Kelly McCullough's Blog, page 23
April 8, 2014
The Experiment Continues
A body is discovered at the base of the clock tower. But did they jump or were they... dropped? It's up to Alex to determine if there's something more sinister going on, and her investigation is hampered by the presence of the two Internal Affairs agents....
If you're confused about what I'm doing over there, the short of it is that I've really struggled with motivation to write ever since I was dropped by my publisher. The idea of posting this is a work-in-progress on WattPad is to keep the momentum going. I am really hoping to develop a following and a community there, so I can be encouraged to keep on keeping on.
I can't really say it's working so far. It's possible that I've been silent too long. My readers may have given up on me, which is totally fair. I really dropped out of the scene pretty hard.
I probably should have considered doing this sort of self-publishing thing immediately, but, the truth is I held out hope that one of my other projects would sell quickly. Obviously, that didn't happen, and when it didn't, I was very thrown for a loop. I still have projects that I'm hoping my agent will be able to sell, but I probably wasted a lot of valuable time scrambling around trying to fight a system that changed on me, seemingly overnight.
For instance, she and I were still trying to sell books on proposal, which, apparently, despite how many books you've had published, you really can't do any more. You need to have a finished project, ideally, but, if not that, then a lot of finished product to show off. I didn't have that, and so when there was interest, I had to scramble and write... which I'm not as good at. I did my very best, but I'm much better at having a chance to have a lot of revision and time to feel my way into a character and the plot. So, no surprise, those 'samples' fell flat for a lot of publishers....
...which, of course, only continued to depress me.
So, the whole idea behind publicly posting my work on WattPad was to up my confidence. But, alas, I've lost half my readers between my first post and my second. So... that kind of sucks. I'm not sure what to make of it. It wasn't like I had an overwhelming response for my first post, either.
However, I'm still trying to use the publication schedule I've set for myself as a motivator. At least if I write a 2,000+ word installment a week, that's forward progress. Considering that previously I was writing zero words a week, that's a very good thing. So, I'm not ready to write off this experience just yet. Not by a long shot.
For those who are wondering, yes, the end result should be a self-published e-book. Provided, of course, I stick with this.
March 31, 2014
New Installment is Live
If you're interested, feel free to check out part 2, in which a demon from Hell named "Furfur" is introduced:
March 28, 2014
Video Evidence
March 26, 2014
Catching Up with Tate/Lyda
Also, if you happen to be in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area and want to listen to me read my stuff, I'm going to be at Dreamhaven tonight:
On Wednesday, March 26 from 6:30 to 7:45 pm, I will be the Speculations readers at Dreamhaven Books and Comics. Dreamhaven is located at 2301 E. 38th Avenue, Minneapolis, MN 55406. You can get more information about the event by calling 612-823-6161 or visiting: http://dreamhavenbooks.com
March 25, 2014
An Experiment aka My Seekrit Project
It's free You can follow along, LIVE, as it were, as I'm writing it on-the-fly. So that means if you want to tell me to change something about the plot or suggest things, you can leave me a comment or an email AND I MIGHT JUST DO IT.
This was actually one of the appealing features of this particular platform. It feels to me like an original fiction version of AO3 (Archive of Our Own), which is a fanfic site that's really geared toward community building. I really learned to love writing like this, in community, and I think it would be a tremendous blast to try it out with original fiction.
So if you're a fan, or just curious to see what comes of this, feel free to check it out and see how things go for me. I'm hoping to update the story weekly, depending on interest and my ability to get sh*t done, of course.
March 17, 2014
Q&A: Naomi Kritzer
Naomi Kritzer’s short stories have appeared in Asimov’s, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, and Strange Horizons. Her novels (Fires of the Faithful, Turning the Storm, Freedom’s Gate, Freedom’s Apprentice, and Freedom’s Sisters) are available from Bantam. Since her last novel came out, she has written an urban fantasy novel about a Minneapolis woman who unexpectedly inherits the Ark of the Covenant; a children’s science fictional shipwreck novel; a children’s portal fantasy; and a YA novel set on a dystopic seastead. She has two e-book short story collections out: Gift of the Winter King and Other Stories, and Comrade Grandmother and Other Stories.
Last year was a busy one for you on the short fiction front: “Solidarity,” the third story in your Seastead cycle, appeared in F&SF; your Cold War time travel story “The Wall” appeared in Asimov’s; and “Bits” (“a fun little story about the sex toy business,” as the reviewer for Tangent described it) appeared in Clarkesworld. Anything I’ve missed?
I also had two stories from 2012 in year’s best anthologies that came out in 2013. Year’s Best SF 18, edited by David Hartwell, reprinted “Liberty’s Daughter” (as well as Eleanor’s “Holmes Sherlock”), and The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2013, edited by Rich Horton, reprinted “Scrap Dragon.”
And what’s new and forthcoming from Naomi Kritzer in 2014?
The next Seastead story, “Containment Zone,” will be in the May/June F&SF. I’m also going to have a short story in a future issue of Analog, “Artifice,” and hopefully I’ll get a few more sales yet this year—the nice thing about short stories is that the turnaround tends to be pretty fast.
What’s “Artifice” about?
It’s a story about robotics and artificial intelligence. Years ago I read a fascinating article about robots used in war zones to clear mines, and how the soldiers who worked with these robots tended to name them, bond with them, and treat them as fellow soldiers, sometimes in ways that made the robotic designers pull out their hair. The whole point of using a robot for this sort of task is that if it gets blown up, it’s easily replaceable; the article mentioned a soldier who brought the shattered remains of “Scooby” to the technicians, and sobbed, “That’s not SCOOBY!” when they offered him a new robot off the shelf. (Worse, they mentioned soldiers who’d risked their lives to retrieve damaged robots.)
“Artifice” isn’t about bomb-clearing robots; the robots in the story are used for household tasks. But it’s a story about how we see robots, and what that says about us.
“Containment Zone” will be your fourth published Seastead story. How would you describe this ongoing project of yours?
When I explain these stories to people, I like to say that seasteading is real-ish. There’s a group called the Seasteading Institute which is trying to found a new country by creating sort of an island and declaring it independent. There are existing locations (such as the Principality of Sealand) that exist in a legally ambiguous space and consider themselves sovereign countries, and there have been various attempts in the past to do this.
The seastead in these stories was built by libertarians, and the stories are set about fifty years after it got set up. The protagonist is a teenage girl, Beck, who is the daughter of one of the powerful men on the stead. She gets an after-school job as a finder, hunting down odds and ends that people need for a fee. Most of what she gets asked to find is very mundane, but one day she gets asked to find a missing person—a debt slave whose contract got sold and whose sister has lost contact. So the first story is a mystery. The second involves a reality TV show being shot on the seastead, and union organizing. The third explores what happens to people who have nowhere to live in a location where there is no concept of public land. The fourth, which is coming out soon, involves an epidemic, and the story I’m working on now is about how you rebuild after a major crisis.
What was your original inspiration for these stories?
I do the weekly grocery shopping for my family. I usually go to the same grocery store on the same day at the same time of day, and that means that I tend to get to know the regular cashiers. There was a cashier at my grocery store who I chatted with regularly. I liked her a lot and would always stand in her line, if she was there. Then one week she was missing. And the next. When I asked about her, I was initially told that she was on vacation. Then, when she didn’t get back, people told me that they had no idea who I was talking about, no cashier by that name and description had ever worked at that grocery store. It was surreal and horrifying to get that sort of stonewalling, and I assumed that she had been fired and her coworkers forbidden from discussing it.
So that’s where the story came from. I imagined someone going missing from their job and another person defiantly tracking them down despite the stonewalling. Initially I imagined setting this on a space colony and then realized I could do a very near-future setting if I put it on a seastead. I had actually pondered a libertarian seastead setting a few times before, but had no real story; now I had a story.
There’s an important addition to this, though, which is that years later, I was chatting with my new favorite cashier and mentioned that I’d always wondered what had happened to that one lady. “Oh,” the cashier said, “She got moved to one of the suburban stores because a customer was stalking and threatening her.”
So the stonewalling? Was actually her coworkers protecting her from a real threat. They had no way to know that I was not connected to the person who was harassing her, so of course they stonewalled me.
Anyway, I was glad to hear that (a) she wasn’t fired, (b) her coworkers had not been intimidated into silence but were protecting her from danger, and (c) she was fine.
What’s next for Beck and the Seastead?
I’m working on some stories about the post-epidemic rebuilding. I’ve actually already written a story about Beck’s experience of living in California and attending a high school there, but I realized I’d skipped over some really interesting stuff.
Are you working on anything else currently?
I have been focusing on short stories, but I’m also revising my urban-fantasy-ish novel in which a Minneapolis resident has the Ark of the Covenant delivered to her duplex by UPS. I am probably going to self-publish it.
Seastead is science fiction, but you’ve also written fantasy, fairy tales, and other subgenres, including some mainstream fiction as well. What interests you about s.f. versus fantasy? Do you prefer one or the other?
I like exploring what-if questions, and I’ve done that both with s.f. and fantasy. With my fantasy stories I’ve also played with types of stories and ways to tell long-established stories—I retold the story of the Snow Queen in a sort of science-fictional, postapocalyptic landscape, because I love that story, but I also liked imagining a sort of “Snow Queen”/Blade Runner mash-up. I wrote “Comrade Grandmother” because I found Baba Yaga really interesting and wanted to write a Baba Yaga story.
I really like both fantasy and s.f. Occasionally I even have ideas for stories that take place entirely in the real world. Unfortunately I have no idea how to sell those.
Besides your many short stories, you’ve published five novels (Fires of the Faithful, Turning the Storm, and The Dead Rivers trilogy). What interests you about one form versus the other?
With a book-length project, I get to spend a whole lot more time with the same characters—that’s great if I like the characters, and a problem if I don’t. I’ve abandoned a couple of projects when I realized that I just could not stand to contemplate the idea of 300 to 400 pages with these people. (I will say that with the Beck stories I’ve been able to bring back characters I particularly liked and have them across multiple stories—they’ve kind of let me combine my favorite things about short stories and my favorite things about novels.)
The biggest challenge with novels as opposed to short stories, for me, is finding a publisher. When I write a short story, I feel very confident that I’ll be able to sell it. A novel is a lot of work with very uncertain reward. (I’ve written three novels that I was not able to sell: Bequest, which is the one about the Ark of the Covenant; Castaways, which is middle-grade adventure s.f. about a group of kids who get stranded on an alien world; and The House That Wasn’t There, a middle-grade portal fantasy where a house in Minneapolis is a door between worlds.)
Do you prefer reading one or the other?
I’ve read both some really good short stories and some really good novels in the last year.
What were your favorite childhood books?
I loved the Narnia books, A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett, fairy tale collections (particularly the ones that didn’t come from the children’s section and had fairy tales I was not already familiar with), The Witch of Blackbird Pond, by Elizabeth Speare (I read that one to pieces), A Wrinkle in Time (I read that one to pieces, too) and The Swiftly Tilting Planet (which held up better, despite being from a box set), the Little House books, H. M. Hoover’s postapocalyptic books like This Time of Darkness, all sorts of creepy fantasy and s.f.-ish books like The Girl with Silver Eyes and Anna to the Infinite Power, Robin McKinley’s The Hero and the Crown and The Blue Sword, as well as Beauty, the James Herriot series about being a vet in Yorkshire ...
I read a lot.
What’s your ideal reading experience?
In a really comfy chair, by a fire that someone else is maintaining for me, with a hassock or ottoman or something to put my feet on, under a cozy blanket, in a cabin with no internet connection, on my Kindle with a stack of really appealing library books on the table next to my chair.
(I really like reading on my Kindle because of the weight; it’s easier to hold.)
What are you reading now?
I read a lot of nonfiction, most of which is from the library. My current stack of checked-out books is:
Transparent: Love, Family, and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers, by Cris Beam; God’s Other Children: Personal Encounters with Faith, Love, and Holiness in Sacred India, by Bradley Malkovsky (I was actually put off by the title, then looked at the cover flap and saw it was a memoir by a Catholic scholar who went to India for academic reasons, fell in love, and married into a Muslim family. I like memoirs); Accidents of Nature, by Harriet McBryde Johnson (reread); Redefining Girly, by Melissa Atkins Wardy (I probably won’t finish it; I picked it up and realized that it is saturated with marketing for her company); The Commitment, by Dan Savage (reread); Too Late to Die Young, by Harriet McBryde Johnson (reread), and Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape, by Jenna Miscavige Hill.
What do you blog about, and where?
I blog at naomikritzer.wordpress.com and naomikritzer.livejournal.com (though I’m trying to phase out the LJ) about various random topics plus local politics.
No one outside of Minneapolis cares about my political blogging; within Minneapolis, apparently a lot of people read my blogging about the last mayoral race. (I wrote about each and every candidate on the incredibly lengthy ballot. Most of them, I made fun of. Conveniently, the serious candidates were spread out alphabetically.)
You’ve recently self-published two collections of your short stories as e-books, Gift of the Winter King and Comrade Grandmother. Any plans for more collections in the works?
I’ve tried without success to sell the novel version of Beck’s adventures on the seastead—so at some point I’m probably going to self-publish those. My other recent stories (since I put together the collections) are “Bits,” “The Wall,” “Scrap Dragon,” “Isabella’s Garden,” and ”What Happened at Blessing Creek.” That’s not quite enough to do a collection yet, but eventually I’ll hit critical mass, right?
March 10, 2014
Q&A: Adam Stemple
Adam Stemple (www.adamstemple.com) is an author, musician, web designer, and professional card player. He has written five novels, including Pay the Piper (with Jane Yolen), winner of the 2006 Locus Award winner for Best Young Adult Book. Of his debut solo novel, Singer of Souls, Anne McCaffrey said, "One of the best first novels I have ever read."
The Hostage Prince, a fantasy novel for young readers, came out last summer; what else is happening on the writing front these days?
B.U.G. (Big Ugly Guy), which I co-wrote with my mother, Jane Yolen, was chosen as a Notable Book in the Older Readers Category for 2014 by the Sydney Taylor Book Award Committee. The book was part of our Rock N' Roll Fairy Tales series, but done for a different publisher. It involves a golem, a garage band, and a bullied boy.
The Last Changeling, sequel to The Hostage Prince and second in the Seelie Wars trilogy, should come out in 2014. My mom and I are hard at work on the final book in the series and also turned in the first of a planned three-book graphic novel noir detective series set in 1920s Edinburgh where the detective is a gargoyle.
Tell us more about the Seelie Wars trilogy.
The Seelie Wars is set in Faery, where an uneasy peace between the Seelie and Unseelie kingdoms is about to fall apart. It has two very damaged main characters: Prince Aspen, a hostage from the Seelie kingdom to insure the continued peace, who has been raised in the Unseelie court, and Snail, a midwife's apprentice for the Unseelie court. When war seems imminent, Aspen is convinced by Old Jack Daw, an advisor to the Unseelie king, to escape before he is executed. Meanwhile an incident in the Queen's birthing chamber lands Snail in the dungeons. She escapes with Aspen, and together these two must overcome their mistrust and contempt of each other to stay alive and make it to Seelie lands and what they hope will be safety.
When does the second book come out, and what’s next for Aspen and Snail?
The Last Changeling is aimed for a summer or fall release, I think. Aspen and Snail are on the road and trying to evade the two armies that are after them. They fall in with Professor Odds's group of traveling players, where they deal with three dwarven siblings, a strange and beautiful singer, twin Sticksmen with no memory of where they came from, and Professor Odds, a very smart man who hates Aspen and has plans for Snail.
You have an extremely fruitful collaboration with your mother, having written three novels and counting together so far. What's it like working with Jane Yolen?
My mother is a machine. We exchange chapters by e-mail, me taking a week or two to finish mine and her sending me hers seemingly three minutes after I send her mine. We generally exchange a few chapters back and forth and then meet up in person to plot. The graphic novel work has been a bit different, as I've been doing a lot of the scene writing, and she's been doing the setting of the panels and formatting.
What else are you working on? Do you have a seekrit project?
Aside from the Seelie Wars, I'm working on Stone Cold with my mother, the graphic novel trilogy mentioned earlier. As for secret projects, I'm shopping an epic fantasy, Duster, to a number of publishers. It's dark and bloody and has maybe my favorite protagonist in an aged and fat veteran who is forced to face his past when war erupts and his family is in danger. I'm also working on an untitled novel about a hit man, a weather girl, and a scientist, trying to survive a zombie outbreak in a Midwest medical facility.
Two of your fantasy novels, Singer of Souls and Steward of Song, feature music, and you're a working musician yourself. Are you playing in a band currently?
I play a lot less than I used to. My current band is tentatively called The Boys from the County Hell and is an Irish duo with my former Tim Malloys cohort, Big John Sjogren. We play at Irish pubs in the Twin Cities.
Do you write songs in addition to performing? What's the creative relationship for you between playing music and writing fiction?
I do write songs. There is a lot of similarity between writing music and writing prose. There's a certain level of perfection needed in songwriting that isn't necessarily needed in novel writing. Every line needs to be just right in a song: melody, rhyme, meter, scansion. Either it all works together or the whole song falls apart. In prose, though you obviously aim for every sentence to be perfect, in an 80,000-word piece a slight imperfection is not going to ruin it.
When you write, do you listen to music, or do you prefer silence?
I cannot write and listen to music with lyrics. I can't create my own words when someone else's are being sung in my ear. But I believe I write better when I listen to instrumental music. The music occupies the whirring part of my brain that wants me to do anything other than the task I'm concentrating on allowing the rest of my brain free rein to get the job done. I can also write if the song is being sung in a language I don't speak. This allows me to indulge in my guilty pleasure while writing: French cafe music.
You've written a book about poker. How did that come about? Does card playing work its way into your fantasy fiction at all, or might it in the future?
The book is called No Limits: The Fundamentals of No-Limit Holdem. It was written with my longtime friend the professional card player Chris "Fox" Wallace and is available at www.nolimitsbook.com. I've been playing poker for many years, and it has been a significant portion of my income. I also give poker lessons and was an instructor at PokerXFactor, as well as running my own training site.
Pete Hautman is also an avid poker player, and I did a story for his anthology Full House.
What do you read about in your everyday life? What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?
Everything. I am currently reading Kedrigern in Wanderland, a humorous fantasy by John Morressy; Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths, a biography of the thirteenth-century Icelandic writer Snorri Sturluson, by Nancy Marie Brown; and a Harlan Coben thriller, The Woods. After telling you what I'm reading right now, I think it would be foolish to be surprised by anything I have on my shelves.
March 9, 2014
Great Review for "God Box" by Lyda
There is some intense characterization and worldbuiling happening in this short story, it’s as if Kayla walked out of a novel or a space opera series to let us in on one small event that would shape the rest of her life. Biblical Terror? shit just got real.The full review is here: http://littleredreviewer.wordpress.com/2014/03/05/king-david-and-the-spiders-from-mars/
Yay!
March 3, 2014
Q&A: Kelly McCullough
Kelly McCullough writes fantasy, science fiction, and books for kids of varying ages. He lives in Wisconsin with his physics professor wife and a small herd of cats. His novels include the Fallen Blade and WebMage series (Penguin/ACE) and the forthcoming School for Sidekicks (Feiwel and Friends/Macmillan). His short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. He has also dabbled in science fiction as science education with The Chronicles of the Wandering Star (part of an NSF-funded science curriculum) and the science comic Hanny & the Mystery of the Voorwerp, which he coauthored and coedited, with funding provided by NASA and the Hubble Space Telescope.
Looking at the year ahead, what do we have to look forward to from Kelly McCullough?
I’ve got one new novel coming out this year: Drawn Blades at the end of November from Ace, which is the fifth book in my Fallen Blade series. I’m working on the follow-up, Darkened Blade, right now, and hoping to get things sorted out for three more in the series soon. I should also have my first short story in a couple of years as part of an anthology set in the worlds of Roger Zelazny. That one’s being edited by Warren Lapine and Trent Zelazny. The story is called “Keeper of the Keys,” and it’s set in the Changeling/Madwand world. My first book for kids, School for Sidekicks, will be out in spring 2015, and I’m really excited about that because I’m cracking three new genres: it will be my first novel-length science fiction, my first superhero story, and my first middle grade. Oh, and I almost forgot, the WebMage books will start coming out in audio this year, as will Broken Blade.
Any other projects on tap besides the writing? What are you up to these days with your frequent coconspirator in cool-and-fun-science-stuff, Matt Kuchta?
I’m hoping to arrange some more slow-motion-photography hijinks this spring with Matt, who shot the Narnia pics and the snow-motion video. I’m also exploring the idea of maybe doing something booklike with the Dragon Diaries, as well as possibly putting some of my unsold backlist into press indie style.
Your daily word count—which is a matter of public record on Facebook—is prodigious. How do you do it?
Mostly it’s a case of the draw of a fortunate card. I’m not sure who originated the idea of the cards-you’re-dealt theory of writing, but I stole it from Jay Lake. There’s a school of thinking about writing that talks about the hand you’re dealt, in reference to the talents that you get out of the gate. So one writer might start out with a natural talent for prose and decent character. Another might get plot and theme. I got fast writer, steady writer, and world building. Also, my wife has had a good steady job with benefits, so I’ve had the luxury to focus on my writing to a degree that many people who are starting out in the field haven’t.
What’s a day in the life look like? How do you balance your hard work and extraordinary productivity with everything else?
Get up. Caffeine. Stagger to hot tub. Caffeine. Raise core temperature to operating levels. Caffeine. Administrivia and Web noodling. Caffeine. At that point it’s either slip out of the house to borrow a dog and some woodsy trails from Neil Gaiman or write. Depends on what time it is. If it’s elevenish, I’ll probably go work out. If it’s noon or one, I write and then squeeze in a workout around three-thirty. I normally knock off around five when my wife gets home. I also mostly don’t work on the weekends. Basically I treat writing and related work as my nine-to-five job. The only time that changes is if I’m on a crazy deadline. For example, with Drawn Blades I ended up having to write a novel in eighty-eight days.
Do you see a definite relationship between exercise/fitness and your writing output?
Absolutely. If I’m not working out regularly, I am a much less happy camper, and I don’t write as well unhappy. For that matter, I love working out, especially outside, and I can use it as a carrot to help me get started when I’m having a slow day. When I keep active, I’m happier, healthier, and more productive.
Who’s your first and best reader?
My wife, Laura, typically reads along as I’m writing, catching up on a daily or, at most, weekly basis as I’m going, and she provides me with a good sense of whether something is working, as well as enormous encouragement. The Wyrdsmiths are usually my second readers, and I get tons of great stuff from them, especially on the early chapters in a novel. I also usually have six to ten beta readers for any book, because reading piecemeal as Laura and the Wyrdsmiths do doesn’t really map well onto the way readers actually experience a book, and it’s important to get some fresh eyes on the big picture. I find the process terribly valuable, though I probably get less out of it now than I did at the front end of my career. These days I have a much better idea of where I’m going and what I’m doing with a book before I even start, so it is less shaped by other eyes.
How about the cats? Helpers or hinderers?
Yes? Mine certainly impede typing when they’re lying on my forearms, but I think that having that companionship at what is a fundamentally lonely pursuit more than makes up for it. They give me someone to ask questions of or complain to when I’m having a hard day at the word mines.
Your first series, WebMage, remains in print and popular with readers both old and new. Do you think you’ll ever revisit Ravirn’s universe?
I walked away from WebMage because I was feeling incipient burnout, and I didn’t want to be the writer who kept writing a series past the point where it was fresh for him. That said, I do know what the plot of book six looks like. But, at the moment, I don’t have the time, and it’s not something that I think my editor is interested in revisiting anytime soon. Mind you, if someone wants to plonk down a good advance for the thing, I’m probably back to a place where I could write Ravirn with real enthusiasm again. Is that wishy-washy enough of an answer?
What does your personal library look like?
We have four major sets of bookshelves with something like three thousand books total in them. They are alphabetized within category and all of them are entered in a database. What’s that? OCD you say? Maybe a little. Well, more than a little, actually.
Are you a rereader? What books do you come back to over and over again?
Very much so. I reread when I’m too intellectually drained to pick up new stuff but still want to be transported. My core rereads are Tolkien, Tim Powers, Martha Wells, Pratchett, H. Beam Piper, and a scattering of books from other writers including Gaiman, Norton, Rowling, and Emma Bull.
What’s the last book that made you laugh? Cry?
My most recent laughing book was Unbound, the third book in Jim Hines’s Libriomancer series. It should be out next year sometime, I think. Crying … hard to say. I cry at the drop of hat in terms of books. Any heroic sacrifice will usually do it.
You and your wife travel a fair bit. What’s your favorite destination or recent trip?
My favorite destination ever is probably Edinburgh, where my wife and I got married—we visit Scotland often—or Kauai, which is almost a second home. New Zealand is a definite contender, too. I just got back a few weeks ago, from my first trip there, and my wife and I are already trying to figure out when we can make it back again. I would love to return to Oxford as well, but that’s a slightly lower priority. But then there are all the new places we’ve never been ... It’s tough.
Readers of your novels will be familiar with the precision of your spatial descriptions. How high are the ceilings in Bag End?
Heh. Depends on which version and who it’s scaled for. The original is probably right around five feet—quite high for a hobbit hole. Jackson’s versions range from four to seven feet, I think. The one that’s implied by the door at Bag End in Matamata, New Zealand, is about seven feet.
March 2, 2014
MarsCON Schedule (Morehouse/Hallaway)
GETTING INTO THE MIND OF A RELIGIOUS FANATICExec Lounge (Krushenko’s)—Saturday, 11:00 amUber villain or bit player, what are they like? Are there any useful generalizations? Are they likely to be suicidal and does that depend on the religion or the person? ow can they make for interesting novels and stories without being stereotyped and one dimensional? With: Naomi Kritzer, mod.; P M F Johnson, Lyda Morehouse, G. David Nordley, David E. Romm, Ozgur K. Sahin
DULL, REALISTIC CHARACTERSAtrium 2 (Re(a)d Mars) — Sunday 03:00 pmThe people who really explore space and fight modern wars have a lot of self control. They don’t slam fists into spacecraft controls like Hulk Hogan. Do you have to forget about them in fiction, or can you make them interesting? And if your protagonist is like that do you just have to accept that critics will complain and press on in hopes of finding an audience that appreciates a little verisimilitude?With: Bridget Landry, G. David Nordley, mod.; Patrick W. Marsh, Lyda Morehouse, Kathryn Sullivan
General MarsCON information is as follows:
MarsCon 2014 Time Is The Key March 7-9, 2014
DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Bloomington-Minneapolis South 7800 Normandale Boulevard Bloomington, MN 55439Send questions about MarsCon to info14e@marscon.org, we’ll do our best to send answers!There’s more about MarsCon on Facebook and Twitter.
Kelly McCullough's Blog
- Kelly McCullough's profile
- 370 followers
