Writing is a passion. Publishing is a business.

BRUCE COVILLE


Interview with BRUCE COVILLE

I was born in Syracuse, New York, on May 16, 1950. I started working seriously at becoming a writer when I was seventeen. Like most people, I was not able to start selling my stories right away. So I had many other jobs along the way to becoming a writer, including toymaker, gravedigger, cookware salesman, and assembly line worker. Eventually I became an elementary teacher, and worked with second and fourth graders. I feel like a very lucky person. From the time I was young, I had a dream of becoming a writer. Now that dream has come true, and I am able to make my living doing something that I really love.

What are you reading right now?

FOREST BORN by Shannon Hale, the fourth in her Books of Bayern sequence, which began with the fabulous THE GOOSE GIRL. The reason I'm reading it right now is that I've been directing a full cast recording of the book that I am producing for AudioGO. I'm really lucky in this regard . . . I don't just get to read great books; I get to bring them to life on audio!

What first sparked your interest in writing?

The first time I can remember thinking that I would like to be a writer came in sixth grade, when our teacher, Mrs. Crandall, gave us an extended period of time to write a long story on any topic we wished. I had a lovely and encouraging success with this, largely because I could write what interested me, not simply what was assigned . . . which had been a problem for most of the year.

The story I wrote was called "The Long Tramp" which was a mild rip-off of Sheila Burnford's great animal story INCREDIBLE JOURNEY. I had so much fun doing it that I started planning a book of animal stories. (I never got around to writing it, but that was the first time I can remember seriously thinking about writing a book of my own.)

After that it was all about writers. In 7th grade I discovered Edgar Rice Burroughs. I fell in love with his John Carter of Mars books and knew that I wanted to do what he was doing.

What do you love the most about writing? The least?

There is a time, sometimes, if you're lucky, when it no longer feels as if you are writing, but as if you are simply a conduit for a story that is somehow being told through you. For me, this usually comes toward the end of the book, after the long struggle to get there. It can be glorious.

What do I like least? All the work it takes to get to the point I just described above!

Tell us a little about your writing process.

Oh, lord. After 100 books and 40 short stories I'm still not sure that I have "a" writing process. Sometimes I just sit down and start, sometimes I kind of flutter around trying to find a way into a story.

I can tell you that I usually outline. Sometimes I follow the outline and sometimes I end up tossing it out and going by the seat of my pants. Other times I do what I call an "ever-expanding outline" where I keep writing ever more detailed versions of the outline, adding dialogue and descriptions, until the outline is almost a book in itself.  And sometimes I make repeated runs at a story, getting ten pages into it the first time, then revising and adding new material, then when I feel stuck going back to the beginning and revising what I have and pushing farther in. When I work that way I may be on the fifth or sixth attempt before I have a full draft. I am a demon reviser, and will keep working on a story until my editor hits me over the head and tells me I have to stop!

What are your passions?

Story, performance, and politics.

Story: I love stories, believe that sharing them is one of the essences of being human. We need stories to understand the world, and even more to understand each other.

Performance: One of the surprising things about achieving some success as an author was that as soon as it happened people wanted me to come out and talk about it. I did not anticipate having a career as a public speaker, but that has evolved out of the writing. I now spend about a third of my year on the road talking at schools and conferences. I've discovered that I love being in front of a group, whether children or adults, and trying to delight and inspire them.

Politics: I care deeply about my fellow humans, my country, and my world. Though many people are very cynical about politics, I believe in my heart and my gut that if we want to change things for the better we have to engage in the political process. While it is undoubtedly true that there are many corrupt politicians, I am not one who believe they are all that way – I think many of them sincerely want to serve the people and improve the world.

What inspires you?

Great art, smiling faces, children, honesty, and stories.

Why fantasy?

Why reality? ; )

Okay, okay . . . first off, I love to readfantasy, so naturally as a writer it is the genre that I most gravitate toward. Modern fantasy is a natural extension of myth, legend, and folklore, which are the forms in which humankind has long expressed its deepest dreams, fears, and desires.

The human heart longs for a bit of mystery, a touch of wonder, a sense of the unknown. As the world becomes ever more mapped and explored, fantasy literature helps soothe that longing by providing new places to dream on.

How was THE UNICORN CHRONICLES born?

Back in the early 1990's Jean Feiwel, who was then publisher at Scholastic, invited me to come into her office to discuss creating a new series for them. We talked about a few ideas, and the one that sparked for me was a world of unicorns. I had already written about unicorns – heck, my second book was SARAH'S UNICORN, one of the first picture books about unicorns – and I was excited to do so again. To me they are the perfect fantasy creature.

The original contract was for three novels of about 150 pages each. I had no idea when I signed it what I was actually embarking on . . . or that in the end it would take me 16 years, 4 books, and nearly 1500 pages to tell the complete story!

Back when I first started writing, my dream had been to create a fantasy world of my own. Luster, the world of the unicorns, turned out to be that world. The story that unfolded in that world turned out to be grander, more complex, more layered, than I had begun to imagine when I first started planning it. Writing it stretched me in ways I had never anticipated, and I am still astonished at what an epic it became.

You have written, well, a lot. Do you have a favorite book or story among your own work?

Ah, the "favorite" book or story question, which is pretty much the equivalent of "Which of your children do you love the most?" Parents know better than to answer that one!

Still, if pressed, I could narrow down this list. And if really pressed, it is likely I would settle on a short story called "The Box." To be honest, I think it is the best thing I've ever written, and (this is somewhat distressing) likely to be the best thing I ever will write.

Oddly enough, I don't feel I can take much credit for the story. I wrote it on assignment in a graduate class on writing for children taught by Helen Buckley Simkewicz, and it just . . . came to me. I think of it as a "gift story" – I was in the right place to catch it as it went whizzing by! It is a story that I love to tell when I am performing.

Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Click here to read Bruce’s writing advice on his website.

JAY KRISTOFF

Interview with JAY KRISTOFF

Jay Kristoff is a Perth-born, Melbourne-based author. His first trilogy, THE LOTUS WAR, was purchased in the three-way auction by US publishing houses in 2011. He is as surprised about it as you are. The first installment, STORMDANCER, is set to be published in September 2012 in the US, UK and Australia. Jay is 6’7, has approximately 13870 days to live and does not believe in happy endings.

What are you reading right now?

I actually just finished WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN yesterday, so I’m totally between books atm. I think I’ll go back to the fantasy pile next, so maybe THE STRANGE AFFAIR OF SPRINGHEEL JACK by Mark Hodder, or RAILSEA by China Miéville. I got all of China’s back catalogue from my 100% awesome UK publishers, but they’re all signed and I’m kinda afraid to read them in case I crack the spines. Which I realize is utterly ridiculous. They’re books for crissakes…

What first sparked your interest in writing?

I’d always written as a hobby, but for over ten years, writing was also my job (I worked in advertising), and the last thing you want to do after writing TV scripts all day is come home and work on a book. When I changed jobs, that freed me up to use my brainmeats to write something other than ads for toilet paper. But I’ve always loved writing, telling stories. Lying, basically. I very much enjoy lying.

What do you love the most about writing? The least?

The Most: that moment when you write something that makes the hairs on your arms stand up. Those brief and all too rare moments where it’s like the universe is telling you “Yeah, you can do this.”

The Least: Copyediting. Hunting for rogue commas and misused quotation marks, re-reading the same text over and over until it ceases to have meaning. I described it once as “like being bludgeoned to death with a bag of dicks.” I was quite proud of that one…

Tell us a little about your writing process.

I’m a total pantser. I’ll get an idea for a scene in my head and just run with it. The first scene I thought of for STORMDANCER was the hunt for the arashitora. A big sky-ship hunting a griffin in the middle of a lightning storm. The next books I’ll be working on in downtime (when I’m not doing books 2 and 3 of the LOTUS WAR) are all just embryonic scenes in my head atm. I’m stabby-envious of people who can plot meticulously – to have a grand plan and work towards it. It’s sometimes terrifying not knowing what comes next. But at the same time, you sometimes get these flashes of inspiration that totally surprise you – those moments in STORMDANCER are my favorite in the book.

What are your passions?

My bride. My books. My booze (hmm, how long can I stretch this “B” thing for). I’m a huge film buff and a colossal nerd. I’m also very passionate about issues like the environment, overpopulation, resource depletion. But I don’t talk about that very often because a) it’s depressing, and b) people find it very easy to write you off if they can label you with some kind of “-ist”.

Shenanigans, I say.

What inspires you?

Do you mean “where do I get inspiration for my books?” There’s no good answer for that. No writer knows where their ideas come from. Anyone who tells you they do is likely trying to sell you something. Probably a book called ”Where great ideas come from.” I sometimes tell people I get them “at the idea store,” because I’m something of a smartass, truth be told.

Why fantasy?

I’ve always loved it. I’ve always been a nerd. I still remember the feeling I got when I first read THE HOBBIT at 9 or 10 years old and realized there were books out there for “people like me.” I love the freedom it brings – the absence of rules, the complete lack of limitations it places on you as a writer. To be able to create a world that’s anything you want it to be – that’s a combination of time-travel hovercar awesome and panty-soiling terror.

How was STORMDANCER born?

It started as a dream I had. A little boy was standing in front of a griffin in a field of dead grass. The kid was screaming at the griffin to fly, but its wings were broken and it couldn’t get off the ground. That imagine – a griffin with broken wings – just stuck in my head. Which is a terribly boring story. If you can think of a better one, let’s run with that.

Just make me funny in it. And preferably handsome. Rich would be nice too.

Why did you choose to write a Japanese influenced story?

I wish I had a good answer for that. I could make up one about being the scion of a line of gaijin who travelled to Japan in the 19th century and learned the Ancient Art of Awesome… but that’d be pure lies.

I guess I wanted to write a steampunk book because I loved the aesthetic, but European-based steampunk seemed like it had already been done a lot, and done very well. The world had some incredible cultures in the 19th century, and I think fantasy is already shamefully guilty of a European focus.

Plus, you know, chainsaw katanas…

Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Other people’s belief in your abilities is lovely, but optional. Your belief in your abilities is mandatory.

Is there anything else you would like to tell us about yourself?


Just that I feel very grateful and lucky to be here. Thanks for sharing the ride.

LAUREN MCLAUGHLIN

Interview with LAUREN MCLAUGHLIN

I grew up in the small town of Wenham Massachusetts. After college and a brief stint in graduate school, I spent ten years writing and producing movies before abandoning my screen ambitions to write fiction full time. Though I fondly remember much of my time in Massachusetts—the marina, the beach, various teenage escapades—I cannot, for the life of me, remember my SAT scores, my GPA, or any of the numbers that once summed me up.

What are you reading right now?

I'm reading Junot Diaz's THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE HER. I adored THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO and have enjoyed some of his shorts. The weird thing about this new book is that I actually already part of it in the New Yorker. The New Yorker's strange that way. They seem to like printing shorts by current literary favorites who have new novels out. I think they did that with Zadie Smith recently. It's almost like they're publishing book trailers. At any rate, I just love Diaz's use of language. It's all extremely conversational and idiomatic without ever being cloying. And the Spanglish is wonderful for me because I used to speak the language really well.

What first sparked your interest in writing?

I can't remember a time when I wasn't writing. I wrote my first poem at age 7 and basically never stopped. I switched from poetry to screenplays in my early twenties, then to fiction in my early thirties. I pretty much always have several stories going in my head. It's useful when I'm trapped in a boring conversation with someone. I can just keep nodding and smiling while disappearing into a more interesting world. Every once in a while I get caught doing it though, which is always socially mortifying.

What do you love the most about writing? The least?

What I love most about writing is falling in love with my characters. At some point in the process they become startlingly real. I begin to care about them as if they were friends (troubled friends always). I begin to feel a sense of responsibility to them. Which brings me to the worst part of writing, which is the heavy responsibility of completing a project in such a way that the initial spark isn't snuffed out by all the mechanics of rewriting. Things can and do go wildly awry during the writing process and the majority of my time is spent trying to get things back on some kind of track. Each novel should feel like a journey. The reader doesn't necessarily have to know where they're headed, but once they get there, they have to believe it was worth the ride.

Tell us a little about your writing process.

It's constantly changing. I used to do a lot of very detailed outlining, but the outline rarely survived the first chapter of the first draft. For my latest, I scrapped the outline and just took off for points unknown. At the end of each chapter, I asked myself, "If I were a reader, what would be the most thrilling thing to happen next?" I had a vague sense of where I wanted to end up, but by the time I got there, the novel had become something very different from its initial inspiration. This led to tons and tons of painful rewriting, a slog-fest from which I am only now beginning to emerge. I'm still in search of The Perfect Process. So is every writer. If you find it, please tell me. In the meantime, I shall resign myself to a life of slogging through rewrites.

What are your passions?

Besides writing, I love to dance, especially swing dancing. I'm an avid runner. I love baking. I throw lots of parties and enjoy having as active a social life as my writing schedule and three-year-old daughter will allow. I'm passionate about people. They fascinate me. I love meeting new people and getting to know familiar ones more deeply.

What inspires you?

People inspire me. Especially people who overcome difficulties. I'm inspired by people who work twice as hard as I have ever had to work in order to get half as far in life. I'm inspired by what I see as a dangerous trend toward massive income inequality in the U.S. I'm inspired by technology, which has the capacity to empower people but also to subjugate them.

Why science fiction?

I can't live in the future, but by writing science fiction, I get to participate in it somehow. I love imagining the ways in which today's technology will mutate into something unfamiliar and even scary. Thinking about these things challenges us by pointing out our prejudices. For example, with SCORED, I wanted to imagine what would happen if everyone (or almost everyone) embraced ubiquitous surveillance. I was already familiar with the critique of ubiquitous surveillance, but what I kept seeing was an unmistakable trend of more and more surveillance all the time. At the same time, I was not seeing an increase in the numbers of people complaining about it. As anyone who reads my book will know, I believe that we are inviting a surveillance state. I wanted to explore what that might look and feel like from within.

Why young adult?

Teenagers are great readers. They have few literary prejudices. They haven't yet settled into any genre loyalties. They'll read SF, fantasy, horror, romance, biography. You name it. This frees up writers who don't have to worry about blurring or crossing any genre conventions. I think if SCORED came out as an adult SF book, SF fandom would complain about the lack of hard core technological specifics in it. They have certain expectations based on the majority of books in the genre. It can start to feel like a bit of an echo chamber and I didn't want to be in it. I wanted no limitations whatsoever on what I wrote. In Young Adult you have that freedom. The only real limitation is the age of the protagonists. But I love writing about teens because they don't have any psychological baggage yet either. They're still in the process of inventing themselves. This is much more exciting to me than writing about adults.

How was CYCLER born?

CYCLER began its life as a screenplay. I don't honestly remember how the initial idea was born. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that I grew up as a tomboy. In fact, when I was about seven or eight years old I remember telling people: "I'm not a girl. I'm not a boy. I'm a tomboy." I actually believed this was a separate gender and that you could choose it if you wanted to. I think what I liked about the tomboy identity was that it had no limitations. At least in my mind. I could climb trees and get dirty. And I could also do gymnastics and cheerleading. In my mind, there was absolutely no incongruity between these two things. I must have been starting to sense the encroaching limitations of society's rules about gender. That's probably what made me so militant in my self-identity. With CYCLER I wanted to explore what would happen to a girl who desperately wanted to conform to society's rules about gender, but couldn't because her own body kept betraying her. That's what we do with protagonists. We ask "what's the worst thing that could happen," then we make that happen and watch them squirm. It's cruel, really.

How was SCORED born?

I was living in a rough neighborhood of London on a street where cars were constantly having their windows smashed in. On the same day that I noticed there hadn't been any smashed windows for a while, I also noticed a bunch of new surveillance cameras. The thieves had gotten wise. They'd simply moved on to a different street with no surveillance cameras. The take home message was clear: install cameras everywhere and you'll eliminate theft. This was a lightbulb moment for me because I realized I liked having those surveillance cameras there. They made me feel safe. That's when I got really scared because I realized that ubiquitous surveillance would come to us, not through coercion by an overzealous government or an overreaching corporation, but by invitation.

Do you consider SCORED a possible future in reality or a fictional “what if”?

I think the world of SCORED is already a reality. We just haven't gone whole hog yet. Education is already reduced to test prep in many places. There's certainly no trend toward reducing the number of cameras in schools. If anything, they're increasing. I don't think it's possible to predict the future accurately, but I don't see any shift in the cultural trends of surveillance and high stakes testing away from the dystopian vision of SCORED. If anything we're moving closer to it./div>

Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

The most important thing for an aspiring writer is to read a lot and write a lot. Whoever you are - and no matter how talented - you're going to write a ton of rubbish. Successful writers know how to wade through that and spin it into gold. It's about time served, words typed, drafts completed. There's no way to do it but to sit there and write. A lot. When you've finished something and you've sent it off to editors, agents, your writing group, your teacher, or what have you, start writing something new. It'll be better than what you've just written. Repeat ad nauseam. If you're lucky, you'll get published, and then your troubles really begin.

JUDITH TARR

Interview with Judith Tarr

Judith Tarr is the author of numerous novels and short stories including the World Fantasy Award nominee for Best Novel, LORD OF THE TWO LANDS. As Caitlin Brennan, she has written a middle-grade novel, HOUSE OF THE STAR, as well as the WHITE MAGIC series for adults. She lives near Tucson, Arizona, where she raises and trains Lipizzan horses. Her new novel for young adults, LIVING IN THREES, will be published in November by Book View Cafe.

What are you reading right now?
 
I just finished reading a draft of the sequel to Kari Sperring's THE GRASS KING’S CONCUBINE. About to read another unpublished manuscript. Also on the pile: CANTEENS: writing and art by Harlem seventh-graders, which I backed on Kickstarter.

What first sparked your interest in writing?
 
Ummm…learning to write?

I can't ever remember not making up stories.

What do you love the most about writing? The least?
Most:  Being attacked by an idea and dragged off to its lair and held hostage until I've written its story.

Least: Proofreading the final draft.

Tell us a little about your writing process.
 
My process is an iceberg. Massive amounts of process happen under the surface. Ideas germinate, develop, and mature before they ever hit page or screen. At a certain point I'll start jotting down notes in what I call "Ideafiles"—developing characters and plot, building worlds, whatever the story needs. When I have enough (for values of "enough" that are completely idiosyncratic and specific to the project), I'll start writing.
I almost never do exploratory drafts. All that happens in my head. By the time the words go on the page, I'm pretty clear on structure and story. Sometimes I'll come at the story from the wrong angle and have to start over, but again, I'll do most of the rebuilding in my head, and only put it on the page when I'm clear on how it should go.
With novels, the first 100 pages/10 chapters/25,000 words are the most tentative and take the longest, as I find my way into the story. Once those are working (and I may go back and layer on new material as I go), the rest is pretty much a straight drive to the end.

I have never had to cut material, but I have often had to add. So I'm a sketcher rather than a kitchen-sinker. I'm also very linear. I never write ahead, though I may go back and recast what's already there. Nor do I skip around the story or write chapters out of order. I'm kind of anal that way.
 
What are your passions?

Writing. Horses. Cooking. History - especially non-conventional, non-white-guys history.

What inspires you?
 
Lots of things. The natural world - from animals and landscape to stars and galaxies. Watching the moon come up over the mountain, through a horse's ears. Human history. Human range and variety. Art and music.

Why fantasy?

That appears to be the way my brain is wired. I take straight history and pretty soon it skews. I love writing about magic and wonder and things that aren't real but ought to be.

How was HOUSE OF THE STAR born?
 
I submitted a manuscript to Susan Chang at Tor Starscape (it was, in fact, an earlier version of my Kickstarter novel, LIVING IN THREES, which will be published by Book View Café on November 20th). She passed on it, but she asked, "Would you possibly be interested in writing a magic horse story for us?" I had an idea, Susan liked it, and it grew from there.

Elen and Ria both exhibit intense prejudices while still remaining likable. In that regard, were they challenging characters to write?
 
Not really. I just engaged my inner kid, and let it rip. (I'm very Method when I write. The kind of writer who hears voices in her head. You know. That kind.) Originally the main viewpoint was Sara's, but a couple of drafts along the line, Susan asked, "Are you sure you have the right viewpoint character?" After I finished cussing and stomping around, I realized she was, of course, right. The real story was Elen's. And I had to go back and write it all over again from her point of view. Now that was hard. Also, a lot of work. But I think it was worth it.

Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?
 
Don't try to write to market. Write the story that's in you. The one you love - that you can't not write. The market will find you.

Is there anything else you would like to tell us about yourself?

When I'm not writing I'm working and playing with horses. The ranch in HOUSE OF THE STAR is based on my little farm in Arizona. Blanca and Moondance are real horses. Someday I'll write a sequel - there are so many more stories to tell about Rancho Estrella.

ALMA ALEXANDER

Interview with Alma Alexander

Alma Alexander's life so far has prepared her very well for her chosen career. She was born in a country which no longer exists on the maps, has lived and worked in seven countries on four continents (and in cyberspace!), has climbed mountains, dived in coral reefs, flown small planes, swum with dolphins, touched two-thousand-year-old tiles in a gate out of Babylon. She is a novelist, anthologist, and short story writer who currently shares her life between the Pacific Northwest of the USA (where she lives with her husband and two cats) and the wonderful fantasy worlds of her own imagination. You can find out more about Alma on her website, her Facebook page, or her blog.
 
What are you reading right now?

I'm in the middle of David Brin's EXISTENCE - a big, complex, involving book with lots of characters and more plot twists than half a dozen pretzels. Pretty nifty read so far.

What first sparked your interest in writing?

That question has no rational answer, because I didn't have an "interest in writing" that was "sparked" by anything. I simply...always told stories. When I was a still-illiterate child, I made them up and dreamed them and told them to whoever would listen. When I learned to read and write, I began writing them. They've always been there. I suspect they always will be.

Stories sparked my interest in stories. Words. The magic of the told tale. That's all there ever was - and I think that was something I simply came into this world with, fully in place, just waiting until I had the capacity to express it.
What do you love the most about writing? The least?

Most - the very concept of being able to create your own world and then to invite other people to come live in it with you, at least for a little while, and watching them react at what they find there. There's something enthralling about watching a complete stranger's face light up with *recognition* at something you've written, and know that you got it right. There's nothing like it.

Least - rewriting and revision. And yes, I do know it is necessary in order to produce the best story that I can. But I hate going over old ground again and again. Perhaps because I know that, if given the opportunity to do so without an endgame in place, I would never stop. You can tweak and tweak and tweak and tweak ad infinitum and you will never quite get to where you are going because there is always going to be one more thing to fix, one more thing to improve, one more thing to make it better. But perfect isn't a destination. It's a journey. And sometimes the journey won't necessarily be the same for the writer and the eventual reader. And sometimes that is hard for a writer like me to internalize.

Tell us a little about your writing process.

And to that I ask, for which book? Because I don't think I’ve ever written two novels the same way.

For one (the single quarter-million-word epic which became the duology HIDDEN QUEEN/CHANGER OF DAYS) it was a single scene written while I was still pursuing my MSC degree in the lab... and then it took me more than half of the eventual book to get around to where that particular scene fit into the entire story arc (and then it took me years of believing in that book before I got it published).

For another (THE SECRETS OF JIN-SHEI) it was a matter of sitting down with a page of character sketches for ten characters in search of a story... and getting, out of the blue, a newspaper article about a dying language, a secret written language, of the women of China and then watching an entire novel shake down around that as the characters on that page sat up and took notice.

For a third - what became the YA WORLDWEAVERS trilogy - it was a throwaway comment from a panel at a fantasy convention that sparked the idea, and then we were off and running - I wanted an anti-Potter book, about a girl who was the heroine of her own adventures, and something as American as Potter was British.

One thread in common is that I write without an outline - I have a basic picture of the book's geography but no road map, and I go where the story takes me. I cannot work from a detailed outline because once I write that down I feel the story is already written and it kills my instinct to write out the "full" version.

I tell people that the way I write is to plant a story seed. Until it sprouts and shows me leaves and a shape and a potential size I have no idea whether I have planted a cabbage or a redwood. I find out what happens in my stories the same way that my readers do, sometimes. Gasping in utter surprise at What Comes Next...

What are your passions?

Well, writing...

Also, truth and justice and honesty and honour. Sometimes it feels as though these can be in short supply these days in a cynical and jaded world. And I make it my business to seek them out and talk about them and write about them and make them happen to the best of my own ability. My passion involves being the best human being I know how to be and hoping that other people are trying to do the same thing.  

What inspires you?
 
All kinds of everything. 

Snow. 

Falling leaves. 

A haunting melody. 

An odd house on a street corner. 

Somebody who catches my eye who happens to be having breakfast two tables away from me at a restaurant on a Saturday morning.

Weird newspaper stories about the strange things people do.

LOLcats.

The howl of a wolf.

Watermelons (the taste of summer) or hot chocolate with marshmallows
(the taste of winter)

Waterfalls.

Candlelight.

Other people's secret smiles.

The world.

Why fantasy?

Because everything is fantasy.

Bad fantasy is lies pretending to be reality. And sometimes succeeds. Good fantasy is always true, in some deeper sense. All you have to do is keep your eyes open and you will see it.

Fantasy is an open door into what makes our own world tick.

How was THE SECRETS OF JIN-SHEI born?

I sat down at a computer one day and typed up ten short paragraphs - each of which was a character sketch for an as yet unnamed character. My husband asked what this was and I said, "My next novel." He said, "What is it about?" And I replied, "I have absolutely no idea."

(I think this is the point where he said, good-naturedly, "I hate you." He's a writer, too. But he doesn't do ideas this way...)

It wasn't until I received, completely arbitrarily and in an unrelated development, a news clipping from a friend that those character sketches sat up and drew a breath and said, yes, that would be us.

The story I was sent concerned nushu, an ancient Chinese written language which was practiced and known only by women, taught by mother to daughter and passed on down through the generations, in which women who were often widely separated from one another geographically used to communicate - women who were not necessarily related by blood but who were sworn friends, something that in my book turned into the jin-shei vow, the sisters-of-the-heart concept.

The rest is history. The story came to me at white heat - I wrote almost 200,000 words in less than three months, and the editing this story subsequently received was minimal, so perfectly formed was the tale as it was being born. It was a gift from the gods of writing, and if I never write another like it I will be forever grateful for being shown what was possible when all the stars aligned...

Did THE SECRETS OF JIN-SHEI require a lot of research?

It did, and its follow-up book, EMBERS OF HEAVEN - I don't like to call it a sequel because it isn't really although it is set in the same world some 400 years after THE SECRETS OF JIN-SHEI - needed even more. I pored over biographies, histories, geographical tomes on China. I read up about its languages, its religions, its customs, its myths. Sometimes this was so that I could learn what rules or contexts I could break to make my own story better. Other times the things I needed came to me practically on demand. I remember going in to study Western alchemy and its practices with the idea of playing with them so that I could make them more "Chinese" to fit into my story and being presented, much to my absolute astonishment, with a home-grown Chinese version of alchemical lore which came read-made for me to use. I found original Chinese myths and legends, which dovetailed perfectly with the story I was telling.

It was one heck of a journey. I learned a lot. Much of it made its way into the books about jin-shei, but not all of it did - and I still cherish that part of my knowledge which came to me as a gift from my stories, something for me to keep, a treasure of words and pictures and ideas, all of which affected and changed and taught me.

In general when I tangle with a fat historical fantasy of an idea I feel compelled to research the time period I am writing in pretty thoroughly - even if I then change things within that context so that my story may live inside it. Research is an essential tool in my
toolbox, and I never set sail into storyland without it.  

Do you have any advice for aspiring authors? 

Read. Read, read, read, read, read,

Write and practice. Realize that you will discard 90% of your early efforts. Realize that this is what they are for.

Write some more.

Oh, and did I mention, read? Keep reading. There is no true course or school or diploma that will make you a writer. Experience will. Immersion in other people's excellence will. Reading is how you learn to write.

Is there anything else you would like to tell us about yourself? I write.

I blog (at http://anghara.livejournal.com, at www.StorytellersUnplugged on the 30th of every month, and at www.SFNovelists.com on the 5th of every month).

I have a Facebook page (come along and "like" it if you will!).

I am also (somewhat reluctantly) on Twitter, so feel free to follow me there, too.
I'm on Goodreads as well.

I have two main websites where you can keep up with what's going on in my writing life and my books, and they are at www.AlmaAlexander.org and www.AlmaAlexander.com.

I'd love to see you there.

Oh, and if you buy any of my books from Village Books, I'd be happy to sign them for you, just ask the folks at the store to call me and ask me to drop in and do it.

I write. I hope you like reading. I hope you'll consider reading my stories. See you at Village Books soon.

LISA PAPADEMETRIOU

Interview with Lisa Papademetriou

Lisa was born August 25, 1971 in Houston, Texas. After graduating from Vassar College, she lived in Guatemala City, Guatemala, where she taught English in a bilingual school. When she came back to the United States, she moved to New York City, where she worked a series of editorial jobs at various publishers, including Scholastic, Inc., HarperCollins Publishers, Disney Press, and what is now Alloy. She then decided that I wanted to be a big-shot businesswoman and enrolled in New York University’s Stern School of Business, but after a year, she decided that big-shotting wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, so she left to write full-time.

What are you reading right now?

EVERYTHING! I’m an MFA student at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and I have to read approximately a book a day. Right now, I’m studying verse novels. I recently read LOCOMOTION, EXPOSED, and MAKE LEMONADE—all of which are fantastic. Also A STEP FROM HEAVEN, which is utterly beautiful. Drop everything and read it right away!

What first sparked your interest in writing?

Reading. I remember reading THE CHRONICLES OF NARIA and thinking, Someone—a writer—wrote this. I want to do that when I grow up.

What do you love the most about writing? The least?

What I love most about writing is the dreaming/ reading/ thinking part. I love imagining characters and how they feel and their thoughts. What I hate is getting reviewed. When you spend years working on something, to have someone dismiss it with a sentence is extremely painful. And even when people like your book, being reviewed has an unpleasant beauty-pageant feeling to it. It turns the book into a thing to be evaluated, rather than a work of art to be pondered.

Tell us a little about your writing process.

First I need an idea. I never know when it will pop up, but when it does, I never bother to write it down, because if it’s good, it will hang around and try to meet other good ideas. Next comes general staring out a window, followed by reading a few books that I can reasonably claim as “research.” Then, hopefully, a second idea will show up. You really need two ideas for any book—one for a character, one for an incident or conflict or ending. Okay, once I have my two ideas, I try to rub them together. Then I stare out the window some more, maybe go for a walk, maybe chat about the idea with someone. If other people are interested, I know it has potential, so I’ll start working on an outline. For me, an outline is a scene-by-scene breakdown of everything that happens in the novel. It is, frankly, easier to muck about rearranging things and changing them in an outline than it is after a draft. Then I start the long slog through the first draft. Then I revise. Then I revise again. Repeat until done!

What are your passions?

Social justice, writing, reading, dogs, my darling daughter, my sweet husband, the Oxford comma, and Martha Stewart Living magazine (embarrassing, but true).

What inspires you?

What inspires me are fans. They write me E-mails, and sometimes they tell me that they bought the book with their own money. When I think about that—about a reader choosing to spend her money on my books instead of someone else’s, or something else that she might want—I know I have to work as hard as I can to make sure she cares about the characters and enjoys the book.

Why fantasy?
I love fantasy. LOVE! It’s the oldest genre (think mythology), and I think a lot of people sort of have it in their DNA, as I do. Unfortunately for me, I don’t really pick and choose the stories I write—they just come to me in pieces, and I start putting them together, and I get interested in them and then I can’t stop. I also write humorous tween books (which I also love to write) that sell really well, and my editors, of course, always want more of that. But…oh, well. I also write fantasy. I can’t help it!

>Why young adult?

I don’t really believe that “young adult” is a writing genre. It’s more of a marketing genre. If your book is about young characters, it’s now published as young adult. If GREAT EXPECTATIONS, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, or—arguably—WUTHERING HEIGHTS published today, the editors and marketers would want them in the YA section. Well, after that ramble, I guess the real answer is, “I dunno. That’s just my brain!”

How was SIREN’S STORM born?


SIREN’S STORM jumps right into the story with a peculiar car collision and a tragic backstory. Did the book always begin there or did it take numerous drafts to find the right starting point?

This is an excellent question, because it gets at something that is always a challenge for writers (and by writers, I mean “me”)—finding a good opening. The way I work is different from most writers, in that I am a hard-core outliner. Still, I often find that the opening scene I had planned in the outline just isn’t compelling once it’s written. So I try not to worry about the first scene until the second draft. I’ll just write a junk opening and then go back and find a better scene after the whole novel is done. That said, SIREN’S STORM is one case in which I saw the opening right away and very clearly, and I still think it’s one of the best scenes in the book.

Obviously, you didn’t create the concepts of sirens or Furies, but in what ways did you take literary license and tweak these beings for your own world?

I went back to the original ODYSSEY and was shocked to discover that a Siren wasn’t a mermaid at all—it was a creature with the body of a fierce bird and the face of a woman. Over time, others changed them to be half-woman, half-fish. Every author tweaks these creations, I guess. For the Sirens, I wanted to get at their backstory, to think about how it might be that some people could think they were birds, some fish. I created a tale-within-a-tale about their evolution. As for the Furies, their history is extremely vague and even conflicting. I tried to simply take the nugget of the idea there and then re-create the Fury out of whole cloth. I combined it with the mythical Phoenix, which rises from the ashes, and discovered a creature I really found intriguing. Like I said above, the fun is in turning the puzzle pieces around and seeing how they might fit.

Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

As a former editor and present author, I have TOO MUCH advice! The two most important things I would say are: do not give up and remember that rejection of your work/suggestions for ways to improve it are just part of the process. Every step leads forward.

Is there anything else you would like to tell us about yourself?
I believe in talent, but more than that, I believe in hard work. In ten years, I hope to be a much better writer than I am now. That’s the other thing that inspires me—the belief that I can be better.

MALINDA LO

Interview with Malinda Lo

Malinda Lo’s first novel, ASH, a retelling of Cinderella with a lesbian twist, was a finalist for the William C. Morris YA Debut Award, the Andre Norton Award for YA Fantasy and Science Fiction, and the Lambda Literary Award. Her second novel, HUNTRESS, a companion novel to ASH, is an ALA Best Book for Young Adults. Her young adult science fiction duology, beginning with ADAPTATION, will be published in fall 2012. She lives in Northern California with her partner and their dog.

What are you reading right now?

Currently I'm listening to the audiobook of THE PRIVILEGE OF THE SWORD by Ellen Kushner. It's set in a European-based fantasy world and is about a 15-year-old country girl who is invited by her uncle, a wealthy and notorious duke, to come live with him in the city. The condition is that she train in how to be a swordsman. The girl doesn't really have much choice in the matter, and the way she deals with her lot — as well as her swordsmanship lessons — are fascinating, and I'm completely addicted to listening to it. (I should note that this is not a YA novel.)

What first sparked your interest in writing?

I was born being interested in writing. So: genetics?
 
What do you love the most about writing? The least?

This has changed or evolved over the years, but right now, after having written two novels about the same cast of characters (ADAPTATION is the first of two books, and I just completed the second draft of the sequel), I think my favorite part of writing is spending time with my characters. I've thought about them so much that they feel totally real to me. I know that I'm going to miss them a lot when I'm finished writing these books.

My least favorite part of writing is transition scenes. I hate these, I really do! I wish people would just get from point A to point B without me having to deal with it, but unfortunately, in fiction as in life, you have to suffer through the commute.

What inspires you?

Almost anything can inspire me. Food, nature, music, fashion, history, art, love, fear, mortality. I think that writers must be able to find inspiration in as much as possible. What's the opposite of inspired? Jaded? Those who are jaded or cynical cannot truly be creative, because they deny possibility.

That said, any creative project — novel or other art form — does not come solely from inspiration. It comes from putting in the time and going to work, even when inspiration does not seem remotely likely to strike.

Why fantasy?

Magic.

Why young adult?

I did not set out to write young adult fiction. ASH was written for adults, or so I thought, but when it came time to send it out to agents, I realized it fit better in the YA market. Since then I've been writing YA because that's where I was launched, and I really enjoy plenty of YA fiction. I like its immediacy and its focus on story. That doesn't mean I'll only ever write YA, but I do think it's a wonderful category right now.

How was ASH born?

ASH resulted from my desire to write the book I'd always wanted to read. My favorite novels growing up were written by Robin McKinley, who has retold many fairy tales. My favorite fairy tale was "Cinderella." Robin McKinley didn't retell that story, so I decided to do it myself.

How was ADAPTATION born?

ADAPTATION came from a dream I had. In the dream, two teens were trapped in an airport while planes began crashing. It was incredibly vivid, and when I woke up I ran to my office and wrote it down in my writing journal. I thought immediately that it would make a great story, and I kept thinking about it long after I'd had the dream. That's how I knew I wanted to write a book that started with what I saw in that dream.

Your two worlds are very different. Was one harder to write than the other? One more fun?

It was a little difficult for me to get the hang of the style of ADAPTATION at first because I was so used to writing in that old-tymey fairy tale voice. However, I think at the beginning of every novel I grapple with how the book should feel, so this wasn't really that different. Once I figured out the book's voice, I found it wonderfully fun and liberating. I got to use all sorts of words that I couldn't in ASH or HUNTRESS— scientific jargon and contemporary curse words and slang. I really enjoyed it.

Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Read a lot. Read what you love. If you don't love something, give it another couple of chapters before you give up on it. Sometimes books take a little bit of time to ease into. And try to read with an open mind; try not to judge it before you've digested it.

Similarly, write a lot. You will need to write a lot of crap before you write anything good. Keep writing, even if you think it's bad — and especially if you think it's good, because it probably isn't. Not at first. I've never written a first draft that rocked on all levels. You always need to step back, give yourself time to digest it (just like with reading) and come back to look at it as dispassionately as possible.

And don't rush. Everything now is go-go-go, but I think speed can be the worst thing to happen to writing. Slow down so you can see the words better.