The result was about six thousand words of novella notes masquerading as a very messy short story, but it achieved the original goal of meeting the dare.
Did you look to any specific stories or ideas as inspiration?
I hadn’t read an awful lot of hardboiled detective stories when I started Horn, nor watched a lot of film noir, but I discovered that it’s a genre you really do pick up through a process of cultural osmosis. You see it parodied in cartoons and sitcoms, or adapted into films like Blade Runner. I think the only two fully-fledged hardboiled stories I knew was Raymond Chandler’s The Goldfish and a slightly off-beat detective novella, Brotherly Love, by an Australian writer named Dirk Flinthart. I re-read both obsessively while writing the first draft, just trying to wrap my head around the voice and the story beats.
I spent about a year working my way through the classics of the hardboiled detective genre after that, before trying to redraft and expand Horn into a novella. And I developed a mild obsession with forensic-investigation TV shows like NCIS and the various CSI spin-offs.
Have you visited these characters, or this world, in your other work?
There’s a second Miriam Aster novella, Bleed, which started when a friend of mine had a short rant about their hatred of fantasy stories with talking cats. I keep threatening to write a third novella one day, but I am eminently distractible on the writing front, and find myself working on other projects instead.
This novella features some rather graphic imagery and a dark spin on what may otherwise be whimsical content (à la Who Framed Roger Rabbit? —that’s a compliment); was it challenging to blend this material and tone?
Honestly, I never gave it much thought. I always considered Horn to be one of those stories that was never meant to get published. I wrote the first story with a very specific audience in mind, and I figured it would be an experiment in seeing how dark I could take things and proving a point in regards to the original dare. It would be read by seventeen or eighteen people, maximum, and then I’d file it away as a learning experience and go write other things.
Then those seventeen or eighteen people suggested it should be a novella, and I had no experience in writing anything longer than six thousand words, so I figured it would be an interesting experiment in expanding things and making the story longer. A lot of the really dark content was already in place after the story draft, which meant I could play around with tone and structure because no-one would be crazy enough to publish a story about unicorns and murder and underage pornography, right? In the end, I only submitted it because my friend Angela Slatter had read a draft and recommended it to an editor she’d worked with.
You can do some very strange things when you are young, assume no-one is looking, and don’t think too much about the consequences. It’s like being a cartoon character that runs off the edge of a cliff, but doesn’t yet realise that they should be falling because they haven’t yet looked down.
Speaking of blending, Horn spans many genres (urban fantasy, dark fantasy, noir, classic frightening fairy tales); do you find yourself drawn to any particular genre when reading/writing?
I read across the board when it comes to genre. Name a genre category and I can rattle off a half-dozen of my favourite authors or books in that area, although I’ll admit to a particular fondness for hardboiled pulp, regency romance, and things towards the slipstream end of the fantasy genre.
The thing that is virtually guaranteed to win me over as a reader is the seamless blending of genre tropes, particularly when it asks you to go back and look at the original genres in a new light. There’s nothing I love more than that moment where you have to pause and ask yourself where, exactly, something fits on the bookshelf and not being able to come up with a definitive answer.
Do you have any fiction idols?
So many. I will try to restrain myself here, but Caitlín Kiernan is probably the finest writer working today and is particularly spectacular in the short form. I’ve spent the last few spec-fic conventions I’ve attended sitting in the bar geeking out with fellow fans of Australian regency novelist Anne Gracie, who is one of my go-to writers I’ll foist on people who think they don’t like romance as a genre. And, in terms of blending genres, I am an enormous fan of Christa Faust’s lucha-noir novel, Hoodland, which is an absolutely incredible book for anyone who is a fan of pro-wrestling or hardboiled crime.
Do you have anything upcoming or in the works that you’d like to share with us?
These days my major projects are more writing-adjacent than anything else. I run the biennial GenreCon Writers conference for the Australian Writers Marketplace, and we’re currently gearing up for the announcements for of the fourth conference that will take place in late 2017.
GenreCon’s an incredible project to be part of for someone with my interest in writing and genre, since it’s largely an excuse to gather together groups of very smart writers and get them talking about the craft and business side of what we do.
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ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Moshe Siegel interviews at Lightspeed, works in the New York State library system, and hatches indie publishing plots from his Hudson Valley home office. Follow tweets of varying relevance @moshesiegel.
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Coming Attractions
The Editors | 147 words
Coming up in October, in Lightspeed …
We have original science fiction by Stephen S. Power (“Fade to Red: Three Interviews About Sebold’s Mars Trilogy”) and Mary Anne Mohanraj (“Plea”), along with SF reprints by Karen Joy Fowler (“Game Night at the Fox and Goose”) and Fran Wilde (“A Moment of Gravity, Circumscribed”).
Plus, we have original fantasy by Jeremiah Tolbert (“The Cavern of the Screaming Eyes”) and Kat Howard (“The Key to St. Medusa’s”), and fantasy reprints by Aliette de Bodard (“The Dragon’s Tears”) and Will Kaufman (“October’s Son”).
All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, along with our book and media review columns.
For our ebook readers, we also have an ebook-exclusive reprint of the novella “The Stars Do Not Lie,” by Jay Lake, and an excerpt from Will McIntosh’s new novel, Faller.
It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.
Thanks for reading!
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Stay Connected
The Editors | 29 words
Here are a few URLs you might want to check out or keep handy if you’d like to stay apprised of everything new and notable happening with Lightspeed:
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www.lightspeedmagazine.com
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Subscriptions and Ebooks
The Editors | 308 words
Subscriptions: If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in epub, mobi, and pdf format. A 12-month subscription to Lightspeed includes 96 stories (about 480,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction). The cost is just $35.88 ($12 off the cover price)—what a bargain! For more information, visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe.
Ebooks & Bundles: We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors ($3.99 each), and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Lightspeed ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! We currently have a number of ebook bundles available: Year One (issues 1-12), Year Two (issues
13-24), Year Three (issues 25-36), the Mega Bundle (issues 1-36), and the Supermassive Bundle (issues 1-48). Buying a bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. So if you need to catch up on Lightspeed, that’s a great way to do so. Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/store for more information.
• • • •
All caught up on Lightspeed? Good news! We also have lots of ebooks available from our sister-publications:
Nightmare Ebooks, Bundles, & Subscriptions: Like Lightspeed, our sister-magazine Nightmare (nightmare-magazine.com) also has ebooks, bundles, and subscriptions available as well. For instance, you can get the complete first year (12 issues) of Nightmare for just $24.99; that’s savings of $11 off buying the issues individually. Or, if you’d like to subscribe, a 12-month subscription to Nightmare includes 48 stories (about 240,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction), and will cost you just $23.88 ($12 off the cover price).
Fantasy Magazine Ebooks & Bundles: We also have ebook back issues—and ebook back issue bundles—of Lightspeed’s (now dormant) sister-magazine, Fantasy. To check those out, just visit fantasy-magazine.com/store. You can buy each Fantasy bundle for $24.99, or you can buy the complete run of Fantasy Magazine— all 57 issues—for just $114.99 (that’s $10 off buying all the bundles individually, and more than $55 off the cover price!).
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About the LIGHTSPEED Team
The Editors | 44 words
Publisher/Editor-in-Chief
John Joseph Adams
Managing/Associate Editor
Wendy N. Wagner
Associate Publisher/Director of Special Projects
Christie Yant
Assistant Publisher
Robert Barton Bland
Reprint Editor
Rich Horton
Podcast Producer
Stefan Rudnicki
Podcast Editor/Host
Jim Freund
Art Director
Henry Lien
Assistant Editor
Robyn Lupo
Editorial Assistants
Laurel Amberdine
Jude Griffin
Book Reviewers
Andrew Liptak
Sunil Patel
Amal ElMohtar
Copy Editor
Dana Watson
Proofreaders
Anthony R. Cardno
Devin Marcus
Illustrators
Galen Dara
Elizabeth Leggett
Reiko Murakami
Sam Schechter
Webmaster
Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios
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Also Edited by John Joseph Adams
The Editors | 167 words
If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, you might also enjoy these anthologies edited (or co-edited) by John Joseph Adams.
THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: The End is Nigh (with Hugh Howey)
THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: The End is Now (with Hugh Howey)
THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: The End Has Come (with Hugh Howey)
Armored
Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 (with Joe Hill)
Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 (with Karen Joy Fowler) [forthcoming Oct. 2016]
Brave New Worlds
By Blood We Live
Dead Man’s Hand
Epic: Legends Of Fantasy
Federations
The Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes
HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! and Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects
Lightspeed: Year One
The Living Dead
The Living Dead 2
Loosed Upon the World
The Mad Scientist’s Guide To World Domination
Operation Arcana
Other Worlds Than These
Oz Reimagined (with Douglas Cohen)
Press Start to Play (with Daniel H. Wilson)
Robot Uprisings (with Daniel H. Wilson)
Seeds of Change
Under the Moons of Mars
Wastelands
Wastelands 2
The Way Of The Wizard
What the #@&% Is That? (with Douglas Cohen) [forthcoming Nov. 2016]
Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above. Each project also has a mini-site devoted to it specifically, where you’ll find free fiction, interviews, and more.
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Table of Contents
Book Reviews: September 2016
Lightspeed Magazine - September 2016 Page 28
