Rachel Swirsky's Blog, page 39

A Year of Writing News, Part Two - An Interview or Two

A Year of Writing News, Part Two - An Interview or Two

I was interviewed a couple times last year, and for various reasons, both interviews were delayed until the last couple months. Now they're both up.

First, Larry Nolen interviewed me about the Nebula awards. We talked about my history as a writer, and about my two novelettes that were nominated for awards last year. I really liked his question about when I'd considered quitting writing rather than how I'd started. On reread, one piece that stuck out for me was our discussion of why "A Memory of Wind" was difficult for me to write:

one of my close friends from college developed disociative amnesia while I was working on the piece. I'd already drafted it by then, but it was strange to have someone close to me suddenly experience something similar to what I'd inflicted on Iphigenia. It hard to work on the story after that sharp, intense loss. I needed distance. I'm not sure how much my reaction to my friend's experiences inflected what I wrote.

The second interview is really sort of an interview and a half. A while ago, Jeff Vandermeer interviewed me for his blog as part of his series "conversations with the bookless." Now that I have a book published, Jeff Vandermeer interviewed me on what it was like to transition to being book-ful. He set up the interview in a fun way by asking me most of the same questions, and then putting my answers THEN next to my answers NOW.

For instance, on why I like short stories:

Now: I love the emotional intensity of short fiction. It can be a slash, a shock, a sprint. It's an impact of images and emotions and weirdness and someone else's head space, the powerful stuff of life boiled down to its essence. I love the ability to polish the prose until each word placed is the word you completely intend, not just the word that happened to be there. I love shearing prose down to exactly what needs to exist...

Then: As a writer, I like the intensity of short fiction. It enables one to concentrate on language in a way that is nearly impossible for longer projects. I like to rewrite things many times, and it's not always feasible to retype a 90,000 word novel twenty times so you can get the rhythm of the language right in your ear.

Sort of similar, but sort of not. It was interesting for me to see both how I'd changed and how I'd stayed the same.

What should I read?

I'm getting ready to do a big reading push so that I can be a somewhat-informed nominator for the Hugos and the Nebulas. I always intend to read everything as it gets published, but then a lot of stuff gets published, and I get behind. You know? So, I was hoping y'all would help me find some places to start reading.

Tell me what you're excited about! What did you read this year that you loved? What changed you? What got under your skin? What was just an awesomely fun time? What did you keep to read a second time and maybe a third? What made you think 'wow"?

Send me links. Send me files. Send me titles!

I haven't read as much this year as I wish I had, but here are some of the things that I've encountered and really enjoyed:

"The History Within Us" by Matt Kressel
"Flying in the Face of God" by Nina Allen (originally published in Interzone and not online, but here's a review from Niall Harrison)
"Ghosts of New York" by Jennifer Pelland
"Amaryllis" by Carrie Vaughn
"Conditional Love" by Felicity Shoulders (originally published in Asimov's; here's the writer's page)
"The History of Poly-V" by Jon Ingold (originally in Interzone, here's my review)
"Petopia" by Benjamin Crowell (originally in Asimov's)

For novels:

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and Broken Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin
Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay (not my favorite of his historical fantasies, but solid)
The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

I read some other novels that I enjoyed this year, but I tend to read novels at random times, and not just when they were published, so it's hard for me to remember what's eligible. I may have forgotten some important ones.

A New Year of Writing News

There's an awesome memoir blog called Hyperbole and a Half which, if you haven't read, you should. The blogger puts up cartoons illustrating incidents from her life, and she once did an entry called This Is Why I'll Never Be An Adult. I identify with every single darn thing in it, but in particular, in one panel she shows herself striding forth brilliantly in a halo of light, with a broom in one hand, proclaiming that she's going to "CLEAN ALL THE THINGS!" A few days later, she's tired, and she slumps over the broom, whimpering, "Clean ALL the things?"

That's what I'm like with blogging. I'm all like, halo-striding, confident-me, "BLOG ALL THE THINGS!" Then I'm like, crouched over the laptop, whimpering me, "Blog ALL the things?"

So, on the one hand, I'm really pleased to announce that I've got a lot of writing news! But on the other hand, since I always feel kind of embarrassed putting up my news, that means that instead of drizzling out my writing news bit by bit as it happens, I end up posting it in a big chunk of all the writing news ever.

I was going to do that this time, but it just got too clunky, so I'm going to split it up into several entries to be posted this week and next week.

A NEW YEAR OF WRITING NEWS, PART ONE

I Wrote a Novella, and Someone Published It, and Two People Reprinted It, and Finally I Linked It!

So, a few years ago, I was reading through all the Sword and Sorceress anthologies because when I was twelve I loved them. At the time, I was editing a market for fantasy reprints, and I thought, you know what my inner twelve year old wants me to run? Stories from Sword & Sorceress. Then I reread them and found out that my outer twenty-five year old didn't love the stories as much as my inner twelve year old had. They had virtues, of course, lots of fun and magic, but they weren't really my ouvre anymore.

In one of the stories, a magic-doing character summoned an ancient demon into the summoning circle. And there was candles and serious music and so on and so on and the demon appeared and it was *pissed off*. Because it's a bloody all-powerful demon, and stuck in this summoning circle.

And I thought, A) That would suck. And B) What would it be like to be the creature who gets summoned? To be very powerful, but only come in and out of stories at their most pivotal moments, to only see the climax? What would that experience be like? And could it form a story?

So I wrote a novella.

Of course, along the way, it got a lot more complicated, and started dealing with prehistory, and sociobiology, and the meaning of cultural change, and so on and so forth.

The novella is called "The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen's Window" and it is 19,000 words long, and it was published in Subterranean Magazine this summer. Both Strahan and Horton picked it up for their years' best anthologies, and it's gotten some very nice reviews from people like Tim Pratt and Tansy Roberts and L. Timmel Duchamp.

The whole shebang is online at the link.

Hanukkah Post on Jewish Identity, Jewish Fantasy, and People of the Book: a Decade of Jewish SF&F

SFF Chat put together a series of essays by Jewish writers for this Hanukkah series. I'm honored to have been included, with an essay about the process of editing People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy (available on Amazon).

Some sample quotes:

When I was eleven, I remember a boy my age asking, "So which is it? Are you an atheist or a Jew?"

His tone was one of skeptical indignation. He was clearly intimating that he'd caught me in a lie because I'd described myself as both. The weird thing was that my perspective immediately flipped to his. Even as I explained that the situation was more complicated than either/or, that I was both Jewish and an atheist, I saw him as right. I saw myself as a liar.

I suppose that was a tiny fragment of what W. E. B. DuBois describes as double consciousness—a "sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others."...

I mention all of this to work my way toward the context of how I understand the question with which Michael Weingrad, writing in the Jewish Review of Books, perturbed the internet (or at least my corner of it) several months ago—"Why Is There No Jewish Narnia?"

Weingrad wonders why "amidst all the initiatives to solve the crisis in Jewish continuity, no one has yet proposed commissioning a Jewish fantasy series that might plumb the theological depths like Lewis or at least thrill Jewish preteens with tales of Potterish derring-do."...

Others have challenged Weingrad's assertions in detail, but at this late point in the discussion, I have to admit that my central response to Weingrad is to wonder whether the entire problem is definitional. Weingrad appears to be defining the fantasy genre in such a way that it excludes most Jewish fantasy. Most secondary world fantasy by Jewish authors doesn't count because it's not theologically based in the way Lewis's Narnia is based in Christianity. And apparently for Weingrad, Jewish primary world fantasy doesn't evoke the same sense of wonder as Rowling's Harry Potter.

It seems to me that Weingrad defines fantasy by the terms of Christian writers, and then wonders why Jewish doesn't look exactly like Christian fantasy does.

Well, why should it?

Why is primacy and centrality given to Narnia but not Kafka?

Why is Christian fantasy taken on its own terms, but Jewish fantasy compared to a Christian default?

Read the rest at SFF Chat.

There's also a book giveaway going on over there. Leave your name and email in comments and SFF Chat will enter you to win a free copy of People of the Book.

A lack of Jewish Narnias, and articles about same.

Dear Crowdsource,

Weingrad's article in the Jewish Review of Books, "Why Is There no Jewish Narnia" appears to have disappeared behind a subscription wall. Does anyone know where it might be found? Or happen to have a copy? I'm trying to write a reply, though it is yonks after everyone else's.

<3,
me

Oh dear god.

I have always known I'm aggressively not visual in my thinking. I have also known that the map memorization I did in 5th and 6th grades, when I could label every state in America with its capital, every province in Canada with same, and every country in the world with same (though that was in severe flux at the time), had faded.

But it was only as I tried to describe to Mike which states still had corporal punishment, by looking at a map labeled in red and blue, that I realized the full, terrible extent of the problem.

(Interestingly, my issue remembering maps may actually correlate to corporal punishment. The teacher I had in 5th and 6th grade didn't practice corporal punishment--which would have been illegal--but she was later fired for being abusive to her students. I was one of her favorite targets. For years afterward, the thought of going to school made me nauseated. I was so afraid of her. I tried very hard not to think about those years, and consequently, I think I forgot much of what I learned then.)

More generalizably, when I was 10-12 and memorized these things, I'd been to like 5 states. I knew where they were (California, Nevada, Oregon, Texas, Oklahoma, maybe another state or four), but everything else was a welter known only by name, or perhaps by name and one random fact. I knew nothing about Idaho except that my dad said they grew potatoes there. I still don't know much about Idaho, honestly, though I know a bit more than that.

But all the states on the east coast, for instance, that I would have memorized by rote, are now part of a mental landscape of visiting people and places. The knowledge I've gained about the states didn't ever integrate with the memorization of the map. Vermont isn't just the state that I memorized as being twin to New Hampshire; it's the place with beautiful fall leaves that my college roommate was from.

The mnemonics I used at 11 had no meaning and were forgotten. But hopefully I can construct an actual knowledge now based on my experience of the world.

I am not dead.

The result of the summer is that I am not dead.

I came a bit closer than I have before, though. Not closer than a lot of you out there have probably come; I don't want to exaggerate my experience. It was closer for me.

I feel different, and not entirely sure of who I am. Or perhaps, rather, who I want to be. Or how my identity as a writer fits into that.

I feel a bit like Alice, I suppose. "I could tell you my adventures — beginning from this morning," said Alice a little timidly: "but it's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then."

I had stopped perceiving myself as a person with a future. I have one. That changes everything.

Gallbladder Gone

Mike is fine. He is home and napping. All went well.

Goodbye, Gallbladder

Mike is in surgery. We'll hear from the surgeon once it's done, in another hour or so.

UNICORN PEGASUS KITTEN CONTEST! And, announcing Clash Of The Geeks!

I have a very cool contest for readers of my blogging (here and elsewhere) this week, relating to the new and spectacular chapbook Clash Of The Geeks.



First, a bit about Clash of the Geeks from John Scalzi:

Holy crap, is this a great little chapbook.

I'm not just saying that. Look, like probably the rest of you, I figured that when the stories for this thing came in, they would be cute and silly, and that we'd all just bask in the glow of doing something useful, namely, raising money to help...