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The Big Idea: Susan McDonough-Wachtman

Posted on February 23, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      7 Comments

They say good things come to those who wait. They also, however, say that the waiting is the hardest part. In both cases, Susan McDonough-Wachtman has reason to understand each aphorism, and in this Big Idea for the aptly-named Snail’s Pace, she explains why.

SUSAN McDONOUGH-WACHTMAN:

I started writing Snail’s Pace in 1984. 1984!

I typed the first draft on a word processor I bought when I was working at Montgomery Ward — it used thermal paper. I’d like to say I was inspired by Orwell, but I know I wasn’t. I don’t think I had read any Orwell at that time. I had read Heinlein and Asimov and watched classic Star Trek over and over. But my true delights were romantic suspense novels ( I was 24-years-old). I was inspired by Elizabeth Peters’ Amelia Peabody, intrepid Egyptologist, and by Mary Stewart’s The Gabriel Hounds which introduced me to Lady Hester Stanhope, the British “Queen of the Desert.”

I thought: What would happen if one of those fearless, sanctimonious, oblivious British women went to space and met aliens from other galaxies? Wouldn’t she be just as charming and aggravating and self-righteous as ever? And I came up with Susannah McKay, British orphan stranded in Hong Kong and looking for a job.

Susannah jumped at the chance to tutor an alien aboard a ship — she naturally assumed the child was Chinese and that the ship had sails. She considered it a great adventure to take this job — and also her duty as a “civilized” person. She did not anticipate snail aliens on a humid spaceship. The hardest plot problem I had was to come up with a reason for the aliens to want Susannah. This is part of the explanation I created for myself:

“Simtlack admired Queen Victoria. She had longevity —unusual in an Earth ruler. She also had self-discipline and a very strong sense of right and wrong. Just the things his son most needed to learn… Simtlack’s tentacles wove thoughtfully. Yes, she sounded quite smooth. He directed the Captain to set course for Earth, then oozed his way out of the communications center. The slimer had to clean up after him.”

I wanted to pit Susannah’s innate sense of superiority against an advanced alien civilisation with shocking table manners. I had a lot of fun creating shocks for Susannah’s sensibilities. Unfortunately, my “quirky” premise has never appealed to any traditional publisher.

I was a veteran of the short fiction trenches then. I had spent a considerable amount of time and money sending out typed paper manuscripts in their SASEs. I got some very nice rejections from George H. Scithers and others, but the only story I actually sold was to a publication which went out of business before my story went to print. 

I got an agent for Snail’s Pace in fairly short order (so exciting!), but these were the sort of responses we got:

(ALT TEXT – “Dear Mr. Rhodes,

Thank you for sending SNAIL’S PACE by Susan Sanchez. While I found some of the protagonist’s alien adventures quite amusing, the story was so far-fetched that it was difficult to develop an emotional interest in the characters. In general, we prefer science fiction with a real grounding in science to this type of satire.”)

(ALT TEXT -“Dear Mr. Rhodes:

Enclosed is SNAIL’S PACE, by Susan Sanchez. We publish few science fiction stories, because there does not seem to be a large market for them among young adult readers.”)

(ALT TEXT -“Dear Mr. Rhodes:

I’m returning SNAIL’S PACE, which came to me as I’m the new editor-in-chief of Four Winds Press, and am sorry to say that I won’t be making an offer for it. It’s an imaginative story, but I was concerned that its quirkiness might make it difficult to sell.”)

My agent gave up. I gave up. I spent the next ten years raising children and writing stories for and about them. The computer age arrived. I got an Apple with 8 inch floppies, typed stories in Appleworks, and created a homepage on Netscape. When I read about PublishingOnline.com’s $10,000 writing contest, I dug out Susannah’s story, typed it anew, revised, and sent it in. I went to Seattle’s Hugo House where I was awarded $5,000 for second place and Snail’s Pace was published!

I was given a wonderful review by Lisa DuMond at SF Site, who suggested the title “Anna and the Snail of Siam.”  She liked the quirkiness of Snail’s Pace! I thought I would soon have tens, if not millions, of readers! But PublishingOnline was not Amazon, and my story was the death knell of another publisher. That’s how it felt, at least, when the company disappeared a few years later. 

So here I am again, trusting Susannah’s “quirkiness” to another publisher. I cried when I read in their acceptance that Water Dragon’s Acquisitions Editor said, ““Love it, read the whole thing, already want a sequel.” I did warn them about my track record.

It seems appropriate, in retrospect, that Susannah’s fraught journey, begun with confidence and not a little hubris, should mirror my own. She faces her challenges with courage, as I hope I do, and she weathered her dark night with the help of her friends. (I had an online women’s writer’s group through Netscape, and later joined OnlineWritingWorkshop.com.) Susannah is inspired by her dead parents, as I am, and in particular her father. My father, Francis Michael McDonough, was a big fan of Susannah’s story. It was he who named it Snail’s Pace. My first grandson, Chaol Francis Michael, was born February 4th. It feels like the perfect timing to send Susannah out into her quirky universe again.

Snail’s Pace: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Google Play|Kobo

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The Big Idea: Matt Ruff

Posted on February 21, 2023    Posted by Athena Scalzi      12 Comments

New York Times bestselling author Matt Ruff is back with his first ever sequel, The Destroyer of Worlds. Follow along in his Big Idea as he tells what led him to write a continuation of Lovecraft Country.

MATT RUFF:

This novel is a departure for me. Over the course of my career, I’ve written in a wide variety of genres, but I’ve never published a sequel before. Typically, one volume is all I need to say everything I have to say about a particular subject. But Lovecraft Country was different. I really fell in love with the characters, and even before I finished the first book, I knew there were more stories I wanted to tell about them.

One of the most important questions I had to answer in returning to the world of Lovecraft Country was what the new novel would actually be about. I’m not talking about plot; I’m talking about theme, a unifying idea that would help me choose among the many possible paths the narrative could take.

A central fixture of Lovecraft Country is The Safe Negro Travel Guide, my fictional version of The Negro Motorist Green Book. The real-life Green Book ceased publication in the mid-1960s, not long after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. If I were going to turn Lovecraft Country into a series, it seemed to me that would be a good way to end it: the last scene could take place on the night the final edition of the Guide rolled off the printing press.

And when I did the math on that, another thought struck me. The character in Lovecraft Country I identify most closely with is Horace Berry, the budding comic-book artist. Horace is twelve years old when Lovecraft Country begins; in 1964, he’ll be twenty-two, ready to go out in the world and seek his fortune as an adult. It occurred to me that I could use the sequel—or rather, sequels, since I was clearly talking about multiple books here—to tell Horace’s coming of age story. His journey to adulthood would become the central arc around which all the other characters’ adventures would be organized. And each novel in the series would focus on a different aspect of that journey.

Which brings me to The Destroyer of Worlds. Shortly before the novel begins, one of Horace’s friends, a girl named Celia Fox, is killed in a particularly senseless fashion. When he overhears someone trying to comfort her stricken father by saying, “She’s in a better place now,” Horace reacts with a mixture of rage and dismay. “She’s better off being dead? How does that make sense?” And this starts him questioning the nice story he’s been told about how you get to go to heaven when you die. What if there is no heaven? he wonders. What if this life is all there is, and if it’s stolen or cut short, there’s no reckoning for that? And how do I live with the burden of not knowing?

So the book is about death: about coming to terms with mortality, and finding hope in the face of the ultimate uncertainty. And it’s also about history, because part of the answer Horace is seeking lies in the past. In one of Destroyer’s subplots, his cousin Atticus and his uncle Montrose travel to the old Swincegood Plantation in North Carolina, where, a hundred years ago, their ancestor Simon Swincegood began his escape from slavery. Their intent is to mark the anniversary by retracing the route Simon took into the heart of the Great Dismal Swamp, but a run-in with an old enemy turns their historical reenactment into a real life-and-death pursuit.

It’s a nail-biting adventure, but it also has a point: Horace isn’t the first person to wrestle with doubt in the face of death. The people who came before us—who made our lives possible—dealt with the same uncertainties we do, and the fact that they found the strength to keep going is evidence that we can too. Or as Horace’s mother, Hippolyta, puts it: “If the things we don’t know were all bad, you wouldn’t even be here to worry about them. So when you feel yourself despairing, remember that just because you can’t think of a reason to hope, doesn’t mean there isn’t one. And as for God, remember that even a universe where He didn’t exist could still act, sometimes, like one where He does.”

That’s what the book is about, in the big picture sense. But of course, since this is Lovecraft Country, it’s also a story about magic and monsters, about powerful sorcerers who want to rule the world, and about ordinary heroes who are smart enough and brave enough—and when all else fails, lucky enough—to win the day. And the real joy for me as a writer is that I get to take these weightier themes of mortality and faith and history and combine them with all the fun tropes of fantasy and science-fiction and weird tales. It’s why I was so eager to return to this story, and why I look forward to continuing it.

While I wait for Destroyer’s debut, I’ve started planning a third volume in the Lovecraft Country saga, which will be about dreams, and desire, and first love. I still have a lot of details to work out, but I know where I’m going with this story now, and with Horace as my guide, I’m confident I’ll find my way.

The Destroyer of Worlds: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

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The Big Idea: Jane Yolen

Posted on February 15, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      5 Comments

This Big Idea, for Jane Yolen’s new book The Scarlet Circus, tangentially involves me! In, I must admit, pretty flattering way.

JANE YOLEN:

I have loved John Scalzi, his work, and his Big Idea column for many years. I even wrote a bunch of stuff for him along the way. But in the manner of fantasy and fairy and romance fiction, there is no real reason for going any further than stating that. There was, alas, no romance, not even a small slightly off-color pun between us. 

But if he had been a jinn or an alien or a time traveler . . . the kind you can find in my stories, well then, our love affair might have made it into my newest book, The Scarlet Circus, stories and poems about fantasy (and science fictional) love.

So, perhaps he might at least have made it into the footnotes or one of the poems in the back. Alas, the hour of our NON-romance has past (although I have to say that I am newly remarried after fifteen years of widowhood, and all Scalzi has to show for it is this small post in his Big Idea column).

This surprises us both, because neither he nor I knew that I was much of a romantic fiction kind of person. But when I began looking at my backlog of published short stories, why, there they were! I put it down to being eighty-three and not remembering everything I have written from the 1960s onward.

So, John, shed a tear, or a laugh, or a sigh. Make a memory that never existed. And settle down to love the humans and others who find romance or a passing fancy in these stories. It couldn’t hurt!

The Scarlet Circus: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Visit the author’s site.

The Big Idea: Paz Pardo

Posted on February 14, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      2 Comments

Writer Robert Benchley once noted that you can do anything, as long as it’s not the thing you’re supposed to be doing. Paz Pardo knows a little bit about that – in fact, it’s one reason why her colorful new novel The Shamshine Blind is now out in the world.

PAZ PARDO:

What if emotions were weaponized—literally. What if someone could shoot you full of envy, or ennui, or joy? What if you could feel giddy, teenage obsession just by taking a tab at a party? Would you ever trust your own feelings?

The Shamshine Blind happened because I ran out of books in an internet-less house in the Argentine Andes. I was a Playwright, who Wrote Theater. I’d just been accepted into playwriting grad school! But I’d discovered that I wrote best with a constant input of fun books with smart protagonists, weird worlds, and intricate plots. And here I was, working on a grim play about my grandmother’s Alzheimer’s and the Argentine dictatorship (great fodder for grant applications! Very hard to write!) and I’d run out of everything to read.

So I did the only thing I could think of—I started writing my own book. I had this idea for colorful weaponized emotions: psychopigments. Like paintball, but with feelings. I couldn’t shake the thought of chaos caused by jealous couples dosing each other with Envy Green. And once I started, the world kept growing. The main character, Kay Curtida, grew on me too.

Worldbuilding started out as a hoot. Who would’ve discovered the tech that turned emotions into weapons? Argentina, with the highest rate of psychoanalysts per capita in the real world, was the obvious choice to me (and I was immensely tickled by the idea of Argentina as a superpower). They would’ve used psychopigments to win the Falklands War in the ‘80s. Most of my friends in the States didn’t even know that Britain and Argentina had once faced off over a bunch of rocky, sheep-covered islands; setting that as a turning point in world history sounded excellent to me.

But as I kept writing, the repercussions of these choices made the world I was imagining a disconcertingly serious place. The brutal Argentine dictatorship, with its neo-fascistic willingness to murder civilians to enforce “traditional values,” would’ve stayed in power—would even have provided a model of government others would seek to emulate. It started out almost as an escapist joke, but in an era of creeping fascism I found myself writing about a world that felt uncomfortably familiar.

At the heart of the book was Curtida, a know-it-all with a keen eye for the absurd and a blind spot the size of the Argentine Pampa when it came to her feelings. Curtida works a small-town beat as a member of the Psychopigment Enforcement Agency, just south of the ruins of San Francisco. She’s extremely competent—a mixed blessing for someone without the interest or tools for politicking that could nab her a transfer to a bigger city.

Curtida’s snarky commentary grabbed me from the get-go, but it was her emotional blind-spot that really kept my going. Growing up, I was always afraid of being too emotional. I was often one of the few girls in the nerdy boys’ spaces—whether that was a Magic: The Gathering tournament in middle school, the robotics competition in high school or the computer science classroom in college. I saw my male friends trying to decide if their own feelings were rational, if they were “objectively” worth paying attention to; and I knew that, as a girl, I was doubly likely to get dismissed if I got too touchy-feely.

So I watched my emotions carefully, analyzing each reaction I had to see if it was reasonable, dismissing the ones that didn’t make the cut—oh, I’m sad because I’ve been listening to depressing music; oh, I’m angry because it’s raining again. Usually if I didn’t like a feeling, I could find some tortured logic to explain it as coming from outside of me. Squash it down and ignore it, pretend it wasn’t really mine. This was not conducive to robust mental health, but it got me through college and my early twenties. Most months, I was a pretty functional depressed person.

Curtida’s got those same tendencies, but she lives in a world in which feelings literally do come from outside of you, thanks to the psychopigments she spends her life chasing through the streets of Daly City. It’s a world in which that depressive ability to squash down feelings can come in really handy: being good at ignoring your emotions is important when you’re trying to do something like arrest a crook who’s been contaminating the emotional landscape of the whole neighborhood with runoff from their illegal Cyan Sadness lab. But of course, Curtida’s human, and those feelings she can’t—or won’t—see continually make messes in her personal life. Without knowing what’s going on inside her, how could she navigate loss? Love? Her mother? I found myself writing a person I could relate to on a much deeper level than just the wise-cracking gumshoe I’d started out with—someone who struggled with the same things I’ve struggled with throughout my adult life.

My big idea of paintball-but-for-feelings started as a fun escape, but like my favorite great escapes it turned out to have something deeper going on as well. I think it’s still fun—if not, I really screwed up!—but eight years later, I finally feel like I’ve written the book I was hoping to read back when I started.

I guess this means I should get back to working on that play about Alzheimer’s…

The Samshine Blind: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powells

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