Technical Difficulties

"When Last We Left Our Heroes," about the competing models of genre series, is up at Storytellers Unplugged.

So the inaugural question of this round of Q&A was such a good one that I stole it for my Storytellers Unplugged column for April.

Q: You've mentioned what you think a secondary world story should and shouldn’t do a few times, but I don't think you’ve ever specifically elaborated on the subject, so, to be blunt: What do you think a secondary world story should do for the reader? What shouldn't it do? Do you think you’ve accomplished this in your writing so far? etc.

A: Here.

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[Ask your question(s) here.]

Is here.

(I remembered it this month! w00t!)

I took Bear's day over at Storytellers Unplugged, and my post is here.

My Storytellers Unplugged post for August is over here.

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Q: It seems from the series so far that you have no plan to make whoever Felix's father is an important point leading off into destiny and prophecy and chosen ones. This pleases me greatly (you said, I think, that you didn't even know who Felix's father was) but I also find it a surprising buck of traditional fantasy forms. Was there ever a time when you considered anything like that? Or even thought about figuring out who his father was?

A: Nope. I've wondered about Felix's father--and Mildmay's father--but I've never had the slightest impulse to bring either of them into the story. (Unless Diokletian is Felix's father, and I tell you honestly, I don't know.) You're right that it's not the way fantasy usually works--hello the patrilineal mystique--but it hadn't even occurred to me that there was a trend I was bucking. It just wasn't relevant.

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Q: How do you think up the (refreshingly unique and memorable) names for the various taverns and inns in The Doctrine of Labyrinths, and is there any kind of significance in the names you chose?

A: My brain throws them at me. Really. When I need to dredge one up, I look for incongruities--things that will be surprising in juxtaposition--and words that I love the sound of. "Anchorite" is one of those. The other option is literary allusions; I like the idea that warped versions of our world's literature are Meduse's folklore.

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Q: What advice would you most like to give to the amateur writers who might be reading this? Any pitfalls you've encountered that you would care to help them avoid?

A: Decide what your victory conditions are. If you want to write for pleasure, don't break yourself on the wheel of publishing. If you want to get published--well, first figure out why you want to get published. You won't get rich (you probably won't be able to make a living off your writing), and the external validation of publishing a story gets the stuffing knocked out of it by the first bad review. And there will be bad reviews. If your stories get reviewed at all. If writing in and of itself doesn't in some way make you happy, then no achievement, no recognition is going to be enough to make things better. And decide what kind of writing you want to do. Not in terms of genre, but in terms of the importance in your writing and your life of art. I place a high value on art and what might pretentiously be termed "literary merit," and there's a certain fraction of the reading public whom I will automatically not reach because of it. And another fraction who won't notice, or who will complain about it. And that's frustrating. But, on the other hand, I made--and make--that choice consciously, because art is part of my personal victory conditions.

Try not to be a jerk. (I have a theory that the world would be improved if part of the passage to adulthood for everyone was swearing the first part of the Hippocratic Oath: do no harm.) This can be hard, both because there's always that temptation for creative people to behave like prima donnas and because, well, many people succumb to the temptation. But seriously. Don't be a jerk.

But otherwise . . . no two writers I know got to where they are (wherever that may be) by the same path. And creativity itself, being as it is intensely and inherently subjective, isn't the same. It works differently for different people. It needs different things. So really, the pitfall I can tell you to avoid is the pitfall of putting too much trust in what anyone else tries to tell you about how or why or what to write.

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Q: You said in an interview that Felix and Mildmay are brothers because the plot demanded it, which makes me wonder, were they both always redheads or did that come about because of their being related?

A: Felix was always a redhead. It's part of his Fantasy Protagonist Specialness, which in general I hope his personality deconstructs. I think Mildmay was also a redhead from the get-go, but I'm chagrined to say I can't remember.

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Q: The cover of Melusine shows a very much idealised picture of Felix (missing his scars and with two blue eyes, if I remember correctly). Did you mind that at all?

A: I was so ecstatic that the cover wasn't unspeakably awful (I know many readers dislike it, but the compositional values are strong, the colors are good, and the character is recognizable as himself) that I didn't, and don't, care about the inaccuracies. I've been a fantasy and science fiction reader since I was old enough to read. I know how bad that cover could have been.

I feel very grateful to have gotten Judy York as a cover artist. The woman's good at what she does.

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Q: Have you been given a release date for Corambis yet?

A: Gentle Readers, I have never yet been given a release date for any of my books. I look on Amazon, like the rest of the proles. Amazon says April 7, 2009.

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Q: How are your cats doing? I miss reading stories about their antics.

A: The cats are fine and I'm sure are gratified by the inquiry. We have been happily antic-free of late.

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Q: There often seems to be a lot of negativity about stories written in the first person present tense. What made you decide to go with it in Melusine for the sections when Felix was mad? Was it to create a clear boundary between the two states, or was it one of those things that just happened that way?

A: It was to signal that there was something seriously wrong with Our Narrator. Also to indicate the collapsing boundary between waking and dreaming that is characteristic of Felix's madness. Also, of course, to be Artistic.

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Q: How many BPI stories are there? Will they be collected into a book?

A: Currently, there's one published, one written but unsold, one chapter of a novel(la), and three that are refusing to put out for me. I hope that the answer to your second question is yes, but I have to write the damn things first.

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Q: You've already talked about similarities, but what's the biggest difference between you and Booth? (aside from gender!)

A: I'm not over six feet tall. *g*

I'm actually not as shy and socially maladroit as poor Booth, but I suppose the biggest difference is that he is happy and fulfilled in a job that would drive me out of my tree with boredom.

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Q: That question could be spread the Doctrine of Labyrinths characters too, I guess. Felix, Mildmay, Mehitabel...what's the biggest difference between them and you? Again, aside from gender and magical powers. :-)

A: The love of books and plays and stories is a commonality between all of us. I actually don't have much in common with either Mehitabel or Felix--part of the challenge of writing Felix initially was to write someone who would persistently do the opposite of what I would do in any given social situation. But Felix, like Booth, has my geekery. *g* I suspect I'm more like Mildmay than I think I am--one of the the things that really surprised me about doing readings was that people laugh, and Mildmay would be surprised, too. He's almost never funny on purpose--and I'm very rarely funny on purpose when I'm writing him, so I think there's a blind spot there that we share. But I don't have Mildmay's sense of direction, nor his grace.

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That's all the questions I've received up to now; I'll answer more if people ask them, but in the absence of questions, there will (obviously) be no more Q&A posts.

If you want to ask a question, go here. (And no, it isn't an imposition. I'm happy to keep doing Q&A because (a.) I'm interested in the questions that people ask and (b.) it saves me from having to think up content on my own.)

My January post is up. It connects directly to other things I've been saying recently. I seem to be developing a hobby-horse.

"Of Scullery Boys and Kings," my Storytellers Unplugged essay for November, is up.

My September post for Storytellers Unplugged is up.

Deep in the throes of book hate. Have some links.

My second monthly essay for Storytellers Unplugged is up.

rivkat reviews Mélusine and The Virtu. (Also The Queen in Winter.)

strangecreature also reviews Mélusine and The Virtu.

The Time Traveler Show #20 is the podcast of the panel John Scalzi, Nick Sagan, and I did at Penguicon 5.0 about lost SF Grandmaster Godfrey Winton.

Speaking of John, he reminds us that the voting for the Hugo closes Midnight (2359 hours) Pacific Daylight Time, Tuesday, July 31, 2007. John's up for Best Fan Writer. I my own self, as you may recall, am in my second second year of eligibility for the Campbell.

Enough about me. How are you?