Author: Kelley

Early thoughts about translations

I am from Germany and I heard here from you today the first time. I am very interested in your story about Salome (“And Salome Danced”). I’m going to write a short text about her and her story in fact of the bible-text because I’m studying literature. Now I found the comment that your story is out of print here in Germany. I loaded it down now in English from your homepage. Do you or your publisher know where I can get it in German?
So I will read next time and hope I can talk to you about it and about the thoughts behind it.

Love, Steph

I’ve sent you a scan of the German text by email. I have no idea whether the German translation captures the nuances of the story (and I don’t know if we’d be able to figure it out between us, but it would be fun to talk about it). I read enough French to know that the French translation made some language and metaphor choices that I found really interesting –” not wrong, just interesting. Some things just don’t translate directly –” cultural references, slang, and the more subtle differences in worldview that a native language creates as we absorb it. These issues interest me in particular since I’m studying to be an interpreter of American Sign Language. If there are so many subtle (and not so subtle) worldview and assumption differences between spoken languages, imagine the difference that might arise between a spoken language and a signed language. And how do translators and interpreters make decisions about expressing meaning in light of those differences? Oof, there goes my brain.

I do hope you’ll let me know what you think of the German text.

When story goes wrong

I just finished reading Solitaire. It was a very powerful book. Halfway through, I almost did not continue –” I did not see how Jackal could do anything worthwhile after the elevator event. But I persevered, and enjoyed the conclusion very much.

While I see the need for the direct plot line, I guess I was a bit disappointed that Steel Breeze never came in for much attention. Surely someone in that organization must have set up Jackal. But why?

I hope to see another novel (or many more) from you!

Albert

I’m certainly glad you didn’t stop reading: I wanted to affect readers, but not like that.

When I stop reading a book, it’s usually because it’s terribly written, or personally offensive, or because I feel the writer has done something to mutilate the book and twist the story beyond repair. Good writing draws me into the head and heart of the characters: bad writing can push me right out, no matter how much I want to engage with the story. Offending me is harder to do, but certainly possible: the only books I’ve ever actually thrown away were, for example, 50 pages of one episode after another of sexual and emotional brutalization (all 300 pages of this particular book might have been like this, who knows? I didn’t get that far). I find this sort of thing offensive because it’s lazy and self-indulgent, in my opinion. I’ve read equally disturbing scenes in books that upset me, and that I might have a hard time reading again, but they weren’t gratuitous: they were specific, written to make clear both the circumstance and consequence, and part of a larger context (rather than the entire context). Writers who think whole novels “about” victimization are deep and meaningful are fooling themselves, but they don’t fool me.

Then there’s the story-gone-wrong. This one’s harder to pin down, but the best example I give is actually from the movie Alien 3. I adored Alien and Aliens: I found them suspenseful, frightening, and well-made, with characters that I cared about. The movies had an internal consistency that impressed me: the Ripley of Aliens was the same woman, but she’d clearly been affected by her experience in ways that directly shaped her actions in the second movie.

And then came Alien 3. What a bunch of crap. In just a couple of hours, everything that was meaningful about Ripley was destroyed. The connections she fought for (with Newt, Hicks and Bishop) are severed even before the credits finish rolling; the fact that she’s a woman is made an issue for the first time in the story arc, in ways that are almost entirely unpleasant; she’s rendered helpless; she’s raped; she’s impregnated with a baby alien; she loses her guts to the point that she can’t take her own life (by which time I’m thinking, who are you and what have you done with my Ripley?) And her amazingly brave struggle of the first two movies ends with an alien bursting out of her chest. Perhaps some postmodernists would call this “deconstruction” and find it artistically meaningful, but I thought it was bullshit. I am still thoroughly annoyed by this movie, can you tell? But it wasn’t badly written or even particularly offensive in any of its elements: it was simply wrong.

And so I am relieved that this was not your experience with Solitaire. The elevator episode was tricky for me, and involved a fair amount of is this really the right way to go? consideration before I wrote it. Writing it was a bit like chewing tinfoil.

The elevator event has also indirectly engendered some interesting responses in reviewers (and, I assume, readers). Most reviews state that Jackal has been framed. They even go so far as to say “unfairly convicted” or “something she didn’t do.” Some perceive that she’s been deliberately put into this position by Ko as punishment. Et cetera.

I’m not sure how to feel about this. I tried to create an ambivalent situation with this plot element, and either I did a great job or a lousy job. It doesn’t matter to the overall story arc what interpretation the reader takes away (she was framed, she was set up, she was an innocent victim, etc.), but it does matter to me that I didn’t communicate it well. You’ve already put your finger on part of it –” I didn’t want the book to become the story of How Steel Breeze Did It. But the other part must be that I didn’t give enough pointers.

And now I can’t talk about this without spoilers.

SPOILER ALERT. BIG SPOILER ALERT.

Okay, so here’s what my intention was: Steel Breeze has in fact already created the assassination scenario, with one of the two elevator attendants prepared to carry out the attack (if you’ll recall, one turns up dead and the other is missing after the event). In the meantime, Jackal has had too much to drink, and is not thinking clearly, particularly with the stress of seeing her web in danger. And she pushes the wrong button. She makes a mistake.

If she hadn’t pushed the button, then the attendant would have carried out the original plan, and the ambassador would have gone down anyway. Would the other elevators have been targeted? We don’t know –” maybe yes, maybe no. We do know that Jackal is in no way a terrorist. Steel Breeze didn’t even know she was going to be there, and they didn’t care about her: they were after the ambassador. They saw the chance to use her after the fact, and jumped on it (I have a very clear picture of Sheila Donoghue in a communication strategy meeting laying it out for Breeze’s media contacts). And Ko couldn’t afford the bad blood with China, so they gave her up.

But the fact remains that Jackal is responsible. She is not guilty of terrorism or murder, but she is guilty of the deaths. She was incorrectly convicted of the crimes she was charged with, but she is not blameless.

So there you are. This whole bit of plotting was pretty frustrating for me –” took me ages to work it all out to my satisfaction, and even more time to decide how much information to include in the book. The elevator scene is a pivotal point, where plot, character, action and consequence intersect with a bang. I needed an event that would strip Jackal of her people, her company, her desire to defend herself, and then propel her into VC. It had to carry a lot of weight, and I think I showed more skill in creating the emotional structure than I did the plot structure. It’s been a big writing lesson, one that I’m chewing over as I begin work on my new book.

Jackal’s life changed forever in the random intersection of her carelessness and Steel Breeze’s machinations. Later in the story, she imagines everyone in the world as colored beads in a bowl, knocking against each other, leaving dents. That, for me, is a metaphor for the elevator scene.

What’s the writer reading?

I know what I’m reading (smile). What are you reading at the moment?

Sam

Lately I’m reading across a spectrum of genre and concern, and that’s about to become even more wacky: I’m making a research list for my new novel, which will include the geology and biology of Midwestern or Northwestern lakes; the art of Norman Rockwell; left- and right-brain neural functionality; cognitive development in adolescence; and who knows what else?

But until those start rolling in from the library, I’ve been enjoying From A Buick 8 by Stephen King. He’s so audacious and damn stubborn in his determination to put pure-D horror and subtle emotional metaphor in the same room and make them get along. I admire him immensely for this. When it works, the result is wacky, thrilling, thoughtful and grown-up, all at the same time. Even the moments that (IMO) miss this high-water mark still resonate for me.

I just read The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (me and about a million other people). It’s a good book, lovely writing and some amazing moments. I think it wobbles at the end and loses some focus, but that’s a matter of taste, and is also a relative criticism, sort of like saying that someone hung the Matisse a few inches off center.

I am also reading a bunch of non-fiction about American Sign Language and Deaf culture, because I’ve been studying ASL. I’m about to get more serious about it — in January I’ll enter a 4-year program to study ASL and interpreting. It’s a beautiful and eloquent language, and its linguistics fascinate me.

Living the story

I am always pleased when an author I have enjoyed has a web site so I can pass on my appreciation.

Solitaire was terrific and affecting. I grew up on Heinlein and Asimov, still read Barnes and Bova, and don’t much like fantasy except for Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover and Anne McCaffrey’s dragons. Solitaire does not seem to me to fit into any neat category, and I just enjoyed it. In a way, it reminded me of some of Connie Willis’s work (like Doomsday Book or Passages), I suppose in the sense of the main character being trapped and the reader empathizing strongly.

Immediately before reading your book, I had read Moral Hazard by Kate Jennings, a novel by a poet which takes a look at the corporate environment of an investment bank and the people who inhabit it. Her heroine is an outsider who has taken the job to support her husband’s care through Alzheimer’s Disease. Not SF, and not as interesting as Solitaire but it addresses some of the same issues.

I shall look forward to your next novel.

Anonymous

It is certainly worth the work of a website to have a way to receive appreciation. Thank you for taking the time to pass it on.

It turns out, according to the Author’s Guild, that something like less than 30 percent of writers have a website. I don’t understand it: it’s an amazing opportunity to connect directly with readers, regardless of whether the writer wants to make herself actually accessible or not. It seems to me that even if one knows (or believes) that a particular web site is managed for an author by a third party, there’s still the sense that the content comes from the writer herself, without filtration by a publisher or interviewer.

As an example: I went to David Bowie’s site the other day. Lovely site, very glam, although the notion of paying to be a member makes me a) incredulous and b) grumpy (and I’m a fan). But still, seeing the welcome message or the message board responses gives me a thrill –” it’s that “I” language, the knowledge that, behind all the technical gloss, someone whose work I love has sat down at his keyboard and communicated.

It’s more difficult to justify an ivory tower existence in this brave new internet world. I am fond of saying that the world is wide, but it is also much smaller than it used to be. We are all connected, like it or not –” not simply by technology, but by the increased awareness of each other that technology makes possible. Suddenly it’s a lot easier to know what war or famine or different cultures are like: we can see and hear the individual stories that make the larger issues real in a way that can’t be replicated by mass media reporting. And it seems natural to me that connecting with artists whose work we enjoy is one natural outgrowth of this new awareness and technological capability. I think that artists had better learn to deal with the growing cultural expectation of this sort of connection.

I’m glad you don’t choose to categorize Solitaire. Just enjoying it is exactly the response I am hoping for. Since you’re a science fiction reader, you probably know (Theodore) Sturgeon’s Law: “90 percent of everything is crap.” I tend to agree with this, and I look for the other 10 percent wherever I can find it, whether it’s speculative fiction or poetry or mystery or mainstream, or any other part of the literary ecosystem. I grew up reading everything I could get my eyes on, pretty indiscriminately for a while, until it finally occurred to me that some books were better than others. I knew that I especially loved a book when I found myself trying to live it. I annoyed the bejesus out of the neighbors for an entire summer by trying to become Harriet the Spy, and exasperated my parents by escaping from home with little bags of food and a determined expression, in the spirit of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. And then I discovered Tolkien, and Heinlein, and Frank Herbert (and I wonder how many other people spent significant portions of their adolescence trying to get the muscle on the back of their little finger to twitch on command?….).

I don’t try to re-enact stories anymore, but any work that I enjoy inhabits me to some extent. Sometimes forever.

I will put Moral Hazard on my reading list. Thanks for the recommendation.

Readers matter most

Hi Kelley,

I just wanted to say I liked the first chapter of Solitaire. It sounds like the kind of story I’m going to love. Your style, new to me, has already engaged me. And the premise of the story made me go “ooooh, that’s cool.” I’m looking forward to Solitaire coming out in September. Yay! Anyway, congratulations on this endeavor.

Silvia

I’m embarrassed at how long I’ve taken to respond to this. I hope you decided to read the book anyway (grin), and that it lived up to your expectations.

There’s no excuse for taking so long to answer, although there are several reasons. Nicola’s sister and her sweetie visited us from England, and of course, when family visits, redecorating is essential. I spent the time just before Solitaire‘s release scraping, spackling, sanding and painting the living room. And then re-painting, because our first color choice was such a hideous mistake. (Lesson learned: small room + red paint = disaster. Many of you probably already knew this, but it seems that I am a person who learns by doing.)

And then there was the trip to Chicago for my friend’s wedding. And various bottles of champagne to drink, as well as some really nice Brunello and a bunch of Oranjeboom beer. And a short story to get into the mail. Et cetera. And the public reaction to Solitaire to ponder.

But as important as critics are, readers are the ones who matter most. I’d be interested in what you thought was cool about the premise, and whether Solitaire turned out to be what you hoped it would.

Negative conflict

Now Kelley, after I sent the comments that you replied to I saw flaws in my comments before you replied. Although you didn’t really address those but you did hit on others. The thing that I decided I missed saying in my previous comment is that I do understand where you were going with both of the stories commented on. I really enjoyed them and the insights they contained. It’s just that I have this thing about putting fine points on almost everything. It can be a pain in the patootie for other people, lol. By the way, no need to apologize for a rant as far as I’m concerned, for what is a rant but a strong opinion with a place to voice it?

I don’t think we can take away the police for murderers and other people who don’t stop at the line where you cross into private and agreed taboo territory either. I really believe that negative conflict is a thing with a life of its own and infects like a virus. But maybe people can eventually get a grasp of how to eradicate that virus. Like some other viruses there will be those too hardy from adapting to be vulnerable enough to stamp out. Just makes me think that the best place for me to do the work I have chosen is right here with me. One little change at a time, exposing it to as many possible places to spread positivity.

Nadja Salerno Sonnenberg. Wow, that is who I was seeing all through your piece, “Strings.” Nadja is my heart, my secret love for all the rest of my life. I was blessed to be able to see her perform here in Anchorage last month. A network of my friends who know how much I love her work made it a reality for me to go to her concert. One paid for the tickets and another picked them up and another went with me, (the ride and shared witness), the rest cheered us all on. I give special invitation only video and CD Sonnenberg concerts here at my home. I was literally floored when you mentioned her. I wrote a poem called “Strings” which is on my web site but it was about my mother who played violin. I grew up in a family of classical musicians, the dean of music at UC Santa Barbara is my second cousin and I am or was a classical and jazz musician back when I had an ax and all my brain cells were working. And just what does any of this have to do with anything here? I don’t know but I felt like talking to another lover of the talent, the incomparable energy, the sound of Nadja.

I am so looking forward to reading your book Kelley. Just as soon as I get my hands on enough money to buy it I will. I won’t even try to wait to see if I can win it. That kind of winning, (contest stuff), isn’t prevalent in my life. 🙂 My big winning comes from having great people in my life and knowing who I am.

Sly

Thanks for the clarification, and no need to worry –” I wasn’t feeling misunderstood in any way. I was just letting your comments trigger some thoughts about rules and red herrings. I do try to stay on topic when someone asks me a question, but sometimes I just wander off into other parts of the playground.

I like the phrase you’ve used, “negative conflict.” I was socialized to regard all conflict as negative (I think a lot of us were raised this way, especially women, although it’s by no means a gender-specific phenomenon). It’s only in the last 10 years or so that I’ve learned that conflict isn’t bad. It’s just disagreement, and like any other communication dynamic it can be handled well, or it can be a train wreck. My corporate experience really helped me learn how to differentiate between the two, as has living with an independently-minded person.

Seems like so often people pick the wrong things to fight about, akin to fussing about the stain on the rug while ignoring the person bleeding onto it –” we get twisted up in the tangential details while the major issues go unaddressed. There’s no win there. I wish someone had given me an understanding of conflict management when I was young, although I understand that there are many grammar schools and high schools now where the basic principles are taught, and enforced. I’m all for it. It’s much better to learn how to deal. Avoidance is so often toxic to everyone involved: I know this is true even though I still do it sometimes. It is at those moments, among others, that I most clearly comprehend the extent and the moray-eel grip of my own socialization.

Going back to your original comments, what I think of now is how correct Timmi Duchamp is in describing red herrings as distracting (not just irrelevant). She was talking about pronouns, but it can just as easily apply to any other thing that we internalize without questioning it. That unconscious acceptance is what I think of when I read your comments about viruses. But I do think people are learning more and more how to question others, and ourselves, which is all to the good. I have hope for less conflict in the future, although reading the news these days certainly doesn’t support that perspective. And yet, I think humans have an amazing capacity to expand our inner horizons, to encompass what is strange and scary without being swallowed by it: to find ways that we can be different without killing each other physically or emotionally or psychologically. It’s a thing people can learn, if we choose to (and if there is someone around to teach us, and help us practice). It would certainly be much more useful on a daily basis than much of what I learned in school.

Thanks for the gentle and diplomatic correction of Nadja’s name. I agree, she’s wonderful, and I’m embarrassed to realize that I don’t actually have any of her CDs. When I first saw her, years ago, I was so taken by the story welling up inside me that I let the actual music get away. I will have to go fix that.

Companies are people

Hi, Kelley,

I’ve gotten a chance to look at Solitaire and it strikes me that your depiction of corporate culture is both accurate and non-judgmental. You seem to treat the corporate milieu more like an ecology –” which can be both benign and malign, depending on where you are within it and how much you understand about it. This runs counter to a great deal of current position-taking regarding the corporate model, which wants to show it either as an Evil Empire or an Innocent Institution that’s merely misunderstood. I wonder if you’d care to comment on your unique approach?

Mark

It’s taken me a while to tackle this question because I keep wanting to say everything I believe, or feel, or know, and that turns out to be a lot. I’m not entirely satisfied with this answer, only because there is so much missing. I think I will have to write a book about it.

I used to believe that business was really complicated. Now I think business is simple: people are complicated.

When I first began working in the adult world, I played the Evil Company game with enthusiasm and an aggressive disregard for how many people I was broadcasting to. I was underappreciated, misunderstood, and the victim of corporate abuse: managers were stupid, leadership was nonexistent, and the company was fucked. Blah, blah.

At a job in Atlanta, I first began to learn some ways that I could change my own behavior and thereby influence the behavior of people around me. I should fess up that I did this because I was about to be fired for being a major self-righteous pain in the ass. I was given the option to change, or to continue being my unhappy self with another employer. So I changed. I learned to be a facilitator and team builder, and I began the intensive study of communication and process and organizational dynamics that is still a large part of my life and work even now, more than two years after my last corporate job.

I’m glad I sucked it up and did the work: it made a huge difference to my life, and it made me understand that corporations aren’t Evil or Good. They are people. When people are less skilled at working together effectively, their part of the company (their particular ecological niche, if you like), becomes chaotic at best: at worst, people get stress, ulcers, and a downward spiral of hostility and misery. When people are better at working together, they get more done and they are more likely to feel that what they do, and who they are, is of value. They thrive, and the company usually benefits.

We hear lots about goals and vision, and those are important. But many executives seem to think it’s the only relevant thing in business. To which I say, get real –” goals are the easy part. Anybody can set a goal. It’s achieving the goal that’s hard, and in my view of the universe it is the responsibility of managers and leaders to do the hard work. It is their responsibility to give people process, tools, and clear rules for working together. It doesn’t matter how complicated the actual mechanics of the particular business are: I absolutely believe that companies live or die on everyone’s ability to manage communication, relationships, process, and interpersonal dynamics. The rest is details.

No two people have the same corporate experience. You can change a person’s morale just by transferring her to another department and moving her five cubicles to the left. And you can also change her morale by teaching her to play nicely with others and then insisting that she do it. And that her boss do it, and so on, right along to the vice presidents and the president and the CEO, who in my not-at-all-humble opinion are all 100 percent responsible for setting the tone for this. If they don’t, shame on them. And I really mean that: shame on them, because what they do, or don’t do, makes a difference to the people that work for them. People’s daily lives are not a trivial thing.

I was amazingly lucky to have the chance to build an entire team at Wizards of the Coast, from scratch, based on these principles. It gave me a great deal of joy. It was also hard, and scary, and imperfect. Like ecologies, corporations are systems, constantly adjusting to different conditions, different surfeits or deficits or pressures. Balance is not a destination, it is a journey.

The skills that Jackal has in the book are real, and they can make a difference, and they are a whole bunch of fun when they do. It’s also true that working this way doesn’t mean that humans become less complicated. Our company may still not make the decisions that we might wish. We may not always have a happy experience. Sometimes it doesn’t work out, no matter how skilled we are. That’s in the book, too.

For people who are interested, I can recommend a few books that I think are very good or brilliant in addressing some of the concepts that are important to me. It turns out, not surprisingly, that I think these ideas are important in life: how to manifest them in business is just one of the challenges.

Blasting out

As commented by Timmi Duchamp in the discussion, Erotics of Gender Ambiguity,

“Pronouns, as I think I said a few months back, are red herrings. Red herrings aren’t just irrelevant, they distract. And an obsession with penetrating missing pronouns is partly what this story has to show us-as in a mirror.”

All through this discussion, (which I am coming to long after its inception), I get the feeling of pioneerism. I am not a young woman and I kept thinking uh huh I’ve heard all this before so many times over the decades. But I think it is important to continually explore the issue so that maybe in the next century people can simply live their lives without interference from anyone who thinks they *know* better how they should live. Trying to bring this around to an actual question, did you have some of the same mind set when you wrote “Strings”? In that story you hit on the big issue for me in my life, why the heck should another living soul tell you how to live or interpret life? Only the most real of my friends can bear to be around me because I won’t live falsely. That is falsely to myself, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s all about gender as there are so many other ways to manipulate behavior that also attempt to inhibit people.

Sly

I don’t mind general rules about murder and rape and theft and traffic: rules help us to negotiate our differences with less misunderstanding, and give us some structured recourse when people do damage. (Social gender rules don’t fit this model for me — I can’t see much about them that lessens misunderstanding.)

Some folks take things a step farther, into the realm of “wouldn’t it be so much easier if we didn’t have to grub around with all these messy differences in the first place.” Maybe they do it out of fear, to minimize conflict and change. Or maybe to avoid having to think too closely about the choices they make. And some genuinely believe that their way of doing things is Right in some universal sense, and if the rest of us were just a tiny bit more reasonable, or mature, or community-minded… well, there’s no way to win that argument, is there? The scary thing is that some people are willing to legislate behavior if they can’t manipulate it any other way, and they are convinced of the rightness of their cause: they only want what’s best for us, and that gives them all the permission they need to improve us, in spite of ourselves.

But maybe I should answer your question instead of going on a rant about people who believe that there’s only one way to be a good human (grin).

It’s interesting to think about “Strings” in this context. It’s not where my head was when I wrote the story, but it’s not unrelated. The idea for Strad (the protagonist of “Strings”) came from a television profile I saw about a violinist named Nadia Sonnenberg (think I spelled that right). She was so amazingly passionate about her music: she vibrated the entire time she played. She was right there, inside the music. I found it attractive and I identified with it. I felt there were so many things inside me that wanted to come out (including writing), and here was a person who a) knew what was in her, and b) knew how to bring it out.

So that’s where it started: with a desire to let it all come blasting out. Music seemed like a perfect metaphor, and the best way to make the blasting-out point was to put Strad in a situation where she was required to keep it all in, and then examine what it would take to make it come out anyway. There’s not a lot of distance between that and examining why people are afraid of difference, because I think it’s the sense of being different that makes a lot of us keep our passions, our selves, reined in. I could be so much larger than I am. I want that. I’m working on it in life as well as in fiction.

The wandering path of Solitaire

Hi,

Congrats on your new virtual existence. Hope that the virtual pint will turn out to be as filling as a good glass of bitter.

Has your publisher planned any hoopla for the release of Solitaire? Will there be a local appearance/reading at a bookstore (or pub) in the Seattle area? (Actually, the pub thing might even work –a literary Tuesday night at the local watering hole).

Nicola has a brief mention of your emergency appendectomy. Hope it didn’t turn into peritonitis (really, really, painful) and thus require an extended stay at the hospital.

Peter

Mmm, bitter.

Hoopla-planning is in progress, with hoopla being a relative term. The only thing I am sure of right now is a reading at University Books in Seattle, on September 25 at 7 pm.

In most cases, there is little fanfare for first novels, even those published in hardcover. That’s not a blanket statement of course, but generally a first novelist (especially in sf) can expect print advertising/reviews in trade publications like Locus, and reviews in some of the friendlier newspapers and periodicals, along with a local reading or two. Maybe some local media coverage. Perhaps a national review (New York Times, Washington Post) if one is lucky and one’s publicist has been playing nicely with the media. There are fewer outlets for review of sf novels than of literary novels, and genre prejudice is still alive and well in the critical world.

Having said all that, I’m not yet sure what to expect for Solitaire. The book has been on a strange and interesting path that has shattered all my assumptions about what will happen with it.

I sold Solitaire to Morrow/Eos as a mass market original. One of the basic rules of mass market originals is that there is no hoopla. There is a print ad in Locus and maybe a local reading if the author has made friends with the bookstore folks. Review copies are sent out, and the publicists do a fine job of making the books sound engaging and worthwhile. I’m not dissing the publishing people: they have to work with a high volume of product and they do a great job in making sure that every book gets a chance. But, along with genre prejudice, there is also “format prejudice.” Hardcovers get more credibility. Reviewers are more likely to pick them out of the pile of books. Sales reps will be more familiar with them. Again, no disrespect intended: it’s a hierarchical system, and although I don’t like it I can certainly understand it. Everyone needs a way to prioritize their work, and this is one of the ways it happens in publishing.

So I knew that Solitaire would get little support. I decided that I could accept that if I knew I had done everything in my power to support the book myself. So I made several reading copies and sent letters to some of the writers that I’ve had occasion to meet over the years, asking if they would read the book and consider giving it a promotional quote. I am fortunate to know some people who were generous with their time, and liked the book well enough to give it some advance praise.

And then my editor, who is a goddess of publishing, was able to use the quotes and her considerable force of personality and professional credibility to generate interest among key people at the publishing house. This is no mean feat: the people who oversee sales and marketing and publicity are busy. But they did take the time to read the book and reconsider the format, with the result that one day I found myself getting the call about being bumped into hardcover.

Now Borders has selected the book for the Original Voices program. I can pretty much guarantee that would never have happened if the book had been published as a mass market original, even though it would have been exactly the same book. It’s a huge thing for me because the Borders program is “literary”, not “genre” (and don’t get me started about these kinds of artificial distinctions, they make me so grumpy). Will Solitaire have the chance and the ability to cross over to some non-genre readers? That would certainly be a fine thing for me, since I feel pretty much the same about book category labels (like sf or literary fiction) as I do about sexual identity labels.

So now I’m hoping for a reading or some event at a Borders store in Seattle, although that is not yet certain. Possibly readings in Portland or Bellingham. Maybe some local press? A review in Publisher’s Weekly. Who knows? It’s all pretty interesting, an unexpected treat no matter how it turns out.

I like the idea of a literary pub event! I will tell my publicist.

And no peritonitis, thanks for asking. They got to the appendix just before the bursting point, and I was actually home less than 12 hours after the surgery with some good drugs and lots of food brought around by friends. I feel fortunate.

Sexual salad bar sci-fi

I’ll definitely be reading Solitaire. I am curious, is it lesbian sci-fi or straight sci-fi? It won’t make a difference, but I just want to know. Thank you.

Katia N. Ruiz

I’m glad for this question: I need to practice answering it, and I have so many different answers that it’s easy to get tangled up in them.

The straightforward factual answer: Jackal has a primary emotional and sexual relationship with a woman in this book. She also has (consensual) sex with a male friend.

The deeper answer is: neither. Because the only stories I’m inclined to characterize as “lesbian” fiction or “straight” fiction are those that pointedly grapple with issues of sexuality. As an example: I just finished reading a really lovely young adult book called Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson. It’s the story of a thirteen year old girl who is raped and has to deal with the psychological damage of the attack at the same time that she’s trying to cope with her first year of high school. It’s a gorgeous book that wrestles with a lot of issues, including sexual power dynamics among heterosexual adolescent people. I can’t imagine that anyone would ever characterize this as straight fiction, but for me it’s much more “straight” fiction than my book is “lesbian” fiction.

Lots of people will call Solitaire a lesbian book because of the relationship, and some people will think that the sex with a man makes it not a “real lesbian” book after all. I suspect I am going to get a certain amount of grumpiness from several directions. I’m glad that it won’t make a difference to you: I don’t see why it would to anyone, but there you go.

I can’t even really categorize Solitaire as bi-sci-fi. Sexual identification just isn’t an issue for Jackal in any way in this book. There’s sex in it but it’s not about sex or the consequences of sexual choices. And just as I resist being labeled in my private life, I resist it in my professional life. Solitaire is character sci-fi, it’s inner-landscape sci-fi. If we must put a sex-related label on it, let’s call it sexual-salad-bar sci-fi, a category that I would be happy to pioneer.