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All Sweeping Aside – On Writing the Chronicles of Amicae

April 8, 2021March 8, 2021Rachel Taylor

Story ideas can come from anywhere, but what does it take for it to flourish into a full-blown novel? Mirah Bolender, author of the Chronicles of Amicae series, joins us to talk about her inspiration for the series, its publishing evolution, and more. Check it out here!

By Mirah Bolender

It’s pretty common knowledge that story ideas can spark just about anywhere. Anyone writing probably has computer documents, notebooks, and paper scraps overflowing with pieces of inspiration. It’s hard sometimes to know which of those will actually keep your attention and grow—sometimes the ones you’re initially passionate about fall to the wayside, and something random you picked up on a whim turns into a monster of a draft.

I recently found my original idea for the Chronicles of Amicae: less than two hundred words jotted down in a junk file on my computer, forming the vaguest of outlines. While I can see the roots of the final story in there, it’s also laughably different! It was steampunk. It had very heavy The BFG vibes. It was weird. At the time I was a college student participating in a writing workshop; the professor was assigning us all sorts of prompts to combine together, and I was having a ball with those already. I thought to myself, why not use this weird idea for the latest prompt? The prompt in question was “a day on the job,” but this professor was also notorious for adding in conditions from whatever he was reading. In this case, he had just finished House of Leaves—we had to create separate but connecting narratives in layers of footnotes. The outcome became chapter one. While the footnotes never made it to the final product (readers will probably thank me for that), the paranoia and subplots from them were still material that became vital plot points for the rest of the series.

Characters are key to every story, and most of the time I come up with characters before I figure out anything else. In this case I came up with the clever and mysterious Sweeper Mentor, but I didn’t want to write from his perspective because 1) clever mentors already know things instead of unraveling them for an audience, and 2) keeping a mentor clever and mysterious when you’re writing inside his head is a very difficult task. I needed a protagonist, but I had no idea what kind of person she’d be. For this I turned to my favorite type of characterization: a pinball method. Basically, if you’ve got one solid character, you bounce the new one off of it and figure them both out based on reactions—after all, if you know what you want the solid one to say, what can prompt them to say it? I bounced the blank Sweeper Apprentice off of the Mentor, what immediately came out was sass, and I said to myself, Ah, yes, I like this one. Boom, I had “Laura” instead of “Apprentice.”

When it comes to plot, I’m absolutely a “pantser”: I “fly by the seat of my pants.” When push comes to shove I can be a hybrid “plantser” by including outlines, but the pinball method hits me here, too—I’ll write a scene, which will then ricochet into something completely unplanned because oh no that gives me another cool idea to weave in—and so it goes. I’m also kind of a story magpie because I’ll toss in recycled bits from my old work or other interesting things I’ve seen recently. If those elements bounce off the existing material right, they stay! Otherwise they get pulled out and thrown in the recycle pile again. For example, the character Okane’s appearance, his personality, and his physical inability to say the word “you” are all harvested from different pieces of old stories that ended up working perfectly into the established magic system here, and became key pieces of this series’ plot.

Writing a series is difficult. You probably already guessed that when pinball is so prominent in my writing process, but even after that stage is over it gets complicated. Imagine the series is a skyscraper. Your solid draft of book one is the ground level up to the fifteenth floor; your early draft of book two forms the next section up; and the mostly written version of book three is wavering up on top in the wind. Edits happen. Maybe they’re tiny edits, but they’ve shifted the foundations and suddenly everything on top is off balance. You keep the bones of book two’s draft but with much heavier edits. Suddenly everything you had for book three makes no sense, it doesn’t work, why did you even have a draft for book three? (The answer is that you should absolutely have something to go on even if it’s an outline). Edits across the books can be so dramatic, there are even two characters in book three that have completely swapped personalities from their original versions! I’ve had the great luck of working with an editor who’s been enthusiastic about my story at every turn and never once suggested a change that didn’t make the narrative stronger, so while it can feel hectic and rushed during edits, it’s also something I’ve been able to step back and marvel at once I’m done.

Writing a series is also a lot of fun. You become attached to the world and characters that you’ve created. After you’ve explained the basics of the magical society and forged the relationships during book one, you don’t have to leave! Everything is broken in already. You don’t have to reiterate the basics, just launch into the new situation! I always had a series in mind, because when I got invested enough to write the story, I kept thinking of all the different situations possible for those characters and how they all couldn’t fit into one book. If you’re going to invest your time, why not put in serious dedication? Case in point: my original thought for Chronicles of Amicae was more like five books. My editor and I took a different course and ended up at the far stronger three. We’re already dealing with politics, mobs, crusading cities, secret magical communities, and man-eating nightmare monsters living like hermit crabs in the equivalent of magical rechargeable batteries. There was so much already; snippets of other Sweeper plotlines had to be filed away to be recycled into future products.

Honestly, it still amazes me that I’m published. Every time that I remember I’ve seen my books on a bookstore shelf or available online, I have to lay down and try not to scream with excitement. It’s so cool that I’ve been able to do what I love professionally. No matter what happens to me in life, no one can take away the fact that I have been published. There are so many ideas, so many things I’ve tried writing…sometimes it’s strange which ones keep my attention long enough to become finished drafts. When I first jotted down those two hundred words, I never would’ve guessed they’d grow into something this big. It’s been a wild ride, but it’s also been a lot of fun.

Mirah Bolender is the author of the Chronicles of Amicae. The final book in the trilogy, Fortress of Magi, is on sale from Tor Books on April 20, 2021.

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Author Features / Behind the Scenes / Fantasy Firsts / On Writing / What's New

A Look Back on the Writing the Chimera Adventures with Cate Glass

March 26, 2021May 6, 2024Rachel Taylor

The Chimera series by Cate Glass has officially come to a close, but we’re continuing the adventure with a very special look back at the series with author Cate Glass! Check out her guest post as she talks about writing the series, developing the story, and more.

By Cate Glass

There was a time when I believed that the idea for a novel must spring forth fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus. Of, course, that was before I ever wrote any novels and didn’t even imagine that I could.

After birthing a few, I believed my best stories always grew from a particular kind of trope-whacking on my part: a handsome, heroic figure who was wholly unworthy of the great destiny awaiting him; or a uniquely skilled magical warrior who was a pacifist by nature; or a mature woman who was not only not an ingénue princess-in-waiting, but a bitter exile who believed her heart dead. I would envision that person in an interesting situation, flesh out just enough of an interesting world to house that situation, and start writing to see where the idea took me.

I call myself an organic story developer. Once I confront my sketched characters with the action of the first scene, I begin to figure out who they really are and why they react as they do, and how I might make him or her or the world or the situation more interesting, deciding what follows logically. The story that may have begun as a standalone idea develops into three books. Another one morphs into two books and eventually into another parallel pair.

The Chimera stories had their origin in my desire to do something a little different. I wanted to build a framework that could house a flexible number of shorter tales. At about the same time, I had a chance encounter with an old TV series. (The series later morphed into a series of Tom Cruise action movies, which are not at all the same thing.)

Every episode of the series was centered on some snarl of political or international evildoing that the Secretary wished to be stopped, but could not afford to be publically involved in. The little group who took on these missions were not spies or secret agents, but people with specific talents that made them able to adapt to a wide variety of situations. We knew little or nothing about these players’ backgrounds or their lives beyond the missions or what they thought about it as it unfolded. (I did not like that aspect!) The pleasure arose watching them create an alternate reality in order to hornswoggle the villains of the week. Tension was always high, because the alternate reality could fall apart at any moment.

So, then I thought: What if these specific talents were magical…and what if the world was the kind to breed nefarious plots…conflicts of politics and myth and burgeoning scholarship…maybe something similar to the Italian Renaissance? Thus was the Costa Drago born and its independent city of Cantagna.

It was great fun to review caper and heist adventures, from The Scarlet Pimpernel to Leverage, from The Great Train Robbery to The Three Musketeers to Burn Notice, and assemble a list of skills that make such undercover schemes work: impersonation, martial arts, escapes, technology, and intelligence about people, culture, languages, economics.

Thus, instead of deriving one central character from sheer inspiration, I went looking for four operatives:

An expensive, well-educated courtesan
A professional duelist
A silversmith/artist
And a teenaged thief, because without D’Artagnan, the Musketeers would have far less spark.

Each player possessed a particular variety of magic and life experience that encompassed the skills I wanted. But use of magic was dangerous…forbidden. The world’s mythology would explain why.

But where to start writing? Always before, I knew what would be my opening scene. The day the unworthy hero bought the slave who would tell his story. The day the bitter woman met someone who forced her to engage with life again.

Because I disliked Mission: Impossible’s shallow characters, I wanted to get to know my four before getting them together on a mission. So, I wrote the tale of how Romy, my courtesan, lost her position at the side of the most powerful man in Cantagna, the Shadow Lord, and was returned to impoverished streets. The Shadow Lord—the Godfather, one might say—could be a source for the kind of missions I had in mind. But before Romy could become the Chimera, she had to deal with a teenaged thief, her own angry, rebellious brother, and they had to meet the duelist and the smith. Once I engaged them in a nefarious scheme—their first mission—I had a novel’s worth of story. Voila! An Illusion of Thieves. A little different than I expected.

Book 2 must give each of the four a chance to explore and use their particular magical talents, because in a world where you have to hide what you are, there hasn’t been much opportunity to do so. And so was born A Conjuring of Assassins. Assassination…impersonation…thievery…tunnels under the city that hid secrets. A political cabal. And just because it was that kind of sultry night walking beside the slow-moving River Venia, Romy rescues a half-drowned stranger from the river. He has interesting talents. Who is he?

I am a fantasy writer, after all, and if I’ve invented a mythology, I have to decide whether the stories it tells are true or not. Indeed, I discovered a connection between the half-drowned stranger, the mythology, and the activities of the villainous society known as the Philosophic Confraternity who had enforced the extermination of magic users for centuries. And so, the simple mission of breaking up a marriage that could upend the political balance in Cantagna became twisted into a revelation about the truth of the myth…and there was A Summoning of Demons.

My three books became, not just three distinct episodes in a framework, but an integrated whole. Organic! I’m delighted that readers can accompany my four new best friends through their adventures

Cate Glass is the author of the Chimera series. An Illusion of Thieves, A Conjuring of Assassins, and A Summoning of Demons are all available in stores now.

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Author Features / On Writing

How to Find Worldbuilding Inspiration in the Desert

March 8, 2021February 24, 2021Rachel Taylor

Science fiction and fantasy books take us to all types of different worlds: forests, deserts, even the stars. Michael Johnston, author of Silence of the Soleri, joins us to talk more about the setting of his latest book and his own desert narrative.

By Michael Johnston

Let’s start with a simple proposition. The desert is another world, or maybe it’s as close to another world as we can get without, you know, actually visiting another world. If you’ve spent any time in Joshua Tree National, you know what I’m talking about. The place feels alien. So when I picture a fantasy or a science fiction world, my mind turns to the desert. For me, it’s a place that’s filled up with a sense of wonder. So let’s talk about why I love to read about the desert and why I chose to place my Amber Throne novels (Soleri and Silence of the Soleri) in the desert.

Let’s start with a little history. When we talk about desert civilizations, we’re immediately forced to consider issues of ecology. Just how did that civilization flourish in the desert? For Egypt, the answer was the Nile. Egypt was often called the breadbasket of the ancient world. Imagine that! A civilization in the desert was known as a chief supplier of grain.

It was all due to the annual flooding of the Nile. Everything depended upon the river overflowing its banks each year and enriching the soil for growing. And if the river didn’t flood, there would be trouble. Life in the desert is a high stakes game, and if something goes wrong, disaster is bound to follow. When I decided to write about an empire in the desert, I tried to capture that same sense of urgency. In Soleri, we encounter an empire dependent on a single crop, the amaranth. The plant is sort of like the Nile, it helps fertilize the land and without it there is no way to farm and no way for the empire to eat.

Survival isn’t always easy in the desert, and that’s where my favorite desert novel enters this story. Given its popularity, there probably isn’t an aspect of Dune that hasn’t been discussed, but I still think it’s worth mentioning and I’ll keep this one short. In Dune, I learned about ecology through science fiction. Honestly, after I read it, I started doing a hundred little things to save water. I was probably twelve at the time, and the novel had a huge effect on me. I found myself taking shorter showers, and turning off the faucet as often as was possible. I was struck by the shear focus on conservation in the novel, the way the stillsuit preserved every drop of water in the body, the way the water of the dead was valued.

When we write fantasy and science fiction, I believe we are fashioning metaphors. We are providing ways for readers to digest and understand their own world. For me, Dune showed me what a world without water might look like, and it made me value the water in my own world. It was the first time I really thought about the conservation. Dune trained me to think about how I used natural resources. And when it came time for me to write my own novels decades later, I came back to that same focus. In Soleri, we see what can happen to a world where the balance of resources is out of whack. For me, that’s a desert story.

And that brings me to the last thing I want to talk about: my own desert narrative. I guess it began when I was a kid. Like most people, I probably had my first encounter with the desert in a movie (Tatooine) or maybe it was a book (Arrakis or John Carter’s Mars). As a kid, I had an image of the desert, and it was mostly based fiction. It wasn’t the early 2000’s that I started actually visiting the sand, and I immediately fell in love with it. I bought a house and started living there part-time. What came next was a bit of a surprise. As I would learn, the desert is a really is a hostile place, and for me, it turned out to be particularly unfriendly. The heat and dry air made my eyes and mouth dry. I found I couldn’t read. I needed a humidifier in every room, and I seldom ventured outside in the summer.

During my first year, my health problems multiplied, and it was clear that the desert was behind most of them. I got the feeling that humans (or maybe just this one human, me) weren’t meant to live there. The desert lacks that one thing we need: water. Okay, arguably, we need air more than water and there is air in the desert, but when it’s heated to 125 degrees, it is almost unbreathable. The desert is hostile. The plants are studded in spikes, and the ones that don’t carry barbs are often poisonous. Those rolling sand dunes that I discovered in fiction were a lot less friendly than the ones I met in real life. I left the desert five years later, but I still visit during the cool, damp months. It’s pleasant in December and January. As for my interest in the desert, it’s come full cycle. The desert went from a place I’d only dreamed of to a home I was forced to leave. And now, it has a third location in my consciousness. Having completed the two Amber Throne novels, it’s a location I mostly just visit in my books. It’s safer that way.

Michael Johnston is the author of The Amber Throne saga. The most recent addition, Silence of the Soleri, is on sale now.

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Author Features / On Writing / What's New

The Best Characters in SFF are Chaotic, Prove Us Wrong

March 4, 2021April 8, 2024Rachel Taylor4 Comments

There are so many different type of protagonists out there, from the sweet cinnamon roll hero to the tortured, tragic titular character. But one of our favorites? The chaotic problem protagonist. Read on as Everina Maxwell, author of Winter’s Orbit, breaks down the trope and why we love it.

By Everina Maxwell

Some characters are good at solving problems. It’s an author’s job to make their lives difficult, so many of my favourite SFF heroes trudge on stoically through the slings and arrows of a plot that does its damnedest to stop them reaching their goals. They fix disasters, right wrongs, and generally leave the world a better place than they found it.

Then there’s the other type of character.

The other type of character innocently walks into a room and three fights and a fire break out around them. They go to the shops and return with an army of the undead. There are some protagonists who solve problems; this is the kind of protagonist who creates them.

I propose four tentative classifications:

This Isn’t My Fault

Protagonists who fall into this category attract chaos like flies to honey. It’s not that they intend to cause large-scale turmoil, it’s just that if you hand them a list of forbidden activities, their first instinct is to treat it as a bingo card. When things go wrong—and they do!—they try and fix them with further wild leaps. This type is exemplified by Wei Wuxian of the c-drama series The Untamed who, through a pinball-like series of individually logical decisions, rapidly graduates from smuggling alcohol to his fellow students to full-scale demonic cultivation. And yet, there’s no real malice there. He wasn’t out to create havoc; he was trying to do the right thing. But sometimes you have to raise a legion of unquiet spirits to do your bidding because you’ve been backed into a corner, and that’s just how things are.

This Isn’t My Fault (honestly)

This type genuinely don’t want to create chaos. They just constantly end up around other people who do. Take Murderbot from All Systems Red: it just wants to be left alone to watch its shows in blissful silence, but wherever it finds itself, several things are invariably on fire or shooting at it. The fact these fires are usually caused, directly or indirectly, by the squishier humans it’s become attached to is unfortunate but inevitable.

This Is Absolutely My Fault And I Did It On Purpose

Some characters act like they prefer to plan, but in fact are at their best when the situation has fallen into total disarray. Because they’re able to react faster, and commit in a split second to ideas that would have your average Health and Safety Committee looking around for a fainting couch, they don’t have much incentive to make it stop. One that comes to mind is Miles Vorkosigan from The Vorkosigan Saga—he might not have caused the chaos, but he’s not sorry it’s here.

Once the dust has settled, unlike the other three categories, this type of character will often claim that they meant things to happen like that all along.

Chaos? This Is Science!!!

I could call out the entire cast of Girl Genius for this category, but instead I’m going to point to Lio and Song, the protagonist’s loving and supporting parents from Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts (spoiler warning). These two scientists discover how to reverse the mutation that’s made animals so big that humans can’t live on the surface anymore. They defy restrictions and wander up to the surface. Hm. These big animals seem cool. Maybe our life’s work for Evil Scientist Boss is a lie? Ooh, what if we figured out how to make big cool animals? Great idea, honey! What if I tried to get pregnant with a big cool animal shapeshifter? Amazing – but wait, what if we made five big cool animal embryos, so we didn’t know which shapeshifter you were pregnant with? (This sounds like the wildest book series you’ve ever read, I know. These scenes, collectively? Ten minutes, tops. They’re like the Sonic The Hedgehog of dubious bioethics decisions.)

Perpetual (narrative) motion

All four types of character above barely need a plot, but it’s fun when they have one anyway. The villain can’t predict what they’re going to do. No one can, because even the character themselves doesn’t know. And it works! These stories can just run and run, because we’re desperate to know what wild idea the character is going to get in their head next. Let chaos reign.

Everina Maxwell is the author of Winter’s Orbit, on sale from Tor Books now. Winter’s Orbit is Everina’s debut novel.

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Author Features / Behind the Scenes / On Writing / What's New

Arkady Martine Answers: What’s It Like to Be Married to Another Writer?

February 5, 2021March 20, 2024torforge1 Comment

Aspiring authors, listen up! Arkady Martine, historian, city planner, and Hugo award-winning author of space operas A Memory Called Empire and its sequel—out next month—A Desolation Called Peace, has writing survival tips and the scoop on what it’s like to be married to a fellow writer.

Is it a whirlwind of focus and productivity? Is it all procrastination and crying over word counts!? Find out below, and grab a copy of A Desolation Called Peace!

What’s it like being married to another writer?

Amazing. I recommend it, if you can swing it. Essentially – it’s like being married to anyone who shares your field, with all the delights and problems of working in the same area at the same time. We celebrate each other’s successes and support each other through publishing vicissitudes. Viv – my wife, whose books are currently with Orbit (the most recent is DREADFUL COMPANY, which has got the Paris catacombs and hellphones (think cellphones, but for calling Hell) in) – is my first reader and my physics-and-spaceflight-and-almost-everything-else consultant. But more importantly she’s my storytelling partner: because we’re both writers, we spend a lot of time talking about narrative, writing to each other, for each other. There are a lot of small easter eggs in my work which are for her, like a palimpsest or a secret gift. She makes me a better artist. She challenges me to write more clearly, with greater intensity of voice and character.

Also it’s pretty great to have someone who understands oh hell I’m on deadline, and who runs away with me to hotels for writing vacations. (A writing vacation is when you don’t get to leave the hotel room until you’ve got your words for the day, but someone else brings you food and makes the bed and there’s nothing around to distract you but your partner, who also has to make wordcount. We do this at least twice a year.)

How do you combat writer’s block?

This is a neat little trick to get back into writing a scene if you’ve been paused for a while, or if you can’t figure out how to start after a transition. It goes like this: describe – in detail, with precision – some architecture, someone’s clothing, something in your POV character’s visual field. Keep describing, but root that description in your POV character’s impressions and understanding of what they’re seeing. Keep describing until you figure out why your character would be looking so closely at that thing – and by then, you’re in the scene, you’ve got the voice, and you’ve probably done some accidental thematic and visual work to tie the story together.

This is, in fact, why my work is so goddamn full of descriptions of buildings and clothes and peculiar food items.

You can pull these setting-scaffolds out again in edits if they get redundant, but I usually leave them in – they’re less filigree than you’d think. They become fairly central to characterization – how does this character notice the world they move through?

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Author Features / On Writing / What's New

An Ode to the Map in the Beginning of Every Fantasy Book

January 27, 2021December 15, 2021Rachel Taylor

Set in a world of goblin wars, stag-sized battle ravens, and assassins who kill with deadly tattoos, Christopher Buehlman’s The Blacktongue Thief begins a ‘dazzling’ (Robin Hobb) fantasy adventure unlike any other. We are thrilled to reveal the official, full color map for this stunning new universe, coming to you on May 25. In the meantime, join Christoper as he talks maps, books, and more!

By Christopher Buehlman

Maps.

You know them, and, if you’re a fantasy reader, you probably love them.

It’s not so unusual, and it’s nothing new, to love the blues and sepias of a world made small. Our Elizabethan friend Christopher Marlowe, in his chronicle of Tamburlaine The Great (Part II), shows us the conqueror in old age, facing death––the only enemy who could ever beat him––and asking not for a doctor or a salve, but for the thing he will now use to take the measure of his life’s worth and his sons’ legacy:

Bring me a map, then let me see how much

is left for me to conquer all the world

that these, my boys, may finish all my wants.

There’s something of divinity in holding a map; in converting countless miles of cliffs and oceans, valleys, groves, hills, and fields into inches, pressed flat, under a human hand. How big must we be if we behold a city as a pinprick, if a splash of our coffee can embrown an ocean?

Of course, it was Tolkien who wed maps to fantasy, gifting generations with Middle Earth, with its elf-haunted Mirkwood Forest, the Balrog-harboring Mines of Moria, The Lonely mountain smoking beneath the moon. How I loved the little Smaug drawn in red. Later, he would remind me of the warnings of medieval cartography, the edges from which no explorer, so far as the mapmaker knew, had ever returned; but to my young eye he was not a possibility, but a sort of fictional fact – here there be one very wicked dragon.

I tried my own hand at mapmaking as a teenaged D&D nerd, and I wasn’t half bad at it. I began to develop certain prejudices, some of which I still hold:

A smooth coastline should not be trusted, nor a straight border.

Drawing in little trees and mountains is tedious, but makes a credible land mass out of what might otherwise be mistaken for an amoeba.

Place names in the same region should have similar sounds – one would never find a Carath Athnon near a Zurkoya ‘Nazh, for example.

I’m sorry I missed the Fire and Ice novels when they first appeared, but they were a great pleasure for me when I finally read them in my forty-second year. And the world. The beautiful, terrible world. I got a huge fold-out map of Westeros and Esteros one Christmas, and it’s one of the loveliest things I ever unfolded that didn’t name a month.

It was with great excitement that I first realized that the world of my own fantasy debut, THE BLACKTONGUE THIEF, would enjoy the attentions of a master mapmaker. I am thrilled to say that Tim Paul exceeded my expectations – he took the rough map I had sketched out and turned it into geographical art worthy of a 17^th century leather-bound atlas. These places I had imagined – the Snowless Wood, where the Downward Tower of the witch who goes on dead legs stands; the cold, northern port city of Pigdenay with its windows of green glass and its rough, stabby taverns; the kraken-infested archipelagos of the Gunnish Sea; Goltay and Orfay in Gallardia, names as grim in their world as The Somme and Stalingrad in ours, came to life in a way they hadn’t when they were just words on a page. Under Mr. Paul’s gifted brush, the capitals and provinces I dreamed now seem as plausible as Constantinople, or Wessex, or Antioch.

As a bonus, Tim even illustrated the calendar, the ten 36-day months and five seasons that comprise the year in this more mathematically simple world. Here, the full moon is always the first of the month, and the new moon, by the darkness of which one may take a moon wife or moon groom in certain lands, comes every 19^th. The extra season, snuck between Fall and Winter, is The Gloaming – 72 days in which, in northern climes, the leaves have mostly fallen and the worst of the snows have not yet come. A time for hunting, for slaughtering livestock, and for telling dark stories.

The tale I propose to tell you is very dark, indeed. Goblins came and tried to eat us all up. Most of the men and all of the horses died. One does not find many children between the ages of 7 and 15 in Manreach because the women were under arms too. But we pushed our adversaries back, for now. And soon the fields and cities and bays Tim Paul has so exquisitely drawn for us will ring with the songs, oaths and poems of the Holters, Gallards, Galts, Ispanthians, and even giants I can’t wait for you to meet.

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Author Features / On Writing / What's New

We’ve Got This: A Message from TJ Klune

January 18, 2021April 8, 2024Rachel Taylor16 Comments

We’ve got this. We’ve. Got. This.

We are thrilled to have TJ Klune, the New York Times bestselling author of The House in the Cerulean Sea, join us on the blog as he talks publishing a book during a global pandemic, the importance of believing in yourself when no one else does, and his hopes for the future. Check out the full article below.

TW for mention of suicide*

By TJ Klune

On the morning of December 31, 2020, I sat down at my desk and flipped my word-of-the-day calendar to the last page. The word (meliorism, defined as the philosophical belief that the world tends to improve when humans aid its betterment) wasn’t what caught my attention, though I’d muse on it later and wonder why that word at that moment.

No, what caught my attention was the bright green sticky note covering the last word of the day, something I’d forgotten was there.

Since 2011, I’ve had this little quirk; one of many, I can assure you. On January 1, I’ll write myself a little note and stick it on the last page of the calendar for the last day of the year. Think of it as…well. Wish might be too strong a word. Perhaps hope fits best. I leave myself a note for what I hope will happen in the following year. Usually, I forget it’s even there until I reach December 31.

So, on the last day of the year that never seemed to die, I found the note I’d written to myself one year before. 2020 was going to bring about big changes for me. It would see the release of two books with my new publisher Tor/Tor Teen, in The House in the Cerulean Sea and The Extraordinaries.

The note I’d written to myself read: You’ve got this. Even if no one else believes in you, believe in yourself. You’ve. Got. This.

Trite? Sure, yeah. At least a little bit.

But then I think about the year I’ve had, the year we’ve all had. You don’t need me to tell you that 2020 didn’t go the way anyone thought it would. With the pandemic, with civil unrest, with those in power doing their damnedest to add fuel to the fire rather than figuring out a way to keeping it from burning everything to the ground, 2020 was, for lack of better words, a stupid mess.

And it got me thinking about meliorism, the belief that the world tends to improve through human effort. By any stretch of the imagination, that can be hard to swallow. Yes, I believe that humans can aid in betterment, but how can we make things better when we as a species seem to be hellbent on self-destruction? Because even though there are people who want to improve our world, there are those who act in direct opposition, wanting to destroy everything they touch.

Honestly? I rolled my eyes a little at the idea of meliorism. And that caught me off guard. Here’s why.

I turned thirty-eight years old in 2020. When I was younger—say, a teenager through my twenties and hell, if I’m being honest with myself, even into my early thirties—I was cynical as they come. I was caustic, my sarcasm a weapon used to deflect anything that was outside my comfort zone. I don’t think I was a bad person, but looking back, I wasn’t as good as I could’ve been.

I know exactly when that changed: 2013, when an event took place that shook my entire world down to its foundation, and the happy, blissful life I’d been living collapsed around me. Someone I loved very much fell severely ill out of nowhere, and it broke me. 2013 was a dark time for me, perhaps the darkest moments of my life. More than once, I contemplated suicide. Once, it came close, but I chickened out at the last moment, too scared to die, and so, so angry at myself that I couldn’t even do that right. When the man I loved later died, I was despondent, lost, and oh so furious that I could barely breathe.

I got better. Not on my own, of course, and definitely not right away. I had my friends. I had my family. I had my dog, my cat. I had my writing. I sought the help I so desperately needed, and through a combination of therapy and medication that could help manage my depression, I found my way out of the shadows. I’m still a work in progress. Though they don’t happen as often as they used to, I still have bad days, days when I don’t want to get out of bed, the very idea of being a functioning person too much to handle. But I have the tools now to combat those days, reminding myself of three words that have become a mantra of sorts.

You’ve got this.

I’ve softened, the older I’ve gotten. Oh, I’m still sarcastic, but it doesn’t have the sharp edges it used to. And the cynicism that once ruled my life has also lessened with age. I take the time these days to appreciate the little things, to be thankful for all that I have, and spend less time worrying about all the things I don’t have.

That’s why I was caught off guard with how quick I was to dismiss the idea of meliorism. How could we improve anything when 2020 seemed to go out of its way to prove that many people don’t give two shits about others? And it doesn’t help that every day seemed to bring news that blew the previous day’s news out of the water. Things just seemed to get worse and worse and worse.

But I don’t want to be that person anymore, someone so mired in cynicism, so I took a step back from those thoughts and turned my attention to the note I’d written the year before. “You’ve got this,” I muttered to myself. “You’ve got this.”

You’ve got this.

I do. Even in my darkest days, I’ve got this. I’ve been through too much to not have this. So, then, what am I doing to make the world a better place?

In the grand scheme of things, it may not seem like much, but the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve thought back to all that I’ve heard from readers, I keep coming back to one thing.

The House in the Cerulean Sea.

The book, released in March right at the beginning of the pandemic, is, at its core, a story about kindness. It follows an everyman, bland and boring and more than a little lonely in a city without color and where the rain never ends. This man, Linus Baker, works for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth (DICOMY) as a social worker. It’s his job to inspect the orphanages where magical children are placed, segregated from everyone else. For their own safety, he’s repeatedly told by his superiors, in the thick tome titled RULES AND REGULATIONS, and in society in general. Because he’s the model employee—empathetic but within the guidelines set forth by DICOMY—he’s summoned by his superiors and given a top-secret assignment: to investigate a mysterious orphanage on an island that houses the most dangerous magical children known to man.

What he finds there isn’t anything like he expects, but I won’t rehash that here. If you’ve read the story, you know what happens, and I thank you for reading the book. If you haven’t yet read it but have found yourself reading these words and are curious about my novel, I hope you’re ready for an adventure if you decide to pick it up.

I was excited as 2020 opened, knowing this year was going to be different than all the years that came before.

And then the pandemic kicked into high gear, literally the week before Cerulean came out in the middle of March.

I remember watching in disbelief as we were all told to stay home, to wash our hands all day, every day, as people decided they needed sixteen thousand rolls of toilet paper for their household, as we were told people were getting sick, that people were dying.

That was more important than any book.

But I still had to release a book. I cringed at the thought of saying, “Hey, I know everything is super scary right now, ha ha, but I think you’d feel better if you read my book! Why, you ask? Because it has the Antichrist. Ta-da!”

I worried that my strange and hopeful little story would get lost in all the necessary bluster and noise. I worried (absolutely without cause) that if the book didn’t sell well, Tor would turn around and say, “Welp, you tried. Please shut the door on your way out.” I worried that the two-year buildup I’d created in my head that led to this moment was all going to be for nothing, and I was dumbstruck by the ridiculousness of it all.

But a strange thing happened. People bought the book. People read the book. Booksellers pimped it out, Bookstagrammers created crazy beautiful photographs of my book, telling people to read it, not just because of the story, but because of the way it made them feel.

And it was how it made many of them feel that hit me the hardest, because I think, deep down, it’s what I was hoping for more than anything.

It made them feel like they were being hugged.

I don’t know if I can impress upon you just how humbling that is, how wonderfully profound. I heard and read that phrase over and over—this book feels like a hug—and for one of the rare times in my life, I was speechless. Because whether I knew it or not when I wrote it, that’s what I wanted for people. To make them feel happy, to make it feel like the book could hug them back just as tightly, to remind them that no matter how dire things get, there is still good in the world. Perhaps, I told myself, I made the world a little better—at least for the time it took to read the story—and maybe that counts for something. A small thing, but a thing all the same.

I don’t know what’s going to happen today. I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow or next week or next month. But I think about meliorism now. Perhaps if we weren’t here, the world would be a better place, the scourge that is humanity gone, allowing things to heal. But for better or worse, we are here, and we need to make the most of the time we have. Because the world will not change for the better unless we work together toward that betterment. I’ve lost a lot of my cynicism, but that’s okay, as it’s been replaced by something bigger. Something stronger. Something that feels a little like hope. Trite, still? Hell yeah, but screw it. It’s how I feel.

On the first day of this new year, I wrote a new note for myself. I stuck it to December 31, 2021, and there it will remain until I reach that day. I won’t tell you what it says because even if it’s not exactly a wish, I’d rather not take the chance, just to be safe. But I know I’ve got this, that I’m going to do my best to try and aid in the betterment of the world. I hope you will too because in the end, we owe it to one another to try.

You’ve got this. I know you do. And I can’t wait to see what you do with it.

TJ Klune is the author of The House in the Cerulean Sea, on sale now. His next book, Under the Whispering Door, hits shelves everywhere on September 21, 2021.

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Author Features / Behind the Scenes / On Writing / What's New

The Poetry of A Memory Called Empire

January 7, 2021March 20, 2024torforge1 Comment

“A Memory Called Empire elevates space opera to poetry—clever, deep, sometimes tragic, sometimes violent, always transcendent poetry that shines like the edge of a knife.” —Delilah Dawson

Have you read the lush, tense, dizzying and dazzling sci-fi masterpiece that is A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine yet? And if have, you were probably pretty impressed by all the detail of the Teixcalaanli culture—particularly all the poetry.

As you prepare for the sequel, A Desolation Called Peace (hitting shelves 3/2/21), check out Arkady as she talks integrating poetry and space opera in A Memory Called Empire, paperback out now:

By Arkady Martine

I’m not myself exactly a poet. I’ve written and published poetry – occasionally I’ve written and published good poetry – but I don’t have the control of the art form that a serious poet does, the understanding of why a poem lands or doesn’t land. What I do have is a decent ear for sentence rhythm, and a fair grasp of symbolic and allusive language, which is all you need to write poetry to stick in a book. Recently Rebecca F. Kuang, author of The Poppy War, introduced me to the Chinese poet Wen Yiduo via a Twitter thread: she quoted something he wrote in 1926, saying that “formal technique aids, not hinders, artistic expression and that poetry only attains perfection when the poet learns to ‘dance in fetters’”. The formal structure of poetry, with its rules and confinements and focusing power, is incredibly powerful, and I’ve used that concept of formal structure in A Memory Called Empire to show poetic skill.

Teixcalaanli literature – which is in many ways based on Middle Byzantine literature – is a literature that centers poetic forms. In part this is because their literature is one which is performed out loud in political settings, so oratorical verse, with rhythm and meter, is a valued skillset amongst the intelligentsia. (The poetry contests in A Memory Called Empire are a little bit like rap battles with politics in. Think of the Cabinet Battle songs in Hamilton and you’ve got the idea pretty much solid.) Most of Teixcalaanli classics are epic poems – and a lot of Teixcalaanli culture is expressed in verse and song. I think I wrote three full poems and many partial ones for the book, including a two versions of the same protest song, a political intervention in the form of a three-line epigram, and a public safety message that used to be part of an epic about city-building.

Absolutely none of that poetry was actually in meter.

First of all, the book is written in English, and the poems – if they were real – would be in Teixcalaanli. Writing in English meter wouldn’t match up with what the Teixcalaanli meter would be – and also I’m terrible at metered poetry. I can fake being a genius political poet in free verse. But if you want a sonnet from me, you’ll get a doggerel sonnet. (In correct meter. But the most twee correct meter you have ever encountered.) The choice to gesture at poetry instead of trying to achieve the heights of the form let me not get trapped in having to be really, really good. It’s a shortcut. But I wanted readers to think that Teixcalaanli poets were incredible, whether or not that particular reader liked English poetry – so I didn’t want to trip them up with English poetry poorly done, or which might ring false or silly and throw them out of the story.

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Behind the Scenes / On Writing / What's New

What Was It Like to Work on To Hold Up the Sky by Cixin Liu? Ask the Translators!

October 7, 2020April 29, 2024Rachel Taylor

Cixin Liu is the New York Times bestselling author of The Three-Body Problem, and we are so, so excited to see what he has in store for us with his latest work, To Hold Up the Sky. To celebrate this new release, we decided to interview some of the people who made it possible for us to read this book in English—the translators. From their greatest challenges to their favorite stories in the novel, check out what Carmen Yiling Yan, John Chu and Adam Lanphier had to say here!

**What makes the stories in To Hold Up the Sky stand out to you as a translator?**

Carmen Yiling Yan: What strikes me the most is the scope of imagination in these stories, the sense of astronomical scale. There’s truly a sense of wonder that I haven’t experienced in much other science fiction lately.

Adam Lanphier: I only translated The Village Teacher, so I’ll talk about that story. Among Liu Cixin’s Chinese readership, The Village Teacher tends to elicit superlatives, both positive (e.g. it’s his “most touching” story, “most humane,” “most real”) and negative (e.g. “softest,” “most sentimental,” “goofiest aliens”). I agree.

Trying to carry this story’s deft, earnest genre-play into English was a balancing act. For the story’s moral message to land, the village needs to be poignant, not lurid; the children need to be sympathetic, not schmaltzy; the teacher needs to be a hero, not a caricature. The aliens didn’t need much—goofy is goofy.

This is a special story to me, as it is to many of Liu Cixin’s fans. I worked hard to do it justice. I hope I succeeded.

What are the biggest challenges in translating science fiction?

Carmen Yiling Yan: One tricky aspect is getting the technical terminology right, especially on a topic that I’m not familiar with. For Full Spectrum Barrage Jamming, I was looking up army manuals and physics articles.

Adam Lanphier: I’ll tell you what isn’t the biggest challenge: the science. I am frequently surprised by how straightforward it is to translate detailed, technical passages, even speculative ones. The language of science is precise and objective, almost by definition; it’s simple to research (compared to history, say) and its terminology tends to strike a similar tone across languages. I imagine most languages have more ways to say “I love you” than “cold fusion.”

John Chu: One of the trickiest things about translating any story is that you’re really translating between cultures. As a translator, you are trying to have the same effect on the reader in the target language that the original author had on the reader in the source language. Two obvious areas that make things difficult are humor and profanity. As a translator, you have to find something that your reader will find just as funny or just as profane. Invariably, it’s not a ‘literal’ translation of what the original author wrote. What we find funny or profane is extremely culture-based.

In that light, I don’t know that the challenges in translating science fiction are all that different from translating a non-speculative story. There may be more elements to balance against each other. Science fiction has its share of technical language and made-up words, for example. Ultimately, it’s still about making the target language reader feel that same “sense of wonder”, for example, that the source language reader feels.

What are some marks of a story that’s been translated well?

Adam Lanphier: A well translated Chinese story, if it’s a story worth translating, will maintain a clear sense of space, direction, and location. In my experience, this is the ‘omelet test’ for translators of Chinese into English, as spatial language in Chinese, though precise, is unintuitive for English speakers and tricky to maintain convincingly in translation. What’s more, it often assume a reader’s familiarity with features of traditional Chinese architecture (e.g. a character might tell another to “go inside” when they’re already indoors, an abstract reference to the series of increasingly private courtyards that were once prevalent in Chinese buildings; one might render this as “go down the hall”) and society (e.g. an “outsider” may mean a stranger, a non-relation, a foreigner, or a layperson, depending on context. “Gentile” sometimes comes eerily close).

If I can’t whether we’re indoors or outdoors, or where a character’s other arm is, or where the magazine on the chair went, that’s a red flag.

Unless a Chinese story touches on biology or butchery, a good English translation will use the word “heart” no more than once every other page.

These are details. Like all translators, I’m a craftsperson, and like most, I’m a freelancer. I shouldn’t presume to offer a more thorough answer to your excellent, difficult question, whose meat I’ll leave Nabokov and Borges to fight over.

John Chu: I honestly don’t think you can tell whether a story has been translated well without doing an A/B comparison with the original text. For reasons not worth explaining, I’ve actually done this with _The Three Body Problem_ and _Death’s End_. (I’ve read _The Dark Forest_ in Chinese but not in English.) So I feel confident in saying that Ken Liu did a superb job with them. Lots of people think they want ‘literal’ translations and they really don’t. _The Three Body Problem_, particularly, is steeped in Chinese history and your typical American reader is not going to have as thorough a grounding in Chinese history as your typical Chinese reader. Ken does an excellent job making sure that someone who doesn’t have a Chinese history background reading in English has at least a similar understanding as a Chinese reader reading the original. There are any number of things in those books that don’t really translate directly, for example, puns. Ken always comes up with substitutes that fit seamlessly.

The things he did that make those translations work so well aren’t noticeable unless you compare back to the original. When you read the translation, what you’re reading is the combined effort of both the original author and the translator. And, honestly, when it comes to things like word choice and phrasing, it can be hard to figure out who did what. (Obviously, original author is solely responsible for stuff like plot.)

That said, the translator is always trying to give you the experience that someone reading in the original language gets. Whether the translator has done that is up to the reader.

What’s the top reason why English-speakers should read more translated fiction?

Carmen Yiling Yan: First and foremost, because there’s so much good stuff out there! Some of the best epic fantasies and historicals I’ve read have been in Chinese. And there’s entire trends and genres with no direct equivalence–I have a soft spot for escape room novels. People who don’t read translations are missing out.

John Chu: I think the wider the net you cast, the more likely you are to find interesting, excellent work. There’s amazing work being published every day and not all of it was originally written in English.

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Author Features / Extras / On Writing / What's New

In Conversation: Hank Phillippi Ryan and Rachel Howzell Hall

September 16, 2020March 20, 2024admin

Forge authors Hank Phillippi Ryan and Rachel Howzell Hall both have new books out this year, so we got them together to chat about writing characters who keep secrets, guessing plot twists, and more!

Both of your books feature women pretending to be someone they’re not — why were you drawn to write about them? Do you have personal experience with pretending to be someone else, or projecting a different image?

HANK:Oh. Daily. (Laughing.) But I have been a television reporter for more than 40 years. I’ve wired myself with hidden cameras, and gone undercover and in disguise. It’s very stressful, and I’ve learned that the only way to be successful is to have most of yourself convinced that you really are who you say you are–is that method acting? And only keep a tiny sliver of your brain free to remember your real goals. That way your behavior and reactions seem authentic. Still, there’s always that one track of your brain that’s thinking: did I get a wide shot? Did I get a shot of his face? Is my camera working? What will I say if I get caught?

(I’ve only gotten caught once. My “hidden” camera was not hidden well enough, and that’s not good. But it all worked out fine.)

RACHEL: Nothing as exciting and as fascinating as Hank, ohmigod. But as a woman, I’ve pretended plenty throughout my fifty years–that I’m more brave than I am, dumber than I look, a wanton seductress and an intellect that surrounds herself in books. It depended on the situation, of course, but playacting is something I think we all have done. I’ve also seen up close women who leave fabulous public lives–friends, successful jobs, bubbly and vibrant personalities–go home to a mess and a family life in tatters. They’re being abused–or act as abusers. Toxic and raggedy, but no one expects that that woman’s being hit? Or that woman’s cursing like a sailor and is mean as a snake? No, because she and the kids roll out the next morning with fresh clothes, forced smiles, and for her, makeup hiding the bruises or perfume hiding the stench of brimstone.

And last, as an African American woman, (and I’ve talked about this plenty), I’ve pretended that I didn’t hear the racist comment, or that I’m fine with the phrase, “I don’t see color,” a phrase that I absolutely hate because nothing is wrong with me being black and by not seeing that, you fail to recognize that my color has influenced and shaped everything about me. That’s like saying, I don’t see food types. Tacos are wonderful. So is roast beef. So is spaghetti. There’s nothing wrong saying, “I love Mexican food.” End rant.

Which comes first when you’re writing these complicated characters – the real character or their pretend identity?

HANK: The real character. Then I think: What does she want, and how far will she go to get it? Because when a book feels real, like the character is a real person–they do things for a reason. So in THE FIRST TO LIE, I knew that at least one character had a driving, obsessive, and understandable motivation for her desire for revenge. Then, understanding that, I had to figure out how she’d accomplish her goal successfully.

RACHEL: With AND NOW SHE’S GONE, I think the character came first. Because I’ve seen women in jeopardy, women who want to leave, and they do, only to be pulled back. I wanted to see that in a book but this time, I want her to actually get away… but not really. And like Hank, I also wanted to write about how far a character will go to get it–but with two women. One who has successfully managed the trick of disappearing and the one who is tasked with finding her.

What is compelling about writing about people with secrets? What about you, can you reveal any of your own secrets/what do people not know about you, or what do they think about you that is dead wrong?

HANK: Every thriller is about secrets–who has a secret, and what it is, and who else knows it–and what will happen if the secret is revealed. And what will the character do to protect that bit of knowledge? That’s truly the fun part of writing–sometimes my characters reveal secrets that even I didn’t know they had! “The first line of the first chapter of THE FIRST TO LIE” is “Lies have a complicated half-life.” Because it’s not only about concocting the lie, and telling the lie, but remembering it.

Secrets about me? Do I even have any? Ah–I’m a terrible singer? But I know all the words to the Beatles songs, and endless Broadway musicals? That I wanted to be a disc jockey when I grew up? And oh–I am the world’s worst driver. The worst. I was a majorette in high school–!!–but I was so terrible, the band director told me to march in the middle of the back row, and just pretend to twirl. What do people think that’s dead wrong? Ah–maybe that I’m super-confident. Trust me, I am terrified with nerves at every appearance.

RACHEL: I refuse to believe that Hank is terrified EVER — okay, maybe when she was caught undercover but other than that? Bah.

Big secrets are exhausting–anyone who keeps them is constantly thinking about them. Holding their breath anytime a subject comes up. Keeping secrets is a mental thing but it’s incredibly visceral. And that makes for exciting writing. And we all relate to these stories because we’ve all kept secrets–not necessarily embarrassing, life-changing ones but secrets nonetheless. From love and loyalty to actually hating that movie or not knowing the words of the Black National Anthem, people have things they’ll hold to their chests until they die.

Those who don’t know me assume that I’ve always led a quiet, middle-class life filled with books and videogames. Books and videogames, yes. But I’ve seen violence up close, gunshots all around me. I’ve had more than six surgeries and my drawers are filled with the nice, treaded socks hospitals slip on your feet before procedures. I have secrets and they fuel my writing. One funny secret that I’ll share: when I was in 7th grade, my mom picked me up from school. I needed to pee really, really bad but she needed me to go into the drug store for something. I protested but I had to go–and so I went into that Sav-on. And I peed in the aisle. And ran out, not telling the manager that I peed in Aisle 7.

What did you find surprising in your writing process?

HANK: I have no idea about the endings of the books. Or, for that matter, the middles. I have no idea what comes next until the next sentence, and the next paragraph, and then, whoa the next scene. SO people say wow, the ending of THE FIRST TO LIE really surprised me! And I say, yeah, wasn’t that a surprise? Talk about a surprise ending. I surprise myself. Every time! But that’s what gets me to the computer every day–I have to find out what happens next. And the only way to do that is to write it.

I must say–I do not recommend this method.

RACHEL: But you do it so well, Hank!

I’m surprised that it continues to be hard. That I continue to be scared–of writing a complete story that makes sense, that makes a reader want to turn the page. I guess that’s a secret–that I fear that I’m no good at this and that I’ll never become the Beyonce of Hank Phillippi Ryans because I suck. LOL. My big secret, writing-related, is that I’m scared to death that I will never be successful. So, it’s a big thrill when someone reads my books, or when I’m nominated for an award. Part of me thinks that happens out of pity or because someone is being nice to me. On my most confident days–Monday through Wednesday–I know that’s not true. I know that I have interesting stories to tell, that it’s fine that my voice is different than Hank’s or Attica’s or Steph’s, that this isn’t a zero sum game and that my stories deserve a place on a bookshelf somewhere. I keep writing in hopes that I will someday get it right.

Hank, do you have a bank of endings that you haven’t used and that you aim to use one day? I have, like, two or three…

HANK: Ha. Ha ha ha. Rachel, you are a funny funny person. I have NO spare endings. I don’t even have the ending I need for the book I’m working on now. (And aw, Rachel. Thank you.) But wait. Rachel. You KNOW the endings of your books before you start? Do you know the whole story?

RACHEL: As a child of pop culture, growing up in the 80s, television as your babysitter, I love good endings–and the best endings for me were always from The Twilight Zone. There was always something special on holidays because of the TZ marathons, and we’d watch all day and the endings still resonated even though you’ve watched that ‘Anthony sending people to the cornfield’ episode 100 times. So, that desire to leave readers with a good ending–not one of those ‘gotcha’ ones but a very lovely, organic end to things… Yes, sometimes I do know the endings, although Land of Shadows–I didn’t know that ending until I wrote it. The ending for And Now She’s Gone, I did know. But I didn’t know the whole story.

You’ve both written series and are now writing stand-alones – what drew you to these stand-alone stories? Were there plots that didn’t fit with your series that you have adapted into stand-alones?

HANK: So different to write a series and a standalone. Because in a series, the main character isn’t going to die–Jane Ryland will be back! So the suspense has to come from something other than the mortality of the main character. So there’s a crime, it’s solved, and you can go on to the next adventure. But in a standalone there’s this amazing knowledge that anything can happen. Anyone can be good, anyone can be bad, anyone can be guilty, and anyone–anyone!–can die. When I realized that, it felt so powerful.

So to me, a standalone means: here is the single biggest and most compellingly important thing that will ever happen to these people. And watch out readers–anything goes.

RACHEL: Writing mystery and crime, we’re blessed (or cursed) with an abundance of story ideas. And I want to get to at least thirty percent of those. I can’t really do that if I’m solely writing a series. I want to hop in different characters’ heads–Lou Norton is different than Miriam Macy, and Grayson Sykes and Isabel Lincoln are different than Lou and Miriam. Of course, I could’ve Rube Goldberged plots to fit into a Lou Norton story or a missing woman plotline, but I didn’t want to do that. I wanted each woman to have a say and to be featured and to have her life examined.

Hank, since you’re an investigative reporter, are there too many stories vying for attention. “Write me! Write me!’ How do you narrow down what you wanna write?

HANK: I have often said to my husband on my writing days: If I can have just ONE good idea a day, I’m happy. One! But that elusive gorgeous idea for a novel? That’s such a great question, Rachel. I have this weird faith or trust or belief that when I need a good idea, it will come. But that is the most difficult part of writing–to get that one gorgeous core gem of an idea. I absolutely remember when it happened for THE FIRST TO LIE. But if I reveal it, it will give it all away.

But Rachel, you honestly have an abundance of ideas? Sigh. Does your writer-brain just decide: This is the one? Or is it a theme?

RACHEL: I do! I have about ten stories that I’ve started and stopped, simply because I don’t know how to write them yet. And I have an Evernote filled with news articles of future stories. I only decide which ones to write only when I can’t stop writing it, when I’m not frustrated or bored by it. I do know that I have to be excited about the idea–and that I’m clear on what I want to say about that issue. It took me more than ten years to figure out the story that eventually became And Now She’s Gone.

Are either of you good at guessing other people’s twist endings?

HANK: Ha! I constantly guess. My husband and I will be watching TV, and I’ll say–The sister did it! Or–she’s pregnant. Or–oh, it’s the daughter. And Jonathan asks–can’t you just watch it? And I say–no, I can’t. I have to guess.

But here’s what’s a little annoying. If we’re told there’s a twist, then we’re looking for it. And reading every single word looking for clues. And sometimes, instead of enjoying the book, our brains race ahead, trying to beat the author to the answer. I wish I could stop doing that. Maybe we should even stop saying that books have twist endings. Just let ‘em be a surprise.

RACHEL: Amen, Hank! I’m already looking for the trick, and with the ‘with the ending you don’t wanna miss,’ I can’t just enjoy the story. As a writer, I like starting simple and have the reader look up and realize that they’ve been caught up in a delicious tangle. I hate twist endings for the sake of twist endings. I think after The Sixth Sense, everyone had to have these crazy contortions in their stories. I think life in itself offers enough twists without having the ‘he was always dead’ ending. I mean, who would’ve guessed 2020 would shape up (or down) like it has? I’m hoping for a twist ending, though. The good kind, though.

HANK: Agreed, dear Rachel.

Category: On Writing

All Sweeping Aside – On Writing the Chronicles of Amicae

All Sweeping Aside – On Writing the Chronicles of Amicae

Pre-order Fortress of Magi

A Look Back on the Writing the Chimera Adventures with Cate Glass

A Look Back on the Writing the Chimera Adventures with Cate Glass

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How to Find Worldbuilding Inspiration in the Desert

How to Find Worldbuilding Inspiration in the Desert

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The Best Characters in SFF are Chaotic, Prove Us Wrong

The Best Characters in SFF are Chaotic, Prove Us Wrong

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Arkady Martine Answers: What’s It Like to Be Married to Another Writer?

Arkady Martine Answers: What’s It Like to Be Married to Another Writer?

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An Ode to the Map in the Beginning of Every Fantasy Book

An Ode to the Map in the Beginning of Every Fantasy Book

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We’ve Got This: A Message from TJ Klune

We’ve Got This: A Message from TJ Klune

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The Poetry of A Memory Called Empire

The Poetry of A Memory Called Empire

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What Was It Like to Work on To Hold Up the Sky by Cixin Liu? Ask the Translators!

What Was It Like to Work on To Hold Up the Sky by Cixin Liu? Ask the Translators!

**What makes the stories in To Hold Up the Sky stand out to you as a translator?**

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What are some marks of a story that’s been translated well?

What’s the top reason why English-speakers should read more translated fiction?

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In Conversation: Hank Phillippi Ryan and Rachel Howzell Hall

In Conversation: Hank Phillippi Ryan and Rachel Howzell Hall

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What makes the stories in To Hold Up the Sky stand out to you as a translator?

What are the biggest challenges in translating science fiction?

What are some marks of a story that’s been translated well?

What’s the top reason why English-speakers should read more translated fiction?

Order To Hold Up the Sky Here:

Preorder And Now She’s Gone, coming September 22, 2020!

Order a copy of The First to Lie, now on sale!

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**What makes the stories in To Hold Up the Sky stand out to you as a translator?**