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11-28-08: A 2008 Interview with Elizabeth Bear :
'The Windwracked Stars'
"Hope you can identify the people who are smoking the Hello Kitty crack pipe before you take them too seriously"
Elizabeth Bear made the rocket journey from being someone with great short fiction in Interzone and the like to being someone who has more books out than you can easily count seemingly overnight. I remember my anticipation for her debut 'Hammered' — and I've seen since the flood of great writing to follow. But what you'll hear in this linked MP3 interview about her latest novel, 'All the Windwracked Stars' is that she's been working on this stuff for like, forever. It's just another example of how overnight success is so often just a matter of perception and publicity.
'All the Windwracked Stars' is a fascinating novel that explores the Norse mythology with the toolkit of science fiction and fantasy. I just love the cover, which reminds me of the sort of science fiction book coves I used to see when I was a child that would literally frighten me because they implied worlds so strange and so adult I knew I could not comprehend them. That's certainly the case here, and Bear talks about how her unusual upbringing influences her characters and informs her fiction. She's a fascinating, powerful force in the science fiction genre, the sort of writer that can write really hard-core weird stuff that pulls in interested readers from outside the genre. And damn, not only does she have that novel done, she has a lot in the wings that she'll tell you about in this linked interview.
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11-27-08: Agony Column Podcast News Report: Andrew Davidson First Books Report : 'The Gargoyle'
In case you missed the broadcast during Weekend Edition Sunday, and because NPR offers up their audio in the less-than-thrilling "RealAudio" format, here's a high-quality MP3 of my report on Andrew Davidson and his first book, 'The Gargoyle', a peculiar and riveting love story that is spans time and place. Davidson parlayed an interest in burn victims and recovery from severe burns, medieval Germany, and sculpture into a bizarrely told story of love and past lives. It's a classic first-writer story. If you want to hear Davidson's full story, you can follow this link to part one and this link to part two. Plus, here’s a link to the review of the novel.
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11-26-08: Agony Column Podcast News Report: Seana Graham on the MUSE Online Writer's Conference
It's easy to get overwhelmed with all the resources available to writers. Conferences, websites, on-line this, that and the kitchen sink – what to choose and why? Who to go to for advice on how effective anything is?
I can't promise to cover every resource, but recently Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet contributor Seana Graham mentioned that she'd attended an pretty damn effective online seminar, and of course, I managed to get her to tell me all about it. It's the Muse Online Writer's Conference.
Here's the only writer's conference you can confidently attend in your pajamas. Well, maybe not the only one, but perhaps the only one you can attend in pajamas and stay at home. You'll have to learn to type fast though. I'm not sure if I could keep up, but Seana could, and it sounds like it was well worth her valuable time. I'll let Seana tell you all about it in this MP3 interview.
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11-25-08 : Agony Column Podcast News Report : Nathaniel Rich First Book For NPR : 'The Mayor's Tongue'
In case you missed the broadcast during Weekend Edition Sunday, and because NPR offers up their audio in the less-than-thrilling "RealAudio" format, here's a high-quality MP3 of my report on Nathaniel Rich, who wrote his first novel, 'The Mayor's Tongue', in secret, even as he was editing the prestigious journal The Paris Review.
Rich's novel is wonderfully funny and surreal, a work of rather frightening magic realism. It's not exactly genre fiction, even if it uses many of the tropes, and uses them well. For more audio, you can hear part one of the full-length interview with Nathaniel Rich here, and part two here. |
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11-24-08 : Agony Column Podcast : A 2008 Interview with Stewart O'Nan: "This is what I think is important."
Stewart O'Nan's latest novel, 'Songs for the Missing' is in fact not about the missing; it's about the left-behind. He's a craftsman of character, a writer whose plots are the arcs of characters' lives, in this case, wrenched out of true by the removal of a young woman from the midst of their lives. The last novel of his I read, 'The Night Country' also dealt with the guilt of survivors, launched off from a supernatural perspective. But the tropes that begin his books are merely departure points for his entertaining and perceptive explorations of American characters. 'Songs for the Missing' is a novel that's been a long time coming from O'Nan; and, as he told me in our interview, his attempts to write if begat a number of other novels.
I asked him about his writing process, and as it happened, he'd brought examples to share. You can hear him talk about the tip of his iceberg, and share notebooks from his forthcoming novel, by following this link to the interview. There's a lot to learn from O'Nan's discussion of creating character, whether the character you are trying to create is fiction — or your own.
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