Clarkesworld Issue 75

by Sandra McDonald

  When you begin an artistic project for yourself (as opposed to a commissioned piece), how do you decide what you’re going to draw or paint?

  I haven’t done very much for myself. There are three pieces I can think of on my website and they all came to me sort of fully formed, even though they’re really detailed, out of myth and religion. I enjoy reinterpreting that stuff. I’m fascinated by the way human beings relate to their universe, and it all comes out in mythology. Like “Cerberus,” “Kali-Prakriti,” and “War of Angels;” and while they’re really dense with detail, the idea of them is simple

  Cerebus

  Kali-Prakriti

  War of Angels

  Do you have emotional themes that you return to frequently in your work?

  I think that’s more in the line of looking for narrative. Often I’m painting action scenes, so there’s always conflict or movement, and the emotion there is the range of stuff you feel in those fight-or-flight moments: anger, fear, determination. I look for some nobility in my people. Every once in a while I get to paint something tender. It’s really a matter of putting yourself into the characters, and bringing out what they feel or finding that inside yourself.

  Is it easy for you to get started on your work for the day?

  It’s hard for me to get started sometimes. It occasionally involves playing a game of Spaceward Ho! just to empty the brain out. Silly old game, but you can finish in twenty minutes. Especially in the early stages of a piece, it can be challenging. The very first part, the thumbnails, when you’re finding the energy and the direction, is not so difficult, just laying down the basic composition and the ideas. Depending on the job—sometimes that can be really frustrating.

  For example, C.J. Cherryh’s books, while I enjoy them a great deal and the politics of the world are fascinating, there are a lot of people sitting around drinking tea and talking politics. Sometimes finding a visual hook for those books is a challenge, but it’s always there. Usually I know by a third to halfway through a manuscript what the cover needs to be, partly because I don’t want the cover to give away anything that happens in the second half of the book if I don’t have to. The last cover I did for C.J., Intruder, I didn’t know what the cover was until I’d read the very last page. And of course with my own book, which I’ve been working on for eight years, I still don’t know what the cover is.

  Cover Art for Intruder

  How did you get started with writing fiction, and how is it going?

  Well, I’ve always written, all my life. I learned to draw by making my own comic books. In my mind, I was drawing movies or TV shows. I would have happily gone either way, but art had more momentum. I just happened to fall into art first, and more deeply, but the last eight years, I’ve been working on a personal project and doing seminars and workshops.

  I’ve worked with Nancy Kress, Greg Frost, and some other authors. I had a short story published entitled, “Between”. It came out in an anthology called Tales of the Emerald Serpent, which got good remarks, and was a lot of fun to write. Lou Anders of Pyr books gave me a very nice write-up in a review, and I really appreciate that.

  I have another short story coming out soon in another anthology called Unfettered, which is a really fun project, in that it goes to help a friend, Shawn Speakman. He’s the blogger for suvudu.com, and he’s Terry Brooks’ continuity editor. He runs his own business called The Signed Page, selling signed editions of books, which is how we met. Shawn had two bouts with cancer, and he beat them both, but he was left with humongous bills. Terry Brooks suggested that a short story he had kicking around could be offered online with the proceeds going to help Shawn pay his bills. Other authors have since joined in the benefit anthology which will include stories by Patrick Rothfuss, Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson, Jacqueline Carey, Tad Williams, and more.

  I’m very happy with this short story. It’s set in the prehistory of the world of my novel, which I sold to DAW books last Easter. Betsy Wollheim had read it initially just as a friend, to tell me whether it was good or not­ and if it was good, who I might want to consider offering it to. When she’d read it, she said, “I want it.” So I’m very excited about that because I’m in very good hands. Betsy is a great editor, and she’s a good friend.

  Cover art for Tales of the Emerald Serpent

  Cover Art for Unfettered

  What’s your book called?

  It’s called The Summer Dragon; it’s the first of a trilogy. I haven’t quite pinned down the trilogy title yet, and of course titles are subject to change, but I think that’s the appropriate title. It’s a young adult fantasy, which began really as anger management during the G.W. Bush years. It became a story that insisted I tell it. You know how it is, because you write. You start with the germ of an idea and suddenly it’s telling itself.

  How does writing compare to painting?

  Either one of those things is a lifelong process. There are rules to writing, or painting. It’s not the same for everybody. Nancy Kress can’t work from an outline or she loses interest, whereas I have to work from an outline, because that’s the way I work.

  That’s the way I paint: start with thumbnails, and then you work towards the details. An outline is kind of the same thing in terms of structure. The structure is narrative, narrative rules both illustration and writing. If you’re building a house, you don’t build the walls and then try to put a foundation under them.

  I think writing is much lonelier than painting. You spend a lot of time sitting alone, and feedback is not immediate. You can turn a painting around and ask “What do you think?” and somebody can say, “I like it,” or “It’s too red,” or whatever. To get feedback on a chapter, somebody has to take time out of their day to read it and then get back to you. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but you receive them all at once.

  Cover Art for In the Shadow

  About the Author

  Nayad Monroe writes science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories. She toiled in the slush mines at Clarkesworld Magazine for three brutal years before her unique combination of cunning, trickery, and deviousness brought her the opportunity to interview innocent people who never dreamed that such a thing could happen to them. She also blogs intermittently and oppresses children and cats in her spare time. You may read her strange pronouncements on Twitter, if you dare, by following @Nayad.

  Another Word:

  The Echo Chamber

  Daniel Abraham

  There was a time, not in my daughter’s life but in mine, when information was hard to get. I can still remember a friend of mine struggling to describe a new programming trick that he was working with. He called it a hyperlink. At the time, it sounded like it might be an interesting way to do footnotes some day. But the world changed and moved on. It’s very good at doing that, and its not much good at going backward. There are people who voted in the last election who never knew a world where tracking down information meant going to a library, a world without hyperlinks.

  I began working in technical support for a small Internet service provider in the mid-’90s, when the advertisements on the television from companies like IBM and AOL could be summed up as “Internet: You don’t know what it is, but you need it. Go! Buy!” They worked just as well as ads for the company I worked for. They weren’t boasts about whose service was best so much as announcements of a paradigm shift. Even with promotion into management, I was on the phones for nine years while the world changed. I went from figuring out init strings for 28.8 modems to programming routers to allow connections to virtual private networks. I saw that things were changing, but not always how. Ebooks still do things that surprise me sometimes. And I have now bought software that will block my Internet access for hours at a time so that I can get my work done without the temptation to check my email or Facebook or Twitter just one more time in case something interesting happened.

  The dynamics of my own thought process have changed. I used to read almost exclusively from books and spend
a relatively long time thinking about what I’d read, only because while I was walking home from school or waiting at a bus stop, I didn’t have anything more with me at the moment. Now I read mostly from a computer screen, and often in tiny, fleeting sips that I forget almost as soon as I’ve seen them.

  But I didn’t come here to decry the Internet or celebrate the past. This endless sampler plate of Cracked.com articles and snarky comments at 140 characters or fewer isn’t by necessity better or worse than reading a book without being able to jump out to a Wikipedia article. It is different, though. Some of the changes I feel like I saw coming. More distractions, for example. Or the pressure to keep things introductory, since any post might be the first thing the reader bumps into. Other aspects, I didn’t: for instance, the increase in literacy that comes from having an entire generation communicate through text. Or the long awaited and justly celebrated death of the mass market returns system.

  What I see shaping genre fiction most in this age, though, is the democratization of authority.

  As with many things, the change in the availability of information hasn’t created a whole new way of thinking so much as shifted the emphasis. Echo chambers or groupthink or being-inside-the-bubble has been part of human behavior forever. What has changed is the ability to find opinions similar to your own. When I was growing up, the media I had to work with—telephones, television, letters, newspapers, books, radio—had one thing in common: no search function. No way to take a huge body of information and pluck out only the thing I was looking for. Today my daughter is in first grade, and she’s just starting to bring home assignments like “find five facts about penguins” and “research who Captain Cook was.” With a kind of nostalgia, I steer her toward books. When we’re looking for facts, though, nothing’s easier than a search engine.

  That’s also true when I’m looking for opinions. It’s never been easier to reach out to find people with whom I already agree and then repeat and reinforce our opinions to each other until they ossify into facts. There have been a few times that I’ve found myself following links down rabbit holes into communities with which I profoundly disagree, and seeing the self-confident, self-congratulatory, and mind-bendingly wrong opinions being shared there was deeply unnerving. I imagine folks who wander by mistake into my bubbles feel the same.

  Which brings me, in my roundabout way, to Arthur Krystal’s recent article in The New Yorker, “It’s Genre. Not That There’s Anything Wrong With It!” In it, Krystal makes a series of arguments that strike me as weirdly old-fashioned, condescending, and unfamiliar. He makes reference to a poem by Dryden. He describes genre fiction as books that “stick to the trite-and-true, relying on stock characters whose thoughts spool out in Lifetime platitudes.” He uses the adjective “jejune” with, so far as I can tell, a straight face. He celebrates literary fiction’s ability to “break the frozen sea inside us” under a headline that’s a TV sitcom reference.

  There is, apparently, an echo chamber in which this article reads as something other than self-parody. And I think that, once upon a time, there was a world in which simply by having been published in The New Yorker, Krystal’s opinion would have had some weight. I live on the Internet, though, and I am no longer trained to recognize that authority. When I see this, my first reaction is the disbelieving laughter of someone who’s just fallen into Wonderland. Krystal’s presentation of himself is a caricature of a literary critic. Insecure intellectual defensiveness rises off his article like fumes. And yet, there is a place in my culture where his opinion would be taken seriously.

  Well, not in my part of it, clearly.

  It is very tempting for me spend a few more paragraphs making fun of Krystal. His article is mean, pompous, and trite, and I want to attack it and him. Only I know that he would be as dismissive of me as I am of him. When I pause in my gleeful disdain of his disdain, the thing that’s interesting is that I see this dynamic everywhere. It’s not just the usual dichotomies either: the Republicans against the Democrats, the Palestinians against the Israelis, the brains against the jocks.

  There was an anecdote I heard once about a man in the Washington press corps bringing a date—a professional model—he particularly wanted to impress to a party made up of some of the most powerful, important, and (critical for my argument here) elite journalists in the world. The model’s comment was something along the lines of how sad it was watching all the geeks trying to have fun. For her, it seems to me, being a member of the elite meant something different and incompatible with what her date meant. She came from a different subculture, and so the status of the people around her wasn’t just invisible to her. It was literally insignificant.

  There was a time in my life when the culture had, if not a single voice, then a profoundly dominant one. Someone on TV or the radio or in the newspaper had authority simply by being there, and their opinions mattered. There was a time before that when an avid reader could read every science fiction and fantasy book published in the US in a given year. There was a time when there were only four channels on the TV, and if you missed a program, it was gone. People shared a context by default, and because that context included definitions of authority, they shared an implicit idea of who and what was important.

  It’s always been possible to create a subculture with its own definitions of what matters, its own idioms and conventions, and its own standards by which to judge who is to be taken seriously. What’s changed is the activation energy. Because of how we communicate, it has become easy to insulate ourselves with people who have our same interests, definitions, opinions, and interpretations. Things outside that context fade and lose their power, or else just stop having any bearing on each other. Krystal’s opinion that genre fiction is inferior and my opinion that Krystal is kind of a yo-yo are both subjective, and so they can both be true in their contexts. In practice, they are so unrelated, they aren’t even in conflict.

  I once heard Lev Grossman say in an interview that he was worried that fiction might lose its place at the center of the cultural conversation. My first response was to look back over my four-plus decades of life and try to remember a time when it was at the center. I misunderstood. When Grossman said “the” cultural conversation, he didn’t mean the one about Kim Kardashian’s marriage or how guardian angels disprove evolution or which team is most likely to win the big game. His definition of culture wasn’t concerned with what issues were being discussed by the largest demographic slice of the country. He meant, I think, the conversation among people who matter. People with authority. The real culture.

  There was a time, in my life but not in my daughter’s, when I’d have known who he meant.

  About the Author

  Daniel Abraham is a writer of genre fiction with a dozen books in print and over thirty published short stories. His work has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Hugo Awards and has been awarded the International Horror Guild Award. He also writes as MLN Hanover and (with Ty Franck) as James S. A. Corey. He lives in the American Southwest.

  Editor’s Desk:

  Getting off the Roller Coaster

  Neil Clarke

  As those who have been reading my blog or prior editorials know, 2012 has been a roller coaster year for me. Between the heart attack, kidney stone, deaths in the family, defibrillators, award nominations and still being alive, I’m never quite sure what to make of things. Shortly after writing my previous editorial, Hurricane Sandy struck and left my family without power, heat, phone and internet service for nearly ten days. Several large trees crashed down around our home, but we safely weathered the storm. After the temperature dropped and our batteries died, we gave up, packed our suitcases and hit the road.

  I was able to spend part of the time in Toronto (at the World Fantasy Convention) and the rest with family as they regained power in their homes. It was reassuring to be in the company of friends and family, but we missed home and were very happy to return. It’s hard to rest when you are displaced and wh
ile inconvenient, we didn’t suffer nearly as much as people who lived closer to the coast. Our thoughts and best wishes go out to our readers that were and continue to be impacted by this storm.

  Shortly after recovering from the hurricane, the roller coaster took another plunge as I lost my job. Much to my regret, I don’t currently make my living from Clarkesworld. It’s an obtainable goal for which we continue to strive but I still need a day job to provide healthcare coverage and money to pay the bills.

  What happened next was incredible. Once again, the genre community bent the tracks and leveled things out. People subscribed or donated to the magazine, started sending me information about new jobs, and made a serious effort to get word of my situation out there so that others could help too.

  I owe a great deal of thanks to many people, but I need to single out Kate Baker, John Scalzi, Cory Doctorow, Jeff and Ann VanderMeer, and Weightless Books. They amped up the signal and said some very kind things that made a big difference to me both financially and emotionally. By the time Thanksgiving rolled around, I had much to be thankful for and the confidence that everything would be ok.

  I can happily say that thanks to everyone’s efforts, November provided our largest single-month gain in the history of the magazine. A big welcome to this month’s new subscribers! As a whole, you’ve made a significant difference and will continue to do so over the next year.

  I consider my time with this magazine to be one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done. It seems only appropriate that I continue to soldier on and this kind of support greatly encourages me. I hope that some of you will take the time to email me your thoughts about how we’re doing. We’re always looking for ways to improve the magazine and reader feedback has played a significant role in all our plans.