Thursdays of Sword & Sorceress 27 – an interview with Elisabeth Waters & Michael Spence

Our final interview is with Elisabeth Waters & Michael Spence.


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1.) Tell us about yourself.


MS: I write. I edit. I snark on Twitter, occasionally, or Facebook. I make bad puns in Bitstrips. I read things out loud, sometimes into a microphone. And at the moment I hail from that part of the country that gave us “Wapsi Square,” Clifford D. Simak, Lois McMaster Bujold, Charles Schulz, Richard Dean Anderson, Patricia C. Wrede, and one of my literary heroes, John M. Ford.


EW: I have “the job that will not die”—I still find myself signing e-mail as “Secretary to Mrs. Bradley.” The current major project is getting her backlist back into print. The real struggle is fitting my own writing around her work. Silly me, I thought it would be easier after she died.


2.) Why do you write?


MS: A tricky question, to which the answer has evolved through the years. Earlier I would have said, “Because it’s fun!” or “There’s this feeling of power…” and both are still true. But with time, experience, and increased exposure to the work of others has come the thought that, dadgummit, I too have something to say; and I need to figure out the right way to say it. As well as learn the best ways to entertain readers, which after all is why people come to Sword & Sorceress, right?


EW: I lived in MZB’s household, and it turns out that writing is contagious—possibly even highly contagious. And people ask me for more stories, so I keep writing them.


MS: I’m one of those people.


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


MS: Trick? TRICK?!? How DARE you, sir! We are honest, hard-working craftspersons here! To even SUGGEST that we would stoop to such tawdry, despicable things as TRICKS…


Ohhh … you mean Reliable Techniques. Well, then. In that case—


Although I’m more than willing to be proven wrong on this one—always in the market for useful tools, y’know—I don’t think so. Of course, it helps to know some strong females, which I do (including my esteemed collaborator); so asking myself, “Would ____ or ____ respond this way?” is useful. It’s the old song, “Write what you know.”


(A maxim sadly in need of clarification, incidentally. What you know is finite and doomed to repetition, and if you stick with what you know you’re can’t do anything truly imaginative, which means that your sword & sorcery career will quickly go ker-ploosh. You must use what you know—or can find out—to help you move on to what you DON’T know.)


To be sure, women and men ARE different (et vive la différence), and it’s a poor writer who simply takes a Conan-surrogate and flips his gender. I’ve heard the generalization that men focus on solving the problem at hand whereas women tend to focus on how that problem affects the persons involved, and I don’t find it hard to believe. But to the degree that this is true, it’s a situation that a swordswoman or sorceress will need to address early in her career if she’s going to make it into this anthology. And although our resident Sensitive, Melisande, hasn’t yet been engaged in magical combat—preferring to work behind the scenes—one of these days we’ll need to have her step up and fire off some thaumaturgy.


EW: I’ve spent my lifetime around strong females. Come to think of it, I’m not sure I know any weak females, so I’d probably have more trouble writing weak female characters. I admit that my grandmother’s answer when I asked what she was doing during the fight for women’s suffrage was “I didn’t pay any attention to that nonsense,” but she was born in 1896 and died in 1997, so she lived through two World Wars (plus Viet Nam and Korea), raised two children, and coped with incredible changes in the world around her. She said if she couldn’t take it with her she wasn’t going–and she didn’t. I admire her tremendously; I have enough trouble coping with the change from the 1928 prayer book.


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


MS: Thews. You probably won’t find thews emphasized in other varieties of fantasy. Particularly urban fantasy.


Here’s a hypothesis for testing: I suspect that sword & sorcery is high fantasy’s counterpart to science fiction’s space opera. Big characters (not only physically, of course), big action, big sets. (For science fiction, see the universes of Cordwainer Smith, E.E. “Doc” Smith, or Lois McMaster Bujold.) That may not accurately describe my writing in general, but it does fit that of Deborah J. Ross, say, or Mercedes Lackey, or Fritz Leiber.


Or Marion Zimmer Bradley herself, who neatly wove the two together with her Darkover stories.


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


MS: I gather it already has changed the way we read and write. Twitter, on the plus side, has made us think about what we’re saying so that we can say it briefly. (The soul of wit, no?) On the minus side, it has also led many of us to scrunch our noble tongue into TextSpeak—wh U no cn B scraggly, alBit Ficient, b/c it focSS N space NstedF gramR. And as grammar deteriorates, so does the structure of language. Moreover, our emphasis on the keyboard as primary input device has caused penmanship, already dealt serious blows by medical school and similar institutions, to decline. I propose, along with intensive early teaching in the Old Math, equally intensive training in simple, aesthetically pleasing Longhand.


Speaking whereof, I’ve heard from various authors, from Umberto Eco to Patrick McLean (check out http://lifehacker.com/5684918/a-defense-of-writing-longhand) about the benefits of longhand for writers. It may also be relevant that Mark Twain, although he experimented with switching from writing by hand to dictating to a typist, gave up the typewriter because “after a year or two I found that it was degrading my character” (http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/mtwain/bl-mtwain-1stwr.htm). Make of that what you will.


Concerning e-books, I’m of mixed minds. On the one hand, they’re useful almost beyond credulity. “Two hours’ wait? No prob; I’ve got Robert Jordan’s entire Wheel of Time cycle on my smartphone.” To say nothing of the storage burdens they alleviate for small households. On the other hand, I’m concerned that their lack of literal mass and volume may lead, at least in the short run, to a correspondingly lightweight regard of them as books. Whether or not they make an impact on our bodies when dropped, I hope they continue to make one on our souls.


EW: E-books have certainly changed the way I read. I started with two e-book reader programs on my Palm Pilot. Now I have the Kindle app on my iPod, which is where I do most of my reading (white letters on black screen, large type–I can read in bed without having to smuggle a flashlight under the covers with me). At my age, I really appreciate the ability to change the type size; there are printed books I simply can’t read. I love the e-book format. Self-publishing has changed the quality of some new books, but it has also allowed authors to re-publish their old ones, so readers are getting a lot of their old favorites back.


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


MS: “They That Watch” is a “Treasures” story, of which several have appeared in recent volumes to introduce the Treasures (and anti-Treasures)—loci of magical powers and influences—and their Guardians. The Treasures support an orderly (though not mechanistic) universe; the anti-Treasures promote chaos.


The introduction to a previous tale noted that, at the time, my wife and I lived in Indiana with our canine Guardian, who was determined to provide all the chaos we could ever need. That last bit stuck in Lisa’s mind (take note, any of you seeking story ideas), and she refused to let go of it. Canine Guardian, canine Guardian—what could we do with a canine Guardian?


Lisa and I each thought about the concept and arrived at similar conclusions. Dogs take a quite different view of physical artifacts from ours, as my dog readily demonstrates by walking on a bed oblivious to the carefully-ordered papers he tramples underfoot. Their priorities are different. Where that line of thought takes us, you’ll see in the story.


This story also expands the world of the Treasures a bit more. You’ve seen references to the land of Grestig (“Crosswort Puzzle”), China (“Daughter of Heaven”) and the Colonies west of the Atlantic (“Inquisition for Blood” and “Truth in the Inward Parts”). There’s more in the New World than the Colonies, however, and what the faculty and staff of the University of Albion’s College of Wizardry don’t know about that piece of geography could hurt them in the not-too-distant future.


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


MS:

Melisande decided to sit in on the seminar after all, but when the group arrived, she felt as if her hair stood on end. As a Sensitive, she knew this feeling well, but why now? It could be just that Edward’s here. Edward was the Guardian of an anti-Treasure, the Sceptre of the Ungodly, and anti-Treasures could be uncomfortable things to be around. Maybe I’m feeling things more than usual because of my pregnancy. That was certainly possible as well.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

As the talk continued—tonight’s session concerned Treasures and their Guardians (apparently they didn’t have either in the Colonies)—Melisande realized that the girl was flirting with Edward. She looked up into his face and actually batted her eyelashes as she said, “There is a saying where I come from: “‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodies?’—and I think it would apply here. You have all of these powerful Treasures,” she smiled at Edward, “and they have Guardians to watch them, but who watches the Guardians? How do you know they won’t misuse the Treasures in their care?”


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


MS: If it’s reading you want, grab our collected, 2-volume Treasures of Albion e-book from Amazon’s Kindle store. Otherwise I’d suggest you head over to Audible.com and give Marion Zimmer Bradley’s early Darkover novel The Sword of Aldones a listen. I didn’t write it, but that’s me reading it.


EW: I’ve been taking advantage of e-publishing to sell stories when the market I wrote them for went away. I have a story called “Line Dancing” available for Kindle and Nook. I also have a couple of stories based on operas: “Shadowlands” and “Our Fathers’ Gold.”


The Sword of Aldones is still listed as “headed to retail” at ACX.com. It should be available in a few weeks from Amazon, Audible, and iTunes, and it’s definitely worth listening to. I’ve heard the whole thing, because I was the person in charge of making sure that all the strange vocabulary was pronounced the way MZB pronounced it.


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


MS: Make Every Word Count, by Gary Provost. I picked it up at a used-book store on a whim and it gave me a wake-up head slap worthy of NCIS’s Jethro Gibbs. “Omit needless words,” decreed William Strunk; Provost confirms it. Sword and Sorceress’s word-count limits give me special incentive for developing that skill.


EW: The New Well-Tempered Sentence: A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed, by Karen Elizabeth Gordon. That’s the book I recommend most often to writers—the proper use of the comma is rapidly becoming a lost art. The companion volume, The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: The Ultimate Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed, is another one I highly recommend.


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Thanks, Elisabeth and Michael, for the interview. And I’d once again like to thank all the Sword & Sorceress 27 writers who agreed to be interviewed.


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

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Published on November 08, 2012 18:51
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