Whatever

Stories have their protagonists and their antagonists – their “good guys” and “bad guys” — but in practical terms, what’s often the difference between the two sides? This is a question Helen Lowe asked herself, leading up to the writing of her “The Wall of Night” series, of which The Heir of Night is the debut installment. What answers came to her? Did answers come to her? Lowe walks you through her thought process on the matter.

HELEN LOWE:

I have loved epic fantasy since I first discovered the Greek myths and legends as a kid, quickly moving on to the Norse sagas with their twilit darkness shot through with treasure and blood and magic. Later, reading Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings as a young teen, I recognized the debt he owed to those Norse legends and their epic sweep, while fully appreciating the fresh magic he wrought with them. From Tolkien I proceeded to read as much SFF as I could find—and found some great reads.

But even as a younger reader, I experienced a growing dissatisfaction with much of the fantasy that I was picking up, in particular how one dimensional it was in terms of the traditional “good versus evil” storyline. “Bad/evil” tended to be a clearcut and easily recognizable external force, its adherents demonic—or at least ugly—in form and usually wearing some variation on black. “Good” would also be primarily recognizable by simple virtue of standing in opposition to “bad”, the characters’ “goodness” usually demonstrated, not by integrity of behavior, but by actively smiting the ugly crew on the other side—oh yes, and wearing some version of white.

Three things struck me about this. One was that these so-called “good guys” did a lot of questionable stuff, but that was ok, by implication, because they were on the “right” side. Secondly, even as a kid, but increasingly as I participated in the adult world, I realized that “Life’s Not Like That.” And finally, that the genre had moved a long way from its roots in the Greek and Norse myths that had hooked me into fantasy in the first place. In those stories, it is the internal conflict within the protagonists—their struggle between the pressures of self-interest, the socio-political forces in their societies, and the codes they hold to be true and right—that drive the power, drama and tragedy of the narrative.

Real life’s like that, too; the same forces are constantly at play in our lives. Any values of “right” and “true” that we are taught as individuals are constantly under pressure, being eroded even, by self-interest and self-preservation and by societal forces driving to achieve particular outcomes in terms of resource use / allocation and to enforce belief systems. I imagine that most of us try to have “bottom lines” and boundaries that we don’t cross—but we live in a world where boundaries are often blurred and the pressure to push the margins further out, and then just a little further again, is a constant.

So there I was, reading fantasy with all these thought swirling around—but the moment I “stopped dead” was with a story where the “good guys” walled a “bad guy” up alive. Unarguably, this character had done some horrific things. Think about it, though: walling someone up to die of thirst and starvation—that is also an horrific deed. Oh, sorry, what was that? They’re the “good guys”, the one’s wearing the “white hats” so that makes it completely ok?

Sorry, not in my book.

That was the idea that worked away in me until it drove me to write The Heir of Night—to take the kind of epic fantasy story that I love and explore what it is that really makes “good guys” and “bad guys”. So yes, The Heir of Night, which is the first in The Wall of Night quartet, does respect a lot of the epic traditions:  it is a fundamentally medieval world (although there are hints of “other”) and it ostensibly sets up a struggle between externally conceived forces of “good” and “evil”. Or does it?

Readers of The Heir of Night may notice certain things:  that this book is focused very much on the people known as the Derai and their bleak, twilit world of the barrier mountain range known as The Wall—or Shield-Wall—of Night; and that the Derai, although they believe themselves to be the champions of good and right, are a society that has been fractured by civil war with its legacy of prejudice, suspicion and fear. Another dimension is that both the Derai and their aeons-old enemy, The Swarm, are alien to the world of Haarth in which their conflict is currently being fought out—and the indigenous inhabitants have their own perspective on the Derai and their ways. This introduces an important cultural dimension to the traditionally conceived conflict, one that I have rarely seen explored in the good-versus-evil formula of much epic fantasy.

These, for me, are the two aspects to the Big Idea that drives The Heir of Night and The Wall of Night series:  the concept of a society that perceives itself as the defenders of good and yet has a darkly chequered history, and the consequences of that history for the individuals caught within the rigid codes of a “people under arms.” Plus the idea that those from the “other” cultures may have a very different view on a conflict that has been imposed upon their world. There are demons and battles and magic, and protagonists who must undertake their “hero journeys”, because this is still epic fantasy. The epic adversary does exist, as well—but whether it remains traditionally conceived through Books 2 to 4 remains to be seen. I suspect the above may have left a trail of clues in that respect—but then again, no tale, epic or otherwise, is ever over until we reach the final line.

One thing you may be sure of is that good and evil do exist in this story. You won’t recognize them by the color of the characters’ “hats”, though. You will also have to make up your own minds about the characters based on what they do in light of their own codes, not where they stand in relation to a line drawn along the Shield-Wall of Night.

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The Heir of Night: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Visit the author’s blog.

Here’s a question for you: How can a book take both ten years — and only four weeks — to write? The answer lies in Hunger, the latest novel by Jackie Morse Kessler. Turns out there’s more to putting together a novel than placing fingers to keyboard, and it also turns out that when it comes to books, the right time to write might be sooner than you think.

JACKIE MORSE KESSLER:

I wasn’t going to write Hunger. It didn’t matter that I’d had the idea for nearly 10 years. And it didn’t matter that this was a book that I dearly wanted to write. I wasn’t going to do it. I’d convinced myself that it wouldn’t appeal to a broad readership, so I’d have to wait until I was a Big Name Author*, whenever that would be. Until then, I’d stick with writing about demons and superheroes—otherwise known as “novels already under contract.”

Then came Albacon 2008. My agent and I got together for lunch, and I casually mentioned to her that my goal was to become a big enough author to write the book I really wanted to write. She wanted to know what book that would be. I said, “An anorexic teenage girl becomes the new Famine, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” My agent asked, “Why haven’t you written this yet?” I patiently explained that no one would want to read it. To which she replied, “Are you crazy?”

So I decided to write the book. (Validation? Extremely powerful motivator.)

Hunger has roots in comic books—both Marvel and Archie, if you can believe that combination—but the idea really sprouted when I was in my early twenties, well after my bout with bulimia. I wanted to write a book with a protagonist who not only had an eating disorder but was defined by it, a book that tackled a very real issue through fantastical elements. So as I waited to become a Big Name Author, the idea percolated.

After thinking about something for 10 years, you might assume that once I’d given myself permission to write it, the words would come easily. Nope. I was plagued with false starts. I couldn’t find the right beginning. Should I set it in a hospital, where the protagonist had been confined because of her disease? If I did, how would Famine’s steed—a big black horse named Midnight—make it past the Nurse’s Station? For that matter, did the protagonist even know she was suffering from an eating disorder? Actually…who was the main character? She wasn’t just some person who happened to be anorexic. I needed to understand her, as well as her disorder.

That’s when it hit me: The protagonist would be inspired by someone I had known—specifically, the girl who’d introduced me to bulimia. That girl from my past is gone; I found out about her death many years after we’d gotten into the huge fight that destroyed our friendship. Maybe it was partially out of guilt, or love, or something else only a psychologist could help me understand, but I decided that Hunger would be her story. That’s how the heroine Lisabeth Lewis was born. Once I had the right protagonist, the first sentence appeared like magic: “Lisabeth Lewis didn’t mean to become Famine.” From there, the first three chapters flowed.

I slammed into my next roadblock when I had to figure out the purpose behind the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Given that I have a background writing urban fantasy (not to mention playing Dungeons & Dragons), you’d think the world-building issues would have been tackled sooner. For every other paranormal book or story I’ve written, that’s been the case: I’d come up with the rules of the world first, then I’d put the character in that world. Hunger brushed that aside. This wasn’t a book about the Horseman called Famine, whose anorexia is an afterthought. This story is about an anorexic girl who becomes Famine. It’s extremely character-driven. I could take away the Horsemen elements and still have a story—a very different story, granted, but a story all the same. If I took away the eating disorder, there would be no story left to tell. So when I was starting chapter four and I realized that I didn’t know why there were the Horsemen of the Apocalypse in the first place, I stumbled.

For days, I wrestled with the notion of the Horsemen. Now I’m all for a little death, doom and destruction, but that wasn’t where I wanted to go with the book. The Apocalypse was officially off the table. So why have the Horsemen at all? What was their purpose? My husband, who helps me brainstorm, asked me, “Wouldn’t it be cool if the Horsemen weren’t there to bring about the Apocalypse, but to prevent it?”

Yes, I thought, already reaching for my laptop. Very cool.

That wasn’t exactly what I wound up running with, but it was a terrific start. The Horsemen, ultimately, symbolize how we choose to destroy ourselves—and how we can save ourselves as well. Oh, there’s a mythology there, too, one that will come into play over the other three books in The Riders’ Quartet. But for Hunger, I’d finally figured out what the Horsemen were, and what they could do, if they so chose.

Armed with this information, I sat down to finish writing the book. The whole percolating-for-10-years thing finally came into play, because from start to finish, the novel took me four weeks. Granted, Hunger is a very (very) short book. And really, I don’t recommend waiting 10 years to write a book—especially when you have to push aside a contracted novel under deadline to do so. (Couldn’t help it. Every time I tried to write about superheroes, Horsemen kept popping up.)

So I finished it. My agent sold the book to Harcourt—and then she asked me, “So which Horseman are you writing about next?” And that’s how, after 10 years, I not only wrote the book I’d desperately wanted to write; I also moved forward. Rage, the follow-up novel about a teenage self-injurer who becomes the new War, comes out in April 2011. And look at that: no Big Name required. Lesson learned.

To help spread the word about what eating disorders are, and what they’re not, I’m donating a portion of Hunger proceeds to the National Eating Disorders Association. So if you bought a copy of the book, thank you for helping make a difference.

* Big Name Author: When an author’s name on a cover is bigger than the book title. Or, better yet, when someone says the author’s name, the immediate reaction isn’t a blank look followed by, “Who?”

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Hunger: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Visit the author’s blog. Follow her on Twitter.

It’s probably inaccurate to call the writing of fiction “restful” (says the man currently trying to write a new novel), but can it offer a respite? From Graham Hancock, it just may. Hancock is best known as a non-fiction author of highly controversial historical books, and controversies, while sometimes invigorating, have their downside as well. So, when Hancock turned his hand to fiction with his novel Entangled, did the experience offer him a break from that controversy — and a new enthusiasm for writing? Let’s let Hancock spin the tale from here.

GRAHAM HANCOCK:

Entangled is my first novel, a work of science fiction and fantasy adventure utterly different from anything I’ve ever written before. At its heart are Ria and Leoni, two brave young women, living at opposite ends of history, who are brought together by supernatural forces to do battle with a demon who travels through time. My heroines don’t need a “time machine”. They encounter one another, and the demon, by travelling out of body in altered states of consciousness induced by the consumption of  powerful psychedelic drugs.

Before I tell you where this big, strange idea came from I need to give you some backstory.

I’ve been a non-fiction writer all my working life, starting out in mainstream journalism in the early 1970’s and finding my way into books from there. I was always heavily facts-based, even if – as I increasingly came to define my role – I was giving a different take on the facts from the mainstream. An example is my 1989 book Lords of Poverty: The Freewheeling Lifestyles, Power, Prestige and Corruption of the Multi-Billion Dollar Aid Business. It won an H.L. Menken Award honourable mention for an outstanding book of journalism. It was entirely fact based, but it took the same facts the aid industry was using to blow its own trumpet and showed that there was a whole other story lying underneath them — a story not of ‘help’ and ‘kindness’ but of corruption, waste, greed and ego on the part of the donor organisations. Lords of Poverty was the first book really to question foreign aid. A lot of people in the aid business got very angry with me about it, but it struck a chord and is still in print more than twenty years later in the US.

So the same basic approach that I brought to Lords of Poverty I also brought to all my later non-fiction books on historical mysteries such as The Sign and the Seal, Fingerprints of the Gods and Heaven’s Mirror – questioning established facts, reinterpreting them and trying to bring new data to the table. Typically I would refer to a thousand-plus other books for each of my big books of non-fiction, which were all fundamentally works of synthesis. If there was anything truly original in them it lay in creating a novel synthesis, and in asking new questions about the data that perhaps hadn’t been given much thought before.

You should see my office any day when I’m writing non-fiction. Dozens of books relating to the chapter I am working on that day are scattered, open, all over my desk and floor. There are little yellow tags in the pages of these books that remind me of some nugget of information hidden on page 243 or 867. As I write I am constantly inserting footnotes (and I’ve learned that if you don’t do the note, at least in abbreviated form, right away than you can never find it again).

It is a constant fact-grinding operation and after three decades of this I have reached a point where, frankly, I’m exhausted by it. Relentless academic attacks on my non-fiction, most ferocious in the UK, completely wore me out and also forced me to start writing in a more and more boring way. Anticipating every nit-picking critique, and knowing how even the slightest mistake would be spun as ‘fraud’ and ‘bad faith’ by the mainstream, I started bullet-proofing my arguments even as I made them, surrounding them with ever larger amounts of facts, observation and data, trying to iron out every weakness in advance. The result — Underworld. It’s a pretty good book in my opinion. I’m proud of it. Proud of the risks my wife Santha and I were prepared to take to do the dives and bring back the evidence – Santha’s photographs being crucial. Proud of the mass of new data, not previously published, that it unveils. But it is close to 800 pages long and the architecture of facts, and the defensive posture I was forced to adopt, means that many readers have found it hard to wade through it.

As I writer I do, above all, want to be read. So what I gradually came to realise was that the need to respond to scholarly attacks on my work was actually making me more and more unreadable! I began to yearn to get back to the place of adventure and daring I was in when I wrote Fingerprints of the Gods and didn’t give a damn about what the academics thought or said.

But it gradually became clear to me that the intellectual climate within which I must work meant that I could never get back to that place again — in non-fiction in this field. I also came to the conclusion, after Underworld, that I had done everything I could do, as an individual, to shed light on the possibility that there might be a great forgotten episode of high civilisation lost in the night of time. I began to be concerned that if I stayed totally focussed on that subject then I would end up repeating myself and doing nothing new.

It was time to move on.

The result, still non-fiction, was Supernatural. The same reference-based approach reinterpreting existing ‘facts’, and another very long book, but this time not focussed on the lost civilisation mystery.

But something amazing happened to me while I was researching and writing Supernatural. I had my first encounters with the Amazonian shamanistic brew Ayahuasca, the Vine of the Dead, and these encounters completely changed my view of just about everything. The experiences filled me up with a new and invigorating creative urge and I began to think more and more about taking a long sabbatical from non-fiction and taking my narrative gifts — such as they are — in the direction of fiction. What was there to lose, I asked myself, when my critics already described my factual books as fiction?! Besides some facts are SO strange that maybe the only way they can ever be explored properly is through the imagination.

So I thought over this for a long while after my first encounter with the brew in 2003. I have continued to drink Ayahuasca several times a year since then, and have now logged more than thirty journeys. In 2006 I participated in a series of five Ayahuasca sessions over a period of two weeks in Brazil. Before we began the work — and Ayahuasca is WORK — I set an intent. It was to find inspiration for a novel.

The sessions gave me the answer. In a series of intense visions I saw my two main characters, Ria in the Stone Age, Leoni today, entangled in a great cosmic battle of good against evil. Some specific scenes and plot elements presented themselves to me. Others I received — downloaded — but could not immediately bring to conscious recollection. And I received a strong instruction from the blessed spirit of Aya and that instruction was: “WRITE IT. WRITE IT NOW!”

I started writing straight away. It was very slow at first. It took me a year to get eighty pages down to show to my editor. But fortunately he loved it, and bought it on the spot and the result, Entangled, I now place before my readers.

Each day of writing this book (and I am writing the sequel right now) has been a wonderful adventure for me. Because I downloaded the whole thing from the visionary realm I have not worked with any kind of outline but just sit at my desk to write every morning not knowing at all where the story is going to go. It’s all fresh and new to me, discovering events only as my characters discover them, and tremendous fun to do.

And I’m realising more and more that, as a vehicle for exploring extraordinary ideas, fiction has a huge degree of latitude and license that our society simply does not allow to non-fiction authors. And no footnotes! No quotations from learned sources! No angry academics waiting to accuse me of fraud! Just the challenge of the blank screen every morning and the adventure of finding out what I am going to put there today…

This is not say I will never write non-fiction again. I certainly hope I will. But I think I’ve earned a break and hope my readers will come with me on this new adventure.

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Entangled: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt of Entangled and see the trailer. Visit the book’s Web site. Follow Hancock on Twitter.

When in doubt, simplify. This is a piece of advice that has general application but particularly works for writers, who can get lost in the thickets of their own words and ideas. Just ask Matthew J. Kirby, whose middle-grade novel The Clockwork Three (which just received a coveted starred review from Publishers Weekly) has it roots in a series of ideas, but which came to life when Kirby realized that the gears of his story meshed together on a more fundamental level. Kirby puts it all together below.

MATTHEW J. KIRBY:

Before I began writing The Clockwork Three, I thought I had three big ideas.  I thought I had three separate books for young readers, stories that had nothing at all to do with each other.

First, there was the story of an Italian street musician.  His name was Giuseppe, and he was inspired by a real boy the New York Times of 1873 named “Joseph.”  During the 19^th century it was a fairly common practice to buy or kidnap children from Italy and ship them off to Paris, London, or New York City, where they were forced to play music and beg on the streets for money.  Many of these children endured years of physical and emotional abuse at the hands of their padroni, or masters.  According to his later testimony, Joseph was regularly beaten, bound, starved, and he had a scar on his ear where his padrone, a man named Vincenzo Motto, had bitten him.  Motto threatened to kill Joseph if the boy ever tried to escape, but one night Joseph did just that.  He fled into Central Park, where he was eventually found by a park-keeper and taken to a woman who ran one of the cottages in the park (a building now known as the Dairy).  This woman looked after Joseph, and he eventually took the stand to testify against the man who had held him captive.  After reading this story, I knew I wanted to tell it in some way.

For my second big idea, I wanted to tell a mystery story, a secret history for young readers.  I knew it would involve a colorful Madame Blavatsky type figure, and Spiritualism, and something hidden.  I had an idea of the setting in which the story would take place, a grand 19^th century hotel, and I knew the main character would be a young maid working in that hotel.

My third idea was for a science-fantasy in which an apprentice mechanician violates the edicts of his guild and attempts to create an artificial man.  Looking back, I know I was overly ambitious, but in my hubris, I wanted to write a Viriconium for middle grade readers, something that would cause them to wonder and think about the technology they are growing up with and taking for granted.  It’s an idea I may still return to if I ever feel able to take on something so large, which won’t be anytime soon.

So I had these three big ideas, and I was pursuing them all as independent stories.  But at some point, I realized I didn’t have three big ideas.  I had one big idea for a story that would bring all three characters and stories together.  The stories of Giuseppe and the maid in the hotel fit naturally in terms of setting.  The story of the ambitious mechanician went through the greatest changes, but he soon became an apprentice clockmaker, and the automaton he creates, with the help of the other two characters, became the central metaphor of the novel.

I know it was the right choice to bring them together.  As soon as I began writing, it was as if the characters had wanted to meet and help each other all along.  And as complicated as the plot is, I was able to write the majority of the book without an outline.  Everything simply fit, page after page, scene after scene.  The stories of Giuseppe, Frederick, and Hannah interlocked, like the turning gears of a clock, and they became The Clockwork Three.

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The Clockwork Three: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt (pdf link). Visit the book site, with a trailer and an interview. Visit the author’s blog.

The Big Idea series here is predicated on the idea that one big concept can motivate the creation of art, but saying this doesn’t discount the idea that authors can want or desire to accomplish a number of things in their book. For The Invisible Order, Book One: The Rise of the Darklings, author Paul Crilley had a list of things he wanted to do, and worked to have those goals dovetail into each other to make one complete whole: the final story. Here he is to give you the details about that.

PAUL CRILLEY:

Magic in the mundane world has always fascinated me. The possibility that around the next corner, separated by the faint whisper of a magic spell, is a hidden world full of danger and mystery.

This was the seed that eventually grew into The Invisible Order. The idea that there was a magical world existing alongside the real one. A mirror image that reflected reality at a slightly skewed angle, where if you only knew how to look you would discover a whole other world: a fey street in Victorian London hidden around a dark alley in Cheapside, where an obese Oberon, once King of Faerie, now spends all his time eating and drinking and has to be wheeled around on a massive wooden chair. A three thousand foot oak tree hidden far below the streets of London, inside of which the Faerie Queen holds court. Hidden spells locked away in the galleries of St Paul’s Cathedral, awaiting only the answer to a specific riddle before releasing their magic. A world where Black Annis and Jenny Greenteeth are as real as you or I, waiting patiently for children to stray too close to the edge of the Thames so they can devour them, limb, by crunchy limb.

A world where creatures of Faerie and monsters of legend battle each other for control of the city, a hidden war fought beneath our very noses.

Victorian London is another subject that has long held my interest. I love the history of the city, the legends, the mixture of old and new, the collision of spiritualism and religion against the onslaught of technology. I love the sheer resilience of a city that has been subjected to plague, fire, drought, floods. It never falls, but rises, sometimes sluggishly, from the ashes and mud to renew itself, disaster after disaster.

And finally, secret societies. I’ve always loved reading about secret societies. Cryptic lore, hidden treasures, clandestine meetings in fog shrouded streets. The name of the series is actually a reference to the secret society created by Merlin the Enchanter back in the mists of London’s pre-history. Merlin founded The Invisible Order and gave its members only one remit: when the fey creatures tried to harm mankind, (and they would), then the Order had to stop them. By any means necessary.

I first wrote The Invisible Order as a short story for the DAW anthology Under Cover of Darkness. But even then I could see that there was potential for broadening the world. This was back in 2004, and I spent the next few years juggling working on the novel with my day job of writing for South African television. (I used to write Zulu language sitcoms. I didn’t have to write in Zulu, which was a Good Thing. I wrote in English and the scripts were translated by someone else. But to say that a lot of jokes don’t cross the language barrier is something of an understatement. I also spent about 18 months writing on a soap opera set in an acting school. Sort of like Fame but with really bad acting and more hysterics.)

While I was writing the book, I knew there were a couple of things I wanted to do. I wanted to create a main character who was competent and engaging. Who garnered reader sympathy without the reader feeling sorry for her. I wanted a character who didn’t need to keep running to adults to solve her problems. Someone who was resolute, who took what life gave her and then did her best to solve her own problems without having to rely on someone older than her to help.

And secondly, I wanted to write a book that could be enjoyed by kids and adults. Yeah, sure, I hear you say. Who doesn’t? But it’s true. I didn’t write the book thinking it was for 10 year olds. I wrote the story I wanted to read. Simple as that. My hope is that younger readers and older readers might take something different away from it. The opening quotes say it better than I ever could.

‘It is not children only that one feeds with fairy tales.’ – Ephraim Gothold Lessing

‘Some day you will be old enough to enjoy fairy tales again.’ – C.S. Lewis.

At the beginning of the book, Emily is an adult in everything but size. She doesn’t have time for magic and fairy tales. All her time is taken up with the real world, with making sure she and her brother have enough to eat and a place to stay. But as the story progresses, she begins to open her eyes a bit to the magic and wonder around her. She slips out of the slightly cynical skin that Victorian London has draped across her. She begins to accept – with, I hope, the reader – that maybe there is more out there than the mundane life she leads. That if you only open your eyes and look around, you’ll find that there is magic out there.

You just have to know where to look.

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The Invisible Order: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt (pdf link). Visit Paul Crilley’s blog. Follow him on Twitter.

Trash: Junk – or a trove? Why not both? In today’s Big Idea, Richard Kadrey digs through the subject of trash and how it applies to his Sandman Slim series of novels, of which the second, Kill the Dead, has just hit the stores. The Sandman Slim books are in fact the best kind of trash — rough and dirty and full of surprising things — And Kadrey explains why that has value.

RICHARD KADREY:

Kill The Dead (and the first book in the series, Sandman Slim) is about a hitman from Hell named James Stark. The book is also about magicians, zombies, witches, vampires, killer angels, necromancers, ultra-secret magic societies, an immortal alchemist, Lucifer, God and a talking head that gets around on a sort of magical skateboard. But where the book comes from has less to do with fantasy than politics.

When George Bush and his gang rode into Washington they bought their own complex religious myth system with them, one I didn’t understand. So, I started reading about the origins of the Christian church, its concepts of good and evil and the development of Lucifer, Satan, the Devil, whatever it is you want to call him. I learned that over the last 2000 years accounts of the relationship between God and Lucifer is a lot more complex and interesting than we were taught in the Cliff Notes version of the Bible we got in Church.

The questions of what are God? Who is Lucifer? And what is truly good or evil forms the deep background of Kill The Dead and Sandman Slim, but the truth is you don’t need to know any of that to read the books. For all the high-minded and possibly pretentious theorizing I just laid out, Kill The Dead is mostly about people punching each other, getting punched, throwing around inappropriate magic in inappropriate situations, stealing cars and drinking and smoking too much. Which leads to the second inspiration for the books.

James Stark didn’t come from memories of Tolkein or the Brothers Grimm. He was inspired by American crime writers such as Jim Thompson, James M. Cain, Joe Gores, Ross MacDonald and, of course, Hammett and Chandler. But the one writer who inspired me the most was Richard Stark.

Stark (One of Donald Westlake’s pseudonyms) wrote a series of hardboiled novels about a professional thief named Parker. The books are terse and brutal. The bad guys are the stars. We watch them plot and carry out their crimes. What grabbed me about Richard Stark’s work was the tone and mood. I’d never read so much conveyed in so few words. I immediately wondered if you could write SF and fantasy the same way (A lot of other people must have wondered that too because these days we’re nipple-deep in books about vampire hunters, ghost whisperers, werewolf crossing guards and, for all I know, poltergeist gumshoes). When I wrote Sandman Slim I wanted to acknowledge the inspiration. That’s why my protagonist is named Stark. It’s also why one of the villains is named Parker. I admire those pulpy writers and the pulpy novels they wrote, books that mostly ended up in drug stores and bus stations but always kept readers satisfied.

It all comes down to this: I’m not an artist. I know artists. I have friends who are artists and I’m not one of them. Mickey Spillane said it best, “I’m not an author. I’m a writer. That’s all I am.” Occasionally I wonder if I even write novels. I write long shaggy dog stories. Messy, kind of odd and noisy. I love the graceful sloppiness of early punk and the garage rock you find on Lenny Kaye’s Nuggets record series. I feel like my books and stories are similar to the way Iggy Pop describes The Stooges music, “It’s dumb. But it’s smart dumb.” My books are basically Raw Power with commas.

Don’t misunderstand me. I take what I do very seriously. I work hard to hit every beat, to be entertaining and to make you want to come back for more. If I say that I’m not an artist and that there a funny angles and out of tune guitars in my work it’s partly because I admire the workman-like approach of pulp writers who knew they weren’t James Joyce and also because I respect the power of trash.

Art terrifies. Trash seduces. The Clash has made more teenyboppers think about politics than all the Noam Chomsky books ever printed. That’s not a bad thing to aspire to. Which brings me back to the God and Lucifer stuff.

Kill The Dead and Sandman Slim are, at their core, about questioning our place in the universe, wondering about the nature of good and evil and if God and Lucifer are our enemies, on our side or if they even remember we’re down here. But the books are also about driving too fast, drinking too much, beating people up with magic or, if that doesn’t work, shooting them in the back.

Yes, I wonder about the nature of our existence, but I don’t get all Tolstoy about it. If you like action, noise and think The Good, The Bad and The Ugly is a thousand times better than Forrest Gump you’re who I wrote the book for. Kill The Dead isn’t American Gods or Zero History. It’s Mickey Spillane with monsters.

I’m not an author. I’m a writer. That’s all I am.

—-

Kill the Dead: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|IndieBound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Follow Richard Kadrey on Twitter.

Author J.K. Beck’s new paranormal Shadow Keepers series (of which When Blood Calls, above, is the first) is about law and order in the world of magic. It’s the kind of set-up that suggests that there’s not much there that could be derived from real life. Right? Well… as Beck explains here, it turns out that the line between the real world and the fantasy world is not always a bright and shining one — and that’s what makes it especially interesting.

J.K. BECK:

Popular wisdom says that truth is stranger than fiction, but I never really believed that.  The fiction I was addicted to had witches and genies and charms and elves.  Magic coins and time travelers.  And no one I knew in real life did that.

And, of course, there’s the old adage:  “write what you know.”  But when I first started scribbling out stories, I had no interest in writing about being a kid.  After all, wasn’t the whole point of writing to escape from who you were?

That’s not to say I haven’t pulled some of my life into my writing.  As Julie Kenner, I have a series about a demon-hunting soccer mom.  And while my day-to-day reality may not involve hunting actual demons, I do own a mini-van, have two kids, and understand the demonic nature of dustbunnies under the couch.

But it wasn’t until I began working on the Shadow Keepers series that I’m writing as J.K. Beck that I also realized that sometimes truth is at least as strange as fiction—and that inspiration can come from the strangest of places.

The series consists of three books being released in Sept/Oct/Nov (When Blood Calls, When Pleasure Rules, and When Wicked Craves), and three more coming soon, and centers on an ancient paranormal judicial system, the purpose of which is to investigate, adjudicate and punish those shadow creatures who break the covenant.  In the October release, When Pleasure Rules, investigators have convinced Lissa, a succubus, to act as a confidential informant, hoping that through her unique skills she can get information from a new werewolf in town.

It’s a dangerous world, full of people who aren’t what they seem, and whose motives are never completely clear.  Sort of like practicing law in Los Angeles…

I’ve done several interviews since the release of the first book, and invariably I’m asked about the premise—how did I come up with it?  And the truth is, I don’t remember the specific moment.  But with my love of all things paranormal and my background as an attorney, it seems the perfect fit.  And once my mind hit on that—boom, the series was born.

Those repeated questions, though, have made me think back.  Maybe there was a kernel.  Something that I drew from.  Some hint of inspiration.  Or even just something that shows that real life is always going to be a little bit freakier than fiction.

And you know what?  I found that spark—and having remembered the incident, I know—I just know—that there’s a connection between what happened in my second year of law school and what I’m writing about now.  See if you don’t think so, too:

So there I was interning for the local Assistant United States Attorney.  It was fun, and I learned a lot, because at the time, especially since I got thrown into the middle of a big case.  A Big Case.  Anyone out there watch Breaking Bad?  Well, RV’s may be the thing now for cooking meth, but back in the day, in that part of the country, caves and storage sheds were the thing.  And the government had its eye on one major player  because not only was he cooking and distributing a ton of meth, but he was doing it to fund his Satanic temple.  Yeah, you heard me right.  His Satanic temple.

Let’s pause a moment to let that sink in.

You should have seen some of the stuff in the evidence room.  Polaroids of the kinds of things you fear your kids will see if they click on the wrong thing on the Internet.  Bibles stained with blood and who knows what else. Guns.  And all sorts creepy nightmare-inducing stuff of the “not within the milieu of the nice girl from Austin” variety.  It was, in a word, freaky.

At one point, I drafted a response to the defendant’s Motion to Suppress—basically arguing that evidence the government had collected didn’t violate any Fourth Amendment strictures.  I don’t recall the details of the motion, but I recall the hearing vividly. I’d taken time away from my classes to attend and I was sitting in the front row of the courthouse.  The defendant was also present at the motion, and he sat there at the defense table, facing forward, posture stiff as a board, throughout the entire hearing.  When the arguments were over, the defendant stood, wrists and ankles in chains, his body covered by a prison-issued jumpsuit, and he turned and started down the aisle toward the back of the courthouse.   He was tall and scarecrow thin, his skin pasty.

And as he stepped into the gallery where I was sitting, he slowed, swiveled his head to look in my direction, and fixed freakish red eyes upon me.  And, yes, they were red, like the eyes of a demon.  I felt my heart clutch in my chest, and in the time it took me to blink, he’d turned back, his eyes no longer on me.

But I’d seen him, and I knew that everything he was about was real.  This guy was not only freaky, he was evil.  He was the personification of the scary things that hide in the dark.  They’re out there, you know.   Dark things, night time things.  And maybe some of them are good—maybe some of them don’t give a flip about the rest of us—but some of them are pure evil with nothing but malice on their mind.

I’m certain of it, because I saw it in that man’s eyes—and I’m not entirely sure that our system is enough to contain that kind of evil.  But it needs to be stopped, contained, adjudicated, and incarcerated.  And that’s where the core idea from the Shadow Keepers comes from.  One small incident that stuck with me.  One short moment that sparked the writer’s question of “what if” years and years down the road.

—

When Blood Calls: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt of When Blood Calls. View a book trailer. Read JK Beck’s Blog. Follow her on Twitter.

Is the perfect protagonist perfect? Because we all love heroes: Chiseled of chin and muscle, right in act and deed, easy to admire, always there when the chips are down and the forces of good have their backs against the wall. But in writing his debut fantasy novel Tome of the Undergates, author Sam Sykes learned a little something about perfect protagonists, something that changed the way he looked at his characters, in changed how he wrote his novel. I’ll let him tell you what he learned.

SAM SYKES:

When I first started writing Tome of the Undergates, it was my earnest belief that all protagonists acted exactly alike: their goals were noble, their methods were just, their affections were easy and anyone who didn’t agree with that was evil.  Reveling in these ideas, I finished the first iteration of Tome when I was eighteen.

And I had succeeded in writing a very boring story.

It was only after I had read it and realized it read like every other adventure story that I started asking why any of these characters were doing anything they were doing.  Why would anyone chase the noble goal when it’s difficult to reach?  Why would anyone take the high road when it’s so much easier to play dirty?  Why would anyone seek another person’s love and assume they’d get it right away?

People are messy, complicated creatures.  People in extraordinary situations are extraordinarily messy and complicated.  Things do not get any simpler when demons and magic are involved and that was what guided me in writing Tome of the Undergates.

The story wasn’t about monsters or quests or magic or mythologies anymore; those came as a byproduct of the characters.  At that point, I knew that I still wanted to write a fantasy, I still wanted to write about adventurers, but I wanted to write about people doing things in a manner that fit actual human behavior.

The end result?

A band of adventurers who had started, when I was seventeen, as masters of their crafts bound by their respect for each other, their desire to save the world and ultimately do good was dead.  Long dead.

In their place I found broken people: loathsome, opportunistic, easily-frustrated, occasionally-incompetent and frequently racist.

I found a priestess not convinced that Gods didn’t hate her, a wizard who abandons all the wisdom of his craft in a desperate bid for attention, a noble savage who at once wants to kill himself and is terrified to die, a wild woman who would dearly love a world where she could easily embrace a genocidal doctrine but can’t stop feeling sympathy for her ancestral enemy, a man desperately trying to cling to the idea that everyone gets a second chance despite his knowing that no such thing exists and a young fellow slowly going mad with his own desires.

There was no more common moral code to hold them together.  In fact, there was little reason they didn’t turn on each other at that very moment.  Some people have found this to be an issue in Tome, and I’m not quite sure I fully understood them myself when I started.

But I learned more about them as I wrote them.  I know this sounds like a traditionally cryptic thing a writer says to make his craft sound mystifyingly complicated, but it’s apt in this case.  I began to realize that these people were not normal.  And moreover, I began to realize I didn’t want normal anymore.  There is no such thing as a normal person.  They do not exist and I didn’t want to write about those fictional normal people.

I wanted to explore people who could hate each other and hate the idea of being apart worse.  I wanted to explore people who had a difficult time coming to terms with what they were supposed to think and what they knew.  I wanted to learn about people whose sole commonality was their fear.

It occurs to me that I may have just described The Breakfast Club, but bear with me a bit as I finish this.

Tome of the Undergates is about broken people trying their damnedest to cope with each other and themselves.  It’s about adventurers as they would act if they were human and not tropes.  It’s about a world that makes such people that can be bound together only by their own self-loathing and what they find in each other to keep going.

Tome of the Undergates is a story about people.

All head-eating demons, crotch-stomping and frank discussions of mutilation are purely side benefits.

—-

Tome of the Undergates: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt here. Visit Sam Sykes’ blog. Follow him on Twitter.

Not every choice an author makes for his or her characters seems all that important when the choice is made — a small character note here, a little personality tic there — but as the story unfolds, the “small choice” made earlier can magnify in importance. Nancy Werlin encountered this fact in the writing of her latest novel Extraordinary, when an almost arbitrary decision about the background of her character blossomed into something, well, extraordinary. Werlin explains below.

NANCY WERLIN:

“Even good ideas [can] feel ‘thin.’ [But] in the tension between two story ideas you can often find the creative stimulus that leads to a story.”
–Orson Scott Card

I believe this quote describes how Extraordinary happened, even if my process was less than deliberate. Two unrelated ideas came together:

• Idea #1 – Wicked, especially the song “For Good” from the musical.
• Idea #2 – A Jewish heroine for a fantasy novel.

Originally I’d have said #1 was the “big” idea. There I was, watching the musical Wicked (from the novel by Gregory Maguire, musical adaptation by Stephen Schwartz, with book by Winnie Holzman). We’d gotten to the penultimate scene where Glinda and Elphaba sing their goodbye duet:

Like a stream that meets a boulder
Halfway through the wood
Who can say if I’ve been changed for the better?

I was in tears before they reached “Because I knew you, I have been changed for good.” For me, the play had gone beyond entertainment and arrived at that ultimate aim of all art: raw emotional truth.

Wicked and “For Good” made me want to try to write a novel that would go to that same core place. It would be about an enormously important friendship between two teenage girls, one more pivotal than a romantic love affair. This friendship would test both girls to their limits, and would force them to grow, not just into maturity, but into better selves than they could ever have imagined becoming alone.

For this to work, I felt, only a fantasy landscape would do.

Also, full disclosure. I wanted to repair what I saw as a tiny flaw in Wicked: in my view, Elphaba gave Glinda a lot more than she got in return. (And here I’ll reference Holly Black about all art being in conversation with previous art.)

But once I began working on my novel about the two teenage girls, one human, one fey, and of their friendship gone dangerously wrong because of some secret (what secret? I’d figure that out later), I had the “little” idea.

“Why can’t my human girl be Jewish?”

It was a hasty, almost thoughtless choice. I expected my human girl, Phoebe, to be largely secular in her outlook, and so I didn’t anticipate that her religious background would affect the story much. Truly, all I was thinking about was making some room at the table for girls who, like me as a teenager, loved reading fantasy but sometimes wondered wistfully why there was never anyone like them in it.

But then, as I worked, I discovered that the decision had put me into a strange place of vulnerability and fear, for reasons that I only later began to understand (see Michael Weingrad’s Spring 2010 essay, “Why There Is No Jewish Narnia,”).

And so a second and thoroughly emotional choice quickly followed: “I’ll not only make Phoebe Jewish, I’ll make her a Rothschild! I’ll make her a member of the most storied Jewish family in modern history!”

I wanted to protect her, I now see. It was pure instinct, because she was going where Jews didn’t go, and where they were—it seemed to my subconscious, which was suddenly demanding to be in charge—not known, not understood, and certainly not welcome.

And then my plot and my characters screeched off in a direction I would never have predicted, and Phoebe’s heritage gave me the answer to the pivotal question “what secret?” that I had taken on faith that I would somehow find as I wrote.

I hope you’ll judge for yourself how it all worked out.

—-

Extraordinary: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Visit the book’s Web site. View the trailer. Visit the blog devoted to Werlin.

The writing process is romanticized, but the fact of the matter is that when ideas drop into a writer’s head, they don’t always choose the most momentous of times to do so — even when the idea is a profound one. You can have an idea good enough to write a book about when you’re folding socks. And to prove that point, here’s Elizabeth Scott, who found herself having a key realization of her latest novel Grace whilst deep in the throes of laundry. Hey, you take inspiration when it comes. Scott gives you the freshly-washed details.

ELIZABETH SCOTT:

I got the idea for Grace from a dream.

I know, how cheesy can I get? But I did. I dreamed of girl, sweating on a slow train, and she–

Well, then I woke up.

And, to be honest, I went back to sleep hoping to dream of a vacation. Or Fritos. Either one would have worked!

But instead, I dreamed of the girl–and now I knew her name was Grace–again. And there was someone, a guy, with her.

I woke up as she realized who he was, became terrified, and then I sat there, stunned and thinking, “What is this?”

I wrote it all down in the notebook I keep by my bed, handwriting slobbing all over the page (I’m not the neatest writer normally, and the middle of the night? Not my time!), and then put it aside.

Why?

A girl on the run? A girl seeing a guy who scared her? The train thing was different, and I had written down “sand, endless, hot sand,”–but what was that? How was that a story?

It came to me when I folding socks, of all things.

Grace is billed as a dystopian novel but it isn’t. It’s story of what was, what is, and what I’m–sadly–afraid will always be.

It’s a story about a girl who’s spent her life training to die, and what happens when she decides she doesn’t want to.

It’s a story about running for your life when you have no options. When you can’t run, but must crawl.

It’s a story about what drives someone to believe that killing people is a good thing. About a world where it’s okay for a teenager to kill people as long as it’s for the “right cause.”

It’s about how there are places–in the past, in the now, and, I think, in the future–where that has happened. Is happening. Will happen.

It made me wonder: who sees a child and thinks, “Yes, this will do for death.”

What sort of world is that?

Ours. And hers.

As Grace’s story unfurled for me, I wrestled with that and with finding a way to understand how someone could believe they had to die–and how they could come to not want to.

It turns out that believing you have to die is chillingly easy. Give someone no choice, give someone a belief system that stresses death as an honor, and there you go.

And if you chose not to die, like Grace does, you don’t just run for your life. You run from yourself. From why you failed. From everything and everyone you know because you are a traitor.

I wanted to know why this happens, and you know what?

I ended up not knowing. Belief is something that we all come to on our own, and that forms all of us in different ways.

What I did learn?

Death isn’t the answer.

But sometimes, in some places–then, now, and the future–it is. I don’t like that, but I think it’s important to see it. And more than that, to ask Why?

Why and what can make you believe that your death is worth more than anything else? And what happens if you somehow see your future, your death–and want more in a world that doesn’t offer it?

I don’t know if Grace provides any answers, but it made me ask a lot of questions.

It made me think about the will to die, and the will to live.

Which one matters more?

The answer seems easy, but it isn’t, and that’s what Grace made me see, and I’m glad I stayed with that dream. With that girl on that train.

With what I realized she’d done. What she believed.

And how, after all of it, she’d taken the biggest step of all.

She’d chosen her own path.

—-

Grace: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt (click on the cover of the book). Read Elizabeth Scott’s blog. Follow her on Twitter.

Do you remember what you were like when you were a kid? You think you do, of course, but do you really? After all, it’s been a while for most of us. For author A.R. Rotruck, the question had relevance: in creating her new book, Young Wizard’s Handbook, she was aiming to inform and entertain an audience of young people, so making that connection to her younger self seem to be a good way to proceed. Did she raise her younger spirit? And how did the younger self guide her? Let’s find out.

A.R. ROTRUCK:

One piece of writing advice I’ve heard is that you should write a book that YOU would want to read.  When I was working on Young Wizards Handbook: How to Trap a Zombie, Track a Vampire, and Other Hands-On Activities for Monster Hunters, I decided to write the book that a ten-year-old me would not only want to read, but would treasure as my favorite book.  That became my focus, or “big idea,” when working on the book: what would the ten-year-old me and kids like her want to read?

When she wasn’t reading, the ten-year-old me (we’ll call her “Tamie”) spent a lot of time playing in the woods and making crafts.  For all the books she read, she never found one that would help with this particular hobby.  Most of Tamie’s ramblings involved imagining various fantasy scenarios; grand quests and adventures.  Tamie made a burlap sack to carry into the woods because it seemed like something the fantasy version of Tamie (maybe call her Fatamie?  No, that’s getting a bit ridiculous.) would carry.  It was bulky and scratchy, but it also, to Tamie’s ten-year-old brain, seemed authentic.  Tamie would cobble together bits and pieces of crafts from books on Native American and colonial/pioneer folk art.  Tamily only had one children’s book in this genre; the rest of the crafts were far too advanced for a ten-year-old.  With Young Wizards Handbook, I wanted to write a book for the children like Tamie: fantasy fans who want to make things to help their imagination come alive with physical tools.

I envisioned Young Wizards Handbook as a scouting guide for the fantasy world.  What would a young wizard interested in monster-hunting need to know?  What activities would prepare a wizard-in-training for a career in monster-hunting?   I researched scouting guides and modeled many of the activities in YWH after them and even got a few ideas from some guides.  The monster-hunting pack came from a line in my old Girl Scout manual that “you can make a backpack out of old jeans.”  No instructions were provided, so I developed my own.  Tamie would have really liked that one, as denim is a lot less scratchy than burlap and a backpack is easier to carry than a sack.

I wanted all the activities in the book to be something that a child in our world could either create or play with to help bring the imagination alive.  Games, crafts, recipes: all of it had to be things that a child could do.  All materials had to be readily available and, if possible, inexpensive.  This created some challenges, such as how to explain something that is typically not found in a fantasy world, like aluminum foil, that is an easy to find and easy to use craft material in our world.  I knew that Tamie would not like finding aluminum foil mentioned in a fantasy book, so I HAD to invent something that would make it palatable to fantasy sticklers like Tamie.  The challenges gave rise to some really fun ideas to write, such as how the great wizard Alum Foilbach created a spell for “thin metal.”

While there are plenty of things for kids to do in Young Wizards Handbook, the activities are only about half of the book.  This book was to also be a field guide to monsters.  As I was writing the book for Mirrorstone, I had to make the information I provided about monsters concur with other Mirrorstone books, such as Practical Guide to Monsters and even the Wizards of the Coast Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manuals.  I noticed that a lot of scouting guides use recurring symbols and bits of information, so I came up with the “Sight, smell, and sound” identifiers for each monster.  That was a fun mix of both imagination and researching the monsters as, while most of the monster books would be fairly detailed about what a monster looked like, they didn’t always mention sounds and description of odors were very rare.  I didn’t just want this to be a book of activities that one could use when pretending; I wanted the book itself to conceivably be a tool that Tamie would take to the woods and consult when pretending to hunt monsters.

Other information I thought wizards hunting monsters would need was basic survival skills.  Tamie loved camping so I added basic survival information that works in pretty much any world, such as how to construct a quick tent.  One part of the book that I admit is lacking as a scouting guide is the section on “how to keep warm.”  Normally, that section would have instructions on how to construct a fire.  However, as this book is intended for kids just out having fun for an afternoon, likely without adult supervision, I opted NOT to include instructions on how to make fire and instead encouraged wizards to use a “warming spell” (and thus encourage kids to use their imaginations).

When the book was finished and I had a chance to see the final copy, I fell in love with it.  If I ever get a time machine, I’m traveling back in time to give this to Tamie so she can make a monster-hunting pack instead of carrying a rough burlap sack, dry some fruit to take on her adventures, and construct a lantern to keep away the monsters when it’s time to sleep.

—-

Young Wizard’s Handbook: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Visit the author’s LiveJournal. Follow her on Twitter.

Anthologies are over the place (for which writers are grateful, because, hey –someplace to send those short stories), and just as every novel has a genesis, so too does every anthology have a small nugget of inspiration… followed by the slog of actually getting the damn thing out. Nick Mamatas, co-editor of the new Haunted Legends horror anthology, is here to give you an editor’s-eye view of the anthology-building process, from idea to completion, and what it really takes to put out these story collections so many of us love so well.

NICK MAMATAS:

For many a horror writer, there is no holiday season quite so wonderful as Halloween. The trees turn skeletal and the nights long, the lawns of the neighborhood are decorated with plastic and latex spectacles, candy gets somewhat more interesting, and for about six weeks bookstores even pay attention to the genre. For this horror writer, though, Halloween is just tedious. Horror movies aren’t scary, gross costumes and props make me roll my eyes (and often smell funny), and little on this planet is more annoying than someone who thinks he or she is “edgy” because Halloween is a favorite holiday. Yes, all sorts of six-year-old girls rocking pink princess outfits every October 31st are just as edgy. Also, part of my Halloween problem can be found in bookstores—as horror fiction is a hard sell, many stores instead stock volumes of regional “true” ghost stories and local legends for their seasonal displays.

There’s one or more such book for every two-stoplight town and stretch of river. Some of the stories are less regional than universal—every dogleg road has a phantom hitchhiker, there isn’t an old lake in America not filled with the tears of an Indian princess. The better titles offer a bit of local color and photography, though most pictures therein are accompanied by breathless captions that confuse lens flair or dust with the “orbs” that appear in haunted graveyards when believers show up to take snapshots. That’s the major issue with these books of “true” ghost stories; with the very occasional exception (e.g., the wonderful Joseph A. Citro) they’re almost always written by credulous weirdoes. Despite the low quality of this subgenre, the books keep on selling, at least for a month and a half every year.

That was on my mind in the beginning of 2007 when I received a letter from the Horror Writers Association, a group of which I was then a member. They were putting out a mass call for pitches for a new HWA-branded anthology. Years ago, the HWA had a number of anthologies edited by legendary figures such as Peter Straub and Ramsey Campbell, but with horror in the doldrums the group was ready for any bright ideas. Mine was simple enough: regional ghost stories/legends written by real writers instead of by the neighborhood kook. We’d call it Haunted Legends. It had a lot of commercial possibilities: major presses publish ghost story books, as do the larger independent and regional houses. If it wouldn’t sell as fiction, we could position the book as non-fiction. And it would fit with those front-of-store dumps that so annoyed me every year.

However, the HWA had a problem with the pitch: I wasn’t famous. (Apparently the group’s publication committee thought only famous people would have good ideas.) Could I find a co-editor? A famous co-editor amongst the members of the Horror Writers Association? Actually, given the number of famous editors in the HWA, this was very easy and I immediately wrote to the best, and indeed, the only sane choice—Ellen Datlow. She was pleased to sign up.

In the end, we didn’t publish Haunted Legends under the HWA aegis. After the HWA, its agent, and its book packager took their cuts, Ellen and I would have been working for the sort of money one more typically makes by stealing the tip jar from a flaming Starbucks.  The HWA has done very well with the other idea that had been developed from that initial call for pitches: the humorous horror anthology Blood Lite. Ellen took the concept to Tor and after the usual delays, we had a deal.

We wanted Haunted Legends to not only feature stories of the highest quality, but to offer stories of all sorts and from around the world. Ellen Datlow’s Rolodex was more than sufficient to guarantee the best stories by the best writers, but to make sure no scary rock was left unturned—and because of a little promise I made to myself when I first started submitting short stories for publication a decade ago—I opened Haunted Legends to unsolicited submissions. I also decided to solicit a few folks that may not be known to readers of horror or ghost stories; experimentalist Lily K. Hoang and the mainstreamish fantasist Carolyn Turgeon were two of the writers I was thrilled to tap.

Reading slush was an experience that revealed certain trends. At around the same time we opened for submissions, I announced that I was moving to California to take a job editing Haikasoru, VIZ Media’s imprint of Japanese SF and fantasy in translation. A few dozen submitters got the idea that Haunted Legends was a book of Japanese ghost stories. I received nine different stories about Hoichi the Earless alone. (We do have a story with a Japanese theme, Catherynne M. Valente’s “15 Panels Depicting the Sadness of the Baku and the Jotai”, but I didn’t need to read a million of ‘em on the way.)

We’d also expressed that we simply didn’t want recitations of local legends, but revisions of the same, a guideline many readers found sufficiently confusing that they just ignored it. And we got some email from cranks who insisted that “ghost stories” had to involve the spirits of deceased somehow bedeviling the living, and so what sort of morons were we to mention, oh, the Jersey Devil in our guidelines? The sort of morons editing our own book, thanks for asking.

In the end, after I shared about twenty-five stories with Ellen—some I liked, some just because the authors were known to us and I thought she should see them—we selected stories from Carrie Laben, John Mantooth, Steven Pirie, and Stephen Dedman for the book. With Dedman, a great writer of dozens of shorts with whom both Ellen and I had previously worked, we kind of slapped our foreheads and said, “Oh, we should have asked him in the first place!” but he was cool with gettin’ down in the slush, thankfully. Laben I’d published in Clarkesworld and was happy to see her work again in my mailbox. Mantooth was also familiar to me—I’d never bought one of his stories for the magazine, but his work always brightened my day and I’d tried to be encouraging in previous rejection letters. I was extremely pleased with “Shoebox Train Wreck.” Steven Pirie had managed to escape my radar entirely until I read his “The Spring Heel” (guess who that one’s about?) despite his publications in Black Static and other venues, so it was a great surprise to find. “This one’s full of whores!” I wrote to Ellen excitedly. “Oh boy!” she wrote back. A fifth story, Erzebet YellowBoy’s “Following Double-Face Woman”, came from Clarkesworld’s slush pile, which goes to show that sometimes editors reject stories based on “fit” rather than quality. YellowBoy’s story didn’t suit CW, but was perfect for Haunted Legends.

Then there were stories by the veteran writers—Ellen and I had little to do other than accept Ramsey Campbell’s “Chucky Comes to Liverpool.”  Joe R. Lansdale’s “The Folding Man” required no editing, just applause and a quick acceptance. We were also very happy to get stories by Gary A. Braunbeck, Kit Reed, Caitlin R. Kiernan and—dare I say those words loathed by anthology contributors everywhere?—many others.

One last treat: perceptive readers may have noticed the ongoing global economic crisis, so Tor will be releasing Haunted Legends simultaneously in hardcover (for collectors, libraries, and people who like to bludgeon others with books) and trade paperback (for the budget-conscious). And the book might even be on a table in the front of a bookstore or two. For me at least, Halloween just got a little happier.

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Visit Nick Mamatas’ LiveJournal. Follow him on Twitter.

Sheri Tepper is one of my favorite science fiction authors of the last double decade, for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that she’s perfectly willing to ask the inconvenient questions in her books, and in answering those questions, give you a story whose narrative you don’t always expect. I first encountered her with the planetary epic Grass (which along with its quasi-sequel Raising the Stones rank in my personal Top Ten of science fiction novels) and since then have kept coming back for more. So it’s with no small pleasure that I host her here today, to discuss her latest book The Waters Rising, and the ideas within. It’s clear she’s not yet done with the inconvenient (but necessary) questions.

SHERI S. TEPPER:

The big idea of The Waters Rising is the same idea The Author has been agitating about ever since she worked for CARE and then for PPWP (Planned Parenthood-World Population, which it was at the time) as a young woman.

It’s a simple idea: “Hey, people, the world is drowning . . . in people.”

Beating a dead horse: Nobody’s listening.

OH-kay. Can’t talk about that. Several religions say we can’t have too many people. Male egos (some female, too) says can’t have too many. “Lookee me, how prolific I am, world’s biggest mommy, eight at a whack, just like a mommy jack rabbit.” Instinct says can’t have too many. This was a very good instinct back when every cave held a saber-toothed tiger or a cave bear or something more deadly. Back when infections had no medications, wounds had no sutures, breaks had no casts. Back when three or four out of five humans died before they grew up. Back when creatures ate people more than the other way around. Not such a good idea now.

Talking to the wind: Nobody’s listening!

OH-kay. Leaders make pronouncements: We have to feed generations yet unborn! We have to provide for generations yet unborn! We (who?) have to do this and have to do that for generations yet unborn! Leaders are paid to say these things by the housing industry (build, build, build), the oil industry (drill, drill, drill), the all-everything-all-the-time industry (more, more, more), all for the generations yet unborn –

Just try to drown out that noise! Nobody’s listening!

OH-kay. So, generations yet unborn will inherit a barren. A warren. A world devoid of trees. A world devoid of animals. Protein grown in factories. Plastic made in factories. People living like termites in termite hills. A world in which the ocean is poisoned, in which there are no fish. ALL RIGHT! Talk about oceans. Not a flood of people, because nobody’s listening, but a flood of water. Talk about people being the prey instead of the predator. Talk about a Big Kill. About what life was like after a Big Kill. Talk about threats to the human race . . . a natural killer, the flood. An unnatural killer . . . one left over from the time before. Plus a few villains because human nature hasn’t really changed.

And a character from a time before. At the end of A Plague of Angels, Abasio, the male lead, was left alone and grieving with only his horse for company. That, too, was a world made barren by a time before. The Author had not intended him to be alone. She had thought he deserved to have his partner, but Charlie Brown (of Locus), who was visiting at the time, read the manuscript, and Charlie said she had to die. The Author did not like this at all, but what can one do when confronted with superior knowledge and firepower? The Author has felt guilty about this ever since.

So, bringing Abasio and his horse back will be a kind of expiation. They fit very nicely into that sort of world, and we let the waters rise and see what happens, with only one very definite end in mind: this time we will not kill off his beloved. The “we” referred to is the Author and the characters, because once they are on the screen—they appear, as on a TV or movie screen, in a setting and the Author’s immediate task is only to record where they are and what they are doing—they do things that they want to, even when the Author has not foreseen any such thing! They get involved with other characters; they develop their own points of view, they see fit to argue and scream and refuse to do certain things (usually something agents or editors think they should do) and eventually have a decisive voice in the matter. In the Author’s head, this character was born and reared in a certain fashion, and when this character must suddenly do something entirely different than his birth and upbringing would lead one to expect (which birth and upbringing exist, mind you, only in the Author’s head and sometimes tenuously at best), the Author feels obliged to rebirth them. Rebirthing is not done at the keyboard, obviously. It is done while sulking. In bed. Reading something else. (People unfamiliar with the Author may or may not know she is a longtime sufferer with arthritis, now having more titanium than bone in her body, so sulking in bed is not as irresponsible as it might appear in a younger and more elastic person who might choose instead to get drunk or have a fit of depression. The Author in general eschews depression as a waste of time, since she doesn’t have much more of it left.)

But of course, each rebirth is only the beginning of other problems, because the characters have to decide where the water is coming from. How high it will get. What will happen to people when it gets there. The answers are always surprising! “My heavens,” says the Author to herself, “how did that happen?” One cannot argue. It did happen. It’s right there, in black and white.  Several characters are in agreement that it did happen, and it seems fairly logical. Author in her role as inventor. But, the solution to each problem changes everything else. This summons the Author in her role as mediator. So, that, at the end, when everything is tied together fairly sensibly, the story goes forward and back, millennia, perhaps, in both directions involving unforeseen octopi and sea bottom castles and how wolves may learn to talk.

The last role is agent and editor, of course. Trying to make it all flow sensibly and of a piece. In this, thank God, we are helped by our real agents and real editors at publishing houses who are not occupied by the entire cast of characters and who are instead people of infinite tact, wisdom, and ability.

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The Waters Rising: Amazon|Barnes&Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt from the novel. Visit Sheri S. Tepper’s biography page.

It’s one thing in fiction to change a little bit of history to fit your story plausibly inside it. But what happens when you change whole, vast chunks of it? On one hand, you’ve got the “alternate history” genre. But on the other hand, you may have a voice whispering in your ear, asking you if you really think you’re going to get away with that, when everyone knows how things really went. Michele Lang knows of this whisper, because in writing Lady Lazarus (which recently garnered a coveted starred review in Booklist), it was right with her the whole time. Here’s how she’s dealt with the whisperer.

MICHELE LANG:

I first read the poem “Lady Lazarus” as a literal-minded freshman in college. I knew it was supposed to be an extended metaphor for Sylvia Plath’s suicide attempts and her fraught relationship with her father, but I preferred to read it straight up, as a revenge anthem of a Jewish woman who returns from the dead to kill the Nazis who had murdered her.

I liked my interpretation way better. I mean, how can you read lines like these:

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air

And not consider the possibilities for mayhem? Even better, what if this girl, who could die and die again, had some way to stop the murderers before they killed anybody else?

I wanted to write that story for myself, wanted it bad. My parents are both Holocaust survivors, and to me the poem “Lady Lazarus” was an exercise in fantasy, the ultimate “what if.”

But such ponderings are fraught with danger. As an interviewer pointed out to me recently, the Holocaust is the third rail of historical fantasy — a million volts of energy humming there, don’t touch it or you’re dead.

I’ll be honest with you. I was afraid to write this book. The seed of this story stayed dormant in my mind for many years. It took a lot of writing, and a lot of living, before I had the guts to try to write Lady Lazarus.

Before that, I did everything I could to avoid touching that third rail. Magda Lazarus, the girl who refused to stay dead, kept following me as I moved to Boston, to Buffalo, to Connecticut. As I developed my writing muscles, I tried to satisfy her with a story set in a different, less challenging place. I tried writing her story set on another planet (really!). In contemporary New York. And all the while, she kept whispering, “No. You know where I belong.”

I didn’t want to go there, the nightmare country where my parents come from.  But Magda Lazarus herself insisted. I didn’t pick this story, it followed me into the dark alleys of my mind and pinned me against the wall. It wouldn’t let me go until I wrote it.

My book Lady Lazarus is essentially about the power of our individual choices to change our lives, and consequently the world.  To write Magda Lazarus’s story, I had to choose to face my own fears head on, and imagine a world in which magic could serve as a countervailing force against evil.

At bottom, I was afraid to write about the war because it wasn’t my story to tell. I didn’t want to hurt my family by leaping across the wall of fire they had passed through at such a cost to survive.

In the end, I had to weigh my fears against the raw need to tell this story. And the story won. I resolved to write this book if I could, and to fix my commitment I told someone in my family, someone I adore, my decision to write Lady Lazarus.

“You can’t write about that!” this beloved person instinctively said. “You can’t stop the whole war. Maybe you can save a little village, but you can’t stop what happened. It’s wrong. You can’t.”

At the time, I couldn’t articulate the well-thought out considerations of alt-hist pros like Debra Doyle and Jim Macdonald (see the Making Light post that Scalzi linked recently).  People in other quarters have implied to me that a topic like World War II is sacred, and a mere genre writer like myself should not sully the real-life history with my imaginings.

But what about Sylvia Plath? Quentin Tarantino and Inglourious Basterds? This is my third rail, dammit, and I have the same right to hit those million volts as everybody else.

I wish I’d had the presence of mind to say to this dear family member, “The question ‘what if’ is the basis of all creative thought. My imagining a different past doesn’t trivialize what actually happened, it explores the ways in which all of us can transcend, or not transcend, the evils that beset us. Asking ‘what if?’ doesn’t negate the lives of Grandpa Gyula, Grandma Tosca, and all the others. It is a way to honor them.”

But none of these noble sentiments came up in our conversation. It’s as simple as this: saying “you can’t” to a writer is like waving a red cape in front of a bull. And Magda Lazarus, the apparition who haunted me and who wouldn’t stay dead, insisted I choose to follow her into the fire.

And, well, here we are. Here she is.

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Read an excerpt from the novel. Follow Michele Lang’s blog. Michele Lang on Twitter.

I’ll make a confession here: I was the only person in my class at my very-competitive college prep high school who did not take calculus. Which is a fact which bothered the calculus teachers immensely – the would come up to me and warn me I was throwing my life away, or at least my chances to attend a good college, by not taking the course. The irony of course is that I went on to write science fiction, a genre which benefits from a knowledge of calculus. The sound you hear is the teeth of those teachers, grinding away.

So it was with some considerable interest that I came to science writer Jennifer Ouellette’s new book The Calculus Diaries: How Math Can Help You Lose Weight, Win in Vegas, and Survive a Zombie Apocalypse. Like me, she was a math class refusnik; like me, she writes in a field where a knowledge of calculus comes in handy. How does she handle coming to calculus at a later point in her life? I’ll let her tell you.

JENNIFER OUELLETTE:

There’s an episode of the TV series House that opens with a group of students taking the AP calculus exam. A boy collapses and is rushed to the hospital. When Dr. House is told of the circumstances of the boy’s collapse, he quips, “That’s the way calculus presents.”

So calculus has a formidable reputation. I have always been among those non-mathematical sorts who viewed it with trepidation and preferred to keep a safe distance. And I’m not alone: a large chunk of the population finds math in general, and calculus in particular, intimidating and distasteful. I have friends who break into a cold sweat at the sight of a simple algebraic equation. The fact that math has its own language — a sort of symbolic secret code to which only a select few hold the key – only makes matters worse.

So I figured it was time someone wrote a book about calculus from that perspective, and who better to do so than a former math-phobic English major who went on to become a science writer specializing in physics? Most popular math books are written by people who already love the subject and are quite knowledgeable – i.e., actual mathematicians.

The problem is, they’re so familiar with the topic that they forget what it’s like to know nothing. The most basic concept can be a challenge for a rank beginner. For instance, how do you explain what a mathematical function is to someone who doesn’t “speak math”? I can parrot the technical definition. But that doesn’t mean I fully understand the concept. 

Of course, this meant I had to actually learn calculus before I could write about it coherently. When I started, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Calculus proved a little over my head. Fortunately, my Spousal Unit is a physicist at Caltech. He helped me find real-world examples of calculus, and gamely answered all my pesky “why is the sky blue?” questions.  The result is The Calculus Diaries: How Math Can Help You Lose Weight, Win in Vegas, and Survive a Zombie Apocalypse. It’s less about teaching the nuts and bolts of calculus and more about turning the world around you into your mathematical playground.

We learned to shoot craps in a Vegas casino to demonstrate the calculus of probability. We indulged in the rides at Disneyland, and I learned about freefall and parabolic curves, and how to apply vector calculus to Space Mountain. I went surfing in Hawaii to learn about sine waves and the Fourier transform, and our house-hunting expedition turned into a multivariable optimization problem.

I even chatted with an epidemiologist about how to use differential equations to analyze an outbreak of zombification. (Worse-case scenario: the zombies wipe us out in four days, unless we go all Zombieland on their undead butts and kill them as fast as possible. So now you know. Read the appendix and you’ll also know the derivation, and can impress your friends at parties.)

Writing the book also forced me to ask some deep questions about where my kneejerk rejection of equations originated. It would be easy to simply blame the patriarchy, but it’s far more complicated than that. It’s true that there is lingering gender bias about women in math – and lots of women have the horror stories to prove it – but my own negative reaction stemmed from a weird form of Imposter Syndrome.

Even though I’d done well in my math classes and earned top grades in high school, deep down I knew I was just memorizing patterns and didn’t really understand the subject deeply. I was terrified that my ignorance would be discovered and I would be publicly humiliated as an academic fraud. Even though this never transpired, that fear colored my attitude towards math for much of my adult life; I avoided it like the plague.

I talked to lots of very smart people with varying degrees of math-phobia, and they all had one thing in common: an early negative experience with math that shattered their confidence and instilled a deep-seated fear and dislike of numbers. As one woman memorably described her feelings: “My initial reaction to the word ‘calculus’ is not unlike a caveman throwing rocks at the moon in ignorance and fear resulting in blind rage. There is no such thing as ghosts creeping up behind me on the stairs, but there is such a thing as a polynomial monster, and it has hooked teeth and causes chronic yeast infections, I’m sure.”

The truth is, the Calculus Monster isn’t all that scary once you face it head-on. We all do some form of calculus all the time, without realizing it. A baseball outfielder has to estimate where the ball is likely to land after the batter gets a hit. Whether he knows it or not, his brain is calculating the trajectory of that ball, then sending a signal telling the outfielder where to place himself in order to make the catch. Lurking somewhere in that process is a calculus problem. Or two.

I think scientists have a valid point when they bemoan the fact that it’s socially acceptable in our culture to be utterly ignorant of math, whereas it is a shameful thing to be illiterate. We could all be just a little bit mathier. I hope my book will encourage others like me to give this much-maligned subject a second chance.

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The Calculus Diaries: Amazon|Barnes&Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read more about the novel here. Follow Jennifer Oullette’s blog. Jennifer Ouellette on Twitter.

Saving the world. Paying the rent. Are these mutually incompatible activities? Laura Resnick ponders this very subject as she discusses Unsympathetic Magic, the latest installment of her fantasy series featuring the quirky character Esther Diamond. And while it might seem at first blush that one have to prioritize these desires (after all, if one does not save the world, paying the rent becomes a moot point), Resnick makes a good argument why both are important in the end.

LAURA RESNICK:

I love juxtaposition. I love the salty-and-sweet flavor of peanut brittle, and the sinus-clearing heat of a spicy curry accompanied by the creamy coolness of raita. I love the close-to-laughter close-to-tears experience of a well-acted Chekhov play, and the mingling of today’s grief with yesterday’s joys that you get from a good funeral eulogy.

I also like a healthy dose of comedy with my drama, and a generous helping of life-and-death stakes with my farce.

Hence the ethos of my Esther Diamond urban fantasy series, of which Unsympathetic Magic is the newest release. When the brilliant cover artist for this series, the award-winning Daniel Dos Santos finished this cover, he told me that coming up with images that have the right combination of menace and comedy is the big challenge of illustrating these books. (And he keeps getting it just right. So hats off to Dan!)

Esther Diamond is a struggling actress in New York City who gets involved in supernatural adventures along with her friend Dr. Maximillian Zadok, a 350 year old mage whose day job is protecting the Big Apple from Evil. They are assisted in their activities by Nelli, Max’s inconveniently-large canine familiar; and they’re occasionally dogged, thwarted, or beaten to the punch by Detective Connor Lopez, a skeptical cop who would be Esther’s boyfriend if he weren’t so concerned about his growing conviction that she’s a deranged felon.

Esther’s vocation as an actress is similar to mine as a writer; she loves it, it’s the work she was meant to do, and she is fiercely dedicated to it. Like writing, acting is a highly competitive profession, a very unstable way to make a living, and often doesn’t pay that well. Consequently, while fighting Evil and confronting the forces of darkness, Esther is also always looking for work, making sure she can pay her bills (no mean feat in Manhattan!), and vexed about any circumstances that interfere with her ability to earn income or pursue her career.

And that’s an example of the sort of juxtaposition that I’ve enjoyed playing with in this series: While confronting supernaturally powerful adversaries and their rapaciously murderous plans, Esther Diamond has to give equal attention to holding down paying jobs, covering her rent, and watching her budget. These constant obligations characterize life as I have always known it, and since I don’t believe these responsibilities will disappear for me if I wake up tomorrow to discover I’m being menaced by zombies and a voodoo curse, I don’t make them magically vanish for Esther, either.

Thus, Esther is working at three jobs throughout Unsympathetic Magic. Her “real” job is acting in a guest slot on The Dirty Thirty, a TV show about corrupt cops which is widely loathed by the NYPD—including Lopez, as well as the cops who arrest Esther for prostitution one night in Harlem. (There is, as she assures Lopez when she asks for his help, a perfectly reasonable explanation for why she was assaulting strangers at midnight while dressed like a crack whore.) Her regular day job is working as a singing server at Bella Stella, a restaurant in Little Italy that featured prominently in her previous misadventure, Doppelgangster. And her other day job is teaching acting classes at the Livingston Foundation in Manhattan’s lovely old Mt. Morris Park neighborhood.

And while tracking down a mysterious sorcerer who’s using the dark side of voodoo magic to raise zombies, call up dark spirits, and terrorize Harlem by night, Esther makes sure she never misses a minute of work at any of her three jobs.

Pursuing her professional vocation, meeting her fiscal needs, and stomping Evil into the ground before it can swallow her city whole and cancel all auditions forever, in addition to trying to have a love life with her almost-would-be boyfriend (Detective Lopez), keeps Esther pretty busy.

Similarly, making sure that I find the comedy in stories about Evil, homicide, abduction, rapacious greed, and attempts to destroy the world as we know it keeps me pretty busy. The stakes in any story have to be high or there’s not much reason for a reader to get invested in it for 400+ pages; and in fantasy, the stakes are traditionally very high, i.e. the struggle between Good and Evil. So Esther Diamond’s action-packed adventures consist of fantasy drama with one more layer—the funny layer, the layer where absurdity is juxtaposed against menace, the mundane is juxtaposed against the earth-shattering, and the pettily irritating is juxtaposed against the truly terrifying.

Unsympathetic Magic attempts to bring together all of these elements and balance them against each other, while also adding a dash of sex appeal, some fun facts I’ll bet you never knew about traditional voodoo, and the dark stormy climax of a mid-August heat wave.

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Unsympathetic Magic: Amazon|Barnes&Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt from the novel. Follow Laura Resnick’s news page. Laura Resnick on Facebook.

Monsters: you know, those big, hairy and scaly things with the claws and teeth and the overwhelming desire to do nasty bad things to you? But then there’s Harry Connolly. No, he’s not a monster (I mean, as far as we know), but he has definite ideas about monsters, and what they should be – and what they don’t have to be. Explains himself, and how his thoughts on the subject inform his latest novel, Game of Cages.

HARRY CONNOLLY:

In The Philosophy of Horror, Noel Carroll nobly attempts to define the monster. To paraphrase him (in a way that would certainly make him cringe): a monster is a threatening and impure creature that violates the natural order as it’s defined by contemporary science.

“Threatening” is pretty straightforward. “Impure,” though, is more complicated. Monsters can be mixtures of things that do not belong together: man and wolf, living and dead, animal and machine. They can be incomplete: a living hand, a bodiless ghost. They also be magnified in size, like a giant shark, or in number, like a swarm of rats.

(And so on. It’s an  interesting book with much to quibble over. I think of it often when I’m planning a new novel.)

And while I don’t write horror (my agent says so), I do write thrillers about extra-dimensional beings who make incursions into our world to feed and reproduce. That means I need a monster for each book–maybe more than one–and being me, I wanted them to be original.

Now for a short but important digression: One thing that bothers me about modern monsters in fiction (aside from seeing the same ones over and over) is the reliance on creative choices designed to work in movies. I’m talking mainly about huge claws and teeth, usually accompanied by animal growls.

There’s a good reason for this–the sight of a gigantic jaw full of long, sharp teeth (another example of magnification) evokes a powerful subconscious fear response. Unfortunately, filmmakers have been one-up each other for decades, finally creating monsters that verge on the  ridiculous.

But fiction isn’t an image medium, so why do so many books try to copy movie monsters?

Once again, I was defining myself by what I didn’t want to do.

I decided to make the monster beautiful rather than ugly, and to have it inspire love instead of fear. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (inspiration to so much modern contemporary fantasy) had already shown that frenzied, irrational love could be scary as hell in “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” the episode where Xander Harris casts the love spell. But in this case, I wanted to replace romantic love with the love between human and pet.

And here I must tread carefully. Our good host has (I’ve learned not to say owned) several pets and one recently passed away. I offered my sincere condolences, but to be honest, the love between a human and a pet is mysterious to me. I grew up surrounded by pets–dogs, cats, snakes, fish, hamsters, guinea pigs–but once I moved out on my own I realized that, whatever feeling people get by sharing their homes with an animal, I don’t share it.

Intellectually, I know the feeling exists. Emotionally, I don’t understand it and maybe never will. That’s not meant to be a criticism, implied or otherwise; it’s simply an acknowledgement of one of the ways I’m different from most people.

And that’s the idea behind Game of Cages: a creature that could force you to love it so much you’d sacrifice everything for it. You’d give up your job, your friends, your life, your children just to be near it and care for it. Instead of magnifying its size, or its teeth and claws, I magnified the emotional connections it created until they became irrational and destructive.

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Game of Cages: Amazon|Barnes&Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt from the novel.Visit Harry Connolly’s blog. Follow him on Twitter.

Fiction can inspire those who read it to do new and even possibly noble things with their lives – but fiction can also be cathartic and transformative for the writer as well. While writing Children No More, author Mark Van Name discovered he wasn’t just trying to write an efficient page-turner, he was working on something that would make him confront parts of his own past… and work to change the future of some whose own pasts need healing.

MARK VAN NAME:

Novels begin for me like small leaks in a dam.  One idea shoots through, then another, then more and more, each one growing stronger until the dam vanishes beneath the water.  With Children No More, what came first was an image of my protagonist, Jon Moore, standing with a few other people, one of them a child, in front of a small army.  The child had until quite recently been a soldier. 

I knew I’d write the book the moment the image came to me. 

In addition to thinking about what would have brought Jon to that point, I also wanted to challenge myself to attempt things I hadn’t done in any previous books.  Other notions then rapidly added to the idea flood.

 Jon couldn’t fight safely with a child at his side, so I had to create a situation in which not fighting was better than fighting—even with armed soldiers threatening him and others dear to him. 

Jon is a classic American mono-myth character:  People ask for his help because of the skills he possesses and his willingness to use them, he deals with the problem at hand, and he leaves.  Leaving is vital, because the very traits, such as an aptitude for violence, that make characters such as Jon necessary also make them undesirable when the action is over.  When you work in conditions that are fundamentally horrific—think soldiers, cops, firefighters, relief workers, and many more—you pay dearly and are forever altered.  You witness things no one should have to see, PTSD settles into you like a black mist, and you never again fit into normal society as well as you once did. 

So of course I had to make Jon stay when the action was over. 

That decision immediately led to another problem:  How to sustain dramatic tension while writing about the post-action parts of the story.  The previous three novels in the series all had the reputation of being page-turners, and I wanted the same compelling reading experience in this one. 

Excellent.  Make him stay, make fighting the less attractive alternative, and make the book a page-turner. 

About that time, I remembered that Jon had been trained as a child to fight and to kill, but I’d never told the story of those times, so I’d do that, too. 

Even better.  Make him stay, make fighting the less attractive alternative, weave in a long story arc from a much earlier time, and make it a page-turner. 

As I was starting the book, my mind finally reminded me of something I’d managed up to this point in the process to ignore:  I had been trained as a child to fight and to kill. 

When I was ten, my most recent father died.  In an effort to give me some male influence, my mother signed me up for a youth group that trained boys to be soldiers.  Its intentions were good:  To use military conventions and structures to teach discipline, fitness, teamwork, and many other valuable lessons.  It accomplished many of those goals with me—but it also did many bad things.  Part of the problem was the time:  I joined in 1965, as the war in Viet Nam was gaining speed.  My first day, an active soldier on leave acted as our drill sergeant.  When he formed us up in ranks and started screaming at us, I began to cry.  He punched me so hard in the stomach that I fell and vomited.  He then ground my face into my own puke with his boot.  A few hours later, I saw my first–but not my last–necklace of human ears and learned the ethics of collecting them. 

I was a member for three years.  The first day wasn’t even in the top twenty worst days I had. 

The worst of those worst days was nothing, nothing at all, compared to what child soldiers around the world endure. 

Those years, though, gave me a strong understanding of their pain and a deep desire to help stop the practice of using children to fight wars. 

That desire led me to the last big idea of Children No More, one that hit me last February, when I was finishing the third draft of the book, about a month before I turned it in.  I was sitting at TEDactive, listening to people talking about changing the world, and I decided I wanted to do something concrete to aid child soldiers, something more than just write the book. 

After some research, I found a group, Falling Whistles, that was working to help rehabilitate and reintegrate child soldiers and other war-affected children, mostly in the Congo.  I partnered with them in a simple program:  I’m giving everything, including the advance, that I earn from sales of the hardback edition of the novel to them to help those kids.  So, when you buy the book, you’re not only getting a good read, you’re not only spending time on an important social topic, you’re also doing a good deed, because money is heading to those children. 

So, I had to make Jon stay, make fighting the less attractive alternative, weave in a long story arc from a much earlier time, make the book a page-turner, and spend months dealing with a lot of shit from my past.  I feared that I might not have the skills to do all that, and I definitely didn’t want to spend that many months in those dark places in my head. 

If I succeeded, though, I could help child soldiers in the real world. 

With a payoff like that, I had to try.

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Children No More: Amazon|Barnes&Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt from the novel.Visit Mark Van Name’s blog.

If you want to tell a story in a modern setting, you often have to look at the past to figure out how you got here and now — even if, in the here and now, you want to write a fantasy story. Mike Shevdon learned this in the course of writing Sixty-One Nails, in which a desire to tell a story set today meant he had to follow paths that lead to the past, in the process discovering, as Faulkner once memorably put it, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” Here’s Shevdon to explain why.

MIKE SHEVDON

When I started writing Sixty-One Nails, I wanted to write fantasy set in the real world – the world of shopping malls, CCTV cameras and mobile phones. I wanted to create a feeling that if you were quick and observant enough, you might see something quite extraordinary. I wanted magic in the now.

This is easy to say, but it immediately spawns a host of questions. Where is the magic? Who’s doing it and what are they using it for? Most of all, why don’t we know about it? After all, if people were able to do magic, it would be obvious, right? We’d be able to go into stores and buy it.

As I began researching the novel I realised how little people actually see. So much of modern life is about attracting your attention to adverts or warnings, that we routinely block out anything that isn’t shouting for our attention. It occurred to me, therefore, that it wouldn’t take very much to be completely unnoticed – not invisible, just not seen. I began to postulate that there could be another race of beings living alongside humanity, unseen by most people; the creatures of folk-tales and faerie stories. What if they existed and were part of our world, but we just didn’t notice them?

That spawned a whole new set of questions. If they exist, why aren’t there any records of them? Where are the fossil remains? Why has no-one photographed them? Why don’t they show up on CCTV or trigger burglar alarms? Where do they live? What do they eat?

I started reading and researching English folk-lore and discovered layers of stories like sedimentary rock, with the oldest stories often revealing more ominous themes. The Victorians gentrified fairies and gave them flower petal hats and mushroom houses to live in – Barbie for the nineteenth century – but before that there were other stories with a darker tone.

A number of themes emerged. The appearance and disappearance of creatures and people, often accompanied by a loss of time. Abduction and replacement of children with something older and not necessarily human is also frequent. Sex crops up, often as a single night of passion which seems like a dream once daylight returns. Deals and bargains occur, often to the benefit of the human party, only to fall apart when the human gets greedy or tries to take the source of the power for themselves. These themes fed into the imaginary world hidden beneath the surface of everyday life.

The questions became opportunities. Why are they so interested in sex, fertility and children? Don’t they have any children of their own? What if they live a very long time and therefore breed very slowly? What if they breed so slowly that a catastrophic failure in fertility goes unnoticed until it’s too late? What if they’re dying out? What if they’re the last of their kind? What happens when they discover that a union with humanity is fertile? What happens to the children of that union? Would the half-breeds be a welcome boon, the saving of a dying race? Or would they be gene pollution for an ancient and noble race?

What if it’s both?

As part of the research I started looking into the relationship between faerie-folk and iron. Its use as a talisman against magic is still present in today’s society, which is why horse-shoes hang over doorways and are used as symbols at weddings. It’s why you find iron nails embedded in the roof-beams of old houses and why blacksmiths are considered lucky.

While researching horse-shoes, I came across something unique. In London each year, in the Royal Courts of Justice, which is home to the Supreme Court, a ceremony is conducted as it has been since the year 1211. It’s the oldest legal ceremony in England barring the Coronation, and it involves the payment of two quit rents, a medieval mechanism allowing a person to ‘go quit’ and avoid an obligation to their baronial lord by making a payment or delivering a service in its stead.

The first of these quit rents is for wasteland called ‘The Moors’ in Shropshire, an area well-known for its ancient iron-workings, and it consists of two knives, one blunt and one sharp. The knives are made by a smith and presented to the Queen’s Remembrancer, an official who is also a senior master of the Royal Courts of Justice. The knives are tested in court to verify that the blunt knife will dent, but not cut, a hazel stick of one year’s new growth, and the sharp knife will cut clean through it.

The second Quit Rent is for a forge in Tweezers Alley, just off the Strand and not far from where the ceremony takes place. The forge is no longer there, but the rent is still paid. It consists of six iron horse-shoes and sixty-one nails, all of which are counted out each year in court. The horse shoes are massive, sized for a Flemmish war-horse, and are the oldest known to exist in England.

The ceremony takes place each autumn (I have been to several now) and next year will be the eight-hundredth anniversary. The question that occurred to me was why, after 800 years, though numerous different governments and changes of political system, an industrial revolution, a civil war and two world wars, was a ceremony involving horse-shoes and iron knives still being performed at the heart of the realm?

The answer to that question forms the core of Sixty-One Nails and inspired the title of the book. It is a tale of magic hidden in plain sight, of danger and darkness threading back through human history. It is the story of a man who has a heart attack on the London Underground and is revived by an old lady who tells him that the reason he is alive is that he is not entirely human. It is about his fight for survival, and his discovery of the magic hidden in the real world.

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Sixty-One Nails: Amazon|Barnes&Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt from the novel in .epub format. Here is the PDF.Visit Mike Shevdon’s blog. Follow him on Twitter.

I’ve been a follower of Matthew Hughes’ work since Old Man’s War and one of his novels had the same “birthday,” and that following has been rewarded with a series of works that think deeply on a number of issues, along with enough plot twists and turns to keep things interesting along the way. Template, his latest novel, is more of the same, with a panoramic view not only a series of worlds, but with a series of people and cultures, and the things that make each culture unique… or perhaps more accurately, uniquely corrupted. Here’s Hughes to tell you more.

MATTHEW HUGHES:

Not so long ago, if you called a man a liar, it was coats off and outside, pal. Go back a few generations farther, it was sabers or pistols at dawn.

Reputation was everything. “Give a dog a bad name and hang him” meant that when good standing was lost, all was lost with it. Better to die, or at least take a beating, than be branded a weasel.

Then something changed. Now people go on “reality” TV to lie and cheat their way to fame and fortune. And their blatant weaselhood doesn’t earn them public contempt. Instead, they become celebrities.

These aren’t secret agents who lie to defend their country. They’re doing it for the money and a chance to appear on Good Morning America. And every time there’s an audition, tens of thousands more rush forward and beg for a chance to connive and backstab their way to the top.

The thing that has changed, it seems to me, is that the role that honor used to play in our society has been supplanted by greed. I see it as a side-effect of the social transformation wrought by marketing in my lifetime: today we no longer think of ourselves primarily as citizens of a society, with rights and responsibilities; instead, we have become consumers in an economy whose only purpose is getting and spending. You know: “This means war! Everybody go shopping!”

In the old days, honor was an extension of pride, especially the esteem of our fellows. People might do something unworthy, but they sure didn’t want anyone to know about it. Our grandparents’ world was built around vanity. Our times are driven by avarice. We want it all, and we want everyone to know about it. And how we got it doesn’t much matter.

Being classically educated (well, I’ve read some really old books), I am aware that greed and pride are two of the seven deadly sins. I once got to wondering if there were societies based on any of the other five. For those of you who don’t read really old books, the rest of the seven big bads are: anger, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth.

Anger was easy: Sparta, Nazi Germany, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Envy? What about all those Asian societies where it is crucial not to lose face? And mini-cultures within our own sphere where keeping up with the Joneses is a driving force?

That’s about as far as I followed the train of thought, when I first had this insight eight or nine years ago. I was only looking for an idea that would underpin an 800-word guest column for the Vancouver Sun. Writing satirical op-eds was one way I kept my name in front of my client base back when I was a freelance speechwriter in British Columbia.

So I wrote a column on the vanity-avarice switch. Then, about a year later, I was working on a novel called Template. It would have been my second book for Tor if the first, Black Brillion, had sold more copies. Template is a Jack Vance-influenced, multi-planet space opera, about an Oliver Twistish orphan whose origins are shrouded in mystery and who has to go from world to world trying to find out who is trying to kill him and why.

I thought it would be cool to work in the idea that all societies are based on one of the seven sins, and take my wandering hero through exemplars. That turned out to be easier said than done. Pride, greed, anger and envy were no problem. The hero came from a world where every human interaction was an economic transaction; that took care of greed. He visited a society on Old Earth where money was considered disgusting but people knew their social worth precisely and he met a fellow from another world where people endured excruciating agony rather than say uncle.

To look at a society based on envy, I had him make a brief stop on a planet where everybody constantly sought to score one-upmanship points against each other without admitting it–passive-aggression as a way of life. A world built around anger was part of the dark secret behind the hero’s origins.

I didn’t want to do a world populated by overeaters (too easy). So I extended the meaning of gluttony beyond mere chomping and swilling to account for a society whose members tended to go overboard on whatever their interest were–imagine a world full of completist collectors.

Lust was a little trickier. Of course I toyed with the idea of a Hollywoodesque planet where sex appeal was the only determinant of status, but it kept coming out as buffoonish. In the end I opted for a sinister cult of decadent Old Earth aristocrats–a secret society called the Immersion–whose members vied “to encompass the full depth and breadth of amatory experience and thus enable themselves to break through to a new realm of consciousness they call Prismatic Abundance.”

With sloth, I confess I gave myself a pass. I will argue that any society based on doing as little as possible would soon die out or be supplanted by some invading culture that was powered by a more energetic iniquity.

All taken in all, I think I made the idea work well enough to support Template’s overarching theme: that there are all different ways to be a human being among other human beings, and that the most important thing in life is to discover where (and perhaps to whom) you belong, then go there and make the best life you can.

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Template: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s|Paizo

Read an excerpt from the novel. Visit Matthew Hughes’ news page.