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.

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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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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!

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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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