by Neil Clarke
Naomi Kritzer’s short stories have been published in Asimov’s, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, Strange Horizons, and Clarkesworld Magazine. She has numerous novels available from Bantam and two e-book short story collections out: Gift of the Winter King and Other Stories, and Comrade Grandmother and Other Stories. She has been nominated for the Nebula Award and won the 2016 Hugo and Locus Awards for “Cat Pictures Please.”
Congratulations on winning a Hugo Award for “Cat Pictures Please!” How does it feel?
Awesome! I’m still smiling.
Why do you think the Internet is obsessed with cats?
Probably because people are obsessed with cats.
I currently have three cats, by the way: Emilycat, a well-behaved tabby who’s the current senior feline in residence; Balto, a very large black cat who never got the “obligate carnivore” memo and has been known to rip open bags of sugar to snack on it; and Cassie Fluffypants, an extremely pretty longhaired cat who likes to sit behind my head and try to groom me like an errant kitten. I would post more pictures of them, but I have a cheap phone with a mediocre camera.
What inspired you to write “Cat Pictures Please?”
I carry an Android phone, and at some point Google started helpfully suggesting that this building I drove past daily was my workplace. (When I’d open the Google Now app they’d show me a little map of the building and ask, “Is this your workplace?” with a button I could click to say “oh yes, Google, you’ve found it!”) I did not work in this building, but after Google repeatedly asked me about it I went and looked up their job listings because I thought, huh, maybe Google knows something I don’t; maybe it should be my workplace. (I found no jobs I was qualified for.) Pretending that my phone’s random quirks were an attempt by an intelligence to manipulate me was really amusing. This combined with the observation that the Internet loves cat pictures, and I was basically off and running.
When you’re trying to figure out what to write next, what is it that usually captures your attention about an idea and makes you want to expand it into a story? Is it an image or a character or a setting?
I usually start with a scenario; the characters come next. The sense of having a full story is usually what propels me into writing. When I jump in without knowing where I’m going, usually I don’t end up going much of anywhere.
How many autographed cat pictures did you give away at Worldcon?
Two, I think. And in both cases I offered them to people who’d asked me to autograph books. People clearly liked the idea of signed cat pictures but didn’t ask for them.
Where do you keep your Hugo Award?
It is currently on the buffet in the dining room. The problem is, one of the cats (Balto) managed to knock a heavy stone sculpture off the mantelpiece yesterday. (Amazingly, the sculpture did not break, nor did it land on the cat. This is truly a heavy, stable, hard-to-knock-over sort of sculpture, but the cat managed it.) I really don’t want my Hugo to get broken, so I need to figure out a reasonably cat-proof location.
I’ve noticed that you occasionally like to play with the format of short stories. “So Much Cooking” is a perfect example of this. What inspired you to write a story masquerading as a food blog?
I get a lot of my recipes these days from food blogs. Food blogs tend to speak in a very characteristic voice: always enthusiastic, sometimes a little breathless, often reassuring (you can totally debone this chicken, followers! Sharpen your knives and I’ll talk you through it!). So I had that voice in my head just from scrolling through some of my favorite recipes. (Here’s an example: http://bevcooks.com/2014/01/crock-pot-chicken-tacos/—this recipe is basically “throw raw chicken into a crock pot with salsa and turn on the crock pot,” by the way, so you can see why I like it so much.)
The second piece of the idea came from the winter of 2014—2015, when Boston got about twenty feet of snow. My friends and relatives there kept digging out, barely, only to get snowed in again the next day. One of my friends posted to her blog about being out of almost everything but wine. This got me thinking about the sort of weird things my family might end up eating if we were being endlessly snowed in, and how a food blogger would talk about them (“I knew that sliced beef heart would come in handy eventually!”). Of course, “snowed in” is a fairly mundane emergency; a pandemic was a lot more compelling.
What does your writing process look like? Do you spend a lot of time planning and mulling over a project before you start writing or do you dive right into the first draft?
I often brainstorm and outline by hand in a notebook. I like unlined paper for this, so I buy myself small (5.5”x8.5”) sketchbooks. Drawing paper is also nice and thick so I can write on both sides without bleed-through. I couldn’t find my notes on “Cat Pictures Please” but I found some for the first draft of “So Much Cooking.” I outlined the blog posts like this:
roast chicken over potatoes w/lemon + garlic | defy the birds! eat them!
chocolate pecan pie with bourbon whipped cream | anxiety! live for today!
substitute cookies—mayo for eggs, leftover mix of chips | terror, holy shit, all going to die
I was thinking in terms of both of the recipes and the emotional flow of the story. Interestingly, when I made this outline, I was thinking that the blogger and her husband were just alone for most of the epidemic; it’s not until the next page I wrote “has teen + pre-teen come stay with her,” and then I realized that bringing in two kids could rapidly lead to more. I actually stuck fairly close to the recipe outline I came up with, and the line from the outline, “this is no longer a food blog; it is a boredom and isolation blog” made it in. (Also “this is a food blog, not a disease blog . . . ”)
Once I have a complete first draft of a short story, I hand it out to my writers’ group. I revise based on feedback, let it sit for a week, re-read, revise again, and submit.
When I’m writing a novel, I don’t draft the whole thing before handing it out for critique—I hand out a chapter or two at a time.
What other projects are you working on?
In process and not yet done:
A short story that sprang from a note I made to myself when someone on a con panel groused about stories about little girls and wee little fairies. I wrote “little girls & wee little fairies” because I was convinced I could do something interesting and unconventional with it. Years ago I ran across a term coined by Children’s Literature scholar Anne Scott McLeod, “Caddie Woodlawn Syndrome,” for a pattern you see a lot in children’s lit for girls where the girl protagonist is allowed a wild, ungendered, tomboyish childhood but must give up her freedom and “become a lady” when she reaches a certain age. Frequently “becoming a lady” is framed as acceptance of maturity and responsibility—it’s her coming of age, essentially. In my Wee Little Fairies story, the fairies are both literally real, and a metaphor for this set of expectations. We’ll see if it works when I’m done with it.
I’ve had a series of near-future SF short stories published in F&SF about a character named Beck Garrison who has grown up on a sea-stead. (An artificial island built in the Pacific Ocean.) In the last published story, Beck was brought back to California by her mother, and the story I’m working on, “California Dreaming,” is about her experiences trying to attend high school in Pasadena. (Her problem-solving skills are not really appreciated by her high school vice principal.)
I started work on a short story that was an attempt at being a meta-ghost-story. I didn’t know where I was going and this story has refused to go anywhere but I’m not ready to just give up on it.
What was the best piece of writing advice you were ever given?
Join a writers’ group.
https://twitter.com/hatfield13/status/768976169081462784/photo/1
Did Neil Clarke pay you in cat pictures for your Hugo Award winning story?
I am delighted to say that Neil pays in actual money! An AI can afford to take payment in cat pic
tures because it has no expenses. (If the programming team started charging it rent for its servers, it might change its tune very quickly.)
About the Author
Chris Urie is a writer and editor from Ocean City, NJ. He has written and published everything from city food guide articles to critical essays on video game level design. He currently lives in Philadelphia with an ever expanding collection of books and a small black rabbit that has an attitude problem.
Another Word:
On Being a Late Bloomer
Kelly Robson
I always wanted to be a writer. That’s not unique. Many writers have their destiny revealed in childhood. Like others with this particular itch, I read voraciously, and when I bought my first Asimov’s magazine at the age of sixteen—a moment embedded in my senses more vividly than my first kiss—I knew I had to be a science fiction writer.
But it took me more than thirty years to become one. And by that, I don’t mean I was thirty before I published my first fiction. I was forty-seven. By anyone’s measure, that’s late for a first publication.
Most of us have preconceived ideas about how a writer’s career should proceed, and we judge ourselves harshly if we don’t achieve the various benchmarks on time. I married an SF writer who hit her milestones at a pace most people would consider ideal. Alyx sold her first story in her early twenties, made her first professional sale later that decade, and her first book came out around forty. By the end of this year, well before she’s fifty, she’ll have five books out, three of them in hardcover, nearly forty stories, and two national awards.
As for me, I just got started last year. My first story came out in the February 2015 Clarkesworld.
You might expect that our home has been a hotbed of professional jealousy over the past twenty-eight years of marriage. It hasn’t. Not because we’re a magical lesbian unicorn couple (though we are) but because we’re very different artists. Alyx pursues writing the way a cheetah pursues an antelope—unblinking, single-minded, and utterly lacking in self-doubt. I always knew I could never, ever work like that. It’s just not the way my mind works. And for many years, I thought if that’s what it takes, I’ll never be a writer. And I hated myself for it.
I feel kind of dumb now. There’s never only one way of doing things, and I should have known that. I should have had the self-confidence to follow my own path. But Alyx’s laser focus is impressive, especially when you live with it, and most especially since I’ve been a big ball of self-doubt and self-recrimination for most of my life.
That’s not unique, either. Many people—certainly many artists—swim in self-doubt. It’s natural. It’s not even necessarily bad because it forces you to pay attention to what you’re doing. But self-doubt can be paralyzing, and at worst, it can make you quit before you even start.
That’s what I did. I saw the way one writer worked, knew I couldn’t do it the same way, so I used it as an excuse to not even try.
But not everyone is the same. There’s no official map to writing success, no freeway with clearly marked on-ramps. SF/F/H is filled with innovators, visionaries, rebels, and iconoclasts, and each one has found their own route. Some achieve success early in life, some later, some very late. The great James Tiptree, Jr., for example, started publishing in her early 50s, and Jack McDevitt in his 40s. A contemporary example is Martin L. Shoemaker, who was a finalist for this year’s Nebula with his terrific story “Today I am Paul,” and who began writing in his 40s. I could fill out the rest of this essay’s word count with further examples, but you get the point.
It’s never too late. And one person’s map to writing success is another person’s malfunctioning GPS, leading them over a cliff.
Many writers put a lot of pressure on themselves to start publishing as early as possible. It’s understandable. Even though it’s a solitary pursuit—maybe because it’s a solitary pursuit—being around other writers is an incandescent joy. One of the greatest thrills of writing is the opportunity to be one of the gang with writers we admire, who share our values, our passions, who speak the same language we do, who understand us. We want to be with our people.
Part of the reason Alyx and I moved across the continent from Vancouver to Toronto was to join the city’s terrific writing community. Many of us spend more money traveling to conventions and workshops than we actually make writing. The company of other writers is like catnip. Being able to count yourself among them is worth a lot of sacrifice.
Another reason we rush into publishing is false urgency. We constantly hear doomsday apocalypse warnings about the publishing industry, which creates pressure to get in before it’s too late. But it’s never too late. Yes, publishing is an industry in flux, but it always has been. It always will be.
When Alyx started publishing twenty-five years ago, the Internet was still in its hand-crank days. No publisher accepted electronic submissions, and except for those savvy enough to use IRC channels and bulletin boards, nobody had an online writing community. Market reports were via newsletters and magazines, and submitting a story meant sending it into oblivion for months. Contracts would come with acceptance letters in the mail, and then you’d have no further contact with the editor until the comp copies eventually arrived, months or years later. Sure, you could email your friends to announce the sale, but that would mean firing up the modem. Egad. You might as well have had to carve the message in stone.
I feel so lucky to be entering the SF community now, when the online writing ecosystem is incredibly rich. The last great holdout for hard copy submissions ended last year when C.C. Finlay took over as editor of F&SF. Up-to-the-moment market information is always at my fingertips, often with submission queue positions and accurate response times. When I announce a story acceptance on Twitter, I get a dozen congratulations within seconds, and hundreds within a few hours on Facebook. When I want to know the latest news from the writers I adore, or read the new story everyone’s excited about, I can do it anywhere.
But those are just technical advances. Other changes are more important. Online fiction is now not only accepted but is leading the field. Indie writers are slashing their own paths through unmapped professional terrain. We are making large steps toward a truly global audience with passionate pushes for inclusivity, like great new markets such as Mithila Review.
Twenty-five years ago, nobody could have predicted these huge changes. Nobody can say where we’ll be twenty-five years from now, but I’m convinced the future will be better and more exciting than we can possibly imagine.
So what about those thirty years I wasted in self-doubt?
I don’t think they were wasted, actually. In fact, I’d argue that the best thing a writer can do is delay publishing for as long as possible.
This isn’t an attractive argument; it’s not sexy. Nobody’s going to make any Top Thirty Under Thirty lists that way. And dammit, writing is difficult. It takes so much hard work and dedication. How long can a person go on working with nothing to show for it?
As long as you can.
Those thirty years didn’t just make me a writer. They made me a good writer. That paralyzing self-doubt morphed into a keen sense for quality in my own work. When I write something that stinks, I can usually smell it. I’ve been reading for more than forty years, so I have thousands of great books and stories banked for information and inspiration. And best of all, I have a lifetime’s worth of unplumbed material to draw on—I’ve seen the world in all its glory and ugliness.
About ten years ago, I realized that if I never gave writing an honest try, it would be the worst regret of my life. I tried NaNoWriMo, which forced me to set aside the self-doubt and just get the words down. I wrote two trunk novels cribbing plots from Shakespeare and characters from Austen. I worked in historical fiction, because though my true love was still SF/F/H, working in the genres I adored seemed beyond my reach. Then in 2013, I was laid off from a job I loved. It was the worst thing that had ever happened to me that didn’t involve a funeral. My
ego was utterly crushed. Writing was the only thing I had left. And in that crucible, that white-hot raging furnace of failure, I finally learned the skills I needed to become the writer I always hoped I could be.
Everyone feels like it’s too late. Writers in their twenties say they feel their opportunities are slipping away. Even writers with shelves of awards and mile-long bibliographies don’t feel like they’ve made it.
Success is a receding target. Having previously written and published good stories is no guarantee of being able to write another one. Every blank page is a new challenge. Starting a new book means learning to write all over again.
So don’t give up. Don’t quit. It’s never too late—not at any age. Find your own path, wherever it may lead. Being a late bloomer can be an incredible gift. It can lead to successes you never dreamed of.
There are many ways to succeed at writing, but quitting is the only way to fail.
About the Author
Kelly Robson's first published story “The Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill” was a finalist for the 2016 Theodore Sturgeon Award. She’s also been a finalist for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Sunburst awards. Her novella “Waters of Versailles” won the 2016 Aurora Award, and this year her work appears in five year’s best anthologies. Kelly lives in Toronto with her wife, fellow SF writer A.M. Dellamonica.
Editor’s Desk:
Nice to Hear from You
Neil Clarke
Most of the science fiction magazines I read as a kid had a letters to the editor column. People would write in and respond to the stories or articles published in recent issues. There weren’t websites or email addresses, so dropping an envelope in the mail was your only chance to let the editors know what you were thinking. I was part of the silent majority, one of the people who never wrote in.