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Neo-pro Interview: Nathaniel Lee

Who are you?  What’s your genre/history/etc?

Nathan: I’m Nathan, or Nathaniel Lee for my Srs Writer Name.  I write oddball stuff that probably would get stuck in “magical realism” or “slipstream” or whatever the term du jour is.  My standard approach is a basic modern-day setting with Something Different About It, and a dearth of explanation as to how or why, for example, words now cause physical damage to match their emotional damage or a hole in the ground is swallowing all the water in the world.  I think of myself as mostly a fantasy author, if that helps, treading on the borderlands of horror every now and then and rarely dipping into SF.

What’s your Race score?

Nathan: I’ve got 21 stories out right now because that’s all the stories I have in a finished state.  I’m a little behind with my polishing; I’ve got three or four stories waiting for revisions/edits, whereas normally I keep that down to two or fewer.  Duotrope says I’ve submitted somewhere around 140 stories in the past twelve months.  My policy is to juggle them right back out as soon as they hit my inbox with the rejection note.  I’ve got a “Writing” label in Gmail that is a deep purple, so when I look at my e-mail and it starts looking like a bruise, then that’s my To-Do List for the weekend.  Once they’re sent back out, I can archive the rejection letters and move on with my life.

  When did you “get serious” about being a writer?

Nathan: Around about 2008.  I am not making tons of progress, but on the other hand, I was fairly desultory about it for the first year or so, writing only a half-dozen stories or so.  I’ve written 20 stories so far in 2011, which has been much more satisfying.  I joined a support group of sorts where the ostensible goal was to produce 25 stories for the year, or one story approximately every two weeks.  I think I’m the only person left actually trying to achieve that, but it really helped for the early bits.  I cannot emphasize enough how much even the tiniest bit of outside accountability helps boost one’s productivity. The effect is astonishing, even on someone as lazy as I am.

  What are your goals with your writing?

Nathan: Well, it would be nice to be able to support myself with it, but I am fully aware that is a pipe dream.  I would be content as a D-grade celebrity, able to go to tiny local conventions and attend events as a Serious Writer or have the occasional successful signing at a local bookstore.  Be one of the names that gets scooped out of slush at a few decent magazines rather than languishing with the hoi polloi. Even just having a book published that I can go to a bookstore and see on the shelves.  I do not want fame and fortune; very mild success will suffice for me.

I’m frankly skeptical I’ll ever achieve that, mind you, but I’ll keep plugging away.  Next year is Novel Writing Year, where I will force myself to finish at least one Damned Book.  (I have three or four 50K+ half-finished manuscripts lying around.  My ADD and general pessimism keep sapping my will to continue on such long projects.)

Where do you see your career in 5 years?

Nathan: Well, barring some kind of unexpected surge, I might have a book and maybe an agent to go with it by then.  Judging by my progress to date, there will be an awful lot of running without much forward motion on the old treadmill.  I think this video pretty much sums up how I picture my writing career: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMO8Pyi3UpY

Do you have a particular story or idea you are dying to write? Or, if you could write a tie-in to any established universe/franchise, what would it be?

Nathan: Usually if I want to write something, I just do it.  I have a list of story seeds right on my desktop, and I open it up whenever I finish a story to pick the theme for the next one.
I’m not hugely into fanfiction – due to Sturgeon’s Law, mostly – but if I had the chance to work on, say, a novelization of an Avatar: The Last Airbender story/sequel/standalone, that would be a ton of fun.

What are your hobbies outside writing?

Nathan: I am a gigantic nerd.  Like, massive.  I read a lot of spec-fic, naturally, and I also enjoy neuroscience and psychology books or interesting science books in general.  I love roleplaying games – much of my writing skills were honed playing forum-based Vampire and D&D and so on, actually – and I am deeply into board games.  We have an entire walk-in closet that is pretty much full of board games.  I favor abstract strategy games, but I also like word games, war games, and your basic Euro-game with little wooden cubes and no way to burn down your enemy’s huts, alas.

I’m also a total hipster/snob about this stuff.  I’m really insufferable.  Like, I don’t play just D&D or GURPS; that’s so *pedestrian*.  No, the games I really like are weird offbeat indie games, like Don’t Rest Your Head and Nobilis and Mouse Guard.  I’m the guy who will cheerfully sit and chat in-character for hours but gets antsy after twenty minutes of combat.

What’s your writing process like?

Nathan: I call it “gumbo.”  I get an idea, and I jot it down.  Then it goes into the Pot of the Subconscious and simmers with all the other stuff down there.  Periodically, I pull something out and look at it more closely, see if I can see characters, a plot, etc., to go with the original striking image or phrase or thematic idea.  Often, I toss it back in the pot to keep cooking, but sometimes I can tell an idea is “done” and ready to go, at which point I dish it up, add spices, and serve.

To drop the metaphor, I am primarily a “pantser,” but not a pure one. I rarely just start writing without any forethought whatsoever.  I just don’t write any outlines or character sketches in advance; it all builds up in my head, organically, and I leave the details vague.  As I write, I find the specific notes I want to hit flow very smoothly out so long as the basic idea has “simmered” for long enough.  If I find myself hesitating a lot or dithering over whether, say, the protagonist has a beloved father or a lost spouse, I know the idea wasn’t cooked all the way through when I pulled it out.  I usually complete a story in one or two marathon sessions of two to six thousand words.  More rarely, I will work on a story slowly over a week or two, but I find those stories tend to need a lot more editing and refining afterward.

What’s been toughest about your journey so far as a writer?

Nathan: The resounding “meh” with which I have largely been met.  Hatred is fine; apathy is hard to swallow.  Given that I tend to love stories that everyone else also says “Meh” to and to dislike stories that receive widespread acclaim, I have attempted to resign myself to being a niche taste with a relatively limited audience.  Which I’m fine with; I just would like to find my audience already.

How do you keep yourself going?

Nathan: Well, I’m going to be making up stories no matter what; if I weren’t writing for publication, I’d be putting excessive amounts of time into some forum roleplaying game or something.  I figure, I might as well send the stories out and see if I can sell ’em, y’know?  It costs nothing, or almost nothing.  I keep a pessimistic outlook and assume failure is a given; that way, when I get rejection notes, I get the grim satisfaction of being proven right about how crappy my writing is, and when I manage to score a sale, it’s pure frosting.

Any tips or tricks you’ve figured out for improving your writing?

Nathan: Nope.  There’s only one way to expertise, and that’s practice.  Read a lot and write a lot.  That’s all you can do.

And finally, got anything you want to pimp?

Nathan: I maintain a daily writing blog of 100-word stories at www.mirrorshards.org.  It is called Mirrorshards, creatively enough, and it is the closest thing to an Author’s Website I have.  (There’s a link to my bibliography on it and everything.)  I’ve been writing a story a day since November 2008, though last year I dropped it to six days a week.  I do not update regularly enough, but I try to catch up whenever I miss a day or two.  I flatter myself that I have developed a decent level of talent at microfiction at this point.

All the stories there are under a CC license that explicitly allows derivative works so long as the original is credited, so anyone who wants to steal my ideas and write a “real” story with them can freely do so.  Not that anyone but me thinks they are interesting ideas, but still.

Neo-Pro Interview #5

Interview with Patty Jansen

Time for another neo-pro interview, this time with Patty Jansen.

Q: Who are you?  What’s your genre/history/etc?

Patty: I’m Australian (please allow for funny spelling), and I have at various times in the past been an agricultural scientist, librarian, non-fiction author, non-fiction bookseller and I’m also a mother of three teenagers. I write a lot of different subgenres within speculative fiction and have been known to write some mainstream fiction. Every time I think I’m completely swaying to one subgenre, I get the itch to write something totally different. That said, I am now no longer too shy to admit that my first love is realistic space-based hard SF and that I am a great fan of space opera, especially the type that considers sociological and economic aspects and the tensions they create on people in a strange environment. In fantasy, I enjoy anything that uses fresh and believable settings and concepts.

Q: What’s your Race score?

Patty: Funnily enough, I’ve stopped obsessing over how many submissions I have out. There are a number of venues where I don’t submit as frequently anymore, because I have other venues to send my stories, and those venues are hanging onto my work much longer than before. I tend to plan the submission path of each story much better, and don’t have so many stories out anymore.

Q: When did you “get serious” about being a writer?

Patty: I started writing seriously in 2004, after my father died of cancer, while there were still so many things in life he wanted to do. I had done some writing in high school and the first years at university, but then a relationship, work and kids played havoc with my time. I started writing again for myself in 2003, and met a friend through another interest who also wrote fiction. She was the first person to make me aware of the existence of critique groups. I joined SF-OWW in December 2004, the date I take as the start of my serious writing efforts. I was there for four years. SF-OWW is wonderful. It is the first place I’d advise a new writer of SF/F to go.

Q: What are your goals with your writing?

Patty: My goals? *Laughs* To have stories accepted in all the major magazines I enjoy reading. On top of that, to publish some novels. Will that happen? I think it the first probably looks increasingly likely. I’ve cracked Redstone SF, as they will be publishing ‘Party, with Echoes’ in May. The second aim… I don’t know, that is if you consider traditional publishing. I think the market is very much in a state of flux, and I have arrived at the wrong time, and am preparing to take my novels to Smashwords and Amazon, where I already have some works up. Times have changed, and while big publishers are hanging on by their fingernails and not investing much in new writers, if at all, small publishers are going broke, leaving writers in all sorts of contractual mess. I have been offered my share of poor contracts by small presses, and I think I can do better myself. Will I ever bother going back to trying to get an agent? Maybe if I hit the big-time. For now, I don’t care much. I’m selling my own stories, and employing my own designers and proofreaders. I quite like it like that. I was able to join SFWA on the back of my short fiction sales. I feel I don’t need the validation of an agent. I want to try doing my own thing. I’ve done it before, in non-fiction.

Q: Where do you see your career in 5 years?

Patty: I really don’t want to make predictions. I write because I enjoy it, and I take my writing where I can sell it. I’d like to have some income from writing that justifies me continuing with it, and that pays for the occasional con attendance, but beyond that, we’ll see.

Q: Do you have a particular story or idea you are dying to write? Or, if you could write a tie-in to any established universe/franchise, what would it be?

Patty: I’ve done quite well with my hard SF stories, but would dearly like to write a cracking good hard SF novel that sets space travel and colonisation in a modern light where the reader feels it could actually happen (in other words, with minimal ‘magic’ technology). Of course such a setting needs a story, and I have a cracking good story, but in the process of research (it involves interstellar travel), my desk has become buried in astronomy books. It’s all mightily interesting but sadly very distracting. Although the work has left me with some really good short stories. One day I will get my mind around writing that novel. It will be my aim to write hard SF with involved characters who have personalities and quirks and hates and real love lives. I want to write a book that not just hard SF buffs enjoy. I think that if His Name In Lights is anything to go by, I’ll be able to do that.

Q: What are your hobbies outside writing?

Patty: Besides astronomy, and orchids, I play the flute. Like so many kids at school, I played the recorder. Unlike many kids at school, I kept doggedly going with it, until I had a collection of nice wooden concert recorders and had been playing for ten years. Then I gave it up halfway through university. Two years ago, I heard of a local music group starting a new concert band for lapsed musicians. It’s great fun. The story of my musical life is very similar to what’s happened to my writing. There was neither the time nor the mental headspace for music or writing when I had a full-time job and three children under five. This is the reality I see a lot of writers box up against. They have a baby, or two. They try to keep going, but after a year or two, they are exhausted and have to give up. To these people, I’d want to say: it’s OK, it will come back.

Q: What’s your writing process like?

Patty: One word: chaotic. One of the things I have found about the writing process is that there is no such thing as a writing process. Sometimes the setting comes to you long before the story, sometimes you have the characters sorted out, but the setting needs TLC, and sometimes you have a good story, but the characters don’t yet click. Each of these eventualities needs a different approach. I’d describe myself as a pantser, but there have been occasions where I knew everything that would need to happen in the story, in which case I had an outline and was happy to follow it. But I’m equally happy to start a novel with a rough idea of how it should start and another rough idea of where the characters will be at the end, and just write random scenes and thoughts into a file. After I’ve done a number such disjointed drafts, I usually form an outline by performing a cut-and-paste and write the final rough draft. That’s usually draft 5. When that is completed, there’s only polishing to be done.

Q: What’s been toughest about your journey so far as a writer?  How do you keep yourself going?

Patty: I don’t think I’ve had it very tough, and to be honest, no one else here does. Writing is something we want to do, and if we want to do it, we have to set aside the time for it. If we don’t want to do that, we should quit whining and take up lawnbowls or croquet. Rejections are tough but you get used to them. And I honestly don’t feel I have the right to talk about tough when so many people out there don’t have a choice about doing mindless jobs, or even have no jobs at all. Doing what you enjoy doing can’t possibly be tough.

Q: Any tips or tricks you’ve figured out for improving your writing?

Patty: Don’t get hung up about other people’s ‘don’t’ rules. Well, according to this advice, you can go ahead and break this one now. I think at some stage developing writers live under the illusion that there is some magic pill and that if only the writers took it, success would be guaranteed. According to whom you speak, that magic pill may contain a total absence of the word ‘that’, or ‘was’, or getting rid of passive language, or some or other writing rule that can be followed off a cliff. I would say: relax. Those rules are written by writing teachers trying to define what constitutes a confident, authoritative voice. And that’s impossible to define, except to say ‘I’ll know it when I see it.’ My advice is therefore to read a lot of those books and stories by recently-published award-winning authors. My advice would be to volunteer as slush reader. And join some form of writers group that involves other people commenting on your work, and vice versa.

Q: And finally, got anything you want to pimp? 

Patty: I have some fiction up on Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/pattyjansen
I’ve recently added something I believe to be rare in fiction: a space-based SF book for younger readers. It’s not just a kids story. ‘The Far Horizon’ was written with adults in mind. I don’t know how many hours I’ve spent reading books aloud to my kids. I loved those books that had a hidden, higher level that engaged adults. Think movies like my favourite ‘The Incredibles’, which can be enjoyed on a pure action-based level by the kids, and on that plus a higher level by their parents. The Far Horizon is about a boy discovering a terrorist plot, but on a higher level it’s about discrimination. I truly love that story.
The same works are also on Amazon, but keep in mind that Smashwords is much more friendly to the non-US writer.
Besides this, I always like to pimp my blog where I talk about writing and science.

Neo-Pro Interview #3

Interview with Gwendolyn Clare

Who are you?  What’s your genre/history/etc?

Gwen: I’m Gwendolyn Clare. I’ll write (and read!) any genre that falls under the speculative umbrella, though I tend to write short SF and long contemporary fantasy. I’m also a PhD candidate in biology, so I research and teach nonfictional science for my day job.

What’s your Race score?

Gwen: Right now, 12, which is low but I’m not stressing about it. After all, if a story is fattening up your race score, that means it isn’t selling anywhere. I do think it’s important to keep sending ’em back out until either they sell or you decide to trunk them for good — I’m just not a particularly numerically motivated writer, I suppose.

When did you “get serious” about being a writer?

Gwen: 2006. I took a year off after college and wasn’t doing much besides working part-time and writing grad school applications, so I had some room to breathe for the first time in a while. It gave me the chance to examine my priorities and figure out that I needed to put the spec fic back into my life.

What are your goals with your writing?

Gwen: Back when I started writing seriously, I would have said my main goal was to get a story published in one of the Big Three. Well… check! My story “Ashes on the Water” appeared in the Jan ’11 Asimov’s. My next big hurdle as a writer is to publish a novel, and I’m toiling away toward that goal now.

Where do you see your career in 5 years?

Gwen: Pretty much where it is right now, only more so. It would be nice to keep selling short stories and start selling novels, but I don’t intend to quit my day job anytime soon. If I did, I’d probably spend most of the time engaged in “cat-waxing” activities and not actually get that much more writing done. Luckily for me, writing is one of those careers that doesn’t have to be performed in the 9-5 timeslot.

Do you have a particular story or idea you are dying to write? Or, if you could write a tie-in to any established universe/franchise, what would it be?

Gwen: I’m not much for tie-ins, but I do have much love for www.shadowunit.org, the greatest fanfic-inspired collaborative project ever. I’m drawn to collaborative efforts in general, and particularly those that explore creative uses of different media. I’d love to write a graphic novel someday, for much the same reasons.

What are your hobbies outside writing?

Gwen: I practice martial arts more-or-less seriously, my current style being I Liq Chuan, a Chinese-Malaysian style of kung fu that’s very subtle and challenging. I’m a lapsed artist in plenty of other forms — modern dance, acting, pottery, painting, photography, folk music — but it’s impossible to keep up with all of them. I’m focusing my energy on writing and martial arts for now.

What’s your writing process like?

Gwen: Like a tortoise. I write maybe one or two pages a night before bed. Sometimes on weekends, I’ll go wild and write a whole five pages in one sitting. I pick away at stories, always slowly, often with difficulty. I don’t wait for inspiration; I think “the muse” is a metaphor writers use as an excuse to not write. Not writing is easy. I could not write any day of the week (and sometimes do). Putting words on the page is work — enjoyable work, yes, but definitely work.

What’s been toughest about your journey so far as a writer?  How do you keep yourself going?

Gwen: The toughest part, I think, is coming to terms with the fact that those first couple novels probably aren’t going to sell, ever, period. It’s easy to trunk a short story because the investment is much less, but it’s hard to accept that your novel — a labor of love that cost you months of time and effort — may be just not up to snuff. That’s part of growing as a writer, though. Most writers have to fight their way through at least one crap novel before they figure out how to do it right. The important thing is to not let past failures shake your faith in the awesomeness of your current project, and that’s something I struggle with.

Any tips or tricks you’ve figured out for improving your writing?

Gwen: There’s a plethora of writing advice out there, so my tip is to only follow advice if it works for you. Everyone’s creative process is different. If a particular approach isn’t helping improve the quantity and quality of your finished products, toss it out the window. Take the topic of revision, for example: some writers swear by it, others swear against it, but the reality is that different stories require different amounts of revision to get where they need to be. Applying any one dogma to all situations not only runs the risk of failure, it will fail reliably at least part of the time.

And finally, got anything you want to pimp?

Gwen: Watch the Clarkesworld website for my recent sale, “Perfect Lies,” which goes live on March 1st. I also have a story in Ekaterina Sedia’s forthcoming anthology Bewere the Night (Prime Books, available April 19th).  I blog semi-regularly over at gwendolynclare.livejournal.com

Thanks to Gwendolyn for doing this interview.  I’ll try not to hunt her down in her sleep for getting a spot in “Bewere the Night” (I had a story held for it (for 5 months!) and then rejected at the last minute, but I’m not bitter.  Yet *grin*).  Be sure to check out her Clarkesworld story, it’s pretty freakin’ awesome.