Sarah Cypher's Blog, page 3

What’s your new novel about?

Set in a post-contagion Mideast, ROOM 100 is a 91,000-word speculative novel about a young mother trying to escape the infamous Quarantine Zone with her child. It combines the brisk pace of Middle Eastern genre stories such as Zoe Ferraris’s City of Veils with the upmarket writing style of Hillary Jordan’s When She Woke.

Forty years after a global pandemic, peace and prosperity in Middle East come at a cost—the sick and their descendants, as well as political exiles, are banished to the walled Quarantine Zone. Rabia is a young mother and the daughter of its powerful medical director, and when she threatens to expose her father’s corruption, he sends her away to the Zone.

Rabia takes work in Room 100, the medical clinic at a girls’ school. The school belongs to Hanbal, a thug who governs the neighborhood, and Rabia learns that it’s an asset in a dangerous political game: he’s marrying the girls off to forge alliances against the soldiers in charge. Rabia’s objections put her and her daughter in danger.

She finds an ally in Um Sahar, the school’s headmistress and Hanbal’s own wife. Um Sahar is an ambiguous and powerful political figure, and until now, Rabia has hidden her identity as the daughter of the most hated man in the Zone. But when Um Sahar discovers this, Rabia must choose whom to defend as the situation in the Zone escalates toward all-out revolt: her daughter or the girls whose childhoods are being sacrificed to fight an oppressive political order. ROOM 100 explores what it means to defend or betray one’s gender, and the compromises a mother makes for her child.

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And for those of you curious about the old version of the novel, and how the story setup evolved when a great editor got her hands on my manuscript, here’s the synopsis of the novel when it was called SHAHIDA.

SHAHIDA is set in the near-future Gaza Strip. It combines the brisk pace of Middle Eastern mysteries such as Zoe Ferraris’s City of Veils and Matt Rees’s A Grave in Gaza with the intense, interior narration style of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

Shunned by her family, Rabia, a disgraced young mother, starts class in Gaza City’s “women’s education program”—a school that trains women as wives, and marries them to graduating men. She needs the marriage to regain custody of her infant daughter, but faces the danger of jail or stoning if she violates the land’s strict, unfamiliar laws.

Yet the school has a covert agenda. Because Rabia already has a child, making her an unlikely candidate for marriage, the dean compels her to join a political club for women. In the club, she embarks on a secret double life that puts her in more danger, but offers hope of eventual escape. She discovers that the women in the club are being trained as shahidat, suicide bombers; but once in, Rabia cannot leave lest she be stoned as a collaborator, and leave her daughter motherless.

Her only escape is a fellow student who offers to help her in exchange for favors to an underground organization. The favors become more dangerous—but also lead to Sami, a resister whom she must learn to trust if she is to survive. As the price of her escape, they make a daring effort to expose the school’s covert agenda, and start a chain reaction that could forever change the land where veils hide all, and where every personal act is also political.

Grants!

Thanks to Lizette Wanzer’s amazing grant workshop at the San Francisco Grotto, I spent some time putting myself out there for new writing opportunities this year.

I’m beyond pleased to say that two of these grant applications were approved. One is a Creative Capacity Fund Quick Grant that will enable me to attend BinderCon in New York next month. The other is a Key West Literary Seminar Writers Workshop scholarship to attend Diana Abu Jaber’s weeklong class in January.

Writing a novel is a notoriously slow and solitary process, so it is gratifying–even life-giving–to gain support along the way. I look forwarding to meeting others on the same path, and to learning from the best.

New freelance piece published in Publishers Weekly

This article exists behind a subscription wall, unfortunately, but if you can, check out my latest freelance piece in Publishers Weekly. After a lot of editing and the help of an amazing editor there, we managed to get my trip to London and about seven interviews to fit into a 650-word article. I still have so much good information from my research that I’m thinking about how I might use more of it in another piece.

If you don’t have a PW subscription and would like to know something specific about upcoming Arab speculative fiction, feel free to contact me.

Beyond One Thousand and One Nights: Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015-2016

Genre fiction is gaining ground in the Middle East—and, slowly, the books are moving West…

From Helmet Head to Helmut Lang

At 9:15 a.m. on Sunday morning, I was swinging my bike around into a light headwind on Highway 1. Despite a fog of condensation across my time trial helmet’s visor, I sighted the next woman in my age group and shifted up a gear, accelerating south along the dramatic Pacific coastline. I was on the second leg of Ironman Santa Cruz 70.3 and having the race of my life.

Fewer than twelve hours later, I was sitting upright in a middle airplane seat, sandwiched between two broad passengers on the way to New York City. The trip would lead me to the Publishers Weekly Star Watch reception on Wednesday, where I got to hear Mira Jacob’s viral BuzzFeed speech, and also learned that five hours and nineteen minutes of sustained athletic activity is nearly painless when compared with a short walk in the five-inch Stella McCartney heels I’d bought to wear with this dress.

Laura Stanfill and me on our way to the party.

I’ve been so busy with editing work that I don’t have time to write a good race report AND give the New York trip the run-down it deserves; and I suspect that the two very different audiences for each will be bored with one (or both) of these efforts. So let’s just jam them into a Procrustean chart.

[Incidentally, I’m finishing this post six weeks after I started it. Lame.]

Location:

IMSC: Santa Cruz Pier, California. Also, less than two miles from the Cement Boat, where many 18-foot great white sharks were spotted in the unusually warm water. That’ll make you swim fast.

Trish, Stacey, Simon, moi, and Erin, ready to out-swim the sharks and sea lions.

NY: Midtown Manhattan, smack in the middle of giant-scale buildings, 99-cent-pizza shops, the Museum of Sex, and not much else.

Duration:

IMSC: 5 hours, 18 minutes, 58 seconds elapsed between a wild gadarene into the surf, and a soft-sand finishing chute. Let me just say that running a quarter mile through sandcastles, broken crab shells, and ankle-deep dry sand was harder than the foregoing 70.05 miles.

This might have been the most sadistic finish chute in all of Ironman.

NY: A day longer than my scheduled return flight on JetBlue, thanks to some poor planning. The banquet was originally scheduled on Rosh Hashanah–oops–and was moved a day later, so I shelled out the $150 to change my flight.

Purpose:

IMSC: To cap off a summer of hard training. I exercise so I can eat. And evidently, I also like to spend money, because no matter how frugal I try to be, triathlon is a ridiculously expensive addiction; albeit a healthier one than drugs, probably.

NY: To continue my wild spending streak. I found a $35 Helmut Lang dress, and proceeded to spend $300 in accessories. This was all worth it because I was supporting my good friend Laura Stanfill of Forest Avenue Press, who was nominated for a Star Watch Award. And being the ace planner she is, she spun the trip into a whirlwind of meet-and-greets with agents, distributors at Perseus, authors, and booksellers. I also visited some clients I’d been eager to meet in person. This insider’s view of the publishing industry blew my mind.

Special gear needed:

IMSC: Rubber suit, funny helmet, metal-cleated shoes, carbon wheels, and running shoes (oh! you mean the ones I forgot at home? Sigh. I had to bust out the credit card to buy a new pair). Also, 270g of carbohydrates strategically distributed across four water bottles.

NY: Aforementioned nice outfit for the party, plus two nice suits. And a laundromat, because I’ve never visited New York on business in 85-degree weather. I sweated more on a twenty-minute trip from the Flatiron Building to Times Square than I did during the whole race. New Yorkers must spend a fortune in dry cleaning. Might I suggest making every day a casual Friday? (Says the person who lives in California . . .)

Results:

IMSC: Eighth place in my age group. I was excited to share the course with my super-fast friends Patricia and Christina, who both qualified for the Ironman 70.3 World Championships in Australia. The championship is my wife Erin’s dream, too, and I fully expect it’ll happen for her next year. As for me, I have no big triathlon dreams, and my goal was–as ever–just to feel strong and happy during the race. Success.

NY: Also successful. Laura made a ton of great contacts for the press, and gave me some much-appreciated mentoring in the nitty-gritty details of publishing a book. I am happy to say that I will be helping out Forest Avenue Press in an editorial capacity starting next year, and as we both agreed, this intense trip also gave our writer-selves a new perspective on the work of getting a deal. There are so many middlemen between writing and reading; but judging from the good people we met, those middlemen are passionate readers, too, and are part of the economy like anyone else. Still, Mira Jacob’s speech resonates with me, and I am clearer than ever on the need to write as and for the part of the story-loving segment of readers whose identity is different, and difficult to pin down, and part of a wide and diverse spectrum of others who–in some way or other–owe their lives to books.

Review: Rediscovering Palestine (aka, adventures in new research sources)

Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900 by Beshara Doumani

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

You won’t know how fascinated you are by the economy of an ancient city until you start reading Doumani’s engrossing portrait of eighteenth-century Nablus. It’s written with the thorough, poignant eye of a biographer and the tacit but relentless authority of a historian: far from the “wasteland” it’s been made out to be in more biased political histories, Palestine had a diverse, thriving economy. Also interesting was the robust capitalism, entrepreneurship, and speculation banking linked all levels of Palestinian society–long before it engaged with the West.

I am supposed to be reading this as research on soap factories, but found myself sidetracked into reading the whole text. It makes me appreciate how detailed, and perhaps even how accurate, a rendering of one’s life can be made by looking only at one’s business activities: orders, contracts, inheritances, suppliers, and sales. I speak mostly as a small businesswoman, but generally, as someone living in the West, it’s difficult to not speculate at times that we are so deeply imprinted by the market that it distorts identity. The text was a clarifying reminder that humans are transactional creatures, and an economy is an intrinsic part of the human environment.

View all my reviews

Schedule: Publishers Weekly Star Watch banquet

Less than a week after signing up for BinderCon, my good friend Laura Stanfill of Forest Avenue Press invited me to be her plus-one at a PW awards banquet in New York. I wouldn’t miss an opportunity to be with one of the most talented friends I have on this special night, and this just sounds like so much fun.

What: Inaugural PW Star Watch Celebration Party

When: September 15, 2015

Where: New York, NY

And there’s a cherry on top: I’m eager to meet the nice folks at PW who will be running my piece on Arab science fiction in the October 5 SF/F issue.

Schedule: BinderCon, NYC, November 6-9

Even as I’m oh-so-overdue for writing about my amazing experience at Shubbak in London last month, I’ve signed myself up for BinderCon, a professional development conference to empower women and gender non‑conforming writers with tools, connections, and strategies to advance their careers. This has been a hugely supportive group of women, and I can’t wait to meet many of them in person and share experiences.

What: BinderCon, hosted by Out of the Binders

When: November 7–9, 2015

Where: New York University campus, Manhattan

And it’s on my birthday, so I guess besides the fact that I can’t spend it with my wife, this is one of the best gifts I’ve given myself in a long time.

Love Letter to the Weird Things

When you have a job in books, you read all the time. And it’s true: I spend literally every single day of the week reading manuscripts on one or two computer screens, hands hovering over the keyboard, usually poised on the seat of my chair in something like a crouch or a perch; a chiropractor’s nightmare. People ask if I get tired of reading.

First, I have a really easy job. Nobody’s sick. Nothing is going to fall on me, and nobody is shooting. I work in a cozy office at home, with the cat and both dogs snoring on the rug. Yes, I started this business and worked hard to make it viable, but it still feels like a guilty privilege. I take it as seriously as possible and devote myself the part of it that matters most–offering helpful, effective advice to writers who are staking a major chunk of their future happiness on the chance of publishing novels. I know how this feels because when I’m not editing, I’m writing, too.

That said: I do get tired of being critical. The most delicious thing in the world is a finished novel that isn’t in need of an opinion. At the end of the day (literally) I want to be something more important to writers–simply, purely a reader.

When almost two months go by without reading anything for fun, burnout is imminent. I think of my imagination as a jazzy, colorful pet, and if it starves to death, what good am I to writers? The ability to run loose in somebody else’s fictive dream is part of both the job of being an editor and the joy of being a reader. And what good am I to myself, or anybody I love, without an imagination, and everything else that flows from it–a sense of humor, a sense of fun?

All of this is context. Right now, my desk is surrounded by science fiction. In a sort of remedial frenzy, I scooped up Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, Ferrett Steinmetz’s Flex, Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon, Veronica Roth’s Divergent, and Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor. In short, it’s a speculative buffet for the little imagination creature: sci-fi, urban fantasy, political spec-fic, YA dystopian, and fantasy. Something about Divergent‘s simplicity turned me off after the first few chapters, but I admired Leckie’s respect for her readers’ intelligence, and I loved Steinmetz’s caper, which transforms OCD into beautiful magic. I’m reading Lagoon right now, and loving the setting (Lagos).

Speculative fiction is superfood for the imagination. It’s full of weirdness and wonder. You can be as precious as you like about the craft of writing, but without imagination, where’s the depth? What’s the point? That’s not to say that all fiction should be written about invented worlds, but having encountered many writing teachers and editors who crinkle their noses at speculative fiction as if it’s as the red-headed stepchild of novels that are Worth Our Time, well, to them, I merely point out that we fun people are sitting at this table here and the Picky Eaters Club is over there, next to the really big bowl of plain lettuce.

In short, editing doesn’t ruin the pleasure of reading–not one bit. Knowing how to change a bike tire hardly destroys the pleasure of riding it. Editing is just a way of interacting with my imagination, articulating how the fictive dream wobbles. But first and always, I’m a reader. Reading is a temperament, a lifelong habit, or a bit of both, and I get a near-ridiculous amount of comfort from the knowledge that even if I live to be as old my centenarian grandmother, I will never run out of good books to read.

 

Shubbak Festival

I’m beyond excited to be attending this year’s Shubbak Festival in London. It includes a weekend of events related to Arab Literature. The highlight, for me, will be the panel “Science Fiction in the Arab World.” (Haven’t I been saying this is a thing?) I can’t wait to bring my notes and ideas home to share, along with book recommendations.

What:  Shubbak: A Window on Contemporary Arab Culture

When: July 24–26, 2015

Where: The British Library, London, UK

If you’re planning to be there, or have a question you’d like me to ask, let me know! In the meantime, I’ll be busy preparing in the most fun way possible (for a bookworm): digging into a pile of exciting novels, graphic novels, and other literature whose authors will be presenting at the festival.

Project 2015 Is Underway

I mentioned earlier that I’m giving this year the big, open-ended, grandiose designation of Project 2015. Mainly, it’s a reminder to me that every day is what you make of it, good or bad. You can pay attention to things that go wrong and stew in your worries, or you can wrap your arms around your big plans, not knowing where they’ll take you or whether they’ll work out. This includes but is not limited to getting pregnant, publishing ROOM 100, and continuing to grow my editing business of thirteen years, The Threepenny Editor. Being ambitious, they are necessarily long-term goals; and I, not being a masochist, realized that it is preferable to spend the journey in a positive frame of mind.

I’m sure I’ll write more about the first two goals soon. In the meantime, here are the first three installments of the #Project2015 series on how to improve your fiction. As always, I’m open to new clients. If you know of anyone, send ‘em my way.

Part 1, “Scaffolding, or How You Build Something Out of Nothing”

Part 2, “Make Your Voice Original by Getting Rid of ‘Received Text’”

Part 3, “‘Strong Protagonists’ Remind Us How to Feel”

More soon!