Playing Nicely
Lambda Book Report (September 2002)
by Victoria Brownworth
At 42, Seattle-based sci-fi and speculative fiction writer Kelley Eskridge believes in karma. Or in more colloquial terms: What goes around, comes around. This has been the secret of her success-that, no surfeit of talent and working very, very hard. “I have been very fortunate, ” Eskridge asserts. “My belief in playing nicely has had a lot to do with where I am now.”
Where is she now? Having been short-listed for the prestigious Nebula and Tiptree awards for her short fiction as well as having had her work adapted for TV, Eskridge is on the gilded road to the success as a writer she has dreamed of for nearly fifteen years. Walk into any Borders and the haunting cover of Eskridge’s first novel, Solitaire, stares out from the eye-catching front-market tables. In a coup for Eskridge and her publisher, Eos/HarperCollins, the novel has been chosen as part of Borders’ Original Voices series. It’s a personal coup as well for Eskridge and her partner writer Nicola Griffith, whom she met at a writer’s workshop fourteen years ago. “We’ve shared the dream of writing together full time since Nicola and I met,” Eskridge declares. “We’ve worked really hard and focused towards this end. It’s so exciting to finally be able to be actually living this life that has been our dream.”
Playing nicely helped. For years Eskridge’s day job has been working for Wizards of the Coast, a games company which produced Dungeons and Dragons and Pokémon, among others. “My team was responsible for managing product development,” says Eskridge. When the toy conglomerate Hasbro bought the company, Eskridge continued on as a vice-president.
Continuing to play nicely meant Eskridge had to defer her work on Solitaire for a year in order to leave Wizards without wreaking havoc on her team or the company. When she left, the pay-off was munificent, literally and karmically. “It’s not the ultimate financial security,” she acknowledges, “but it felt like the universe was saying ‘Do it!’. It seemed churlish not to.”
Eskridge had sold Solitaire to HarperCollins as a mass market paperback original based on chapters, outlines, her reputation as a short story stylist and her achievement as winner of the Astraea Award in 1992. Proud of Solitaire, she “wanted to see it well-received. I was determined to do more for the book if I could.”
“Nicola and I like to meet people, to find bridges and connections with people,” Eskridge explains. “There’s nothing we like more than eating, drinking and talking with people.” For years the two had met writers, editors and publishers as they built their careers. Among the judges awarding the Astraea to Eskridge had been Dorothy Allison. As she transitioned out of her day job, Eskridge began querying writers, including Allison, for their response to her book. It was huge. Blurbs came from a host of well-respected queer and sci-fi writers. By the time the book was completed, Eskridge had a complement of praise for the as-yet unpublished book, giving her editor — she hoped — ammunition to shift the book from mass market to trade paperback. Instead her editor gave the book to the sales director, who loved it and decided to make it a hardcover. “Writers often see editors and publishers as adversarial,” notes Eskridge. “I like to think of everyone as a team. And it worked — everyone came together for me and for my book.”
Playing nicely and building bridges catapulted Solitaire from mass market anonymity to hardcover limelight.
In Solitaire Eskridge utilizes her corporate background to create a framework for her characters’ travels and travails. Extending as it does beyond the limits of strict sci-fi delineations into more expansive literary fiction, HarperCollins hopes Solitaire will garner a crossover audience who will see more than a genre label to the novel set in a near and not-so-pleasant future. “Genre is about marketing as well as framework,” explains Eskridge, “not just about the tropes that sci-fi writers write about. Speculative fiction forms the particular literary playground where metaphor can be made concrete. We can, for example, view alienation through the lens of actual aliens. But I’m not ‘just’ a genre writer. I find genre limiting in that it sets up preconceptions. Anything I can do to change that is a good thing.”
With the publication of Solitaire, Eskridge has changed a host of preconceptions. Solitaire explicates the need for playing nice on a global scale in a futuristic society. Its author elucidates by example how well living out that metaphor can work in the here and now.