In this final installment of the Toonari Post’s interview with renowned fantasy author N. K. Jemisin, she discusses her relationship with the Altered Fluid writing group as well as her path to landing representation.

Toonari Post (TP): You are a member of the Altered Fluid writing group, correct? What do you like best about the experience of being in a writing group?

N.K. Jemisin (NKJ): For one thing, I have deadlines. I’m one of those people who works better with deadlines than without. But I also like having another group of people that I can commiserate with over the lifestyle issues of writing. I can talk with them about the difficulties of trying to date while being a writer. Dating as a writer can be awkward because when you get involved with someone and they’re like “I want to spend time with you,” but you’re like “well, I have 1,500 words to write.” My writing group also does an annual retreat where they rent a house in the boondocks somewhere, and we just spend four or five days hanging out with each other and quietly writing.

TP: Do you ever feel overwhelmed by the amount of input you receive?

NKJ: Not really. I will say that when I do novel critiques with them, it is a bit overwhelming. There’s so much material, there are so many different reactions, and I’m so close to it—I tend to get invested in novels in a way that I don’t get invested in short stories—and people are telling me that my baby is ugly. Hopefully they’re telling you how to make your baby less ugly, but it can still take a while to deal with that. When I get a novel critique, I take all the material and set it aside for a few weeks, and then I start using it to revise the novel.

TP: What do you do when you’re presented with wildly divergent opinions? How do you decide how to proceed?

NKJ: No, actually. That’s what makes it work, as far as I’m concerned. If I’m in a group and one person says “I hated this character,” then what I need to do is figure out if other people feel the same way. If multiple people are saying the same thing, then maybe something’s wrong. Maybe there is something I’ve done that is making this come across wrong, and that’s definitely something I need to fix. But if one person says “I loved this thing that you did here” and someone else says “I hated it,” well, that’s normal. Like with the sex in the Inheritance Trilogy, some people loved it, some people hated it. And then some people hated it because it was too much, while others hated it because there wasn’t enough. You can only do what pleases you. You can only do enough to satisfy yourself. The question is, are you doing it in a way that is getting across what you want to get across? And if what’s coming across is not what you want, then you need to tweak it. But if you intend for it to be a certain way and people just don’t like it, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It just may mean it’s not their taste.

TP: Could you tell us a little bit about your journey toward becoming a published author? How did you go about finding your agent?

 NKJ: I did a traditional agent search. I did some basic research, and I started reading Locus which has a section dedicated to deals and deliveries and things like that. You can see that Author Blank sold Book XYZ to Publishing House ABC using Agent Bob. So you can see which authors are selling to which publishing houses using which agents. I tracked Locus for about six months and looked at whether or not authors were selling to publishers I cared about, and then I looked who their agents were. Then I looked up those agents and looked up their requirements. Then I prepared a set of ten packets and mailed those out. While I was waiting on those ten packets, I researched ten more and sent those out. But then I got a request for the full novel from two of those agents. One of those later recused herself because she’d just gotten pregnant, but the other one was still very interested. We met and I liked her, she liked me, and at that point it was a deal.

TP: That’s impressive that you managed to get an agent after only sending out twenty submissions. Many authors end up sending out dozens and dozens of queries before they get representation.

 NKJ: Well, it’s six of one, half-dozen of another. I ended up getting that agent a good five years before I actually sold the book. Other people take a long time finding the agent and not that much time selling the book, but for me it was the other way around.

TP: What are your thoughts on the debate between self-publishing vs. traditional publishing?

 NKJ: I think both traditional publishing and self-publishing will continue to be good and viable markets. I have chosen traditional publishing myself largely because I am incredibly lazy, and I do not want to do the marketing, and I don’t want to spend hours agonizing over what print type of paper quality I want. I just want to write. As you said, I have two full-time jobs, and the more time I spend trying to figure out ebook production, the less time I have to write. I think that as long as there are lazy people like me, there will always be room for traditional publishing. Then again, there will always be people who don’t want a middleman. Of course I do make less money from traditional publishing, but I do get something for that money. That money isn’t being lost, it’s being spent to pay a series of really good professionals who are going to do a really good job making my work look good.

Image Courtesy : Robert Hoge

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In this penultimate installment of the Toonari Post’s interview with prominent fantasy author N. K. Jemisin, she elaborates on her famous blog post “Don’t Put My Book in the African-American Literature Section” and talks about the rituals she observes when she writes.

Toonari Post: One of most notable posts on your blog is the one where you talk about how your work is sometimes shelved in the African-American literature section. It’s a very powerful piece, and I was hoping you might elaborate on it for the benefit of those who haven’t had the chance to read it.

N.K. Jemisin: Well, I would encourage people to read the post itself because it’s a very complex issue, and it’s not something I can sum up easily, but I’ll try. The blog post is called “Don’t Put My Book in the African-American Literature Section,” and my feeling on it is that [the African-American literature section] is basically a form of segregation. It’s something that I think originally had good intentions. It was done because, back in the day, there weren’t a whole lot of books published by black authors or that had black characters. One of the reasons that people started highlighting those that did is because back then it was actually hard to find them.

So at one point, these sections served a good purpose. But nowadays, there are so many other ways to find this material, and nowadays it has become harmful. It’s a way for bookstores and publishers to effectively fission off, partition away, and hide works by authors of color. But it’s not just authors of color—the same thing happens to women’s fiction, as well as LGBTQI fiction. Anything that’s not white male mainstream literature gets shoved in the back of the bookstore. It doesn’t matter what the book is about; it doesn’t matter if the book has white protagonists. If the author is black, it gets shoved in that section. The end result is that it cuts into the sales of authors of color because their books aren’t as readily available. By cutting into their sales and by making it seem as though books by black authors don’t sell well, it becomes harder for black authors to sell more books, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

TP: Do you observe any particular rituals when you write?

NKJ:  My favorite thing to do when I write is to go to a coffee shop, and the wonderful thing about Brooklyn is that there are coffee shops all over the place. I tend to find a coffee shop that has a good feeling to it. If they play music, it has to be the kind of music I can tune out and not the kind I’m actually interested in. They have to have good coffee, as well as little snacks and pastries. They also can’t be obnoxious about making you buy things constantly or else they’ll kick you out. I will write at home: I have a little space cordoned off that I use as an office, but I am a typical New Yorker with a typical tiny New York apartment and a very noisy, very attention-demanding cat who will periodically get up and start meowing at me for no particular reason.

TP: In addition to being a successful author, you also have a day job as a career counselor. How on earth do you juggle two full-time occupations?

NKJ: I honestly don’t think it’s that difficult simply because I don’t have other things that would make it more difficult. I’m not married, I don’t have any kids—you know, I have nothing but respect for authors who do because they’re the ones who I’m totally like “how on earth do you do it without becoming a neglectful parent or a bad spouse?” But in my case, all I’m juggling is two full-time jobs. So while it’s hard in some ways, it could be so much worse. Basically, I work all day, then I come home and either work out or go out with friends, but then I always try to do a little bit of writing. The weekends though are my golden writing time.

TP: Do you set targets for each writing session?

NKJ: Yes. On days after I’ve had a long day at work, my target is just 250 words—a page. Fortunately my workplace has allowed me to do a four day work week, so on my dedicated writing days my goal 1,500 words per session.

TP: Do you do your revisions as you write, or do you do them after you’ve finished the whole book?

NKJ: I revise as I write. In fact, I will usually begin a writing session by going back and reading over what I wrote the day before and tweaking that a little bit. That way, I’m in the flow of the language and the frame of mind that the character needs to be in, so I can continue it more easily.

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Here is more from the Toonari Post’s interview with N. K. Jemisin, acclaimed author of the Inheritance Trilogy and the Dreamblood Duology. In this installment, she shares her thoughts about the epic fantasy genre (i.e. fantasy set entirely in a parallel world) and the business of worldbuilding.

Toonari Post (TP): We’ve already touched on this a bit earlier, but why do you write epic fantasy? Have you always written it?

N.K. Jemisin (NKJ): No, actually. I write almost as much science fiction as I write fantasy, to be perfectly honest.  You see the science fiction more in my short stories, and I also write other kinds of fantasy. I’ve written a number of short stories that are liminal, for lack of a better description—just strange things happening in our everyday world. I’ve also written some straight up science fiction—you know, first contact with aliens and stuff like that. Not all of it has been published though. Fantasy is something I tend to do at novel-length.

As to why I write it, I guess it’s because there are stories that fit the epic fantasy framework so well. For example, a story about gods that literally spans millennia. You can’t really do that in a short story, and you can’t really do that in other forms of fantasy, in my opinion. Epic fantasy is ideal for a cosmic family drama. But when I first wrote the Inheritance Trilogy, I wasn’t thinking of it as epic fantasy. I didn’t know what it was, to be perfectly honest. I wrote it the way I wanted to write it, and then I sent it to my agent and said “send it to whoever will buy it.”

She sent it to three publishers as I recall, one of whom was actually considering it for urban fantasy. The other two I believe were considering it as epic fantasy, or just generic fantasy. The one that ultimately won was of course Orbit, and they had sort of an epic fantasy idea for it, and it works as epic fantasy. I think it could work as several different genres though.

TP: I’m kind of surprised that someone thought it could be urban fantasy. It’s certainly not like a lot of the other urban fantasies out there.

NKJ: Then again, it’s not like the other epic fantasies either. It’s all in how you market it. If they were marketing it as an urban fantasy, they could have stuck a picture of Yeine with her back to the camera on the cover, wearing tight clothing and looking at the viewer in this sort of badass way.

TP: Would you have been happy with that?

NKJ: If it had sold, sure. I’m not really wedded to what sub-genre it is. I mean I was pretty clear on the fact that it was fantasy, but I’m not all that wedded to the marketing of it. If Orbit buys another work from me and decides that they can market it as ABC instead of XYZ, then fine, whatever. That’s why I don’t publish this stuff myself. That’s why I sought a relationship with a publisher. I’m not a marketer, and I figured that they can identify the best way to position and sell my stuff.

TP: How do you approach worldbuilding? Do you start by working on the big things and then go down to the level of the characters, or do you start with the characters and make the world fit around them?

NKJ: A little bit of both. I’m working on another epic fantasy right now, and one of the first things that popped into my mind was a type of person, a type of magic. And then I started building a world around that type of magic. Then I could adjust the magic to suit the world, and they sort of play off of each other.

The magic that popped into my head was the ability to control seismic activity. I’m sure this sort of thing has been done in comic books, so it’s not anything special or fantastically new. But I asked myself, okay, why would people have the magic ability to do this, and then I thought that it’s because their world is very seismically active. There are lots of earthquakes, lots of volcanoes, and things like that all over the place. So basically people have evolved with the magical ability to sense when an earthquake is coming so they can get out of the house. Naturally, evolution would select people who survive, and they in turn pass on that ability.

And obviously there would be some people in whom this ability is stronger or weaker, and those who are stronger can not just feel it coming, but can actually do something about it. But then I thought, if this world is incredibly seismically active, how would that influence the development of society in this world? This is a world where, every few centuries, there is an extinction-level seismic event. So I had to think about how people deal with this constant fear that the world is going to end, and I started thinking of characters at that point.

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In this installment of the Toonari Post’s interview with critically-acclaimed fantasy author N. K. Jemisin, she discusses how she incorporates real-world material into her fiction, as well as her willingness to discuss politics on her blog.

Toonari Post (TP): It’s interesting that you incorporate so much real-world material into your speculative fiction.

N. K. Jemisin (NKJ): Well, that to me seems to be what speculative fiction is supposed to do. I always thought of that as the way that good books were written. Maybe this is my bias, but I always took to heart the old adage that you’re supposed to write what you know, which makes no sense in the case of speculative fiction writers because of course we don’t know it—it’s speculative! But for a while I thought I would write what I knew, so I would go and visit places and see things and learn more and I could then speculate based upon those real things that I had seen. And I always assumed that that was normal, and that was how writers were supposed to do things.

Then I realized that that is not actually how epic fantasy is written. A lot of the epic fantasies that I mentioned—the ones that were referential to Tolkien without doing the amount of research that he did—were written by people who, while they may have been members of the Society for Creative Anachronism, had never actually been to England and looked at a castle. They had never been to some part of Europe that actually had leftover medieval dwellings and based their settings on that, or they’d never done any research into what real medieval life was like. I complain about this a lot with epic fantasy where you see all these depictions of medieval northern Europe that have no people of color in them and only one, maybe two, ethic groups.

Usually, humans and elves are the only two ‘ethnic groups’ even though they’re really not even the same species. But the reality is that medieval Europe was full of contact with other cultures and other societies, from Jewish traders to people who were traveling the Silk Road to China and the Middle East. It doesn’t make any sense to depict medieval societies where there’s never anybody brown or anybody from a different cultural background. I see those excuses made and I realize they didn’t actually do the research. While it is fantasy, that doesn’t mean it has to be bullshit.

TP: On your blog, you make no secret of your political opinions. How does your activism influence your writing?

NKJ: For one thing, I’m not really that much of an activist. I think of activists as people who put themselves in actual jeopardy. I suppose that, to some degree, I am risking my career by being really open about how I feel about things, but I honestly don’t think that’s the case. Anybody who reads my stuff is going to pick up on how I’m feeling about certain things.

Now it’s not like I’m writing polemics, and in my writing I actually espouse a lot of opinions that I don’t actually share. But the whole idea of a writer being online is that they are more accessible to people. If anyone is going to try to access me, they’re going to get…well…me. I don’t see any reason to hide how I feel about certain things. Although I don’t consider myself an activist, my beliefs do permeate my work in a number of different ways, like how I feel about history being mangled in order to fit the Dungeons and Dragons version of medieval Europe.

TP: Your work does play around with issues of gender and sexuality in a very understated way. In other words, you avoid turning your writing into a bunch of “Very Special Episodes.”

NKJ: That’s because Very Special Episodes don’t work. I see no reason to treat human beings and human issues as exceptional, or try to treat human issues that are outside the mainstream as exceptional. As far as I am concerned, human life is a mélange of different people from different backgrounds doing all these things at once. I try to capture as much of that as I can in my fiction because it feels more realistic. It’s not a matter of good writing, not activism. If you want to do good characterization and worldbuilding, your world will reflect the complexity of humankind.

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The article N. K. Jemisin on Real-World Influences, Politics appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

Here’s more from our exclusive interview with fantasy superstar N. K. Jemisin!

Toonari Post: I know you probably get asked this a lot, but who is your favorite mortal character from The Inheritance Trilogy, and who is your favorite godling?

N. K. Jemisin: I was going to say Sieh, who starts out as a god and becomes mortal. Does that count? [Laughs] Can I use one person to answer both questions?

TP: Sure. For those who haven’t read the trilogy, can you explain how that happens?

NKJ: The third book [The Kingdom of Gods], takes place from the perspective of Sieh, who is the god of childhood. Sieh is not himself a child, although he resembles a child superficially. Although he’s something like 10 billion years old, but he acts like a nine or 10 year old boy. He’s also specifically a trickster god, and he especially likes to play mean, dirty tricks. He’s a little bit of a ‘chessmaster,’ but he’s more of the asshole type of trickster. He starts out by befriending a pair of human children, and when he decides to make an oath of friendship with these two, something goes horribly wrong, and he begins slowly turning human. He’s the god of childhood, yet he starts to grow up—the older he gets, the less power he has, and the more vulnerable he becomes to the things that would harm mortals, but are ordinarily nothing to gods.

TP: What was your inspiration for having that sort of storyline?

NKJ: I don’t know that there was a clear inspiration. I had always intended for Sieh to grow up. In the first book, there is an interaction at one point between him and his father Nahadoth, and Nahadoth says something to the effect that he loves Sieh because Sieh is never going to grow up. As I was writing that scene, it sort of hit me that, well, this doesn’t make any sense. Gods are living beings, and I had established that they can be born and they can die. Therefore, no god could stay a child forever, even one that is supposed to be a child. And I had also established two different rankings of gods. One were sort of the uber-gods, the set of gods that came out of creation, and then there were their children, the godlings. And children always grow up, so I’d always intended for Sieh to grow up. I’d also always intended for the three gods who are part of the overarching plot of the series to reach some point of resolution or catharsis with each other. There was no time for them to resolve all their issues with each other, but they could at least begin the process of healing.

TP: Your discussion of the Three provides a nice segue into my next question. Your books have a bit more sexual content than most epic fantasy novels. Were you ever worried about alienating potential readers?

NKJ: Not really. That’s mostly because I didn’t care what they thought [laughs]. I wrote the kind of story that I wanted to read, and if other people liked it, great. If a publisher wanted to publish it, great. But if not, that’s great too. I would have continued to work on it because I’ve always written primarily for myself. That’s not to say that I didn’t want to get published because obviously I was trying to, but my feeling was that I couldn’t write this with an eye to trying to hit certain ‘plot coupons’ or ‘buttons’ that I saw in other books because I was already not going there. I was already off in territory that I hadn’t seen touched upon very much. The instant that your protagonist is a woman in epic fantasy, you’re doing something that isn’t done very much. And the instant that your protagonist is non-white, again you’re doing something that you don’t see very much in this field. So by that point, I was like “well, I’m already off the reservation, let’s just keep going and see what we can do with that.”

TP: Has there been any negative reaction to the sexual content?

NKJ: Yeah, there’s been some, but it’s been interesting to see the reactions. Some people have said that there’s too much sex, it’s gratuitous, and it’s ‘girly sex’ because it’s from the perspective of the woman. And some people have said that it doesn’t serve a purpose because it doesn’t make a hero go do something in response to that sex. But I’ve also seen people say that there isn’t enough sex, or that it wasn’t hot enough [laughs]. You can’t please everybody; I get that. And again, I wrote it for myself. I thought that, in the situation that I had where the protagonist is essentially the reincarnation of the lover of a god, and so that god is reacting to her like “hey, you’re my lover reborn.” In that case, it didn’t make sense to ignore the potential sexual implications. Plus, since this was inspired by epic myth, and when you look at those ancient epics, they were smutty beyond belief.

I had actually intended for the sex to not be realistic in the first novel because it’s a person having sex with a god, it’s not supposed to be normal, or even titillating. What kills me is that all the negative reactions I have seen have been to one of the sex scenes, which isn’t the one I thought they were going to react to. There’s two sex scenes in the first novel. One of them is essentially tentacle porn for lack of a better description. I’ve seen people argue that that wasn’t actual sex because there was no actual penis or vagina, but it still counts as sex as far as I’m concerned. But it was essentially a tentacle scene; there were more than two hands involved, and I thought that would be the one to squick people out, but apparently people didn’t have an issue with that one. So I guess I’ll just have to include more tentacles in the future!

Stay tuned for more from N. K. Jemisin!

Image Courtesy of  Houari B

The article N. K. Jemisin: An Interview Part 2 appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

Since the publication of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms in 2010, N. K. Jemisin has earned a well-deserved reputation as one of the most brilliant speculative fiction writers around. Her powerful stories have been nominated for the Hugo, the Nebula, and the World Fantasy Award. Although best known for The Inheritance Trilogy (of which The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was the first book), Jemisin released a new series, the Dreamblood duology, to critical acclaim earlier this summer. Jemisin was kind enough to grant Toonari an extensive interview, the first part of which can be found below.

Toonari Post: Could you please tell us a little bit about your background? When did you start writing?

N. K. Jemisin: I most often claim Mobile, Alabama and Brooklyn, New York because I spent the bulk of my childhood in one or the other, which is partly why I don’t have much of an accent. Every time I start to develop a southern accent, I cancel it with a Brooklyn accent.

My first ‘published’ book was a thing with cardboard covers and yarn backing that I was so proud of. I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember, and I never really thought that I would actually try and get published until I was about 30. But I did it as a hobby for years and years and years, and I’ve never really stopped.

TP:  Could you briefly describe the Inheritance Trilogy for those who haven’t read it?

NKJ:  Basically, it is set in a world not our own where, through a complicated set of events, the people of this world managed to enslave several of their own creator gods, leaving one of the remaining gods completely and solely in charge. The story follows a series of human characters, and one character who is not human but becomes human by the end of the story, as they try to deal with the fallout from those events, as well as the ongoing conflict between the gods as the ones that were enslaved try to get free. The one who is free tries to keep them enslaved, and tries to deal with why he enslaved them in the first place and so on.

TP: I really loved how you had the macro plot involving the gods that spans the entire trilogy, plus three micro plots focusing on the human protagonists that provided the framework for each individual book. Why did you choose that approach instead of focusing on either the gods or the mortals?

NKJ: Well, I wasn’t all that interested in doing just another epic fantasy story about mortals who are dealing with mortal things while vague and distant gods looked on and maybe egged on their respective teams—you know, Team Mordor, whatever. But it just seemed to me that a lot of epic fantasies did the epic from that perspective. I’ve always been fascinated by ancient epics, and ancient epics are as much about the gods as they are about the human beings dealing with the gods, and I just felt that I hadn’t seen that for a while in a modern fantasy. I was also intrigued by the idea of what does it mean when the gods are really interacting with a human world. They’re clearly there—they’re not just distant, omniscient beings that are hovering overhead and that people know about but never see. I figured they would essentially be another species occupying the same space as humankind, and that would have a huge impact in the way that human beings regarded the world.

TP: It’s funny that you should mention that because, when I was reading The Inheritance Trilogy, I noticed that it had a similar flavor to classic works like The Illiad and The Aeneid.

NKJ: I always thought that’s where all epic fantasies come from. I don’t actually read a lot of epic fantasy. I mean I read Tolkein and lot other works from the start of the modern epic fantasy wave, but after a while, it all started to kind of feel alike, and it started to feel so self-referential. It looked like writers weren’t looking to old epics for inspiration, but instead were looking to other epic fantasies. And I just wasn’t interested in yet another clone of Tolkein, so I decided to try and follow the same path that I thought Tolkein had done, which was to look at ancient epics.

TP: I too have noticed that a lot of the fantasy novels out there share the same five-man band of archetypes, but they all end up running together.

NKJ: I have seen some attempts to subvert that. I started reading Sam Sykes’ Tome of the Undergates. It’s almost more sword and sorcery than epic fantasy, and among other things, the elves are sort of assholes. I think that lately those of us who grew up on the Tolkein clones of the 80s and 90s are now writing ourselves, and we’re like okay, no more elves, no more dwarves, no more halflings; we need to come up with something different.

Stay tuned for more of our exclusive interview with N. K. Jemisin!

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The second day of OddCon 2012 began with a spirited conversation about steampunk. The discussion immediately delved into academic territory as the panelists debated the nature of literary canons. There was general agreement that steampunk is a very open-source canon that is open to a lot of different influences.

According to panelist Janice Bogstad, who has an impressive list of academic credentials including two Masters’ and a PhD, “Canon is not like a metal bell that prevents its constituents from touching other genres.” She even went so far as to describe George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones as a steampunk novel, though she did not elaborate on her reasons for doing so.

But although the canon is incredibly broad, there are limits. Eric Larson pointed to a recent poll on a blog that showed that the overwhelming majority of respondents did not want to see magic in steampunk novels. Gregory Rihn countered that argument by saying that steampunk often has its own form of magic. In the Girl Genius comic, the main character can bend the laws of physics with the ‘spark.’

After getting the theoretical stuff out of the way, the panel moved to the nuts and bolts of steampunk—literally. Rihn claimed that steampunk favored external combustion over internal combustion, and zeppelins over fixed-wing aircraft. “If it breathes steam, exudes steam, and goes “choo-choo-choo” when it walks, it is probably steampunk,” Rihn said.

But technical details are key. Because Jules Verne does not describe the power source of Captain Nemo’s submarine in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, it falls into the realm of science fiction rather than steampunk, according to Rihn.

A question from the audience led to a discussion of what the ‘punk’ means in steampunk. According to Rihn, the critical element is the violation of Victorian social norms. “It involves expanding not just tech possibilities but social possibilities,” he explained. Some of the panelists saw a divide between older writers, who preferred to merge technology with social graces, and younger ones who were more interested in ‘gadgets and punk.’

After the steampunk panel, Toonari Post went to a panel entitled “Just the Facts, Ma’am,” which focused on the importance of facts in fiction. Moderator Shane McCook was inspired to put the panel together after listening to an audiobook where a character living in prehistoric Europe went out to pick blueberries, which are native to North America.

Richard Chwedyk explained that he normally does ten times more research than will ever show up in the story. When teaching science fiction writing workshops, he advises his students to provide just enough detail for the reader to make sense of the situation, without bogging them down in facts or taking them out of the story.

Chwedyk also pointed out that most experts are more than willing to talk about their work, and so are valuable resources for writers seeking to get their facts straight.

Jeannie Bergmann also stressed the importance of handling human emotions accurately. She cited an example of a romance novel where a nobleman takes a girl from an orphanage and raises her to be a proper lady a la My Fair Lady. Despite having suffered horrific abuse as a child, the girl is able to transition from victim to aristocrat smoothly. Bergmann noted that, in real life, the child would not be able to bounce back from her misfortune so quickly.

She also slammed romance novelists who write books where a ‘bad boy’ is reformed thanks to the heroine’s love. According to Bergmann, these books can encourage women to stay in abusive relationships. “Authors have an obligation to write books that won’t damage people,” she said.

Perhaps appropriately, the day ended with a panel on death in fiction. As one might expect there was a great deal of discussion as to why we are fascinated with the subject. Jeannie Bergmann noted the “dichotomy between person’s consciousness and body. Fascination with the body is an odd peculiarity of humans.”

“Death is disturbing because we don’t know where consciousness has gone,” she continued.

The conversation also covered notable deaths, including Janet Leigh’s famous demise in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Eliminating a main character a third of the way through the movie is certainly unusual, and its unexpectedness helped to make it all the more gripping. This stands in contrast to George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series, where death is quite frequent and the reader knows they cannot count on their characters to survive.

Stay tuned for yet more coverage of OddCon 2012!

Eli Parke contributed to this report.

Image Courtesy of   http://odysseycon.org

The article Odyssey Con 2012: Day Two appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

French author Aliette de Bodard has established herself as one of fantasy’s rising stars. She is the author of the genre-crossing Obsidian and Blood series, which follows Acatl, the Aztec High Priest of the Dead, as he investigates supernatural crimes in pre-Columbian Mexico. The series currently has two books: Servant of the Underworld (Angry Robot, 2010) and Harbinger of the Storm (Angry Robot, 2011). A third book, Master of the House of Darts, will be released by Angry Robot in October of this year.

In addition to her novel-length works, de Bodard has also published short fiction in such publications as Azimov’s, Interzone, Realms of Fantasy, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction.

De Bodard was kind enough to answer the Toonari Post’s questions via email.

Toonari Post: When did you first realize that you wanted to be a writer?

Aliette de Bodard: It depends… I started writing when I was eight, but I didn’t have much organisation or drive at the time. I guess the starting point was my deciding I wanted to publish a novel: I was sixteen at the time and living in London, and I found a book by Orson Scott Card about “How to Write Fantasy and Science Fiction”, which explained the nuts and bolts of craft. I immediately started working on a novel (I still remember cutting out my own index cards). I didn’t ever finish that novel, because the hard disk it was on was fried on the move back to Paris–which taught me a very important lesson on the value of backups–but I never looked back after that.

TP: Could you describe your journey from aspiring writer to published author?

AdB: I have the inconvenience of not living in an English-speaking part of the world, so for a while I was struggling to find like-minded people. I finally joined up an online crit group at Hatrack, and started writing short fiction, which I religiously submitted to Writers of the Future every quarter. For a few years, I skipped between crit groups, trying to find one that would work for me–I finally joined OWW, which provided a big breakthrough in terms of craft: I could crit the numerous stories posted there on my free time, which enabled me to gain a much better understanding of the things that worked and didn’t work for me, and I could get fast feedback on a piece.

I kept submitting (and collecting rejections, which I pinned to the wall behind the dining room table where I worked), and I finally got two big breakthroughs at nearly the same time: first, Jetse de Vries told me he was buying my short story “Deer Flight” for Interzone; and, about a month after that, I got a call from Writers of the Future telling me I’d placed second in my quarter.

TP: What made you decide to write about the Aztecs?

AdB: I had had exposure to the myths and legends of many cultures when I was young, but somehow I’d managed to always skip the Aztecs: the first I heard of them was through my Spanish courses. At the time, the consensus was that of the conquistadores: that the Aztecs were a barbaric, bloodthirsty people. I twigged on pretty early that the conquistadores were not very nice people, and it made me wonder what they’d managed to distort in their reports on the Aztecs. And, sure enough, it only took a little bit of digging to find out about a fascinating civilisation, who was way ahead of Europe in lots of ways (gender equality, medicine, astrology), and whose empire managed to span the entire length of Mexico (no mean feat considering their armies were basically on foot and had to cross mountains and deserts). And I thought it was a real shame that this entire culture had been basically reduced to bloodthirsty villains. I don’t personally agree with human sacrifice, but I can see why they would have thought it was necessary given their belief system (and God knows the Middle Ages that their raft of practices I personally find unsavory, such as torture–something which actually shocked the Aztecs, as they couldn’t understand why something as sacred as pain and blood would be so casually used). So I decided to write stories set in that milieu, partly as a way to explore the culture, and also partly seeking to do my bit to redress the balance (though I’m aware it’s going to take more than a few books to change perceptions, but I can at least try).

TP: How did you find your agent? Do you have any advice for writers who are struggling with the dreaded query letter?

AdB: I found my agent through a series of weird coincidences. Basically, we met at World Fantasy in Calgary, in 2008, through a friend we had in common; but it’s likely nothing would have come of it if my plane back to Heathrow hadn’t been canceled, leaving my agent, me and Marc Gascoigne (who was editing for Angry Robot) stuck in the same hotel lobby with nothing much to do. They both coaxed me into pitching Servant of the Underworld to them; and, after the first moment of panic, I managed to condense my query letter into something short and punchy–and that’s how I ultimately got both my agent and my editor.

I have struggled with the query letter myself, and I think a lot of the problems I had was trying to summarise the entire book in two paragraphs, which is just impossible. I found that it helped me to think of the query letter as a short introductory paragraph setting out why you’re contacting this particular agent, the book title and word number, two or three short paragraphs of book summary, and a paragraph about the relevant bits of your experience as an author (mention previous publications, and other credits if they are relevant to the book). The main problem I had was with the book summary, and I solved it by thinking of it, not as a summary, but as that little blurb you put at the back of the book to make readers want to pick it. I got books from the library and studied the blurbs for a while, and I saw that they were focusing on one aspect of the book and one cool character, and that was about all they had space for. That’s how I wrote my own summary.

TP: Do you have a particular routine for writing? For example, do you set aside a specific time to do it? Do you aim to write a certain number of words/pages per day?

AdB: I wish I had a routine, but the sad fact is that with the day job and the irregular evenings, I don’t have much of one. I basically slot writing into the empty spaces of my schedule. I tried aiming for a certain number of words or pages, but it didn’t work for me, because I can be so irregular. I prefer to set aside, say, 1-2 hours during which I do nothing but write, and accept that sometimes I’ll have 500 words at the end of it, and sometimes 100 words–and sometimes negative words, because I’ve been editing and had to excise an entire section…

TP: Do you do anything special to get yourself in the mood to write, such as listening to a particular kind of music?

AdB: I do have music I listen to, which helps me maintain the mood across the various computers I write on. What I usually do is brew a teapot full of tea (or a herbal brew if it’s too late in the evening), and bring it to my writing desk. I then answer a few emails and browse forums for a bit; and then I start writing by turning the music on.

For music, I mostly go for singer-songwriters such as Vienna Teng, Dar Williams, Girlyman (my new favourite), or for ambiant mood pieces such as traditional Asian songs. I used to listen to last.fm to get my songs, but we got a home stereo with way better sound, so now I tend to put a CD on the stereo and listen to that. It has the advantage of giving me a break when I get up to change the CD.

TP: Given the prominence of human sacrifice in Aztec culture, some readers may find it odd that Acatl never sacrifices anyone as part of his duties as High Priest of the Dead. Could you explain why you chose to omit human sacrifice from the cult of Mictlantecuhtli?

AdB: I did it for a couple reasons. The first was that I was a very green writer when I started writing Servant of the Underworld, and I took one look at the possibility of writing a scene with an actual human sacrifice–and just didn’t think I could pull it off in a way that wouldn’t be corny.

The other one was a basic sympathy problem: the Aztec civilisation is already fairly brutal and fairly distant from our current society, and I didn’t want to add to that distance by having an utterly unsympathetic main character (and I was already running into enough trouble with the animal sacrifices, which put some people off). Acatl was the reader’s only viewpoint in the society, and so he had to create some reasonable empathy with the reader, since I wasn’t going to be able to use someone else as a counterpoint in the narration. I had already given him a sense of duty and a distaste for political manoeuvering, but he remained fairly distant as a narrator, and I thought having him offer human sacrifices in the name of his god would break the fragile balance of empathy I was trying to achieve. So I decided that I was going to skip the human sacrifice part from the clergy of Mictlantecuhtli, but also that it would be disingenuous to remove it from the society. I tried to include some of it in Servant of the Underworld, but I think I was more successful in integrating human sacrifice in both Harbinger of the Storm and the forthcoming Master of the House of Darts.

It’s been three years since that first draft now, and I feel more confident that I could pull this off and still draw the reader into the story, but still… it would be a very difficult juggling act, since the main explanation I could offer would be religious belief, and a lot of people in the US either find religion repulsive, or follow a religion that categorically forbids human sacrifice as an aberration.

TP: What are your influences as a writer?

AdB: Every book I read! More seriously, in genre, I’m very much influenced by Patricia McKillip (I love her style, and her evocation of magic as something mysterious and deadly, not as a system that can ever be mastered and fully understood), Ursula Le Guin (who always has such lovely wordbuilding, and very efficiently manages to question what we think of as the fundamentals of genre and society, such as gender, or political systems, or religions), and I’m indebted to Roger Zelazny for the flamboyant use of style and mythology in his books such as Lord of Light.

Out of genre, I got a lot from mysteries: I love Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael for so accurately nailing the mindset of the Middle Ages, and for presenting a character for whom faith is the centre of the universe; I read Elizabeth George for her depiction of the devastation left by a murder and her fine psychological studies of characters; and I probably wouldn’t have written [the Obsidian and Blood series] if not for Christian Jacq and his books set in ancient Egypt, and Robert Van Gulik and his Judge Dee mysteries.

TP: Could you give us a taste of what will happen in Master of the House of Darts?

AdB: Ha! Master of the House of Darts is, basically, the consequences of what happened at the end of Harbinger of the Storm. (trying not to spoil the end of the second book here…) The main characters made an important decision at the end of that book, but they didn’t pause too much to consider what it would do to the Fifth World. There were also a number of unsolved conflicts, particularly between Teomitl and Tizoc-tzin, that will take centre-stage in this book; and Acatl is in for a number of surprises from people he took for granted.

TP: How do you go about making the past accessible for readers who might not have much historical knowledge?

AdB: Making the past accessible boils down to two things for me: one, making the mindset accessible, and two, getting the details right; The mindset is pretty much vital, but it has to be explained enough. I can tell you that someone I know took a job at a bank manager, and you’d guess they did that because they liked finance and/or wanted a high-paying job; but I tell you that my main character wants to die as a human sacrifice, and I’m going to have to do much more explaining so that you don’t get the wrong idea. It’s the gulf between our Western mindset today and the mindset of an unfamiliar culture in the past.

The second things is details: once again, I can tell you that me and my friends went for Chinese food, and you’ll probably be able to fill in the gaps. If I say that my main character had a typical Mexica meal without telling you what, you have few ways of guessing. So I have to fill in the gaps: tell you what he ate, what it tasted like: I could also do it for me and my friends, and it would reveal things about our characters; but here’s it’s a far more basic need. I have to tell you so you can imagine it. And the more details I give you about the food, about the houses, about the rhythm of daily life, the more real the setting is going to feel to you. There is an upper limit, though, beyond which anything I tell you is just infodumping, but the reader tolerance to details can be fairly high.

It’s also very easy to get details wrong or slip into the wrong mindset (i.e. back into the 21st Century): a writer friend and I once had a good laugh over the fact that his main character in a medieval fantasy had just had donuts–I surmised he must have been hungry at the time.

TP: In addition to your historical fantasy, you’ve also tried your hand at alternate history in the form of your Xuya universe. Could you briefly describe Xuya, as well as your inspiration for it?

AdB: Xuya is what I think of as my sandbox of cultures: it’s what would have happened in North America if the Europeans hadn’t arrived first. The basic premise is that Chinese ships land in America in 1411 (this would have been technologically possible, because Chinese ships were much more advanced than European ships of the same time period; it just didn’t happen because various factors caused China to all but close its borders and fall back into hardcore Confucianism). Because the Chinese were more interested in prestige than in conquest, I imagined that as when they met the Mesoamerican Empires, they would prefer trade to conquest. And, because China already has a foothold in America (and brought gunpowder and smallpox ahead of schedule), the Spanish find it much harder to land at the end of the 15th Century.

This leads to a tripartite North America: you have a Chinese colony in the West (but with far more rights given to the Native Americans), the northern tip of the Mexica Dominion (the Aztecs) in the South, and the much diminished and much impoverished United States. This is the setting for the modern stories; I also took this forward into space, and imagined civilisations centred around Minds, artificial intelligences incubated in human wombs.

TP: On your website, you say that you’ve written novels set in the Xuya universe. Do you have any plans to publish them?

AdB: I do have plans! My SF thriller set in the Xuya universe, Foreign Ghosts, is undergoing revisions at the moment, and I’m brainstorming a few sequel ideas. Then it’s going out on submission, and we’ll see what happens.

TP: There are all kinds of stories now about authors finding success by self publishing on the Kindle. What made you decide to go with a traditional publisher? What are your thoughts on the future of the publishing industry? Do you think self publishing will be the way of the future, or will there always be a place for traditional publishers?

AdB: I’m not really in a position to know, I confess (I live in a country where Kindle access is fairly limited). I wanted to have a physical book, and one that would be sold in major bookstores, which pretty much ruled out self-publishing (and, at the time I was writing, self-publishing was just taking off, and the Kindle was barely out).

I think there will always be a place for traditional publishers, both as gatekeepers, and as people doing the work authors don’t want to do. It’s a bit like agenting: I could negotiate my own contracts, but I don’t have the will, the time or the competences to do so. Similarly, I was listening to Michael J. Sullivan at the Nebulas weekend, and he was saying that doing the covers, editing and proofreading his work had been very much time-consuming–and I totally believe him, because I’ve seen how much work went into friends putting up even a simple short story on the Kindle. I have a dayjob; and I admit I just don’t have the energy to do all of this.

TP: What advice would you give to aspiring authors?

AdB: Believe in yourself, and keep writing. And beware of rules: you have to know and understand why they exist, but after you do that, you must allow yourself to break them. Otherwise you’re just limiting yourself.

TP: What’s next for Aliette de Bodard?

AdB: Several things are in the pipeline: I have a novella I hope to finish one day, and then I’ll move to editing the Xuya novel, Foreign Ghosts, as well as planning its sequels. Then we’ll see; I reckon that should keep me busy for a bit.

To learn more about Aliette de Bodard, check out her website . You may also follow her on Twitter or ‘like’ her fan page on Facebook.

The article Aliette de Bodard, One of the Rising Stars of Fantasy Fiction appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

From comics, to the small TV screen series and now to the big cinema screen!

The Smurfs have been classic characters in the comics world, but now they have turned live. The Smurfs village, mushrooms houses, and blue colors are now being featured in 3D on cinemas, portraying an enjoyable and funny adventure.

On the Opening Weekend the movie gain a total of $35.6 millions in US. The total worldwide cipher reached $55.5 millions.

The Director, Raja Gosnell, leaves the audience satisfied once again. His previous productions and participation on films such as: Never Been Kissed (1999), Scooby-Doo (2002), Big Momma’s House (2000) and Home Alone 3 (1997) have placed him in a great position in the cinema industry.

The Smurfs were first introduced as a comic series, by the Belgian cartoonist Peyo, (Pierre Culliford) on October 23, 1958, The name “Smurfs” came up to Peyo’s mind when he was eating with his friend André Franquin and the world salt didn’t came up to his mind. Speaking in French he asked his friend to pass him the ( schroumpf). Franquin responded:  “Here’s the Schtroumpf , when you are done schtroumpfing, schtroumpf it back…” and after joking around they translated this word into Dutch as Smurf.

The comic strips followed a same pattern where the storylines were full with adventures. The movie brings up again a lot of adventure, where the Smurfs by running away from the evil Gargamel (Hank Azaria), leave their world and end up in New York City.

What is really interesting about the movie is the combination of reality and unreality. These characters are in the real world for the first time. They ended up living with a married couple Patrick (Neil Patrick Harris), and Grace Winslow (Jayma Mays) whom at first were afraid by this blue creatures but at the end they form a great friendship.

Gargamel also ended up in the city, to chase after the Smurfs. The movie shows the essence of the Smurfs, and how these characters behave. As any other community they always want to stick together, and each Smurf collaborates and contributes with different tasks. Most of them look alike, all with their short with trousers, blue skin, and white hats.

The movie depicts several values as friendship, trust, and hope. The friendship among the Smurfs is something unique and solid, everyone cares about the other. Trust comes when they have to live in the real world with complete strangers, but immediately they opened themselves to the unknown and try to build a beautiful relationship with the humans. The last value is hope, which appears throughout all the movie, since the only thing that the Smurfs want to do is return to their home and they are just waiting to have a full moon so they can return, as the same way they arrived to the real world.

We can see how reality and fantasy show an amazing combination, but the movie shows how both of them cannot fit in one world. For the Smurfs it would be too dangerous to remain in the real world where they don’t belong, and humans would always want to take advantage of them.

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