The Reality Break Interviews: Volume #0

by Dave Slusher

  DS: Do each of these different subgroups have their own set of standards for what good writing would be?

  NG: Not so much for good writing, but for how to write. There are certain writing and reading protocols. For example, I'm sure many people have heard of the science fiction reading protocol in that if you read a sentence that says “The door irised open” you know immediately that you are in a science fiction novel, because doors do not iris in this present time and place. You know you are on a spaceship or an airlock or some futuristic kind of thing. Lesbian and gay novels have their own protocols, their own coming out layers, their own tackling of homophobia and so forth. It's a fairly new genre, so that protocols aren't set in stone.

  DS: With your first novel coming out soon, have you seen a review of it yet?

  NG: Yes! I would like to talk about that. I have seen two reviews of my novel Ammonite. They both pissed me off for separate reasons. The first review was a very short review by Faren Miller in Locus. It was a short take, and she liked the book mostly. She talked about “masterly sure handedness and so forth but she said there were aggravating lapses. In other words there were large parts of the novel that she really didn't like. I thought about it for a while and I have decided that what she didn't like was the fact that my protagonist actually has problems. She is not always full of life and happy-go-lucky. She is not indomitable, not omnipotent. She, at some point, loses her way emotionally, spiritually and literally. She gets kidnapped, she gets hurt physically, she gets lost. She loses her self-esteem, her sense of self and goes into a kind of psychic shock. In other words she doesn't act like a heroine. That I think pissed off Faren Miller because she is used to reading SF novels where the characters are superwomen and supermen. I think it upset her world view to have an SF protagonist having a hard time.

  DS: If you are doing something off the beaten track, shouldn't that be perceived as good. Rather than a rehash, are people going to say that you are breaking new ground or that it isn't what they are used to?

  NG: Let me talk about the second review, which brings some of those questions into relief. The second review was 1000 or 1200 words, and it was also in Locus, by Dan Chow. I'm sure he thinks he is doing me a favor by some of the things he says when he talks about it breaking new ground and being extraordinary and so on. What he does is call is a “lesbian science fiction novel” which it isn't. I'm the author, I'm a lesbian. My protagonist is a lesbian, and she has a lesbian love affair. It's no more a book about being lesbian than Neuromancer is a book about coming to terms with ones heterosexuality. Because everyone in the book is straight doesn't mean that the book is about being straight. That's one of the things that happens when you do leave the beaten track is that people fall on you like a ton of bricks, smiling. They say “I'm sure you are doing very well, Nicola. I'm sure you are trying very hard and it's quite a good effort but really ... tsk, tsk.” There is a wagging of fingers and a real condescension in the review, a real “she tried hard but it's only about lesbians, without men in it, it's a bit narrow minded.”

  DS: Having read reviews that made you angry, does that make you rethink how you review others?

  NG: Those two in particular didn't, because I like to think that I've already worked past those particular problems. Sometimes I read a review and think “God, I hope I don't make that mistake” or “That's a clever way to approach another person's writing.” I learn a lot from reviewing and from reading other's reviews.

  DS: Let's talk about your life outside of writing. You have a very interesting career history, to say the least. What kind of bands have you been in?

  NG: Just one band, called Janes Plane. It was a women's band, in a city called Hull in England. I fronted it, I was the songwriter and sometimes percussion player. We were an in-your-face with shaved heads and big boots and waistcoats. I sang about cutting up people in the street if they got in my way. We were on network TV, but as soon as we were offered the college circuit our drummer decided she wanted to be the sound engineer for a TV cartoon series, and we couldn't find another competent woman drummer. Me and the guitarist set up as, not a band—I'm not sure what you would call it, but I wrote all of the music and we did chants and played drums and I made this percussion thing out of a Fijian wood block and a tambourine and two broken drumsticks. [laughs] We would go to theaters and sing during the intermissions. We basically sang for our supper, because I was really broke at the time.

  DS: Do you see some similarity between trying to break into the music business and trying to break in as a writer? In both you have a steep pyramid with very few at the top, but many others that would like to be at the top.

  NG: I read somewhere that someone once said that in order to make one's living in any field of creative endeavor one had to be almost psychotic. You have to believe in yourself so strongly, to sit there day after day with your computer or your pen or your piece of paper or guitar, and think “I can do this. 999 billion people before me have failed, but *I* can do this.” It's quite a psychotic state of mind to have to hang onto year after year. It takes years. Nobody does it overnight.

  DS: Are there ever times that you feel that you are losing that intensity, self-doubt where you say “I've done it before, but I don't know if I can do it again?"

  NG: Often. Well, I say often and sound definite but what happens is that it is split into two layers. There is a deep core that knows that I can keep doing it. There is a surface stream that says “Maybe that won't work.” It's happening a little right now as I have started two more novels, and I keep hesitating. I write a bit and think “I could do this another way, this character should go here.” Basically, I have so many choices now because I'm a better writer than I was a year ago when I wrote Ammonite. It's casting doubt on myself because I can see so many alternate ways to make something work that I hesitate a lot. I often do that at the beginning of any piece of work. Once I get well into the novel, I'll be fine.

  DS: You've talked about being a member of the Clarion workshop. Do you think that that really helped your career? Without that, would you have had a similar career?

  NG: I'm not sure. I don't think it changed the way I write, but I do think it changed the way I regard being a writer. It's a subtle distinction. Before I went to Clarion, I knew I wanted to be a writer. After I came back, I knew I was going to make myself be a writer. My determination hardened, I became more professional. The letters I sent to editors were no longer “Buy this you jerk"—not that I did that a lot, but the temptation was there. After Clarion, I would say “This is what I've written, I hope you enjoy it.” I took things less personally. If someone rejected my work, I didn't think they had no taste. Maybe it's not a very good story, or maybe they don't like it, or maybe they are under editorial constraint. Also, it gave me access to other professional writers. The one I've had the most contact with is Tim Powers. We talk often on the phone. He hasn't exactly given me brilliant advice, mainly because I haven't asked, but he gives me hope, simply by being there. I can phone him up and say “I'm having a really shitty time with this outline.” His response is “Yeah, me too. You wait a minute while I get myself a beer and we'll talk about this.” The fact that he's been through it all before and that he's survived it helps.

  DS: That's a theme that's recurring a lot in these interviews, the sense of community. You seem to have benefited from it. Is that someone that you knew you would get?

  NG: I had no idea. I didn't know that a quote “science fiction community” unquote existed or that there was such a thing as fandom or sf conventions. I knew nothing. I just wrote Ammonite. I knew there was a magazine called Interzone in England and I knew there were sf books that people published and read, but I had no idea that there was this whole sense of connectedness.

  DS: You came from outside of the field. Would that account for the convention breaking that you exhibit in your work?

  NG: I'm not sure. I think coming from England helps in the sense that there seems to be less of a...

/>   DS: Is there less baggage, that not having read so much in the field you don't feel you need to match with what has come before?

  NG: There isn't such a pressure to conform.

  Ann Kennedy and Chris Reed Introduction

  Because of the logistics of doing interviews, most of the interviews I've ever done have been over the phone. That's a shame, because in person interviews are much more fun and are easier. You can see the guests, tell by the expression on their faces how things are going, and generally connect better. At the time I interviewed Ann Kennedy and Chris Reed I had not done a studio interview in a very long time. Being able to actually sit across the console from them and talk to them was so immensely pleasurable that it made everything loose and fun. As I recall, Ann approached me about doing the interview because she and Chris were already going to be in town anyway and wanted to get as much bang out of the trip as possible. I had heard of both of their magazines, The Silver Web and Back Brain Recluse, but had not read either prior to the interview. When I did, I enjoyed both quite a bit. The Silver Web is darker than most of the short fiction I read but since this interview, I've become a regular reader of it.

  The circumstances surrounding this interview were a little odd. That day, my wife Darlene and I were volunteers at the first Music Midtown festival in Atlanta. We spent the morning and early afternoon out in the Atlanta sun, painting children's faces despite our having no face painting training or aptitude. My strategy was to steer kids towards those things I knew I could do—"Wouldn't you like a pretty rainbow?” After hours and hours of this interrupted only by sneaking off and seeing bands like The Smithereens and Band du Soleil, we headed for the radio station. By the time we got there, I was about half-exhausted from being in the sun all day and ready for a nap. We had intended to be there plenty early, but instead beat Ann and Chris by only about 5 or 10 minutes so there wasn't much time for setting up. I don't know what their experience was, but I immediately liked both of them quite a bit. I knew right away that I would be able to have a good half-hour conversation with them.

  In a lot of ways, I felt they were both kindred spirits to me. All of us were involved in heading our own productions, none of which was a blockbuster by any standard of our respective media. We all had day jobs and supported our creative projects on the side. Yet, all of us called all the shots and were quite proud of the work we were doing. I felt comfortable enough while talking to them to do something I had never done before. After fumbling out a question and seeing the quizzical looks on their faces, I put up my hands and said “That was really dumb—don't answer that and let's just move on.” Bear in mind that this interview was going out live and that couldn't be edited out later on. It was a funny moment, and much better than making them struggle with a half-formed idea.

  This interview is also the only one that an interviewee ever transcribed. Chris typed it up for use in a British writing magazine. I never was quite sure if it was published or not, but I was delighted to get another transcript to use without having to go through the awful Herculean effort of transcription. Before I picked up one of those dictation machines with the foot-pedals for $10 at a garage sale, I used to transcribe by repeatedly rewinding the tape on a boombox that was sitting on my desk. That, in itself, was unpleasant enough to prevent me from ever transcribing another one. Thank god for stumbling across that machine.

  Both of these magazines are worth seeking out. There is information about them in the reference section following the interview.

  Ann Kennedy and Chris Reed

  This interview was recorded at the WREK studios in Atlanta, Georgia in May 1994. The transcription and initial editing was done by Chris Reed.

  Chris Reed (CR): Back Brain Recluse is the full title of the magazine, but it's usually abbreviated to BBR. (Don't ask me where it came from—there's probably something to do with a Mike Moorcock song for Hawkwind in there.) The easiest peg to hang it on is the weirder end of science fiction and fantasy, but we don't really like to pigeonhole it too much. If it's not really too commercial but it's good writing then we're interested in seeing it.

  Ann Kennedy (AK): Well, the Silver Web basically tries to publish the kind of fiction that is too bizarre to fit into mainstream but that doesn't fit the standard traditional genre. I've been doing it since about 1989.

  DS: Okay, and how long has BBR been around?

  CR: It's been going since 1984.

  DS: Now why did the two of you start doing these magazines in the first place? That seems to be a large jump from ‘I really like to read fiction, I'm not seeing all the fiction I like to see’ to ‘let's put out a magazine'—what caused that jump?

  CR: You start with ‘wouldn't it be great to start a magazine'. At the time I was working in a secondhand record store and an artist worked there too who was going to do the graphics side of it. When he lost interest I just carried it on. Once you start these sort of things they take over and get a life of their own, like a cuckoo in the nest they grow and all the time you're just working to keep feeding it, and it grows and grows and grows. So once you've made that step into ‘let's start a magazine’ it's up to you to decide *not* to put the brakes on at any point.

  DS: Has that been your experience, Ann?

  AK: That's pretty close. I had been reading a lot of small press publications and back in 1988 for some reason I just mentioned to a girlfriend of mine, ‘You know, we could do something like this'. Little did I know how much work was involved, but once you get started it's like Chris said it's hard to put on the brakes because you really love what you're doing and the people that you meet are the best people in the world.

  DS: Before you started did you have a good focus of what you wanted to do or did you sort of hone that as you went?

  AK: I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do—I know what I *didn't* want to do. As time has progressed, I think that my focus has gotten better and I've got a better idea of what it is I'm looking for. In the beginning it was pretty much ‘let's see what's out there'.

  CR: I don't even have a particular focus now. If you were to ask me what sort of stuff am I looking for, I couldn't tell you, because I don't know it until I see it. So yes, the editorial focus in terms of the quality of writing has been more defined, but it's still down to if I like it, and I like it enough, then it goes in the magazine. And at the moment it tends to be the weirder end of speculative fiction. I don't advertise BBR as a magazine of the surreal or science fiction or whatever, it's just a fiction magazine.

  DS: Now when you first started doing this and you dipped into the well of unpublished fiction that was out there, did you find any surprises versus what you expected or did you even have any preconceived notions of what sort of fiction you would see from people?

  CR: It was a great leap into the unknown. Unlike Ann I hadn't been seeing any small press magazines at all, we had one mass-market magazine in England at that time called Interzone and that was really the only benchmark that I had. When I started the magazine I was trading predominantly with music fanzines, so it wasn't until several years later that I started mixing with more traditional genre publishers.

  AK: I think one of the things that surprised me—more now than in the beginning—is that there is an awful lot of really good fiction out there that's not being picked up by the bigger magazines, and that's where my magazine comes in. I do get a lot of the same old thing in my slush pile, but I come across some incredible writing sometimes from people that have never been published before, and I say to myself, ‘How come the big magazines don't know about these people?’

  DS: Is it more a matter that they have a specific slant that it just missed or is there just more good fiction than people can get to—why do you suppose that things like this fall through the cracks?

  CR: Because you can't fit it in a nice neat pigeonhole. The commercial publishers are looking for ‘in the classic tradition of Tolkien’ or ‘the classic tradition of Catherine Cookson'. It's easy to market and it's minimum eff
ort with maximum profit. Whereas the sort of stuff that Ann and I like can't be defined like that, it's difficult to market, therefore they can't work out how much profit they're going to make on it, therefore they don't touch it. That doesn't stop people wanting to write it or read it, so it falls to the more specialist or smaller publishers who've got smaller overheads and no ten-storey office block to maintain. Just because people can't find it in a high-street bookstore doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, and certainly as publishing's becoming more and more commercialised then there's an increasing need for publishers like us to do what we're doing.

  AK: The big publishers don't want to take chances with something new and they're only going to put out what they already know will sell. That's why when one vampire novel made it really big everyone's doing vampire novels all of a sudden and everyone's selling vampire novels and that's what you're seeing everywhere. You see the same thing on regular prime time TV, all the shows are the same. Very rarely do you come across something that's different and when a new show comes along that *is* different then everybody jumps on that and then all the shows are the same again.

  DS: Working in small presses do you have any antipathy for the large presses, is there an ‘us versus them’ mentality or is it different edges of the same field?

  AK: I don't think that there's an us versus them mentality. I sometimes feel that I have a great deal more freedom than they do because I don't have to play any of the political games that they do and I don't have to worry about whether or not this will sell or that will sell because my kids are still gonna eat—I have a day job. Their goal is business and my goal is I want to put some really good stuff out there to show to other people.

  CR: We're not competing for the same market. They're dealing with the people that want more of the same, we're dealing with the people who want something different every time, so we complement each other, and yeah, it might be that some of the small presses grow bigger and increase in stature and start competing with the bigger presses, but I think that's a natural progression. You get the same in the music business—some of the indie labels get bigger when they suddenly find someone who hits the big time and they grow with them.