RealityBypass

Welcome to another Interview Friday, folks! I’m really excited for this next one, Elizabeth Bear’s Sci-Fi is some of my favorite out there. Imagine my delight to discover she writes Fantasy as well! Wooohooooo! She has won a long list of awards and honorifics for her writing, including the following in 2008:

• Philip K. Dick Memorial Award nominee (Undertow)
• Lambda Award nominee (A Companion to Wolves) (written with Sarah Monette)
• Asimov’s Readers Choice Award for 2007 (“Tideline”)
• Hugo Award for Best Short Story (“Tideline”)
• Sturgeon Award (“Tideline”) Sidewise Award nominee (“Lumiere”)
• Romantic Times Reviewers Choice Nominee (“Dust”)

Vital Stats

Lives: Connecticut 
Webpage: Elizabeth Bear
Books: The Promethean Age : Blood & Iron (2006) Whiskey & Water (2007), Blood & Iron paperback release (June 2008) Ink & Steel (July 2008) Hell & Earth (August 2008). Iskryne world (with Sarah Monette): A Companion to Wolves (Oct 2007) The Edda of Burdens: All the Windwracked Stars (Oct 2008), By the Mountain Bound (forthcoming Oct 2009) The Sea thy Mistress (forthcoming Oct 2010)
 (And many Sci-Fi novels, short stories and more!) 
Fun Fact: She was born the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins
Genres: Norse Fantasy, Historical Fantasy and Contemporary Urban Fantasy, Sci-Fi 

On to the Interview:

1. What is the fantasy cliché that most bothers you, or what is your book pet-peeve?

Oh, I have a ton. Usually, I start writing a novel because I’m annoyed by some common trope and want to undermine it. Thus, the companion-animal fantasy in A Companion To Wolves, to choose an example at random.

2. What is your favorite fantasy critter or fairy tale character and why? No, it doesn’t have to be one you write about.

I have to pick just one? Oh, that’s hard. I love dragons And they are so very rarely done well. They have to be used sparingly, I think, because it’s easy to wear the luster off–but a good dragon is unmatchable.

3. We all know it’s easy to get distracted when a project is taking its own sweet time to bubble. What is your Achilles heel when it comes to getting distracted from writing?

I’m not actually all that procrastinatory. More often, my frustration is wanting to write and finding that the story isn’t quite cooked yet.

4. With the holidays coming up what is your favorite winter activity?

Well, I live in New England, so my favorite winter activity is waiting for the weather to clear. Mostly, my life doesn’t change too much in winter: I do less hiking, and more climbing indoors as opposed to out. If I had a dog and a fireplace, my favorite thing would be sitting in front of the fireplace with my dog and a mug of cider.

5. I’ve heard of inspirational eating, so when you’re settled in to get things done is there a particular food that you just have to have on hand?

Not in particular. I often have characters who crave a particular thing, though–I’m a method writer, apparently, and one of the things I do in order to write a character is feed myself things they like. This can be very problematic when it comes to foodie characters, or alcoholics, or a couple of the Shadow Unit characters, whose physical demands are in excess of five thousand kilocalories a day.

6. What does it take to write a really good villain? Do you ever find yourself in a mental space that scares you or makes you wonder if that really came out of YOUR head?

I have shelves full of forensic textbooks. The contents of my own head are not particularly scary to me. Although I did once deeply worry an ex-boyfriend by getting a little too thoroughly into the head of Vlad III or Wallachia. I don’t often write villains, per se. I write antagonists, which is to say, people who are on the opposite side from the protagonists, but who are not puppy-kicking evil. Some people consider this a strength of my work. Others, a weakness.

7. Which of your characters gave you the most trouble and was the hardest to write for?
 
Michelangelo, one of the protagonists of Carnival. He’s a bit of a sociopath, and he really did not want to let me get into his head and get access to his motives.

8. We all have darling lines or paragraphs in our stories. Stephen King even says we should kill them. What is your most favorite murdered darling from any of your books?
 
I try not to cut out the good bits, actually. Because I am a chronic under-writer–apparently the opposite of Mr. King, who I know claims to cut 15% of his first draft–I rarely have editors telling me to cut things. More often, they get after me to add bits, and explain more, and establish things more. So my second draft is usually 15% longer than my first draft, because of all the stuff I left out. That advice to “murder your darlings,” I think, often gets misinterpreted. People take it to mean that you should cut out any bit you like, which is just nonsense. What it means, or what I understand it to mean, is if you are getting attached to the pretty at the expense of the story and the character development, the pretty has to come out. If you find yourself going through amazing elaborations to avoid cutting a sentence because you think it’s pretty… cut the sentence. That’s just part of good editing.

9. What is your worst writing habit, the thing which you keep telling yourself you’re going to change and you do it anyway?

That’s another meme I think is nonsense. Any writing process that works is a good process, and this idea that you have to do it in a particular approved way to be a Real Writer is foolishness. As long as what we are doing produces quality, finished work, and the general quality trend is upwards, we’re doing it right. That said, my worst habit is probably a workaholic streak. Even when I don’t really need to be working–or when it might be smart for me to take a break and let my brain regenerate–I often keep pushing. I’ve gotten better about it, though. I’m on vacation right now!

10. If you were going to interview another author, whose brain would you want to pick?

Living or dead? I dunno. I never really thought about it. I do study the work of other writers for technique, and there are some books of writing craft I think are indispensable–John Gardner’s On Becoming A Novelist is a great book on how to observe like a writer. I’d like to buy Edward Gorey a cup of tea.

This is somewhat off topic, but considering a big part of what we do in these themed months is review books, I figured I could get away with it.

Reviewing books is scary! When you are a writer you know just how much heart and soul goes into the act of writing, so it’s hard to sit down and decide whether you think a book is Good or Bad and why. I have, however, realized something even scarier. Reviewing books as one of the Intellectual Elite Literary Analysts! I just finished writing a comparitive analysis on the work of Sara Paretsky, an author I love and a Chicana author I have recently discovered, Lucha Corpi. The thought briefly crossed my mind that I should maybe let the authors know about the paper, especially since my Professors have suggested it might be publishable (They have to read it first, of course, they’ve just heard my proposal!)…

But I realize that speaking with Literary Scholar Authority on a work is scarier than simply reviewing it for reading interest or not. After all I’m drawing conclusions on how the novels function from feminist vs feminine perspectives, and I know I may very well anger people in my interpretation.

I’m used to writing analysis of the work of long dead authors. This is the first time I’ve done a research paper on the work of living authors. It’s hard to think of myself as a literary scholar, but I’ve got a number of years of training in it now!

Still…

Eeep!

Anyway we now return you to your regularly scheduled Fantasy December