I generally have a pretty good idea before I begin of how long the story will be. Most of the science fiction I’ve published has been in the novelette form, in part because I’m drawn to the suspense mode, and it can take ten thousand words or more to give that kind of plot the setup and payoff it deserves. (On some level, I’m always trying to rewrite “Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell, which I still think is the best science fiction story of all time.) “Ernesto” was actually a deliberate departure: it was an attempt to write something relatively short, almost a vignette, and to sustain the reader’s interest with the development of a single idea, rather than with a lot of action. And I’m happy with the result, although I also haven’t been tempted to try it again.
What’s next for you, Alec NevalaLee?
I’m currently at work on a big nonfiction book titled Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction, which is scheduled to be published by Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, sometime in 2018. (Along with so much else, it will be the first full-length biography of Campbell, the legendary and controversial editor of Astounding. ) The story of Campbell, his circle, and their impact on the genre is incredibly timely, and I’ll be talking about it this year at the Nebula Conference in Chicago and the World Science Fiction Convention and Campbell Conference in Kansas City. I’ve also written a radio play, Retention, that will premiere this summer as an episode of an online science fiction series distributed by the Howl podcast network. And I still blog on a daily basis at nevalalee.com .
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ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Robyn Lupo lives in Southwestern Ontario with her not-that-kind-of-doctor partner and three cats. She enjoys tiny things, and has wrangled flash for Women Destroy Science Fiction! as well as selected poetry for Queers Destroy Horror! She aspires to one day write many things.
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Author Spotlight: Jaymee Goh
Laurel Amberdine | 581 words
I like how the meaning of the title is inverted in the story. “Crocodile Tears” typically means insincere sympathy, but in this story the crocodile is the truly sympathetic one. Did you know this was the title you were going to use at the start? How did it occur to you?
I am generally inspired by the questions suggested by certain phrases. If a crocodile cannot shed sincere tears, then how does a crocodile mourn?
There are two stories in this one: Si Tenggang is a story about a prodigal son who returns home after a long time with a great fortune, only to deny his mother. She curses him and his ship to turn to stone. Then there is a story about an old woman who, like the mother in this story, loses a grandchild to crocodiles, and the head crocodile asks her to help his grandchild. In exchange, she asks the crocodiles to leave the river.
I thought to myself, where was the grandchild’s father? Also, Si Tenggang’s punishment seems a bit pat. I’m also very interested in recuperating the crocodile as a monster. The crocodile is a monster to us as humans because we are so easily killed by one, but in its element, its character simply fits its nature. I also wanted to explore the narrative of the forgiving crone alongside the penitent adopted child versus the cruel child.
I know you’re a Clarion student this year. What was your writing process for “Crocodile Tears” like, and how has Clarion changed how you write?
Generally my writing process is simple: I stew on an idea for a long time, trying to figure the ins and outs of the story, and then throw it on the page to see what sticks. I usually come up with workable first drafts that just need tweaking here and there. I’ll let it sit for a couple of weeks or months, then return to it with fresh eyes. I’ll find inconsistencies, more questions wherein I decide whether or not to answer them, fix up grammar and spelling, and maybe other stylistic things.
Clarion has changed this process little, except I’ve churned out story drafts at an extraordinarily fast rate. Fortunately I went in with story ideas that I’ve been fiddling around for a long time. The thing about Clarion is that it’s also confirmed for me that I do a lot better with people around me and also that I am not an ogre.
It’s also been good to get some solid instruction on how to streamline stories—specifically genre stories. I did a creative writing minor in undergrad; I was not a good note-taker, and also the expectations were more literary when I was clearly a genre nerd. Clarion being specifically genre has been helpful in giving me questions I need to ask with regards to themes and structure.
Any new projects that you want to share?
I am writing a dissertation on whiteness in steampunk! That has generally been my schtick for the last three years. I’m also editor of The WisCon Chronicles 11, among other ambitious things like more stories. I will be in Hidden Youth: Speculative Stories of Marginalized Children from Crossed Genres.
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ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in San Francisco where she writes science fiction and fantasy and works for Locus Magazine. Her YA fantasy novel Luminator is forthcoming from Reuts Publishing in 2017. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.
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Author Spotlight: An Owomoyela
Laurel Amberdine | 1318 words
I am personally acquainted with two people who have been tried and jailed for absurd “hacking” charges because corporations and the government want to make a point. One of them is still there right now. So I really loved “Unauthorized Access.” Were you inspired by any particular cases or people?
I’d say not so much specific cases as the overall zeitgeist. We’re in a time when the internet and all its data and patterns of interaction are powerful, ubiquitous, extremely contentious—and often poorly understood, both by the people making the laws which regulate it and by the people using it as consumers.
Drastic legislative initiatives like SOPA/PIPA (and the vast scope of the backlash against those), governmental and corporate ambivalence about whistleblowers, social movements from Anonymous to Occupy, Twitter-powered revolutions, the explosion of FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source Software) resources and communities, hackerspaces, the claiming and reclaiming of the word “hacker”… all of these paint a world much different from the one I grew up in, and I’m still rather young. It’s fascinating to watch. I wanted to play in some corner or other of that emerging culture.
I attended Clarion West 2008 with Douglas Lucas, among many other excellent people, and I know that when I was writing Unauthorized Access, he was putting out a lot of news articles (bit.ly/2bJxPRx) on hacking cases. So that was certainly in my awareness, as well.
I know you have a background in computers, but did you do any additional research for this story?
Nothing really specifically tailored. I do a lot of desultory reading about whatever I’m writing about, and I’ll cast about to answer specific questions and untangle plot snarls, but often the shape of the story takes place after I’ve run into some article or story which provides the seed and most of the information I need. Then, most of the things I need to research are background details—for some reason, I find myself looking up cricket flour any time I write anything in this universe.
(Cricket flour is, for the curious, readily available on Amazon [amzn.to/2bcjw9o], as well as being made into new protein bar products such as Exo bars. I have not personally tried any of these products, as I have yet to convince myself that this is really what I ought to be spending my money on, but I find it vaguely reassuring to know that they exist.)
You don’t mention the actual secret that Cadares is interested in. Did you have something in mind?
… I’m sure I did at some point.
Energy distribution, though—in a world in which energy is used for everything from autocabs to lighting and information access—could be used to systematically advantage or disadvantage all manner of people, companies,
and neighborhoods. I know I layered in the plot seeds of corruption of some sort. The exact parameters of that corruption may best be left as a sequel hook for myself.
Do you have other stories set in this future, or any planned? I’d like to see what happens with Aedo next!
I do, in fact! I’m working on a story which loops back around to check in on Jace and Culin, from the earlier story set in this universe, Undermarket Data. The plan is to crash the two of them into Aedo and LogicalOR, and watch as hijinks ensue. (These hijinks will probably be somewhat amusing to Jace, and less than amusing to everyone else in the equation.)
I’d also like to explore more of the Undercity, as well as the relationship between Upcity and Undercity and the history of the city in whole. And possibly also figure out if the rest of the world, you know, exists.
Can you tell us a bit about your writing process?
Sure! It’s rather haphazard, but it works for me when it works for me.
I get ideas from all sorts of random minutiae. A few of the more recent ones I’ve been toying with—which may or may not go anywhere—include a riddle-based urban fantasy (because I was curious as to how an early speech syntheziser would read out the initials of the months, “J F M A M J J A S O N D”, because there’s a credible ma’am and Jason in there), and some kind of space opera or something exploring the idea of people raised from a young age to be soldiers or assassins who aren’t brainwashed or terribly abused. (Because brainwashed and terribly-abused supersoldiers and assassins seems like a trope that keeps coming up in my media osmosis, and I can’t help but feel that someone has to have looked at that and thought, “That sure seems like it’s set up to backfire spectacularly,” and come up with a safer way to do things.)
Once I have an idea, I’ll usually toss down a few lines either describing the idea or sketching out a scene, an interaction, a bit of setting detail, or whatever catches my eye in either a new sub-folder of my massive Scrivener “short story scratch” document, or in a running Gmail conversation I have with myself. Gradually, the idea bounces off other compatible story seeds or ideas or pieces of implication or subversion (for example, with the month thing, it’d be so much more creepy if one of people finding this old computer was named Jason or had a significant Jason in their past—maybe in her past, because I like female main characters, because why not like female main characters; could be a boyfriend or a brother, but those relationships are frequently overplayed, so what else could I do with that name, hmm … ), and those lines of reasoning stick to it and accrete into something resembling a plot. If I’m lucky. Sometimes they just accrete into something resembling a stringy mess of half-finished scenes connected by tenuous threads of implication.
Eventually, either I’ll decide that the proto-story is viable and that I enjoy it. Or an editor will ask me for something. (Frequently, when an editor asks me for something, I’ll jump-start the accretion process by going back through my old Gmail conversation or feeding a bunch of prompts into a Bingo-card generator I built. That can be found at bit.ly/2bcBPgf, and a lot of people who use Bingo cards for creative fun can be found at allbingo.dreamwidth.org if anyone else is interested.) Once I’ve decided to work on something, I’ll hop around in it, writing snippets here and there in no real chronological order, until I get to about sixty percent finished with it and decide that it’s terrible and broken beyond all repair. Then I’ll go and work on something else for a while.
Occasionally, I’ll poke my head back into my terrible, broken story, and add a line here or change a paragraph there, and poke and prod, and then retreat again, grumbling all the while. And then a few days later I’ll do the same thing, until somehow it’ll get to about the eighty-percent-done mark. At that point, I usually decide that if it’s come this far it had better well just become finished, and I’ll bull my way through the writing until it can be read from beginning to end with no giant pits or gaps in the middle.
And at that point, I have a completed short story!
I may go back and re-read and revise it then, but usually by the time I get there I’ve gone back and forth over it so many times in my haphazard, non-linear writing style that it’s effectively had a series of internal revisions during the writing process. So then I usually send it out into the world as-is, which works for me, because I generally don’t want to look at it any more.
And that’s my writing process, in a nutshell.
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ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in San Francisco where she writes science fiction and fantasy and works for Locus Magazine. Her YA fantasy novel Luminator is forthcoming from Reuts Publishing in 2017. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.
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Author Spotlight: Christopher Barzak
Jason Ridler | 766 words
The narrator’s voice is prim and proper, an outsider who knows everything inside and yet refrains, “After all, we don’t live in that house.” It speaks to knowledge and responsibility. Why else choose this kind of narrator?
The narrator is a first person plural voice, which I wanted to use in order to talk about public versus private dealings, particularly in small rural towns, where the social fabric is very tight in many ways, some good and others invasive, where everyone knows each other’s business, and talks about it, while also often not intervening. I like this collective “we” voice as it embodies that kind of language used in those communities, and it’s not one that I’d seen used in regard to small town supernatural fiction before. Stories of haunted houses are often engaged with what happens to those haunted within the house, contrasting with the normality of the world outside it. This type of voice seemed perfect to amplify that affect.
The narrator also feels like the voice of the community (“We all feel a bit sad for Mary Kay Billings”), which reminded me of Shirley Jackson and William Faulkner (“A Rose for Emily” in particular). What does such a POV character allow you to do that, say, a distant, disembodied third person omniscient narrator cannot?
I think the collective voice rides this really weird line that blurs between feeling intimate and feeling at a distance, whereas the disembodied third person omniscient narrator is mostly just distant. While both achieve the ability to narrate on an omniscient (or almost omniscient, in the case of the collective pooling of knowledge or hearsay in the case of the first person plural), it’s the collective voice that also personalizes that knowledge in the context of a specific community.
There’s a repetitive tone of voids and holes: the bathroom as privacy where things are flushed away, the hole in the dead child’s heart, Jesus speaking through the mouth of Rose, buttons that litter the house without their holes; Jonas’s argument on people becoming “nothing,” the vanishing Blank family members. Hauntings are usually about what is left behind, but here there are notes of what is lost forever. Why make that the focus?
I usually like to invert genre expectations, or at least to put a different spin on them. Since, as you mentioned, hauntings are often about what lingers, I wanted the haunting effect to be about what’s lost irrevocably, which can haunt in a different way. The strong absence of someone or something can sometimes be felt as if it’s a presence.
Rose loves flowers and Jonas loves drink. But the house is the one that seduces her, as if trying to bring life into the dying orphan’s structure, with a tradition of draining families of life. A pattern started with the Blanks. What appealed to you about this common cultural note of intimacy between women and home?
Traditionally the home has been equated with women, particularly in patriarchal cultures where women’s roles have been limited to the running of a household. But homes and houses also function as prisons in this way, where that intimacy can feel oppressive, which I felt was a perfect sort of note for the oppressive nature of haunted houses.
Stories that cover large swaths
of time often face the challenge of holding a reader’s attention compared to ones that focus on immediacy and urgency. Here that challenge is met with depth and layers of horror. Were there other advantages for having a generational discourse in the narrative?
I think covering generations in one short story does have the possibility to feel at a distance to readers, but by fracturing the narrative, moving between the time periods, the present back into the past on a loop, I think the story accrues a kind of gravitas that might not have been felt had the weight of the house’s history not been an aspect of the story. The backstories of the previous families in the house are revealed as the present-day story unfolds, and I think this creates an engaging feeling of parallels and concurrent hauntings within the story.
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ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Jason S. Ridler is a writer, improv actor, and historian. He is the author of A Triumph for Sakura, Blood and Sawdust, the Spar Battersea thrillers and has published more than sixty stories in such magazines and anthologies as The Big Click, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Out of the Gutter, and more. He also writes the column FXXK WRITING! for Flash Fiction Online. A former punk rock musician and cemetery groundskeeper, Mr. Ridler holds a Ph.D. in War Studies from the Royal Military College of Canada. He lives in Richmond, CA.
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Author Spotlight: Peter M. Ball
Moshe Siegel | 1057 words
What was the genesis of your novella, Horn?
I wrote Horn on a dare when I was at Clarion South back in 2007. Lee Battersby was coming in as a tutor and one of the other students who knew him gave the cohort a warning before his week started: “Whatever you do, don’t write a story about fourteen year old girls and unicorns. Lee hates that sort of thing.”
My first response to that kind of statement is almost always, “I don’t know. I think we could write one he’d love,” and things snowballed from there. I’d disappear into my dormitory room for an hour, then emerge with a new way of approaching the story: What if it started with an autopsy and the unicorn was the murderer? What if it was a horror story that played with classic noir tropes? What if the fourteen year-old girl was a runaway pulled into a bad scene? Eventually someone dared me to just write the damn thing, and I did.
Lightspeed Magazine - September 2016 Page 27
