Whatever

The Big Idea: Gideon Marcus

Posted on March 5, 2024    Posted by Athena Scalzi      6 Comments

For as long as there has been science fiction, there’s been women writing science fiction. Unfortunately, as time passes, some of these stories can get lost along the way. Thankfully, Gideon Marcus is here to bring them back into the spotlight, for you to discover for the first time. Or, as the title suggests, rediscover some of these old but gold works. So hop on board as Marcus takes you to the past in the new anthology, Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women Volume 3 (1964-1968).

GIDEON MARCUS:

Time marches on, and so does our voyage of Rediscovery.

Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1958-1963) was our first release, back in August 2019. It was experimental in every way: a science fiction anthology of works largely un-republished in 55+ years, introduced by a host of largely unknown (but promising) authors. A book by a brand new press that hardly knew what it was doing. A selection of works that reflected a time of transition in science fiction—the end of the Silver Age.

It succeeded beyond our wildest dreams, introducing a new generation to SFnal dreams that still resonated across the years. It brought forgotten names back into the spotlight. It also served as a springboard for new names; at least six of the introducers on the first volume went on to become Hugo/Nebula finalists.

Of course, a second volume was inevitable. For that one, we went back in time rather than forward, to explore the peak of the Silver Age and the height of women’s involvement in science fiction before Star Trek and second wave feminism opened the floodgates for good. Though no less relevant, the character of the fiction women wrote between 1953 and 1957 was more fantastic, more focused on the family, than the harder SF of the Volume 1’s era.

Volume 3, covering 1964-1968, is another thing altogether.

With the crashing of the New Wave, the participation of women in the genre at a nadir, and society in the throes of revolution, the timbre of the stories changed. They are darker, often tinged with horror. The gamut of fiction in this era literally runs from A to Z, from the reassuring traditionalism and fine craftsmanship of Ashwell’s “Wings of a Bat” (originally published in Analog) to the absolutely deconstructive prose of Zoline’s “Heat Death of the Universe (New Worlds).

Perhaps apropos of the maelstromic times this volume represents, this era proved the most challenging to rescue names from. Some are eternal and have stood the test of time: Kate Wilhelm, Joanna Russ, Kit Reed—these are well-known and much reprinted authors (though our stories have largely lain fallow). But Dorothy Jones, one of Star Trek fandom’s most important contributors? Pauline Ashwell and Hilary Bailey, British savants who are virtually forgotten today? And L. J. T. Biese…it took an Herculean (as in Poirot) effort to learn that she was Lucinda Biese, whose personal story is as remarkable as the piece we included in the volume.

And that’s really The Big Idea (™) of this volume. What we discovered as we rediscovered was not only a tremendous crop of science fiction/fantasy/horror stories, but a brilliant cohort of authorial talent. And we were able to connect with these authors more directly than ever before: four of the Afterwords are by daughters of the writers. Two of the authors are still alive: Mary Jane and Pam Zoline, both of whom we corresponded with at length. We also worked with the Biese and the Ashwell family in the course of putting the volume together.  Kit Reed was a friend (she passed away in 2017).

The result is a more personal book. I can’t objectively say it’s the best in the series—I can’t say that about any of them. They’re all stand-outs, all different. But of all of them, it means the most to me. I hope when you read it, you are affected as strongly and as positively as I was when I first encountered them. 

Rediscovery: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Jounreypress|Powell’s

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The Big Idea: Annye Driscoll

Posted on February 29, 2024    Posted by John Scalzi      11 Comments

Stuck for information about how to make your cosplay come together — and stay together? Annye Driscoll has just the book for you with Glue Guide: Everything You Need to Know About Adhesives. Here she is to warm you up on this sticky subject.

ANNYE DRISCOLL:

I never in a million years thought my first book would be about… glue.

I’ve been a fantasy reader my whole life. I was named after a bookseller (“in the hopes you’d be a reader!”) and raised on Tamora Pierce, Redwall, and the-wizard-who-shall-not-be-named. I wrote some fanfiction and read a whole lot more of it, and as I grew so did my TBR and my Goodreads yearly goal (hashtag join the Storygraph exodus). I won NaNoWriMo in 2017 with a silly little fantasy book about magic horses and took that writing habit into 2018, but by March I had to admit to myself that fiction writing wasn’t for me. I’m obsessed with the craft and will be a fan forever, but (at least for this season of my life), I remain solely a consumer.

As I slowly came to terms with my fiction writing failure, I was finding success in another fantastic creative endeavor: cosplay. For my second ever cosplay build I created – from scratch – a suit of armor, a five-foot sword, and a tower shield about the size of me. The contrast with my short-lived writing endeavor was immense. Where fiction writing was a chore – one that I felt was well-worth, but which took an immense amount of self-coercion, some days – sewing, prop-making, and armorsmithing seemed to flow out of me (and into greatly multiplying Rubbermaid bins).

(To say nothing of the con scene! There, I was at home. I could wear my art. People asked for photos of my art! I met my creative heroes and got to see, touch, and ask questions about their art!)

I started out okay at cosplay, but I got better quickly. I won some awards, I judged some contests, and I started teaching.

When people asked what my advice for a beginner cosplayer was, my answer was always the same: think about your glue choices… when you need to stick a thing to another thing, pause for a moment and make sure the adhesive you’re choosing is the one that’s actually best. Adding a little bit of time and thought to a build process will result in a costume that’s stronger, cleaner, and much more beautiful.

I gave the same advice to cosplayers wanting to move up a competition level, or to cosplayers wanting to have better con experiences. I felt I was repeating this advice at every con and in many social media posts, and even saying it to myself when I worked on my own builds.

Glue choice matters a lot in any craft, but in cosplay it’s particularly important for two reasons:

• We’re often adhering two atypical materials. Yoga mat foam and pleather! Insulation foam and wood dowels! Tiny sparkly jewels and a plastic off-brand dart gun!
• Because we’re packing, transporting, wearing, and posing with our creations, we have to be able to trust them to hold up in lots of different situations.

And so I wrote The Ultimate Glue Guide. I want makers to not only be proud of their craft, but also to be confident when their pieces are displayed in a crowded convention hall, soaked during a photoshoot in the rain, or shoved into a Rubbermaid bin for three months. Wearing one’s artwork is hard enough without having to worry about foam armor panties falling apart at a comic con.

I never thought my first book would be about glue. I never considered it would be nonfiction or that I’d be reading data sheets and researching PPE filters for it.

I am so proud of The Ultimate Glue Guide and I know it’s going to help a lot of artists improve their craft. It’s not exactly how I imagined this dream that I’ve had my whole life – of joining those great authors I’ve spent every day of my life with – coming true. But as my release date nears, my butterflies heighten, and I get closer and closer to the day I get to see my book on the shelves of Barnes and Nobles, I do feel, just a bit, like I’m living in a fantasy land.

(Sadly, no magic horses here. Yet.)

Happy making, and stick with it!

The Ultimate Glue Guide: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop.org|Powell’s

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The Big Idea: Eliza Chan

Posted on February 28, 2024    Posted by John Scalzi      2 Comments

One of the great advantages of speculative fiction is that it can take the legends, myths and trope you already think you know, and recontextualize them in a way that presents them in a way you’d never considered them before. For Fathomfolk, author Eliza Chan took a well-known aquatic trope and presented it in a way that’s destined to make a splash.

ELIZA CHAN:

Water is a necessity of life. People the world over choose to settle near water: on islands and shorelines, near rivers and lakes. It is unsurprising then, that mythology and folktales, as varied as they are across the globe, often feature stories of sea folk. Mermaids and kraken, kelpies and water dragons. Most mermaid retellings focus on the love aspect of the traditional Hans Christian Andersen story; I wanted to focus on the movement from water to land.

In my head, the little mermaid is an first generation immigrant. She has to learn the etiquette and culture of another people; is isolated from the land of her birth, her family, pretending to be fully human to fit in. These were all concepts close to my diaspora heart, thinking about the journey my own parents made halfway across the world, my own sense of identity as someone who wasn’t ever certain where they belonged and was constantly hounded by the question, “Where are you from originally?” Fathomfolk is the story of these first and second generation sea folk, set in a big multicultural city, teaming with life and opportunities but also inequality and division.

I foolishly thought I was avoiding all the tricky worldbuilding of big epic fantasy or historical fantasy novels with my urban contemporary, semi-flooded cityscape. The first draft soon proved me wrong. I struggled to visualise a European style city that was semi-flooded without it edging into science fiction or terrifying visions of Waterworld flashing before my eyes. The more I researched, the more I was drawn to real-life aspects of East and South-East Asia: the stilt houses; the different boats still used to this day for housing, transport or fishing; the adaptations to monsoon rains and flooding. This is where my story wanted to be and so mid-draft, it became an Asian citystate.

With this base, I gave myself the extra task of having scenes above and below the waterline. Above, humanity are concentrated in towers and skybridges, with rooftop gardens and vertical farming to maximise the space. I looked to Singapore and Hong Kong as they built higher and higher due to the lack of space. In the submerged depths, I had kelp forests, underwater nightclubs lit with bioluminescence and fathomfolk-powered water tuktuks.  Building my world was difficult but satisfying, especially having to remember if characters were walking or swimming, but I loved the freedom of imagining something quite different to anything I’d read before.

The little mermaid comes onto land for the love of a man. She tries to fit in, hiding her true self until things don’t work out. Then… well it depends which version you prefer. In the first draft of my novel, I had a single point of view. After a while this started to frustrate me, scared me even, worried readers would assume this character represented my point of view. The fear of being the mouthpiece of an entire culture (although I’m not sure what culture exactly a semi-submerged, human and sea folk populated city represents). Switching to multi-point of view, the story had more space to float. The characters could be themselves, different, messy, flawed people with a myriad of ideas of where they belonged and how to enact change.  

The little mermaid is still there, in a very loose, very reimagined form. The story is no longer just about her though. It’s also about the seawitch, a villain or merely an astute businesswoman making the best of her circumstances? It’s about the other seafolk, the messy melting pot of opinions, generational, class and political differences that make a minority group less homogeneous than it first appears to those on the outside. It is a reminder that fantasy is for everyone and is as strange or familiar as we make it. It can stretch as far as the imagination allows us to take it, even if my imagination went to an Asian seafolk city mash-up.

Fathomfolk: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Waterstones

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The Big Idea: Zilka Joseph

Posted on February 27, 2024    Posted by John Scalzi      2 Comments

The world is wider than we often know, with more people and communities in them than many of us have heard of before. In Sweet Malida: Memories of a Bene Israel Woman, author Zilka Joseph explores her own connection and history with a largely little-known group, and why she decided to open up her past and place it on the page.

ZILKA JOSEPH:

Who are the Bene Israel Jews of India? Where did they come from? How did they survive in India? What is their legacy? What does it mean to me as a descendant of the Bene Israel, how do our stories/lives connect?

The history of my Bene Israel ancestors, my exploration of their life and traditions, and how these stories reflect on the narrative of my own memories and journeys, are at the core of my book. The origins of this micro-minority, an ancient Jewish community from India known as the sons of Israel—the Bene Israel, has always been fascinating to me. I read books about my ancestors by pioneering researchers in this field, and later my study of this subject deepened, as I read books by contemporary scholars. I’ve been publishing books rooted in my life experiences mingled with a myriad other subjects, but this is the first time I created a book focused exclusively on the stories of the Bene Israel, and my personal journeys.

My ancestors are believed to have been survivors from a shipwreck on the west coast of India, and have lived there since their arrival in 175 B.C.E. Some think they came after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E., that they were descendants of the Lost Tribes who came around the tenth century, perhaps around King Solomon’s reign. I want people to read about our great and unique culture. Many people, especially in the West, are knowledgeable about the dominant European/East European Jewish cultures, and seem to know little about Jewish communities/cultures from around the world.

A not uncommon reaction to hearing about our existence is disbelief or suspicion. Sometimes the information people have can be skewed or incorrect. Our customs, food and culture, influenced by region, our literature, our art, our professions, and lives, exist not just in history or the past, but in the present, as we live today in countries everywhere. We are here, we are beautiful, we are not a monolith, or specimens to be pinned and catalogued. We are living community. We celebrate who we are in every way, in India, and wherever on the globe we choose to live.

I was born in Mumbai, and lived in Kolkata, India. We were not religious, but we celebrated certain Jewish festivals and enjoyed the food connected with them. We lit Shabbat candles. We had friends from all religions, neighbors of all religions, as that was how many of our neighborhoods were in India. I was a high school English teacher for many years, and later, I immigrated to the US with my husband. The openness with which I was brought up enabled me to embrace the study of varied subjects. Our home was a treasure trove of books. I loved world epics, folktales, literatures, mythology, Nature and animals/wildlife, and this is reflected in all my work. (It’s likely I became a bookworm because I was home a lot, half-paralyzed with a terrible disease called polio, and my life as a child changed overnight.)

I continued to be an avid reader even in my teens. I read Benjamin J. Israel’s books, The Jews of India and The Bene Israel of India. I realized, only decades later, how his books had laid the foundation for renowned scholars today. These materials are invaluable. Will people become curious about our culture and legacies? Teach future generations about us? I hope so. Also, I hope schools and Universities in India, and all over the world, will add and/or expand the scope of Jewish Studies to include the study of minority and micro-minority Jewish communities and their rich cultures.

In my book, I imagine the lives of my ancestors, and how they adapted, and adopted Maharashtrian (today the state of Maharashtra) foods, dress, etc. They were a part of the Indian population even before the festival of Hanukkah came into existence, and even before “India” was a country at all. They were oil pressers, “shanwar tellis,” we know for a fact. Perhaps because they were indeed one of the Lost Tribes of Israel whose profession was oil pressing? The gaps in the records too, are vital to my exploration of new narratives and perspectives, of parallels in my own life. While some pieces reflect myths, customs, mysticism, quirky facts, and Bible stories, I return often to the subject of food. Given my own love of food, food history and anthropology, I describe how certain traditional sweets are made. These food journeys are very meaningful to me.

Voyage, or journey, then, becomes a central metaphor, and maritime references are quite organic to my work. The geographical, historical, spiritual journeys of my ancestors, my grandparents are of great interest to me. My grandfather was a doctor (then in British India) and sent to Egypt and Palestine during the World War 1, and I am trying to find information about his life and untimely death after he came back home. The voyages of my father, a chief engineer in the merchant navy and my mother who sometimes accompanied him when they sailed to Europe Africa, Australia, North America. These journeys are inextricably entwined with the wanderings of my people, and my own travels, search for home.

This collection came together in a very organic way. It became a tapestry of pieces I had written and saved, or had published in gastronomic/literary journals, and new work. Narratives shift in place and time. My work braids many worlds together, and wanders through history, myth, and memory, celebrates what’s lost and found, finally rests in a moment of connection. A moment I hold on to everyday, as I continue my journey as a writer in an increasingly turbulent world.

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The Big Idea: Kerrie Faye

Posted on February 26, 2024    Posted by John Scalzi      3 Comments

Sometimes as an author, you have to work to develop a character. And sometimes, they just… appear. Which of these did author Kerry Faye have happen for her novel Dead Girl? She’s here now to enlighten you.

KERRIE FAYE:

I’ve always been curious about how storytellers come up with their ideas. Most of the time, it’s not how I would have imagined. For me the big idea came not as a concept, but as a character.

Ember, the main character of my debut novel, Dead Girl, literally arrived one day in early January 2021. You see, I had just come off a big move from South Florida to Denver, Colorado, in 2019 when the pandemic hit. While some found 2020 to be the perfect time to pursue their hobbies (writing), I couldn’t fathom creating. I had meat and toilet paper to procure. I didn’t have time for fun things like world building. I was in survival mode.

But then 2021 rolled around, and I found that I was able to separate myself from the chaos of the world around me and pursue my true love, writing. I did like most novices—I found a craft book to get the muse going. I scoured the internet. I joined organizations, critique groups. This was it. I was going to write a best seller. Spoiler alert: I did not. But what I did do was play. And in that play, my main character showed up. And she showed up in a big way. Some might say, she was my big idea.

So, there she was: Ember. I had to get to know her. She was mysterious and alluring in my mind’s eye, auburn hair and honey-colored eyes. But beyond her initial façade, there lay sadness, scars, the source I had to uncover. After some time, she laid herself bare. I cried. She was misunderstood. Made fun of. And, worst of all, she didn’t want to live.

Heart in my throat, I scooped Ember up and held her close. Together, we found a way out—a future where she could be herself. The story that unfolded was beyond even my wildest imagination. She showed me why the kids at school made fun of her. She taught me about synesthesia. We dug deeper and found out she was misdiagnosed. She was, in fact, Nephilim!

The more we explored and navigated her world, we realized that her biggest threat wasn’t her classmates. It was the Order, a heretical sect that wanted to eradicate her kind. But to overcome that threat, she would have to accept who and what she was. She would have to let go of the peer pressure to fit in. Stop worrying about what others thought of her. Ember would have to embrace what made her different and discover self-love. Essentially, she would have to want to live.

To my great joy, she did. The girl took the reins of the plot and overcame death’s seductive call. She made friends. She had her first kiss. She fell in love. She became the Dead Girl who lived. By the end, she had me in tears once more—not because of her old wounds, but because of the bravery that, I knew, it took to overcome them.

Ember was more than just the big idea, my inciting incident on the journey to becoming an author. She was the story.

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The Big Idea: Cory Doctorow

Posted on February 21, 2024    Posted by John Scalzi      8 Comments

Even if you don’t know what the word “Bezzle” means — yet — you know what it is, because it’s almost a certainty that someone you know, and perhaps even you, have found yourself in that state at one time or another. Cory Doctorow is here now to explain to you what The Bezzle is, and why he found it such a compelling topic for his tale.

CORY DOCTOROW:

Bezzle, n: The magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it.
-John Kenneth Galbraith

My Martin Hench novels chronicle the adventures of a two-fisted, hard-bitten forensic accountant who spent 40 years doing spreadsheet-to-spreadsheet combat with technology’s most inventive scammers.

I introduced Hench with last year’s Red Team Blues, which is – paradoxically – Hench’s last adventure, told in the manner of the final volume of a beloved, long-running series. I thought it was a cute conceit and then my editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, loved it so much that he bought two more and I had a brainwave: what if I told the stories in reverse? Sure, the reader will always know that Hench survives, but that’s more-or-less true of every long-running series, right? No one really ever bought a new Conan novel thinking that Howard was gonna give the mighty-thewed Cimmerian the axe.

There’s lots to love about this setup. Given that Marty’s career spans 40 years of Silicon Valley history, I can parachute him into any scam in tech history. He’s the Zelig of tech-finance fraud.

Patrick bought three of these: Red Team Blues (Marty’s last adventure, a ripped-from-the-headlines cryptocurrency fraud novel that came out just as FTC was imploding) (though, honestly, I coulda published that one in any month between 2020 and 2024 and there would have been a ghastly crypto scandal to hook it to); Picks and Shovels (Marty’s first adventure, in the heroic era of the PC, set in an early 1980s San Francisco where AIDS is scourging the city, Jello Biafra is running for mayor, and every grifter has invented a new personal computer), and – published today – The Bezzle,

The Bezzle tells the tale of an escalating series of scams spanning the golden age of the scam, starting with Yahoo!’s Web 2.0 buying spree that saw every great, useful tech company bought up with Saudi royal money (funneled through Yahoo! via Softbank) and then torn to shreds by Yahoo!’s warring, venal princelings that pioneered the enshittification playbook.

From there, the book ascends a gradient of ever-more-destructive scams: the real-estate financial engineering that incubated the Great Financial Crisis; the pigs-at-the-trough bailouts that followed; and then, the rise and rise of prison-tech grifters, who filled America’s heavenly overcrowded prisons with cheap Chinese tablets that replaced libraries, continuing education, phone calls, video visits and commissary accounts, with vendors extracting huge sums from prisoners and their families (this scam continues to this day).

I’ve studied scams and scammers for a long time, and despite that, I’ve fallen prey to scams. Repeatedly. This has given me many opportunities to consider the stories that scammers and their marks tell themselves about why scams work.

For the scammer, the principal narrative is the self-serving notion that “you can’t cheat an honest man.” Many of the classic cons involve tricking the mark into thinking that they are committing some kind of scam, and the con-artist smugly pockets their winnings, telling themselves that if the mark had only been honest, they’d have kept their dough.

But not every con involves tricking the mark into thinking that they’re getting one over. The most successful and durable cons rely on the mark simply not wanting to know that they’ve been conned.

This is where Galbraith’s “bezzle” comes in – that “magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it.” As Galbraith pointed out, the bezzle is an enchanted moment where everyone feels better off: the mark thinks they’re richer, and the con artist knows they are. This was the case during the 2008 housing crisis, when bankers, insurers, and borrowers colluded with regulators and analysts to prolong the bezzle for as long as they could. So long as no one looked too closely at those collateralized debt obligations and other exotic financial instruments, everyone could pretend that the whole world was richer and the line would go up forever.

Same goes for STONKS, cryptos, NFTs and every other vibe-based asset class of end-stage capitalism. So long as no one looks too hard at these pigs-in-pokes, the bezzle can continue and with it, the good feelings it brings.

But the longer the bezzle goes on, the more scam-debt the victim accumulates. Prolonging the bezzle is like going from the bar to a series of speakeasies to avoid your hangover. You’ll have to take ever-more-heroic measures to stave off the inevitable, and the payback, when it arrives, will be a million times worse.

The bezzle is how the con artist enlists the victim to prolong the con, participate in their own victimization and deepen the wound.

It’s damned hard to convince people that they’re being scammed, but not because “you can’t con an honest man.” It’s because we all flinch away from pain and try to keep the party going for as long as we can. It’s because it’s easy to understand how you’re winning, and understanding how you’ll lose is both a lot of dull detail, and a serious downer.

The anti-scam forces have invented many tactics to make it easier to shut the bezzle down. David Maurer, a linguist, turned his glossary of con-artist slang into a gripping anthropological study of con artists (it was adapted for film under the title The Sting). When Adam McKay adapted The Big Short, he had Margot Robbie deliver all the most technical explanations while partially submerged in a bubble-bath. And of course, John Oliver and the Last Week Tonight crew use stunts and comedy monologues to transform even the most tedious scams into rage inducing, laugh-aloud TV gold.

This work is unbezzling. Transforming a scam’s mechanics into entertainment is a way of fashioning a long, sharp pin that can prick the magic bubble of denial that turns a moment’s lapse in judgment into a life-destroying victimization.

This is what makes the Hench books so satisfying to write (and, I hope, to read). Just as my Little Brother books turned the bone-dry business of understanding surveillance and information security into tight technothrillers that inspired a generation of technologists to pursue security and privacy, the Hench books are designed to be a highly entertaining vaccination that inoculates the reader against the raging pandemic of scams that passes for our economy.

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The Big Idea: Jennifer Estep

Posted on February 20, 2024    Posted by John Scalzi      3 Comments

We all know about protagonists, the characters who drive the story, and the secondary characters, the ones who do… other things while the protagonists drive the story. What happens when one of those other characters want to take a turn at the wheel? Author Jennifer Estep knows, and in this Big Idea for Only Hard Problems, is here to give you the low down.

JENNIFER ESTEP:

If there is one universal truth I’ve discovered as an author, it’s this:

Secondary characters are awesome.

C’mon. Admit it. Some of your favorite book, movie, and TV characters aren’t the main characters of the story—it’s the secondary characters you can’t stop reading about and watching. As an author, I love to write about secondary characters, and I often have more fun with their stories than I do with the regular books in a series. 

In my mind, all my secondary characters have their own adventures, hobbies, goals, pet peeves, and more. I just don’t always get the chance to show those things on the page. But sometimes, a secondary character will plant themselves in front of me, shake their fist, stomp their foot, and demand their own story. That’s what happened with Zane Zimmer in Only Hard Problems, book #3 in my Galactic Bonds science-fiction fantasy series.

Zane Zimmer is a powerful psion with telekinesis, telepathy, telempathy, and other abilities. He’s also a wealthy Regal lord and an elite warrior known as an Arrow. Zane is delightfully snarky, supremely confident, and exceedingly ruthless, and he usually gets all the best/funniest lines. Here’s one of my favorite Zane lines from Only Hard Problems:

“That sounds rather sketchy, even for space magic.”

So far in my Galactic Bonds series, Zane Zimmer has been an antagonist to Vesper Quill and Kyrion Caldaren, the two main point-of-view characters. Zane has insulted Vesper and Kyrion, chased them down, thwarted their escape attempts, turned them over to the big bad villains, and more.

Zane hasn’t been a hero or even a remotely good person, but he’s been interesting­—so interesting that I decided to write a short book from Zane’s point of view and delve even deeper into his character. Why does Zane want to be the leader of the Arrows? Why is family so important to him? How will he react to a major secret that was revealed in a previous book? I tackled all those questions and more in Only Hard Problems.

And here’s a question I had to answer for myself: Why do I like reading and writing about secondary characters so much?

To me, it’s all about the distance and the mystery. A secondary character like Zane Zimmer can strut onto the page and do all sorts of dastardly things, and the reader is never quite sure of the character’s motives and goals, unless the character announces their intentions in the dialogue (or something similar). A secondary character can just be a little bit extra—extra funny, extra dangerous, extra villainous, extra cool—without the character being over the top (unless that’s what you are going for as an author).

But writing about a secondary character is also a risk. What if readers don’t like learning more about a particular character? What if readers only want to read about the main point-of-view characters?

I’ve had those worries with Only Hard Problems, along with other books/novellas I’ve written from a secondary character’s point of view, but I’m going to keep writing those kinds of stories. Why? Because to me, secondary character stories are like bonus material that give the reader a different look at and another glimpse into a beloved book world/series.

Extra is always better, at least when it comes to secondary characters.

I hope everyone enjoys Zane Zimmer’s story. Happy reading!

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