Thursdays of SWORD & SORCERESS 28 – the Michael Payne interview
As I have done for several years in the past, I will be running interviews with my fellow contributors to Sword & Sorceress 28.
It’s fun to do, and a good chance for the writers to talk about themselves and their work. This week’s interview is with Michael Payne.
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Tell us about yourself.
I continue working at the local library, singing and playing guitar at the local Catholic church, and hosting a Sunday afternoon radio program dedicated to light music and storytelling at the local university. I also update my two webcomics, Daily Grind and Terebinth, with a cumulative 11 pages a week, have written over 300,000 words of “My Little Pony” fanfiction under the name of AugieDog in the past two-and-a-half years, and was pleased to receive the 2013 Kevin O’Donnell Jr. Service to SFWA Award recently for my two decades of keeping a desultory eye on the group’s Circulating Book Plan. Oh, and my second novel, Rat’s Reputation, should be out sometime this year from the fine folks at Sofawolf Books.
Tell us about your S&S 28 story.
It’s the latest in the continuing adventures of Cluny, the squirrel sorceress, and her two familiars, the human Terrence Crocker and the firedrake Shtasith, as they wend their collective way through the hazards of learning their respective magical arts at Huxley College. This story actually wraps up their first year as students.
Can you share an excerpt from your story?
OK. Here’s the opening:
Sudden crackling twitched Cluny’s ears, memories sparking through her of harvesting termites from the fallen trees back home on her parents’ nut farm.
The sound kept growing louder, though, its vibrations taking on a supernatural edge that prickled her fur and pulled her out of her notes. Looking up from the floor in front of the bookcase where she lay sprawled across Magistrix Gosstelain’s treatise on the numenistic forces inherent within the mind/brain interface, she said, “Uhh, guys? I think we might have a–”
A cabbage-sized mass of flame burst into the air above Crocker’s desk, made him cry out and nearly tip over in his chair. “The fools!” came a shout, and Shtasith whooshed from the fireplace, his black and gold wings flaring. “They shall rue this attempted invasion of our inmost sanctum!”
But the fireball vanished with a camphor-scented pop, an envelope drifting down to settle on top of the evocation problem Cluny had given Crocker to solve. “Huh,” he said, picking the envelope up. “Anybody expecting any mail?”
Would you say fantasy needs to reflect real life, or offer an escape from it?
I wouldn’t say that fantasy “needs” to do anything. I mean, yes, I prefer my fantasy stories to subscribe to the various fictional virtues–verisimilitude and structural integrity and that sort of thing–but a lesson I’ve learned hanging around the edges of the “My Little Pony” fanfiction community is how wonderfully pliant a genre fantasy is.
The site where I post my stuff, fimfiction.net, hosts over 100,000 individual stories ranging from shorts of a thousand words, the minimum required by the folks running the site, to pieces that’re longer than the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, all of them focusing in some way or another on this same group of candy-colored cartoon equines. There are stories about ponies having grand adventures and stories about ponies having little parties. There are stories about ponies having devastating emotional crises and stories about ponies having sex. There are stories about ponies written by people who seem to have never before put together a sentence in English and stories about ponies written by people who show a pretty steady hand as far as the art and craft of fiction goes. All of them are fantasy stories of one sort or another, and all of them are fulfilling a need for at least one person.
So maybe that’s all a fantasy story needs to do: make one person’s writing dream come true even if it’s just for a moment or two…
What are your preferred tools and environment for writing? (Typewriter, computer, pen, coffee shop, and so on.)
For my prose stories, I’ll happily type away on any computer that’s available to me wherever I am and whatever I’m doing. I always carry my little flash drive in my pocket, so whether I’m upstairs in bed with my laptop or downstairs in the spare room with the big old desktop that I use every day for scanning and uploading my comics, whether I’ve got a lull at the library’s front desk or during my lunch breaks in the back office, I can snap the drive in and open up whatever I’m currently working on–I save everything as RTF files, and all the computers that I have access to have some program on ‘em that’ll let me hammer away at an RTF file.
The comics, though, those are all done up by hand on certain specific types of paper, so I’ve gotta be at home for that.
How many drafts of a story or novel do you typically write?
Writing on computers, I’ve found, kind of does away with the whole idea of drafts. Because every time I pick up where I last left off writing a story, I always scroll back a few pages and start rewriting from there as a warm-up. Then when I hit the blankness at the end of the file, I can just slide right over from rewriting to writing and push on into terra incognita. So by the time I’ve worked my through and am finally typing out the story’s ending, I’ll have already rewritten the beginning and the middle multiple times and gotten them largely into the shape I want them to be. Then a couple more read-throughs of the whole thing to make sure all the pieces fit, and I’m done.
Have you tried any self-publishing projects yourself?
In a way I have, but… See, the idea of “business” seems to baffle me. I mean, in the mid-2000s, through a series of business decisions in a writing-related venture some friends and I tried to start, I ended up losing my life savings, going another $80,000 into debt, and destroying my credit rating. Every decision we made seemed perfectly logical to me as we were making it, but whether it was just that we lacked the talent or the savvy or the gumption, it all turned out very, very bad for the whole group of us. I’ve since recovered financially to a certain extent, but the thing that suffered the most from the experience was my confidence in my ability to tell a bad business decision from a good one. So trying to self-publish for money strikes me as something I really ought to stay away from lest I somehow manage to go completely bankrupt this time.
Self-publishing just for fun, though, well, I’ve been doing that with my webcomics for more than a decade now, and all the Pony stuff could doubtless be called self-published. I did put up a Kindle version of my first novel, The Blood Jaguar, three years ago as well as a collection of four related short stories called A Curial Quartet, but I doubt I’ve sold 40 copies of either since then.
If offering advice to a new writer, would you suggest they pursue traditional publication or self-publication?
The only advice I feel competent to offer anyone is the occasional: “See what I did there? Don’t do that.”
Still, I don’t think I’ve got a dog in the whole “traditional vs. self-publication” fight. I’m sure that for folks willing and able to do the work, self-publishing becomes a more viable option with each passing day. It’s just that I have no idea what that work might entail.
And yes, if I cared enough about it, I’m sure I could educate myself in the details–you, Jonathan, are a font of information on the subject, and I’ve wandered around the websites of Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Dean Wesley Smith and M.C.A. Hogarth looking at the things they’ve written about their experiences. But right now, I’ve got outlets for my storytelling that don’t make me wonder if any sort of metaphorical structure is about to collapse on me, and I’m more than willing to stick with them till they all dry up or decide they don’t like my stuff anymore. Then I’m sure I’ll start flinging ebooks in random directions like some wind-up toy gone haywire. My usual mode of operation, in other words.
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Thanks, Michael, for the interview.
Check out our interviews with past S&S contributors – , , , Sword & Sorceress 25, Sword & Sorceress 26, and Sword & Sorceress 27.
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.
