Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 104

by Kressel, Matthew

  The Beasts of Tabat is the first in a projected quartet. Why four novels rather than, for example, a trilogy? Do you know how the overall story ends? How much planning did you do before you sat down to write the first novel?

  Originally I did think it would be a trilogy. A lot of people write fantasy trilogies, after all. But then I realized there was too much stuff I wanted to cover, and the structure that I wanted to do didn’t work with a trilogy. The structure is an odd one: the second book starts midway through the first book, and follows two different characters throughout the entire book, and then the third book starts in the middle of that book, and then the fourth book is going to be this cavalcade of stuff.

  The fourth book, Gods of Tabat, isn’t written but I do know what’s going to happen. I know the overall plotline, I know certain moments, and I know pretty much what will happen to each major character. There’s a lot of side characters I’m still not sure about, in terms of where they’ll be. Book three, Exiles in Tabat, is an inchoate mass right now. Book two, Hearts of Tabat, is pretty much totally plotted and about half-way written. I hope to turn it in by July. This is one of the advantages of being with a small press; we could actually see volume two out this year. That could make for a great publishing schedule. It’s satisfying and a little frightening at the same time.

  Were there previous attempts at novel-writing?

  Yes, there were several. My first was a YA story. It’s about a heroine who is this reluctant champion of Faerie and also just happens to be a little chubby. People keep getting bitchy about it and she says, “Screw you. This is who I am.” My first agent shopped it around and no one wanted to buy it. I do want to go back and rewrite it one day—I suspect I’ve learned enough things that I could make it more sellable now. Then I gave my agent a different book, a paranormal romance, and she shopped that around and no one wanted to buy it either. I’m kind of glad it wasn’t picked up because I’m not very happy with it.

  I also started writing an urban fantasy called The Easter Bunny Must Die, with a world a little like the world of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? I got halfway through that and will probably go back and finish it at some point.

  With Beasts of Tabat, I’m conscious that this is the sort of book I’d like to be known for. I’d like to think it’s a good, interesting fantasy novel, and has some serious stuff at its heart too.

  About the Author

  Alvaro Zinos-Amaro is the co-author, with Robert Silverberg, of When the Blue Shift Comes, which received a starred review from Library Journal. Alvaro’s short fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Analog, Nature, Galaxy’s Edge, Apex and other venues, and Alvaro was nominated for the 2013 Rhysling Award. Alvaro’s reviews, critical essays and interviews have appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Strange Horizons, SF Signal, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Foundation, and other markets. Alvaro currently edits the blog for Locus.

  Another Word:

  It’s Good to Be Lazy and Foolish

  Ken Liu

  I’ve been employed in three professions that all involve working with a lot of text: programming, law, and creative writing. I’d like to show you what I’ve learned from the first two that I think can be helpful to writers.

  Among software developers, there’s a generally accepted belief that the most productive programmers are lazy and dumb.

  What?

  Okay, allow me to explain. Laziness is a virtue among programmers because lazy programmers are interested in doing their jobs in a way that maximizes using the creative parts of their brains and minimizes tasks that are better left to the machine.

  Here’s an example.

  Programmers are often faced with the need to modify text across many lines across multiple files in some systematic manner. This could be because of a change in the interface definition of a module (e.g. all instances of GreatLibrary_procedure() now have to be changed to AwesomeLibrary_function()), because of a change in coding style or naming convention (so all instances of AwsomeLibrary_function() have to be changed to awesome_library_function()), or because of some quirk of the syntax of the language (e.g., in Python, indentation of lines is important for control flow, so frequently blocks of code have to be indented or unindented as a unit).

  Text editors used by programmers are optimized to make many of these systematic changes easier, though one often has to learn arcane commands for how to invoke these capabilities (just look up vi and emacs). A programmer who is not lazy, who is focused on getting the job done and meeting the daily lines-of-code metric, will learn the minimum amount necessary, open up the files, and get to work. If that means pushing the tab key at the beginning of each line twenty times, or opening every file in a directory of three hundred and running the same search-and-replace sequence one by one, so be it. Two hours later, the changes are still not complete, and the programmer is suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome—and by the way, they missed a couple of files in this tedious process. But to the inexperienced manager, it seems the programmer is working hard.

  The lazy programmer, on the other hand, will seem to hardly be working in the interim. They spend the time to learn the text editor. They study its commands and syntax and scripting language and support for regular expressions until they can wield it like a robotic servant. This process might take hours. But when they’re done, they’ll write a few lines of magical incantation, and voilà, all three hundred files will be changed perfectly and instantaneously.

  The sort of laziness I’m praising, in other words, is an aversion for drudgery. It might be quicker in the short term to push the tab key twenty times in a row, but it’s more fun to learn how to use the macro system to accomplish the same thing in three or four keystrokes. Instead of copying-and-pasting a block of code, they’d rather refactor that into a separate function. Instead of extending and elaborating on a bad foundation, they prefer to rewrite the system from scratch so it’s more solid. Instead of doing things the way it has always been done, they prefer to find a more elegant and beautiful shortcut. Thus, they invest the time into intellectually stimulating tasks that may (or may not) pay off later, even if that means they won’t write the lines of code demanded of them that day.

  So what about “dumb?” Rather than keep on using that word, which is probably outdated, I prefer to think of the quality I’m praising as “foolishness,” in the sense of “stay hungry, stay foolish.” This is related to the aversion of drudgery. Foolish programmers know that they’re not the best at their job and believe that there is probably a better way.

  The foolishness that I’m praising is related to this aversion of drudgery. These types of programmers know that they’re not the best at their job and believe that there is probably a better way. They’re curious about new text editors, new programming languages, new design patterns, etc., because they think someone smarter has invented a way to do the job better, a way that they can adopt so that they can be even lazier.

  When I became a lawyer, however, I found out that the way the profession approached text was very different (caveat, I’m obviously talking from my very limited experience in corporate law, and I must note that I generally had very positive experiences with my mentors). Lawyers seem intent on treating contracts as a patchwork of magical phrases that must be preserved exactly as they are, and laziness is actively discouraged. For example, if some complicated clause drafted with the typical pleonastic legalese (“sell, convey, license, lease, rent, assign, or otherwise transfer”) is needed multiple times in a contract—perhaps with minor variations—then the safe thing to do is to copy and paste that language everywhere and adapt as necessary, instead of refactoring into something more elegant. And if that means a great deal of drudgery for the associates and legal secretaries, that’s even better, because lawyers are paid by the billable hour.

  To some degree, this is understandable, as lawyers live in perpetual fear that changing a single word in some well-worn bit of legalese will cause a judge to suddenly deci
de to give the clause a new interpretation. Besides, every lawyer lives in mortal fear of admitting that they don’t know something, and so being foolish is not even an option—the words from the form document must remain exactly as they are because they contain magic. Thus, refactoring is out, as is any attempt to make things more elegant and concise. When in doubt, just add more words and clauses to dangle from a rickety, unstable framework until contracts turn into messy, ridiculous structures full of hoarded junk that hasn’t been touched since the 18th century. But hey, that means even more copying-and-pasting and proofreading and reference checking and modifying for subject-verb agreement . . . and more billable hours!

  I think writers should think more like programmers and less like lawyers. Instead of striving hard to meet some daily word count goal, I advocate giving yourself permission to be lazy. It’s fine to spend the time to work out worldbuilding details that will never go into the finished story because it’s intellectually stimulating and fun. It’s fine to think about how to accomplish characterization and worldbuiding, and advancing the plot all in the same scene, even if that means you end up writing fewer words that day. It’s fine to throw away a draft and start a new story from scratch if continuing to work on the flawed draft feels like drudgery and deprives you of joy. It’s more than fine to refuse to do the same thing you’ve done many times (and may have found success with) because it now feels tedious—better to be lazy and think of something new to try.

  And it’s perfectly valid for writers to admit that they are foolish, that they don’t know what they’re doing. Such an attitude leaves one open to influences from everywhere, not just the right critiques or the best books. If you see a story resonating with readers but doing things in an unusual way, try to understand why it works. If you see writers succeed by following a different career path than you’ve envisioned for yourself, try to see if they have lessons to teach you. If you hear advice that is counterintuitive or sounds dumb, try to resist the urge to dismiss it out of hand and see if there is, in fact, something in it that you can learn.

  Above all, don’t be like the lawyers who treat template contracts as sacred spells that must be preserved at all costs. Writing is a kind of magic, but it’s the living magic of making a connection between the reader’s mind and yours, not the dead magic of judges’ interpretations. Take risks; leave out things that “everyone” claims you must have; add in things that “no one” thinks will work; experiment; mix it up; rewrite the rules if you don’t like them; tell, if you don’t believe it should be shown; dare to boldly stick in that adverb, write the story that only you can write.

  About the Author

  Ken Liu is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

  Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, the first in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, will be published by Saga Press, Simon & Schuster’s new genre fiction imprint, in April 2015. Saga will also publish a collection of his short stories.

  Editor’s Desk: Overload!

  Neil Clarke

  Spring is finally here in NJ and I can once again bear to go outside. For a while there, it seemed like the winter would never end. I spent a lot of time by the fireplace working on a variety of projects and it’s only come to my attention today that I neglected to tell you about one of them. Sometime in 2016, Night Shade Books will be publishing my first year’s best anthology: The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 1.

  As a short fiction aficionado this promises to be a lot of fun and more than a little intimidating. I already read a lot of stories, but now that pile has grown significantly. It walloped me even more when I realized that the last editor to use this title was Terry Carr. I have those books on my shelf and they were a regular part of my annual reading for a long time. No, no pressure there.

  It’s a complete coincidence that I launched Forever Magazine earlier this year, however. If the book deal came in just a bit sooner, I might have delayed that one a bit, but in retrospect, a reprint magazine makes a great companion project for a year’s best series. It might also give people an early impression of what that series will be like as my tastes run a bit broader than I might normally consider right for Clarkesworld. Do I have you interested? Good. Check out forever-magazine.com for more details or subscribe via Amazon, Weightless, or B&N (soon).

  If that isn’t enough, I’m also well into the planning stages for my next original anthology. I’m not sharing any details yet as I haven’t decided whether or not I should pitch this to a publisher or handle it myself. There is a certain attraction to having someone else handle publication, particularly since I’m juggling all these projects on a part-time basis. That said, I make more going the direct route and that might just help me move towards full-time.

  Decisions. Decisions.

  I should probably get back to work now.

  About the Author

  Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, owner of Wyrm Publishing and a three-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

  Cover Art:

  Io Emissary

  Julie Dillon

  About the Artist

  Julie Dillon is a science fiction and fantasy illustrator creating art for books and magazines, as well as for her own projects and publications. She has won two Chesley awards, a Hugo Award, and has been nominated for two World Fantasy Awards.