This summer, I'll be working on a self-publishing project. If I get a bit of seed money from a grant I've applied for, I'll self-publish the sprawling epic family saga. A big name editor who recently retired from a big name imprint and now freelances says she's excited about doing the structural edit with me, whenever I can raise the funds to pay her. If I don't get the grant, it'll probably be a related novella that I self-publish first, and I'll work my way up to the longer book and the series it opens.
I'd like to add my thanks for your invitation to do this interview. Writing so often feels like dropping words into the void, and it's always good to get a sense that there's someone on the other side of the process who wants the story, and the story about the story.
Sarah, thank you very much for such detailed and entertaining answers. Good luck with reaching all those dreams!
Interview with Author Christine Borne
Christine Borne is a writer, editor, and recipient of the 2012 Creative Workforce Fellowship in Literature. Christine earned a B.A. in English from Cleveland State University in 2000 and a Master's Degree in Library and Information Science from Kent State University in 2002. She has worked for numerous Cleveland cultural institutions including the Shaker Heights Library, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Western Reserve Historical Society, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum's new Library and Archives, and Loganberry Books. In July 2011 Christine attended the Tin House Summer Writers' Conference where she workshopped an excerpt from her novel Rust World Problems. Christine has lived in Montana, New Jersey and New York, and currently resides in Cleveland with her husband, James Nickras. She enjoys drinking sherry, watching Columbo, and listening to Hüsker Dü, and is currently working on a YA novel about Krampus.
Q&A
Iulian: Give us a little bit of background on Christine Borne. How/where did you grow up, what was your upbringing and were there any particular influences in your life, especially ones that steered you towards your current self?
Christine: That's a big can of worms! Let's see. I grew up in a small house on a busy streetcorner in an inner-ring suburb of Cleveland in the middle of the Rust Belt era. That's pretty much what set this ball of neuroses rolling.
How did you get involved into writing? Give us summary of your path.
I was writing as early as I can remember—from age four or five, I was obsessed with my mom's electric typewriter. As a kid I was a prolific writer of fan fiction. There was no Internet so I had no idea that fan fiction was a thing, of course. I still have notebooks full of Doctor Who and Red Dwarf and Blake's 7 scripts written in junior high. Actually I lost that compulsion to write in high school and ever since, writing has been like pulling teeth—I think it's because I kept forcing myself to try and write long fiction and never really considered the fact that what I really like doing was dramatic writing.
In 2012 you have received the Creative Workforce Fellowship in Literature. How did this came to be and what did it mean for your and your career?
The Creative Workforce Fellowship was a program of Cuyahoga Arts and Culture, which (I believe still) is the third largest public arts grantmaking agency in the United States, after the states of New York and Minnesota. I say "was" because the program in on hiatus right now, which, if I might be frank, completely sucks because $20,000, no-strings-attached arts grants are pretty hard to come by. I owe a lot to this fellowship because I would never have rediscovered my interest in dramatic writing without it—I spent the year trying to bang out this terrible satirical novel which was really just a catalogue of people who had wronged me, but through the program I met my current writing partner, Justin Glanville, and we sort of bonded over our mutual love of television. We ended up using the last vestiges of our fellowship money to take a TV writing class through Mediabistro, after which we were a little befuddled, like "what are we going to do now? Move to LA?" Well that's not in the cards for me at least because the two things I hate most are a) driving and b) the sun, so we took our idea and developed it into a dramatic podcast series, which we're now recording with a full cast at Cleveland Public Theatre. I don't know what it was, but we felt sure that podcasts were about to blow up as an art form, and apparently they are.
What do you consider to be the defining moment in your writing career, the moment when you knew this is what you will do for the rest of your life?
I definitely haven't had that moment, as I've spent most of my adult life avoiding writing. It's taken me a long time, actually, to realize that I want to write but I also want to do other things. I am a writer but I am other things too.
In the past, you've worked as a librarian and independent book seller. It seems like you've lived most of your life around books. What other things have you done, or are currently doing?
Well I've recently gone back to school because I want to do a master's degree in linguistics, which was my first love, intellectually. I'm not sure how I ended up in library school, honestly. I was a terrible librarian. I loved selling books, though. The bookstore I worked in, Loganberry Books, is like the bookstore you picture dying and going to; it's got library ladders and Persian rugs and secret nooks and a bookstore cat (his name is Otis). Seriously, if I had a nickel for every New Yorker that ever walked in through the front door and said "we don't have things like this in New York anymore…" Right now I'm winding up to do another long distance move and do some more traveling. I'd like to rent a cottage in the Shetlands for a month or two and finish one of my half-finished novels, maybe, just to say I did. Just for me.
In our issue #5, we've included your story "Tempest Fugit." Tell us a bit about it. How did it come to be? What does it mean to you?
"Tempest Fugit" was one of those stories that came to me fully formed in a dream. It's actually an older story—I wrote it in 2009, when I was freshly laid off from the local historical society and kind of in a tailspin—we'd just moved back to Cleveland from New York, which I had misgivings about, because I liked New York an awful lot even though I had this terrible guilt about Cleveland, about how all the educated people were moving away and it was dying, etc. I think I spent that entire summer in the basement reading Neil Gaiman and Lisa Goldstein and every ghost story anthology I could get my hands on. I guess I felt like a ghost, in a way. I felt like there was just no use for me here. Anyway, the story is about a sea captain and his men who died in a battle hundreds of years prior, who are just hanging around the place they knew best in life—a cliffside brothel. The captain's men are starting to disappear, though, as the city they fought for declines once again. Because whatever change you work for in life is never really permanent.
Do you have any works in progress? If so, can you tell us something about it?
Yes! As I mentioned before, my writing partner and I are working on an 11-episode dramatic podcast series called "Munchen, Minnesota," which a friend has generously been describing to people as "Buffy meets Lake Wobegon." It's about a broken down old textile mill town in the Upper Midwest that's got a problem with, let's say, an infestation of supernatural critters. The heroes are a geeky teenage taxidermist, her gay librarian father, and an ambitious city planner who's just transferred from the East Coast. We've got an incredible set of actors lined up—working with actors is a particular joy that I wish I would've discovered a lot sooner.
What is your advice for today's young writers who are trying to break through this ever more difficult market?
You have to learn to recognize what advice works for you, and what never will. Getting up an hour earlier every day is just never going to work for me, and if it means I work more slowly on something, that's just how the cookie crumbles. You also have to recognize your limitations and learn to work with them rather than berate yourself for being the way you are. Also, you have to figure out how long you should spend on something. You'll reach a point where you need someone else to get excited about your work, because you've gone over it so many times that you're completely not excited about it anymore yourself. But the thing
is, once you're at that point, the work is probably pretty good, and then someone else (an editor, an agent, etc.) is (hopefully) going to run with it and reenergize you.
What's next for you? Is there anything else you'd like to add?
Well, Justin and I are doing a presentation at the AWP conference in Minneapolis this spring on dramatic writing for podcasts, so we hope people attend (it's on Saturday, April 11, at noon). I've still got a few half-finished novels lingering. Otherwise, that's about it. Thanks for having me!
And thank you, Christine, for participating!
Interview with Award Winning Editor John Joseph Adams
John Joseph Adams is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy. He is also the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, such as Oz Reimagined, The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. Recent books include The Apocalypse Triptych (consisting of The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come), Robot Uprisings, and Dead Man's Hand. Called "the reigning king of the anthology world" by Barnes & Noble, John is a winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been nominated eight times) and is a six-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of the digital magazines Lightspeed and Nightmare, and is a producer for WIRED's The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. For more information, visit his website at johnjosephadams.com, and you can find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.
Q & A
Iulian: Before we delve into the meat of the many things you do today, give us a glimpse of your life before all that: where were you born, how did you grow up, where there any early signs foreshadowing your future?
John Joseph: I was born and raised in New Jersey, right across the river from Staten Island, NY. (Turnpike Exit 11, for New Jerseyites.) Raised there until I was 8 or 9 years old anyway; at that point my family moved to Cutler Ridge, Florida (near Miami). A year after that we relocated to Port St. Lucie, Florida, which is where I lived for about 16 years. I graduated from the University of Central Florida in Orlando, and then after college I moved back to New Jersey so I could try to get a job in publishing. (Into the same house I lived in as a kid, actually—because it belonged to my grandparents and they still lived there.) Now I live on the Central Coast of California, where I have the nicest weather by far of any of the places I lived.
I can't think of anything as a kid that might have foreshadowed my future as an editor. I actually didn't even really identify as a science fiction/fantasy geek until my late teens, though looking back, I do remember that SF/F did seem to comprise most of my favorites in all media as I grew up, and I really was always a geek—I just didn't realize that there was a whole sphere of the entertainment world kind of geared toward my interests.
You edit. A lot. And awesome stuff. What drives you to the genre? Where there any authors, books, or short stories that you can think of as the initial driving force that pushed you in that direction?
The two most important authors for me that drove me to the genre are Michael Crichton and Alfred Bester.
Crichton might seem like an odd choice, but it was reading his mainstream-friendly, but chock-full-of-science books (like Jurassic Park, Sphere, and The Andromeda Strain) that sort of opened up my eyes to the fact that I could handle reading books that had that level of science in it. At that point I was already a Star Trek and Star Wars fan, and I had a read a bunch of those tie-in novels, but I had never really tried any regular SF novels... for fear that I wouldn't understand them. I was under the mistaken impression that I'd need some kind of science background to be able to read them, (which of course was a ridiculous notion). But anyway, Crichton really opened my mind to the possibilities that science fiction had to offer. And I'll always be thankful that my former brother-in-law said to me "If you can handle the science in Jurassic Park, you can pretty much handle any science fiction novel."
But Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination is probably the most formative book for me ending up where I did in my career. At the time I read that, I hadn't read much "core" SF. I had read some, but when I read Stars, it just blew my mind. It pushed all of my buttons as a reader—buttons I didn't even knew I had at the time—and after reading it, my goal as a reader was to find more stuff like that.
James Gunn's anthology The Road to Science Fiction, Volume 3: From Heinlein to Here is probably the most formative work for me specifically pertaining to short fiction. I read it in college in a science fiction/fantasy literature class as one of our assigned texts, and to this day it still contains some of my very favorite classic SF stories. Some, like "The Cold Equations" and "The Streets of Ashkelon." I'd surely reprint a couple of the others from there, but can't get the agents who manage the estates in question to even reply to my inquiries. (Or in one case, they were looking for—literally—one hundred times as much as I normally pay for reprints.)
Let's talk about magazines. Without sounding too cheesy, I'd like to say that I am a proud member of a large crowd that believes that whatever you touch turns into genre gold. And what better way to emphasize that than through your contributions to one of my favorite magazines of all times: F&SF. Could you tell us how you started there and how that first role as editor has influenced your work?
I mentioned earlier how I went to UCF (where I majored in English/Creative Writing) and then after graduating moved back to New Jersey. Once I got there, I started trying to find a job, but I set myself up with enough of a cushion that I didn't have to just take the first thing I could find—and I wanted to find something in SF/F publishing specifically. The first thing I tried was applying to the "big three" SF/F magazines—F&SF, Asimov's, and Analog—mainly because I thought that it might be a little easier to break in there than at a big New York publishing house. This was in January 2001. So I sent my resume to those three places. Gordon Van Gelder at F&SF was the only one to reply, but initially it was bad news: He told me that he wasn't looking to hire anyone at the time, but I should check back later in the year.
I continued looking around and didn't find anything, and so a couple months later, in May, I figured "Hey, it's later in the year. Why don't I follow up with F&SF?" And lo and behold when I emailed back, Gordon told me that his assistant had just given his notice and asked me to come up to Hoboken for an interview.
So I drove up to meet Gordon, and we went and had lunch at a diner near the F&SF office. It was really relaxed and informal, and we just basically talked about science fiction and fantasy. I admitted to liking Crichton, which probably lost me points, but I named The Stars My Destination as my favorite novel, which garnered me lots of points. Later I would learn that my unbridled criticism of The Matrix was one of the things that convinced Gordon to give me a shot at the job; I think he appreciated that I had a strong point of view on the subject—and was vociferous about it even though it ran counter to popular opinion.
As for how the job influenced me… well, it's hard to properly convey how much of an impact it had. Gordon basically taught me everything I know about editing. Not just by watching him work, and working alongside him, but via our extensive conversations about all things SF/F and/or publishing. I'll always really, really appreciate that he was willing to take time out of the workday to just talk from time to time, because I think it was in those conversations where I really leveled as an editor.
After F&SF, you gave life to Lightspeed Magazine. Since then it has grown into a successful, award-winning, reader favorite e-zine that keeps delivering great content month after month. Give us a few words about the challenges you faced launching Lightspeed in 2010 and how bumpy (or not bumpy) was the road to the Lightspeed of today?
The main initial challenges associated with launching Lightspeed were that (a) I'd have to leave F&SF, a magazine I'd worked for for 9 years and had grown to truly love, and (b) I'd have to take a pretty significant pay cut. Now as an assistant editor at F&SF—and a part-time one at that—I wasn't exactly making bank, but even so my initial Lightsp
eed salary was a big pay cut. Luckily, around that time I was starting to make money selling anthologies, and I was also working as a book publicist for Night Shade Books and doing some regular freelance writing about SF/F (mainly for the Syfy Channel's website). So I was able to take the plunge and leave the relative security of F&SF to take my shot at sitting in the big chair.
At the time, I figured that Gordon was only 10 years older than me, and was both editor and publisher of the magazine, so it was unlikely I'd ever be promoted to editor—and naturally that's what I wanted, the shot to be the one making the final call about what goes into the magazine. Of course, as I write this, just recently F&SF announced that Gordon would be stepping down as editor (while remaining as publisher), to be succeeded by C.C. Finlay. So I guess I was wrong about that, but launching Lightspeed and making it into a success is one of my proudest achievements—and, hey, it got me a Hugo!—so it all turned out well in the end.
The road hasn't been too bumpy otherwise. The one big obstacle we had was about a year and a half after launching Lightspeed, the publisher Sean Wallace, decided he wanted to get out of the magazine publishing business, so he asked me if I wanted to buy the magazine and take over as publisher. It was a tough decision—not only financially but also because suddenly I'd be a publisher in addition to being an editor. In the end I think it all worked out quite well. I'm enjoying the flexibility being both editor and publisher has afforded me—for instance, the ability to do our Destroy special issues. Editing is definitely where my heart is, though!
I am not the biggest fan of horror fiction, but I do appreciate a good story in that genre. You decided to separate Nightmare magazine, even though you collapsed Fantasy into Lightspeed. Tell us a little bit about the reasons behind the current setup.
Well, to me, the audience for fantasy and science fiction is largely the same audience. There are some folks who only read one or the other, but those readers are a fairly small percentage. So to me it made sense to fold Fantasy into Lightspeed, as that made it easier to grow a singular brand, rather than having two separate but related ones.
Fantasy Scroll Magazine Issue #5 Page 11