Q&A 31, post-WisCon edition
May. 25th, 2009 04:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyWisCon is a blur of awesomeness. Hello to everybody I never quite managed to catch up with!
Also, Jo Walton (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
papersky) reviews Mélusine, The Virtu, The Mirador, and Corambis for Tor.com.
Q:Did the idea of actually letting Felix and Mildmay be a couple go through your mind?
A: Never seriously. Mildmay is straight.
Q: Do you think there's a possibility that someday you'll give us a new story with Felix, Mildmay & co., or that takes place in the same universe?
A: I make no efforts to predict what my brain will want to do in five or ten years. So maybe.
Q: What do you think about fanfiction?
A: Look over here.
Q: I have a problem when writing: my mind is too creative. I start working on an idea, and when I'm in the middle of a story, another idea pops up in my head, and this new idea won't let me rest (I've actually spent long sleepless nights with a new idea rumbling in my head) until I pay atention to it. So it's getting very hard for me to finish anything, and I'm getting more and more frustrated. Has this ever happened to you? And if so, how do you deal with that?
A: Oh yes. It's much easier for me to start stories than to finish them. I wish I had good advice for you, but I don't. I do think it's better to take notes on the new idea than to try to ignore it, but the proliferation of ideas vs. actually finishing stories is a problem I'm still wrestling with. (I made a list the other day: I have nearly forty stories that I could be working on and no idea how to finish any of them.)
Q: A friend is reading DoL (on my advice, since the first duty of a raving fanboy is to get other people to consume the media which is the object of his devotion) and he commented that he cannot find a reason for where one chapter ends and another begins. I never noticed because when I'm serious reading a story, chapters are just places where I need to turn the page sooner.
So, the question, all formal like: How did you decide what chapter ended where?
A: Um. By where felt right? Partly it was length and partly coming to a good stopping point or finding a killer exit line and partly a sort of, "well, this piece of the arc is complete" kind of thing. But there was no coherent and well-articulated set of guidelines.
Q: I've noticed that Felix seems to attract "disabled" characters (Mildmay, Gideon, Kay) like fruit flies to vinegar, and I've been wondering: Did you intend for him to become, as my friends call him, a "crip magnet"?
A: Nope, although I agree that it does seem to happen--possibly, however, we should put this down to my tendency to mutilate my characters more than anything else.
Q: Having just read your short stories, Straw, Queen of Swords, and A Light in Troy, I have to say they were haunting (in a good way). Can I ask you where you got the inspiration for them, or the general ideas surrounding? I'm pretty sure I can at least partially guess where A Light in Troy and Queen of Swords came from, but curiosity abounds.
A: "Straw" came from a dream. "Queen of Swords" I think came from reading Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and also from trying to make up a fairytale. Which is a lot harder than it looks. "A Light in Troy" came from reading The Trojan Women (both Euripides and Seneca) crossed with some internet reading about feral children.
Q: So what information was it that Gideon had on Thaddeus? And will you write more about the Bastion and its defectors, do you think? I really liked Gideon and was very sad when he died.
A: Thank you. Killing Gideon was one of the hardest and most awful things I've ever done; I'm still not entirely sure I've forgiven myself for it.
If I get an idea for a story set in the Bastion, I'll certainly write it, but I don't have any such idea at this time.
And I don't know what Gideon had on Thaddeus. Neither of them would ever tell me.
Q: I just finished reading Corambis, and I was just wondering...you describe Melusine as a fairly chromatic setting, where white people like Felix and Mildmay are the exception, rather than the norm, but doing a quick count in my head it seems like a lot of your major characters, even the ones in Melusine, are actually white or else strongly signalled as white (by blonde hair or pale eyes, for instance): Felix and Mildmay, of course, but also Mavortion and Bernard; Shannon; Kolkhis; Vey Coruscant; Simon; Malkar - and also, the two major countries your characters travel to seem to be populated mostly by paler people. Even Mehitabel is described as more "pale gold" than any shade of brown. So I was just wondering, was there any particular reason behind that choice?
A: Naive solipsism which I am trying to train myself out of?
Q: You wrote a lot of queer characters into Doctrine of Labyrinths; do you think you'd ever write a character who was trans? (In any universe, I mean, not just DoL.)
A: I have a short story called "Amante Dorée" that has a trans character, and there's a novel I really want to write about a ftm transsexual where I'm really just waiting for the damn plot to show up. So, yes.
Q: Also, in Mélusine, when Felix was having his hallucination-type-things, why was Gideon the only character who didn't appear as some sort of animal? Was there any significance to this?
A: Honestly, I think the reason is that I could never decide what animal Gideon would be.
[Ask 'em if you got 'em.]
Also, Jo Walton (
papersky) reviews Mélusine, The Virtu, The Mirador, and Corambis for Tor.com.Q:Did the idea of actually letting Felix and Mildmay be a couple go through your mind?
A: Never seriously. Mildmay is straight.
Q: Do you think there's a possibility that someday you'll give us a new story with Felix, Mildmay & co., or that takes place in the same universe?
A: I make no efforts to predict what my brain will want to do in five or ten years. So maybe.
Q: What do you think about fanfiction?
A: Look over here.
Q: I have a problem when writing: my mind is too creative. I start working on an idea, and when I'm in the middle of a story, another idea pops up in my head, and this new idea won't let me rest (I've actually spent long sleepless nights with a new idea rumbling in my head) until I pay atention to it. So it's getting very hard for me to finish anything, and I'm getting more and more frustrated. Has this ever happened to you? And if so, how do you deal with that?
A: Oh yes. It's much easier for me to start stories than to finish them. I wish I had good advice for you, but I don't. I do think it's better to take notes on the new idea than to try to ignore it, but the proliferation of ideas vs. actually finishing stories is a problem I'm still wrestling with. (I made a list the other day: I have nearly forty stories that I could be working on and no idea how to finish any of them.)
Q: A friend is reading DoL (on my advice, since the first duty of a raving fanboy is to get other people to consume the media which is the object of his devotion) and he commented that he cannot find a reason for where one chapter ends and another begins. I never noticed because when I'm serious reading a story, chapters are just places where I need to turn the page sooner.
So, the question, all formal like: How did you decide what chapter ended where?
A: Um. By where felt right? Partly it was length and partly coming to a good stopping point or finding a killer exit line and partly a sort of, "well, this piece of the arc is complete" kind of thing. But there was no coherent and well-articulated set of guidelines.
Q: I've noticed that Felix seems to attract "disabled" characters (Mildmay, Gideon, Kay) like fruit flies to vinegar, and I've been wondering: Did you intend for him to become, as my friends call him, a "crip magnet"?
A: Nope, although I agree that it does seem to happen--possibly, however, we should put this down to my tendency to mutilate my characters more than anything else.
Q: Having just read your short stories, Straw, Queen of Swords, and A Light in Troy, I have to say they were haunting (in a good way). Can I ask you where you got the inspiration for them, or the general ideas surrounding? I'm pretty sure I can at least partially guess where A Light in Troy and Queen of Swords came from, but curiosity abounds.
A: "Straw" came from a dream. "Queen of Swords" I think came from reading Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and also from trying to make up a fairytale. Which is a lot harder than it looks. "A Light in Troy" came from reading The Trojan Women (both Euripides and Seneca) crossed with some internet reading about feral children.
Q: So what information was it that Gideon had on Thaddeus? And will you write more about the Bastion and its defectors, do you think? I really liked Gideon and was very sad when he died.
A: Thank you. Killing Gideon was one of the hardest and most awful things I've ever done; I'm still not entirely sure I've forgiven myself for it.
If I get an idea for a story set in the Bastion, I'll certainly write it, but I don't have any such idea at this time.
And I don't know what Gideon had on Thaddeus. Neither of them would ever tell me.
Q: I just finished reading Corambis, and I was just wondering...you describe Melusine as a fairly chromatic setting, where white people like Felix and Mildmay are the exception, rather than the norm, but doing a quick count in my head it seems like a lot of your major characters, even the ones in Melusine, are actually white or else strongly signalled as white (by blonde hair or pale eyes, for instance): Felix and Mildmay, of course, but also Mavortion and Bernard; Shannon; Kolkhis; Vey Coruscant; Simon; Malkar - and also, the two major countries your characters travel to seem to be populated mostly by paler people. Even Mehitabel is described as more "pale gold" than any shade of brown. So I was just wondering, was there any particular reason behind that choice?
A: Naive solipsism which I am trying to train myself out of?
Q: You wrote a lot of queer characters into Doctrine of Labyrinths; do you think you'd ever write a character who was trans? (In any universe, I mean, not just DoL.)
A: I have a short story called "Amante Dorée" that has a trans character, and there's a novel I really want to write about a ftm transsexual where I'm really just waiting for the damn plot to show up. So, yes.
Q: Also, in Mélusine, when Felix was having his hallucination-type-things, why was Gideon the only character who didn't appear as some sort of animal? Was there any significance to this?
A: Honestly, I think the reason is that I could never decide what animal Gideon would be.
[Ask 'em if you got 'em.]
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-05-26 01:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-27 12:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-26 06:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-27 01:06 am (UTC)Have you ever read Christa Wolf's Cassandra?
no subject
Date: 2009-05-28 07:21 am (UTC)I was absolutely giddy when I first read this the other day -- I really enjoy your work and have been interested in your portrayals of gay characters, and for a long time have been wanting to see some trans* characters in good books! After thinking about it some, though, I want to say that I hope you'll be diligent with your research on this. Cisgender privilege seems to be particularly tricky to unpack due to the pervasiveness and the invisibility of our cultural assumptions about gender; even as a transperson, I sometimes find it difficult to navigate some of the particulars.
I do hope that the plot of the novel shows up and we all get to read it someday (soon!)
Also, re: the material under the cut, what everyone else has said. Probably the most memorable scene of its type that I've read.
--FWL