Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 (20 page)

Miriam’s scenes in the rain started out as my wanting to make sure there was some reference to the Wind and the Rain song that Feste sings in
Twelfth Night
, but when I did some research on Jews in mid-19th-century Persia, I came across an actual, historical law that forbade Jews from going out in the rain. Which, of course is terrible, but it opened up a lot for me to do with Miriam. So I loved writing these rain scenes for Miriam, because the mere act of her being outside in the rain is this act of intense rebellion and freedom. Which is what a lot of Miriam’s character is about.

I’m also really proud of the tiny things that people might not notice — little links between smaller characters, like which professor is sleeping with which other professor’s mother, and who Fiona’s first client was when she was a prostitute. I love little links like that.

What makes for a compelling protagonist in general and in a speculative fiction in particular? Can you talk a little about creating Violet or another character?

I don’t know if there’s a good answer to that question, because not all characters are compelling to all people. I know readers who refuse to read anything with female or queer protagonists, because as straight men, they feel they just can’t relate to anyone else who isn’t a straight man. This might be more a limited mindset, but it’s an extreme example of the idea that not all characters appeal to all people. That said, I think what’s important is making sure your characters are complete, and well-rounded. That means that while Ashton is a bit of a flamboyant dandy gay-man-stereotype, I tried to make him more than that — he worries about his sister, keeps things from his family, he has contradictory motivations and doesn’t always know why he feels a certain way — that’s human. Were he just a flouncing stereotype, or merely had a nod to humanity by giving him some secret sadness that pops out for one scene, he would be doing a great disservice to the reader.

In the case of Violet, it would have been easy to fall into the super-girl trap, where she had no flaws and way amazing in every way and never doubted herself, etc. etc. etc. But doubt makes a person real. Flaws make people real. Violet is flawed — she’s massively overconfident, judges people fairly quickly, and often times doesn’t really know what she’s feeling because she’s so focused on her inventions. But she’s also amazing. I love her because of her flaws, not in spite of them, and I think that’s how you make characters that people really love — no matter the genre — by making them human.

What does having a character disguise her gender allow you to do?

It lets you talk openly about gender. “Oh you do things this way” and such. Essentially, for those of us who are cisgendered, we grow up conditioned and socialized a certain way based on our sex (even your super-liberal hippie families can’t keep a child from seeing the pink and blue differentiations at some point. I mean, maybe if they were raised in a cult-situation, cut off from the rest of the world… but I digress). When you have a character who switches the outward appearance of her sex (I won’t speak to writing a trans-character, I think that’s probably very different as it’s about physically changing into what the character already is on the inside), you get to examine that socialization from the point of view of someone outside that socialization. So, things that are taken for granted about the way a man behaves might be questioned by a woman disguised as a man.

I think about that
Simpsons
episode a lot. The one where the school gets divided up by gender, and Lisa disguises herself as a man to joins the boys section. She does this because in the girls side she finds the math to be nonsense and soft (”what does a four feel like?”), so the implication is that she thinks “like a man” (although the episode is simultaneously mocking the idea that genders think specific ways) — but she doesn’t know how to “act like a man.” I think having a character disguised as the opposite gender is great, because you get to explore the performativity of gender. It’s not about how people think or look or any of that — it’s how they behave
without thinking
. Which is fascinating stuff.

What spin have you put on this classic situation?

I think the academic setting is a new one — so often you see women disguised as men to go to war, or travel alone, but it’s not usually a “for academic achievement” scenario. But also I really tried to explore not just what it means to dress up as a dude in Victorian London, but what it means to be a woman — how does Cecily, who gets to go to the school as a woman, compare to Violet, in terms of how they think about their situations. And what about Miriam, who is there, but not as a student? Or Fiona, who is completely outside it? I tried to really deconstruct so much of what gender meant back then. How’s that for a tedious, academic answer?

Did it ever get hard juggling such a large ensemble of characters?

I love large ensembles. They’re not hard for me to keep track of because every character is totally human in my mind — what’s hard is
cutting
. Just because I know a thousand different things about each character and wrote more detailed backstories and scenes doesn’t mean they belong in the book. But when I cut parts of their story, it feels like I’m hurting friends. But you have to do it. Not every piece of information is relevant. Fiona, especially, got a lot of her scenes and story cut, and I had to fight my agent to keep what is there. She was almost totally done away with. But I think she’s important because she’s the only really lower-class woman in the book. She’s the one who has to fight to survive and do whatever she can, no matter how mercenary it might seem, and she’s the one who can call Violet on her BS, and also the one Violet turns to when she wants to know what behaving like a woman should look like (which gets us back to gender performance).

But back to your question — like I said, I had to cut a lot. That’s the hardest part of writing a large cast. To give you an idea, the book was over 100 pages longer before we gave it to my publisher. That’s over 100 pages I essentially cut from my characters lives. But the cuts had to be made. Otherwise there’d be a 30 page stall in the middle of the action to talk about Bracknell’s childhood. And while that might be interesting, it isn’t necessary for the book.

That said, I also know
reading
a large ensemble can be hard for some folks. But I wasn’t trying to write a big action adventure here. I was trying to write something about people in a place and time and how they are shaped by the world and shape it in return. This goes back to your question about style: Were I trying to write a fast-paced gunslinger, there wouldn’t have been a large ensemble to begin with. The book writes itself and it creates exactly the right amount of characters.

Did the cast and crew ever get out of hand in the writing of this? Did they surprise you?

I’m not a writer who “shows up to the page” and sits in front of a blank screen waiting for the next word to come. I respect that technique but it doesn’t work for me. I’m a lie-in-bed-staring-at-the-ceiling-thinking writer. I don’t sit down at the computer until I know the next scene I’m going to write and then it flows out very quickly. I go back and fiddle with language as I’m writing it, of course, but overall, when I sit down at the keyboard, I know what’s going to happen. So the characters never surprise me as I’m writing. Sometimes, when I’m doing the thinking part, one of them will suddenly smack me upside the head with what should have been an obvious choice, but when you’re just lying there thinking the characters and story have such free reign that there are no surprises, because everything is a surprise.

What’s next for you? You mentioned writing a noir novel. Can you talk a little more about that?

I only just finished a rough draft, and it needs some serious work before I even show it to my agent, but it’s a futuristic
noir
, a sort of
Bladerunner
with climate change sort of thing. The central character is a detective named Simone Pierce, and she gets caught up in what first appears to be a cheating husband case, then an art heist, but in the end is something stranger than all that. Again, I’m playing with gender a bit as I am familiar with noir themes and archetypes and I’ve switched around the genders while trying to keep the old-school
noir
feel alive. So we have a female detective with men constantly fawning over her, and a possible
homme fatale
, plus a female nemesis and a female partner-figure. So it’s classical
noir
, but with science fiction and with plenty of gender bending, which changes how the classical noir elements come across.

My agent and I are also hoping to try to sell my first novel, which is a magical realism-y novel about seven interconnected people in NYC who don’t realize how connected they are. I’m also working on a YA and I have a rough draft of a sequel to
All Men of Genius
finished. But I put it aside for a while because I was feeling a little steampunked-out. I should be going back to it soon, though.

Oh, and the German version of
All Men of Genius
comes out in the spring. I don’t speak German, but I’m looking forward to seeing the book in German. It’s being translated by someone named Hanne Hammer, which is possibly one of the best names ever.

Wait, did you say a sequel? To
All Men of Genius
? What’s it about?

I did! It takes place two years later and opens with Jack and Cecily’s wedding, which is interrupted by the sudden appearance of Cecily’s long-lost father, who says he’s promised her hand to the prince of Lemuria and promptly kidnaps her. Jack and his friends, of course, then begin a search for Illyria so they can rescue her. The book focuses more on Jack and Cecily, but it also shows how Illyria has changed in the past few years, since Violet’s plan, and also how Violet and Earnest have adjusted to married life — Violet, after all, is a Duchess now, and the standards of gender conformity are much higher than they were when she lived at home and had only Mrs. Wilks to deal with. Now she has all of society to deal with, and she’s too famous to just go out in drag again.

This one is inspired by
An Ideal Husband
and
The Tempest
, and I’ll be frank, I sometimes wonder if
The Tempest
, being a problem play, was the best choice. It’s leaning more adventure-y than comedy of errors-ish. It’s also somewhat darker. A character from the first book dies, in fact (at least in the current draft). But as I said, it’s only a rough draft. It needs a lot of work before we show it to my editor and ask her to give me money for it.

Any parting words?

Is it appropriate to say “buy my book” here? Like ninety times in a row? No? Ah, well. But I will say that people can visit my webpage, LevACRosen.com for the usual blogging, news and such, but also for reading group questions, and this amazing lockpicking game my friend Sam made, which unlocks passwords to deleted scenes from the book. It’s also unnervingly addictive.

And thank you, Jeremy. This was a really fun interview.

About the Author

Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher. He is the Staff Interviewer for
Clarkesworld Magazine
and a frequent contributor to
Kobold Quarterly
and
Booklifenow.com.
He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC. He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006. Jones lives in Upstate South Carolina with his wife, daughter, and flying poodle.

Wendigo Waistcoat Spyglass and Other Words with Lisa L. Hannett

Jeremy L. C. Jones

In
Bluegrass Symphony,
Lisa L. Hannett writes of a place that is, perhaps, somewhere (or nowhere) in the rural United States — a place that is inspired, in equal parts, by the American South and Medieval Icelandic literature.

“Lisa Hannett weaves words the way the Norns weave fates, elegantly, seamlessly and with just a little bit of cruelty,” said Angela Slatter, author of
Sourdough and Other Stories.
“Her stories are astonishing in their scope, so strange and yet familiar. Her ability to insert the unlikely and the terrifying into the everyday with such a convincing touch that you have no problem believing in Swan Girls, Minotaur rodeos, soul cigars and twig-wives, is simply stunning.”

Raised in Ottawa, Canada, Hannett now lives in Adelaide, South Australia, a coastal city much like Charleston, SC on a very weird day. Her fiction has appeared in
Clarkesworld Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, Weird Tales, ChiZine, Midnight Echo, Shimmer, Electric Velocipede, Tesseracts 14,
and
Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded,
among other places. She is a graduate of Clarion South.

There is a relentless musicality to Hannett’s prose and fierceness to her vision. Beware of her beautiful song.

“L.L. Hannett’s work has the uncanny ability to get under your skin,” said Ann VanderMeer. “Her stories are so comfortable and familiar until they turn on you in the best possible way. Never a boring minute, her fiction is fiercely original and imaginative.”

Below, Hannett and I talk about style, the short form, and “the human side of even the nastiest creatures.”