Sheri Tepper is one of my favorite science fiction authors of the last double decade, for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that she’s perfectly willing to ask the inconvenient questions in her books, and in answering those questions, give you a story whose narrative you don’t always expect. I first encountered her with the planetary epic Grass (which along with its quasi-sequel Raising the Stones rank in my personal Top Ten of science fiction novels) and since then have kept coming back for more. So it’s with no small pleasure that I host her here today, to discuss her latest book The Waters Rising, and the ideas within. It’s clear she’s not yet done with the inconvenient (but necessary) questions.

SHERI S. TEPPER:

The big idea of The Waters Rising is the same idea The Author has been agitating about ever since she worked for CARE and then for PPWP (Planned Parenthood-World Population, which it was at the time) as a young woman.

It’s a simple idea: “Hey, people, the world is drowning . . . in people.”

Beating a dead horse: Nobody’s listening.

OH-kay. Can’t talk about that. Several religions say we can’t have too many people. Male egos (some female, too) says can’t have too many. “Lookee me, how prolific I am, world’s biggest mommy, eight at a whack, just like a mommy jack rabbit.” Instinct says can’t have too many. This was a very good instinct back when every cave held a saber-toothed tiger or a cave bear or something more deadly. Back when infections had no medications, wounds had no sutures, breaks had no casts. Back when three or four out of five humans died before they grew up. Back when creatures ate people more than the other way around. Not such a good idea now.

Talking to the wind: Nobody’s listening!

OH-kay. Leaders make pronouncements: We have to feed generations yet unborn! We have to provide for generations yet unborn! We (who?) have to do this and have to do that for generations yet unborn! Leaders are paid to say these things by the housing industry (build, build, build), the oil industry (drill, drill, drill), the all-everything-all-the-time industry (more, more, more), all for the generations yet unborn –

Just try to drown out that noise! Nobody’s listening!

OH-kay. So, generations yet unborn will inherit a barren. A warren. A world devoid of trees. A world devoid of animals. Protein grown in factories. Plastic made in factories. People living like termites in termite hills. A world in which the ocean is poisoned, in which there are no fish. ALL RIGHT! Talk about oceans. Not a flood of people, because nobody’s listening, but a flood of water. Talk about people being the prey instead of the predator. Talk about a Big Kill. About what life was like after a Big Kill. Talk about threats to the human race . . . a natural killer, the flood. An unnatural killer . . . one left over from the time before. Plus a few villains because human nature hasn’t really changed.

And a character from a time before. At the end of A Plague of Angels, Abasio, the male lead, was left alone and grieving with only his horse for company. That, too, was a world made barren by a time before. The Author had not intended him to be alone. She had thought he deserved to have his partner, but Charlie Brown (of Locus), who was visiting at the time, read the manuscript, and Charlie said she had to die. The Author did not like this at all, but what can one do when confronted with superior knowledge and firepower? The Author has felt guilty about this ever since.

So, bringing Abasio and his horse back will be a kind of expiation. They fit very nicely into that sort of world, and we let the waters rise and see what happens, with only one very definite end in mind: this time we will not kill off his beloved. The “we” referred to is the Author and the characters, because once they are on the screen—they appear, as on a TV or movie screen, in a setting and the Author’s immediate task is only to record where they are and what they are doing—they do things that they want to, even when the Author has not foreseen any such thing! They get involved with other characters; they develop their own points of view, they see fit to argue and scream and refuse to do certain things (usually something agents or editors think they should do) and eventually have a decisive voice in the matter. In the Author’s head, this character was born and reared in a certain fashion, and when this character must suddenly do something entirely different than his birth and upbringing would lead one to expect (which birth and upbringing exist, mind you, only in the Author’s head and sometimes tenuously at best), the Author feels obliged to rebirth them. Rebirthing is not done at the keyboard, obviously. It is done while sulking. In bed. Reading something else. (People unfamiliar with the Author may or may not know she is a longtime sufferer with arthritis, now having more titanium than bone in her body, so sulking in bed is not as irresponsible as it might appear in a younger and more elastic person who might choose instead to get drunk or have a fit of depression. The Author in general eschews depression as a waste of time, since she doesn’t have much more of it left.)

But of course, each rebirth is only the beginning of other problems, because the characters have to decide where the water is coming from. How high it will get. What will happen to people when it gets there. The answers are always surprising! “My heavens,” says the Author to herself, “how did that happen?” One cannot argue. It did happen. It’s right there, in black and white.  Several characters are in agreement that it did happen, and it seems fairly logical. Author in her role as inventor. But, the solution to each problem changes everything else. This summons the Author in her role as mediator. So, that, at the end, when everything is tied together fairly sensibly, the story goes forward and back, millennia, perhaps, in both directions involving unforeseen octopi and sea bottom castles and how wolves may learn to talk.

The last role is agent and editor, of course. Trying to make it all flow sensibly and of a piece. In this, thank God, we are helped by our real agents and real editors at publishing houses who are not occupied by the entire cast of characters and who are instead people of infinite tact, wisdom, and ability.

—-

The Waters Rising: Amazon|Barnes&Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt from the novel. Visit Sheri S. Tepper’s biography page.

It’s one thing in fiction to change a little bit of history to fit your story plausibly inside it. But what happens when you change whole, vast chunks of it? On one hand, you’ve got the “alternate history” genre. But on the other hand, you may have a voice whispering in your ear, asking you if you really think you’re going to get away with that, when everyone knows how things really went. Michele Lang knows of this whisper, because in writing Lady Lazarus (which recently garnered a coveted starred review in Booklist), it was right with her the whole time. Here’s how she’s dealt with the whisperer.

MICHELE LANG:

I first read the poem “Lady Lazarus” as a literal-minded freshman in college. I knew it was supposed to be an extended metaphor for Sylvia Plath’s suicide attempts and her fraught relationship with her father, but I preferred to read it straight up, as a revenge anthem of a Jewish woman who returns from the dead to kill the Nazis who had murdered her.

I liked my interpretation way better. I mean, how can you read lines like these:

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air

And not consider the possibilities for mayhem? Even better, what if this girl, who could die and die again, had some way to stop the murderers before they killed anybody else?

I wanted to write that story for myself, wanted it bad. My parents are both Holocaust survivors, and to me the poem “Lady Lazarus” was an exercise in fantasy, the ultimate “what if.”

But such ponderings are fraught with danger. As an interviewer pointed out to me recently, the Holocaust is the third rail of historical fantasy — a million volts of energy humming there, don’t touch it or you’re dead.

I’ll be honest with you. I was afraid to write this book. The seed of this story stayed dormant in my mind for many years. It took a lot of writing, and a lot of living, before I had the guts to try to write Lady Lazarus.

Before that, I did everything I could to avoid touching that third rail. Magda Lazarus, the girl who refused to stay dead, kept following me as I moved to Boston, to Buffalo, to Connecticut. As I developed my writing muscles, I tried to satisfy her with a story set in a different, less challenging place. I tried writing her story set on another planet (really!). In contemporary New York. And all the while, she kept whispering, “No. You know where I belong.”

I didn’t want to go there, the nightmare country where my parents come from.  But Magda Lazarus herself insisted. I didn’t pick this story, it followed me into the dark alleys of my mind and pinned me against the wall. It wouldn’t let me go until I wrote it.

My book Lady Lazarus is essentially about the power of our individual choices to change our lives, and consequently the world.  To write Magda Lazarus’s story, I had to choose to face my own fears head on, and imagine a world in which magic could serve as a countervailing force against evil.

At bottom, I was afraid to write about the war because it wasn’t my story to tell. I didn’t want to hurt my family by leaping across the wall of fire they had passed through at such a cost to survive.

In the end, I had to weigh my fears against the raw need to tell this story. And the story won. I resolved to write this book if I could, and to fix my commitment I told someone in my family, someone I adore, my decision to write Lady Lazarus.

“You can’t write about that!” this beloved person instinctively said. “You can’t stop the whole war. Maybe you can save a little village, but you can’t stop what happened. It’s wrong. You can’t.”

At the time, I couldn’t articulate the well-thought out considerations of alt-hist pros like Debra Doyle and Jim Macdonald (see the Making Light post that Scalzi linked recently).  People in other quarters have implied to me that a topic like World War II is sacred, and a mere genre writer like myself should not sully the real-life history with my imaginings.

But what about Sylvia Plath? Quentin Tarantino and Inglourious Basterds? This is my third rail, dammit, and I have the same right to hit those million volts as everybody else.

I wish I’d had the presence of mind to say to this dear family member, “The question ‘what if’ is the basis of all creative thought. My imagining a different past doesn’t trivialize what actually happened, it explores the ways in which all of us can transcend, or not transcend, the evils that beset us. Asking ‘what if?’ doesn’t negate the lives of Grandpa Gyula, Grandma Tosca, and all the others. It is a way to honor them.”

But none of these noble sentiments came up in our conversation. It’s as simple as this: saying “you can’t” to a writer is like waving a red cape in front of a bull. And Magda Lazarus, the apparition who haunted me and who wouldn’t stay dead, insisted I choose to follow her into the fire.

And, well, here we are. Here she is.

—-

Lady Lazarus: Amazon|Barnes&Noble|Powell’s

Read an excerpt from the novel. Follow Michele Lang’s blog. Michele Lang on Twitter.

I’ll make a confession here: I was the only person in my class at my very-competitive college prep high school who did not take calculus. Which is a fact which bothered the calculus teachers immensely – the would come up to me and warn me I was throwing my life away, or at least my chances to attend a good college, by not taking the course. The irony of course is that I went on to write science fiction, a genre which benefits from a knowledge of calculus. The sound you hear is the teeth of those teachers, grinding away.

So it was with some considerable interest that I came to science writer Jennifer Ouellette’s new book The Calculus Diaries: How Math Can Help You Lose Weight, Win in Vegas, and Survive a Zombie Apocalypse. Like me, she was a math class refusnik; like me, she writes in a field where a knowledge of calculus comes in handy. How does she handle coming to calculus at a later point in her life? I’ll let her tell you.

JENNIFER OUELLETTE:

There’s an episode of the TV series House that opens with a group of students taking the AP calculus exam. A boy collapses and is rushed to the hospital. When Dr. House is told of the circumstances of the boy’s collapse, he quips, “That’s the way calculus presents.”

So calculus has a formidable reputation. I have always been among those non-mathematical sorts who viewed it with trepidation and preferred to keep a safe distance. And I’m not alone: a large chunk of the population finds math in general, and calculus in particular, intimidating and distasteful. I have friends who break into a cold sweat at the sight of a simple algebraic equation. The fact that math has its own language — a sort of symbolic secret code to which only a select few hold the key – only makes matters worse.

So I figured it was time someone wrote a book about calculus from that perspective, and who better to do so than a former math-phobic English major who went on to become a science writer specializing in physics? Most popular math books are written by people who already love the subject and are quite knowledgeable – i.e., actual mathematicians.

The problem is, they’re so familiar with the topic that they forget what it’s like to know nothing. The most basic concept can be a challenge for a rank beginner. For instance, how do you explain what a mathematical function is to someone who doesn’t “speak math”? I can parrot the technical definition. But that doesn’t mean I fully understand the concept. 

Of course, this meant I had to actually learn calculus before I could write about it coherently. When I started, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Calculus proved a little over my head. Fortunately, my Spousal Unit is a physicist at Caltech. He helped me find real-world examples of calculus, and gamely answered all my pesky “why is the sky blue?” questions.  The result is The Calculus Diaries: How Math Can Help You Lose Weight, Win in Vegas, and Survive a Zombie Apocalypse. It’s less about teaching the nuts and bolts of calculus and more about turning the world around you into your mathematical playground.

We learned to shoot craps in a Vegas casino to demonstrate the calculus of probability. We indulged in the rides at Disneyland, and I learned about freefall and parabolic curves, and how to apply vector calculus to Space Mountain. I went surfing in Hawaii to learn about sine waves and the Fourier transform, and our house-hunting expedition turned into a multivariable optimization problem.

I even chatted with an epidemiologist about how to use differential equations to analyze an outbreak of zombification. (Worse-case scenario: the zombies wipe us out in four days, unless we go all Zombieland on their undead butts and kill them as fast as possible. So now you know. Read the appendix and you’ll also know the derivation, and can impress your friends at parties.)

Writing the book also forced me to ask some deep questions about where my kneejerk rejection of equations originated. It would be easy to simply blame the patriarchy, but it’s far more complicated than that. It’s true that there is lingering gender bias about women in math – and lots of women have the horror stories to prove it – but my own negative reaction stemmed from a weird form of Imposter Syndrome.

Even though I’d done well in my math classes and earned top grades in high school, deep down I knew I was just memorizing patterns and didn’t really understand the subject deeply. I was terrified that my ignorance would be discovered and I would be publicly humiliated as an academic fraud. Even though this never transpired, that fear colored my attitude towards math for much of my adult life; I avoided it like the plague.

I talked to lots of very smart people with varying degrees of math-phobia, and they all had one thing in common: an early negative experience with math that shattered their confidence and instilled a deep-seated fear and dislike of numbers. As one woman memorably described her feelings: “My initial reaction to the word ‘calculus’ is not unlike a caveman throwing rocks at the moon in ignorance and fear resulting in blind rage. There is no such thing as ghosts creeping up behind me on the stairs, but there is such a thing as a polynomial monster, and it has hooked teeth and causes chronic yeast infections, I’m sure.”

The truth is, the Calculus Monster isn’t all that scary once you face it head-on. We all do some form of calculus all the time, without realizing it. A baseball outfielder has to estimate where the ball is likely to land after the batter gets a hit. Whether he knows it or not, his brain is calculating the trajectory of that ball, then sending a signal telling the outfielder where to place himself in order to make the catch. Lurking somewhere in that process is a calculus problem. Or two.

I think scientists have a valid point when they bemoan the fact that it’s socially acceptable in our culture to be utterly ignorant of math, whereas it is a shameful thing to be illiterate. We could all be just a little bit mathier. I hope my book will encourage others like me to give this much-maligned subject a second chance.

—-

The Calculus Diaries: Amazon|Barnes&Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read more about the novel here. Follow Jennifer Oullette’s blog. Jennifer Ouellette on Twitter.

Saving the world. Paying the rent. Are these mutually incompatible activities? Laura Resnick ponders this very subject as she discusses Unsympathetic Magic, the latest installment of her fantasy series featuring the quirky character Esther Diamond. And while it might seem at first blush that one have to prioritize these desires (after all, if one does not save the world, paying the rent becomes a moot point), Resnick makes a good argument why both are important in the end.

LAURA RESNICK:

I love juxtaposition. I love the salty-and-sweet flavor of peanut brittle, and the sinus-clearing heat of a spicy curry accompanied by the creamy coolness of raita. I love the close-to-laughter close-to-tears experience of a well-acted Chekhov play, and the mingling of today’s grief with yesterday’s joys that you get from a good funeral eulogy.

I also like a healthy dose of comedy with my drama, and a generous helping of life-and-death stakes with my farce.

Hence the ethos of my Esther Diamond urban fantasy series, of which Unsympathetic Magic is the newest release. When the brilliant cover artist for this series, the award-winning Daniel Dos Santos finished this cover, he told me that coming up with images that have the right combination of menace and comedy is the big challenge of illustrating these books. (And he keeps getting it just right. So hats off to Dan!)

Esther Diamond is a struggling actress in New York City who gets involved in supernatural adventures along with her friend Dr. Maximillian Zadok, a 350 year old mage whose day job is protecting the Big Apple from Evil. They are assisted in their activities by Nelli, Max’s inconveniently-large canine familiar; and they’re occasionally dogged, thwarted, or beaten to the punch by Detective Connor Lopez, a skeptical cop who would be Esther’s boyfriend if he weren’t so concerned about his growing conviction that she’s a deranged felon.

Esther’s vocation as an actress is similar to mine as a writer; she loves it, it’s the work she was meant to do, and she is fiercely dedicated to it. Like writing, acting is a highly competitive profession, a very unstable way to make a living, and often doesn’t pay that well. Consequently, while fighting Evil and confronting the forces of darkness, Esther is also always looking for work, making sure she can pay her bills (no mean feat in Manhattan!), and vexed about any circumstances that interfere with her ability to earn income or pursue her career.

And that’s an example of the sort of juxtaposition that I’ve enjoyed playing with in this series: While confronting supernaturally powerful adversaries and their rapaciously murderous plans, Esther Diamond has to give equal attention to holding down paying jobs, covering her rent, and watching her budget. These constant obligations characterize life as I have always known it, and since I don’t believe these responsibilities will disappear for me if I wake up tomorrow to discover I’m being menaced by zombies and a voodoo curse, I don’t make them magically vanish for Esther, either.

Thus, Esther is working at three jobs throughout Unsympathetic Magic. Her “real” job is acting in a guest slot on The Dirty Thirty, a TV show about corrupt cops which is widely loathed by the NYPD—including Lopez, as well as the cops who arrest Esther for prostitution one night in Harlem. (There is, as she assures Lopez when she asks for his help, a perfectly reasonable explanation for why she was assaulting strangers at midnight while dressed like a crack whore.) Her regular day job is working as a singing server at Bella Stella, a restaurant in Little Italy that featured prominently in her previous misadventure, Doppelgangster. And her other day job is teaching acting classes at the Livingston Foundation in Manhattan’s lovely old Mt. Morris Park neighborhood.

And while tracking down a mysterious sorcerer who’s using the dark side of voodoo magic to raise zombies, call up dark spirits, and terrorize Harlem by night, Esther makes sure she never misses a minute of work at any of her three jobs.

Pursuing her professional vocation, meeting her fiscal needs, and stomping Evil into the ground before it can swallow her city whole and cancel all auditions forever, in addition to trying to have a love life with her almost-would-be boyfriend (Detective Lopez), keeps Esther pretty busy.

Similarly, making sure that I find the comedy in stories about Evil, homicide, abduction, rapacious greed, and attempts to destroy the world as we know it keeps me pretty busy. The stakes in any story have to be high or there’s not much reason for a reader to get invested in it for 400+ pages; and in fantasy, the stakes are traditionally very high, i.e. the struggle between Good and Evil. So Esther Diamond’s action-packed adventures consist of fantasy drama with one more layer—the funny layer, the layer where absurdity is juxtaposed against menace, the mundane is juxtaposed against the earth-shattering, and the pettily irritating is juxtaposed against the truly terrifying.

Unsympathetic Magic attempts to bring together all of these elements and balance them against each other, while also adding a dash of sex appeal, some fun facts I’ll bet you never knew about traditional voodoo, and the dark stormy climax of a mid-August heat wave.

—-

Unsympathetic Magic: Amazon|Barnes&Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt from the novel. Follow Laura Resnick’s news page. Laura Resnick on Facebook.

Monsters: you know, those big, hairy and scaly things with the claws and teeth and the overwhelming desire to do nasty bad things to you? But then there’s Harry Connolly. No, he’s not a monster (I mean, as far as we know), but he has definite ideas about monsters, and what they should be – and what they don’t have to be. Explains himself, and how his thoughts on the subject inform his latest novel, Game of Cages.

HARRY CONNOLLY:

In The Philosophy of Horror, Noel Carroll nobly attempts to define the monster. To paraphrase him (in a way that would certainly make him cringe): a monster is a threatening and impure creature that violates the natural order as it’s defined by contemporary science.

“Threatening” is pretty straightforward. “Impure,” though, is more complicated. Monsters can be mixtures of things that do not belong together: man and wolf, living and dead, animal and machine. They can be incomplete: a living hand, a bodiless ghost. They also be magnified in size, like a giant shark, or in number, like a swarm of rats.

(And so on. It’s an  interesting book with much to quibble over. I think of it often when I’m planning a new novel.)

And while I don’t write horror (my agent says so), I do write thrillers about extra-dimensional beings who make incursions into our world to feed and reproduce. That means I need a monster for each book–maybe more than one–and being me, I wanted them to be original.

Now for a short but important digression: One thing that bothers me about modern monsters in fiction (aside from seeing the same ones over and over) is the reliance on creative choices designed to work in movies. I’m talking mainly about huge claws and teeth, usually accompanied by animal growls.

There’s a good reason for this–the sight of a gigantic jaw full of long, sharp teeth (another example of magnification) evokes a powerful subconscious fear response. Unfortunately, filmmakers have been one-up each other for decades, finally creating monsters that verge on the  ridiculous.

But fiction isn’t an image medium, so why do so many books try to copy movie monsters?

Once again, I was defining myself by what I didn’t want to do.

I decided to make the monster beautiful rather than ugly, and to have it inspire love instead of fear. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (inspiration to so much modern contemporary fantasy) had already shown that frenzied, irrational love could be scary as hell in “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” the episode where Xander Harris casts the love spell. But in this case, I wanted to replace romantic love with the love between human and pet.

And here I must tread carefully. Our good host has (I’ve learned not to say owned) several pets and one recently passed away. I offered my sincere condolences, but to be honest, the love between a human and a pet is mysterious to me. I grew up surrounded by pets–dogs, cats, snakes, fish, hamsters, guinea pigs–but once I moved out on my own I realized that, whatever feeling people get by sharing their homes with an animal, I don’t share it.

Intellectually, I know the feeling exists. Emotionally, I don’t understand it and maybe never will. That’s not meant to be a criticism, implied or otherwise; it’s simply an acknowledgement of one of the ways I’m different from most people.

And that’s the idea behind Game of Cages: a creature that could force you to love it so much you’d sacrifice everything for it. You’d give up your job, your friends, your life, your children just to be near it and care for it. Instead of magnifying its size, or its teeth and claws, I magnified the emotional connections it created until they became irrational and destructive.

—-

Game of Cages: Amazon|Barnes&Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt from the novel.Visit Harry Connolly’s blog. Follow him on Twitter.

Fiction can inspire those who read it to do new and even possibly noble things with their lives – but fiction can also be cathartic and transformative for the writer as well. While writing Children No More, author Mark Van Name discovered he wasn’t just trying to write an efficient page-turner, he was working on something that would make him confront parts of his own past… and work to change the future of some whose own pasts need healing.

MARK VAN NAME:

Novels begin for me like small leaks in a dam.  One idea shoots through, then another, then more and more, each one growing stronger until the dam vanishes beneath the water.  With Children No More, what came first was an image of my protagonist, Jon Moore, standing with a few other people, one of them a child, in front of a small army.  The child had until quite recently been a soldier. 

I knew I’d write the book the moment the image came to me. 

In addition to thinking about what would have brought Jon to that point, I also wanted to challenge myself to attempt things I hadn’t done in any previous books.  Other notions then rapidly added to the idea flood.

 Jon couldn’t fight safely with a child at his side, so I had to create a situation in which not fighting was better than fighting—even with armed soldiers threatening him and others dear to him. 

Jon is a classic American mono-myth character:  People ask for his help because of the skills he possesses and his willingness to use them, he deals with the problem at hand, and he leaves.  Leaving is vital, because the very traits, such as an aptitude for violence, that make characters such as Jon necessary also make them undesirable when the action is over.  When you work in conditions that are fundamentally horrific—think soldiers, cops, firefighters, relief workers, and many more—you pay dearly and are forever altered.  You witness things no one should have to see, PTSD settles into you like a black mist, and you never again fit into normal society as well as you once did. 

So of course I had to make Jon stay when the action was over. 

That decision immediately led to another problem:  How to sustain dramatic tension while writing about the post-action parts of the story.  The previous three novels in the series all had the reputation of being page-turners, and I wanted the same compelling reading experience in this one. 

Excellent.  Make him stay, make fighting the less attractive alternative, and make the book a page-turner. 

About that time, I remembered that Jon had been trained as a child to fight and to kill, but I’d never told the story of those times, so I’d do that, too. 

Even better.  Make him stay, make fighting the less attractive alternative, weave in a long story arc from a much earlier time, and make it a page-turner. 

As I was starting the book, my mind finally reminded me of something I’d managed up to this point in the process to ignore:  I had been trained as a child to fight and to kill. 

When I was ten, my most recent father died.  In an effort to give me some male influence, my mother signed me up for a youth group that trained boys to be soldiers.  Its intentions were good:  To use military conventions and structures to teach discipline, fitness, teamwork, and many other valuable lessons.  It accomplished many of those goals with me—but it also did many bad things.  Part of the problem was the time:  I joined in 1965, as the war in Viet Nam was gaining speed.  My first day, an active soldier on leave acted as our drill sergeant.  When he formed us up in ranks and started screaming at us, I began to cry.  He punched me so hard in the stomach that I fell and vomited.  He then ground my face into my own puke with his boot.  A few hours later, I saw my first–but not my last–necklace of human ears and learned the ethics of collecting them. 

I was a member for three years.  The first day wasn’t even in the top twenty worst days I had. 

The worst of those worst days was nothing, nothing at all, compared to what child soldiers around the world endure. 

Those years, though, gave me a strong understanding of their pain and a deep desire to help stop the practice of using children to fight wars. 

That desire led me to the last big idea of Children No More, one that hit me last February, when I was finishing the third draft of the book, about a month before I turned it in.  I was sitting at TEDactive, listening to people talking about changing the world, and I decided I wanted to do something concrete to aid child soldiers, something more than just write the book. 

After some research, I found a group, Falling Whistles, that was working to help rehabilitate and reintegrate child soldiers and other war-affected children, mostly in the Congo.  I partnered with them in a simple program:  I’m giving everything, including the advance, that I earn from sales of the hardback edition of the novel to them to help those kids.  So, when you buy the book, you’re not only getting a good read, you’re not only spending time on an important social topic, you’re also doing a good deed, because money is heading to those children. 

So, I had to make Jon stay, make fighting the less attractive alternative, weave in a long story arc from a much earlier time, make the book a page-turner, and spend months dealing with a lot of shit from my past.  I feared that I might not have the skills to do all that, and I definitely didn’t want to spend that many months in those dark places in my head. 

If I succeeded, though, I could help child soldiers in the real world. 

With a payoff like that, I had to try.

—-

Children No More: Amazon|Barnes&Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt from the novel.Visit Mark Van Name’s blog.