Matt Ruff's Blog, page 39

Reader Q&A: Research + thoughts on YA

Commenter Cody asks: How much research did you do [for The Mirage], and was there a point when you felt your head was about to explode?

I did a lot of reading—history of Iraq and the Middle East, biographies of the real-life players who were going to appear in the novel, and accounts by journalists, soldiers, and ordinary Iraqis where I could find them. The fact that The Mirage takes place in an alternate reality did make the job somewhat easier. Although there were a few areas, like theology, where I tried to be as accurate as possible, a lot of the research was aimed less at getting the exact truth than at getting a sense of how far I was (deliberately) departing from it.

The closest I came to having my head explode was during the copyediting phase. I'm always worried about missing some obvious mistake, and there was more stuff to double- and triple-check than usual. Fortunately I have a very good and very patient production editor named Lydia Weaver who got me through it with a minimum of sanity loss.

Also, what are your thoughts on the explosive YA market and have you ever thought about writing for it?

My most recent YA-related thoughts have been about the kind of house I would build if I had Suzanne Collins' money.

Bestseller-fantasies aside, I think I lack the discipline and temperament to write for a specific market. The way it usually works for me is I get obsessed with telling a particular story and just assume that if I tell it well enough, somebody will want to read it—exactly who is a problem for later. So if I were going to write a YA novel, I'd probably have to come at it sideways—hit on a story that just happened to be YA, or that could be marketed as YA even though it didn't quite fit the suit. (The closest I've come so far is Bad Monkeys, which won an Alex Award in 2008.)

It's not the leading contender for book #6, but I've been kicking around this idea in my back brain for an SF novel about a race to land on another planet. I was telling a friend about it recently and joked that I could pitch it to my editor as "a Matt Ruff take on a Heinlein juvenile." That's not a wholly accurate description (the protagonists are all adult women whose attitude toward space exploration would have given Heinlein fits) but it's accurate enough that I wouldn't feel guilty about using it.

Oliver Munday discusses the design of The Mirage cover

Over at The Huffington Post, artist Oliver Munday, who created the jacket illustration for The Mirage, talks about the design process. The article includes images of early, rejected versions of the cover, like the one at right.

I find this really fascinating. HarperCollins has been very good about keeping me in the loop on cover design, but when they made the decision to replace the "flipped cities" cover that appeared on the Mirage ARC, they were on a pretty tight timetable, so I never got to see any of these prototypes, only the final version. In hindsight, I'm very glad of that—one of the things I love about the finished jacket is that the evocation of the twin towers is so subtle, you may not even realize they're there at first. But the trick only works if it hasn't been spoiled for you.

(Thanks to Greg Delaney for the heads-up about the HuffPo article.)

The Mirage post-book tour recap

Previous recaps: week one; week two; week three; week four.

This week The Mirage is back on the Pacific Northwest Independent bestseller list at #12. Also, Nancy Pearl has been saying nice things about me on the radio, and next month I'll be a guest on her Book Lust TV show. And my publicist and I are still waiting, fingers crossed, on reviews from a couple major newspapers that haven't weighed in yet.

But in the meanwhile, now that the book tour is over it's time for me to shift back into writer mode and start working on my next novel—and by "working" I mean, at this stage, going for very long walks, talking to myself, and trusting my wife to understand why I am even more distracted than usual.

To get myself back in the work work habit, I'm also going to try and blog more frequently—so if you've got questions you didn't get a chance to ask me on tour, or just general topics you'd like me to ruminate about, feel free to make suggestions in comments.

A Book For All Seasons

As a coda to my book tour, last Saturday I went out to Leavenworth, Washington to help A Book For All Seasons celebrate their 20th anniversary. There was cake, wine, and a contest where I and four other local authors sat around the store stamping customers' prize cards—collect us all, and you had a chance to win a $25 gift certificate. I was seated in the fiction section, and managed to get in some quality browsing time when I wasn't schmoozing. Look who was face-out directly to my left:

Hi, Kelley! Love the new cover!

I signed stock before I left, so if you're in the vicinity and looking for a signed Mirage, Bad Monkeys, or Set This House in Order, stop in and say hi. And remember to wish them a happy 20th!

(P.S. They also own a local winery.)

A belated report on my adventures in SF

So, Monday of last week I flew to San Francisco for the final leg of my book tour. As part of their merger with Continental, United Airlines changed my reservation and flight numbers without telling me, but fortunately I figured it out in time to send a heads-up to the media escort who was picking me up at the airport. (United also has a new procedure where they board all the people with window seats first, then the middle seats, and finally the aisle seats. This may make boarding faster, but if you're an aisle-seat guy worried that all the overhead luggage space is going to fill up, it also makes it a lot more stressful.)

The flight itself was uneventful, and I had a couple of hours to relax before my first event, a reading at the Book Passage in Corte Madera. In what was a first for me, I recognized one of my Twitter followers, @taddsche, in the audience (fun fact: people's real faces are much larger than their Twitter icons). Another attendee was a book collector who'd driven 50 miles to get his first-edition Fool on the Hill and Set This House in Order ARC signed. So, a good night.

Tuesday morning I went for a long ramble through Chinatown and up to Coit Tower before meeting my friend Christopher Moore for lunch. He brought me a copy of his new novel, Sacré Bleu, and we talked shop and commiserated about the rigors of book-touring, while our waitress—working an eight-hour shift for tip money—played a very small violin in the background. I spent the afternoon being driven around the East Bay and Palo Alto to sign stock at various bookstores.

Tuesday night's reading was at Borderlands Books, a very cool SF/fantasy and horror bookstore in the Mission district. Everyone had been telling me about Borderlands' cats—Sphynxes all named after characters from the Aliens movies—so I was a little disappointed that the cats weren't there (long story short, until they install the new doors between the bookstore and the adjoining cafe, non-service animals, even hairless ones, are a health-code violation). But even without the cats it was a fun evening. Good crowd, and I met another Twitter friend, @lisaeckstein. Also, in a bonus bit of surrealism, a woman I went to high school with, and who I've seen maybe twice since the 1980s, just happened to be in San Francisco on vacation, and just happened to walk by the bookstore and see my name in the window—she came in, introduced me to her kids, bought a copy of The Mirage, and left again (Hi Doris!). The night ended with a further trip down memory lane, a late dinner with a Cornell pal at Lefty O'Doul's.

Wednesday was more stock signings and an interview with NPR's Rick Kleffel at KQED. I also did a recording for the KQED podcast, The Writers' Block. Then it was off to The Haight for an event at The Booksmith. Superfan Susan Tunis took video of the reading and Q&A session and posted it here. Afterwards I went out for drinks with David Moles, his girlfriend (and noted IRS-nemesis) Meredith, Tiptree Award short-lister Alice Sola Kim, and tech writer Anthony Ha.

And then it was time to go home. More fun and games with United—they switched my departure terminal at the last minute, and the computer that scans the boarding passes crashed, and then I nearly set off a panic in cyberspace when a friend with 10,000 Twitter followers retweeted my joke about solar flares disrupting the flight—but I made it back safely.

And with that, the Mirage book tour is over. Thanks to the fans, booksellers, and other folks who made the last month so much fun, and a big shout-out to my hard-working publicist, Heather Drucker.

If you're in Los Angeles, you can catch me next month at the L.A. Times Festival of Books. (If you're not in L.A., but you'd like to order a personally inscribed copy of one of my novels, you can contact Secret Garden Bookshop in Seattle at 206-789-5006 or via email.)

Home, and resting

I flew back from San Francisco yesterday. I was going to do a blog post about my adventures there, but I'm exhausted and have another busy day tomorrow, so I think will let that wait until Monday. In the meantime, some quick notes:

* Tomorrow from 1:00 to 3:00 PM I will be at A Book For All Seasons in Leavenworth, WA. The store is celebrating its twentieth anniversary with a "multi-author book buzz" featuring yours truly and fellow authors Kiki Hamilton, Robert Anderson, Sean Salazar, and Joseph Vizzard. This will be my last public event before next month's L.A. Times Festival of Books.

* I will be attending the L.A. Times Festival of Books on the weekend of April 21-22. More details shortly.

* If you missed my readings in San Francisco but still want to get a signed copy of The Mirage, here's a list of the Bay Area bookstores where I signed stock: Book Passage (both stores should have copies), Borderlands Books, The Booksmith, Books Inc. (the stores in Berkeley, Burlingame, The Castro, Laurel Village, The Marina, Opera Plaza, and Palo Alto), City Lights, Diesel, Green Apple Books, Hudson Booksellers at SFO Airport (in the International Terminal, before the security checkpoint), and Moe's Books in Berkeley. Quantities are limited, so you may want to phone ahead before making a special trip.

Signed Mirages in the Bay Area, part 2

I signed a lot of stock at Borderlands Books last night, so if you're in SF and looking to complete your Matt Ruff collection, that would be an excellent place to start. Today I also signed copies of The Mirage at the Books Inc. stores in The Castro, Laurel Village, The Marina, and Opera Plaza; Green Apple Books; and City Lights, who also had a few copies of my earlier novels.

See my previous post for some other Bay Area stores that may still have signed copies.

And if you're free tonight, I'll be doing one last reading in the city at The Booksmith at 7:30 PM.

Signed Mirages in the Bay Area, part 1

Just a heads-up, this afternoon my media escort drove me around the Bay to sign stock. If you can't make it to one of my readings, the following bookstores now have signed copies of The Mirage: Book Passage in Corte Madera; Books Inc. in Berkeley, Burlingame, and Palo Alto; Diesel in Oakland; and Moe's Books in Berkeley.

Supplies are limited, so you may want to phone ahead.

More stock signings in the city tomorrow, and of course I'll be reading at Borderlands tonight (7 PM) and The Booksmith tomorrow (7:30 PM).

The Mirage week four recap

I'll be in San Francisco for the next three nights (see my event schedule here for details). Before I head for the airport, here's a quick rundown of last week's Mirage highlights:

Reviews

Salon.com reposts Paul Di Filippo's piece from Barnes & Noble Review

Essays and Interviews

Radio interview with Ross Reynolds for NPR's The Conversation
Interview with Lindsey McGuirk for Northwest Book Lovers

Other mentions

CQ Homeland Security, a daily news digest published by Congressional Quarterly, name-checked The Mirage in its February 17 roundup  "BEHIND THE LINES: Our Take on the Other Media's Homeland Security Coverage"

Scorekeeping

#5 on the Seattle Mystery Bookshop February hardcover bestseller list
#7 on the Pacific Northwest Independent bestseller list for February 26, 2012

Previous recaps: week one; week two; week three.

Tumwater, Liz Hand, and SF

I took a day trip downstate yesterday for a reading at the Tumwater library. Good crowd, especially for a weekend afternoon with decent weather, and I signed a bunch of stock for the local Barnes and Noble. Thanks to librarian Sarah Jaffa for inviting me and for taking me to lunch.

On the train ride home I finished reading Elizabeth Hand's Available Dark, a fun, creepy, misanthropic murder mystery. Worth checking out, although if you haven't read the first book in the series, Generation Loss, you should start with that one.

Tomorrow I fly to San Francisco for a trio of readings in the Bay Area. Monday night at 7 PM I'm at Book Passage in Corte Madera, Tuesday at 7 PM I'm at Borderlands Books, and Wednesday at 7:30 PM I'm at The Booksmith.