Locus, January 2013

by Locus Publications

  ‘‘I’m working on another middle grade now, and it’s the last middle grade I’m going to write for a while because I don’t have another idea to follow it up. It’s a book about a boy who is apprenticed to an evil wizard, one who isn’t quite as evil as he’s advertised to be. I’ve very carefully not said when it’s set. I would like it to be 20th century, maybe early 21st, but I’m not too concerned with the details. The boy enters the evil wizard’s world, where time has kind of stood still – it’s a place where it’s always some previous century. I’m still working on whether I need to pin it down, because some of my readers have been worried by the vagueness. Or maybe I can find a way to just have my protagonist dealing with stuff, and not have people ask about when it takes place.

  ‘‘Considering that my PhD is in Shakespearean Renaissance drama, I couldn’t get any further away from my training. But I do write historical fiction. Almost everything I’ve written has some historical dimension. My interest in the past is certainly in all my work. I’m also interested in language and how language works, and the registers of language. I’m very conscious of my characters’ speech patterns. A lot of my writing is trying to get the sentences and the words to be exactly the way they’re supposed to be, without being precious. I’ve written two stories in Elizabethan English, which is slightly more directly related to my education. One of them is the most reprinted story I’ve ever written, ‘The Fairy Coney Catcher’, which has appeared in Japanese and Russian and all sorts of things. I can’t believe that people choose that one to translate. Their decision, not mine.

  ‘‘I’m a very poor critic, but a very good scholar. I’m good at looking things up. A critic is an analyst. They take things apart, and you need a mind that’s good at abstraction in order to do that. I’m a very concrete person, and I’m not good at the whole abstraction and generalization business. What I am good at is discerning patterns in people, and in history. I get all this data and I start creating a narrative about the interaction between background and foreground, and that’s what a scholar does. You find out all these facts about something, but you’re always looking at the context. I wrote a scholarly dissertation. I did an edition of King Leir, written by Anonymous. It’s a dreadful play that Shakespeare touched with the alchemy of his genius and turned into gold. What’s interesting about it is what it reveals about the prejudices and opinions of the period.

  ‘‘One of the things I found in my research was that people back then really believed in magic. Up until the late – well, up until now, really – there are still people who believe in magic and practice it as a religion. Looking back on history with a modern brain, and saying magic didn’t exist doesn’t do much good. They believed in magic, and they behaved as if it worked, and possibly sometimes it did. I don’t know; I wasn’t there. I prefer to write history with the magic left in. The magic that I write about is the magic that people believed in.

  ‘‘I’m about to start researching for my next book, which is set against the background of the Depression in New York. It begins right before Black Monday and goes on for a few months afterwards. I’m researching that period, and the Yiddish theater. The plot will take my characters down to the Lower East side. What are you going to do? It’s the theater, it’s Yiddish, it’s good. There was a large Jewish orphanage about which there’s a lot of research available, and of course I’m going to be writing about orphans and foundlings. Even though the story is based on Hansel & Gretel, I don’t know if it will have any magic in it. I’ll find out.

  ‘‘I’m an absolute city girl. Cities make me feel more alive than other places. I’m a gregarious introvert. I really like people, but sometimes I can’t be around them. What I like about the city is that you can be around people and not with them. I love the anonymity. I write in cafés because in order to write about a character I need to know what they look like, and all I have to do is look up for examples. I love the sense of busy-ness around me when I’m writing in a café, and you don’t get that in a rural environment. You get a lot of alone time, which is fine, but I don’t need to be alone to be alone. I also love the beauty of nature. I’ve traveled all my life. My mother loved traveling and she would haul me out of school early, and we’d be gone for six, seven weeks during the summer. I feel comfortable in cities. In the country, I have to drive a car, I don’t quite know how to get around, and when you talk to somebody you really need to talk to them – the interactions tend to be more intense because there are fewer people around. I don’t feel shy in a city. I feel shy in the country.

  ‘‘I lived in Boston for 35 years, but I always felt a bit as if I was an exile from my native land, New York – partly because Boston doesn’t have enough theater to suit me. The theater is excellent there, but few and far between. Boston the sort of place a lot of people pass through. I wondered why after 35 years I only had two close friends in Boston. It’s not because I don’t make close friends – it’s because most of them moved away. They got jobs at other universities, they just moved on, and the people who are left were dear to me, but I was not socially at home there the way I was and the way that we are in New York. People are friendlier in New York.

  ‘‘I never know my themes until someone points them out to me. Baths. (My characters are constantly thinking in bathtubs. When I really need to have a good think, I retire to the bath.) History. The fact that you cannot understand the present without understanding the past. You don’t know how much of the way you move through the world is determined by your great-grandparents. And I don’t mean that you inherited anything from them, but that the world you come from itself comes from another world. Especially when writing for young people, I want to say that if you are ignorant of the past, you don’t understand why you do things now.

  ‘‘One of the things I worried about with The Freedom Maze was that everyone would say I’d gotten things wrong, that I would have said something to offend someone, that I would have demonstrated my own racism. I wrote this book because both of my parents were Southern and I was brought up in a racist world. The furniture of my brain includes a lot of things I’m not proud of. The only way I could deal with it, because I’m a writer, is by writing about that situation, so that I could try to make myself face wherever my great-grandparents were coming from. They were part of a world in which slavery happened. I needed to face that and work through it. That’s why I spent so much time revising the book. I sat down with Nora Jemisin, and Alaya Dawn Johnson, and Doselle Young, and Nisi Shawl, and Ricardo Sturges. Ricardo was a Clarion student of mine, and a voodoo priest, who helped me with all of the voodoo stuff. I told them all, ‘You have got to be completely brutal with me, and tell me whether I’m doing this right.’ They weren’t brutal, they were very kind, but they were very honest with me. I was still nervous, sending it out there.

  ‘‘I get a lot out of teaching writing. My own writing improves when I interact with people who are not writing the kinds of things I write. Since everything I do and every breath I take turns me into a slightly different kind of writer than I was before, dealing with so many people and stories really speeds up the process. Teaching is also like doing five-finger exercises: it strengthens my muscles for attacking writing problems. I write slightly faster than I used to because I have done the teaching I have done. I really enjoy engaging with manuscripts, and I love talking to people about their stories. It just makes me happy.

  ‘‘What’s really fun is when you’ve got a student who makes some of the same mistakes you do – like being too obscure. I say, ‘I know you think you’ve told me this information, and I know you can point to the words where you did so, but I’m here to tell you that without the secret decoder ring, no one is going to understand it.’ Note to self: you are not being subtle, you are being hopelessly obscure. You are writing to an audience of one, and the whole point of writing is that you want to communicate something to others.

  ‘‘I’ve got some other books I want to write. It’s a question of which ones I fall in lov
e with, and which ones anyone wants. I’m not as young as I used to be. I take more chances with my short fiction because it’s not such a huge investment of time and energy. I approach writing more professionally than I once did – it’s not like I have all the time in the world, and it doesn’t matter what I do next. It does. I know if I keep my marbles for another 20 years I’ll be doing well. So I need to have some discipline, and sit down and write when I don’t feel like it.’’

  –Delia Sherman

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  PEOPLE AND PUBLISHING

  MILESTONES

  C.S. LEWIS will be honored with a memorial stone in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey on November 22, 2013, 50 years after his death.

  MADELEINE L’ENGLE’s favorite writing spot for four decades, the Diocesan House library in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, was named a literary landmark by United for Libraries, a division of the ALA. A ceremony and reception were held at Diocesan House on November 29, 2012, which would have been L’Engle’s 94th birthday.

  AWARDS

  GENE WOLFE has been named the 29th SFWA Grand Master. He will receive his award at the Nebula Awards Weekend in in San Jose CA, May 16-19, 2013.

  Gene Wolfe (2010)

  ANGELA CARTER’s Nights at the Circus (1984) has been named the best-ever winner of the James Tait Black Award, England’s longest-running literary award, given annually since 1919. The winner was chosen by students at Edinburgh University to celebrate the 250th anniversary of their literary studies program.

  BOOKS SOLD

  DEAN KOONTZ sold Deeply Odd, the final Odd Thomas novel; a new Christopher Snow novel; and four more books to Gina Centrello for Ballantine Bantam Dell, with Tracy Devine to edit.

  CECELIA HOLLAND sold The Dragon’s Wife, based on her story ‘‘Dragon’s Deep’’, to David G. Hartwell at Tor via Susanna Einstein of Einstein Thompson.

  PETER WATTS sold a story collection to Jacob Weisman at Tachyon via Howard Morhaim.

  JEFF VANDERMEER sold the Southern Reach trilogy – Annihilation, Authority, and Assimilation – about a biologist investigating a mysterious area sealed-off by the government, to Sean McDonald at Farrar, Straus & Giroux via Sally Harding of The Cooke Agency.

  ERNEST CLINE sold Armada to Julian Pavia at Crown for a reported seven figures via agent Yfat Reiss Gendell of Foundry Literary + Media and manager Dan Farah of Farah Films & Management. Film rights were optioned by Universal, with Farah Films and Bluegrass Films to produce, via Farah, Paradigm, and Greenberg Glusker.

  ROBERT CONROY sold alternate history 1920: America’s Great War and a second book to Toni Weisskopf at Baen via Eleanor Wood.

  Angela Carter (1980s)

  A. LEE MARTINEZ’s Helen & Troy’s Epic Road Quest – ‘‘about a minotaur girl, an all-American boy, a three-legged dog, and a classic car on an epic journey’’ – sold to Devi Pillai at Orbit via Sally Harding of the Cooke Agency.

  ALAN DeNIRO sold his second collection Tyrannia and Other Renditions to Gavin J. Grant at Small Beer Press.

  WESTON OCHSE sold Halfway House to Christopher Payne at JournalStone via Robert Fleck of The Fleck Agency.

  JEFF CARLSON sold apocalyptic thriller Interrupt to David Pomerico at 47North via the Donald Maass Literary Agency.

  KEVIN HEARNE sold books seven, eight, and nine in the Iron Druid Chronicles; e-book original Iron Druid novella Grimoire of the Lamb; epic fantasy A Plague of Giants; and two more novels to Tricia Narwani at Del Rey via Evan Goldfried of Jill Grinberg Literary Management.

  JEFFREY J. MARIOTTE sold supernatural thriller Season of the Wolf and resold the Border trilogy – River Runs Red, Missing White Girl, and Cold Black Hearts – to DarkFuse via Howard Morhaim. As JEFF MARIOTTE, he delivered Star Trek: The Folded World to Pocket Books.

  MARK MORRIS sold world rights to three books in the Obsidian Heart series, beginning with The Wolves of London, to Cath Trechman of Titan Books via John Jarrold. He sold e-book rights to backlist titles Toady, Stitch, The Secret of Anatomy, Mr Bad Face, Longbarrow, Genesis, Fiddleback, and Nowhere Near an Angel to Gollancz for their Gollancz Gateway project via Jarrold.

  J.A. PITTS sold collection Bravado’s House of Blues to Patrick Swenson at Fairwood Press.

  FAITH HUNTER sold the eighth, ninth, and tenth Jane Yellowrock novels to Jessica Wade at Roc via Lucienne Diver of the Knight Agency.

  CHRIS BECKETT sold Gela’s Ring – sequel to The Holy Machine and Dark Eden – and Slaymaker to Ravi Mirchandani of Grove Atlantic UK for their Corvus imprint via John Jarrold.

  DAVID B. COE, writing as D.B. JACKSON, sold the third and fourth Thieftaker novels to Jim Frenkel at Tor via Lucienne Diver of the Knight Agency.

  Cecelia Holland (2010)

  GARETH POWELL sold world rights for SF novel Hive Monkey, sequel to Ack-Ack Macaque, to Jonathan Oliver at Solaris via John Jarrold.

  M.J. SCOTT sold the fourth Half-Light City novel and another book to Jessica Wade at Ace via Miriam Kriss of the Irene Goodman Agency.

  ERIN TETTENSOR sold Darkwalker and a second book to Danielle Stockley at Ace via Jessie Cammack of JABberwocky Literary Agency.

  GARY K. WOLF (not to be confused with Locus reviewer Gary K. Wolfe) sold Who Wacked Roger Rabbit?, third in the series, to Celina Summers for Urania Speculative Fiction.

  ERIN TETTENSOR sold supernatural crime novel Darkwalker and a second title to Danielle Stockley at Ace via Jessie Cammack of JABberwocky Literary Agency.

  KAREN HEULER sold The Inner City to ChiZine Publications.

  CHANDLER KLANG SMITH’s Goldenland Past Dark sold to ChiZine Publications via Joy Tutela of the David Black Literary Agency.

  DENISE GROVER SWANK’s The Curse Keepers, an urban fantasy about the Lost Colony of Roanoke, and two more titles sold to David Pomerico at 47North.

  PATRICK CARR sold A Cast of Stones, first in the Staff and Sword medieval fantasy trilogy, to David Long at Bethany House via Steve Laube.

  RUSTY FISCHER’s Zombies Don’t Forgive: A Living Dead Revenge Story, sequel to Zombies Don’t Cry, went to Emily Steele at Medallion Press.

  MICHELLE ZINK sold Temptation’s Heat and two more in a paranormal romance series to Georgia McBride of Swoon Romance via Steven Malk of Writers House.

  DORANNA DURGIN sold Sentinels: Lynx Revealed and three more paranormal romances to Ann Leslie Tuttle of Harlequin Nocturne via Lucienne Diver of the Knight Agency.

  JENN BENNETT’s historical fantasy Bitter Sprits and a second book sold to Leis Pederson at Berkley via Laura Bradford of Bradford Literary Agency.

  ADRIANA RYAN sold Prophecy, prequel to Enlightened, to Marlene Castricato of Crescent Moon Press.

  PAUL STEWART and illustrator CHRIS RIDDELL sold the middle-grade SF Scavenger series to Macmillan UK Children’s via Philippa Milnes-Smith of Lucas Alexander Whitley.

  PATRICK SAMPHIRE’s Secrets of the Dragon Tomb and a second YA fantasy sold to Christy Ottavianio of Christy Ottaviano Books via Jennifer Laughran of Andrea Brown Literary Agency.

  CECILIA GALANTE sold YA fantasy The Blessing to Jennifer Arena at Random House Children’s via Jessica Regel of the Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency.

  LEAH CYPESS sold Buried Above Ground, sequel to Nightspell, to Martha Mihalick at Greenwillow via Bill Contardi of Brandt & Hochman.

  MARY E. PEARSON sold The Remnant trilogy to Kate Farrell at Holt Children’s via Rosemary Stimola of Stimola Literary Studio.

  JENNY LUNDQUIST sold YA fantasy The Princess in the Opal Mask and a second book to Mario Scrimizzi at Running Press Teens in a preempt via Kerry Sparks of Levine Greenberg Literary Agency.

  EMILY LLOYD-JONES sold YA Adverse Effects, described as ‘‘X-Men meets Ocean’s Eleven,’’ and a second book to Pam Gruber at Little, Brown Children’s via Quinlan Lee of Adams Literary.

  LAURA DIAMOND sold YA fantasy Zodiac Collector to Jennifer Carson of Pugalicious Press.

  ROSAMUND HODGE sold novella Gild
ed Ashes, a sequel to Sundered, to Sara Sargent at HarperTeen Impulse via Hannah Bowman of Liza Dawson Associates.

  SOPHIE BELL sold middle-grade novel The Ultra Violets, about four friends who develop superpowers, and two more books to Ben Schrank and Rebecca Kilman at Razorbill.

  GARRETT CALCATERRA sold Dreamwielder to Mary Cummings of Diversion Books via Elizabeth Kracht of Kimberley Cameron & Associates.

  ERIN FRY sold Secrets of the Book to Marilyn Brigham of Amazon Children’s via Jill Corcoran of The Herman Agency.

  STEVE BRYANT’s Lucas Mackenzie and the London Midnight Ghost Show and another title sold to Georgia McBride of Month9Books via Anne Olswanger of Liza Dawson Associates.

  JOHN DIXON’s first novel Dissident and a second book in a YA SF thriller series, sold to Adam Wilson at Gallery via Christina Hogrebe of Jane Rotrosen Agency. Film rights were optioned by ABC Studios via Joe Veltre of Gersh.

  Nineteen-year-old new writer STEPHANIE DIAZ sold her Extraction trilogy to Kathy Huck at St. Martin’s at auction via Alison Fargis of Stonesong.

  JEN ALEXANDER’s first novel, YA SF The Wasteland, and a second book sold to Natashya Wilson at Harlequin Teen via Mollie Glick of Foundry Literary + Media.

  ELISABETH ANNE LEONARD sold debut fantasy YA novel Moth and Spark to Emily Murdock Baker at Viking via David Gernert of the Gernert Company.