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The Hardest Part: David Tallerman on Crown Thief

Posted on 2012-10-17 at 19:11 by montsamu

British author David Tallerman’s short story “The Burning Room” appeared in Bull Spec #4 and was later included in Ellen Datlow’s online Full Honorable Mention List for Best Horror of the Year volume 4. Tallerman has published dozens and dozens short stories across fantasy, science fiction, and horror, and what I’ve managed to get my hands on has been of the spookier or more serious variety; as a comment on his December 2010 story “Jenny’s Sick” at Lightspeed Magazine describes his stories, “Haunting, but with a distinct narrative tone.” Yet early this year, Angry Robot published Tallerman’s debut novel, Giant Thief, featuring a sarcastically and darkly funny thief who manages to find himself in possession of, if indeed one can possess such a thing, a stolen giant, alternately stomping and bumbling his way across a low fantasy landscape, in and out of trouble, castles, boats, and carriages. Here, Tallerman writes about the hardest part of writing the recently-released sequel, Crown Thief.

Giant Thief Crown Thief

David Tallerman:

I always wanted my second novel, Crown Thief, to stand on its own.  As a reader, little bugs me more than getting to the final page of a book and realising that “end” means “now wait for the next installment.”  I think that has as much to do with my childhood reading habits as anything; as a kid I’d load up on library books, not paying attention to much besides the covers and back blurbs.  Nothing was more frustrating that getting one home and realising I couldn’t read it because I’d missed the previous five volumes, or else discovering that all I’d been reading was a taster for umpteen sequels.

Still, childhood prejudices aside, doesn’t anyone who picks up a book deserve a complete story for their money?  Sure, there’s a lot to be said for the megaseries, especially when it comes to fantasy, a genre uniquely suited to telling preposterously large and epoch-spanning tales.  Even then, though, it seems to me that the casual reader, the reader who impulse buys because they like a cover or blurb, shouldn’t get completely short changed.  How hard is it to make a middle volume readily pickupable, or to wrap it up in a way that makes the next part a choice rather than an obligation?

Well … as it turns out, it’s pretty hard.

It didn’t take me long to realise that writing a book that feels complete but also picks up existing characters and threads and themes - and also paves the way for a planned third installment - is no easy order.  It quickly occurred to me that I find it almost as irritating when a writer goes to great lengths reintroducing people and places I already know from a previous volume.  And how to get around the fact that the early portions of Crown Thief involved characters backtracking over terrain they’d covered in my first book Giant Thief?  What was new to one reader could soon get tired for another, while it would be all too easy to leave new readers feeling stranded.

What I ended up with was a kind of writerly multiple personality disorder.  I always try and have an imaginary reader in mind, or perhaps just to keep a portion of my brain stuck in reader mode, watching over my mental shoulder to remind me what I wouldn’t stand for if I’d paid money to read my work.  With Crown Thief, that reader acquired a sibling, with a whole different set of tolerances and prejudices.  Keeping them both satisfied was a balancing act; it also meant accepting that I couldn’t always win.  There’d inevitably be pages where the new reader was slightly befuddled or the returning reader felt a little patronised; the best I could hope was to ensure that the one never went too long without a crucial dose of background information, while the other had more than enough in Crown Thief that was fresh and different to Giant Thief that they’d forgive the occasional unwanted recap.

Did I pull it off?  I hope so.  I felt like I had when I reached the end, but it was definitely a weight off when an early reviewer began by pointing out that they hadn’t read Giant Thief and had enjoyed Crown Thief regardless.  At the least, I’m pretty sure my younger self would have been satisfied had he snatched it up from a library shelf.

Tallerman’s Giant Thief is also available in unabridged audio from Angry Robot on Brilliance Audio, narrated by James Langton. Crown Thief is just out from Angry Robot in mass market paperback and ebook.

Posted in The Hardest Part | Tagged david tallerman

Friday quick update: weekend events

Posted on 2012-10-12 at 17:54 by montsamu

A couple of interesting things going on this weekend:

  • This weekend (Oct 13-14) is Sci-Fi & Fantasy Literary Weekend at the Carolina Renaissance Festival in Huntersville, NC (a bit northeast of Charlotte, between I-77 and I-85). Among other authors involved, Charlotte epic fantasy author Gail Z. Martin and adventure fantasy author Misty Massey will be participating. There's also a costume contest and other activities.
  • Meanwhile in Durham, on Sunday newly opened Atomic Empire (formerly Sci-Fi Genre) hosts 2012's North Carolina State Championship Magic (the Gathering) Tournament. Registration opens at 9:00 a.m. and the first round begins at 10:00 a.m.
Posted in events

The Hardest Part: Tina Connolly on Ironskin

Posted on 2012-10-10 at 17:03 by montsamu

Portland author Tina Connolly is a Clarion West graduate and the author of a long and growing list of well-received short stories, including “Selling Home” in Bull Spec #6. She’s also a podcast narrator, both out and about on several podcasts and on her own, the bite-sized fiction podcast Toasted Cake, which won this year’s Parsec Award for best new podcast. Her just-released debut fantasy novel Ironskin tells a story which is more complex than the intriguing but reductive tagline “Jane Eyre with fairies” conveys, and mapping out the muddy middle of this more complex plot was the hardest part of its writing.

”Jane Eliot wears an iron mask. It’s the only way to contain the fey curse that scars her cheek. The Great War is five years gone, but its scattered victims remain—the ironskin. When a carefully worded listing appears for a governess to assist with a “delicate situation”—a child born during the Great War—Jane is certain the child is fey-cursed, and that she can help."

"Middle-Muddles and Lockpicking Tools” by Tina Connolly

THE MUDDLE IN THE middle. That’s the hardest part for me. Or count it as the doors between acts, maybe.

Ironskin was my 7th book, and the most structurally complex of any book so far. Well. The most complex of any book finished. I naturally write short (flash! It’s a GREAT length) and so for a long time I had piles and piles of Chapter Ones littering my hard drive, with no idea what to do next. Eventually I attacked this roadblock in a couple ways—first, by writing a couple romance novels (because they had a very solid structure to follow) and then, several years later, by writing middle-grades. I wrote two MGs and then a YA, each one slightly longer and more complex. But none of them were really complex—they all had a pretty neat and tidy structure—you know, like a farce, for example. Complications pile up, but there’s a clear throughline to where you’re going. (I still rather love the shortest of the MGs, and it has a very thoroughly structured plot—think something vaguely like Jumanji, where every chapter is the next crazy event that happens.)

But Ironskin is not a farce, and it’s meant to be more organic. It started life as a novella (with a lot of extra stuff left over, and a lot more left to say.) At some point while I was struggling with arranging it into a book-length arc (and despairing), someone pointed out the similarities to Jane Eyre. That gave me the structural key to turning my piles of scenes and ideas into a plot. (And thematically it worked beautifully—I think my subconscious was several jumps ahead of me.)

Things started improving. Until I ran into the same problem I had with previous novels—that of getting stuck at the doors between acts. You start off in the beginning, full of steam—so much to say! But then the door opens into act 2. You turn the corner. And … what? How do you complicate things up? And then, after you’ve complicated them … the door to act 3 comes along. How do you wind them all back up?

But at some point, muddle-middles aside, the book takes on a life of its own. Themes organically come out and you find the important things you’re trying to talk about. You stop trying to make the plot do things, and look at what puzzle pieces fit in with the puzzle you already have. IE, it turns out this book is about X. So in this hole, what else do I want to say about X? Or, Jane’s character shows that she often does Y. I need to reinforce Y in this hole.

So I learned a lot while writing this book. It was the most challenging story I’d attempted and finished. I’ve written 2 books since Ironskin—I wrote a complete YA while we were shopping Ironskin that I haven’t done anything with yet. And then I wrote the sequel, while baby-wrangling. (THAT will be the subject of “the hardest part” post for book 2, lol!) And I’m noticing with relief that what I learned is still bearing fruit and even improving. My process is getting better. (Slowly.) The muddle in the middle is still, yes, a great muddly part where I curse the book and rue the day I started it and swear I’ll never it make it to the end. But I muddle through better these days. The doors into the acts aren’t shut and barred against me—or at least, I finally have a better set of lockpicking tools than that old credit card and hairpin. So there’s hope… .

Ironskin was published October 2 in hardcover and ebook by Tor. An audiobook edition from Audible Frontiers is available on both its .com and .co.uk sites, narrated by Rosalyn Landor.

Posted in The Hardest Part, Uncategorized

Friday Updates: new events, Nathan Kotecki on Saturday, Hope Larson on Sunday, Kij Johnson on Tuesday, and more local author publication notes

Posted on 2012-10-05 at 20:15 by montsamu

As usual, as soon as I send out the newsletter I find out about publication news and events that I’ve missed. This month is no exception, although the events list is indeed exceptionally long. But first, some upcoming events:

Local author publication notes: And here is that (very!) long list of "NEW-NEW" events in October and November:

OCTOBER

NEW-NEW: 6 (Saturday) 7 pm — Flyleaf Books hosts Durham author Nathan Kotecki for a reading and signing of his new Young Adult fantasy novel The Suburban Strange. More info: http://www.flyleafbooks.com/event/nathan-kotecki-reads-his-new-young-adult-fantasy-novel-suburban-strange

NEW-NEW: 14 (Sunday) 10 am — Atomic Empire hosts the North Carolina State Championship Magic Tournament. Registration begins at 9, winner receives invite to the national championships in Indianapolis. More info: http://www.atomicempire.com/2012s/

NEW-NEW: 18 (Thursday) 7 pm — Local authors Mark L. Van Name (The Wild Side anthology, Baen) and Clay Griffith (The Vampire Empire series, Pyr) will discuss urban fantasy at the Cameron Village library.

NEW-NEW: 23 (Tuesday) 7 pm — Durham author Nathan Kotecki visits The Regulator Bookshop for a reading and signing of The Suburban Strange. More info: https://www.facebook.com/events/241877642602182/

NOVEMBER

NEW-NEW: 5 (Monday) 7 pm: Quail Ridge Books hosts Cinda Chima for a reading and signing of her young adult fantasy novel The Crimson Crown, the fourth and final novel of her Seven Realms series. More info: http://www.quailridgebooks.com/event/cinda-chima-seven-realms-conclusion-crimson-crown

NEW-NEW: 10 (Saturday) 11 am — McIntyre’s Books hosts Ilie Ruby for her second novel, The Salt God’s Daughter, “Imbued with a traditional Scottish folktale and hints of Jewish mysticism”. More info: http://www.fearrington.com/village/calendar.asp?month=11&year=2012

NEW-NEW: 17 (Saturday) 3 pm — Quail Ridge Books hosts Morgan Keyes for a reading and signing of new “ages 10 and up” fantasy novel, Darkbeast. More info: http://www.quailridgebooks.com/event/morgan-keyes-new-fantasy-darkbeast

NEW-NEW: 19 (Monday) 6:30 pm — Local author Mark L. Van Name will host a NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) related writing workshop at the Cameron Village Library.

NEW-NEW: 30 (Friday) 7 pm — Cherie Priest returns to the Triangle, as Flyleaf Books hosts a reading and signing from her forthcoming Clockwork Century novel, The Inexplicables. More info: http://www.flyleafbooks.com/event/cherie-priest-reads-her-new-steampunk-adventure-inexplicables

NEW-NEW: 30 (Friday) 7 pm — Quail Ridge Books hosts Allie Condie for Reached, the conclusion of the #1 NYT bestselling “Matched” trilogy, a YA dystopia. More info: http://www.quailridgebooks.com/event/allie-condie-matched-trilogy-conclusion

Posted in events

The Negative Zone #003: Looper

Posted on 2012-10-05 at 14:59 by Wander Lane

THE NEGATIVE ZONE #003: LOOPER, WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY RIAN JOHNSON

by Andrew Neal

The timeline has changed. The promised review column I wrote for the comics of Brandon Graham will run in two weeks instead of today.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iQuhsmtfHw]

In another timeline, I overheard several phone calls made by folks working on the production of the movie Looper. Something has happened in my past self’s present which is causing my memory to blur, but I have recorded the ones I can remember here. There are some mild-to-moderate spoilers here, or if you haven’t seen the trailer, I guess there are some major spoilers:

“Do you think people are gonna buy that Joe and Bruce are playing the same guy? Yeah, yeah, I know they’re good actors, it’s just that people might not get that they’re playing the same guy. So here’s what I’m thinking: in order to make it a little more clear that they’re the same guy, we’ll put Joe in that mask I have that looks kind of like Ray Liotta as Frankenstein. Cool?"

"Hey, I’ve been looking over the script, and I’ve got to say, there’s a really significant issue with the flow of the movie. Specifically, you get to the middle of the movie, and it’s moving along and we’ve finally built up some momentum, and I’m worried people are going to get too caught up in the flow of what’s going on, so here’s an idea: about halfway into the movie, maybe a little more, we’ll introduce two new important characters in such a way that it just slams all the action to a halt. That ought to just confuse and bore the hell out of people, which would really bring us back to where a time travel movie ought to be."

"Hey, man, I’m kind of freaked out and I don’t know what to do. Yeah. Yeah, okay, I’m calm. I’m cool. Okay. Thanks. Thanks for cooling me down. So here’s the problem: remember how at the beginning of the movie, we had this whole thing about telekinesis? Yeah, well, we completely forgot about it after that, and now we’re almost done with the movie! So, okay… yeah… oh, wow, great, I like that idea. So what you’re saying is that we can just jam the whole telekinesis thing back in there at the end, and the whole end of the movie can be about telekinesis. Right? Awesome. Thanks."

"Hey, could I speak to Mister Oldman, please? This is Bruce. Bruce Willis. Yeah. No. Willis. Yes, I’ll hold… hey, Gary, it’s Bruce! Yeah, listen, do you still have that hairpiece thing you wore in The Fifth Element? Yeah? Hey, that’s great. I’m working on this new thing where Joseph Gordon Levitt and I are playing the same guy, and… what? Yeah, it’s a time travel movie. No. Not like Twelve Monkeys. But yeah. We’re playing the same guy. Anyway, so you know frogs? Yeah, frogs. Like the reptile. Okay then, amphibian. You get what I mean. Frogs. So imagine Joe is the polliwog, and I’m the frog, right? No, I’m not playing an actual frog. This is conceptual, Gary. Pay attention. Okay, so Joe is the polliwog, and I’m the frog, but we need a shot of that in-between phase where it’s like a polliwog with little frog legs coming out the back, and for that, I’m thinking if you still have that Fifth Element hairpiece thing, I could throw that on and it would be perfect for showing that intermediate phase. So yeah, I’ll be over to pick that up, let’s see, when? Would eight o’clock work for you? Great, great. I can burn you another CD of my harmonica stuff to bring over if you… Gary? Gary, are you there?”

Andrew Neal sells comics, writes, and draws. You haven’t read this yet, but in the future, you will have read it, and at that time, you can post hate mail as a comment here.

Posted in columns, the negative zone

The Hardest Part: Daniel Rabuzzi on The Indigo Pheasant

Posted on 2012-10-03 at 18:33 by montsamu

New York City author Daniel A. Rabuzzi’s debut novel The Choir Boats was published by ChiZine Publications in 2009 as part one of a two-volume fantasy series, Longing for Yount, described by reviewers as “Gulliver’s Travels crossed with The Golden Compass and a dollop of Pride and Prejudice,” and “a muscular, Napoleonic-era fantasy that, like Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials series, will appeal to both adult and young adult readers.” Just published in September, The Indigo Pheasant concludes Rabuzzi’s series, and I’m very glad to welcome him as a contributor to “The Hardest Part”.

 

CHARACTERS IN MY NOVELS resist my control, evade my closest supervision, and in some cases thumb their noses at my efforts altogether. They come and go as they please, craving special attentions that I struggle to provide.

I have recently written elsewhere (“A Picture-Show in the Night-Kitchen,” at Layers of Thought) that my creative process revolves around images and sounds that wander and wind through the crevices of my half-woken mind. I am an “imagist,” not a “plotter.” I sometimes think I am a documentary filmmaker, trying to capture the stories of characters who exist separate from me and any whims or fancies I might have.

Which is all very well, insofar as the actors appear so quickly and forcefully, with their lines already emerging from their lips, full blossomed and ripe…but the initial result is a clutter of scenes, long ribbons of dialogue that snag and tangle, an opening of umbrellas all at once in the drawing room.

I labor long to make sense of the anarchy. I sift through the many disparate scenes, the tinctures of feeling, the sudden passions, trying to find the unified story within. I cannot focus on just a few characters (let alone one), but am confronted with the competing demands of a large, varied cast. To be frank, I am not sure that I do best justice to the various story-lines and sometimes contradictory motivations of my characters; I worry that the plot as a whole shivers beneath the weight of so much Declaration and Description, that it falls shy of convincing.

The task gets even harder for me when I realize that I care deeply about my characters. I think the novelist’s best trick is to deceive him- or herself into believing in the existence of his or her creations. I must not only conjure the suspension of disbelief among readers, but first contrive self-hypnosis and glamour. I will pretend otherwise, but especially under the eaves of night I would confess to belief in the reality of my characters. I do not think I could write about them if I believed differently. Why else do I desperately, viscerally want Maggie to succeed in her combat with the Owl, and Sanford to judge as he does the actions of others, and Jambres (“The Cretched Man”) to rise above his punishment? Why else is the fate of Sally and James so meaningful to me?

Eventually, I give up on finding the full resolution of the plot, and abandon the novel to my publisher, hoping for a measure of reprieve. The novel has a beginning, a middle, and an end, at least in terms of page-count, but it is more like Tristam Shandy than The Return of the King. My novels are like the carriages in The Pickwick Papers…the route may have departures and destinations, but individuals get on and off as they will throughout.

Last year, Bull Spec poetry editor Dan Campbell accepted Rabuzzi’s poem “One Hundred Years in the Wood” which was published earlier this year in Bull Spec #7. The Indigo Pheasant is out now.

Posted in The Hardest Part

October newsletter: Michael Chabon, Hope Larson, Kij Johnson, Christopher Paolini, and more

Posted on 2012-10-01 at 18:36 by montsamu

Vol 2. No 7. October 1, 2012:

September was quite a month for things to do, with an immensely successful inaugural Escapist Expo, great author events with Scott Sigler, Andy Duncan, Neil Gaiman, Junot Diaz, Brent Weeks, and Steven Erikson, and the grand re-opening of Sci-Fi Genre Comics and Games under its new name and at its new Westgate Drive location as Atomic Empire. October is just about as packed, starting with Michael Chabon TONIGHT at Quail Ridge Books and continuing throughout the month. There are several NEW events on the calendar below, including graphic novelist Hope Larson, recently-announced Hugo Award winner Ursula Vernon, bestselling fantasy author Christopher Paolini (Eragon, Inheritance), and more, so definitely check out the events listing. To help remind yourself (or others!) you can print out one of the new flyers, as always in grayscale and color.

In Bull Spec news, the first entries in the teen writing contest have come in! But I’m hoping to see a lot more submissions, so I need as much help as I can get in reaching out to area libraries, high schools, teen writing and reading groups, etc. For more info on the contest, which has a December 1 deadline, see: /2012/08/31/announcement-second-bull-spec-teen-writing-contest-judged-by-sharyn-november/

Meanwhile, Issue #8 is heading into the stretch run, with more and more stories and content going final. I’d hoped to be able to launch issue #8 at World Fantasy in Toronto the first weekend in November (in absentia on my part, but with some helpers up there) but that may be a bit too aggressive. We’ll see. I know that is another long, un-quarterly break from issue #7, which was itself a long, un-quarterly break from issue #6. But! Help is on the way in the form of new staff member CD Covington, coming aboard as production manager for the 2013 run of three “ternary” issues. She has schedules and charts in hand and, with new fiction editors Natania Barron and Eric Gregory finally getting to debut their choices of fiction including Ken Liu, Lavie Tidhar, and An Owomoyela (so far!) meaning I’m hopefully out of the bottleneck of story editing, things are looking very, very good for next year’s run. So, in short, now is an absolutely great time to subscribe!

Local publishing notes:

-Sam

PS: As usual, events come in as soon as I click “send”. See below for “NEW-NEW” events from Mark L. Van Name, Clay Griffith, and Cherie Priest!

OCTOBER 2012

1 (Monday) 7:30 pm — Quail Ridge Books hosts Michael Chabon (the author of The Yiddish Policeman’s Union and The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay) for a reading and signing event of his forthcoming non-genre novel, Telegraph Hill. More info: http://quailridgebooks.com/event/michael-chabon-telegraph-hill

2 — Local author new collection: Night & Demons by David Drake (Baen, Oct 2) — Drake’s first collection since 2007’s Balefires has some overlap, but also a few stories not appearing since their first publication (“Codex”, “Dragon, The Book”, “The Waiting Bullet”, “The Land Toward Sunset”), and considerable new words in the form of story introductions. Drake recently contributed a piece on putting this collection together for bullspec.com’s “The Hardest Part” series: /2012/09/26/the-hardest-part-david-drake-on-night-demons/

NEW-NEW: 2 (Tuesday) 5 pm — The Regulator will be selling books for the “Suburban Strange” release party starting at 5pm. Durham author Nathan Kotecki will be there to sign books and hang out. More info: http://motorcomusic.com/suburban-strange

NEW: 6 (Saturday) 4 pm — B&N of Cary is hosting a Star Wars Reads event for kids on Saturday, October 6 at 4:00 with characters from the local 501st Legion coming in costume

NEW-NEW: 6 (Saturday) 6 pm — Flyleaf Books hosts Durham author Nathan Kotecki for a reading and signing of his new Young Adult fantasy novel The Suburban Strange. More info: http://www.flyleafbooks.com/event/nathan-kotecki-reads-his-new-young-adult-fantasy-novel-suburban-strange

NEW: 7 (Sunday) 2-4 pm: Graphic novelist (and Bull Spec #2 interviewee!) Hope Larson visits Chapel Hill Comics for a reading and signing from hew new adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time: https://www.facebook.com/events/506635952698280/

9 (Tuesday) 7:30 pm — Kij Johnson returns to the Triangle for a reading and signing of her new collection from Small Beer Press, At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories, at Quail Ridge Books. More info: http://quailridgebooks.com/event/kij-johnson-nebula-winner-new-stories

NEW-NEW: 14 (Sunday) 10 am — Atomic Empire hosts the North Carolina State Championship Magic Tournament. Registration begins at 9, winner receives invite to the national championships in Indianapolis. More info: http://www.atomicempire.com/2012s/

NEW: 16 (Tuesday) B&N of Cary hosts Hugo Award winning artist and writer Ursula Vernon for the latest in her Dragonbreath series of part graphic novel, part text books for kids, “When Fairies Go Bad”. More info: http://store-locator.barnesandnoble.com/event/3878803

NEW-NEW: 18 (Thursday) 7 pm — Local authors Mark L. Van Name (The Wild Side anthology, Baen) and Clay Griffith (The Vampire Empire series, Pyr) will discuss urban fantasy at the Cameron Village library.

NEW: 20 (Saturday) 9 pm til past Midnight — Pittsboro’s Davenport & Winkleperry hosts the Clockwork Ball, a Steampunk-themed gala of costumes and music: https://www.facebook.com/events/274644505987172/

22 (Monday) 7 pm — Jasper Fforde at Quail Ridge Books on Monday, October 22 for his young adult fantasy novel The Last Dragonslayer. More info: http://www.quailridgebooks.com/event/jasper-fforde-last-dragonslayer

NEW-NEW: 23 (Tuesday) 7 pm — Durham author Nathan Kotecki visits The Regulator Bookshop for a reading and signing of The Suburban Strange. More info: https://www.facebook.com/events/241877642602182/ — UPDATE: This event has been rescheduled to Monday, November 12.

NEW: 26 (Friday) 6 pm — Bestselling fantasy author of Eragon, Christopher Paolini, visits Barnes & Noble of Cary for a reading, discussion, and signing of the special “deluxe” edition of the concluding book of his Inheritance series, Inheritance. More info: http://store-locator.barnesandnoble.com/event/78123

NEW: 27 (Saturday) 5-7 pm — Chapel Hill Comics hosts Brandon Graham as part of his new comic “Multiple Warheads” tour. More info: http://www.chapelhillcomics.com/content/?p=2585

29 (Monday) 7 pm — Clay and Susan Griffith at Flyleaf Books on Monday, October 29 for a reading and signing of The Kingmakers, the conclusion of their Vampire Empire trilogy.

31 — Local author new novel: Alex Granados’s Cemetery Plot to be published by Crushing Hearts and Black Butterfly Publishing. Taglined “The apocalypse isn’t all it’s cracked up to be”.

NOVEMBER 2012

NEW: 3-4 (Saturday to Sunday) — Ultimate Comics hosts a 24 hour comics day event from Nov 3 Sat to Nov 4 Sunday noon to noon; participants will full 24-page comics in 24 hours. More info: https://www.facebook.com/events/409522805782118/

4 (Sunday) 2 pm — Alex Granados reading and signing Cemetery Plot at McIntyre’s Books in Fearrington Village in Pittsboro. (See above for book info.)

NEW-NEW: 5 (Monday) 7 pm: Quail Ridge Books hosts Cinda Chima for a reading and signing of her young adult fantasy novel The Crimson Crown, the fourth and final novel of her Seven Realms series. More info: http://www.quailridgebooks.com/event/cinda-chima-seven-realms-conclusion-crimson-crown

7 (Wednesday) 7:30 pm — Quail Ridge Books hosts Greensboro author Orson Scott Card for Ruins, the second book in his Pathfinder series from Simon Pulse (young readers/young adult).
9 (Friday) — Granados at The Storetellers Bookstore in Wake Forest, during the town’s Art after Hours event.

NEW-NEW: 9-12 (Friday to Monday) — The Rocky Horror Show at the Carrboro ArtsCenter, presented by Pauper Players. Tickets: http://www.etix.com/ticket/online/eventSearch.jsp?event_id=570503&cobrand=artscenter

NEW-NEW: 10 (Saturday) 11 am — McIntyre’s Books hosts Ilie Ruby for her second novel, The Salt God’s Daughter, “Imbued with a traditional Scottish folktale and hints of Jewish mysticism”. More info: http://www.fearrington.com/village/calendar.asp?month=11&year=2012

NEW-NEW: 12 (Monday) 7 pm — Durham author Nathan Kotecki visits The Regulator Bookshop for a reading and signing of The Suburban Strange. More info: https://www.facebook.com/events/241877642602182/

12 — Local author new novel: J.L. Hilton’s Stellarnet Prince, sequel to January’s Stellarnet Rebel, to be published by Carina Press.

13 (Tuesday) 7:30 pm — Granados at Chapel Hill’s Flyleaf Books.

15 (Thursday) 7 pm — Granados at Durham’s The Regulator Bookshop.

NEW-NEW: 17 (Saturday) 3 pm — Quail Ridge Books hosts Morgan Keyes for a reading and signing of new “ages 10 and up” fantasy novel, Darkbeast. More info: http://www.quailridgebooks.com/event/morgan-keyes-new-fantasy-darkbeast

17-18 (Saturday and Sunday) — NC Comicon at the Durham Convention Center with a long list of guests: http://nccomicon.com/

NEW-NEW: 19 (Monday) 6:30 pm — Local author Mark L. Van Name will host a NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) related writing workshop at the Cameron Village Library.

NEW-NEW: 30 (Friday) 7 pm — Cherie Priest returns to the Triangle, as Flyleaf Books hosts a reading and signing from her forthcoming Clockwork Century novel, The Inexplicables. More info: http://www.flyleafbooks.com/event/cherie-priest-reads-her-new-steampunk-adventure-inexplicables

NEW-NEW: 30 (Friday) 7 pm — Quail Ridge Books hosts Allie Condie for Reached, the conclusion of the #1 NYT bestselling “Matched” trilogy, a YA dystopia. More info: http://www.quailridgebooks.com/event/allie-condie-matched-trilogy-conclusion

JANUARY 2013

11-13 (Friday to Sunday) — illogiCon 2 will be held at the Embassy Suites of Raleigh-Durham/Research Triangle on January 11-13, 2013, with writer guest of honor Tim Powers and webcomic guest of honor Garth Graham, and toastmaster Mark L. Van Name: http://www.illogicon.com/

FEBRUARY 2013

NEW: TBD –Quail Ridge Books again hosts best-selling author Brandon Sanderson, this time for the conclusion of The Wheel of Time series, A Memory of Light. More info: /2012/09/06/breaking-event-news-quail-ridge-books-to-host-brandon-sanderson-for-a-memory-of-light/

JUNE 2013

27-30 (Thursday to Sunday) — ConTemporal 2013 at the North Raleigh Hilton, beginning with the Thursday evening guest of honor dinner and continuing all weekend, as this Steampunk-themed convention is back for a second year. More info: http://contemporal.org/

END

Posted in newsletter, Uncategorized

The Hardest Part: David Drake on Night & Demons

Posted on 2012-09-26 at 14:00 by montsamu

Pittsboro author David Drake has had a long and prolific writing career, and when I saw his recent newsletter mention the word count of new introductions for his new collection Night & Demons (Baen, October 2), I thought I knew what I would get when I asked him what the hardest part of putting together the new collection was: “The story introductions total around 12,000 words and are as much autobiography as you’re likely to get from me.” However, it turns out it wasn’t the words themselves or their number, it was the trip there and back again to get them that made for the toughest sledding.

”A Hard Look Back” by David Drake

ON A PANEL AT The Escapist Expo in September, my friend Mark asked for a show of hands from people who hadn’t been born in 1966 when I sold my first story. He got at least half the room. Folks there and generally nowadays see me as a successful writer who is respected by his colleagues and whose books have been selling well for over 30 years.The stories in Night & Demons weren’t written by that person. Here are a few examples of the things that were happening to the person who wrote Night & Demons:

  1. My first sale in 1966 brought such a brutal acceptance letter with the $35 payment that I didn’t look at the story again for decades. During that period I repeatedly described it as a bad story.

When I finally reread the story (because I was booked for a reading at a World Fantasy Con), I realized it was quite good of its sort; ‘the sort’ being a filler for Weird Tales in 1938. I had modeled it on the filler stories which the editor had been writing for Weird Tales in 1938.

  1. When I was typing up my third story at Blackhorse Base Camp in Di An, Republic of Viet Nam, the ammo dump blew up behind me. This was by no means the worst thing that happened to me while I was In Country.

Nowadays I realize that immersion in really bad parts of reality in 1970 gave my fiction an edge which I couldn’t have gotten any other way. The ability to transfer savage reality to the page sets my work apart from that of most people writing on similar subjects.

  1. In 1974 my agent, Kirby, edited an original horror anthology titled Frights. He offered me 2-cents/word for a story. I met Kirby for the first time in at the Worldcon that year, where he was trying to convince Joe Haldeman to accept payment of only 4-cents/word for his story in Frights.

I turned my story in. Kirby thought I’d overestimated the wordage (I hadn’t; I counted every word and sent him the page by page totals). Kirby also thought that the ending (a climax/conclusion) was too abrupt.

More recently, Kirby has told me that on rereading, he saw that my ending was exactly right for the story. At the time, he wasn’t used to anything so harsh.

  1. Kirby then edited another original horror anthology, Dark Forces. It was to be the no-holds-barred equivalent of what Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions was for SF.

Kirby didn’t ask me for a story this time, because I’d recently written a horror story for a British anthology. My story had really disturbed Kirby, and it was at least partially responsible for getting the anthology seized by the police.

When a twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Dark Forces came out, Kirby phoned me to apologize for not asking me for a story—or simply taking the one which had been banned in Britain (since the whole edition of the British anthology had been pulped).

Those four examples (the stories are included here) show you the stature in the field of the person who wrote Night & Demons. The follow-ups to these anecdotes happened to the present me, the successful writer whom people think they meet at conventions.

But writing these intros and proofreading the stories rubbed my nose in the person I was in the ’70s. I wasn’t an innovative writer who was laying the groundwork for what has been for more than 30 years a successful career: I was a failure, a traumatized Nam vet whose friends and agent were part of the chorus telling him he was doing the wrong thing.

And in my head when I look back, as I had to look back to prepare Night & Demons, I’m still that person.

Dave Drake

david-drake.com

Posted in The Hardest Part

The Negative Zone #002: The Drowned Cities by Paolo Bacigalupi

Posted on 2012-09-21 at 17:53 by montsamu

THE NEGATIVE ZONE #002: THE DROWNED CITIES by PAOLO BACIGALUPI

by Andrew Neal

When I was younger, I never would have thought I’d get tired of post-apocalyptic and dystopian fiction, but the rest of the world caught up with my tastes and now it’s all over the place. Turn over a rock and out comes a zombie. Roll over a log and discover a plucky, heroic young girl surviving the harsh future against all odds. Dredge the flooded streets of an ancient ruined American city and find an almost indestructible man-animal hybrid named Tool.

Actually, wait. That last one sounds pretty cool. Count me back in on the post-apocalyptic thing.

Tool is one of the characters in Paolo Bacigalupi’s latest book, The Drowned Cities. He’s a half-man, or a dog-face, depending on which character is talking about him. Tool is one of several important characters in this book. Some of the others include Mahlia, a not-really-very-plucky, heroic young girl surviving the harsh future against all odds, Mouse, Mahlia’s dear friend who is in fact rather plucky, and Ocho, a sergeant in a squad of warboys who serve a warlord based in the ruins of Washington DC. None of the characters struck me as unique on their own, but by weaving the characters’ story threads together and apart, Bacigalupi created tension, character growth, and an exciting story.

This book is aimed at young adult readers, but it had a good amount in common with Bacigalupi’s adult novel, The Windup Girl. Both are set in a world (possibly the same world) in which the planet’s oil is used up, both feature genetically modified plant and animal hybrids, and both deal with the concept of beings created by man who struggle against genetically-induced loyalty to their masters.

Most of the differences between the novels are matters of degrees: for example, both books include instances of violent, dehumanizing sex. In The Windup Girl, it’s explicit. In The Drowned Cities, the reader sees the before and after, but not the act itself. Bacigalupi doesn’t shy away from the atrocities of war in his book for young readers, but he doesn’t go into all the details. I appreciate this. I think it’s important for an author not to lie when he’s writing. This is Bacigalupi’s book, and he could have written it any way he chose, but he embedded the elements of war so strongly in his fantastic setting that it added a level of truthfulness that may otherwise have been missing. He convinced me.

I don’t mean that he made me believe that dog-men are real or that Washington DC had been flooded; I mean he convinced me that the world he created was consistent and real, and that the characters within acted and reacted in as truthful a manner as possible considering their fictional surroundings. This is the highest praise I can give to a book. I highly recommend The Drowned Cities.

And hey: I haven’t even mentioned yet that The Drowned Cities is described on the dust jacket as a companion piece to Bacigalupi’s previous young adult novel, Ship Breaker. I haven’t read Ship Breaker yet; I decided to read The Drowned Cities first so that I could find out if it works on its own. This is something I am obsessed with in genre literature: the tendency toward publishing “books” that are actually just really long chapters. If you’ve read the previous six paragraphs you know I think The Drowned Cities is a fantastic book, and not just a chapter or addendum. I intend to read Ship Breaker very soon; hopefully I’ll get to recommend it just as highly as The Drowned Cities.

Andrew Neal sells comics.  He also writes and draws.

The Negative Zone #003 (Friday October 5) will be about the comic series Prophet by Brandon Graham, Simon Roy, Farel Dalrymple, and Giannis Milonnogiannis.

Posted in columns, the negative zone

The Hardest Part: Nick Mamatas on Bullettime

Posted on 2012-09-19 at 17:14 by montsamu

[Editor’s note: this debuts a new weekly Wednesday feature, “The Hardest Part”, where creators talk about the hardest part of putting together their most recent book or other work.]

Nick Mamatas is the Hugo-nominated editor of Haikasoru, an imprint of VIZ Media which brings Japanese science fiction and fantasy to “America and beyond”. He’s also the co-editor with Masumi Washington of the May-released anthology The Future is Japanese, the co-editor with Ellen Datlow of the 2010-released, Bram Stoker Award winning anthology Haunted Legends, and co-edited Clarkesworld Magazine from 2006-2008. He’s also a prolific writer of short fiction, including “O, Harvard Square!” in Bull Spec #4, non-fiction, including several reviews now for Bull Spec and his 2011 book Starve Better: Surviving the Endless Horror of the Writing Life, and novel-length fiction, with four published novels since his well-received debut Move Under Ground in 2004 including Sensation (2011) and The Damned Highway: Fear and Loathing in Arkham (2011, co-written with Brian Keene). He writes with apparent disregard for genre categorization or market, and here talks about the hardest part of writing Bullettime, his August-released novel from ChiZine Publications.

THE HARDEST PART OF writing Bullettime was finishing it. That doesn’t mean that I struggled with the ending, or was experiencing writer’s block or anything like that; I was simply doing other things. For six years. Also, rampage killings.

After a writer publishes a novel, like say my 2004 debut Move Under Ground, there’s no real need to finish subsequent novels before selling them. That’s why we have agents, and write synopses, and when someone asks, “So, what are you working on now?” you often find yourself shrugging and stammering, and finally answer, “Uhm…things? Short stories. I dunno…” But there’s a problem with selling a novel based on a partial manuscript when the novel is about a touchy subject—say, school shootings—and has an unusual structure—for example, a first-person narrative from three alternative perspectives of the same character, one of which is trapped in the Ylem, a realm beyond space/time, from which he can observe all his possible existences. And maybe there’s also a third-person present-tense narrative threaded through the material, following the same character. Just like Bullettime. So it takes a while, and your agent can’t get any traction. And you move across the country, and start striking up conversations with independent publishers on your own. And one editor, from an outfit called M Press, is interested.

And then perhaps there are some school shootings, like the Amish school shooting in 2006. And then you don’t hear from M Press anymore, which is just as well as it folds soon after.

So you work on another book, instead. A simpler one, about a family that builds a nuclear device–the first chapter features step-by-step instructions using household items, and some mail-order uranium. And the structure is simpler too: just a memoir of the son, who also happens to be a powerful telepath who can read minds regardless of their distance from him. Call it first-person omniscient point of view. And this book sells! And is released! And ruined by a botched production job because the publisher has no money and has an underfed, overbearded intern lay out the book! Because its distributor goes bankrupt a few days before its release! That’s my book, Under My Roof, which at least found audiences in its German and Italian translations. Now we’re in 2007. And you decide to go back to school, so you can teach creative writing instead of just doing it. And you have to write a book to graduate.

And then perhaps there are some more school shootings, like say the horrifying Virginia Tech massacre, and the Bullettime partial is pulled from circulation entirely. So you don’t finish that book, you write another one, and it’s about the Internet, and anarchism, and told from the point of view of a collective of hyperintelligent spiders. Call that first-person plural omniscient point of view. And your agent is excited. And you are excited. And the book is called Sensation because that’s what you hope it will be. And then capitalism collapses and everyone in publishing is fired, so your agent doesn’t even get rejection letters, she gets “This editor is no longer employed here” letters (but he was fine yesterday!) and “This imprint no longer exists” letters.

So you move across the country again, back to California, and get a day job—a day job in publishing. You are the only person in the latter half of 2008 to actually get a decent job in publishing. And then, amazingly, there’s another stroke of good luck! You can sell a book on a partial—though it takes nearly a year to hammer out the details. And it’s a collaboration with Brian Keene, who is already famous, which certainly helps, and you only have to write half a book, and amusingly it sells to Dark Horse Books, the daughter program to the late M Press. And thanks to the blizzards of 2010 nobody can fly from California to the East Coast, least of all you, you get to sit home on the week between Christmas and New Years and finish the book. And it’s The Damned Highway, and it features a Hunter S. Thompsonesque character dealing with Lovecraftian Old Ones during the 1972 Presidential election. And the advance pays off the debts accrued from running around the country for the prior five years.

And Bullettime is still there, on your hard drive, and you don’t even look at it. Then the editors of a magazine in which you’ve had two stories appear start putting out books. And they’re in Canada, where school shootings are rare, but sadly not unknown (e.g., École Polytechnique, 1989). And in 2009, they had opened to submissions, and so you sent in your fifty pages and promptly forgot about it. And so did they. Until late 2010, when at the World Fantasy Convention you meet them in person, and perform a feat of strength—lifting John Langan off the ground—for them and they are impressed. Then one of them remembers your submission, and reads it, and wants it, and in mid-2011 you finally sell the book.

Now you finally have to finish it. But day jobs are busy, as it turns out, and you were working on all those short stories … and stuff, but the deadline is far far away, it seems. And Sensation comes out via PM Press, an anarchist press that is oddly immune to the vagaries of capitalism it was born to critique, and the novel is pilloried in the trade journals as an instantly obsolete collection of in-jokes about Internet activism. And then Occupy happens, almost exactly as you describe your political movement in the book, and you get involved in that and it’s like living in the book.  And The Damned Highway comes out, and people like it, and its vision of the 1972 election seems eerily predictive of the current Presidential election cycle. And you have to run around promoting that too, on top of the day job in publishing, on top of the short stories and whatnot. But the news is finally on your side! And the Bullettime deadline, January 2012, just sneaks up on you. And so, you spend Christmas alone again, because it worked so well last year, and you finish the book. And then two weeks before Bullettime is due to come out, there’s another mass shooting in Colorado, not far from the one that initially inspired the idea…

Bullettime was published August 14 in print and ebook by ChiZine Publications. An audiobook edition is forthcoming from Audible.

Posted in The Hardest Part | Tagged bullettime, chizine, nick mamatas
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