Authors Derryl Murphy and William Shunn weren’t necessarily looking to collaborate on a story. But then a chance encounter on the road set events into motion that would result in Cast a Cold Eye. I’ll let the two of them take it from here.

DERRYL MURPHY and WILLIAM SHUNN:

Derryl Murphy:

My mind often wanders to thoughts of Story on long drives. A story I’m writing, a story I want to write, often a story I had no idea existed. The latter happens more often than is healthy, and in the middle of one eight-hour drive with my wife and two (now adult) sons I watched an old truck with a hand-painted sign approach, and as it zipped by I knew I had misread the sign but insisted Jo write down that misreading in my notebook: Spirit Photographer.

At the same time I was wrestling with a few disparate ideas circling the Spanish flu epidemic that had killed a great-grandfather. Perhaps I could tie them together when I got home.

Reader, I could not. I tried and tried, but wasn’t happy with any of the outcomes. At one point I was sure this would be a short story, another time I worried I was looking at a novel. About ready to shelve it and move on to other things, I happened to read a story by Bill Shunn and thought, Gee, I wonder if he might have the key? And so I emailed him.

William Shunn:

When Derryl’s email arrived, I was already working on too many projects at once, with too little time for them all – like usual. This was the summer of 2004, and I lived in Queens, New York. I had a novel and a handful of short stories going, not to mention another draft of my seemingly endless memoir project. Derryl is Canadian, but I had become acquainted with him online when he moved to Utah and started hanging out with some of my old writing group friends. I liked him and I admired his work, but jumping into a collaboration with anyone was not high on my list of priorities.

It wasn’t just that I was so busy with my solo projects. I don’t think I trusted the process of collaboration. I had only tried it once before, in the mid ’90s, with a young writer who was on a hot streak and couldn’t seem to not sell every story she wrote. Our collaboration sent her streak careening into a brick wall, and after just two rejections she swallowed some sleeping pills. She was fine – it was only six pills – but my desire ever to collaborate again had suffered a mortal blow.

Or so I thought. Despite myself, something about Derryl’s pitch spoke to me: “It involves photography and spirituality, sorta, which might make for a nice blend between us.” The pitch also involved Luke Bryant, a teenager whose parents were among the many who died in the Spanish flu epidemic, and Annabelle Tupper, a widowed “spirit photographer” who needs an apprentice for the duration of her stay in town.

With no idea what I was really signing up for, I said yes. Soon enough we were brainstorming over email, tossing ideas back and forth until we had a rough plot that we liked. Then Derryl sent me the first chunk of actual text – Luke hiding out in a cemetery where he can feel the statues watching him – and the hard part was underway.

Derryl Murphy:

It’s a difficult thing, writing with someone else. Whether it’s more difficult doing so long distance or if you’re in the same room fighting over the keyboard, I don’t know. But while it was a long haul – some four years – it did result in 24,000 words, as opposed to the five or six years it took to write a 5,100-word story with Peter Watts. (Points to the first person who can point out the odd thing Bill and Peter have in common.)

What did that four years get us? Well, I fully believe that Luke Bryant would not be the realized, pained, and desperate young man he became if it wasn’t for Bill. I think working together resulted in a fine line between keeping things real and heavy-duty one-upmanship: we didn’t mess things up for each other, even as we ramped things up more than either of us might have done on our own.

It also got us a damned spooky story. And a damned moving one.

William Shunn:

From this remove, it’s hard to remember who was responsible for which elements of Cast a Cold Eye. Certainly Derryl provided all the expertise in early photography, including the eerie detail of Annabelle’s chemically blackened eye. The Nebraska setting was my contribution. Beyond that – the stern uncle and aunt, the gun in the truck, the ghostly buffalo – who can say? One thing I can say for sure, though, is that this slim book would not exist without both of us.

The Big Idea of Cast a Cold Eye, looked at one way, is of a boy plagued by ghosts who learns to see a brighter world – literally – through the lens of a camera. It’s the story of a haunting, yes, but even more so it’s a story about perception.

But looked at another way, it’s a story about two people with their own ways of doing things learning to work together to create something neither one could have created alone. That’s what Luke and Annabelle do in the book. I like to believe that’s what Derryl and I did in learning to tell their story.

Derryl Murphy:

We were lucky enough to sell the story, a rejection or two before a fairly quick acceptance from PS Publishing in the UK, which resulted in a gorgeous little hardcover book, in a very limited signed and numbered edition and an only-slightly-less limited unsigned edition. When it was gone, it was gone. An apparition only a few people got to witness.

All these years later, we’re happy we can finally share the story of Luke and Annabelle and the ghosts that haunt them with the wider world.

—-

Cast a Cold Eye: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Apple Books|Kobo

Read an excerpt. Visit Derryl Murphy’s site and Twitter. Visit William Shunn’s site and Twitter.

How scary is too scary? Or not scary enough? And does the calculus change when you’re writing for a younger audience? These are the questions that Christian McKay Heidicker confronted when writing Scary Stories for Young Foxes. Don’t be frightened: His answers await you below.

CHRISTIAN McKAY HEIDICKER:

When I started work on Scary Stories for Young Foxes, a middle-grade novel for ages eight to twelve, I had a tough decision ahead of me.

How scary should I make this thing?

The book is a retelling of classic horror tropes from the perspective of fox kits. Outside of some narratively necessary anthropomorphism (the foxes talk), I tried to make the story as scientifically accurate as possible. So, the zombies are rabies-infected foxes. The ghost is a white-furred predator that’s camouflaged by snow. And the witch is a woman who taxidermies small critters in order to sketch them for her children’s book. (This person was real, by the way. Her name was Beatrix Potter. Apologies if I just ruined your childhood.)

I had a vision and a formula. I just needed to decide how far to push the horror for my tender-aged readers.

Many fox kits don’t survive their first winter. The world is filled with hawks and badgers and tractors and traps that will snuff out their innocent, adorable lives. If I was going to be honest, then young foxes were going to die in this book. This started a tug-of-war in my brain.

Animal deaths in fiction seem to be more difficult for us to cope with than human ones. A good author friend stopped watching Game of Thrones because “They keep killing the direwolves!” Another friend still gets teary-eyed when she talks about Hedwig. Save the Cat, the all-time bestselling book about screenwriting, encourages writers to always, ALWAYS rescue the pet. I was caught between being honest about nature and breaking one of the golden rules of storytelling. So, I started searching for a model for how to be honest about fox experiences without disturbing my young readers beyond reason.

Of course, animal deaths are prevalent in popular children’s fiction: Where the Red Fern Grows, Black Stallion, Old Yeller, The Yearling. But these stories follow a specific formula: the death always comes at the end, and it teaches the reader a Big Lesson, be it about morality, responsibility, or even just introducing kids to the concept of death. But none of these stories qualify as horror. In order to deliver on the promise made by SSFYF’s cover, I’d need to shiver my readers’ whiskers from start to finish. I kept searching.

Fortunately for my book, anthropomorphized deaths seem to be less traumatizing than those of “real” animals, who have little to no agency. Charlotte from Charlotte’s Web was aware of her own mortality, so her death felt more like grandma slipping off to sleep. Aslan from Narnia obviously has his own thing going. And the splatter-horror fest that is Watership Down is mercifully shelved in the adult section.

Disney movies weren’t much help because they tend to exchange Big Lesson deaths for plot device. The Lion King and Bambi kill off parents early in the story so the main character can go on a great adventure. The best example I could find was in Pixar’s Finding Nemo. In the opening scene, the mother fish and ninety-nine percent of her eggs are eaten by a barracuda. It isn’t a lesson or a plot device but a bonding moment between father and son. Even though these are the last characters to die in the movie, the scene infinitely magnifies the threat of the deep, wide ocean our heroes about to get lost in.

Revisiting Finding Nemo emboldened me to make my book slightly scarier and to start poking at the literary norms. Why do we save animals in stories? Are we reasserting the obvious point that innocent creatures don’t deserve to die? Are we trying to convince the audience that we aren’t bad people and would never hurt a cat, not even a pretend one? Or are we just sweeping facts under the rug?

Considering that humans have developed into the type of creature that doesn’t like to know where our food comes from, I’d vote on the latter. We aren’t revolting against animal deaths in media for the animals’ sake—it’s for our own peace of mind. If anything, our ignorance of animal plights puts them in more danger. We only feel guilty drinking from plastic straws after seeing a YouTube video of one being bloodily extracted from a sea turtle. Most people I know tend not to finish these videos. I think this is because we’ve been trained to compartmentalize animal suffering from a young age. But I’m not convinced this does our kids any favors. As Neil Gaiman points out, “. . . if you are keeping people, young people, safe from the darkness . . . you are denying them tools or weapons that they might have needed and could have had.” Scary stories can be healthy for kids. But where was my model for how to tell the scary story I wanted to tell? David Attenborough to the rescue.

Right as I started writing the book, my fiancée introduced the BBC series Planet Earth to her young daughters. Those of you who have seen the show know that it can be harrowing. In one memorable scene, a lone baby iguana scrambles to escape a swelling tide of hungry snakes. My soon-to-be-stepdaughters barely batted an eyelash. In fact, I don’t think they blinked during the entire segment.

Was it scary? Absolutely. Did the girls pinch at their own elbows with worry for the poor baby iguana? You betcha. Did they whimper when some of the iguana’s siblings were caught and devoured? Of course. But did they want to see how it ended? Minecraft itself couldn’t have torn them away.

Most shockingly, the girls didn’t even cry. They’re four and six years old. They cry when I mess up the grilled cheese. But they accepted the iguana’s horrifying reality with quiet stoicism. There seems to be something about nature that kids inherently understand. Prey has to die so the predator can eat. The rain stops, and there isn’t enough water to go around. Humans tear down forests, leaving behind homeless orangutans. And there’s no all-powerful author who read Save the Cat to write them out of it.

Of course, nature documentaries always end on a hopeful note. Life finds a way. There’s no use in telling kids that the Earth is dying if you can’t also tell them there’s something we can do about it. You’ve gotta scrape a little char off that burnt grilled cheese.

After months of tweaking and balancing and adding a lick on the whiskered cheek for every gnash of teeth, I tried to make Scary Stories for Young Foxes land in what I call “Cozy Horror.” So long as there’s balance to the world . . . so long as life continues . . . things can get pretty scary. And instead of disturbing them to sleeplessness, I’m hoping my book will provide readers with tools to face the challenges ahead.

—-

Scary Stories for Young Foxes: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

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

For his Big Idea for The Reefs of Time, the first of his Out of Time series, Jeffrey A. Carver talks about structure — of his story, the universe, and other important things.

JEFFREY A. CARVER:

Big ideas are the meat and potatoes of classical science fiction, but sometimes they collide with one another like bowling balls on a pool table. In The Chaos Chronicles, I have played with some pretty cool cosmic ideas: sentient suns and sentient singularities, supernovas and hypernovas started (or stopped) by the likes of humans and their alien friends, the starstream (a cosmic superhighway for star travel), an enormous Shipworld at the edge of the galaxy serving as refuge for species who have lost their home planets… and in my new book, time travel a billion years into the past, via quantum entanglement. I love this sort of thing! They are part of the driving energy of these books.

But long before I rolled any of that into this story, I had a big idea of a very different sort—a grand scheme for how I was going to structure the books. It was very new for me: I was going to make the books small. Short. Quick. Snappy. Entangled with each other, though not necessarily in a quantum sense.

I tend to create long stories—my mind just works that way—maybe not Game of Thrones long, but long enough that I’d completed a number of my books with enormous exhaustion, as well as satisfaction. Unfortunately, I’m also a slow writer. I had to rethink my approach.

Thus was born my crucial idea: Write that long story that’s percolating in your head—you’re going to, anyway—but do it in a string of short, connected-but-self-contained novels. That way you can keep the books coming, but still write long. (I can just hear you muttering, “Say, isn’t that what most people call writing a series?” Well, yes, that’s obvious now. But then, to me, it was a revelation.)

At first, I stuck to the plan. Neptune Crossing was suitably short, and pretty snappy. The books that followed were… not exactly short, but not long, really. And then I took a break to write in a different universe, and Eternity’s End was… the longest book I’d ever written. Uh-oh. By the time I came back to The Chaos Chronicles, my “big idea”—short, quick, snappy—lay in little bitty pieces. Smashed by the bowling balls of my other ideas. Sunborn took seven years. The Reefs of Time took eleven. A lot of people thought I’d quit writing, or died! When it was finished, it was so complex I had to break it into two volumes, though it was still one novel.

So much for my structural “big idea.” But I still had the cosmic gems I mentioned earlier. And they were a big part of why it took so long to write the blasted books.

When you set a story around sentient stars and supernovas and time-entanglement, there’s a central challenge: How do you wrap your people around such things? Part of it is a plotting problem. How do you make the ephemerals and the near-eternals intersect? But more than that, how do you create relationships? The stories I like to read are all about relationships. The cold universe might not care about us, but good stories aren’t just about cold, unfeeling things (or even “cold equations”). Stories are about people clashing and loving and hating and killing and rescuing and winning and losing and finding redemption. And by people, I mean everyone sentient, regardless of species, planet, number of dimensions occupied, or organic status.

I wasn’t sure how to do that. I’m a pretty intuitive writer, meaning I often don’t know what I’m writing until I’ve written it. Oh, I try to plan, but my way forward can be (with a nod to E.L. Doctorow) like driving in the fog at night with one headlight out. There’s a lot of faith involved. Faith that I’ll find the way. Fear that I won’t. Wrong turns. Bridges out. Lucky breaks. That’s how I felt as I threw my people together with cosmic entities.

So you want a character to somehow have a relationship with, maybe even a friendship with, say, a sentient star who lives on a scale so unthinkably different that the human is a mayfly by comparison? In this case (I eventually realized), it is helpful to have a third party who has a special facility for manipulating time. Time fusion. You can’t maintain it for long, but maybe for a brief interaction, the human and the star can connect. Share thoughts. Share feelings. Share joys and pain.

Or, as in Reefs, where the mental and emotional journey backward in time (through something called a ghoststream) is just as important as what you find when you arrive in deep time. I wanted to warn the characters: It’s crucial to notice little things you feel along the way. There might be something alive there, something that matters to you, even if you don’t know it yet. Also, that quantum thread of space-time you’re moving along is fuzzy, as quantum things tend to be. Think of it as yarn, not thread. The edges are uncertain. You might need to make use of that uncertainty to find your way home. You might need the help of unexpected others to find your way home. (I, the author, certainly needed the help of others—for example, my initial readers—to find my way home.)

But for all this, I think the biggest challenge remains the question (or questions) wordlessly posed: Who am I? What am I doing here? What will I do when confronted by, not just the problems I was expecting, but the hard edge of the infinite?

These are questions John Bandicut confronts—again and again, as his story unfolds and one crisis after another looms in his path. Will there be any rest for this man? Any salvation or redemption?

It’s not just John. Everyone who comes into his life, from the noncorporeal alien Charli, to the inscrutable Ik (whose homeworld was destroyed), to the two women he loves (Julie, a human; and Antares, an alien)—each one ends up facing similar questions. Why me? Can’t someone else save the world this time? Can I please rest?

Because you’re here, no, and not yet. And don’t expect to be thanked.

Battered by the winds of destiny, by the forces of chaos, by malice, or even just by ignorance, they have to find a way. It all seems terribly unfair. Who could be expected to rise to the job of (take your pick): preventing a comet from devastating the Earth, stopping a deadly AI from destroying a “Shipworld” vaster than the Earth, redirecting a rogue intelligent stardrive, or stopping a hypernova being engineered by a malicious intelligence? And yet, somehow, they find a way. Because they must.

If the lives of others depend on you, you must change, grow, adapt. Find a way. Because if there’s redemption to be found in this world, maybe that need is the first place to look.

—-

The Reefs of Time: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Kobo|Book View Cafe

Read an excerpt. Visit the author’s site. Follow him on Facebook.

As a well-known pie enthusiast, I believe pretty much all pie is magic. But in Midnight at the Blackbird Café, author Heather Webber takes the “pie is magic” concept even further than that — and in the process opens doors to questions far beyond what might be in the pie filling.

HEATHER WEBBER:

Have you ever mourned someone you loved deeply?

After that person passed away, did you ever dream of them? A dream so real it was like they were still alive?

I have. And it’s those dreams that are driving force behind my new novel, Midnight at the Blackbird Café, where a magical piece of pie can bring a visit from a dearly departed loved one through a dream. Yes, pie. Blackbird* pie, specifically.

You see, this book was inspired by the Beatles’ “Blackbird.” After hearing the song for the first time, I was captivated with the concept of broken wings and how emotional wounds can keep many from being able to metaphorically fly. And if blackbirds could, what would they sing to us in the dead of the night? What do we most want to hear? Blackbird research led me quickly to the Song of Sixpence with its “four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie,” and then a tidbit in Celtic folklore revealed that blackbirds were considered guardians and messengers of the “Other world.” With that, the heart of this book took form. What if blackbirds with their songs could pass messages from dearly departed loved ones through, of all things, pie, to bring comfort and love to those left behind?

Yet, writing about death and its aftermath can be challenging, because everyone has different ways of grieving…and healing. As I wrote, it was a struggle at first to see past my desire have these special dreams heal every broken heart right from the outset. (It is a heartwarming, feel-good book, after all…and I’m a sap.) But I knew it was just as important to explore grief, and its various stages, through my characters’ eyes. A piece of pie wasn’t going to fix everybody, and the downside to these dreams had to be shown as well.

One of my main characters is a young widow searching for answers to the mysterious circumstances surrounding her husband’s death. She believes a visit from him in a dream will bring the closure she needs to move on. But will it? What is closure, exactly?

Another character eats a piece of pie to keep a connection to his wife, who passed on nearly ten years before. Yet is keeping that connection holding him back from living? Doesn’t learning to fly mean letting go?

Believing that loved ones who have passed on are still around in some way is not a new concept. Cardinals, butterflies, pennies, rainbows, feathers—and dreams—are often thought to be signs that heavenly loved ones are near. Are these signs wishful thinking? A coping mechanism? Maybe. Maybe not. If the sign brings a measure of peace and comfort…does it truly matter?

Like the characters in Midnight I want to believe that there might be more to life—and death—than anyone dreams possible. I’d eat a piece of that blackbird pie every chance I could get. Would you?

 

*Disclaimer: no birds were harmed in the creation of this book—the pies are made with fruit.

—-

Midnight At the Blackbird Café: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Snail On The Wall

Read an excerpt. Visit the author’s website. Follow her on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook.

 

In today’s Big Idea, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone are feeling epistolary, which, considering the letter-writing format of their collaborative novella This is How You Lose the Time War, is entirely appropriate.

AMAL EL-MOHTAR and MAX GLADSTONE:

Dearest Max,

I write to you from the past—knowing you’re presently asleep while I’m awake, three hours’ worth of time zone between us—to talk about ideas. It’s tricky to know where to begin; when the most succinct description we can manage of our book clocks in at “epistolary spy vs. spy novella across time and space,” the ideas crowd and clutter.

But I think it all ultimately begins and ends with us. The two of us, becoming friends, and writing each other letters.

Do you remember when we first decided to write something together? I know the fact of it, but I don’t remember the hour, the words—only that we loved each other’s work, wanted to work together, wanted to set a sensible boundary of how and when and for how long to work together. A novella, not a novel or short story; something epistolary, to give our voices space to harmonize in their difference. I remember the plan, scribbled on a paper on the coffee table in my parents’ house, and the season, a cold snowy spring—but I wish I could remember, rather than invent, the moment in which one of us suggested it.

But I do remember the refrain we developed once we’d secured the time and space for a writing retreat at which to work. We spoke of

“The novella

that we will write

in [mysterious benefactor]’s house.”

We used it as punctuation, as shorthand, and we made jokes of it. Dolphins will speak! The stars will throw down their spears and water heaven with their tears! Because of

the novella

that we will write

in [mysterious benefactor]’s house.

We always structured it as hyperbole and line breaks. Ludicrously grand and specific claims capped with a bob and wheel, a promise, a spell. And look, look at this magic we made between us—our book is real, is soaring on red and blue wings, and my heart is a bird on a spit in my chest, as the prophets say.

So that’s how I see it, anyway—our Big Idea was that we wanted to write together. We wanted to find a methodology for blending our styles, for working together

on a novella

that we would write

in [Mysterious Benefactor]’s house

but that’s only the half of it, I think. I’m holding my memory up to the light, but I so badly want to see yours, what colours your own memory will cast against this page. What do you remember, Max? What’s the core of this, for you?

Love,

Amal

 

***

 

Dearest Amal,

It’s your future as I’m writing this—you still have a few hours of morning left. Enjoy them! Learn from my mistakes! Unfortunately the only mistakes I’m aware of so far today are, as follows: 1. didn’t have protein with breakfast, so I’m peckish now that it’s lunchtime, and 2. spent time on Twitter chatting about queer subtext (not to mention text) in the Great Gatsby. AND I ALONE AM ESCAPED TO TELL THEE!

So, in sum, it’s been okay over here, at least insofar as things-I-can-control are concerned. Wish I had more Future Wisdom to impart! Most of the things I’m discovering right now on a day to day basis have to do with child care, and most of them boil down to the fact that hardly anyone knows hardly anything, and that it’s a wonder and a miracle any of us is alive at all.

But to your question, about memories: I actually remember the initial conversation! I could find the date without much trouble, but since we intend this particular correspondence for outside observers I’m chary of letting others that close to the marrow of the thing. Suffice to say I was on my way home from a long, long tour, a bunch of authors in a single car, and I’d hit New York City dog tired and careworn.

New York is a great city to wash up in. You vanish like a grain of salt into a water glass. I was feeling that weird dry kind of lonesome you get when you’ve been around people too long and all of a sudden they’re gone—you’re worn out and hungry to be alone, but when you are, you feel like you’ve done something wrong. That one day, everyone I knew in the city was busy, or so far away it didn’t make sense for them to come. So I found an Italian restaurant near the Flatiron that had a restaurant week special, sat by myself at the bar, and opened up a folder of your stories to read.

We’d been corresponding for a while by this point, longhand, extremely low-tech. (It still feels weird to write you email! Or to text, even, after such a long entirely paper-based correspondence.) Naturally I’d read your criticism and I’d read The Green Book, but I hadn’t read your other stories; I’m honestly not sure why. I’d been writing you from the tour, but, of course, travel being what it is, I couldn’t get any letters back. I remember struggling to post them, hoping the counter attendants at the tiny B&Bs with their breakfast room TVs showing bad politics would remember to drop them in the mailbox. Anyway—I was starved for replies by this point, and I had a folder of your stories—so there at the bar, I read them all, one after another. Your friend’s story is not entirely your friend—but you can feel them in it, and also there’s a pure self betrayed in the telling of a good story. You learn what someone cares about by learning what they love, or hate, enough to write down.

By the end of the night I was drunk on those stories. They were different from my work—but they were so full, and so finished. I could also see how they meshed, sort of sideways, with my own concerns & projects. Basically I was overcome with a desire to just get out the instruments and jam, high school garage band style. Surely, if we could do something together, the spheres would revolve into harmony, dolphins would speak, all that’s mean and evil in the world would suffer revelation and weep for the harm it caused, and all forms of life would enter into a great colloquy.

I guess there’s a lot of Bill and Ted in that vision, which is appropriate, given what came later.

So, basically: that one night on the walk back to the hotel I grabbed my phone and texted you how we had to write something together. And you said yes! And that’s where it started.

But of course it started further back, didn’t it? With letters. Do you want to talk about the letters?

Love,

Max

 

***

 

Dearest Max,

I’m so grateful for your memory. It’s aligned the tumblers in my own mind’s lock, and the hour and my surroundings spilled out: I remember that conversation, when you read my stories, so clearly! I was standing in my sister’s kitchen, probably staying over—I was especially nomadic that year—when you texted, and I remember glowing more and more brightly, feeling unspeakably happy to be seen.

Which is also my memory of writing letters.

There is, in letter-writing, a tender and terrible vulnerability. To write a letter is to commit one’s naked self to the page, to send it into the future with no more protection than paper and wax, and to place that self in the hands of a person you’re inventing, a person who may or may not actually exist. One can, of course, write at several layers of remove—party invitations, thank you notes, the equivalent of a friendly nod in letter and ink—but cards are not correspondence; that friendly nod is not a tête-à-tête. To write a letter, longhand over pages, is to delve inevitably into one’s own thoughts, to reach for things we don’t know we feel until we’ve dredged up the words for them, and in so doing make a single person’s future self privy to the unbearable intimacy of our present.

“How I love to have no armor here,” writes Red to Blue, as their own correspondence deepens.

I remember that when we started writing to each other, I used whatever I had to hand—sheets of harsh white paper stolen from the printer, jammed into white #10 envelopes, scribbled on with whatever pen was nearest me. The content, I figured, was what was important—but then you started writing back on gorgeous creamy G. Lalo paper, so I got the same brand to match, and I introduced you to sealing wax, and suddenly it felt like our correspondence was robed in sensory magic, easily distinguished at a glance from the press of bank statements and circulars. We’d committed to physicality, to slowness, to something that couldn’t be approximated in email, no matter how swift and effusive the clack of keys beneath our fingers. We’d committed to time travel—and didn’t those letters have a knack of arriving just when we needed them? When the weight of the world pressed against our lungs, and those golden envelopes stamped in colour arrived bearing a space in which to breathe?

Your letter, this one, found me at my gate in the San Francisco airport, minutes before boarding a flight to Seattle, and closed a circle years in the making. Because all this began with you on tour writing to me—and here I am, on a tour launched by the book we wrote together, a book we wrote because we’d written letters to each other, writing you a letter about our book.

It feels fully as magical, to me, as finding words in the rings of a thousand year old tree, or the swirl of tea leaves in a porcelain cup.

Love,

Amal

 

***

 

Dearest Amal,

Tea leaves, tree rings, and wax seals—when we started writing letters I was surprised by how dangerous the whole project felt.

Even to me that sounds a little weird. After all, what could be more normal than dropping a letter in the mail?

Maybe it was the fact that we both spent a lot of time on the internet and at conventions, participating in Public Discourse in front of the whole world. There’s so much thought in public these days—and so much of that public thought is tactical, designed to accomplish a specific effect, whether that’s gathering a following or even wasting someone else’s time. Lots of good comes from that public conversation, but it’s all so omnivoracious. Twitter wants your every idle thought.

By contrast, writing letters felt like staking out our own territory—a small paper space between the two of us, unscanned, unhindered. The letters were so fragile! Walking to the mailbox in a blizzard I’d find myself thinking how easy they would be to destroy. Dropping one in a puddle would do it. And yet—how many thoughts have I dashed off in seconds and sent whirling off into the void, barely remarked upon except, of course, by a vast silent intelligence that records all I say and do, and uses it to build shareholder value? In a sense those words will last forever—they’ll last as long as capital sees value in unstructured human generated text, anyway—but in a more real sense they’ve been ripped from me altogether. While letters only last as long as paper.

Then again, some paper has lasted longer than capitalism. And, as the man says: manuscripts don’t burn.

The phrase hadn’t yet entered the public consciousness back then, but in a real sense writing letters felt like we were both fighting to reclaim our time. We were carving a few hours a week out to impose some order on our own lives, and offer that to a friend. And I think there’s a bit of that rebellion come through in the book, too—a quest for silence and slow time in a world where all that’s solid melts into air.

And now we’ve made a book. We’ve written the novella we would write at [the mysterious benefactor]’s house. Sending it off to readers feels a bit scary—part of the reason this was such a hard project to title was that for most of its life we referred to it either by the file name, or simply as

the novella

we would write

In [the mysterious benefactor]’s house.

It’s scary to think of those words out there as a product! But if a book is a commodity of a sort it’s a kind of letter, too, sent out in a bottle on the waves in search of a reader. Fragile ink on fragile paper, or ephemeral strings of ones and zeroes, here one minute and gone the next, leaving marks in dreams. Now it’s out there in the world. And we’ll have to see what it does there—what further moves it inspires in this great weird Time War we’re all, always, fighting to win. Or to lose.

Love,

Max

—-

This is How You Lose the Time War: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Visit Amal El-Mohtar’s site and Twitter. Visit Max Gladstone’s site and Twitter.

Author Sean Grigsby has a theory about people. It’s… not terribly optimistic. But it does have relevance for his latest novel, Ash Kickers, which features firefighters in a slightly alternate version of the world. One with dragons!

SEAN GRIGSBY:

Whatever catastrophe nature throws at us, people always seem to make it worse.

Not all of us. Some seek to help and not to hurt, to heal instead of destroy. Firefighters are just one example of a few good people trying to make a difference. I’m proud to call myself one. But, like I said, sometimes there are a few hateful assholes standing in our way.

The Smoke Eaters series is about firefighters versus newly-returned dragons, sure, but there are other big ideas at play. In the first book I talk about corrupt government using disasters for their own gain, and replacing first responders with robots. In Ash Kickers, it’s something much worse.

So, the year is 2123. Parthenon City, Ohio is doing great because they’ve discovered that dragon blood can save lives and heal all wounds. The smoke eaters are no longer slaying the scalies, but tranquilizing them and placing them in specialized enclosures to live out their happy, fire-breathing lives.

The miracle of dragon blood has attracted people from all over an ash-covered United States to flock to Ohio, desperately seeking cures for their loved ones and to benefit from the safety of a dragon-free city.

But some people don’t like that. A group forms, calling themselves PC First, led by a man named Duncan Sharp (it was the sleaziest alt-right name I could think of). They consider these immigrants to be “rats” who are going to use up all of the medicine and resources. I think it’s pretty obvious by now on whom I based these fictional jerks.

However, just like in our reality, Parthenon City has actual problems to worry about. A phoenix has emerged and it’s causing the dragons to go bonkers. A string of suicide arsons is also plaguing the city, leaving police and fire marshals baffled as to who is behind it.

PC First, though, is more concerned about hoarding all the things! Just like a dragon. This lack of compassion for fellow humans, this cruel self-importance… well, it just makes things worse. Not only for decent people trying to make their burning world a better place, but also for the schmucks who try to get ahead by shoving others down.

When I’m called to fight a blaze, I rely on my fellow firefighters. No one fights over the attack line. No one complains that they weren’t the one to carry grandma out of the window. Every single person on the fireground is important and works as a team. We have to. If we don’t, someone could die.

I hate to break it to you, but the world out there is on fire right now, and we can either get busy helping or get busy hurting. I’m strapping on my helmet and charging in to quell the flames. I hope you’ll come with, because I can use all the help I can get.

—-

Ash Kickers: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

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