Q: What is one of your favorite stories you have written and why?
Tag: interview
Short Story Interview: Zachary Jernigan
News
The stories, poems, and visual works for the 2014 Art & Words Show have been chosen, and I’m excited to see what everyone comes up with for the final show; view the selected visual works and the authors involved here. Here’s a sneak peak of some of the previously published written works:
- “The Rumination On What Isn’t” at Nature by Alex Shvartsman
- “Keith Krust’s Lucky Number” at Flash Fiction Online by Alisa Alering
- “The Scene” by Janet St. John
My short story “Old Boys” was also posted yesterday for free reading at The Colored Lens. The magazine issue is also available as an ebook for $2.99.
Zachary Jernigan is a 33-year-old, quarter-Hungarian, bald male. He has lived in Northern Arizona, with occasional forays into the wetter and colder world, since 1990. His favorite activities include: listening to 70s-00s punk and post-punk music, cooking delicious and often unhealthy foods, riding human-powered vehicles, talking and/or arguing about religion, and watching sitcoms.
During his rare periods of productivity, he writes science fiction and fantasy. NO RETURN, his first novel, comes out March 5th, 2013 from Night Shade Books. His short stories have appeared in a variety of places, including ASIMOV’S SCIENCE FICTION, CROSSED GENRES, and ESCAPE POD.
Visit him at zacharyjernigan.com.
- James Tiptree, Jr. / Raccoona Sheldon / Alice Sheldon
- Cordwainer Smith
- Carol Emshwiller
- Edward Bryant
- Ian McDonald
- Joanna Russ
- Elizabeth Hand
- Samuel Delany
- Roger Zelazny
- J.G. Ballard
Short Story Interview: Deborah Walker
Today I’m featuring an interview with Deborah Walker. Deborah publishes an insane amount of stories. It seems as though every time I log onto Twitter I see that she’s publishing a new story, a translation, or a reprint. She was also a participant in last year’s Art & Words Show (Submissions close tonight at midnight!). Here is her bio:
Deborah Walker grew up in the most English town in the country, but she soon high-tailed it down to London, where she now lives with her partner, Chris, and her two young children. Find Deborah in the British Museum trawling the past for future inspiration or on her blog: http://deborahwalkersbibliography.blogspot.com/Her stories have appeared in Nature’s Futures, Cosmos and Daily Science Fiction and The Year’s Best SF 18. Deb’s alter ego, Kelda Crich, has a story in the Bram Stoker nominated anthology After Death.
Q: Tell me about your short stories.
Sometimes they start life as a poem, so they can be a bit lyrical. A reviewer once said that I Got Rhythm: I liked that. They’re often about people (human or otherwise) discovering the previously unsuspected forces that shape their lives. Not so much problem solving, although occasionally my characters might get the urge to steal a jump gate.
Q: What is one of your favorite stories you have written and why?
It’s got to be ‘Aunty Merkel’. I shouldn’t really laugh at my own jokes, but it makes me smile to think of her, sitting in that church, being what she is.
Q: Are there stories you’ve published, perhaps earlier in your career, that you would change, if you could?
Nah! Je ne regrette rien. I’ve always written the best stories I could at the time. Getting published (forgive me) quite a bit has always spurred me on to write more stories.
Q: How do you write stories? Do you edit extensively? Do you write so much per day?
I edit extensively until the story is baked. And then when it’s done, it’s done. I aim for 20K finished words a month. I often don’t meet that target, but it gives me something to shoot for. I have a lot of time to write. Maybe six hours a day.
I have a bit of an unusual process.
Say, I want to write a story about umbrellas. Then I add another concept. Bones? Bone umbrellas sound interesting.
I then copy swathes of Wikipedia about umbrellas and bone into my working document.
As I write, I read the research, deleting it as I go.
The research leads me onto more ideas for the story.
I love, love, love Wikipedia. For instance, I don’t know much about umbrellas, but Wikipedia has got 5000 words on them.
Q: What themes and subjects do you find yourself drawn to? Why do you think you’re drawn to these subjects?
Umbrellas? No, I kid. Although I kinda want to write that Bone Umbrella story.
Stone circles and Venus figures recur. Free will crops up a lot. To know the future is to change it? Or is it? I’ve no idea why I write what I write. And I don’t want to know.
Unreliable narrators are my favourite. Especially the well-meaning, but clueless type. Also, I quite like liars.
Q: What do you have coming out, and what can you tell us about these stories?
I have a story coming out in The Journal of Unlikely Acceptances. This was a call for very bad flash. Luckily it’s under my pen name Kelda Crich so no one will know it’s me. (I’m cunning as a fox.)
Q: What are your favorite short story magazines?
The last page of Nature. You can read Nature’s Futures stories here. http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/arts/futures/
Q: Who are your favorite short story writers?
Philip K. Dick, D.H. Lawrence, H.P. Lovecraft, Ursula K. le Guin, Tanith Lee, Al Reynolds, Robert Silverberg, Liz Williams, Scott Wolven, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Eudora Welty.
Q: What are five of your favorite short stories (by other writers)?
Is ‘Call of Cthulhu’ a short? It’s kinda long. *checks Wikipedia* Yes, it is. (it’s actually around 12K words)
Short Story Interview: Ken Schneyer
News
My Art & Words Show is now open for submissions for the month of March; see this page for submission information. The show was also profiled in Poets & Writers.
My story “Mrs. Stiltskin” is out from Lakeside Circus.
Interview
This week I’m featuring a favorite short story writer, Ken Schneyer. I reviewed Ken’s story in my Clockwork Phoenix 4 review, and he’s also been a participant in my Art & Words Show, mentioned above. His story from Clockwork Phoenix 4 has just deservedly been nominated for a Nebula. Here’s his bio:
An actor and lawyer by training, a teacher by profession, and a writer by inclination, Ken Schneyer recently received a Nebula nomination for his short story, “Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer.” His fiction appears in Analog, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clockwork Phoenix 3 & 4, Daily Science Fiction, Escape Pod, Podcastle, and lots of other places. His complete bibliography resides at http://www.writertopia.com/profiles/KennethSchneyer#bibliography. He sold his first story in 2008, attended the Clarion Writers Workshop in San Diego in 2009, and joined the Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop in 2010. Born in Detroit, he now lives in Rhode Island with one singer, one dancer, one actor, and something with fangs. He can be found on Twitter, on Facebook, and at http://ken-schneyer.livejournal.com.
Q: Tell me about your short stories.
I think of myself as a science fiction writer, but I’ve produced as much fantasy as science fiction. Although some of them are comic, the majority are pretty sad or at least wistful. I get better at shorter word counts, where I can really brood over every syllable and punctuation mark. I’m often drawn to strange voicing, especially “found documents” stories where the narrator doesn’t know s/he’s a narrator.
Q: Do you notice any distinct differences between the themes and subject matter you’re drawn to in sci fi versus the themes you’re drawn to in fantasy, other than the obvious genre differences?
It’s more that certain narrative problems are easier to solve with one subgenre or the other. It’s easier to create an atmosphere of mystery and radical uncertainty with fantasy, because you can make up whatever rules fit the mood. In science fiction, everything is either understood or potentially can be understood. Science fiction, especially near-future science fiction, is better for forcing the reader to confront his or her own reality – this might happen, what are its consequences, what are your responsibilities in such a world? Pretty much all my comedy is science fiction rather than fantasy, as is most of my political fiction.
Q: What is one of your favorite stories you have written and why?
I like “Hear the Enemy, My Daughter” (Strange Horizons, May 6, 2013) because of its emotional and thematic complexity, its strong narrative voice, the personal & painful truths it contains, its ambiguous moral resolution, the quadruple-entendre in the title, and the fact that it makes me cry when I read it aloud.
Q: What were the circumstances under which you wrote “Hear The Enemy, My Daughter”?
In 2010, the year after Clarion, I ran a Kickstarter called “Are You the Agent or the Controller?” to fund the writing of six short stories that summer. The highest-paying backers got to give me a prompt for a story. My friend Cinthea Stahl, a screenwriter who is too clever for her own good, gave me the prompt “Marsupials are fierce warriors.”
The first draft of the story was called “The Sacred Band”, and focused a lot more on the alien Sheshash. But by the time it got to my writers group, it was clear that the core of the story was parenthood, the alienness of children, and the difficulty of unconditional love. That theme, combined with what Alex Jablokov called the “army composed of Mommy & Me play groups”, allowed me to juxtapose the horror of child soldiers with the limitations all parents feel in raising the young
Q: Are there stories you’ve published, perhaps earlier in your career, that you would change, if you could? Why?
Well, *sigh* all of them. I’m usually happy with my language, voicing, symbolism, theme, etc. – but plot is my weak point, and I always look back and imagine I could have made my protagonist less passive, could have created more decision points, could have ended more definitively. There’s one story (I’d rather not name it) where I let an editor talk me into major revisions that, I now realize, make it choppy and slightly incoherent. I wish I hadn’t done that.
Q: How do you write stories? Do you edit extensively? Do you write so much per day?
Because I’m a college teacher nine months out of the year, I work round the clock, and it’s hard to set up a regular daily writing regimen (although other profs don’t seem to have this problem; I ought to ask them what their secret is). I’m able to put away 500-1,500 words a day during the summer and term breaks, but in the fall and winter I have to resign myself to editing.
When I am able to write, I write even if there’s no story idea. Sometimes I’ll give myself a prompt and start banging out words. The first draft of my story for the Art & Words Show was written almost in a single sitting, with the drawing sitting in front of me, in sort of a waking dream. When I finished it, I wasn’t entirely sure that I was the one who wrote it. The same thing was true of “The Mannequin’s Itch” (The Pedestal #67 & the Toasted Cake podcast #46).
Other times I have a specific thing I want to accomplish, either an experiment in voicing or a particular emotional impact at the end, and I write towards them. John Irving once said that he always writes the end of his novels (and of each chapter!) first, and then writes toward them as if it were the harmonic resolution at the end of a musical composition. That works well for me – if I know the general direction in which I’m headed, I do better.
I usually let a first draft sit for several weeks, then read it and rewrite it based on my fresh observations; typically this is the moment where I realize what the actual theme is, and I revise to highlight it. The second draft then goes to my writing group (the Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop) or other beta readers, and I use their comments to craft the third draft. The third draft is sometimes major surgery, adding or deleting whole scenes or, more rarely, rewriting from scratch. Often there’ll be a fourth draft as well. At four drafts, though, I usually hit my “cosmic disgust” point where I have to send it out to markets or I lose all confidence in it.
Q: What themes and subjects do you find yourself drawn to? Why do you think you’re drawn to these subjects?
The themes of memory and loss come up over and over again; I think this is because I’m middle aged. There’s also a lot about love – romantic love, filial love, the conflicts that are part of love; I think this is because I’m forever working out what I believe about human relationships.
Q: What do you have coming out, and what can you tell us about these stories?
“Levels of Observation” just went online at Mythic Delirium last month (February 2014), and the Chinese magazine ZUI Found printed Geng Hui’s translation of “Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer”. I sold reprint rights to another story that I can’t talk about yet because the contract isn’t signed. I have three other stories currently under submission; if things go the way they usually do, I’d bet those stories will come out sometime in late 2013 or early 2014. I’ve also been talking with a small publisher about bringing out a collection, including some unpublished stories, hopefully before the Nebulas. 🙂
Q: What are your favorite short story magazines?
Anything with a podcast. Nowadays I absorb the great majority of my fiction in audio form during my commute or while exercising. So it’s Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Podcastle, and Escape Pod. I’m particularly fond of the Lightspeed podcast, because they use Stefan Rudnicki’s Skyboat Road Company to make their recordings, so the performances and audio quality are always stunning. I’m also very fond of Anaea Lay’s style of reading on Strange Horizons. Whenever I’ve had one of my own stories appear on a podcast, I feel like it’s become more “real.”
I also loved Greatest Uncommon Denominator (GUD) while it was still in regular publication.
Q: Who are your favorite short story writers?
I have to separate this into my favorite writers I’ve read recently (as in, the last few years) and my favorite writers of all time.
My favorite recent writers are Ken Liu, Cat Rambo, Rachel Swirsky, Amal El-Mohtar, Matthew Kressel, Yoon Ha Lee, Ted Chiang, Elizabeth Bear, Eugie Foster.
My favorite all-time SFF short story writers are Ursula Le Guin, Robert Sheckley, Alfred Bester, James Tiptree Jr., Greg Egan, James Patrick Kelly, Alexander Jablokov, John Varley, Nancy Kress.
But there are many, many, short fiction writers I love. It’s my favorite form.
Q: What are five of your favorite short stories (by other writers)?
Yeah, I couldn’t limit it to five. In no particular order:
- “5,271,009” by Alfred Bester
- “Living Will” by Alexander Jablokov
- “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary” by Ken Liu
- “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin
- “The Price of Oranges” by Nancy Kress
- “Reasons to be Cheerful” by Greg Egan
- “Son Observe the Time” by Kage Baker
- “Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo” by John Varley
- “The Wedding Album” by David Marusek
- “We Who Stole the Dream” by James Tiptree Jr.
- “Zima Blue” by Alastair Reynolds
- “Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast” by Eugie Foster
- “The Cambist and Lord Iron” by Daniel Abraham
- Bester’s “5,271,009” was the first story I ever read that critiqued the infantile nature of many science fiction tropes. It was also the first story I saw whose central “science” was psychoanalysis. It has an unforgettable main character (the outrageous Solon Aquila) with an over-the-top voice. Best of all — you’ll like this part, Bonnie — Bester wrote the story from a visual prompt: Tony Boucher and Mick McComas sent him Fred Kirberger’s cover art for an upcoming issue of F&SF and asked him whether he could do anything with it.
- I love “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary” because of its complex voicing (“found documents,” a favorite technique of mine), the fresh way Ken looks at time travel (witnessing, personal history, accountability, and political truth), and his refusal to allow the agonizing central conflict to resolve into an easy moral. It also breaks my heart.
- “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” is on a lot of people’s all-time-best lists. Structurally it is nearly perfect. It breaks some narrative rules at precisely the right moments, to shattering effect. It takes an innocent little philosophical speculation, transfigures it into an imaginary village, turns the village into a knife blade, and tears out your soul. I could name people whose lives have been changed by reading that story as college students. To this day, more than 30 years since I first encountered it, I cannot read the whole thing aloud because I’m always sobbing at the end.
- “Living Will” is a perfect example of what science fiction does best. It takes a wish to solve an awful human problem, makes it literal, and then runs with it. In this case, the problem is that nobody wants to live as a demented incompetent. We’d all like to live life to the fullest, take every moment of enjoyment we can, and then have ability to end things when they became unbearable. But by the time the moment comes, we’re already unfit to make decisions for ourselves and we have no control at all. Alex imagined a way technology could solve this problem, and then took it one step further. It leaves the reader wondering, “Would I want this? Would I do this? How would it feel?”
- “The Wedding Album” takes two of my favorite SF themes – the nature of consciousness and the contrast between past and present – and weaves them together. The protagonist is an A.I. that mirrors the consciousness of a woman on her wedding day. She is locked into the frame of mind and outlook she had on the day she was recorded, but the real world changes around her. Every time she is replayed, she encounters her real self aging, losing things she holds dear, becoming bitter – and that’s only the start. Much of my own fiction tries to recapture the intensity of what this story made me feel.
SSR Extra: An Interview with Aliette de Bodard
In honor of this year’s Hugos — and my excitement at attending WorldCon for the first time — I am publishing interviews with the three writers nominated for Best Short Story; a few weeks ago I featured a brief interview with Ken Liu. Today I’m featuring my interview with Aliette de Bodard, author of “Immersion” (reviewed as part of my Hugo Awards Post).
Aliette de Bodard’s stories have appeared in magazines such as Interzone, Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction. She won this year’s Nebula for “Immersion,” which has also been nominated for the Locus Awards and the Sturgeon Award. Her Aztec mystery-fantasy novels, the Obsidian and Blood series, were published by Angry Robot. On her website, she states that she “lives in Paris with her husband, in a flat with more computers than warm bodies, and a bunch of Lovecraftian plants that are steadily taking over the living room.”
with more computers than warm bodies, and a bunch of Lovecraftian plants that are steadily taking over the living room. – See more at: http://aliettedebodard.com/biography/#sthash.1IIL5Voq.dpuf
Servant of the Underworld, Harbinger of the Storm, and Master of the House of Darts, are published by Angry Robot, worldwide. – See more at: http://aliettedebodard.com/#sthash.vZbkuufC.dpuf
Servant of the Underworld, Harbinger of the Storm, and Master of the House of Darts, are published by Angry Robot, worldwide. – See more at: http://aliettedebodard.com/#sthash.vZbkuufC.dpuf
Servant of the Underworld, Harbinger of the Storm, and Master of the House of Darts, are published by Angry Robot, worldwide. – See more at: http://aliettedebodard.com/#sthash.vZbkuufC.dpuf
Servant of the Underworld, Harbinger of the Storm, and Master of the House of Darts, are published by Angry Robot, worldwide. – See more at: http://aliettedebodard.com/#sthash.vZbkuufC.dpuf
Her Aztec mystery-fantasies, Servant of the Underworld, Harbinger of the Storm, and Master of the House of Darts, are published by Angry Robot, worldwide. – See more at: http://aliettedebodard.com/#sthash.vZbkuufC.dpuf
Her Aztec mystery-fantasies, Servant of the Underworld, Harbinger of the Storm, and Master of the House of Darts, are published by Angry Robot, worldwide. – See more at: http://aliettedebodard.com/#sthash.vZbkuufC.dpuf
Short Story Review: Tell me about your short stories.
Aliette de Bodard: I write character-driven science fiction, a lot of which is set in non-Western settings. I draw inspirations from myths, legends, and the odd smattering of science in order to explore other cultures in space and the different uses they’d find for technology. Most of my SF is set in the recurring universe of Xuya, an alternate history where China has become the dominant spacefaring culture, and biological constructs known as Minds have revolutionized space travel as well as familial structures.
Short Story Review: What is one of your favorite stories you have written and why?
Aliette de Bodard: The one I really like is my novella “On a Red Station, Drifting”: I started it as a homage to the Chinese Classic Dream of Red Mansions, meaning to carry over its domestic focus into space; and it mutated into a long meditation on what war means to those who stay at home, on the different significations of honour and familial loyalty. It wasn’t an easy thing to write, but I’m very glad that I finished it, and that the reaction to it has been so positive.
Short Story Review: Are there stories you’ve published, perhaps earlier in your career, that you would change, if you could?
Aliette de Bodard: Ha, quite probably! There’s always that moment of staring at the screen and marveling at how far I’ve come. I was much less aware of problematic tropes and bad representation of minorities when I started writing, and it shows in a few of my early stories (not to mention the ones where I cheerfully mangled the Chinese language through sheer ignorance…).
Short Story Review: How do you write stories? Do you edit extensively? Do you write so much per day?
Aliette de Bodard: I am a very irregular writer: I tend to brainstorm extensively before I write even one word of the draft. This enables me to save on editing time, because I produce relatively clean drafts (there are exceptions of course, and stories I’ve had to take apart in order to make them work). I don’t write so much per day when writing short stories: it’s more irregular bursts of activity when I have time to spare. For instance, it took me three weeks to brainstorm “Immersion”, but only about two days to write the first draft, and then a week or so to complete edits after I got feedback from my beta readers.
(Novels are different beasts though; I’ll make efforts to write something on a novel every day, or I’ll lose momentum).
Short Story Review: What themes and subjects do you find yourself drawn to? Why do you think you’re drawn to these subjects?
Aliette de Bodard: It really depends on what I’m writing, but the themes I’ve focused on lately have been the meaning of familial bonds–how they function and how they are stressed, and what gets passed from one generation to the next and how its meaning shifts. I suppose a lot of it is down to my personal history (I come from two cultures where family is really important), and to familial history (my maternal family immigrated to France, so a lot of my focus is on identity, assimilation, and the shift from the first generations of immigrants to the later ones who have never really known the home country other than through brief holidays).
Short Story Review: What do you have coming out, and what can you tell us about these stories?
Aliette de Bodard: I have a novelette, “Memorials”, coming out in Asimov’s, which is a complement to “The Weight of a Blessing” (a story published in Clarkesworld March 2013). It deals with war refugees, the appropriation of their experience by the local culture, and how a troubled young woman makes her way through life in the absence of familiar guidance.
My story “A Slow Unfurling of Truth” will be out in Ben Bova’s and Eric Choi’s Carbide-Tipped Pens. It’s set in a society where people change bodies like you change haircuts, and where specialised teams of authenticators use statistical analysis in order to make sure people are who they say they are. My main character is one of those authenticators, and has to deal with the difficult problem of identifying a man who has been absent from that society for twenty years…
Short Story Review: What are your favorite short story magazines?
Aliette de Bodard: I read a lot of magazines, and I like them all–they’ve got different preferences and different kinds of stories. My current favourites are Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons (I like their fiction, but it’s their non-fiction articles and reviews that keep me coming back to them), and Interzone, which has great fiction by authors you don’t necessarily see elsewhere (and nifty illustrations!).
Short Story Review: Who are your favorite short story writers?
Aliette de Bodard: Ken Liu, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Zen Cho, Benjanun Sriduangkaew.
Short Story Review: What are five of your favorite short stories (by other writers)?
Aliette de Bodard: “The Man Who Ended History: a Documentary” by Ken Liu is a poignant look at the meaning of history, and how the descendants of those involved in atrocities come to terms with what happened.
Zen Cho’s “House of Aunts” is a hilarious and bittersweet take on Malaysian vampires, and is about a teenage girl who becomes a vampire and has to navigate school, her growing attraction to a classmate, and her impossible aunts.
Rochita Loenen-Ruiz’s “Dancing in the Shadow of the Once” is a really sharp look at the use of colonised people as commodities, and how even “charity” causes can become humiliating; it’s also a beautiful meditation on what coming home means when you no longer have a home of our own.
Benjanun Sriduangkaew’s “Woman of the Sun, Woman of the Moon” is a lovely retelling of the legend of Chang’e and Houyi (the goddess of the moon and the archer who killed the nine suns in Ancient China), in which both main characters are women. It’s a great piece of feminism, as well as having some of the most beautiful language I’ve ever read.