Charlie Jane Anders's Blog, page 45

This illustration comes from my first draft of All the Birds in...

This illustration comes from my first draft of All the Birds in the Sky,
which I wrote longhand. Laurence has been working on building a
giant robot in his bedroom, while also running away from certain
problems in his life. He doesn’t have room to build a whole giant robot,
so he just builds a single finger, and in the end, he looks at it and
realizes that he’s built “a robot appendage designed only for flipping
off people who deserved it.” Sadly, this did not make it into the final cut of the book. Plus Laurence’s chin got a lot bigger in later drafts, and his acne wasn’t so bad, thank goodness.

Here’s another one of the animated gifs, featuring a quote from...

Here’s another one of the animated gifs, featuring a quote from the book, that the lovely people at Tor Books made for me. So beautiful! To see the first one of these, click here!

Meet Laurence!

The other main character of All the Birds in the Sky is Laurence, the book’s mad scientist character. Where Patricia has a hard time making magic work for her, especially after as a young girl, Laurence has no trouble building all sorts of awesome devices, including a miniature time machine, a supercomputer, and a ton of other stuff.

Unfortunately, Laurence gets bullied a lot—this is a doodle of Laurence getting shoved into a dumpster, from the first draft of All the Birds in the Sky, which I wrote in longhand. Laurence is constantly getting harassed by the other kids at his school, and meanwhile his parents are convinced that if he just stays indoors doing geeky stuff all the time, he’ll turn into an antisocial misfit like his Uncle Davis. 

Laurence isn’t just a great inventor, he also has a vivid, wild imagination, and he’s having the life crushed out of him. Until he gets to visit the site of an upcoming rocket launch.

Laurence believes in progress and rationality, and he absolutely wants to make the world a better place. He really thinks that if we can build better rockets and computers and other devices, we’ll be able to help the human race grow out of the problems we’re facing. But meanwhile, almost everybody in Laurence’s life just wants him to be more normal.

By the time we meet him in middle school, he’s already got a healthy disdain for authority, and he’s constantly building weird devices to help him subvert the terrible school his parents have sent him to. Like, he builds a retinal teleprompter to help people get around the school’s obsession with making kids memorize stuff. And he makes a sleepiness ray that he uses to try and make his teacher fall asleep in class.

Laurence is convinced that if he just gets out of this terrible school and this dead-end town and manages to be among other super-smart makers and inventors, he’ll be able to change everything. But of course, when he finally gets his chance, he discovers life is never that simple.

Somehow it makes perfect sense that Joe Bob Briggs is filed...

Somehow it makes perfect sense that Joe Bob Briggs is filed between Clive James and Angela Carter on my shelf.

I gave a TEDx talk at Harvard! And I talked about the themes of...

I gave a TEDx talk at Harvard! And I talked about the themes of All the Birds in the Sky—particularly the idea that the dichotomy between science and nature is a false one, like most dichotomies. We’re going to need to stop thinking of technology and nature as opposites, or separate, if we’re going to make it through the next hundred years.

So stoked about the starred review from Kirkus Reviews!...

So stoked about the starred review from Kirkus Reviews! Especially the part where they say the book is “[r]eminiscent of the best of Jo Walton and Nina Kiriki Hoffman.” That is the BEST praise!

Meet Patricia

Back when I wrote the first draft of All the Birds in the Sky, I wrote it out longhand. And here’s a sketch I made of Patricia in the middle of a passage of her trying to be a witch, as a girl in middle school. Her hood is kind of ferocious!

The thing about Patricia is that she really wants to be a witch, as soon as she finds out it’s a possibility for her. She never tries to reject her power, the way some other superpowered characters do. When Patricia is a little girl, she finds a wounded bird and tries to save it, and something about her compassion for this injured creature (plus exposure to lots of spices, maybe) activates her magic powers. And soon she can understand what the bird is saying to her. This is what makes her a witch. But then… nothing else happens.

And once Patricia has had her first taste of being magical and being able to make a difference, she will do almost anything to achieve her potential. She wants to keep being able to do magic for both selfish and selfish and unselfish reasons.

Selfishly, she wants to be special, and not just be as boring as everybody else in her world. And she wants to escape from her super-intense family, with all of their demands, and also get away from the school they’ve sent her to, with its soul-crushing program of memorization and standardized tests. But Patricia’s unselfish reasons are just as strong: she really, really wants to help people, and other creatures. She is willing to put herself on the line to be there for someone else, and she is always, always motivated by compassion.

Of course, once we meet Patricia again as an adult, in her early 20s, everything has gotten a lot more complicated for her. She still really wants to help those in need, and she’s still desperate to escape from other people’s demands. But her magic isn’t as much of an escape as it was when she was younger.

Here’s the whole thing of that drawing I did while I was tryign to figure out this darn book, back in 2011 or thereabouts:

One of the coolest things I saw in Saratoga Springs when I was...

One of the coolest things I saw in Saratoga Springs when I was there for World Fantasy was the bookstore Lyrical Ballad, which looks teeny from the outside but is a huge sprawling maze, built around a former bank vault. VAULT FULL OF BOOKS!!!!! (Photo by Jagrap/Flickr)

Iain M. Banks didn’t just have the greatest universe, and the...

Iain M. Banks didn’t just have the greatest universe, and the most consistently amazing writing—he also had the most beautiful covers.

The best music for reading and writing by

Some people can’t write while listening to music because it distracts them too much, especially if there’s lyrics. Other people can’t read while listening to music, for the same reason I guess. But I love doing both. I get sucked into a book way more when I have a good soundtrack, and I can’t write without music. Different books need different soundtracks, though– sometimes it’s gospel music, sometimes it’s blues, sometimes it’s hip hop. Or the Mountain Goats and Joni Mitchell. Sometimes I’ll leave little clues in stuff I write about what I was listening to as I wrote it, so if people want they can listen to the same stuff as they read it.

But everything goes with Stevie Wonder. Right?