1) You were in Women Destroy Science Fiction–a project I greatly admire. What appeals to you about the project? What was your story like?
The Destroy series has been so phenomenally successful and huge that it’s hard to remember that it started as an announcement that basically went, “You know what? Screw this. We’re going to do a thing. Details forthcoming, let us know if you’re in.” I’m both irritable and prone to scheming wild projects, so an announcement like that is a perfect recipe to pique my interest. I sent them my info: i actually volunteered to read their hate mail for them since I get a bit of a kick out of getting hate mail. I have a weekly quota of cackling I have to meet and reading hate mail makes it really easy for me to hit it.
They did not take me up on that offer, but did ask me to write a personal essay for a series they were putting up on their Kickstarter page. There’s less cackling involved in that sort of support, but I was game. It’s pretty short and you can still read it online if you want. It’s mostly about how I found SF at just the right moment for it to assure me that I wasn’t as alone or strange as I thought I was.
What I like most about the Destroy project as it’s grown and developed is how conversations around it have grown and developed. A lot of voices that were always there, but usually at the edges or hard to go find have been amplified and brought closer to the main stream of the conversation. That’s the kind of effect that stretches beyond a single anthology or project. Twenty or thirty years from now, I’ll get to be the pedant droning on in convention hallways about how this and that other thing taken for granted ties back to this project and here see all the ways I can tie them together. People will humor me and act like I’m being terribly interesting, and when they finally escape, I’ll cackle. (I’ll probably still have a quota to meet.)
You have an unpublished novel. You quote what John O’Neill had to say about it: “…an unpublished novel set in a gorgeously baroque far future where a woman who is not what she seems visits a sleepy space port… and quickly runs afoul of a subtle trap for careless spies.” Can you tell us more? How did you come up with the idea, and did it surprise you where it went?
That novel was a bit of an experiment. I had a big, sprawling space opera universe that I’d been building in the back of my head for years while working on other things. It was time to start actually working on things there, but while I knew a lot about it, things in the back of my head tend to be squishy and hard to work with. So I decided to do a safety novel first, something that would let me touch on the major set pieces without any risk of pinning myself in later or breaking something I’d need.
Which meant I had no idea what I was going to do with it when I sat down. I knew I wanted a pair of sisters as the protagonists, and I wanted the younger sister to do some protecting of the older sister, then just kept throwing things out there to see what happened.
You used to podcast poetry–how do you go about figuring how to give a poem voice?
I hosted the Strange Horizons poetry podcast, but I did as little reading of the poetry as possible; that’s our venue for getting in a variety of voices and it seems to me that if people are particularly invested in my voice, they can get plenty of it in the fiction podcast.
That said, I would step in when we were short on readers or there was a poem that particularly caught my eye. (Editor’s privilege is a marvelous thing!) Reading poetry is both easier and harder than reading prose; poems are frequently crafted with a very deliberate ear toward how they sound, which means you’re not likely to find the text dull to interpret vocally. At the same time, you then have to do justice to the choices made in how the poem was put together, and justify it being you doing the reading rather than any given reader’s interior head voice. So I look for the tools the poet gave me, then look for the ways I’m best suited to using those tools and build my performance around that. I’m a complete sucker for consonant clusters and sibilants.
What was wonderful about running the Strange Horizons podcast?
Running the Strange Horizons podcast is fantastic. I’ve given the poetry podcast over to Ciro Faienza, who was one of our staff readers for the poetry podcast and the single most common provocation of fanmail the podcast has gotten. That podcast takes a lot of work, and I’d gotten to the point where I was very aware of a lot of ways it could be better, but realistically wasn’t ever going to have the time to implement any of those improvements. Ciro immediately made some great changes and I’m really looking forward to what he does as he gets into his groove.
The politic, and mostly true, answer to what’s fantastic about doing the fiction podcast is getting to read the stories early and then pull them apart and put them back together in order to give a good reading. The slightly more true answer, which has been growing over the course of the podcast, is the responses I get to the podcasts from the writers and the audience. I pretty much only consume short fiction in audio form these days, which leaves me very grateful to all the places that are making it available. Every time somebody reminds me that I’m one of those people is really great, especially when they’re reminding me because they liked what I did.
But also, I really like getting to pull the stories apart and put them back together.
So, on your website, you claim that the rumors I am a figment of your imagination are compelling. What are those rumors and why are you compelled by them?
I actually exist as a multi-bodied individual quietly working to bring the world under the rule of a mischievous alien intelligence through widespread distribution of coffee and sunlight. We’ve already conquered most of California and are making great headway in Washington. Every sip of coffee you take, and every day with bright, clear skies, our agenda advances that much further.
Once, upon being informed of this (it’s no fun to subvert an entire civilization if they don’t know it’s happening – you have to advertise) the person I was warning expressed skepticism about the veracity of my claims. Apparently, according to them, the very concept of a multi-bodied individual is imaginative speculation and the idea of being one even more so.
There’s not a lot I can do in the face of such claims. There are people who don’t believe in the moon landing. There’s not a lot I can do about people who insist on remaining skeptical about coffee and sunshine powered conspiracies. But I do find such relentless denial of obvious reality to provide a fascinating insight into human psychology, especially when the stakes are this high.
The projects question: got anything you’d like to mention to readers?
