Is there anything new to say in the worlds(s) of steampunk? Perhaps, if you look beyond the usual settings and suspect. For Stormdancer, author Jay Kristoff broadened his horizons and listened to his dreams. this is what he came up with.

JAY KRISTOFF:

“Telepathic samurai girls and griffins in a Japanese-inspired steampunk dystopia.”

That mouthful is my elevator-pitch reply when people ask me to sum up my debut novel Stormdancer. It took me a year to get it that concise. I hang my head in shame.

It was a dream that started it all. I was in the process of querying my first novel, and meeting the kind of success fluffy bunnies meet when querying moving cars with their faces. In the midst of this blizzard of boiler-plate rejection letters, I dreamed about a boy trying to teach a griffin to fly in a field of dying grass.

This boy was yelling at the top of his voice, but the griffin’s wings were broken and it couldn’t get airborne no matter how masterfully the kid swore (friends who read too much into dreams have said the boy was me, and the griffin was my novel – flawed to the bone). I was looking for an idea for my next book, and the image lodged in my head.

But an image doesn’t make a novel – or if it does, it’ll be a gorram short one. Hardly the kind you’ll buy a castle next to Jo Rowling’s with. So the little boy became a teenaged girl who, instead of shouting into the griffin’s ears, could shout into his mind. The field of grass became a field of blood-red flowers, choking the life out of everything around them. And instead of the griffin’s wings being broken, they’d been taken away from him. By bastards. That’s how Stormdancer was born.

Stormdancer’s setting is a nation teetering on the edge of ruin. Shima is an imperium built on the backs of fantastical technologies – sky-ships and motor-rickshaw and thunder-rail, defended by Iron Samurai in lumbering suits of power armor. But the engines that drive the empire are ever thirsty, and Shima is being slowly consumed by the very technologies that once made it great. Fields of blood lotus flowers are cultivated for the fuel that drives their machines, but that same flower is killing the earth and everything on it. The magical beasts of legend are dead or gone, the air is choked with toxins, and a blast-furnace sun burns in a scarlet sky. When I first pictured the islands in my head, I imagined a high-speed collision between the epic settings of feudal Japan and the fictions of Verne, Moore and Gibson, smudged with a handful of soot and burned motor oil.

I wanted to take steampunk’s corsetry and rose-colored goggles and wide-eyed enthusiasm for the wondrous machine and make it ugly. Make the machine the enemy. Tell a story about a people so hopelessly dependent upon their technology that they couldn’t pull back from the brink, despite the awful truth that their technology was killing them. To me, that seemed a truth not so far from our own, and a sandbox worth playing in. As for the cultural touchstone, steampunk Victorian England had been done, and done well. But the world during Victorian times was an amazing place, and as far as I could see, not many folks had drawn inspiration from one of the most incredible cultures of the day – the Tokugawa Shōgunate of 19^th century Japan.

Imagine it: Steam-powered samurai. Flying maru. Chainsaw katanas.

Steampunkery aside, and at its heart, Stormdancer is a book about an unlikely friendship between two even more unlikely characters – a girl with the ability to speak telepathically to animals in a country where animal life is virtually extinct, and the last griffin left alive. I wanted to write an epic adventure, full of battles and betrayals and chainsaw katana fights, with a kick-ass heroine who didn’t need to choose a boy by which to define herself. I wanted to collide epic fantasy with steampunk and see where it took me. But more than that, I wanted to write a book with heart; a book about a friendship that bloomed despite all obstacles. A bond that would grow to become a thing of legend in this nation on the edge of ruin – a friendship that challenged the might of an empire.

But it all started with a dream, and my life has felt a little like a dream since I first found out it was getting published. So, if you’re considering giving some of your time to this absurd little dream of mine, you have my heartfelt thanks.

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Often times reading a book is the closest you can come to an experience without being there yourself. But can writing the book pull off the same sort of trick? Let’s ask Sarah Beth Durst, whose latest novel, Vessel, took shape at first because of a yearn to travel — or at the very least, to be elsewhere than she was. It didn’t stop there, of course…

SARAH BETH DURST:

I chose to write Vessel because I wanted to walk across a desert.

Some people might have booked a plane ticket and packed a suitcase.  But I don’t like being hot, I don’t like sand, and I’m about as athletically inclined as a garden gnome.  Minus the beard.

I think of it like choosing the next travel destination on my armchair traveler itinerary.  I’d written about the Arctic a couple years ago and immersed myself in a world of ice.  This time, I wanted to live in a world of sun and heat and sand.

But not just any desert.  It had to be a fantasy desert (because that’s the way my mind works — I was the kid who would always check her closet for an entrance to Narnia, who would always put “magic wand” on her birthday wish list, and who would always memorize where she put her stuffed animals so she’d catch them if/when they moved…  I probably shouldn’t admit that last one).  So my initial brainstorming went a little like this:

ME:  I want to write about a desert.

MY BRAIN:  Sure.  So long as I can write in air conditioning.

ME:  But I want more than sand.  Beaches have sand.  Sandboxes have sand.

MY BRAIN:  How about wolves made of sand?  And dragons.  No, not dragons, sky serpents!  Made of unbreakable glass!  And gods and goddesses that walk the earth inside the bodies of humans!  And a trickster god!  And a young emperor in a glorious palace!  And desert horses!  And monstrous worms!  Mwah-hah-hah!

ME:  You know we need a story too, right?

MY BRAIN:  Oh.  Right.

I found the story one night.  It was the perfect night: a crescent moon, a cool breeze, and me snoring (or, as I prefer to call it, “breathing”) on my pillow.  Yes, as cheesy as it sounds, the key to Vessel came to me in a dream.

I dreamed about a girl dancing.  She had long, black hair and silk skirts that flowed around her as she swirled.  Her feet were bare, and she was dancing on sand with the moon above her.  I was the girl.  And I was dancing wildly, joyfully.  As I danced, I knew that when the dance ended, I was going to die.

When I woke up, I couldn’t stop thinking about that girl.  I didn’t know why she was dancing, why she was going to die, or why, knowing that, she would feel so joyful and free.

In answering those questions, I found my Big Idea.

In this desert land with wolves made of sand that hunt inside storms and sky serpents made of unbreakable glass that guard mountains, every clan has its own god or goddess.  Once every hundred years, the clan’s deity claims a human body and uses it to work the magic that fills the wells, revitalizes the oases, and increases the herds.  Without this infusion of magic, the clan will wither and die.

Liyana has been chosen to give her body to her clan’s goddess.  She doesn’t want to die, of course, but she is willing to sacrifice herself for the sake of her clan and especially for the sake of her four-year-old brother.  She begins the ceremony to summon her goddess…

… but her goddess doesn’t come.

Vessel is a story about losing your destiny and what happens after.

For me, for Vessel, the Big Idea didn’t come as a lightning strike.  It came as sparks that fused together.   I think that’s how the creative process works a lot of the time – or at least that’s how it works for me.  You start with a stray thought, a whim even, “I want to write about a desert.”  You prod it, twist it, stretch it, add to it, tear it up and sew it back together, toss in a few dreams, mix it up with bits of your soul… and then suddenly, magically, after a lot of typing and a lot of chocolate, you have your story, and you are walking across a desert with a girl who’s trying to save a goddess.

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Look! A large, sinister manor! Filled with parapets and secret panels and whatnot! What sort of story shall we put in such a thing? Well, Sarah Rees Brennan knows, because there’s one in her latest novel, Unspoken. Draw up a Victorian-style chair next to the roaring fire in the large (and sinister!) hearth, and let her tell you about it.

SARAH REES BRENNAN:

Gothic novels are often referred to as the ‘girl meets house’ genre. This is pretty accurate: usually the girl meets a tall dark dangerous man and a tall dark dangerous manor at about the same time.

It’s like a love triangle, in the Arthur/Guinevere/Lancelot or Edward/Bella/Jacob vein, if brave Sir Lancelot or that poor werewolf guy was a house. A house that was on fire.

It’s very difficult to have relationships with a house, especially if it’s a Gothic manor.

MAIDEN: I just don’t know if I can trust you to be a good manor! You’re mad, bad and dangerous to buy or rent!
MANOR: Baby I can change.
MAIDEN: You always say that! And then I find another madwoman in your attic or God forbid, someone else buried alive in the walls…
MANOR: But we’re so good together. This bed is on fire, with passionate love!
MAIDEN: Yes, the bed is LITERALLY ON FIRE. That’s part of the problem!

Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca starts with a lady having a woooooonderful dream about her house, and that house in the dream, it is lookin’ goooooooood.

And in Barbara Michaels’s Someone in the House… the house actually forms a, um, body at a Key Moment and makes sweet housalicious love to someone. Don’t look at me like that: I just report the news.

But, hey. Who doesn’t like an old manor full of family secrets? I like an old manor. (But not, and I want to stress this, in a sexy way.) I like an atmospheric mystery with all the underlying emotional business: that you’re trapped, that you’re in danger, that nobody will believe you and even you are starting to worry that you’re crazy.

So, I wanted to write a Gothic mystery. But I wanted to make it new: I wanted to make it mine.

So, first of all, I thought, the Gothic hero who comes with the house, the one who is keeping all those secrets? Here’s looking at you, Edward ‘Wife In The Attic Plus Fake Girlfriend Because That Situation Wasn’t Complicated Enough’ Rochester.

That boyfriend is a terrible boyfriend. Girls don’t have to put up with stuff like that nowadays, for God’s sake, there’s always match.com.

I started thinking, though, that children have to move where their parents bring them. And, since I love the reversal of a trope about as much as a gothic heroine loves a house, I decided to make my gothic heroine … a boy.

Now, I don’t mean I wanted to make him a gothic hero. Gothic heroes are always in the know about everything and keeping quiet, apparently to be annoying mofos, and also are always wenching around Europe (a fine time to be sure, but the poor lad’s only seventeen). I wanted to give the usual business of a gothic heroine, alone, unloved, transplanted into a sinister Gothic manor and kept in the dark about many a shady family secret, to a boy character. And well, yes, okay, I threw in a little brooding gothic hero business too for good measure. And lo, I got Jared Lynburn, lunatic, secret romantic and twitchy dude ready to deck you at a moment’s notice for asking the time.

But since he was going to be an outsider to the little English town which the Gothic manor overlooks, I wanted to write about an insider, someone who knew Sorry-in-the-Vale and all its inhabitants. (Think about it: the villagers clearly know there’s something up with Count Dracula. ‘He tips really well when he brings the castle linen to the drycleaner’s, but we are so tired of him kidnapping the children and feeding them to wolves.’)

And the heroine should be someone capable of unravelling a Gothic mystery. This is the point where two genres collided in my head with a glorious smash: Gothics and lady sleuths.

I like me some Lois Lane: I like me some Miss Marple. I like me some Nancy Drew, and the women behind these creations, and the women these creations were based on.

Girls who are indomitable, who like mysteries, who go toward the creepy sound in the cellars or the dark doings in the woods because they want to report on it.

The more Gothic mysteries I read, the more I thought we needed someone like that around.

Enter Kami Glass, brand new editor of the school newspaper, intrepid girl reporter, goofball (because what sinister mystery would not be improved by a little humour, this stuff is funny, you all read what someone did with a house…), becoming very concerned about a) actual screaming going on in the woods outside her town, b) everyone in town, including her own mother, acting fifty shades of shady, and c) how it all links up with the Lynburn family, who just arrived back in their ancestral manor after a 17-year absence.

Murder. Magic. Petty crime in the cause of great justice. Love, fear and live burial. Very embarrassing psychic links. Really suspicious architecture.

The big idea was to give you all of the above with Unspoken.

—-

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Very few people in the world are truly tabula rasa — a blank slate. So when you’re creating a character who is as close to one as can be, how do you keep it real… and compelling? That was Peter Adam Salomon’s task with Henry Franks. Sit down and find out how he did it.

PETER ADAM SALOMON:

When I began to write Henry Franks, my first thought was to start with a father figure, the man responsible for shaping the only world his son knew, and wondered how it would be possible to create a false reality for that child. For instance, if you were taught that the green stuff in front of your house was called ‘hair’ and the brown stuff on top of your head was called ‘grass’ then you would find it perfectly normal to mow your hair and cut your grass. I wanted to play with identity in the same way, to make the completely irrational perfectly normal due to the ‘training’ of the child.

However, what quickly became more interesting to me were the reactions of the son as his doubts weakened all he had been taught to believe about himself. So, I began again, this time from the son’s point of view. Of course, this meant that I was basing an entire novel on a character with some serious holes in his personality.

I struggled to create a character without a past, which turned out to be a great deal harder than I had expected. There’s no history to detail, no depth other than the immediate present. Taking that away forced me to explore other ways to share Henry with the reader and, most importantly, to hopefully make the reader care for this young man.

I kept returning to the same basic questions about identity: Where do you turn when you remember nothing? Who do you rely on to tell you the truth about yourself? If you can’t trust your past, is it really possible to be human?

That pervasive sense of doubt and suspicion provided an excellent backdrop for Henry’s search for identity. In the context of a horror novel with all the requisite “bumps-in-the-night,” where even the weather and the house he lives in become characters, every detail becomes a necessary component to the characterization of Henry. If the possibility exists that anything—a photograph, last night’s leftovers, a locked room—might be crucial to understanding yourself, then everything must be taken into account.

Finally, in order to help Henry, I introduced him to the only person able to see past his scars to the lost young man inside: his one friend, Justine. Originally I had envisioned Justine as the Watson to Henry’s Sherlock (in other words: a platonic friendship) as they investigated his past. But I ended up with something more powerful than I had actually planned for, something deeper and far more real than I had expected. Justine took over the book in so many ways. She grounded it, the way she grounded Henry. She allowed Henry to trust her, she earned that trust and, most of all, she repaid his trust with her own.

What started as the quiet story of a young man’s search for himself (if, by quiet, one includes serial murders and a hurricane) ended up becoming a story about one young man meeting a young woman and together, always together, solving the oldest mystery of all: Who am I?

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Dudes! Kevin J. Anderson worked with Neil Peart of Rush on a novel! How cool is that? Seriously, that’s all I’ve got by way of an intro here. The novel is Clockwork Angels, which is also the title of the latest Rush album, and no, it’s not a coincidence. Not a coincidence at all.

KEVIN J. ANDERSON:

As the Muse sings…

“In a world where I feel so small, I can’t stop thinking big.”

For some writers, their muse is an ethereal, feminine voice that whispers inspiration, a hint here, a metaphor there.  My muse, on the other hand, has always been a lot more aggressive. In this particular case, it’s three guys named Geddy, Alex, and Neil with their vocals, bass, guitars, drums, and lyrics. Yes, it’s the progressive-rock band Rush.

The music of Rush has inspired many of my stories and novels over the years, but with their new album (and my new novel) Clockwork Angels, the music was more than a mere catalyst for inspiration; the songs were a full-blown kick in the teeth (umm, in a pleasant way). My book is a novelization of the intricate steampunk fantasy story told across the tracks of the album.

Like young Owen Hardy, the main character in Clockwork Angels, I grew up in a very small town (mine was in Wisconsin, while Owen’s is in the imaginary land of Albion). I was surrounded by cabbage farms that serviced the local sauer kraut factory; Owen is an assistant apple orchard manager—but we both had dreams of grand adventures and imaginary lands.

I wanted to be a writer and tell stories like the ones that inspired my overactive imagination. Our town didn’t have a record store, but I did join the Columbia Record Club—15 albums for a dollar. There were sheets of tiny stamps, each showing an album cover; you peeled off the stamps to choose the ones you wanted and affixed them to the membership sheet.  With so many albums to choose from, how to decide? I’d never heard of many of the bands, but something intrigued me about “2112” from a group called Rush, and another one “A Farewell to Kings,” and “Fly by Night.”  They seemed to have a science fiction or fantasy flair—so I took a chance.

They were wonderful! Songs that covered vast imaginative landscapes and told epic stories, rather than the tedious “oooh, baby baby” pop songs on the radio.  (As a nerdy kid with bad haircut, thick glasses, and a fascination with monsters and aliens, I didn’t have much experience with girlfriends anyway.)  As I created my stories, I drew inspiration from the music of Rush, feverishly writing down the scenes that those songs evoked in my head.

My first novel, Resurrection, Inc., was inspired by the Rush album “Grace Under Pressure,” which eventually got me in contact with the band’s drummer and lyricist Neil Peart, and we’ve had many exchanges over the past twenty years about creativity and inspiration, adding a few more ingredients to each other’s imagination.  (Once, during a soundcheck for a concert, my wife Rebecca and I were listening to the band practice a few songs, including “Red Sector A”; Rebecca was test-reading one of my novel manuscripts at the time, and she recognized the connection. She looked over at me and said, “How many stories are you going to get out of that one song?”  Several, actually!)

To me, music and prose are two different ways to convey a story, and I’m intrigued by the crossover.  For my Terra Incognita fantasy trilogy, I worked with ProgRock Records to do two CDs that highlighted storylines from the novels; Rebecca and I wrote the song lyrics, and the music was performed by some of my rock heroes from the groups Kansas, Asia, Dream Theater, Saga, and others. (Neil’s schedule didn’t allow him to join the project, which we called Roswell Six.)  The CDs added an entirely different dimension to the story.

A few years ago, Neil approached me as he was developing the overall story for a new Rush album. He had visions of a steampunk world and a grand adventure, and he had read my old “Gamearth” novels that featured Jules Verne, steam-engine cars, hot-air balloons, even a steam-powered atomic bomb, although those books were published years before anyone invented the term “steampunk.” I helped as a sounding board as he created some of the scenes, characters, plot twists, but it was obvious as it grew that this was a much bigger story. Could it be . . . a novel?  Why, yes—yes it could.

Neil and I wrote a short story together years ago and were looking for a larger project to merge our different creative toolkits. Clockwork Angels seemed to be that project. When Rush played two shows near my home in Colorado, with a day off in between, Neil and I climbed a mountain together, 14,265-ft Mount Evans, brainstorming Clockwork Angels all the way. That was where the rest of the story came together (amidst gasping breaths and plodding steps). We were off and running, as Neil finished writing the lyrics to the songs, and I fleshed out the characters and mapped the details of the plot.

The outline was the bare bones of the story, but it wasn’t until I heard the rough tracks of the music that I really added rocket fuel and a match to my imagination. The music was that extra dimension that brought the story to life for me, shifting it from a black-and-white Kansas farm to Technicolor Oz.

I started writing the draft furiously, sending Neil draft chapters every day (and listening to the music constantly). I’ve collaborated many times before, but always with other writers. Neil Peart is a creator who approaches a story from a different direction, with a rhythmic/lyrical mindset. The project was very smooth and all the pieces slipped perfectly into place (and let’s not forget the fanboy joy of slipping in about a million little Rush Easter eggs in the prose!)

I love this novel, and I feel I’ve been preparing to write it for more than twenty years. I have always been inspired by music, but I previously had to slip in my lyrical nods in a stealth fashion. With Clockwork Angels, I could come out of the closet with an unabashed celebration of music and words.

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We’ve all experienced rites of passage in our lives, and they are usually framed as celebrations. But is there another side to those rites — a not always celebratory one. It’s a side that Morgan Keyes explores in Darkbeast, her new middle-grade novel. We’ve got here to explain.

MORGAN KEYES:

In Darkbeast, twelve-year-old Keara runs away from home rather than sacrifice Caw, the raven darkbeast that she has been magically bound to all her life. Pursued by Inquisitors who would punish her for heresy, Keara joins a performing troupe of Travelers and tries to find a safe haven for herself and her companion.

Keara’s story grew out of my own interest in rites and rituals, formal ways that we mark life passages. These ceremonies are important – they bind together societies, weaving individuals into the greater fabric of their culture. They help everyone – celebrants and witnesses alike – to join in a greater tradition, to be part of a greater whole.

And yet, rites of passage are not necessarily all good. Typically, people forfeit some of their individuality when they cast off their earlier, more carefree lives. They set aside some of their differences with authority; they accede to society’s demands.  (Down the road, of course, they might regain their individual voices; they might work to change the system. But most children, in most rites, yield to the traditions of their people, suffering some loss of autonomy along the way.)

Certainly, my views about rites of passage were shaped by my own experience. I grew up in a Jewish family, but in the years before I turned thirteen, I had very mixed emotions about becoming a bat mitzvah. I didn’t mind the studying, but I fretted that it was “fake” – I wasn’t truly learning Hebrew and I wasn’t mastering the teachings of my people. Rather, I feared that I was just memorizing some passages so that I could put on a show. Ultimately, I decided not to go through with the ritual (although I changed my mind and became a bat mitzvah when I was sixteen, in a different congregation with very different rituals.)

My ambivalence directly colored the experience of my Darkbeast character, Keara. Keara is eager to take on the trappings of adulthood – she wants to wear women’s clothes and live in the Women’s Hall. She longs to be treated with respect, to have a say in important family and village decisions.

And yet, she knows that completing her nameday ritual will require a very real cost – the life of her closest companion, her darkbeast Caw. Keara fears losing the creature who has guided her, who has been her moral compass. She questions whether she’s prepared to live life without her darkbeast. Most of all, she wonders whether she wants to live in a world that requires the execution of darkbeasts.

Keara is forced to balance good and bad. She is required to grapple with the gift of ritual and the cost thereof. Ultimately, her decision has grave consequences for Keara, for Caw, and for their society.

Completing the darkbeast ritual would certainly not have been all good. Avoiding it is not all bad. But the complexities of accepting adult responsibility become the basis of Keara’s character in Darkbeast.

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You know superheroes. You love superheroes. But if you want to write about superheroes, sometimes it’s hard to put a spin on a subject that hasn’t already made the rounds. Adam Christopher faced the Superhero Challenge in his latest novel, Seven Wonders; here’s how he defeated it on his own terms.

ADAM CHRISTOPHER:

Sometimes the big idea just comes to you, unannounced, sneaking up and moving into the spare room before you can say a thing. And then it sticks around, lingering, for weeks, months, years. Sometimes you forget about it, and then when you’re working at your desk it suddenly sticks its head in front of the screen and tells you that it is way, way better than the whatever-it-is you’re currently working on.

Well, you get the picture. Those ideas, as annoying as they may be, are often the best. The idea at the heart of Seven Wonders was like that. Annoying, persistent, and quite wonderful.

I love superheroes, and I especially love superhero comics. Superhero novels, on the other hand, are difficult beasts – superheroes need a big canvas, a lot of space, whether it’s on the pages of a monthly from Marvel, or DC, or Image, or the multitude of other comic publishers, or whether it’s on the big screen down at your local multiplex. Superheroes are about colour, and action; they’re about extremes, good and evil fighting it out with a good helping of wirework and SFX and those gorgeous double-page splashes. Superheroes are about excitement and adventure and really wild things.

Mostly. Watchmen has action and spectacle but is about something much deeper, of course. Astro City, one of my favourite comics by one of my favourite creators, Kurt Busiek, tells wonderful, moving stories about individual lives and loves against a vast backdrop of superheroes. Comics can tell any kind of story, and maybe superheroes can too.

Seven Wonders is my love-letter to superhero comics. My debut novel, Empire State, was actually written after Seven Wonders, and while that novel features a couple of superheroes, it’s more a science fiction detective story. When I was writing that book, I’d already done my big superhero story – that manuscript was sitting in a drawer, my homage to the Silver and Bronze Ages of superhero comics, filled with spandex and crazy names and unlikely anatomies, heroes and villains and the people caught in the middle. Of course, Seven Wonders is by no means the first superhero novel – far from it. Superheroes in prose go right back to 1942 and come and go in waves every few years with books like Soon I Will Be Invincible, After The Golden Age, Prepare to Die!, Playing for Keeps, the Wild Cards series, to name just a few – it’s a fine tradition, one I hope I’m contributing to.

So, what was the big idea, exactly? Well, it was – it is – the twist at the centre of the tale, the pivot point that made this story about two opposing factions of superpowered people punching the living daylights out of each something more, something else. It’s an idea that stuck with me for years, and years, until it just absolutely had to be written.

But central to this were the characters – there are good guys and bad guys, and some that are both or neither. For Seven Wonders, I wanted to tell the story from several different points of view – from the heroes, the Seven Wonders themselves: how do they see their own actions as they fight to, apparently, protect their city while letting their arch-nemesis the Cowl do what he likes? And what about the Cowl? He’s the villain, for sure, but nobody thinks they are doing wrong or are evil – they’re doing what they think is best, whether it’s for themselves or for some greater purpose. So what happens to a supervillain when things don’t go according to their plan? And how do the Seven Wonders, the Cowl, and the city’s hapless police department (more often than not cleaning up the mess after the capes have had one of their regular smackdowns) react to the arrival of a new force, an ordinary guy suddenly having to come to terms with being the most powerful superhero of them all?

And… what would you do, if you were Tony? If you had the power to save your city, to maybe show those lazy good-for-nothing superheroes a thing or two while you’re about it… would you do it? Could you control it? Or is that kind of power just too big for a single person to master?

That’s the big idea, at the heart of it. With great power comes great responsibility.

But perhaps with great responsibility comes… great power.

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Are you a loser? You just may be! If you are, Richard Kadrey argues, you are in some fine company — and indeed, some of your favorite fictional heroes may just be there in the loser camp with you. Kadrey gets under the skin of Devil Said Bang, his latest installment in his excellently deranged Sandman Slim series, and looks at how losers populate his book front and back… and why that’s a good thing.

(Note: Some spoilers below for those of you who have not caught up with the series to date)

RICHARD KADREY:

As Devil Said Bang opens James Stark, aka Sandman Slim, has been tricked into becoming the new Lucifer when the old Lucifer hightailed it out of Hell. This is kind of thing is pretty much just another day for Stark. He’s survived Hell’s arenas, argued with God, bitchslapped the Devil, and saved the world a couple of times but that doesn’t change the most the most salient fact of his life: He’s a loser.

I don’t mean that as any kind of put down. The truth is that most of us are losers in one way or another. We started out thinking our lives would be one thing and however successful we might be, most people secretly dream of being something else. Bankers want to be rock stars. Rock stars want to be Picasso. Actors want to be writers. Writers want to be, well, pretty much anything easier than being a writer. Ninety-nine percent of the world is made up of losers and that unites us against the one-percent who got exactly what they wanted and are happy with it. Fuck those people. They have no imagination. Or they’ve put theirs on ice so they won’t wake up from troubling dreams about life as a cabaret singer, a pirate, an astronaut, or a tightrope walker.

I’m not the first writer whose books star a loser. Let me give you a famous example. If you’re a fan of this blog chances are you’ve read and probably love The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Is there a bigger loser in all of literature than Arthur Dent? But we still care about him and root for him. And Arthur isn’t pop lit’s only loser and he’s certainly not the most famous.

Sherlock Holmes is a misanthropic creep and a speed freak.

Neuromancer’s Case is a geek with a drug problem, a bomb in his head, and a girl who’s either going to leave him or kill him.

Batman is flat out psychotic.

King Arthur? Massive loser.

Hamlet, King Lear, Romeo, and Juliet? Losers times four.

The X-Men? Laser-eyed losers.

Frodo saves Middle Earth and for his trouble ends up with the worst case of PTSD since Colonel Kurtz.

How do losers survive and thrive in the world? The lucky ones, the smart ones create a community of likeminded losers. Frodo has his Sam and other slightly damaged Hobbits. The X-Men have their coven of mutants. And even though he’s constantly rude to him, Holmes would be a complete wreck without Watson.

Stark has a few PTSD issues of his own. Wouldn’t you after eleven years as everyone’s punching bag in Hell? Stark plays at being a lone wolf (and sometimes has to be one) but he relies on a community to keep him sane. And who is his community? More losers. Vidocq, Stark’s surrogate father, is a quality thief and brilliant alchemist but he also blew an experiment so badly that he’s turned himself immortal. Alice, Stark first girlfriend, was murdered and his current squeeze, Candy, is a recovering vampire-like monster. Brigitte, the zombie hunter, is out of job now that Stark has wiped out all the zombies, and her acting career isn’t going too well. Allegra, who always wanted a purpose in life, has one but it keeps her locked in her clinic. And then there’s Kasabian. What can I say about him? He’s a headless body on a magic skateboard. Even Stark’s sometime employer, Lucifer, is a loser. And there’s a certain deity in the shadows who’s having his own nervous breakdown.

All these characters gravitate to each other for the simple reason that even when they fight and occasionally consider murder they recognize themselves in each other. That’s what communities are: mutant families that exist because we can’t get along without them.

Losers might not be the ones who run the world but they’re the ones who keep it going. They make art. They raise families. They invent radio and alternating current (Yes, Tesla is the quintessential loser hero).

All the characters in my novels are losers and each is a hero in their own small way, just like the characters in so many of your favorite books, comics, and movies. Just like people in the real world. People who put one foot in front of the other and do the real work of keeping the world spinning and making it an interesting place. Losers rule, on paper and in life.

Now if you’ll pardon me, I’m going to put ice on my knee. I wrecked it playing street football when I was in high school. What a stone loser.

—-

Devil Said Bang: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt from the novel. Visit his Tumblr (some images NSFW). Follow him on Twitter.

A list of books on a wall led author Kari Sperring on a literary adventure that took her from 17th century French satire to the world of her latest novel, The Grass King’s Concubine. How did she get from one to the other? Read on.

KARI SPERRING:

About ten years ago, my partner and I spent a weekend in the Belgian city of Antwerp. And one of the places we visited while we were there was the Plantin Moretus Museum, which is devoted to the history of printing and includes the original premises of Plantin Press, which remains in its original 17^th century state.

Posted on the wall in the shop part of the business is a list of books that have been banned officially, in this instance by the Christian church. These were books that it was illegal to print, to sell, to distribute, to own. The banned works included science, philosophy, satire, theology, memoirs.

I knew about these lists but I’d never seen an original one before. It was neat and unshowy, in black and white on the bookshop wall. There was nothing dramatic or violent or imposing to it. It was miles away from the book-burning images of Fahrenheit 451 or BBC dramas about Galileo. It was just there, a fact of seventeenth century daily life.

Fast forward a couple of years, and I was commissioned to write a book about the background and history to Alexandre Dumas’ famous The Three Musketeers. One of Dumas’ sources for that book was Mémoirs de M. d’Artagnan, a pseudo-autobiography by one Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras. I knew the book: I’d picked up a copy as an undergraduate, and I knew that Courtilz de Sandras was a professional satirist of the late 17^th century, but I’d never done any research into him or the wider context of French pseudo-memoirs, court satires and secular banned books. I read Robert Darnton’s The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, and I remembered that list on the wall of the Plantin Press. In the back of my head, in the mulch where my writing lives, something went click (or, possibly, squelch). I knew a lot about why governments and religious bodies, kings and school boards, took it upon themselves to ban books. I knew where I stood on that issue, too – the idea of banning a book on ideological, moral, religious or just plain crazy grounds struck me then and still strikes me as deeply wrong. But I knew far less about the writers behind these books.

Courtilz de Sandras was no Galileo or Rousseau. He had no breakthroughs to share, no strong political, social or religious views to promote. He was a professional: he wrote what would sell, and satires on court life, dressed up as eye-witness accounts, sold well. They were risky: he spent long periods in the Bastille, having offended the king and the court, but they paid, and he went on writing. (He had a lot in common with Dumas, in fact, though Dumas never managed to get himself arrested, and the Bastille was long gone.) I found I kept thinking about him, and the whole issue of banned and proscribed books long after my research was done. There was something here I wanted to explore.

That mulch at the back of my brain produced a character named Marcellan. He’s a traveller, an explorer, a jobbing printer and, above all, a writer. His driving force is his need to learn knew things and make them available to as many others as possible. His actions and their consequences set up the plot of  The Grass King’s Concubine: his hunger for knowledge reshapes one world and is creating conflict in another. One half of the book follows him in WorldBelow, a realm of non-human creatures ruled by the titular Grass King, whose very shape and way of life were partially created by one of his works. Captured by the Grass King’s bodyguard, the Cadre, he teaches one of them first about printing and then about ways of measuring time. The outcome is… messy. And when two of the Grass King’s subjects, the ferret-sisters Yelena and Julana, try and practice a kind of magic to help Marcellan, the trouble spreads both in WorldBelow and the human world (WorldAbove).

In WorldAbove, Marcellan’s books cause a young woman, Aude, to start questioning her society, its inequities and her place in things. She sets out in search of the origins of her family’s wealth and status. When she too finds herself in WorldBelow, she has to discover what Marcellan has done and find a solution for at least some of the consequences.

My thinking about banned books and their authors took me to some very strange places. It was important to me, throughout, that I stayed positive about that core idea about shared knowledge, and the positive effects of books. And yet my reading showed me that books could have some very strange effects on societies, as new knowledge emerged. We could all name books that have been revolutionary, from the Principia Mathematica to Das Kapital. But not every revolutionary book has a positive effect in every circumstance. Marcellan’s political works influence Aude into thinking critically about the assumptions she makes about class and power and money. But his knowledge of water clocks has negative effects on WorldBelow. Sometimes things are used inappropriately.

These are big themes for a midlist author. I often felt, writing Grass King, that the book was too big for me and that I should go away and write about something easier, like toast. But I wanted to write it, I wanted to talk about what books can do. Have I succeeded? I don’t know. I hope I’ve done the best I can with the skills I have. And I got to write about ferrets and water clocks, underworld portals and carnivorous mud. I read a lot of very very good books along the way. I learned a lot. (I can now bore for Britain on those water clocks.) In the end, the book took me about nine years to get into shape.

It started with a four-hundred-year-old list on a wall in Antwerp.

 —-

The Grass King’s Concubine: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Visit the author’s blog. Follow her on Twitter.

Several years ago, author Lara Zielin took a trip to watch tornadoes. She was expecting storms, and she got them. Just not the ones she was expecting. Here she is to explain how that fateful, stormy trip relates to her latest book, The Waiting Sky.

LARA ZIELIN:

I’ve told people part of what inspired The Waiting Sky —but not all of it.  I booked a tornado chase in 2004, I tell them, to see amazing weather and crazy storms. I paid an experienced guide to get me close to extreme weather, spending hours and hours on the road with strangers in the process. All of us were folded into a stale-smelling van, waiting until the moment the sky opened and the twister descended.

Only that never happened. Our group never saw an actual bona fide tornado. Some bad weather, sure. Never a twister, though.

But all that time on the road, all those miles between storms—that provided the inspiration for my main character, Jane, who leaves her alcoholic mom in Minnesota to chase tornadoes with her brother, a Ph.D. student studying meteorology at the University of Oklahoma. Jane winds up having to face her own internal storms, thanks to all the quiet moments storm chasing ironically provides. I mean, what else are you going to do besides look inside at your messed up life when you’re crossing from Kansas into Oklahoma?

What I’ve neglected to say in every version of this story—until now—is what storm I had to face when I went to Tornado Alley. Because, you see, none of us storm chasers are really chasing literal storms. Not in my experience, anyway. All of us are running from something. All of us are looking for chaos in the clouds because better it’s there than in our own lives.

If I’m honest, I’ll tell you that I was running from an unhappy marriage.

I was married right out of college to a good guy, a decent, hard-working guy, who just wasn’t…THE guy. And this truth—this unavoidable storm of honesty—descended on me in Tornado Alley. I think, when I went on that chase by myself in 2004, I still thought things were fine, just fine. I’m a Midwesterner, after all, and we are prone to impractical optimism.

And I probably could have eschewed the truth that I was unhappy—daily, hour after hour, week after week—if it wasn’t for Bradley. His name has been changed to protect…something. The last shred of dignity you have before you fall for someone in Tornado Alley, perhaps.

Because I did fall. Hard. Bradley was British and attractive and rich and, would you even believe it, into me. ME. The overweight, Midwestern, married girl who was on this trip alone—no friends, no husband, no tethers to the things that keep us from thinking that romances forged among storms last.

Bradley was the thing that made me realize that I went someplace hoping to see what would happen when the world was turned topsy-turvey—when twisters rip through barns and tear up hay fields—and found out instead that everything was already upside down. I was already in a tornado. I was already spinning. Bradley just made me see how far over the rainbow I’d already come.

When the chase ended, I knew I had to click my ruby-red slippers together and get home. However, suddenly I didn’t really want to go back. Because if I did, then I knew I had to bring the storm with me. Which is scary for about six thousand reasons. Does any woman want to go back to her normal, mundane life after admitting feeling insane attraction for someone who isn’t her husband?

But I did it. Except, I went back and created an EF-5-sized tornado of my own. I acknowledged how completely unhappy I was. I forced myself to admit that the magnetic attraction I felt for Bradley was less about him and more about me being desperate to find someone who would just—I don’t know, think I was cool or something. When was the last time my spouse and I had thought the other was a badass? Not in a long while, that’s for sure.

Not that this is a quick, easy thing, mind you. It took a while. And all that time, storms brewed and faded across the plains. Other chase teams caught tornadoes. They took pictures and posted them to websites. Me, I was chasing the most dangerous storm of my life and I had no pictures to show for it. No viral videos. Just lonely nights sleeping beside someone I no longer really knew.

So, look. This was my storm—and I found it because I went to go see funnel clouds and instead I encountered stillness. The quiet miles between storms forced me to really acknowledge what was going on in my life, as messed up as it was. Storms are funny things that way. My protagonist in The Waiting Sky goes through something similar. Though, if you ask me, you don’t need a tornado chase to acknowledge what’s really eating at you, what’s really tearing up your cornfields and ripping the siding off your house. Everyone has storms. It’s whether you face them that matters.

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The Waiting Sky: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Visit the author’s blog. Follow her on Twitter.

It’s no surprise that authors love books. But it might surprise you, in the context of Libriomancer, Jim C. Hines‘ newest novel, how the author’s love of books so directly shaped this particular novel. Or, perhaps, knowing authors, it might not surprise you at all.

JIM C. HINES:

There are two truths at the heart of Libriomancer. First, books are magical. And second, magic is awesome.

The former should be evident to anyone who watched bookstores throughout the world prepare for the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, or saw schoolkids gathering together to talk about the new Hunger Games book. Older readers might recall the way The Lord of the Rings swept through the United States when it was first published in this country.

As I wrote about Isaac Vainio, he began to epitomize that love of books. He was the part of me that read every book he could get his hands on. Even before he discovered the art of libriomancy, Isaac read every book in the SF/F section in his northern Michigan library. And then he discovered interlibrary loans, and there was no turning back. Like so many of us, he explored Middle Earth and Narnia and Neverland. He traveled by warp drive and tesseract and TARDIS.

I made that love of stories the key to Isaac’s magic. It’s what allows him to do what so many of us have dreamed of, to reach into the pages and create the things described within. To use the daydreams and the fantasies of other readers, all layered together and bound to those books. Libriomancy can create anything from magical flaming spiders to disruptor pistols (perfect for use against vampires) to winged sandals to a laser sword from a galaxy far, far away whose official name we won’t use because I tried very hard not to get sued while writing the book.

What I love about this idea is the way it engages our sense of wonder. Our need to ask “What if…?” There are so many possibilities to magic. There are limits too, of course. Isaac can only create things that would fit through the pages, so there’s no real way to build a shuttlecraft and fly to the moon. There are dangers as well. Intelligent minds can’t handle the transition from fiction to reality, so if you pluck a Smurf from the pages, it’s going to end badly for everyone. And then there’s the risk of reaching into a book like Twilight and either accidentally or deliberately infecting yourself with vampire venom. Suddenly you have sparkling vampires running through Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

But Isaac loves it all. He loves magic. He loves the potential. At one point, he encounters a manananggal, a creature who literally rips herself in half, allowing the upper part of her body to fly about in order hunt and feed on blood and organs and unborn children. Isaac’s reaction isn’t terror or disgust, but delight. He’s amazed by the magic that lets the manananggal separate and reconnect her body, and wonders how such power might be used for magical surgeries and other purposes.

Even when running for his life, a part of Isaac will always be studying and admiring the creature trying to kill him.

So much of what I read these days feels dark and grim. There’s nothing wrong with that, but after a while I start to ask myself what happened to the joy? What happened to the awe and hope and discovery? Libriomancer, and Isaac in particular, is my love letter to that sense of wonder. To the part of our imagination that says, “If I were Harry Potter, I’d don a spacesuit and apparate to Mars, just to see what’s out there!” The part that pretends to use the force every time the elevator doors open, because for that one moment, the magic can be real.

Where would we be without that drive to explore and discover? Without that need to poke sticks into the dark corners or tug at the frayed edges of what we think we know? Some of my favorite scenes in the book are when Isaac stumbles across magic he thought was impossible. Because even when that magic is trying to destroy him (which happens far more often than he likes), it proves that the universe is bigger than he knew, and nothing makes him happier.

There’s so much I enjoyed about writing this novel. I got to write Smudge the fire-spider again. I haven’t even mentioned my butt-kicking dryad, or the psychiatrist who fights an uphill battle trying to keep the libriomancers sane, or the kidnapping of Johannes Gutenberg, or the vampire day care center.

But one of the best parts was getting to share Isaac’s joy, to rediscover the love of books and magic, and to remember that it is indeed awesome. And if I can share that love with readers, I consider that to be every bit as magical as anything Isaac does.

—-

Libriomancer: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt (pdf link). Visit the author’s blog. Follow him on Twitter.

Sometimes it’s nice when your iPod runs out of power. Meagan Spooner explains how a day without hers led to her thinking about the world in a whole new way, and led to her novel Skylark.

MEAGAN SPOONER:

I don’t usually come up with settings first. For me the meat of any good story is in the characters, and that’s usually my way in. But with Skylark, the world came to me first, and in such a screaming torrent of “what ifs” that I had to pull my car over to the side of the road.

I’d been listening to an editorial piece on NPR about the energy crisis. That makes me sound all informed and intellectual, but the truth was that my iPod was out of batteries and it was the only radio station I’d bothered to program on my car’s presets. So while a voice in the background outlined plans for new solar endeavors, wind-driven energy farms, and corn-powered cars, my mind was free to wander. And because I am who I am, I ended up thinking magic. And that was the moment I had to stop driving and turn off the radio to concentrate, as my brain turned over a thousand different questions.

What if instead of electricity generated by coal, oil, nuclear reactors, and solar panels, technology was powered by magic? What if instead of circuitry and electronics, machines ran using clockwork wound by a “spring” of magic? What if the spark of life, the indefinable energy that makes us living, functioning beings, was something that could be tapped? What if the world evolved around the idea that people, not the planet’s resources, contained all the power we’d ever need?

And, perhaps most importantly: what would happen if the human race abused that resource, in this alternate world, as we’ve done in ours?

As I sat there in my car, bemusedly watching the traffic whizzing by, an entire civilization rose—and fell—in my imagination. I pictured huge, gangly transport machines, household servile automatons, flying novelties, city streets clogged with horseless carriages, all powered by magic. I pictured a society awash in luxury, always wanting the next invention, the newest fad, all the while draining civilization of the magic that kept it running. And then, playing the scenario out to its inevitable conclusion, I imagined being wars fought over the last, remaining dregs of power. I pictured a magical wasteland, twisted and destroyed by the warring factions’ efforts to horde the power for themselves.

I love imagining what happens after the end, so even more interesting to me than the rise and fall of this magic-based civilization were the last shards of humanity left behind—power-hungry, war-scarred, and desperate. And so the city in SKYLARK rose up in my mind, governed by the descendants of scientists clever enough to outlast the wars, existing under a dome to protect them from the magic wasteland outside. In this walled-off, precarious ecosystem, every resource would be balanced exactly. Each new child would be harvested of his or her magic as soon as they matured, so not a spark of power would go to waste. In this new, bleak existence I imagined that everyone would have to fulfill their roles with perfect efficiency, each person a tiny cog in the larger machine of the city. No room for error—no room for malfunctions.

Up until this point, it was like an intellectual exercise. I was just imagining this world for fun, with no intention to tell any kind of story, just letting my mind wander wherever it wanted to go. But then I discovered Lark, my main character. Because in a world where everyone’s lives depend on smooth efficiency, where your safety is purchased by the sacrifice of your magical energy, it was obvious to me whose story would be the most interesting to tell: the girl who fails.

I like writing about misfits, so I knew instantly that I had a story I wanted to write, not just a fun world to think about. Lark is older than the other unharvested kids, and as the years go by they pass her over again and again for the harvest without telling her why. The people around her consider her a freak, a dud, born without magical abilities—an unheard of anomaly. The novel begins with Lark’s discovery that not only does she have magic, but she has more than she knows what to do with. A fact which doesn’t escape the notice of the city’s architects—who have plans for her after all.

I like unlikely heroes. I like heroes who start off ordinary, no different from you or me, but are shaped by the world and by their choices. I like moral gray areas, and wrong decisions, and mistakes. I like characters who are afraid, because I know I’d be afraid if I were them—I like seeing characters who are afraid but who are taking action anyway, because that’s what I hope I’d do. I like watching characters become the people they’re meant to be. And that’s what gripped me so, lodged in my brain like a splinter. I knew who Lark was at the beginning of the book, but what I wanted so, so badly to see was who she’d become by the end of the story.

It was at this point in my thought process that I finally managed to pull my car back out onto the road and finish driving home. When I got there, I sat down and started writing, and I wrote every day until I finished the first draft a couple months later. It was the first time in years that I’d felt so seized by an idea. It was the first time I’d ever consistently and repeatedly raced home to my computer to write each day. It was also the first novel I’d ever finished.

Still, I can’t help but wonder, two years later, “what if?” What if I’d been on the road just half an hour later, and NPR was broadcasting something different? What I’d just forced my attention back to driving? What if I’d driven home in silence instead of turning on the radio? What if I hadn’t forgotten to charge my iPod, and I spent my drive home belting out Bad Romance and The Best of Queen?

The laws of probability, though, suggest that I’ve probably watched a thousand big ideas go sailing by without even noticing them. That we all have. But that ought to be an encouraging thought. What if there is an infinite supply of awesome ideas out there, waiting for the right person at the right time? To me, that’s a pretty cool “what if.”

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Skylark: Indiebound | Powell’s | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Book Depository

Read the opening pages. Visit the author’s site. Follow her on Twitter.

You may have heard the phrase, “you have to know what the rules are before you can break them.” Well, that basic concept comes into play when one is researching history in order to throw a little magic into it. Author D.B. Jackson explains why, and how learning history mattered before breaking it in his new novel Thieftaker.

D.B. JACKSON:

Who would spend literally months doing research for a historical fantasy novel, taking every care to get right even the smallest details, and then turn around and base the entire concept for the book and series on two complete historical fallacies?

Well, if you must know, I would.

My latest book, Thieftaker, book I in the Thieftaker Chronicles, is a murder mystery set in pre-Revolutionary Boston. On the night of the Stamp Act riots in 1765, a young woman is murdered. Officials of the Crown wish to blame the rioters, but of course our hero, Ethan Kaille, conjurer and thieftaker, has other ideas and soon finds himself enmeshed in a web of magic and politics. Hi-jinx ensue…

I have a Ph.D. in history. I take the idea of historical authenticity seriously, and so when I started working on Thieftaker, I made every effort to create a physical backdrop for my story that is as accurate, rich, and compelling as possible. I read biographical essays and books on the various historical figures who interact with my fictional characters, in the hope that I would make the two sets of personalities — fictional and historical — blend together seamlessly. I took great pains to portray correctly the subtleties and intricacies of pre-Revolutionary politics.

And having done all that, I inserted these historical elements into a novel whose two key concepts are completely ahistorical. Sort of.

First — and I suppose this comes as no surprise to anyone — there were no conjurers in 18th century Boston, or anywhere else in the colonies for that matter. The spellcrafting abilities of my lead character make for fun reading and what I like to think are some truly exciting plot twists, but they are about as historically inauthentic as any literary device could be. This is fantasy after all, and so I didn’t hesitate to insert a magical element into my worldbuilding for the series.

And second, while thieftakers were common in 18th century English cities, and even appeared for a short while in the United States in the early 19th century, there were no thieftakers in any American colonial city. None. In my book, Boston has at least two of them: Ethan, and his nemesis, the lovely and dangerous Sephira Pryce, who is modeled loosely on London’s most notorious thieftaker, Jonathan Wild. But, of course, in my book, the Wild character is a woman, another historical conceit.

What makes my historical inaccuracies work, however, is that both of them address, albeit indirectly, true circumstances. There might not have been conjurers in 18th century New England, but there were witch scares going back nearly a hundred years. In Salem, not far from Boston, well over one hundred men and women were jailed as witches in the spring of 1692. Twenty were executed. And during the 18th century, fear of witches persisted throughout the Province of Massachusetts Bay.

In Thieftaker, conjurers and witches are not the same thing. Witches are the stuff of myth; preachers rail against witchery and “black magick” in their sermons in order to frighten their congregations. Conjurers, on the other hand, are real. But fear of one is conflated with the other; Ethan and other conjurers must keep their abilities secret, lest they be hanged as witches.

Similarly, while Boston had no thieftakers in the 1760s, conditions in the city were ripe for some sort of private law enforcement infrastructure. Boston had a sheriff: Stephen Greenleaf was sheriff of all of Suffolk County. But he had no constabulary force at his disposal. British troops had yet to occupy the city, and those men of Boston’s night watch who weren’t incompetent were as likely to break the law as to enforce it. So, though there were no thieftakers in Boston, it is easy to imagine how, under existing circumstances, thieftakers could have thrived.

And for me, this is the big idea. Crucial parts of my story are at odds with historical fact, but I have tried to fit the fictional elements of my worldbuilding into actual historical conditions. My goal in writing historical fantasy is not to create a perfectly accurate portrait of 1760s Boston. This is fiction, after all, and fantasy at that. I want to tell a story, and despite all my research, my first allegiances as a novelist have to be to character and narrative, rather than to historical exactitude. But while I am not set on recreating a Boston that was, I do strive to create a Boston that could have been, that is as believable and nuanced and alive to the senses as the real thing.

To my mind, history is another tool, like character, plot, setting, and voice. It has to enhance the story, and bring elements to it that would not otherwise be there. As soon as concerns about accuracy get in the way of storytelling, the history is no longer a boon to good writing. It becomes an obstacle, something that will prove to be an annoyance for writer and reader alike. Now don’t get me wrong: I would never suggest that we ought to play fast and loose with the facts. Instead, I look for a balance.

On the one hand, I draw upon history to bring flavor to my narrative, ambiance to my setting, cultural context to my characters. On the other hand, I also know when to allow my imagination to take over so that I can concentrate on spinning the most exciting and absorbing yarn possible. Because with historical fiction, as with all fiction, everything comes back to the two words that make all big ideas possible: “What if?” My version of 1765 Boston might not match what we see in textbooks, but it is a realistic portrayal of what the city would have been like with conjurers and thieftakers. And as it turns out, that’s a pretty cool place in which to set a novel.

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Thieftaker: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Visit the author’s blog. Follow him on Twitter.

Pamela Ribon is one of the funniest humans I know. Much of what makes her so is not about her ability to make me or anyone else laugh; it’s her knowledge of people and how they work, even in situations where’s not necessarily a laugh to be found. Her latest novel You Take It From Here is funny and also knowing — about people, about relationships, and about the responsibilities we have to the people we make our family of the heart. Here’s my friend Pamie to explain more.

PAMELA RIBON:

You Take It From Here deals with a lot of bossiness.  Stubborn people, one-track-minded illnesses, the conviction that comes with knowing someone loves you whole-heartedly, and what can happen when you’re faced with the terrifying enormity of the unknown. It’s about the lengths we will go to for the people we care about the most, and how much we can handle in order to hang on for the ones who need us. We act like nobody knows how he or she going to die, but that’s not exactly true. Some people know. They know with utter certainty. Sometimes they even have a pretty good idea of when. When those people need you, it’s hard to say anything other than, “Tell me what to do.”

I first thought up the idea for this novel when I was on an airplane. My first set of scribbled notes has the telltale signs of a bumpy flight. I work well on airplanes – trapped in a tiny seat, facing forward, usually no Internet, trapped with strangers and questionable food choices. I find the words come freely the more uncomfortable my situation.  (This also explains why I enjoy working in television.) A friend of mine does an impression of me in what she calls my “writing stance” – doubled over at the edge of the couch in a protective hunch, attacking the keyboard in an attempt to get the words out before I pee myself.  That is exactly what I’m doing when I’m at my most inspired.

So I was up in the air when I first started mulling over the idea of one friend asking another to take over her life. I’d gone through a lengthy divorce, and for a couple of years I’d let my bossiest friends take over. I needed them to tell me what to do, how to get up, what to put in my empty apartment, what antidepressants might work for me, how to wear make-up to hide puffy eyes. As I got my life a little more in order, as I found how to dress myself and go to work and fall in love and stand on my own again, I didn’t need so much bossing around. I don’t think I weaned them properly, the bossy ones. They were a little in shock that I was no longer needing their strong guidance, that I might have some opinions and decisions I’d made on my own. I could easily imagine one of them deciding that my life had become one that was more expendable; I wasn’t having that much fun living it anyway, so why not take over theirs?  “I mean, I’m important.”

I was deciding whether it’d make a better screenplay than a novel, wondering where the story could go, when I got distracted with some deadline and dropped the idea.

A few months later I was sitting on the bleachers above the roller derby track (see: the last time I had a Big Idea) where I’d torn a ligament in my knee only the day before.  I was searching for a comfortable position with my knee brace as I watched that night’s practice for my attendance requirement, counting the minutes until I could go home and take my first, hard-earned Vicodin, when I got a frantic phone call.

I don’t use the word “besties,” but my friend would. I might use “bossy,” but she’d call it “besties,” and she’d say that bestie status would give her the right to tell me to get on a plane immediately and fly 1400 miles to her side, as her daughter was in the hospital and was “very, very, very, very sick.” My friend was past hysterical and into the shock-sobs, where the words don’t all come together into real sentences, but I was able to figure out that her daughter, who had been in the hospital for a few days with a kidney infection, had taken a turn for the worse, and was on some emergency antibiotics. “You need to get here,” my friend wept into the phone.  I made one feeble attempt at keeping my plans for the evening. “Can we maybe do this by Skype?” I asked. “If you just need someone to talk to; I’ll stay up all night for you.” She hissed back,“If your baby was in the hospital — if you ever had a baby — you know I would do it for you.”

And that was it. By the time I hobbled myself into my car and got home my boyfriend had packed a bag, secured a (not cheap) red-eye flight and hailed a cab to whisk me away to LAX. Less than twelve hours later I was in Louisiana, groggy and in miserable amounts of pain. I was greeted at baggage claim by my bestie’s hubby, who informed me that his daughter was now feeling much better, and was to be discharged from the hospital that afternoon. He looked to the ground as he stammered, “Um, that phone call might have been made after she’d had a little too much wine.”

This is what happens to best friends who love with all their hearts and wallets, but it especially to the best friends who have no babies, who are childless and therefore seemingly carefree. We are expected to book the flights to come visit, never to spend a single holiday in the comfort of our own homes. We hire the dog sitters and cat sitters and house sitters and rent the cars and find hotel rooms and pack the bags and stuff our carry-ons with presents for the kids. For without a child in your care, there’s no excuse you could give that’s good enough to miss Christmas. To skip that New Year’s gathering. To be unable to attend a fifth-grade graduation. Only: “You need to get here.”

By the end of that night, the travel and pain medication and torn ligament and lack of sleep and the exhaustion of a day at the hospital finally caught up with me at three in the morning, when I found myself trying to find a way to kneel on one leg to vomit an exceptional amount of wine into my friend’s toilet. And that is when I thought, “Yeah. There’s definitely a story in here.”

I outlined the novel on the flight home. If being in an uncomfortable writing position was all I needed for inspiration, I had reached the ultimate – on an airplane, hungover and trapped in the middle seat with a leg that couldn’t bend, unable to take any painkillers because I needed to be alert enough to have someone wheel me to the proper gate during my layover, furious that I’d just dropped more than a grand only to visit a peppy teen girl not dying of what turned out to be a urinary tract infection.

You Take it From Here also explores another unstoppable, rather constant force in my life – lung cancer. We’ve lost quite a few celebrated loved ones in the past few weeks to it (Donna Summer, Kathryn Joosten, Nolan Miller, George Marino); my own family has already lost two to lung cancer this year, and it’s only June. Ten years ago my father died of lung cancer, and I still have a lot of guilt over how it all went down, and whether or not I was a good daughter to him when he might have needed me.

Cancer seems to have two speeds: unfairly immediate or tortuously slow. My father went the slow way, more than seven years of fighting, off and on. I wasn’t able to be there for him for much of it. I was in college when he went through chemo and radiation. His cancer was in remission when I decided to move to Los Angeles. I’d just finished unpacking my final box when his cancer returned, and he’d decided to refuse treatment. I will never forget that phone call, when my father said in his slow, calm voice, “So you might want to come home for Christmas, as it’ll be my last one.”

Part of this novel comes from the guilt I have that I missed a lot of time with my father as he went through his struggle. It’s not entirely my fault—Dad pushed everyone away. He didn’t like being seen as weak or helpless; he didn’t want people asking him questions or giving suggestions. Dad wanted to deal with cancer like he did all of his problems: alone, where he could ignore it without anyone getting in the way. And who’s to say if that was right or wrong? It seems unfair to those who loved him and wanted to be there, but in the end he was the only one who had to die – why shouldn’t he go out exactly how he wanted to? My father liked to be in control, and I can only assume the thing that pissed him off the most about cancer was that it was firmly in charge.

My father did a lot of rather confusing things for someone facing a terminal diagnosis, especially towards the end. He didn’t write a will. He put my mother’s name on all of his credit cards, so that someone would have to pay off his debts. He erased the hard drive on his computer. He bought a new wardrobe. He went to the eye doctor for a new pair of glasses. Soon after he died, my mom got his new drivers license in the mail.

Think about that. Two weeks before my father entered hospice care, my dad decided to stand in line at the DMV.

I used to think Dad was prepping for what he thought he’d need when he got to Heaven – a brand new wardrobe, glasses that would work for all of eternity, all debts handled and a license to drive. But now that I’m older, now that I’ve lost more people to this selfish illness, I think I get what Dad was doing in those final days.

He was stretching them out.

If you only had a few days left, filling them with friends and family and good times would turn them into a blur. But if you scheduled nothing but the mundane, the minutes could stretch until they felt like hours. Your day could seem like a lifetime. And for that moment you aren’t a guy dying of cancer. You’re just another guy in line at the DMV, taking care of a few errands. You’re not about to go anywhere. You’re sandwiched between some strangers, waiting for your turn to get your picture taken.

Although, going back to the Heaven scenario, maybe Dad thought of the DMV as a test-run for waiting in line at the Pearly Gates. Wanted to see if he’d be patient enough. I honestly think he might have bailed halfway to Heaven to see if there was an open craps table somewhere in purgatory he could hit for a few decades. But I wonder sometimes if he wanted someone standing there with him in some of those lines. If, towards the end, he regretted how much he’d pushed us all away. If he had more to say, but nobody there to listen. Maybe that’s why he went to the eye doctor. Someone to talk to who wouldn’t say a single word about how he had days left to live.

This is the part where I need to tell you that this novel is mostly a comedy. It’s about friendship and history and small towns and love affairs and yes, cancer, but it’s really about that bond you have with your very best, lifelong friend, and how it can survive pretty much anything.

Perhaps because there’s no legal way to sever it. You can’t divorce your best friend. You can’t get emancipated from her. A restraining order only sends her to the boundaries of what will still be an audible yelling zone. You are stuck with each other, even if you spend years ignoring it, even if you pretend each other dead. You will still talk to each other inside your heads. You can hate each other like siblings in the back of a car on week three of a month-long family vacation, but you will still need each other like lovers reuniting at an airport. Nothing can split that bond. Not even death. Because you know that girl will find a way to haunt you. So you’d better be nice to her while she’s still around.

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You Take It From Here: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powells

Visit the book page, which includes excerpts. Visit her blog. Follow her on Twitter.

When confronting the incomprehensible universe, it’s sometimes useful to have something to cart stuff around in. Simple, proletarian wisdom, or something more? Anne E. Johnson argues for “something more,” especially as it relates to her science fiction novel Green Light Delivery.

ANNE E. JOHNSON:

Sometimes life hands us things we don’t want. Things we don’t understand. But we have to deal with them anyway because, well, that’s life. We face inexplicable, nonsensical situations forced on us by destiny, and there’s nothing we can do about it. It’s pretty funny, if you think about it. And that’s the big idea in Green Light Delivery.

Webrid is just a guy, an everyman. He’s big, hairy, macho, and sort of lost. He has a menial job in the city of Bargival on the planet Bexilla, carting items either to deliver or to sell on consignment. But suddenly he finds himself tapped for a big job he doesn’t want. And he can’t exactly refuse it. A robot embeds a laser in his skull, and in order to get rid of it, Webrid has to take it…somewhere. If only he can figure out where.

Making Webrid a professional carter was integral to the big idea: For one thing, it helped the mechanics of the story. Webrid is being used by some entity (he doesn’t know who until the end) to transport something from one place to another. He’s accustomed to that concept because carting is his job. This helps him accept the ridiculous assignment that fate hands him. And because he doesn’t know who his client is, exactly what he’s carrying, or quite where he’s supposed to deliver it, Webrid feels like a pawn of fate, the toy of a snide universe that’s just playing with him.

Another reason I chose Webrid’s profession was for its humorous value. The ironic twist is that he doesn’t need his pushcart for this particular delivery, since the laser is stuck in his head. Yet he takes his cart with him everywhere out of habit and nostalgia, even when he travels between planets. It annoys everyone around him, but turns out to be a fateful choice. That cart is useful for all sorts of unexpected reasons.

The low-tech nature of a hand-pushed cart also appealed to me. I specifically wanted the city of Bargival to be like a major American inner city in the 1970s, not a gleaming city of the future. This isn’t the future, anyway; it’s an alternative universe, and the government is a mess. Things are falling apart. I was tickled by the vision of a big lug of a guy pushing a metal cart through streets that also had robots flying around them. And I wanted a person with no tech skills to be entrusted with one of his world’s most cutting-edge gadgets. He’s the last person anyone would expect to carry this thing.

Green Light Delivery is meant to be entertaining, but in truth, it grew from my sardonic belief that destiny is ridiculous and we are often not in control of what’s in our lives. Yet, most people persevere, which I realize on my less cynical days. Let Webrid be a lesson to us all: With a determined attitude, a strong-axled cart, and friends who can help you with the science stuff, nothing fate shoves in your face is too big to handle.

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Green Light Delivery: Amazon|Barnes & Noble

Read an excerpt. Visit the author’s blog. Follow her on Twitter.

Jane Austen has been a muse for more than one speculative fiction writer, in no small part because the world she lived in can echo into the future, amplifying what the author of a new work wishes to say. So it is for Diana Peterfreund and her latest novel For the Darkness Shows the Stars, which takes its Austen inspirations in new and compelling directions.

DIANA PETERFREUND:

Post-apocalyptic Persuasion. At first, it was just a fun tongue-twister. After all, in 2009, the book publishing world was in thrall to a little mash-up called Pride & Prejudice and Zombies. But as I started thinking on it more seriously, I realized the potential for a true re-imagining. Persuasion, for the unfamiliar, is the story of a nobleman’s daughter who, in her younger days, refused the hand of an ambitious but poor young Navy officer on the advice of friends and family who thought he wasn’t her equal. Years later, her useless father’s mismanagement has left the ancestral estate in a precarious position, forcing them to rent out their family home to up-and-comers of the middle class. Into her life waltzes her old suitor, now a rich and famous captain, and certainly still angry about her rejection.

It may be the most class-conscious of all Jane Austen’s novels, and deals directly with the failure of an indolent nobility to recognize how swiftly the economic and social landscape is changing thanks to the industry and success of a rising bourgeoisie. The world is changing, getting better, moving forward – and the old guard, who’d run the world in less-enlightened times, refuses to entertain the idea. How much more post-apocalyptic can you get?

Modern retellings of Austen twist themselves up like pretzels trying to formulate a notion of class that makes sense to young American readers, who generally consider class to be fluid (we’re all going to grow up to be rich celebrities, right?). Clueless, for example, recasts the minor class barriers in that story as the cliques of a status-conscious high schooler. In my case, I got to utilize science fiction to make my class divides durable and understandable to my young adult audience.

My husband and I spent a few enjoyable evenings with glasses of wine and important questions: What caused the apocalypse? What is the makeup of the class system? Fascinated by the idea of what the future holds in the realm of biotechnology and genetic engineering, we initially played around with a class structure arranged on those lines. But Aldous Huxley had that pretty well sewn up, and it didn’t necessarily jibe with my imagery of an upper class mired in the past.

Then it hit me: I could kill both birds with the same stone. What if overeager genetic engineering was actually the cause of the end of the world, and the backwards-thinking post-apocalyptic upper class were the descendents of the people who’d denied themselves this tragic genetic tinkering through religious objections, scientific skepticism, or just plain poverty? The meek who’d inherited the Earth.

Thus were born my Luddites, the survivors of a genetic experiment gone wrong that rendered the bulk of the population of the Earth severely mentally disabled. Fiercely anti-science and anti-technology, they plunge the world into a new Dark Age.

This backstory opened up all kinds of knotty moral conundrums. The Luddites aren’t actually wrong—genetic engineering was demonstrably dangerous to the human race. To this, add the fact that their ancestors faced attack from a dying society that would rather destroy the world than let other people have it, and that they spent countless generations as the caretakers of the helpless “Reduced” people left behind. That’s a pretty hefty chunk of indoctrination and duty to set on the shoulders of my heroine, Elliot, the teenaged daughter of a feckless Luddite lord.

Elliot, like a lot of teens, is trying to define her own beliefs about the world and decide how they differ from what she was taught growing up. What parts of her heritage are true and right, and what parts should be discarded as humanity moves into the future?

By the time of the novel, there’s a growing population of healthy humans born to the Reduced who, nevertheless, possess the same low status and lack of liberty. One of these “Post-Reductionists” is her childhood best friend, the servant Kai. Her relationship with him causes her to question Luddite values and the complacent and self-satisfied caste system that disenfranchises the Posts.

Kai is unwilling to accept the social status quo, and runs away to make his fortune beyond the confines of their Luddite estate. Years later he returns, wealthy, powerful and spouting radical, revolutionary philosophies of technological progress. But though he may be angry, he hasn’t forgotten about Elliot. And Elliot isn’t the woman society expects her to be, either. Together, they could be the start of a new age, a chance to move past the devastation the world has suffered – as long as they can forgive each another.

But how to tell this story of their fraught reunion while giving proper weight to the earlier relationship that made it possible? Again, Jane Austen came to the rescue. She loved epistolary novels as much as I do , and often incorporated letters into her works (Sense and Sensibility was originally an epistolary story called “Elinor and Marianne”). Persuasion’s own famous love letter gave me the idea to create a parallel epistolary narrative.

As childhood friends, Elliot and Kai sent each other letters where they debate the nature of their society and the potential of their star-crossed romance, following in long tradition of letter-loving lovers whose correspondence is as philosophical as it is affectionate: Heloise and Abelard, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and (my personal favorite) John and Abigail Adams.

These letters from my heroes’ younger selves are interspersed throughout the novel, showcasing the character’s changing views of the world and each other, and setting the stage for the world-changing trials they face when they meet again. The story is about love and second chances, both for Kai and Elliot and for the world they live in, which is finally emerging from its long, restless sleep.

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For Darkness Shows the Stars: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Read a prequel story (pdf link). Visit the author’s blog. Follow her on Twitter.

The “bad guy”: Essential for many plots, fun to write, and fun to read. But what goes into making a bad guy bad? Is it more than malfeasance on the mind? In The Providence Rider, the latest Matthew Corbett book, set in colonial America, Robert McCammon brings the bad guy out to play. Here’s why, and how it makes this novel fit in with the rest of the series.

ROBERT McCAMMON:

I wanted to write about the “bad guy.” In essence, what makes a perfectly respectable and unassuming human being crack, and in cracking birth from himself an evil force that revels in power and will never—can never—go back to what he was before. I had introduced the character of Professor Fell first in The Queen of Bedlam. He keeps to the shadows in the next Matthew Corbett book, Mister Slaughter. But in the new one, The Providence Rider, he emerges from the darkness onto center stage…or, to be more precise, he always brings his cloak of darkness with him, but here he presents a picture of his past and how—as he puts it to Matthew: “You have seen part of my world. What I have achieved. And me…from academic beginnings. It boggles the mind, doesn’t it?”

Matthew has to agree that it does.

I have embarked upon a journey of ten books. The first “Matthew book,” Speaks the Nightbird, wasn’t meant to be the beginning of a series. It was the story of an earnest and intelligent young magistrate’s clerk in the year 1699, who finds himself acting as the champion of justice for a woman accused of witchcraft in a small Carolina colony town. I had no intention of taking him forward. I was going to do something entirely different next, and yet…

I left the ending of Speaks the Nightbird open. Matthew was out upon the world, facing “the century of wonders,” and who might know what he would find there? Well…how do these things happen? How does walking, or sitting on a balcony bench, or lying on a grassy hill watching the clouds move help create the magic that makes an idea work? I suppose it’s in the stillness. It’s in that inner realm all writers know…the mystic place where things from childhood and a hundred thousand memories and desires merge. And then you say, “Oh yes, I understand now.” And you may think you fully understand but you don’t, because nothing is born without effort and some books are kind to their creator and some are near killers, but suddenly you have an idea and a purpose. A challenge, too. And a whole lot of hard road to travel.

But…you know you have something that calls you, and pulls you, and in a way commands you. You can’t turn away from that. You must follow where it leads.

So…I’ve done four in this series and working on the fifth. I’m approaching the halfway point. I suppose my Big Idea is the series itself. There’s a larger story arc that connects all the books, and I’m hoping that when I’m done it will read as smoothly as one long book. It’s a challenging task, keeping up with so many characters, names and such…and the research is tough, too, but very rewarding. I know there’s an expert for everything under the sun, and you’ll be told very quickly when you make a mistake…but I’m trying to keep the series as historically “valid” as possible while having fun with it. No boring history lessons here! Trying to make them exciting, funny, suspenseful, sexy, wicked…but never boring!

And I suppose there are other Big Ideas at work here as well. I always like having a “motif” for my books. In Speaks the Nightbird, it was the idea of finding a place for yourself in a hostile world. In The Queen of Bedlam it was the creation of order from chaos. In Mister Slaughter it was the juxtaposition of civility and brutality. In The Providence Rider it is the hierarchy of predators. And in the Matthew book I’m working on now, The River of Souls, it is the flow of comedy into tragedy and back again. Kind of like a river, I suppose.

I intended the series to offer a respite from the modern world. Someone recently pointed out to me that, in spite of the fast-forward motion of progress and the subsequent quick-dating of modern novels, the Matthew series will never become “dated,” since it’s already set in the past.

I like that. I also like the idea of taking a break from cell phones, instant messaging and the frenzied pace of modern life. The Matthew series is a door to the past, and one I particularly like opening and living in for awhile. I couldn’t survive very long in that era, for sure, but it is fun to go visit.

Professor Fell makes his first physical appearance in The Providence Rider but of course there’s more to come. Actually, the seed of what the entire series is about is planted in this book. I am getting so much pleasure out of doing this. I don’t work from an outline, so the books occasionally surprise me in the direction they take and the choices they offer. I think that’s as it should be.

I am pleased to be able to offer a visit to another world. Neither supernatural nor science fiction, but a vastly different and strange world all the same, with that intriguing juxtaposition of civility and brutality at its core.

One thing I’m doing that’s particularly fun for me is…since my series is about one of the first “problem-solvers”, I’m dropping in each book the names of various fictional detectives. Some are out there for everyone to see, some are more hidden. But another Big Idea behind Matthew’s story is that it is my bow to the authors of the great detectives of history, and of one of my first loves…the mystery novel, starring the stalwart and indefatigable detective who never gives up until the last clue is deciphered and the case solved.

I hope I and Matthew can do our parts to carry that tradition into the future, even working as we are in the past.

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The Providence Rider: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|IndieBound|Powell’s

Visit The Providence Rider’s book page. Follow the author on Twitter.

I’ve often mentioned to hopeful writers that doing something else with one’s life than just writing is often very useful for one’s writing. As a cogent and very interesting example, here’s debut novelist Rhiannon Held, talking about how the knowledge and experience gained in her day job made a material difference in how she crafted her new novel Silver.

RHIANNON HELD:

Silver started with werewolf religion. What would it be like? That question created the spark of a character for me, a werewolf who had been injected with silver nitrate, so she hallucinated…or saw the spirit realm. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to be absolutely ambiguous about whether what she saw was real or not, in the terms of the novel’s world. Readers seldom have incontrovertible proof of any religious force in their own lives, so why should the characters? With that character in my mind, I started creating the details of the religion and world that shaped her.

I’ve seen werewolves linked before to female lunar deities, or more generalized Gaia-like Earth-mother figures. I work as a professional archaeologist, so my academic training is in anthropology, and that sort of generality felt vacuous to me. To use the religion of my childhood upbringing as an example, that’s like saying Christianity is based on an omnipotent force who had a son. Period. What about Esther and Solomon and Moses and the disciples and burning bushes and turning into pillars of salt and threatening to cut babies in half? What about “love thy neighbor” and “let he who is without sin cast the first stone?” So much of real religions lie in their stories, their parables, their prayers, their songs, their rituals. That’s what I set out to create for my werewolf culture.

As I went along, my academic training sneaked farther out of my hindbrain and started working on the other key aspect there: the culture. The werewolves wouldn’t just have religion, they’d have social etiquette and traditions and holidays and slang and games. There, I made another key choice that’s different from what I often see with urban fantasy creatures: I made my werewolves a species. They are only born, not turned. I made that choice for a very specific reason. Turned creatures such as vampires lend themselves more to metaphors about lifestyle choices, whether consensual or not, than cultures. That’s cool, but it’s been done, so I wanted to do something different. I wanted to offer a metaphor for people in non-dominant cultures. People like immigrants who are faced with a decision about how much to identify as part of the culture they were born into, and how much to identify with the culture they find themselves interacting with every day, as my werewolves do with humans.

Having my werewolves be a species also scratched a scientific itch for me in other ways. It bothers me in urban fantasy when the heroine happens to be the only female of her magical creature type. That’s no way to have a breeding population! Involuntary shifts to another form bothered me too. If you couldn’t hold back a shift when the mob was approaching, you and your genes would get pitchforked to death, leading to a clear evolutionary pressure for at least some control over shifting. I subjected all of my werewolf traits to the test of whether it would make sense for a species to survive when it worked that way.

Of course, working out all these details in abstract is one thing, but you have to consider how an audience will react to them. I once heard a costumer express this most succinctly. When discussing the historical accuracy of costumes in a movie, she said that sometimes you had to ask yourself: do you want your characters to look attractive to modern audiences, or do you want them to be completely accurate? You can substitute anything for “attractive”, whether it’s “villainous” or “cunning” or “naïve”. What she was getting at is that people’s modern assumptions will unconsciously influence them to read a different meaning into a historical costume than it might once have had. For my own uses, I expanded the concept to include a splash of “pick your battles”. You can counteract people’s unconscious assumptions with extensive work through the other avenues available to you, but you simply don’t have space or energy to accomplish that on every front.

If, for example, I’d wanted my werewolf characters to be sympathetic but I made their culture dismissive of human lives, I’d have had to work ten times as hard to show them as moral in other ways, to overcome the reader’s automatic reaction of “these people would kill me! I don’t like them!” I didn’t use that particular aspect for my werewolf culture, but I stumbled onto plenty of other aspects that made my first readers react differently to my characters than I’d intended. Then I had to choose whether to change that aspect or pick it as one of my battles where I worked against people’s unconscious assumptions.

So like the complexity of any real human group, my werewolf world-building started simple, but ended up expanding to many aspects of their lives and even biology. It’s my hope that that makes them feel even more real, and makes the metaphors they can provide for our own lives even more interesting.

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Silver: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Follow the author on Twitter.

I have a shameful confession to make: I owe Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan some books. See, many years ago, they won a Web award of some sort for Go Fug Yourself, their righteously snarky fashion blog, and part of their prize package was a couple of books from me. And I never sent them. Because, apparently, I am the worst human being who ever lived.

Somehow, the two of them managed to pull their lives together in the face of this complete neglect, and write not one but two young adult novels about the lives of Hollywood teens, the second of which, Messy, hit bookstores this week. Here they are to talk to you about it. And Heather and Jessica: Come to one of my LA area tour stops next week. I’ll totally give you each a copy of Redshirts. I SWEAR.

HEATHER COCKS and JESSICA MORGAN:

In many ways, our Big Idea was born eight years ago. By day, we write Go Fug Yourself, a lighthearted blog about celebrities’ red-carpet fashion missteps, an endeavor that lets us exorcise our pop-culture demons while referencing everything from Judy Blume to that time poor, until-recently-deaf Regina Morrow snorted coke in Sweet Valley High No. 40 and immediately died (subtle moral: don’t do drugs, kids). So when we got the itch to write fiction, it seemed smart to stick to the voice we’d spent so long honing, as opposed to glancing at the bookstore shelves and trying to copy whatever we saw. It would be a strange swerve for us to pump out a Very Important Adult Work about suburban ennui or murder most foul, and although as readers we respect and enjoy the limitless creativity in the fantasy and paranormal genres, as writers we are self-aware enough to know that is not where our strengths lie — Twilight’s sales numbers be damned.

So we stuck to our guns and set our novels, Spoiled and Messy, in a universe we’re more familiar with: Hollywood (although in its own way, this town is as otherworldly and peopled with supernatural bodies as any). One of us grew up near L.A. and the other is a transplant, so it made sense to channel our experiences into a tale that touched on a relatable emotion for both our young-adult target audience and beyond: the fear of change, and struggle to decide how that change should or should not redefine you. Doing it through the prism of gentle Hollywood parody, which is second nature to us at this point given how absurdly acquainted we are with things like Jessica Simpson’s gestational period, was a natural way to keep our books in the Go Fug Yourself family tree.

Sure, it was occasionally tough to resist the impulse to throw in a scorching hot psychic ghost centaur — at a recent author event at Torrance High School, all the kids toted books with spooky supernatural covers, rather than something like Spoiled’s cheerful makeup-centered design – but we had faith that there was room in people’s hearts for the living as well as the mythologically dreamy. Especially because epic battles can be so stressful. Sometimes, a reader needs a break from being constantly afraid a character they love is about to bleed out on the rug (oh, hi there, Gray Hairs Ron Weasley Gave Us).

Specific to Messy, our challenge was deciding between a direct sequel to Spoiled or something more anthologized. Spoiled tells the tale of Indiana transplant Molly Dix, whose mother dies right after revealing Molly’s her father is not only alive but also the world’s biggest movie star. Molly goes to live with him in L.A. and meets her flashy half-sister Brooke Berlin, and the two co-narrate their exploits while dad Brick pops off to Key West to shoot Avalanche! in front of a green-screen with as many real polar bears as he can muster (“White fur is the apex of fear. Everyone knows that”). The emotions in that scenario are universal even if the circumstances aren’t: You don’t have to have been spawned by a Schwarzenegger clone to understand what it feels like to be the new kid, or to be ignored, or to have half-hearted bangs , and we’ve all had to figure out how to present ourselves so that we can soldier forth and be happy. Molly was the ultimate outsider, and the perfect vehicle.

But the closer we got to Book Two, the more we worried that Molly’s journey might dry up a little once she stopped being a true fish out of water. People might get sick of two incessantly warring protagonists, yet bored of a pair of happy half-sisters who only fight over who gets to drive the car. How could we weave new identity struggles into this bizarre universe without it feeling like a retread?

Ultimately, we hit on the idea of a partial sequel, shifting to a self-made outsider rather than an accidental one. Messy became the story of Molly’s best friend, the green-haired misanthrope Max McCormack, whose dire financial straits lead to her taking a job ghost-writing Brooke Berlin’s fame-mongering “personal” blog. It was a way for us to wink at the Web site that brought us here, without being grossly reflexive about it (“Read this book about a girl who’s just like us!”), plus it afforded us a fresh perspective. In Spoiled, Molly is marooned without her beloved mother and her familiar surroundings; Max makes herself an island by choice.

And where Molly’s version of self-preservation is figuring out how much of herself (if any) she had to change to survive in her new life, Max’s approach is to push violently against her social opposites so that the rejection she expects from them won’t hurt her. Plus, using Max let us check in with Molly, kept us from fully resetting the universe, and let us retain the juxtaposition of opposites – and a more taut connection to Spoiled itself — by remaining in Brooke’s head for part of the book. Brooke defines who she is by what she wants her father to see, and in that sense Messy is very much a continuation from her arc in Spoiled. So we call Messy a follow-up — not a sequel, but closer than a cousin. You could suggest we ended up having our cake and eating it too, but Brooke Berlin would never endorse the public consumption of baked goods.

And as a bonus, Brick Berlin still acts like a horse’s ass, which means he’s as close to a centaur as you can be without having hooves. Huh. Maybe we’re more supernatural than we think.

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Messy: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|IndieBound

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