like Writing but Hate Being a Writer”

The actual writing is maddening but also wonderfully satisfying. A lot of the rest of it I’m less fond of.

What projects are you currently working on?

I’m turning “If Angels Fight”, an earlier Nebula nominee “There’s a Hole in the City” and a lot of my other recent stories into a mosaic novel tentatively called, Dust Devil: A Life in Speculative Fiction.

Richard Bowes was born and raised in Boston and has lived in Manhattan for most of the last forty-three years. He has written five novels, the most recent of which is the Nebula nominated From the Files of the Time Rangers. His most recent short story collection is Streetcar Dreams and Other Midnight Fancies. He has won the World Fantasy, Lambda, International Horror Guild and Million Writers Awards.

Recent and upcoming stories appear in F&SF, Electric Velocipede, Clarkesworld and Fantasy magazines and in the Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Year’s Best Gay Stories 2008, Naked City, Beastly Bride, Haunted Legends and Lovecraft Unbound anthologies.

His story, “If Angels Fight” has been selected for all three of the annual best fantasy anthologies and for the Datlow, Year’s Best Horror. It and many of his other recent stories are chapters in his novel in progress Dust Devil: A Life in Speculative Fiction.

Charles A. Tan is the co-editor of the Philippine Speculative Fiction Sampler and his fiction has appeared in publications such as The Digest of Philippine Genre Stories and Philippine Speculative Fiction. He has conducted interviews for The Nebula Awards and The Shirley Jackson Awards, as well as for online magazines such as SF Crowsnest and SFScope. He is a regular contributor to sites like SFF Audio and Game Cryer. You can visit his blog, Bibliophile Stalker, where he posts book reviews, interviews, and essays.

Cory Doctorow 2009

2009-07-02T00:27:00-06:00

Cory Doctorow is nominated for his novel Little Brother.

Most of this Q&A was taken from Julian Bennett Holmes’ Publishers Weekly interview.

Why did you decide to write a young adult novel?

A bunch of my friends had written young adult novels and were having the best time. My friend Kathe Koja had been a famous horror writer who’d written very graphic horror, and she decided to write these very very spare, almost Hemingway-esque young adult novels. And the experiences she described were just so cool, writing for kids who read not just for entertainment but to try to figure out the way the world works. The feedback she got was so blunt and honest that she was really, really, really excited, and she let her horror novels go out of print.

The other thing is that I was going to write a book where the technology really worked, where it was real technology. I thought young adult was a good genre for that. In young adult fiction, there’s an honorable tradition of talking about how technology works—unashamed lectures—and I really like that mode. [Robert Anson] Heinlein was a great proponent of that. When I was a kid, I found out a lot about how finance and politics and so on worked through books like Have Space Suit—Will Travel. My book is sort of a radical, political Have Space Suit—Will Travel. So young adult seemed like the right genre.

What was the flash of inspiration for Little Brother?

One thing was the kids I was meeting, who thought of technology increasingly as something that controlled them and not as something that empowered them. That was the complete opposite of how I’d grown up. People in my Dad’s generation grew up thinking of computers as these soulless machines that would regiment them and put them in lines, but in my generation—I got a computer in 1979 and a modem in 1980, and it was like the whole world opened to me. The amount of control and power I had over my world as a nine-year-old was unbelievable. I don’t think there had ever been a nine-year-old before that who could travel across the globe with these things and have conversations and meet interesting people. But now I meet kids today who tell me, “The computer is used to spy on me, the authorities know what I’m doing, marketers know what I’m doing.”

Another inspiration was thinking about how all these techno-thrillers I read depended on technology that was like magic—technology that did something technology really can’t do. As a geek, I thought I’d be able to use technology in the story and not make it totally implausible. I thought, “Can I write a tight, well-paced techno-thriller where everything could actually happen?”

How much of the stuff in the book is real and how much is possible in the future?

I’d say 90% is real now, and 100% is possible in the future. Most of the stuff in the book just requires reconfiguring the bits we have today. The things that aren’t real yet are Microsoft releasing a free Xbox and making money by selling software licenses. The book relies on the idea that everyone has one of these in the closet because Microsoft is giving them away on the street.

For a while, merchants were giving us barcode scanners called QCats. They gave them away for free when you bought anything at RadioShack, and the idea was to be able to scan barcodes in magazine ads, and so pretty soon everyone had them lying around the house. And then someone figured out how to hack them to read any barcode. You could, for example, catalog your whole CD library. And you could count on everyone having one sitting in a closet. That’s a magic combination.

One of my favorite hardware hacks of all time is when someone figured out to build a WiFi antenna out of a Pringles can. The most amazing thing is that the directions for where to drill used the Pringles labels as landmarks: through the left eye, through the cholesterol count, and then the bar code in the middle, too. It’s pretty amazing when anyone interested in doing the project has access to a precision-manufactured piece of hardware: a Pringles can. It’s sitting there so cheap that anyone can walk out anywhere in the developed world, 24/7, and get one—that’s a really powerful thing for the transmission of an idea. So there’s a lot of stuff in the book that’s barely possible, a lot of stuff that actually exists, and stuff that could exist pretty soon.

What research did you do in preparation for Little Brother?

Little Brother was all stuff that I knew was going on, or stuff I’d written about, or could look up, or had already spoken to people about and written about on Boing Boing. So it’s the opposite of coming up with an idea and then figuring out what you need to know. It’s knowing a bunch of stuff and seeing what ideas come out of that.

I’m working on a new novel that’s a little more research-intensive and a little less foreknowledge-based. It’s set partly in India, and I know a lot of what I need to know, but I haven’t spent much time in China and I haven’t spent any in India. So I’m taking a research trip and spending a little time in both.

It’s going to be a young adult novel called For the Win. It’s an extension of a short story I wrote called “Anda’s Game,” which is about people who play video games, and this play is a form of work called gold farming. Games have a virtual wealth, a virtual gold, and a lot of people would rather buy the gold on eBay than do the repetitive tasks required to amass it. And so people in the developing world are paid to work in essentially sweatshops and play games all day, making virtual gold that’s then sold to rich players.

What were the differences between writing for adults and writing for young adults?

I once asked a young adult writer what she thought the soul of young adult fiction was. She said, “Being an adolescent is the state of perpetually going through these one-way changes, where you’re very brave, and you jump off cliffs. You can’t go back again. Like one day you’re someone who has never told a lie of consequence and then you’re someone who has. You can never go back and be that other person again.”

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the centers of our brain that govern risk don’t fully develop until we’re out of our teens. There was a court case last year or the year before in which a teen had done something very foolish, and part of the defense was that his capacity to understand risk was not physiologically fully developed. He literally couldn’t parse risk the way an adult would. I think if you could parse those risks, you probably wouldn’t take all kinds of momentous steps in your life. From a plotting perspective, I like to keep that in mind.

The only other big difference was that when it was all done, my editor said, you know Scholastic has some interest in distributing this as part of their book club. But they won’t do that if it’s got the F word in it, so do you mind if we just take it out of the two places where it is? And I said, take the F word out. No big deal.

Have you exhausted the issues covered in Little Brother?

Not at all. These are immutable topics for our era. Surveillance will be key to all the work I do, because we live in a surveillance state. I live in London. My photo is taken 500 times a day. London is the most surveilled city in the world. Scotland Yard recently advocated that five-year-olds should have their DNA logged into a police database if they exhibit so-called criminal behaviors so that later in life when they offend, we’ll know who they are and we can pick them up. London Metropolitan Police have put up posters all over the city advising us that if we see people taking pictures of security cameras, that we should rat them out to the police because they might be terrorists. It’s increasingly difficult to take note of all the ways we’re losing our civil liberties. Go into an airport and try saying, “I don’t see how I could blow up a plane with my shoe and some water.” They’ll throw you out of the airport, they might even arrest you for “making jokes about terrorism.” It’s not a joke; it’s a security discussion! We’re not allowed to ask the man who’s telling you to take off your shoes, why do I have to take off my shoes?

How do you balance your writing with your other activities?

I do a lot of stuff—I’m on a lot of advisory boards, I’m on some boards of charities, I do all this activism stuff, I write Boing Boing, I write six columns—and yes, this stuff takes up a lot of time. What allows me to do all this is that it’s all part of the same thing. I think the job of a science-fiction writer is to figure out how technology is changing society, how it might change society in the future, and sometimes to even influence how technology is changing society. But that’s also the definition of a tech journalist, a columnist, an activist.

One question I often get is, “How much time do you spend on Boing Boing?” Depending on how you calculate it, I either spend all of my time or none of it. Every time I run across something relevant to anything I do, I write it up for Boing Boing. So in addition to making it searchable, and having people comment on it, and making it clearer, putting it on Boing Boing is powerfully mnemonic for me—it means I remember it. These are sometimes like pieces of a puzzle that I don’t have the box art for. I find these pieces lying around, and I put them on Boing Boing so that I’ll know which pieces I’ve got—and every now and then I’ll find a corner piece, and a whole piece of the puzzle snaps in.

Little Brother was very much like that. I had a flash of inspiration, and I went home and wrote the book in eight weeks, from the day I started to the day I finished. Technically it’s a very research-intensive book—there’s a lot of factual and technological material in it—but everything there, I had already written about on Boing Boing. So I’d been collecting this stuff on Boing Boing without knowing what it was for.

I know a lot of visual artists who work this way—they have of boxes of stuff that looks like it should go into something someday, but they don’t yet know exactly what. My friend Roger Wood, a sort of mad clockmaker, has boxes and boxes in his flat labeled “doll parts,” etc. Boing Boing is like that, but machine searchable.

That said, I don’t have much of a social life.

What was the most difficult part in writing Little Brother?

As with anything, finding the time. Writing, even when conducted “full time,” always seems to be a discretionary activity that falls behind administration, interviews, etc.

What’s the appeal of science fiction for you?

It’s capacity to use parables about the future to describe the hidden shifts technology is wreaking on the present.

What projects can we expect from you in the future?

I’m presently working on a young-adult novel called For The Win, and it’s kind of a novelization of my short story “Anda’s Game.” It’s a book about trade unionists who use video games to organize people in the developing world, to work in special economic zones where labor organizers aren’t allowed to go in. And the way that they do that is by signing up people who work in gold farms, which are virtual sweatshops where people perform repetitive virtual tasks, or videogame tasks, to amass videogame wealth that’s then sold to rich players. It’s set about 10 to 15 years in the future, in the midst of a huge kind of hedge-fund bubble based on virtual goals. And these Industrial Workers of the World Wide Web, or the Webblies, set out to sign up and organize all these people. The book revolves around special economic zones in India, and in the coastal cities in China , and also in Orange County in Southern California.

Cory Doctorow is an activist, teacher, public speaker, and technology expert. A New York Times bestselling author, he is also co-editor of BoingBoing.net, one of the most popular blogs in the world and recipient of more than three million unique visitors per month, and a columnist for publications ranging from Information Week to The Guardian.

Most recently a visiting professor at the University of Southern California, Doctorow served as a Canadian Fulbright Chair in Public Diplomacy and also serves on a number of boards of directors and advisory boards, including those of the Participatory Culture Foundations, the Open Rights Group, the MetaBrainz Foundation, Technorati, Inc., Onion Networks, and others. He also served as Director of European Affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation [EFF] for over four years, where he was a delegate to treaty negotiations at the United Nations in Geneva.

Doctorow has won the Locus Award three times, been nominated for the Hugo and Nebula, won the Campbell Award, and was named one of the Top 25 Web Celebrities by Forbes magazine for the past two consecutive years, as well as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. He also received the Pioneer Award for significant contributions to online freedom from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He is frequently invited to speak at colleges and corporations across the country.

Cory’s novels include Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, and Eastern Standard Tribe, as well as two short story collections. Cory’s written and online work has been referenced by media outlets from CBS television show “Criminal Minds” to the “The Colbert Report.”

Born in Toronto, Canada, Cory currently lives in London. His parents both worked in education, his mom in early childhood education and his dad as a math and computer science teacher.

A New York Times Notable and an LA Times and Washington Post pick for one of the best books of 2008, Little Brother is his first Young Adult novel and it deals with issues of security, civil rights, censorship, and technology—but it is also an adventure story with smart teenage protagonists. The author hopes that you’ll use technology to change the world

Kristin Cashore 2009

2009-06-23T23:25:00-06:00

Kristin Cashore is an Andre Norton Award finalist for her novel Graceling.

Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. Let’s start with your book, Graceling. For unfamiliar readers, can you tell us more about it?

Sure! Graceling is the story of Katsa, a young woman who’s been able to kill people with her bare hands since she was eight. Katsa lives in the seven kingdoms, where very occasionally, people are born with extreme skills called Graces. A Graceling might have impossibly good hearing, run superhumanly fast, or be able to calculate huge sums mentally. Some Graces are useless, like the ability to talk backwards; some are eerie, like mindreading or seeing into the future. Katsa has a fighting and killing Grace.

Gracelings are feared and exploited in the seven kingdoms, and none moreso than Katsa, who’s expected to do the dirty work of torture and punishment for her uncle, King Randa. But then she meets a mysterious stranger named Po, who’s also a Graced fighter and the first person ever to challenge her in a fight. The two form a bond, and each discovers truths they never imagined about themselves, each other, and a terrible danger that’s spreading slowly through the seven kingdoms!

What made you decide to write a full-blown fantasy novel, complete with the cosmology of the Seven Kingdoms?

That’s an impossible question to answer, because I don’t really know! A story simply started growing in my head, and I had to write it down. The plot required there to be numerous kingdoms, so my world grew.

I can say that the whole thing started with the characters. Katsa came first, and unsurprisingly, she came to me fighting—quarreling, to be more specific, inside my head, with another character who grew into Po. Really, Graceling began as conversations in my head between two characters who were furious with each other. My job was to listen to them argue, and figure out what they were so upset about, and what was going on in their world, and what that world was like. Katsa and Po kind of formed themselves for me—at the beginning, I was more of an observer than a creator.

What was the road to publication like? Were there any difficulties?

I had an atypical experience. The first agent I ever queried about Graceling turned out to want to work with me, and I turned out to love her. A couple of months later, she sold Graceling to the editor of my dreams at Harcourt. Talk about counting my lucky stars! I still can’t believe how fast everything has happened.

How about the writing process, what were the challenges in writing Graceling?

There were lots of challenges, first because I was a pretty inexperienced writer, learning to write by doing. I mean, I was trying to learn everything at once—dialogue, pacing, characterization, setting, mood, you name it. And second because… well… it’s a plot with some complexities, and I didn’t realize what I was getting myself into! I didn’t realize how complicated it would be to tell the story I imagined—or how tricky it would be to bring some of my main characters’ Graces to life. Writing this book was a real strain on my feeble brains; I always felt as if it was just outside my control. I was not in charge of it; it was in charge of me.

Could you tell us something more about the upcoming books in the series, Fire and Bitterblue?

Fire, out in October 2009, is a prequel-ish companion book to Graceling. It takes place across the mountains east of the seven kingdoms, thirty or forty years before the story of Graceling, in a rocky, war-torn kingdom called the Dells. There are no known Gracelings in the Dells, but there are beautiful creatures called monsters. Monsters have the shape of normal animals: mountain lions, dragonflies, horses, fish. But the hair or scales or feathers of monsters are gorgeously colored—fuchsia, turquoise, sparkly bronze, iridescent green—and their minds have the power to control the minds of humans. Fire, seventeen years old, is the last remaining human-shaped monster in the Dells. Gorgeously monstrous in body and mind but with a human appreciation of right and wrong, she’s hated and mistrusted by just about everyone. The book is her story, and if you’re wondering what connects it to Graceling, the answer is that (Graceling spoiler ahead!) one of the minor characters in Fire is a creepy little boy with mismatched eyes who seems to have some peculiar verbal abilities. (Fire is by no means Leck’s story, but it does reveal where he came from.)

Bitterblue, currently in progress, is a sequel-ish companion book to Graceling. It takes place six years after Graceling, and Bitterblue is the sixteen-year-old protagonist. Katsa, Po, and many other characters from Graceling will be part of the fabric of the book. Since it’s a work in progress, that’s all I’m willing to say about it at this time!

I didn’t write Graceling planning to write prequels or sequels. I thought of it as a stand-alone book. But then I simply realized at some point that there was a related book I wanted to write; and once I was writing that one, I felt the third one asking to be written. My hope is that Bitterblue will tie all three books together in some way, but again, work in progress, so no promises!

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

I always wanted to be a reader and a daydreamer. Then, in college, I discovered that I also loved to write. I think it would be fair to say that I always suspected I wanted to be a writer, but didn’t know it for sure until I was about 19 or 20. And then, of course, it took a few more years for me to get serious about actually doing it. (I’m 32 now.)

Did you intentionally want to become a YA writer (or wrote your novels with a YA audience in mind) or was this something that happened later on?

I don’t write my novels with any particular audience in mind—and if the mail I receive is any indication, as many adults as young adults are reading YA literature. Sometimes it feels like more of a marketing distinction to me that anything else. The U.K. edition of Graceling, published by Gollancz, is marketed to adults—so I guess that sometimes it’s a judgment call on the part of the publishers.

In your opinion, what are the qualities of a novel that make it YA? Do you think there should be a distinction?

Since I have a degree from The Center for the Study of Children’s Literature at Simmons College, I should be able to answer this question; but the truth is, I’ve always hated this question and have never known how to answer! I think it often has to do with the age of the characters, and maybe with the novelty of the situations they find themselves in. YA literature contains all of the same themes and subject matter as literature for adults, but often, since the characters are young, they’re dealing with these issues for the first time ever, perhaps with less personal experience to call upon. It gives the literature a freshness, in my opinion. And no wonder lots of adults love YA lit, because dealing with brand new hard issues seems to be something we never grow out of! Adulthood often seems to me like one new kind of adolescence after another.

One distinction that’s often made between YA and adult literature, but shouldn’t be, has to do with quality, of course. A lot of people seem to think that YA literature—children’s literature in general—is not as high quality, not as much Literature with a capital L, as books written for adults. Those of us who read lots of children’s literature of all kinds, study it, and plumb its depths know that isn’t true. But there is a sad cultural tendency to condescend to young people, isn’t there? And unfortunately, it extends to their literature.

Who are some of the authors that impress you?

In no particular order: E.B. White, Margaret Mahy, Melina Marchetta, Mary Stewart, Sigrid Undset, Dorothy L. Sayers, Edward Gorey, and Edith Wharton. Just to name a few favorites!

Kristin Cashore grew up in the Pennsylvania countryside as the second of four sisters. She received a bachelor’s degree from Williams College in western Massachusetts and a master’s from the Center for the Study of Children’s Literature at Simmons College in Boston, and she has worked as a dog runner, a packer in a candy factory, an editorial assistant, a legal assistant, and a freelance writer. She has lived in many places (including Sydney, New York City, Boston, London, and Austin), and she currently resides in northern Florida, where her daily activities include walking along the St. Johns River and counting pelicans on the dock.

Kristin Cashore’s debut novel, Graceling, grew from her daydreams about a girl who possesses extraordinary powers—and who forms a friendship with a boy with whom she is insurmountably incompatible. Her second novel, Fire, is a companion book to Graceling and will be released in the fall of 2009.

Ingrid Law 2009

2009-06-17T00:09:01-06:00

Ingrid Law is an Andre Norton Award finalist for her novel Savvy.

Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. Let’s first talk about your book, Savvy. How did you come up with the title (or more appropriately, what made you decide to use savvy as the term for each person’s special abilities)?

First, I wanted to write a book about magical children without ever using the word “magic.” Second, I wanted the magic I created to have a distinctly American feel . . . I wanted to know, if there were an “American Magic,” what might that look like? I chose to use the word “savvy” in lieu of “magic” because the word itself has its roots in American slang. In fact, it was used as a noun for more than a hundred years before it was ever used as an adjective. So I saw no harm in turning it back into a noun again. The original definition of the noun, savvy, was: a practical sense or intelligence. When I discovered this, it seemed like the perfect word to use for my book.

It’s interesting for me how your book is translated into other languages and the titles are different. What’s your favorite foreign language title and why?

I love the German title, Schimmer, just because I imagine it must sound nice when said aloud. In the Netherlands, they titled the book 13!, which is fun as well. Those are the two I know so far. I suppose that translating the title of the book must be a challenge. Titles in general can be rather tricky.

The novel has a rural feel to it. What made you decide to place it in such a setting, in addition to the incorporation of these tiny magical elements?

I wanted to set the story in small towns in a part of the country many people might not at first imagine magical children to live. But small towns have big heart and a love for larger than-life-things. You can often find the World’s Largest curiosities—the World’s Largest Porch Swing, the World’s Largest Ball of Twine, and so on—in the smallest of towns. Just because someone’s from a small town, that doesn’t mean that they don’t think big or possess extraordinary abilities. Some of the magical elements reflect rural or small town ideals. The grandmother in the book cans radio waves. When thinking up her ability, I asked myself what my grandmother was good at. I remembered jars of homemade jam and things canned straight from the garden. Then I asked myself what a “savvy” grandma might be good at and came up with Grandma Dollop’s jars filled with years of radio programs and songs.

Did you originally intend to write a YA book or is something that came out later on?

I’ve always known that I wanted to write for young readers, though I’ve been pleased to discover that the book has appealed to a wide audience. I’ve received email messages from six year olds and sixty-eight year olds, and just about everyone in between. But I love writing for young people because kids in the middle grades are still so totally tapped into their own sense of wonder. It’s still so natural to them to be able to suspend disbelief. Yet, they are also beginning to come into their own sense of who they are and who they will become. I like to think that the kids I write for have one foot firmly on the path toward growing up and the other foot hopping through make-believe games on the playground.

Any difficulties in the actual writing of Savvy?

Savvy came to me in a wonderful, exciting explosion of words and ideas. I had a lot of fun writing it and I learned a lot along the way. This particular story treated me very well. However, I tend to be a full-glass kind of person, so it’s easy for me to forget the parts of a thing that were difficult. I know I had a few hair-pulling moments along the way, but every story has to have some struggle or conflict to be good, right? Even our own?

How did Penguin end up publishing it?

My agent, Daniel Lazar, submitted the manuscript simultaneously to multiple publishers. Alisha Niehaus, my editor at Dial Books for Young Readers (a division of Penguin Young Readers Group), was one of the first to read the manuscript and express her enthusiasm. Her excitement was just one of the factors that won me over, but it was a big one. Another was the potential partnership with Walden Media. In the end, Penguin Young Readers Group and Walden Media acquired the rights to Savvy in a preemptive multi-book deal in July, 2007, in joint acquisition. So I have two amazing companies backing the book. Additionally, Walden Media secured the rights to develop Savvy into a feature film. It was a whirlwind right from the beginning . . . much like the first chapter of the book when the fictional Beaumont family has to move “to the deepest part of inland” because of the hurricane and the fact that one of the characters caused it.

What were the challenges in getting your first book published?

Savvy was not the first book I tried to get published, so I know the familiar feel of rejection. However, there is so much information available now for writers about how to write query letters, how to approach an agent, what to do, what NOT to do. By investing some time and energy into becoming educated about these things, when I did have a book that was ready to find a home, I already knew how to get started.

What is it about the fantasy genre that appeals to you?

I’ve always been a huge fan of fantasy. Fantasy allows us to explore aspects of conflict and humanity in all new ways, unfettered by the constraints of reality or of the every day. In many ways, learning to manage the onset of a “savvy,” dealing with new, out of control powers that arrive simultaneously with the thirteen candles on a birthday cake, is just a metaphor for dealing with the changes we experience as we grow up. But exploring this through fantasy allows young readers to come to these issues through the safety and fun of make-believe. Who doesn’t sometimes feel confused enough or angry enough to cause a storm? Who doesn’t struggle to weed the opinions and ideas of other people from their heads when trying to find their own true voice? Why not manifest these efforts as actual abilities? It’s a lot more fun that way . . .

How does it feel to have your book nominated for several awards?

I never expected it. I’m continuously stunned and completely thrilled. It’s an amazing honor to be nominated for awards alongside such talented people. And I do like shiny things . . . even if someone else gets them. It’s fun to get together to celebrate the fact that people still love creating story.

What projects are you currently working on?

I am working on a follow up to Savvy, exploring the family tree a bit more. Looking at new points of view. Discovering what else we can learn about ourselves through fantasy and magic. My next book should come out next year.

Ingrid Law is a big fan of words and stories, small towns and big ideas. Born in New York, Ingrid’s family moved to Colorado when she was six years old. Now the mother of a teenage daughter, Ingrid still lives in Colorado, where she is hard at work on her next book.

James Patrick Kelly 2009

2009-06-10T22:44:00-06:00

James Patrick Kelly is nominated for his short story “Don’t Stop.”

First off, how did you first get involved with speculative fiction?

I was a voracious consumer of fantastic stories (and movies and TV and comics) as a kid. When I went to college, sf was considered just a half-step above porn by my English professors, so I settled into a headlong infatuation with the Theater of the Absurd. When I first started submitting fiction for publication after college, I tried my hand at pretty much every genre I could think of, but it was clear that my best stuff was speculative. Then I went to the Clarion Writers Workshop and my fate was sealed.

You’ve dabbled in a lot of fields. What’s the appeal of cyberpunk for you? How about slipstream?

When Michael Swanwick published his controversial essay “A Users’ Guide to the Post Moderns” in Asimov’s, he lumped me in with my pals Connie Willis and John Kessel and Stan Robinson as one of the “humanists,” a group said to be in opposition to the cyberpunks. It was news to us. I went to Clarion with Bruce Sterling and had been following what he called The Movement pretty much from the beginning. I did think that the cyberpunk vision of the future was incomplete. I wrote a story called “Rat” which was a satiric take on the standard issue cyberpunk hero. And although my story “Solstice,” used cyberpunk tropes to forward the humanist agenda, Bruce bought it for Mirrorshades, which became something of a classic anthology. However, it was about that time that I started messing around with computers and realized that, although I was never going to get to outer space, there was an exciting future waiting for me in cyberspace. That’s when I began to lose some of my ironic distance from cyberpunk.

I started thinking about slipstream at the Sycamore Hill Writers Workshop in the eighties when I had to come up with something to say about wonderful and enigmatic stories by the likes of Carol Emshwiller and Karen Joy Fowler. Nothing in my literary toolbox seemed to be of much use. So I set out to acquire better tools.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

Probably when I was in eighth grade, although it seemed rather an improbable aspiration. I thought it only slightly less likely that I would be a Martian when I grew up. My dad wanted me to be an engineer, I think. Or failing that, a lawyer.

What was the biggest hurdle you faced breaking into the industry?

Believing that I would make as a writer, despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary. It took me a long time before to become James Patrick Kelly . I sold my first story in 1975. In 1980 I crammed about 500 rejection slips into a box and tossed it into the attic. In the eight years after I went to Clarion, I published a clutch of stories and a novel; I now regard all of the early stuff as apprentice work. I was very proud of them at the time, but at this point I’m glad they’re hard to find and I intend to keep them that way.

You’ve attended Clarion before and currently the Vice Chair of the Clarion Foundation. Can you tell us the impact Clarion had on you back then and now, and its influences, if any, on the current industry?

Getting into Clarion was the first validation I ever had as a writer. The encouragement of my teachers at the workshop and afterward—especially that of the founders of Clarion, Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm—sustained me through the lean years of rejection. Probably the most enduring legacy of Clarion is my career-long reliance on the workshop method. Just about everything you have ever read of mine has been subjected to group critique. Before I found workshop bliss, I used to put stories away for a month or so to try to get distance from them before I attempted a submission draft. I have found nothing quicker or better for getting that necessary distance than hearing smart people unpack my stories—especially when they speak bluntly about what isn’t working.

As far as fiction podcasts are concerned, you’re a veteran. How do you think podcasts are affecting the industry and your career?

I have no doubt whatsoever that I wouldn’t have been nominated for the Hugo or won the Nebula for my novella Burn had I not podcast it. I talked Jacob Weisman at Tachyon Publications into letting me start with Chapter One the day he published. Four months later, it was available to anyone who had the patience to download all sixteen episodes. And that was quite a few people! There were upwards of twenty thousand downloads that I know about, but no doubt many more than that have listened in, since I released it on Free Reads under a Creative Commons. And Free Reads caught the attention of the good people at Audible.com, who approached me to podcast fifty-two of my stories for pay over at James Patrick Kelly’s StoryPod on Audible. So podcasting has been very good to me.

Having typed this brief history, however, I am not at all sure that my experience is reproducible. As you say, I was an early adopter and, insofar as I had an extensive bibliography, was a something like “name brand” in the early podosphere. It’s much more crowded now, which means that there many, many talented sf writers sharing their work in the hopes of growing their audience and maybe making a few extra bucks. The way I see it, podcasting is a good side bet against the inevitable changes in publishing, but it can’t carry a career.

You write in a variety of formats from short stories to novels. Is there a particular medium you favor and what are its strengths?

Of course, since I haven’t published a full-blown novel in more than a decade, I guess I favor the short form. Short story writers have to be nimble. The work must be focused. It’s a high impact art form; if a story doesn’t leave a strong impression, then it almost certainly has failed. That said, the reader’s investment of attention and emotion in a story is far less than it is with a novel, which is why sf has evolved from story genre to a novel – or trilogy! – genre. Readers tend to remember titles and authors of novels; if they’re trying to recall a story they may only have the vaguest notion of the plot. It’s that one where they push that girl out the airlock. It’s that one with all the forest fires.

Lately, there are a lot of changes happening in the publishing industry. How have you adapted to the changing scene and what steps do you think other authors/publishers/editors should take?

Vernor Vinge wrote about the possibility of a cultural singularity overtaking us someday, and I wonder if we might not be seeing the first signs of a publishing singularity. Of course, one of Vinge’s key insights about that larger singularity was that we who are on the near side of it can’t possibly know what those on the far side will be like. Similarly, it’s hard for me to imagine what a writer’s life would be like without the magazines, without books (or with paper books marginalized) and without the economic infrastructure of readers paying for the texts they read. Are we really going to have to earn our income from sales of tee shirts or some such paraphernalia or by slipping product endorsements into our stories? As you know, Bob, as a starship pilot I couldn’t even manage to navigate my way out of near earth orbit without my Microsoft Envision™ wetware.

So take this advice as from one who admits to being deeply confused about the future of publishing: work on your charisma. Having charisma doesn’t mean you have to soar into Neil Gaiman space, but it does mean that you have to do more than just sit at home and churn out stories that get honorable mentions in the Year’s Best Science Fiction. You have to find – or develop—some attractive personal quality that you can exploit to raise your profile. Blogging? Sure, but not about your goldfish, please. Podcasting? Absolutely, but buy a decent mic. Paneling at cons? Yes, but not if you’re going to spend the entire hour pimping your latest masterpiece. And I’m sorry, but if you’re not giving away some free content on your website, then nobody is going to click over to you.

Let’s talk about your story “Don’t Stop.” What was the inspiration for the piece? Were there any challenges in writing it?

“Don’t Stop” is a story that workshops made – and unmade. I wrote the first draft when I was teaching at Clarion West in 2004. Usually when I do a Clarion, I try to write something to show solidarity with the students and that skinny twenty-three year old wannabe Jim Kelly. Then as Norescon Four loomed, the members of my local workshop, the Cambridge Science Fiction Writers Workshop, proposed to the con that we would critique a story by one of our members in public as a kind of performance panel. I volunteered a very different version of “Don’t Stop.” Others may have a different recollection, but what I remember is that the comments were withering. In fact, I put the story in a drawer for a year because I was so confused by what my friends had said. Eventually I pulled it out again and ran it through BRAWL, another local Boston workshop, which had been kind enough to invite me as a guest. This time the comments were gentler, but no less confusing. There was something wrong with the ending, something missing in the middle. Okay, okay—back into the drawer. Again, it sat for the better part of a year. What finally got me to look at it again was the curse of the June story. Sheila Williams wondered often and at length whether I had something to keep my streak of consecutive appearances in the June issue of Asimov’s. I rewrote the story all over again, added a character, and totally changed the ending. And here I am, writing about a Nebula nominee!

But you really asked about inspiration, so here it is: I’m a runner, and every so often I have to write about my love of running. There is a short passage that includes a few sentences that some of my personal favorites. The main character and her coach are racing each other down a hill:

He always made a distinction between running and jogging. Jogging is a mental activity. You do it because you ought to. Running is a physical activity. You do it because there is no choice. Ought doesn’t win races. You win the race because there’s a tiger chasing you or because you absolutely have to get home in time or maybe just because it’s a beautiful day and you’re seventeen and life is impossibly sweet. Coach no longer looks sixty-eight. He is seventeen all the way to the bottom of the hill.

James Patrick Kelly has had an eclectic writing career. He has written novels, short stories, essays, reviews, poetry, plays and planetarium shows. His most recent book, a collection of stories, entitled The Wreck Of The Godspeed, was published in the summer of 2008. His short novel Burn won the Science Fiction Writers of America’s Nebula Award in 2007. He has won the World Science Fiction Society’s Hugo Award twice: in 1996, for his novelette “Think Like A Dinosaur” and in 2000, for his novelette, “Ten to the Sixteenth to One.” His fiction has been translated into eighteen languages. With John Kessel he is co-editor of Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, Rewired: The Post Cyberpunk Anthology and the forthcoming The Secret History Of Science Fiction. He writes a column on the internet for Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and is on the faculty of the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine and the Board of Directors of the Clarion Foundation. He produces two (count ‘em – two!) podcasts: James Patrick Kelly’s StoryPod on Audible and the Free Reads Podcast. His website is www.jimkelly.net.

Mary Rosenblum

2009-06-03T23:05:00-06:00

Mary Rosenblum was nominated for her novelette “Night Wind.”

What was the inspiration for “Night Wind”?

When Deborah asked me for a story for the book, I was working on an alternate history project and was in that frame of mind. Myself, I see magic all over the place in the real world – we just think it’s science, or we don’t let ourselves see it – and that particular period in European history, when Spain began bringing its infusion of bloody treasure in from the New World, tied in with the alt history story I was working. And it enticed me since I saw that as a flow of darkness being piped into the magic fabric of Europe. So I set it then, made magic more commonplace in this version of history, and I even got to play with horses. I never quite outgrew being a horse-mad girl, even after owning several.

“Night Wind” appeared in Lace and Blade - what were your favorites among the other stories appearing there?
I have to say that it was Chaz Benchley’s story, In the Night Street Baths that really stayed with me. His characterization is excellent, the implications of larger story are wonderful, and he does it in narrative form which is common in fantasy, but not always well done. In fact often is not. It’s really powerful .

You write mystery as well as science fiction. How does the experience of it differ - if it does?

Mystery is totally different from fantasy and SF. There, the concept of the story, the message that I invariably weave into the backstory of my SF, that ‘lets look at the magic that’s all around us’ that I like to do in my fantasy, has no counterpart. I love mystery, but it’s like designing an intricate jigsaw puzzle. Lots of fun to do, and yes, I can create characters I really love, but the plot’s the thing there, the characters are a close second, and anything else I add to it needs to be seriously third. I enjoy writing mystery a lot, but I love writing SF and fantasy.

Have any other genres tempted you as a writer?

I do mainstream from time to time and have published in small anthologies. Generally, they have been intense little character stories, but again, I miss the larger stuff you can weave into SF and even fantasy.

What have you read recently that sparked story ideas for you?

Oh, gosh, what have I NOT read that has sparked ideas for me! Ideas I don’t lack. I just finished reading Beryl Markham’s ‘West With the Night’ which is an outstanding memoir of her life in Kenya in the thirties. And I’m finding there another of those built in conflicts that could power some very nice fantasy – the unnoticed (by the whites) friction between the indigenous culture and the white society. I’ll have to think about that for awhile. See what develops. Everything makes me think of story ideas! Science magazines, newspaper articles., even ads!

How do writing and teaching overlap for you? Do you enjoy both in the same way?

They’re a wonderful yin/yang. You can’t really understand something completely, in my opinion, unless you can teach it well. I teach writing with the same passion I bring to the writing. In order to really make someone comprehend how to do what they’re trying to do well, you have to understand what it is that you do at a much much deeper level than if you simply write and revise. The two are inextricably entwined now. I learn as much from teaching as I teach, I think.

You’ve talked about starting to write f&sf because you wanted to supply some of the strong women characters that were lacking. Do you see many gender-related changes in the field since you started?

Oh, of course I see changes! Cat, it was a desert back in the sixties! Women, in fantasy, were either victims or evil witches and only the evils witches seemed to have real power. The victim heroines always got saved by someone. Well, okay, you had a few fairy godmothers, but they were hardly very realistic. In SF it was worse. We only existed as wives who held their hubbies back from doing cool and heroic things, or shrill and nasty smart women who were just plain unlikable. Yuck! What a message. How power or be smart and you must be ugly and nasty. It’s hardly a gender-blind world today, any more than it’s a color-blind world today, but I can find women characters I love and admire. Ones that I didn’t create. J

What do you think of the Sci-Fi Channel’s proposed switch to the name, the Syfy Channel?

Well, sorry, what’s in a title? I’m not a fan of the visual-media representation of SF, whatever you call it. I’m afraid that most of the time it reinforces that stereotype that SF is nothing more than raygun and alien and Dangerous Cyber Being action adventure fluff.

You raise sheep as well as write. How did you begin doing that? Have the sheep ever appeared in your writing?

Gee, I don’t think I’ve ever put sheep into my writing. But may I recommend the totally hilarious horror spoof ‘Black Sheep’? If you haven’t seen it, rent it. I had a hard time staying in my chair, I was laughing so hard, they hit all the horror film clichés and did it with outstanding style. What a hoot! Okay, end of paid advertisement here. In reality, I raised dairy goats before I raised sheep. When I started writing, I lived on a small acreage, was a single parent, and was making squat money writing, as you might imagine. Since barter is not an approved from of payment to mortgage companies and the IRS, they got whatever cash I earned. The only way to eat well and not do food stamps was to grow the stuff. So for thirty years now I have raised all my food and heated my wood-heat-only house on my acreage. I no longer have dairy animals (milking twice a day, 365 days a year gets old fast when you live alone) but I do raise all my fruit, veggies, and meat. It’s a lot of work, but I still figure that it’s part of my income. I’d pay a LOT to buy the same organic stuff at New Seasons. And to be honest, mine is better. And think how much I’d have to pay a gym to stay in the shape I’m in. J I’d probably go to rabbits instead of sheep now, except that then I’d have to clear the weeds in my woodlot. My sheep do it better and besides I compete in herding trials with my dogs, so they’re also practice sheep.

Oh yeah, I do teach dog training and compete in herding trials, tracking tests, and obedience competitions.

As a child, Mary Rosenblum never really wanted to have a nine-to-five job to pay for doing what she wanted to do on the weekends. Grownups kindly explained that this wasn’t practical. So far, she has managed to actually fulfill that life ambition to be poor by writing. She started out at Clarion West in 1988 and published one of her Clarion stories, ‘For A Price’, in Asimov’s Magazine. Since that first publication, she has published well more than 60 short stories in SF, mystery, and mainstream fiction, (she stopped counting at 60) as well as eight novels. Her newest novel, Horizons, was released in November 2006 from Tor Books and came out in paperback in November 2007. Water Rites a compendium of the novel Drylands as well as three prequel novelettes that first appeared in Asimov’s were released from Fairwood Press in January 2007. The hardcover collection of her early short fiction; Synthesis and Other Virtual Realities is available from Arkham House. Her SF stories have been published in Asimov’s, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, SciFiction, and Analog among others. She won the Compton Crook award for Best First Novel, The Asimov’s Readers Award, and has been a Hugo Award finalist as well as an Endeavor Award finalist , an Ellery Queen Reader’s Award finalist, and short listed for a number of other awards. She publishes in mystery as Mary Freeman, teaches writing for Long Ridge Writers Group, and at writers workshops, and was an instructor for the Clarion West Writers Workshop this summer.

When she is not writing, she lives sustainably on a small acreage where she trains dogs, raises sheep, teaches cheesemaking, and grows all her fruits and vegetables. She managed to raise two sons who have turned out to be pretty cool people and has even done a bit of traveling in China. And she still doesn’t have a nine-to-five job. Or a lot of money, but hey, you choose your priorities. You can find more information at her website: www.maryrosenblum.com

John Barth described CAT RAMBO’s writings as “works of urban mythopoeia”—her stories take place in a universe where chickens aid the lovelorn, Death is just another face on the train, and Bigfoot gives interviews to the media on a daily basis. She has worked as a programmer-writer for Microsoft and a Tarot card reader, professions which, she claims, both involve a certain combination of technical knowledge and willingness to go with the flow. In 2005 she attended the Clarion West Writers’ Workshop and is a member of the Codex Writers’ Group. Among the places in which her stories have appeared are ASIMOV’S, WEIRD TALES, CLARKESWORLD, and STRANGE HORIZONS, and her work has consistently garnered mentions and appearances in year’s best of anthologies.

She is the co-editor of critically-acclaimed Fantasy Magazine.

Vera Nazarian 2009

2009-05-26T22:50:00-06:00

Vera Nazarian is nominated for her novella “The Duke in His Castle.”

Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. Let’s first talk about The Duke in His Castle. What made you decide that the length would be that of a novella, as opposed to a novel?

Good question. Would you believe (to quote Maxwell Smart) that this work originally started out as a short story? I think all ideas start out as pre-inflated rubber balloons. Depending on their potential scope they grow as big and blimpy as a multi-book series or stay as tiny condom-sized condiments of flash fiction.

In this case, I think I did have a story, or at most a novelette in mind—just two characters interacting, Rossian and Izelle, yin-yang in a nutshell. But then all the introspection and the compounded thickness of the mental state of the characters forced me to switch gears. First, I broke the single story into scenes. Then something else happened, and the scope of the story shifted, expanded. I believe the Castle itself became a character and added all the baroque hoary atmosphere, and the servants, and the ancient history. . . .

I did consider briefly padding it out further into a novel but that was really not the story’s natural length. As is, I think it is just right. When Tanith Lee read the novella, she told me that she thought it would make a stage play, with the kind of insular stage-level intensity between characters, the one-on-one riffing off dramatic dialogue, etc. Indeed, a play makes better sense to me than a novel.

What was the most difficult part in writing it and getting it published?

As I mentioned elsewhere, this is a work of twenty years. I’ve always been an ambitious kid, and unfortunately my college-age aspirations had overshot my abilities by several decades. (Fortunately, these days my ambition works in Benjamin Button-reverse mode, and the older I get the less I think of my “razmakh”—a great Russian word that doesn’t exactly translate but means “the swinging wide of one’s arms” in the metaphoric sense.)

The difficulty in writing and rewriting The Duke in His Castle was that I knew long in advance this was supposed to be somehow an intense, “important” work, but the first short drafts were inadequate in every sense. I had to really learn to write first, before I could write it. And part of the learning meant I had to immerse myself in the claustrophobic mindset over time. As for the language—the thick, long sentences—it is the Castle speaking. It did not start out in such a dense style but evolved layers, like lichen growing over old moldy granite walls.

As a result, the characters are a little insane. Rossian, the young Duke, is not particularly likeable, and at times he is demonic. At others, he is a lonely little boy.

Now, most writers realize that novellas don’t have venues and there are very few places you can sell one. Although, these days I must say the situation has improved vastly, with places like PS Publishing and a number of other fine small presses that specialize in novellas. But it used to be you could only serialize them in the digests. So not many people intentionally start out with the intention of creating a novella unless they have a specific market in mind.

Erzebet YellowBoy was kind enough to take The Duke for her micro-press Papaveria Press, in order to do a marvelous hand-made art edition; that got delayed due to her moving to the UK, and other things came up, and in the meantime, my father died and I basically felt I really needed to bring this work out myself before a mass audience. I and it could no longer wait. And so I did the book through Norilana—in many ways to do a personal tribute to the strange cycle of death and life and death and life and….

Any update on its proposed hand-bound edition?

Not at this point. I’ve been extremely busy running Norilana Books and dealing with the dire economic stuff and Life (TM) and I am not sure Erzebet’s situation is right now. I do hope eventually we can do the Papaveria Press hand-bound edition and use my interior illustration and her gorgeous cloth covers and exquisite hand-sewn pages and gold foil…

What made you decide to tackle the setting in a moody castle?

I think it wasn’t so much my own decision as it was it that tackled me. And by “it” I don’t mean the castle, but the dark claustrophobic mindset, the strange powerless stagnation that underlies everything—a state of mind that came to overtake the story.

How do you manage to juggle your publishing duties at Norilana with your writing duties?

Right now I am not writing. And that truly sucks. I grieve. I started just one story last year, and it’s about 6,000 words, still unfinished, and I’ve had bare minutes to work on it, here and there. Let me repeat, I grieve. After all these months and years without a proper writing outlet I am now an overflowing vessel of Liquid Story, lidded up and bursting without an outlet.

That’s because I am working on Norilana book production non-stop, often 24/7 (yeah, I’ve gone without sleep for days straight, so this is not much of an exaggeration). Mostly the insane schedule is so that I can get an income steam going that will allow me to pay the bills and keep the house, and take care of mom. And this means I have to keep adding books into the system, and do all else that goes with it. Norilana Books is growing and I am almost there.

These days I wistfully see other people post their writing progress and talk about writers block and other vagaries and so-called writerly woes, and I want to take a two-by-four and slam them upside the head for being lucky enough to have a life and to have 15 minutes to write, or to wail about not writing. Seriously, I would love to have some of your problems, people.

On the other hand, I then take that same virtual two-by-four and slam myself upside the head to remind me that I am fortunate to be doing the other thing that I love instead of being stuck in a soul-killing office day job and taking hundreds of tech support calls a day as I used to.

I am publishing books—mine or other people’s—so it’s all good. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I am blissfully swimming in the sea of all of you—the industry—of all of us who love Language and Story and Adventure, and Thought and Dreams and True Wonder.

Can you tell us something about your publishing company, Norilana? Why is it named Norilana Books?

Okay, the dirty little secret is about to come out. What is Norilana? There is possibly one other person in the world who knows or remembers the word, and that’s my childhood friend Cathy who was there when I first came up with it in junior high. “Norilana” is a made-up word, a personal mantra of sorts. Get ready . . . it is the name of a mighty sorceress of the night in my first unfinished epic fantasy novel, titled (to shamelessly ape Terry Brooks) “The Sword of Norilana.” So now you get the tongue-in-cheek audacity, since that’s also the name of the upcoming high fantasy imprint of Norilana Books. My dreams live on in publishing, though not exactly as I’d originally envisioned them.

As far as Norilana Books the small press, I am proud to say that since I started this business in 2006, we now have over 230 books in print, and that’s a mix of classics of world literature, genre reprints and originals. In the imprints, YA Angst continues to bring out excellent YA fantasy by Sherwood Smith. Leda is the home of romantic fantasy and the Lace and Blade anthology series (volume one includes this year’s Nebula Award Nominee in the novelette category, “Night Wind” by Mary Rosenblum) edited by Deborah J. Ross. Curiosities, the imprint of poetry and unclassifiable delights, showcases Catherynne M. Valente, Mike Allen, and JoSelle Vanderhooft, and the there are various fantasy, SF, and women’s fiction titles by many other amazing authors under the general imprints.

Coming later this year is TaLeKa, the unique imprint dedicated to the works of Tanith Lee and the art of John Kaiine. Then, there’s Spirit, the imprint of the soul in search of meaning, where I plan to release several unusual fiction anthologies that mix history, philosophy, the arts, and inspiration. Finally, there’s the previously mentioned The Sword of Norilana and a very exciting announcement related to it coming soon, in conjunction with the debut of a stellar new author and a monumental epic fantasy series in 2010. In short, there are so many exciting things to come that I can hardly keep talking about it here. Stay tuned!

Do you consider yourself more of a short story writer or a novel writer?

Personally I see myself as a novelist, the writer of very long and possibly blabby and complicated yarns. It’s never an issue of expanding but cutting down, with me. Which in turn is likely the result of having grown up reading Tolstoy, Victor Hugo, and other old verbose classics—complex stories of introspection and very slow pacing. That’s what comes naturally.

On the other hand, I had to teach myself to write short stories, and even there I tend to put in a lot of effort into very intricate, possibly excessive worldbuilding for each short piece, so that they are potentially settings for novels.

Currently, what’s the most difficult aspects when it comes to writing? When it comes to publishing?

I would say, these days it is time and resources. When it comes to publishing there’s never enough time to get things done, and I am always doing the Red Queen trick just to stay in place and on schedule. I would also love to have more finances so that I could expand the business faster and add employees.

With writing, time and focus has also been an issue. As a writer I used to get easily distracted and tended to work in intense bursts, and not on a daily basis—that’s just how I roll. This made it difficult to produce creatively when under constant severe stress (as has been my experience for the last several years). Now I’ve gotten much better at managing to write when under emotional duress, and deadlines are always a good thing and act as a catalyst. But when there’s simply no time to write, there is little anyone can do.

As a writer I see myself as a precarious syringe-needle of intensity, cutting into a single initial point from which begins the injection of a story. To maintain the story, the focus must always be sharp and precise, else I lose the fine thread of creation. An odd metaphor, I know, but it’s how I visualize my process. It is never a blunt random outpouring. It’s very calculated and linear; one sentence follows another in a logical chain of succession. I may not know where exactly I am going—since I write organically without an outline, with only a vague idea of completion of a theme—but I always know how to end the immediate thought.

What are the projects you’re currently working on?

Oh, if only I could set all things aside for several months and just worry about nothing, and simply write! My first thing would very likely be the sequel to LORDS OF RAINBOW, already written in my head and to be titled LADY OF MONCHROME. Otherwise there’s a number of other novels and fantastic otherworlds in progress, including a second book in the Compass Rose milieu, GODS OF THE COMPASS ROSE, and COBWEB BRIDE, and AIREALM, and even that short story I started some time last year. . . .

But I am dreaming. Right now, it’s back to publishing work.

VERA NAZARIAN immigrated to the USA from the former USSR as a kid, sold her first story at the age of 17, and since then has published numerous works in anthologies and magazines, and has seen her fiction translated into eight languages. She made her novelist debut with the critically acclaimed Dreams of the Compass Rose, followed by epic fantasy about a world without color, Lords of Rainbow. Her novella THE CLOCK KING AND THE QUEEN OF THE HOURGLASS from PS Publishing with an introduction by Charles de Lint made the Locus Recommended Reading List for 2005. Her collection Salt of the Air, with an introduction by Gene Wolfe, contains the 2007 Nebula Award-nominated The Story of Love. Recent work includes the baroque illustrated fantasy novella The Duke In His Castle, released in June 2008. In addition to being a writer and award-winning artist she is also the publisher of Norilana Books.

Ian McDonald 2009

2009-05-20T11:57:01-06:00

Ian McDonald is nominated for his novel Brasyl.

Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. What’s the appeal of science fiction for you?

For me it’s not so much a thing of reading but a way of thinking. Science fiction is my way of looking at the world. It’s a compulsive neural twitch to look at events, history, technology, society and ask, ‘what would happen if I changed that, tweaked that, that was ten times larger or smaller, came back in one hundred years time?’ I can’t help but think this way--but I find it not a disability but a useful mindset. It’s enquiring, it assumes nothing will stay the same, it embraces change and it looks to possibilities, it assumes there will be a future and it broadens the horizons from the ‘Me! Me! Me!’ mindset endemic in Western 21st century society. It’s a way of navigating the now. And at it’s very best, it dazzles you with wonder.

What was the inspiration for Brasyl? What kind of research did you have to do?

After ‘River of Gods’ I had a slightly heightened awareness of places that science-fiction forgot about, but which have the potential to become major political, economic and cultural players. India was obvious --China has always been much more prominent in SF thinking of Asia, because the SF worldview is very much a US-centric worldview. I had an idea that I wanted to explore the Many World Theory: I’ve always been fascinated, scared and seduced by Brazil and it seemed a nation that better expressed than anywhere that sense of worlds, universes, lying next to each other, quite inaccessible to each other, but which can sometimes open on to each other into moments of madness. You get that sense in cities like Rio and Sao Paulo, where the social jump from even one end of a street to another can be from a palace to a favela. Parallel and inaccessible universes literally next door to each other. Brazil is huge --it’s larger than the conterminous states of the US, it’s almost completely unknown to us Northerners, who see nothing more than a bit of bootie-shaking at Carnaval, or the occasional performance by the Selecao, the national soccer team --who seem well on their way to becoming the Harlem Globetrotters of world soccer, alas, or wring our hands at the fate of the Amazon. Seemingly separate world, but all connected. Yet here is a huge, vibrant melting pot American culture that is completely its own thing: one of the things I love about Brazilian music is how it invents a totally different black music tradition from the one in North America. And beyond those obvious markers, the country is a blank to most people, hence the fair few comment on The Interweb from reviewers who ‘didn’t get all that Spanish’. Put it all together and it’s obvious…

What made you decide to structure the book using three timelines/characters?

It’s a book about connections between the disparate, specifically the quantum connections between things and, being me, I was perversely drawn not to the huge difference between parallel universes --the classic Hitler/Napoleon/Confederacy/Vikings win-- but to imperceptible differences between universes, that over time add up. So you see someone you think you know and slowly realise, hey; they’re not from round this neck of the universe at all. It’s a fun way of playing with identity, and questions of identity run all through Brasyl; it seems to me another Brazilian cultural trait, a sense of looseness of identity, of being happy to be several social selves in one body. It was originally just two timelines: the near-future Sao Paulo of Edson and the Rio of Marcelina… but as I read more about the history of the country, it became obvious that I had to set something in the past. Brazil’s history of stunning and appalling, and the late Mission period, before the Jesuits were expelled because they were the only force for social good in the colony, who spoke out against the mass enslavement, and thus destruction, of the Brazilian natives. As it turned out, that was the but I enjoyed writing most. I’ve always had a thing about the 18th century, it’s the fusion of elegance and refinement with brutality and passion.

What was the most difficult thing you encountered when writing Brasyl?

The inevitable one of not being Brazilian, the same as not being Indian, American, a citizen of any one of the ten thousand (and counting) cultures of my general purpose far future Clade. But then that’s the whole trick of any writing, as it is of acting, of people knowing you’re not what you pretend to be, but convincing them sufficiently. ‘The Other’ starts at your eyelids, I find. All writing is trying to extend ‘you’ into the rest of the universe that is ‘not you’, and communicate that. I try and immerse myself in a world over a long period of time: the River of Gods/Cyberabad Days (out now!) world has been evolving since 1999. I researched Brasyl for two years before writing a single word. I mass a colossal amount of information, most of which I never use, but if I don’t put in the spade-work, Ill never know whether it’s needed or not.

Moving on to your other writings, what are you currently working on?

I’m tunnelling into ‘The Dervish House’, part three of the unofficial ‘New World Order’ trilogy. It’s set in Turkey in the not-too distant future, five years after it joins the European Union (something the current government wants very much). There’s the usual pother of intermingling stories, told over five days and focused on a diverse group of people who live and work in an old converted dervish lodge in a tatty corner of Istanbul. Why Turkey? Look at it on a map. It’s immediately obvious that this is one of the planet’s strategically important countries. It’s undergoing a manufacturing boom. And when you go there, you realise how endlessly rich and fascinating the country is. Their history goes back to the very limits of human imagination. It’s been the highway of Empires and been capital of four empires itself.

When you start a novel or a story, do you have an agenda beforehand or is it something that surfaces as the writing progresses?

A bit of both. I have the science idea, some tool in the science-fictional trope-box that can be beautifully expressed through the society and history of that country, and which can change it, illuminate it in ways different from our Atlantic-centric thinking, and which the people can make entirely their own. I have the social and political set up well in advance, the triggers for social change which are the energy source for the book. It’s nice still be to be able to write a political novel --and SF is at its heart deeply political because it’s the way the world can be. As I write, things come into clearer focus, ideas that seemed brilliant and vital are dropped because they’re clunky, the whole edifice breaks forward. And I’m still sourcing material as I write. It’s kind of intense, like method acting. However, I’ve never yet thrown a Christian Bale on set.

You’ve featured a wide variety of countries/cultures in your books and tackled various causes. How do you decide to set your stories in this or that place?

Big, brash and overlooked --particularly by the US. Places that offer a completely different interpretation of the US-centric values and tropes of Science Fiction. Aliens come to Earth: okay, so what if, rather they land on the White House lawn, they land in East Africa? (Chaga/Evolution’s shore). Or India, where my particular take on artificial intelligence seemed to mesh perfectly with a predominantly Hindu democracy emerging as a major information technology centre. For Brasyl, as I said, I’d long wanted to explore the wilder shores of quantum theory, particularly the idea that quantum computing, because of its code-breaking powers, might be tightly regulated, and that a pirate quantum computing culture might evolve --and that seemed strangely South American. And Sao Paulo is so essentially science-fictional. The rich commute from tower-top helipads… how can you not love this?

What’s your definition of third world?

It’s not an expression I use any more. I like ‘developing world’. Third world, to me, reveals an old-style Eurocentric thinking: The First World is the Old world, then there is the New World (including Australia --so it’s clearly developed from British Empire thinking), and then the rest is the supposedly impoverished and struggling Third World. Except it’s not like that. India and China are motoring up to become major world players, Brazil is the regional superpower in South America and has ambitions to play a role commensurate with its size on the global stage. Information technology is a great leveller --I’m fascinated by the way that African villages have cellphones before they have a land line, and find exciting and innovative uses for them totally suited to their needs that we would never think of. There are political and social markers that I would think of as ‘underdeveloped world’: corruption, a weak state but a powerful government, reliance on families, lack of access to finance, poor rule of law, male gun culture, theocracy… They’re always the most interesting to wrote about.

What was the biggest hurdle you faced breaking into the industry?

The second third and fourth stories. The first one you sell is easier, because you’ve cried blood over that little gem, you polished it to a gleam over maybe years. Then you realise you need to follow that up --momentum is a key play in writing, maintaining a steady rhythm of work and delivery. But, for me, it’s been disgustingly easy. Sorry but that’s the truth. I didn’t have years of trawling through the slush pile, things fell towards me, which is odd for someone writing in a science-fictionally isolated place like Northern Ireland, at that time, which was the end-game of the Troubles, when everyone knew it was over because there was no clear win for any of the players, but no one could move first to finish it. It’s been a charmed life. Then again, there’s that second novel of which I do not speak: ‘Out on Blue Six’… I did suffer a big set back when I lost my first US publisher in 1996, and it took a good few years to recover from that and get working with Pyr, who may be small, but that means they have heart and soul and passion and rock mightily. On the upside it did mean that I had to get a day job, which has turned out to be a blessing, in that I get to meet Real! People! (well, as real as you can get in an animation company)

What’s been the most rewarding experience so far?

Writing? Rewarding? People are rewarding, the world is rewarding. Being part of a global science-fictional community, one that likes to talk and shout and argue and pulls together when the family is threatened from the outside, that’s very rewarding.

How has the present you differed from the Ian McDonald of two decade ago?

Well, there’s not an atom of me in existence then that is part of me now and yet, somehow, a sense of me persists. This is mystery, and I still maintain that keen sense of mystery that is the heart of SF. I’m older than I think, which baffles me. Writing seems easier now, so I mistrust that, as anything that seems too easy may not be very good. I’m duller, grumpier less tolerant of fools but keener to the tiny joys of life.

Ian McDonald’s mother is Irish, Fatrher Scottish, was born in England but has lived for almost all of his forty something years in Northern Ireland, more specifically, in that narrow strip of land along the southern edge of Belfast Lough. From that vantage he’s seen the Troubles start and also, he hopes, end. His first story was sold in 1983 to short-lived but very glossy local SFF magazine Extro. He bought a guitar with the money. His first novel, Desolation Road came out in 1988 from Bantam Spectra, this year PYR republish it for the first time since then in the US. His most recent novel was the Hugo and Nebula nominated Brasyl, just out from PYR in the US and Gollancz in the UK is Cyberabad Days, a collection of stories from the future India of his 2006 novel River of Gods, including Hugo winning novelette The Djinn’s Wife. In progress is a new novel, The Dervish House, set in near-future Turkey. In daylight hours he works for local animation company Flickerpix.

K.D. Wentworth 2009

2009-05-13T11:21:00-06:00

K.D. Wentworth is nominated for her novelette “Kaleidoscope.”

Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. What’s the appeal of speculative fiction for you?

Ever since I was very small, I always wanted the world to be stranger than it really was. I had to be disabused of the notion of Santa Claus at a much later age than most children because I simply wouldn’t stop believing. Speculative fiction satisfies that itch for a wilder, stranger world.

At what point did you know you wanted to be a writer? What challenges did you have to overcome in order to do so?

I decided I wanted to be a writer when I was in the fourth grade and stuck with the notion, even writing two (very bad) Man from U.N.C.L.E. novels in high school, mostly designed to make my friends laugh. The main challenge for me (besides learning to type!) was learning to turn off the TV, the radio, the stereo, etc., close the door to my office and commit some real time to writing every day. I’m easily bored so it was hard to learn to be alone with my thoughts and the keyboard.

Is it easy for you transitioning between short stories and novels? Which do you prefer?

I love both so it’s easy for me to go back and forth. Sometimes I even work on my novel in the morning and work on a short story in the afternoon. Short stories are short term gratification. You can write them in a week or two and then send them out into the world to earn their bread. Novels are comfortable because you create these characters and worlds and then get to spend a really long time exploring and getting to know them.

How has the Writers of the Future contest affected you, both when you started out and in the present?

Writers of the Future was my first sale and the first indication that I’d ever received that I wasn’t wasting my time and that a career was possible. Winning gave me confidence, and then what I learned at the WOTF workshop gave me a head start.

How did being an elementary school teacher affected you as a writer?

It taught me a lot about human nature and it also taught me how to make good use of my time, since I had so little spare time! Also, the first few stories that I sold had child protagonists which can be traced back to the fact that I spent so much time with children.

What was the inspiration for “Kaleidoscope?”

The concept behind “Kaleidoscope” first came to me as a scribbled note in my writer’s notebook about someone having a “quantum memory.” Then an escaped dog named Sadie came running past my house when I was out working in my garden. I called to her and just for a moment we had two equally probable outcomes. Either she would come to me and I would save her life or she would ignore me and try to run across the six lane very busy street half a block away. Fortunately she came to me, but that dual moment stayed with me and I had the character for my story.

What were the challenges in writing that story?

The biggest challenge was how to collapse the wave so that Ally could go back to living a normal life. I do not plot my stories out in advance so it all has to weave together at the end.

For those unfamiliar with your work, could you tell us more about your novels?

I have seven in print. The first, The Imperium Game, is a humorous sf adventure/mystery taking place in the near future in an interactive residential game environment which recreates ancient Rome and has all the gods programmed into the computer. The gods keep manifesting and driving everyone crazy.

The second and third, Moonspeaker and House of Moons, take place on a long-ago human-colonized world where the gene pool has split into two groups, the psi-gifted Kashi and the normal Chierra. The Ilseri, aliens who share this world with them, come to the main character, Haemas, and teach her to walk the Pathways of When.

The fourth is This Fair Land, a Cherokee alternate history fantasy which takes place in a timeline where the Indians kicked Columbus out of the New World with their magic when he first appeared, then kept the White Man out for the next two hundred years. The main character is an Irish Catholic priest, Declan Connolly, who discovers to his horror that he has a talent for Indian magic.

The fifth and sixth were Black/on/Black and Stars/over/Stars, which deal with a fierce seven foot furred race called the hrinn. The main character is Heyoka Blackeagle, a hrinn kidnapped from his world as a toddler, sold as a slave, then rescued and brought up by a human on Earth. He feels human but longs to find his roots and in Black/on/Black finally travels to Anktan to find out how he came to leave. Once there, he encounters an unsuspected crisis with the Flek, an insectoid species engaged in a long term war with humanity.

The seventh is The Course of Empire, co-written with Eric Flint. Again it deals with aliens (my favorite subject), this time the Jao, a species uplifted into sentience, and their former masters, the insane Ekhat, who wish to scour the entire universe free of nonEkhat intelligence. When the book opens, it’s been twenty years since the Jao conquered Earth, but the humanity still resists its Jao masters where it can. Then a young Jao prince is assigned to Earth and is able to see the situation with fresh eyes.

Next March, The Crucible of Empire, co-written with Eric Flint and the direct sequel to The Course of Empire, will be published. It features the return of both the Jao and the Ekhat, along with a new species, the Lleix.

What kind of research did you have to do for them?

I did the most research for The Imperium Game (endless books on Roman culture) and This Fair Land (endless books on Cherokee culture and Georgia landforms), but I also did a fair bit of research on Arab, African, and Japanese culture when creating the hrinn. The latter was useful in helping me ferret out my assumptions and break free of a Western mindset.

What projects are you currently working on?

I just turned in a book so right now I’m writing a few short stories for invitation anthologies and dreaming up the background for a new stand alone novel series.

K.D. Wentworth lives in Tulsa with her husband, a combined one hundred eighty pounds of dog (Akita + Siberian Hussy) and writes full time since retiring from teaching elementary school six years ago. She has sold over seventy short stories and eight novels, with The Course of Empire (Baen Books) being the most recently published. Her next book, The Crucible of Empire, written with Eric Flint, will be out in March, 2010. “Kaleidoscope” is her fourth Nebula Nomination for short fiction.

Lisa Goldstein 2009

2009-05-05T22:29:00-06:00

Lisa Goldstein is nominated for the novelette “Dark Rooms.”

Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. What’s the appeal of science fiction for you? How about fantasy?

I like getting lost in different worlds, both in fantasy and science fiction. I like seeing how people build worlds, and how they make them consistent. I like them both for showing possibilities, the future in science fiction, and anything at all in fantasy. (People keep saying that fantasy is about the past, and a lot of it is, but there are amazing possibilities there—you can write about anywhere and anywhen.)

What made you decide that you wanted to be a writer? At what point did you consider yourself an actual writer?

I always wanted to be a writer, ever since I could read. I loved the idea of being able to create stories like the ones I enjoyed reading, of trying to do something as good as my favorite authors. I didn’t think of myself as a writer until I got my first book published, though.

How would you describe your writing?

That’s a hard one, because I’m not really sure. I’ve written lots of different things, fantasy and science fiction and mainstream. I mostly write fantasy, but even there I’ve done all kinds of sub-genres, urban fantasy and historical fantasy and magic realism and some stuff I wouldn’t know how to categorize. My favorite description of what I do is that I try to write about magic in everyday life.

Which medium are you more comfortable with, short stories or novels?

I like writing in both. Novels are great for spreading out and getting lost in, and short stories are fun because they focus down on one or two specific things.

What’s the biggest challenge you had to overcome before getting published?

Rejection, like almost everyone else. Also, at the beginning I had a hard time making myself sit down and actually work—there always seemed to be something more fun or more important to do. Okay, that’s two biggest challenges.

Who were the writers that influenced you back then? How about now?

Then and now I like Ursula Le Guin. When I first read her there weren’t a lot of women writing sf, and I was so thrilled to find a woman who could not only play by the rules of science fiction but who did it better than anyone else. Now I think she’s amazing for the breadth of things she can write well—science fiction and fantasy and mainstream and poetry. I can’t write half the things she does, but I learned a lot from her. Back then I also read writers who were part of what was called the New Wave—Samuel Delany and Roger Zelazny and Carol Emshwiller (another woman!), and I liked the way they expanded the possibilities of science fiction and fantasy. These days my favorite book is Possession by A. S. Byatt, which is about parallel stories—two writers in Victorian England, two literary critics in the present—and the way they echo and re-echo each other, and is just amazingly constructed—I find something new in it every time I read it. It isn’t fantasy, but there is a woman in it who writes fantasy and fairy tales. I also like Neil Gaiman—he’s definitely one of the people who takes advantage of the possibilities of fantasy.

How different is the field back in the 1980s compared to today? Do you think the industry is faring better or worse?

When I started out it was almost possible to read every fantasy and science fiction novel that got published, so you could have a conversation about the field and everyone would know what you were talking about. Now the field’s split off into dozens of different sub-genres, and no one could possibly keep up with it. I keep seeing books by new writers I’ve never heard of. With so much being published, it’s much harder for new writers to get noticed—I know it would be harder for me if I had to start now. Also, it seems to me that publishers are less willing to take chances now, especially with the economy so bad, so there are too many books all about the same thing.

On the other hand, there are more small presses these days, and people are taking them more seriously. So if you have something no big publisher would want to take a chance on, something quirky or different, there’s always a possibility a small press might pick it up. Of course you still have the problem of getting noticed ...

What was the inspiration for “Dark Rooms?”

It came from a book about movies called The Invisible Art, which had a picture of Georges Méliès, a pioneer of film, selling toys in a Paris train station. This seemed almost unbearable poignant, and I was sure there was a story there somewhere. In fact, I liked this image so much that for a couple of days I just circled it, the way a sculptor would circle a good piece of marble, hoping I could do it justice.

What kind of research did you have to do for the story?

Quite a lot. I read books on Méliès and saw his movie Voyage to the Moon, and I read books on the early history of film, and some books, on Hollywood for example, that turned out to have nothing to do with the story except for some touches in the background. And I got distracted by the history of magic lanterns and a Jesuit priest named Athanasius Kircher, who was supposed to have invented the magic lantern (pictures painted on glass and projected onto a wall) in the seventeenth century, and who will probably someday be the subject of another story.

To those unfamiliar with your work, which of your novels would you recommend?

I like Dark Cities Underground, because it worked out nearly as well as I wanted it too. I wanted to take unrelated subjects—subways and children’s books and Egyptian gods—and put them all together in a sort of grand secret history, with some steampunk thrown in. I’ve never been able to come up with another conspiracy theory that worked as well. I’d also recommend The Red Magician, which got lots of attention and is my most personal novel, a book based on stories my mother told me about growing up in a small town in Eastern Europe.

What is it like writing under a pseudonym?

It was strange, and I don’t know if I’d recommend it. (It was the publisher’s idea, because they thought those books were very different from anything I’d written before.) I was essentially starting over, and, as I said above, it’s hard for a new writer to get attention in this climate. Also, at the beginning I wasn’t allowed to let the secret out, and so I was unable to publicize the books at all—though finally I just said the hell with it and began to tell people. On the other hand, there’s something really fun about having a secret identity. My fondest hope was that I would hear something about my books (something good, of course) from someone who didn’t know I’d written them, but unfortunately that never happened.

What projects are you currently working on?

I’m mostly writing short stories. Actually right now I’m writing another story inspired by The Invisible Art, this one about a huge set that D. W. Griffith constructed on Hollywood Boulevard that was supposed to represent ancient Babylon. (I have to say, that book was a very fortuitous find.) I also have an idea for a novel set in the early 1970s and based in part on some college friends, but that one will have to settle in my brain a little more.

Lisa Goldstein lives in a 90-year-old house in Oakland with her husband Doug and her cute dog Spark.