Thursdays of Sword & Sorceress 27: the Michael Payne interview

This week’s interview is with Michael Payne.

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1.) Tell us about yourself.

Eh, what’s to tell?  I’m just your average library clerk/church musician/college radio host/webcartoonist/story writer.  Dime a dozen, really.

2.) Why do you write?

‘Cause I’ve never been able to stop.  Stories and characters are constantly skating through my head, and typing them out so I can shape them into things that maybe make sense and are maybe interesting keeps me from hopping around after them like Frankenstein’s monster chasing butterflies only he can see.

3.) Sword & Sorceress is known for sword & sorcery centered around a strong female character. Is there any particular trick to writing strong female characters?

Get to know some strong females.  Around about 1960, for instance, when my mother was in her early 20s, she packed up, left her whole family behind in Illinois to move to southern California with nothing but two suitcases, and got a job as a proofreader at the little local newspaper where my father had just started working as a photographer.  And my eldest sister worked as a chemical engineer building rocket engines for several years after graduating from CalTech.  So I’ve just been writing what I know.

4.) What would you say makes sword & sorcery different than other kinds of fantasy?

It wasn’t until the last year or so that I realized people actually thought of sword & sorcery as something different from other kinds of fantasy, so I may not be the best person to ask this question.  I’d guess that real sword & sorcery stories have fewer talking squirrels in them than mine do, but again, that’d just be a guess.

5.) How do you think ebooks and the Internet will change the way we read & write?

I’m what you might call a slow adopter; I mean, I still don’t have a cell phone ’cause I can’t think of any reason to get one, and for the same reason, I’ve yet to invest in any sort of ebook reader.

But the advent of the internet has certainly changed things.  Where else, after all, could a guy like me who can barely draw have spent the last seven-and-a-half years posting two pages of comics to his website every weekday for an audience that regularly reaches into the double digits?

And as an avid admirer of the current My Little Pony TV show, I find the internet indispensable for writing and reading fanfiction.  No more smudged mimeographs or stapled-together fanzines!  And while most of it’s as grammatically atrocious and artistically questionable as fanfiction has always been, now it’s all lovely and pristine and carefully indexed on the web!

6.) Tell us about your Sword & Sorceress story.

“Airs Above the Ground” is the sixth adventure of Cluny the Sorceress Squirrel and her two familiars, Shtasith, a firedrake, and Terence Crocker, a somewhat befuddled human.  The previous five stories saw them navigate their first year at Huxley College where the expectations of who can be considered a sorcerer have forced them to pretend that Crocker is the wizard with Shtasith as his familiar and Cluny just a fetish he needs to keep his highly disturbed mind focused.  This story sees them on summer break visiting Crocker’s well-to-do and not-terribly-supportive family.

7.) Can you share an excerpt from your Sword & Sorceress story?

Flexing his nostrils, Shtasith gave a greenish puff, the rotten-egg stench making Cluny wince.  Crocker groaned, leaped for the window, the tiny tornado Cluny had conjured to stir a breeze in the August Friday morning heat ruffling his black curly hair.  “That!”  Crocker shook a finger at Shtasith.  “A weekend with my folks will stink exactly like that!”

Cluny flared her claws, stretched the tornado’s tail into Shtasith’s cloud, sucked it outside.  “I’m sorry, Crocker, but if we’re truly going to come together as a team, balance each other, and keep each other honest, we need to–”

“To what??”  His anguish folded Cluny’s ears.  “Totally humiliate me??”  The half-angry, half-queasy look on his face was like nothing she’d ever seen there.  “My folks already thought I was a blot on the family name before I got the lowest passing marks possible on the Huxley entrance exams!”  He flailed his arms.  “And now I can either pretend I’m a crazy, ultra-powerful super wizard like Master Gollantz wants ev’ryone to think, or I can tell ‘em the truth: that they were right all along, that I’m not good enough to be a wizard, that I’m nothing but the world’s only human familiar!”

8.) Recommend one other book or short story you have written that we should read.

A recent thing I’m really happy about is my short story “Thoughts on Early Spring” in Kazka Press’s anthology Bronies: For the Love of Ponies published back in June.  I’ve had the story’s two main characters lurking around in my head for twenty years, but I was never able to build a story around them till I began observing the adult fandom that’s sprung up in the wake of the aforementioned My Little Pony cartoon show.

9.) Recommend one non-fiction book that you haven’t written.

I’m trying to recall the last time I even read a non-fiction book.  Simon Louvish’s biography of Laurel & Hardy last spring before giving it to my uncle as a birthday present, yes, but unless you’re as mad about Laurel & Hardy as everyone in my family is…

I could recommend my all-time favorite book on writing, Algis Budrys’s Writing to the Point, but it’s been out of print since before he died, so I doubt anyone could track down a copy.  Judging from the evidence, therefore, non-fictional things don’t much interest me, a conclusion I find a little surprising.  I’ll hafta look into that.

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Thanks, Michael, for the interview.

Check out our interviews with past S&S contributors – , , , Sword & Sorceress 25, and Sword & Sorceress 26.

And the novel featuring my Sword & Sorceress character, spy and assassin Caina Amalas, is now available for free in all ebook formats: Child of the Ghosts.

-JM