by Nina Allan
I saw that you recently filmed yourself writing the opening prologue of your new Stormlight novel. You want to tell us about that?
Sure. I mean, I’ve talked about all of this stuff that goes on with social media and whatnot, and I like the interaction that you can get. Some artists that I like, they’re doing this thing where they’ll film themselves painting a piece, and you get this awesome thing where you start with the blank page and then you see in fast motion them painting the whole thing. Dan Dos Santos did this for the cover of Warbreaker, one of my novels. You can find this sped-up video of him painting the whole thing and it’s awesome. I can’t really do that with writing. It’s not nearly as engaging to watch someone typing as it is to watch someone creating this amazing piece of art out of nothing, but I wanted to try it and see what it was like. And so I picked a scene—it’s not actually the prologue. It’s one of the scenes that won’t be a spoiler. I do these things called “interludes” in the Stormlight Archive where I basically write short stories in the world and put them between major sections of the book. I screen-captured myself typing that out, starting with my little outline that I did for it, then typing the whole thing out. Theoretically, I will film myself doing the revisions. The idea is just to put those things up as something fun that people might enjoy—probably sped up a bunch, since it took me six hours to write the scene. It might be helpful to new writers, I don’t know. It might be just a curiosity, but it’s something I wanted to try.
Did it make you self-conscious at all knowing that people were going to be watching your process in action?
Yeah, it totally makes you self-conscious. Mostly it’s the spelling. I’ll be typing along and I’ll see that I spelled some word wrong, and I’ll be like, “Ah man, I should know how to spell that.” So I’ll just use the Microsoft Word spellcheck thing. It does actually keep you focused, though, because every time your instinct is to go check your email or go check your browser, you’re like, “Oh, wait a minute, I’m filming. I probably should not do that.” So that was nice.
In an earlier episode, we were talking about how it seems like there’s a disproportionately high number of Mormons who get into writing science fiction. Do you have any ideas why that might be?
Oh boy, I don’t know. We all have our pet theories, right? I think it’s probably—if you really looked at it—something pretty innocent. Such as, I bet you’ll find a disproportionally high number of Mormons in all writing fields, just because there’s a high focus on literacy in the community, so a lot of people end up writing. There’s probably some confirmation bias going on, if that’s the right term. You don’t remember if somebody is a Jewish writer as much as you remember they’re a Mormon writer. And so you start seeing us pop up all over the place. But it is something we discuss. Is it real? I don’t know.
The other thing is that BYU does have a science fiction/fantasy writing class that was started because of Orson Scott Card. He didn’t actually end up teaching it the first time, but it was started because of him, and then he couldn’t end up teaching, so someone else took it over. And it’s been going now for over twenty years. And it could also just be that if you see one successful person doing it, it makes it that much easier for you to do it. I got published in part because a writer came and taught that class while I was at BYU. This writer is Dave Wolverton. He also writes as David Farland. He taught the class and he was a real person who wrote, right? And he was making a living at it. When everyone before had told me you can’t really make a living as a writer, I saw somebody really doing it and I said, I could do this too. Those are lots of theories. Those are the theories from being on the inside and looking at it. I’m sure people who are on the outside can come up with lots more tongue-in-cheek reasons. I’ve read them myself and get a chuckle out of them.
And you’re actually teaching that writing class now, right?
I am teaching the writing class now. I took it over from Dave. After he retired, there was one more teacher for a couple years and then I took it over. I’ve been doing it for ten years now.
Do you put that same focus on writing as a career?
Yeah, I do. Because at a university, when you take creative writing classes, you’re going to get lots of craft discussion. And I try to do craft discussion, but you’re going to get very little real-world professional advice. So I try to give the real-world professional advice, because I’m the one who can give it. I did actually have a grad student post all my lectures online last year. It was part of a project for another class. If you go to writeaboutdragons.com, he posted all of those as YouTube videos. So you can see what my lectures are like.
I understand that BYU actually has its own science fiction magazine? Have you had any involvement with that?
Yeah, I was editor of that for a couple of years. It’s a semiprozine. It was started by the same group who took that first class twenty years ago or more now. We call them “the class that wouldn’t die.” They continued on meeting, started their own writing group, started up The Leading Edge, which is the magazine. And it’s just handed down from student to student from them, and they just kept doing it. It’s a fun magazine. It taught me a lot about publishing and about writing, actually. Nothing teaches you about writing faster, I feel, than reading other people’s horrible work and realizing it’s much like your own, and you need to be doing stuff better than that.
It seems like most of the writers that I know are either naturally short story writers or naturally novelists, and you definitely fall into the latter category. I was actually wondering, have you written more published short stories or unpublished novels?
Definitely more unpublished novels, yeah. Because short stories, if you use the technical definition of short story, I think I’ve actually only ever written one. Everything I write goes into at least novelette length. I wrote one for Charlaine Harris. She wanted a story from me for an anthology that sounded like a lot of fun, Games People Play, and so I wrote an actual short story for her. That’s just how it came out. Everything else I’ve done is novelette or novella. I really like novellas. I love reading novellas, I love writing novellas, because they really are just short novels, right? You do all of the sorts of things you do for a novel, but you do them in a short form. Whereas a short story is a completely different art. It’s the difference between learning to drive down the green and to putt. You’re using similar tools, but there’s so much difference there that becoming a good short story writer takes a lot of work in different ways. I’m very naturally a novelist, but I can apply a lot of my same skills to the novella form, and have been very pleased with how some of my novellas have turned out because of that.
Do you want to tell us a bit about some of the novellas that you’ve written?
Sure, I’ve had two novellas come out this year. One’s called Legion. I did that one with Subterranean Press. It was me trying my hand at some more thriller-esque modern day things. It’s about a camera that can take pictures of the past, and it gets stolen. And a very interesting individual gets hired to track it down. His name is Stephen Leeds. I came up with this idea for someone who was a genius and who could read up on a subject and become an expert at it in a very short amount of time. But in order to store all this information in his brain, what he does is he creates this hallucination—another person—who is actually a repository for that information, who then follows him around and gives him advice in those situations. So if he wants to learn a new language, he can study it, and then this person will appear next to him who becomes his interpreter in that language. He runs into people and has to have his hallucinatory interpreter—his figment, as he calls them—translate for him so that he can understand, and things like that. It was just a wacky fun idea. So that’s Legion.
The other one that I have I’m really proud of. If you’ve never tried any of my work, the thing I would suggest would probably be this. It’s called The Emperor’s Soul. It’s the story of a woman who uses forgery magic, and who is hired to create a forge
ry of the emperor’s soul magically, because he’s been wounded in the head and is brain dead. There’s just a shell left there, and the people who are keeping him in power want to have a forged soul placed into him so that no one will know that he’s been wounded, so they can keep on ruling the empire.
I understand you’ve also had work in some of the fine anthologies edited by John Joseph Adams?
I have. In fact, John has two of my shorter works. One is one of these interludes from the first Way of Kings. And it stood fairly well on its own—we just named it after the character Rsyn, and it’s in John’s anthology Epic. And in fact, the scene that I video recorded is actually a new interlude with Rsyn for the second volume. So that’s pretty cool. I also have a story that I co-wrote with a friend of mine in Armored, the anthology. Again, I don’t have the military expertise, but I wanted to write this military science fiction story, and so I went to a friend in the military—who is also a writer—and we did the story together.
In addition to writing, you’re also the co-host of the Writing Excuses podcast. And I understand that Mary Robinette Kowal actually flies from Chicago to Utah just to tape the show?
Yeah, the podcast is successful enough—we have an Audible sponsorship—that we can actually afford airfare and things like that, which is pretty cool. And so we fly Mary out. Skype is a wonderful tool, but when it’s a show that you really need the energy of the hosts together—and that’s kind of what we focus on—we need to be there in person, we find. So we do it in person.
What are some recent topics or guests that you’ve covered?
Right now we’ve got four ways the industry is changing and how to write a secret history—secret history is kind of a subset of alternate history. We’ve got one where we had listeners send us in questions and we answer the questions. We do things like: What are your embarrassing early projects? How do you tell if your idea is too big for the story you’re working on? How do you avoid discouragement? How do you handle multiple magic systems in one book? And then we have a few before that where we brainstorm stories together, and then talk about how we would outline them, and things like that. There are all sorts of things on there. We have a lot of editors and other writers on as guests. We’ve broken down all kinds of writing topics from outlining, to how to do characters, and all these different things. So if you’re interested in writing, go look it up. There’s a ton of archives. I think we’re starting our eighth season or something like that.
I saw you’re also starting up a writer’s retreat called Out of Excuses?
Yeah, Mary suggested this, to do a writer’s retreat. People have been asking about doing this. I like to try to do one thing like this every year. In the past, I’ve been doing one with Kevin J. Anderson, which is called Superstars Writing Seminars. This year I wanted to try doing something a little more hands-on with some students. Mary’s parents have a vacation home next to their actual home, I think, or they own two houses—I don’t even know how it works, you’d have to ask Mary. Anyway, they rent it out for vacationing and things like that, and we’re going to be renting it and holding a seminar in it. We will meet with listeners and all write together, and hopefully record some episodes of Writing Excuses and help people out.
Can people still apply to that?
No, we sold out in like nine minutes. [Laughs] Maybe in a future year, but yeah, I think it was actually like nine minutes. There’s only twenty spaces for it, so it went really fast.
You’ve also been involved recently with the Waygate charitable foundation. You want to tell us about that?
Waygate is a foundation run by Wheel of Time fans. A number of Wheel of Time fan organizations have long been involved and have a good history with charitable work. Recently, they decided that if they’re going to be doing this, and having the amount of money flowing through and toward charities that they were doing, that they should make it official, tax-wise. They actually started a company and made it a nonprofit, did all the things they needed to do. I’ve been working with them. They put me on the board. This year we’ve been focusing on Worldbuilders, Pat Rothfuss’ charity, which is a fantastic charity for Heifer International, which buys llamas and things in developing countries and teaches people how to take care of them so they can sustain themselves off of livestock they’re given and things like that. It’s a fantastic charity, so we’ve been working with that to try to do some good where we can.
And just to wrap things up, are there any other new or upcoming projects you’d like to mention?
I’m hard at work on the second Stormlight book. That’s actually been my focus for the last five or six months, ever since I finished the last Wheel of Time book. It will continue to be my focus following the tour that I’m doing. I do also have a couple of projects that I started working on years ago, before the Wheel of Time came my way, which I had to put on hold until now. Both are YA books that I’ve written. One’s called The Rithmatist. It’s coming out from Tor in the summer. And then in late summer I’ve got one called Steelheart, which is a really awesome superhero apocalypse sort of book, that’s coming out from Random House.
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is hosted by:
John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor of Lightspeed (and its sister magazine, Nightmare), is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Oz Reimagined, Epic: Legends of Fantasy, Other Worlds Than These, Armored, Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Way of the Wizard. He is a four-time finalist for the Hugo Award and the World Fantasy Award. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.
David Barr Kirtley has published fiction in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, Lightspeed, Intergalactic Medicine Show, On Spec, and Cicada, and in anthologies such as New Voices in Science Fiction, Fantasy: The Best of the Year,and The Dragon Done It. Recently he’s contributed stories to several of John Joseph Adams’s anthologies, including The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2,and The Way of the Wizard. He’s attended numerous writing workshops, including Clarion, Odyssey, Viable Paradise, James Gunn’s Center for the Study of Science Fiction, and Orson Scott Card’s Writers Bootcamp, and he holds an MFA in screenwriting and fiction from the University of Southern California. He also teaches regularly at Alpha, a Pittsburgh-area science fiction workshop for young writers. He lives in New York.
Artist Gallery: Armand Baltazar
Artist Spotlight: Armand Baltazar
Galen Dara
Armand Baltazar is an illustrator, animator, fine artist, and storyteller currently living in California. Starting out in advertising and editorial illustration, Armand eventually made his way to Hollywood working as a concept painter and animator for Dreamworks, Disney, and Pixar. He currently is turning his storytelling skills to making an illustrated book, Collidescope Chronicles.
You have taken a pretty interesting path to get where you are now! Let’s see, you started out in Chicago training as a fine artist, then worked as an advertising and editorial illustrator. After some soul searching, you moved to California to pursue book illustration, then ended up getting tapped by DreamWorks to work on Prince of Egypt, which launched you into a career as a concept artist for all the big animation studios. Did I get that all correctly? What do you point to as key moments (or individuals) that helped you become the artist you are now?
In general that is correct. I’ll clarify a few points. I began my career in animation as a traditional background painter on Prince of Egypt. My skill set expanded with each movie, as color keys, lighting design, and layout design were added to my toolbox, so to speak. This all culminated with visual development for the films. Essentially, visual development and concept art perform the same function in terms of preproduction design for a film.
I had many great tea
chers, experiences, and fortunate circumstances that helped me on the road to my career. My passion started as a kid with drawing, comic books, and movies. In high school I had an inspiring and encouraging teacher, Paul Gavac, who pushed me. I attended Art Center College of Design because so many of my heroes had come from there, artists like Syd Mead, Ralph McQuarrie, Mark English, etc. There I learned a lot about painting, drawing, design, and narrative illustration from many great teachers, but Steve Huston and Richard Bunkall were very influential to me. My early years at DreamWorks, I was mentored by a group of artists from diverse backgrounds: Ron Lukas, a traditional oil painter trained by Russian Impressionist Sergei Bongart; Paul Lasaine, a master Matte Painter and Production Designer; Marcos Mateu-Mestre, a comic book, animation layout, and concept artist extraordinaire; and Sam Michlap, a veteran Layout, Visual Development, and Production Designer were all instrumental in my formative years in animation.
It sounds like storytelling has always been one of your driving passions. You went to California (Art Center College of Design) initially to become a book illustrator and now have come full circle with this new illustrated book project of yours, the Collidescape Chronicles. What can you tell us about this book and what brought you to this moment?
The book has been a labor of love for the last two years. I’d tried on at least two failed occasions to write and illustrate an adventure story like the kinds I’d loved in my youth: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Treasure Island, Dune, and of course Star Wars. In both of those previous outings, I hadn’t created anything that made me passionate. When I began to write Diego and the Steam Pirates: Book One in the Collidescape Chronicles, something important had changed in my life. I was both a father and I found a story within me that I was impassioned to tell my son. It was essentially a story about a father who strove to make a better world for his son and a son who found the courage and the adventure to fight for it. Newly ignited, the words and the pictures began to flow. My schedule allowing, I hope to complete book one this year!
