Vicki Pettersson's Blog, page 3
September 11, 2014
On Ambition…aka, My Latest Book Deal
Flashback, c. 2011:
Me: “I want to write a book.”
Husband, James: “You are writing a book. It’s called The Lost.”
Me: “Not that book. Another book.”
Practical husband, James: “You are writing another book. That one’s called The Given.”
Me: “Not that book.”
Practical husband falls still, challenging when driving across the hard-baked Mojave in the middle of the summer: “Okay. So what book do you want to write?”
“I want to write a monster of a chase book. I want to write cat-and-mouse thriller with life-and death stakes—no, death and death stakes. I want to write a balls-to-the-wall chess match between two people—no one else—and not let up until the final page.”
James (predictably practical): “Gee, babe. You should really be more ambitious.”
Me, arms crossed: “Okay, then. I want to scare the *&%$ out of Stephen King.”
The photo at the side was taken in August 2011, almost three years ago to the day, and it’s the moment I started the monster of a chase book that aimed to be a cat-and-mouth death march between two sole characters across the Mojave desert that doesn’t let up and might even scare Stephen King:
And this is today’s Publishers Marketplace:
“Vicki Pettersson’s SWERVE, in which a medical professional goes head-to-head against an unpredictable killer, and has only twenty-four hours to find her abducted fiancé somewhere in the searing Mojave Desert, to Ed Schlesinger at Gallery, in a good deal, for publication in Summer 2015, by Peter McGuigan at Foundry Literary + Media (US).”
This is my first thriller, my first hard cover, and my first title with Simon & Schuster. Let it suffice to say that despite the side photo, not every writing day was a day at the beach. Still, you have to start somewhere and I began this after my initial research trip through the desert for SWERVE. Sea breeze goes well with a blank screen and bald hope.
Mind, I don’t know if I managed to write something that’d scare the *&%$ out of Stephen King…but early reader feedback tells me I’m going to cause some sleepless nights for one or two of you.
Everything Old is New Again
The first book I ever published was THE SCENT OF SHADOWS, though it wasn’t the first book I’d ever written. The story came to me on the heels of a long love affair with historical fiction. With my interest in that genre waning (that’s code for ‘I could never finish a darned book!’) I became energized (code for: obsessed) by the idea of a strong contemporary heroine, and a magical world beneath the shimmering veneer of my hometown, Las Vegas. I didn’t know what it was, and so I didn’t tailor it to any genre or any extant similar stories I’d read. Truth was, I hadn’t even read a story like it – that’s probably why I wanted to write so badly.
“This is Dark Urban Fantasy.”
That’s what my agent told me in our first phone conversation. Mind, she was offering representation at the same time, so I readily agreed that that’s what it was, and rushed straight to Google to research it the moment we hung up.
What it happened to be was a genre filled with the exact same elements that had attracted me to historical fiction: fully realized worlds, larger-than-life characters, and a true escape from mundane reality. Yet by using a contemporary setting, I found a way to ground those fantastical elements in a way that’d previously eluded me. Everything felt more real—although it probably helped that I didn’t people my story with vampires or ghosts or werewolves. Joanna Archer is just like you and me … you know, if we unexpectedly (and unwillingly) found ourselves moonlighting as superheroes.
The superhero angle also gave me a chance to play with the idea of people not always being what they seem, whether they’re a beauty queen with a surprising core of inner toughness, or a homeless man with a heart of gold. I use superheroes and the masks they wear to explore how we all have one face we wear in public and another, often very different one, just below that.
After all, who can’t relate to that?
Now if you’d asked me at the conclusion of the sixth book if there was any more life left in the Zodiac world (and people did) I’d have said no (and I did). That story belongs to Joanna Archer, and her journey—if I didn’t make it clear—was over, her trials complete. My girl had done the best she could under very trying circumstances, and even I thought she deserved some well-earned down time.
And then.
What is Joanna doing now?
What about her daughter, Ashlyn, who’s fated to come into her powers soon?
What about Zoe?*
(I can’t tell whether people love Jo or Zoe more sometimes…maybe because I can’t tell who I love more, either. That Zoe is fierce.)
Even as I penned the entirety of the Celestial Blues trilogy, these questions came to me. Celestial Blues was both well-reviewed and well-received, and still my feeds and emails and posts were filled with questions about Joanna’s fate.
And readers were still finding the books after all these years, doing it in their own time, as readers as wont to do. Sure, some cried ugly tears at the conclusion of THE GIVEN, and some banded together on Facebook solely to tease me about my cooking skills *ahem* but even those who were happy to follow me as an author were still wondering about Joanna and Co.
So when a friend (Kevin J. Anderson, whom I’ve wanted to work with for years and have been without the personal bandwidth to do so) asked if I’d like to contribute a story to a charity anthology just after I’d completed the Celestial Blues trilogy, I thought, Why not give my readers what they already want?
I had to pause and feel around in my mind a little bit. Re-enter a world I hadn’t stepped foot in for years. See, I always believed that “what happens next” in the Zodiac world begins with Ashlyn Archer’s story, Joanna’s daughter. Yet Joanna remained my inlet to her – and to all things Zodiac – so even though she was likely still sick of me, I wondered if she would be willing to speak to me after I’d given her so much time and space. Maybe now that she’d finally lived some of her happy ending (such as it was) she would open up again.
Or, just as likely, I’d end up with a crossbow bolt between my eyes.
I wasn’t really sure, but when I finally did go back and poke around in her sandbox, damned if she didn’t sit right up and say, “I missed this.”
And I realized I had missed this.
And that’s how I wrote THE REORDERING.
So for all of you who wrote to tell me that you loved the Zodiac series, that though satisfied with its conclusion, you still didn’t want it to end—this is a gift from Joanna and me … to you.
It’s out in October (more on that coming soon) and when you’re done reading it, feel free to contact me and let me know what you think. Because writing THE REORDERING didn’t just give me another story.
It gave me another World.
It’s Not About the Monsters
This is an essay I wrote a few years ago for Locus magazine, since revised, though I still very much stand by these words. When I tell people I’ve written fantasies, many inevitable respond with, “But how do you do that? How do you keep inventing new creatures and worlds?” And I tell them that you don’t focus on the newfangled creatures, you focus on characters. You concern yourself with people. That’s how you create a true connection with others—on the page, over distances, through time.
It’s Not About The Monsters
I have to admit that I didn’t even know if there was a market for what I was writing when I began the Signs of the Zodiac series. I had this a bare-knuckled heroine, a mouthy first-person narrative, and an urban setting that embodied the gritty darkness of the noir fiction that I read and so loved. And then there were those supernatural beings who’d popped up, mushrooming on the page as if waiting for optimal conditions. The truth is, I never chose to write about superheroes. They chose me.
So when I’m asked “Why superheroes?” as if I was baking a paranormal cake and needed to measure out ingredients in order to get it right, my reply is almost always disappointing. I thought I was simply writing a story about a woman with a dark past and an uncertain future. Since my only job was to follow wherever the ‘What ifs…’ chose to take me—since I’d recently decided that I was going to write whether I was ever published or not—when a mere side character popped up to declare himself ‘super’ on the page (and as he’d just survived being struck by my heroine’s car, it was pretty clear he was right)—I decided to follow this beady-eyed bum in sore need of a bath and shave … and found out that he was right. He was a superhero. One cheesy throwaway line later, and my budding series had been turned completely on its head.
Yet I think what people really mean when they ask me this question is why didn’t I write about vampires (especially) or werewolves (often) or witches (also tried and true)? Yet I’ve never written specifically to genre, much less followed trends. I’d been working on my writing for eight years by this point on CompuServe’s Books&Writers forum, schooled along with other budding writers (an inordinate number of whom have gone on to be publisher; it was extremely fertile ground) on how to be a professional writer. We watched the working writers as they conducted their daily lives—in particular Diana Gabaldon, who has always been extremely accessible (though is likely less so now).
I mimicked those writers. (How? Write daily. Read widely. Don’t stop.). I clearly also mimicked Gabaldon’s ‘Write it and they will come’ approach to a series. I mean, what is Outlander? Where do you shelve those books? She didn’t even know, she didn’t care, and so I didn’t care, either, and just believed, “If you write something that’s good, it will be published.”
Back to the monsters.
Fantastical or not, it’s easy to recognize an author who is passionate about the characters peopling their world. It’s equally transparent when something like a vampire is thrown in merely because the conventions are already cemented in a readers mind. (Dark – check. Brooding – check. Fangs – double check.) Twisting myths to create something new is one thing, but plugging a monster into a plot hole is quite simply cheap. As my entree into urban fantasy was a fortuitous accident—remember, I didn’t know where this book would be shelved, either—I was a bit mind-boggled to find myself a part of a cultural shift in reading that resulted in a demand for hot chicks in leather and a penchant for attracting all things that go Bump.
All I know is that along with Harrison and Hamilton, Butcher and Harris (and why God, didn’t I create a pen name starting with the letter ‘H’?) readers discovered a genre that had something fresh to say about the human condition. Urban settings, the most tangible window dressing in a twenty-first century life, became characters in themselves. The myth-twisting was fun … a wizard P.I. solving supernatural crimes in modern-day Chicago? Yes, please! Female driven stories where the women weren’t devices to provide a male protag with agency? Hell yes!
But a half-vamp-half-wolf with fairy wings who’s been bitten by a zombie while having sex – all for the sake of creating a ‘new’ monster? Frankly, that makes me want to bite someone.
Because it ain’t about the monsters.
We read for a specific character’s journey. We want to explore the world’s pitfalls along with someone we care about. And just as most people want to recognize the person reflected back in their morning mirror, when a reader gazes into the pages of a book, they too want to catch a glimpse of themselves. After all, the ‘self’ (as exemplified by a Twitter-mad society) is everyone’s favorite subject. If all you show the readers are the monsters on the page, that connection is obliterated.
Yet create a person with shiny new facets, one re-imagined, and up against unthinkable odds (prior to your having thought of them, of course) and now you have stakes strong enough to pull words from a page and tuck them into the gray matter for later examination. I wanted my readers to think of my first protagonist, Joanna Archer, whenever they saw a flicker of movement in their rearview mirror, or better yet, when they’re brushing their teeth – baring them – and they are forced to pause. Show someone the monster lurking within them, and you’ve tapped into a very real way of dealing with an unreal world. Ambiguity lurks deep inside all of us, and our job as writers is to slide an ink-tipped finger alongside that raw emotion. Suddenly a mythical and multicultural archetype – like a vampire or shape-shifter, or a hero who shows up when you need them – has a place of relevance in the modern world.
It can be tempting for any writer to chase what’s hot. But developing monsters that play to reader expectation is the least creative way to work. Doing so undermines the writer’s passion, the reader’s intelligence, and prevents fresh fables from being born.
Short-change your readers like that, and don’t be surprised if their inner monsters rear up and bite back.
On Ambition…aka, my Latest Book Deal
Flashback, c. 2011:
Me: “I want to write a book.”
Husband, James: “You are writing a book. It’s called The Lost.”
Me: “Not that book. Another book.”
Practical husband, James: “You are writing another book. That one’s called The Given.”
Me: “Not that book.”
Practical husband falls still, challenging when driving across the hard-baked Mojave in the middle of the summer: “Okay. So what book do you want to write?”
“I want to write a monster of a chase book. I want to write cat-and-mouse thriller with life-and death stakes—no, death and death stakes. I want to write a balls-to-the-wall chess match between two people—no one else—and not let up until the final page.”
James, predictably practical: “Gee, babe. Why don’t you try for something more ambitious?”
Vicki, crossing arms: “Okay. I want to scare the *&%$ out of Stephen King.”
[image error]August 2011: the day I started the monster of a chase book that aimed to be a cat-and-mouth death march between two sole characters across the Mojave desert that doesn’t let up and might even scare Stephen King:
And this is today’s Publishers Marketplace:
“Vicki Pettersson’s SWERVE, in which a medical professional goes head-to-head against an unpredictable killer, and has only twenty-four hours to find her abducted fiancé somewhere in the searing Mojave Desert, to Ed Schlesinger at Gallery, in a good deal, for publication in Summer 2015, by Peter McGuigan at Foundry Literary + Media (US).”
I don’t know if I managed to write something that’d scare the *&%$ out of Stephen King, but early reader feedback tells me I’m going to cause some sleepless nights for one or two of you.
