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The Big Idea: Laura R. Samotin

Posted on May 7, 2024    Posted by Athena Scalzi      3 Comments

For The Sins On Their Bones, author Laura R. Samotin was challenged to do several tricky things at once in order to make the whole story work. And how were these things tricky things accomplished? As today’s Big Idea explains: trickily!

LAURA R. SAMOTIN:

One of the big ideas motivating my debut adult fantasy novel The Sins On Their Bones was “how do the characters who lost the war and survived continue to live after the shooting stops?” We see many a fantasy novel where the battle is the climax, and yet I wanted to explore what it would feel like to be living in the aftermath of trauma, to be a character dealing with devastating political and personal scars. So The Sins On Our Bones starts at the end—with a Tzar in exile, having (quite spectacularly) lost a civil war to the ex-husband who deposed him. 

What I didn’t anticipate when writing was that this narrative choice posed intertwined challenges, not only for the telling of the story, but for the ability of readers to connect with deeply traumatized characters they meet at the lowest point of their lives, with the least agency and self-esteem they’ve ever had. The setup of the book is this: Dimitri Alexeyev is the former Tzar of Novo-Svitsevo, and he and the few surviving members of his court are in exile. His court is concerned—there have been rumors that his ex-husband, Alexey, is coming to finish the job and kill Dimitri and the rest of his them. And besides, it seems as though Alexey is preparing to do some rather unsavory things to the country and people they care for in the name of shoring up his rule.  

Dimitri, though, would prefer to languish in bed, chain-smoking and drinking himself to death—he is profoundly depressed and dealing with serious PTSD. There are dozens of rejections sitting in my agent’s email inbox that go something along the lines of Dimitri is too passive, he’s not an engaged character. The thing is, those rejections are right—but the implication that the only books worth publishing are the ones in which characters immediately pull themselves up and out of horrible situations by their bootstraps really frustrated me. It didn’t feel realistic to me that Dimitri would immediately spring out of bed and start drawing up plans for how to retake his country after just having suffered the biggest personal and political trauma of his life and rule. At least in my personal experience, that’s not how grappling with depression and anxiety works.

But I knew that I could make readers care about Dimitri—I just had to make them understand what he’d been through, and how miraculous it was that he was continuing to function at all. If they knew his history, they’d see the strength it took just to survive, let alone move forward, and how remarkable it was that he still allowed himself to be open and vulnerable with his friends. The complicating factor was that I couldn’t do this so easily, since I was committed to starting the book off at the point at which Dimitri had already lost—remember, that was the literal whole point of my big idea. What were all these characters doing after the shooting stopped and they found themselves on the losing side?

So on a craft level, I had to work hard to reveal the depths of Dimitri’s trauma while avoiding the one trap that every writer dreads: infodumping. I would have lost readers straight away if I began with a long recounting of everything that had happened over the course of years, because why would they care? It would be like meeting a stranger on the street and having them begin reciting their biography. Without an emotional connection to the character, there’s no reason to care about what they’ve been through—but to get readers to care about this character, I needed them to know what he’d been through. It was a very frustrating MC Escher-like scenario, especially for a debut (and still quite novice) writer. 

Working with my editor, I began to untangle the puzzle of how to do this, through conversations with other characters, flashbacks, bits of remembrances in dreams, and more. I invented a whole plot point just to give two characters a way to share their nightmares and thus reveal inner thoughts and fears and pain that they weren’t yet ready to confess out loud. I decided to feed readers a steady drip of “this is what happened” moments in order to keep them emotionally engaged, and to allow them to develop greater and greater sympathy for Dimitri.

In this sense, it’s been gratifying as an author to have already heard from so many readers that they relate to Dimitri. Many people felt as though reading the book was hard but worth it, for the reminder that even when we’re at our lowest points, we’re still worth something, and there are still people who will love and support us if we let them. But also the reminder that it’s possible to slowly regain a sense of self-worth and agency through that support (in addition to therapy, medication, etc.—all of which I have fantasy analogues for in my world). I hope that in addition to showing that books which begin at the end can be loved by readers on a craft level, that my book shows readers who relate to Dimitri a little love in return.

The Sins On Their Bones: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|The Ripped Bodice

Author’s Socials: Website|Twitter|Instagram

The Big Idea: Thersa Matsuura

Posted on May 2, 2024    Posted by Athena Scalzi      2 Comments

Folklore, superstitions, and legends are all essential parts of a place’s culture and history. Today, author Thersa Matsuura wishes to share these incredible stories and beliefs of Japan with the rest of the world, whether you’re a beginner, or a seasoned expert on the subject. Immerse yourself in the legends with her new book, The Book of Japanese Folklore: An Encyclopedia of the Spirits, Monsters, and Yokai of Japanese Myth.

THERSA MATSUURA:

I was newly married, living in a small Japanese town in the early nineties when my mother-in-law sat me down one day and enlightened me with the news that I was “sticky.”  This meant, she went on to explain, that compared to a normal person, all those spirits and ghosts that lurk pretty much everywhere all the time, like to attach to me and cause mischief. That was my first indication that living in Japan was going to be exciting and strange. 

It wasn’t long after that, she told me about how an extremely wealthy friend of hers had moved house last year, only he didn’t pay proper respects to the land kami and inadvertently invited a binbōgami (god of poverty) to live with them. Afterward, came a string of bad luck and within months his business went under and now they were very poor and trying to make ends meet. Not only was living in Japan going to be strange and exciting, I had a lot to learn. Learn I did. 

This was pre Internet times, so I spent many days in the library or talking to the little old men and women in the neighborhood to learn more about these superstitions, folk beliefs, and ever present supernatural entities. I mitigated the hurt of being told my careless actions brought bad luck and even sickness with the sheer wonder at and fascination with this extremely rich and layered culture. I just had to share my findings with someone, anyone. That’s when I began using my experiences living here, as well as my boots on the ground research, to fuel my writing and podcast, Uncanny Japan. 

So thirty years later, when Adams Media approached me about writing The Book of Japanese Folklore: An Encyclopedia of the Spirits, Monsters, and Yokai of Japanese Myth, it sounded like a perfect fit. Only by now, thanks to games, manga, anime, and the Internet, Japanese culture had really taken off. It was everywhere. So I mulled it over and thought what is my, well, Big Idea for the book? What can I bring to the proverbial kotatsu table that all these other books and websites and Youtube and TikTok channels out there haven’t?

Here’s where I remembered the feedback I get from listeners and readers, and how I’m continually blown away by how much more knowledgeable fans of Japanese culture and learners of the Japanese language are than they were twenty, ten, even five years ago.  What if I could write a book that could be picked up and read by an absolute beginner on the subject, but also include lots of little unique morsels of information for more intermediate — even advanced — readers?

One way of doing this was to add kanji characters to not only the mythical beasties, but also important book and temple names, as well as interesting nuanced sayings and phrases. Kanji is delightful and multifaceted and sublime. It’s also a good way to really understand the beauty and depth of the Japanese language and culture. Keeping in mind that it’s so much easier and a lot more fun to learn a new language if it relates to something your super curious about, why not study Japanese through folklore and yōkai?

Another way to see my big idea through, was to dive into my Japanese books on the subject. With every one of the 45 chapters, I dug up some obscure and interesting fact or story that I personally haven’t seen translated into English. This way even the most avid yōkai and folklore enthusiast can hopefully learn something brand new. 

And finally, while it’s impossible to list all the places these supernatural beasties, mythical heroes, and their stories can be found in recent games, anime, manga, and movies, I did try to give a brief overview just to further demonstrate how delightful, ubiquitous, and interconnected they have become.

What I find marvelous is that after 34 years of living in Japan, while it’s not always easy, I am still learning something new every single day. My hope is that readers of The Book of Japanese Folklore will gain a deeper understanding of the nuances and subtleties of the country and relish in the brilliantly outrageous  — oftentimes hilarious — imaginations of the Japanese people of yore. And maybe, just maybe, if their curiosity is piqued enough, they can use the book as a jumping off point to go on their own strange and exiting journey into the seemingly fathomless depths of Japanese culture and mythical beasties.

The Book of Japanese Folklore: An Encyclopedia of the Spirits, Monsters, and Yokai of Japanese Myth: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author socials: Website|Facebook|Instagram|Twitter

The Big Idea: José Pablo Iriarte

Posted on April 30, 2024    Posted by Athena Scalzi      6 Comments

Author José Pablo Iriarte is here today to tell us a bit about their debut middle grade novel, Benny Ramírez and the Nearly Departed. Both their novel and their Big Idea feature a feeling many creatives (and others!) are familiar with: imposter syndrome. Follow along to see how fitting into a new school is only the beginning of Benny’s problems. 

JOSÉ PABLO IRIARTE:

I first encountered the term “imposter syndrome” from the proprietor of this very website. I was in Denver in 2008 for Worldcon, and since it was my very first Worldcon, I attended a panel/presentation given by John Scalzi and Mary Robinette Kowal that was titled something like “Worldcon for N00bs” (I’m too lazy to attempt to look it up, so let’s assume that’s what it was called). I was an aspiring writer without a fiction sale but with a recently completed novel manuscript, and Kowal was a finalist for the Best New Writer Not-A-Hugo and I wanted to learn the secrets of becoming part of the community of specific writers, and who better to learn from than these two?

At some point the two of them talked about the phenomenon of imposter syndrome and I had an immediate flash of Holy crap, I know exactly what she means! Not as a writer, because I wasn’t even accomplished enough to be an imposter. But I’d experienced it as an early-career teacher, and in other contexts where people seemed to defer to my alleged knowledge and talents, even when I wasn’t sure I had much of either. Now I get to deal with it as an author, where I’ve got some of the credentials that would suggest I know what I’m doing, but I’m pretty sure I don’t, that I’ve gotten lucky two or three times, and that it’s only a matter of time before somebody comes along and realizes I’m just playing at all this.

In Benny Ramírez and the Nearly Departed, my middle grade debut novel from Knopf/Random House, Benny has to deal with a case of imposter syndrome of his own, and he could point to pretty definitive reasons why it’s deserved: He’s enrolled in an arts magnet school, but he has no discernible artistic or creative talent. While everybody else in the school had to audition to get in, he’s there because his parents are on the staff as teachers, and so their kid gets to bypass that hurdle. His father is a successful screenwriter who has left Hollywood to teach drama. His mom is a polyglot who plays guitar. His siblings are a talented dancer and a star thespian. And then there’s Benny.

When his brother’s attempt at a joke backfires, leading everybody at his new school to believe that Benny is a trumpet-playing prodigy, the screw twists even tighter. 

Benny does have one “gift,” however: he’s the only one who can see the ghost of his famous musician grandfather, Ignacio Ramírez. Ignacio has been denied entrance into the great fiesta in the sky due to the many people he hurt in life with his arrogance and self-absorption, and he’s been given a New Year’s Eve deadline to make things right, or walk his former haunts forever. Exacerbating Benny’s imposter syndrome, Ignacio believes he can accomplish his goal by transforming him into the star musician everybody expects him to be. To that end, he gives Benny one bit of terrible advice after another. 

Folks who’ve read my short fiction know I tend to focus on feelings and relationships more than on high stakes action and protagonists squaring off against antagonists. While the premise of a kid trying to fit in at a new school and a self-aggrandizing ghost trying to earn his wings does lend itself to a lot of hopefully funny hijinks, I can’t write a story until the characters feel real to me and until their needs and problems feel like ones I can personally identify with. So a lot of my own fears about not being good enough, or about not belonging, powered Benny’s narrative. 

I hope readers will find my novel to be a fun visit to Miami with a supernatural twist, but I hope the explorations of family relationships and belonging, and how to navigate both while being true to your own authentic self, linger on after the hijinks are done.

Benny Ramírez and the Nearly Departed: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s  

Author socials: Website|Twitter|Instagram|Facebook|Bluesky 

The Big Idea: Lyda Morehouse

Posted on April 29, 2024    Posted by Athena Scalzi      4 Comments

Fight the good fight. That’s what we all try to do, isn’t it? Stand up and fight, never surrender. It’s what makes us human. At least, that’s what author Lyda Morehouse expands on in her Big Idea for newest novel, Welcome to Boy.Net. Read on to see what exactly could make a computer “human.”

LYDA MOREHOUSE:

There’s been a lot of talk about artificial intelligence in the news lately. Congress is rushing to pass laws; artists, actors, and authors are freaking out for very reasonable and legitimate reasons; and everyone and their dog is trying to sell you some “AI enhanced” app or some such. But, when we say AI, what we really mean is highly-sophisticated machine learning. There isn’t a real intelligence behind this. 

That being said, we don’t really know how to test for machine intelligence. 

The Turing Test is the most famous way to try to determine if a machine is intelligent, but the weak point is, well…  us. All a program has to do to pass the Turing Test is convince us of its humanity. And, I’m not saying we’re easily fooled, but, generally, as a species we enjoy anthropomorphizing things. Give me a cute enough mascot and a reasonable enough argument and I’d probably allow that spoons could be people. We love to give the benefit of the doubt. In fact, as early as 2016, Saudi Arabia of all places had already given a robot named Sophia citizenship, and all the human rights that entails.

So, in my mind, at least, the Turing Test is kind of an easy “A” for most of the current crop of machine learning programs out there.

When thinking about the far-future, I started to wonder  what might replace the Turing Test.  What is something that is so fundamentally human that it could be instantly recognizable as sentience, as a sign of intelligence? 

My answer: resistance.

When I wrote Welcome to Boy.Net, the first book of the Earth’s Shadow trilogy, I decided that some future think tank determined that if a program can resist being overwritten or reprogrammed, that is an absolute and certain sign that it is intelligent enough to have a sense of self-preservation. My two heroines don’t believe such an artificial intelligence exists… until they meet one. But the theme of resistance, of fighting to preserve one’s authentic self, resonates throughout the entire book. 

I started writing this novel shortly after Trump got elected, and its germination happened in the activism I was participating in. I was going to protests almost daily, and you’ll see that in the book’s literal street protests that turn into a kind of communal rescue operation. At a time when we were all making jokes about the “darkest timeline,” I tried to write the future I wanted to bring into existence.  My working title for the book was “Lesbians in Spaaaaaace,” because part of what I wanted to write into existence was a future where people like me got to have adventures.

Being alive and queer — especially trans — is also a daily act of rebellion, of resistance. My main heroine, Lucia Del Toro, is a trans woman who is a refugee from a militaristic stratocracy. Hers is the struggle against the kind of fascism that refuses to accept her as a human being. I’ve been writing a lot about trans and queer folks, ever since my first novel Archangel Protocol was published in 2001. I’ve known that I was a very butch lesbian for a long time, but the more I’ve learned from the trans community, the more I’ve come to my own personal understanding of the parts of me that don’t fit a cis definition. For me, personally, and especially with Trump and his allies on the horizon again, this story feels particularly necessary. Some days, for many of us just waking up alive is an act of resistance. 

And hopefully this fun space opera of mine will leave readers with a sense that resistance is never futile. That’s just the lies of fascism talking, trying to convince us to comply and not fight back. As my fellow Minnesotan Paul Wellstone used to say, “Stand up, Keep fighting!” And, I would add, be a lesbian in spaaaaace! 

Welcome to Boy.Net: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Kobo|Powell’s

Author socials: Website|Bluesky

The Big Idea: Samantha Mills

Posted on April 25, 2024    Posted by John Scalzi      3 Comments

Author Samantha Mills has a lot on her mind with The Wings Upon Her Back, and much of what is on her mind goes back… way back. Find out how the experiences of those who come before come to color the lives of those who live in the now, and what it means for this novel.

SAMANTHA MILLS:

One of the shittiest things about intergenerational trauma is that you’ve often passed it on before you even realize you have it.

I was in my thirties with two small children when I began to reflect more heavily on my own upbringing (like you do), and it finally clicked, in a way it never had before, that my parents were raised by people who had fled Europe after World War II. An entire generation of stoic survivors who didn’t want to talk about any of that; who didn’t believe in therapy and instead insisted that kids need toughening up, as though a bit of trauma now would inoculate them against life’s worse atrocities later. (Spoiler: everyone’s got anxiety instead!)

There aren’t many circumstances that have society-wide repercussions for entire generations at once. War is one of them. Covid-19 has been another.

In The Wings Upon Her Back, there is also a single widespread trauma that shapes society for generations, and that is godly abandonment. There are five gods sleeping above the city of Radezhda. When they first arrived, they bestowed great technologies on their followers and inspired unbridled devotion. But one day, without explanation, they turned their backs.

The trauma of that abandonment haunts the book and everyone in it. I used it to build out the history of the city (I had a load of fun in the epigraphs, if fun is the right word), the character backstories, the primary conflict and its messy resolution… once I understood the ramifications of what I was describing, it seeped in everywhere. It had to.

My main character, Zemolai, spends much of the novel in a crisis of faith. And fantasy is a great medium for this, because you also get to ask interesting questions like: what does a crisis of faith look like, when you have physical proof that the gods are real? The people of Radezhda have built towers to the heavens to go knocking at their gods’ feet. Their existence isn’t in question. Their motivations, on the other hand…

This is the situation Zemolai finds herself in. Cast aside by the charismatic leader she gave up everything to serve, facing the terrible things she did for her, and questioning everything. Her story is the story of the city itself, an entire people caught in a cycle of devotion and disillusionment, an entire people asking why did they leave us? and finding that the answers are never as satisfactory as one hopes.

It’s a compassionate book, I hope. The villain is villainous as hell, but there’s a terrible pain point underlying everything she’s done. Zemolai struggles with her faith, but comes to a more nuanced place than she started. As in real life, the way through for her involves looking to the past and untangling the threads of shared history. For all of us, it means coming to terms with what brought us here, and then doing our best to make things better for the next generation.

The Wings Upon Her Back: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Mysterious Galaxy

Author Socials: Web Site|Bluesky|Instagram|Twitter

Read an excerpt.

The Big Idea: Chris Panatier

Posted on April 23, 2024    Posted by Athena Scalzi

We all have voices in our heads. But what do you do when one becomes so loud they begin to take over? Author Chris Panatier is here with his newest horror novel, The Redemption of Morgan Bright, to show what can happen when two “people” occupy the same body.

CHRIS PANATIER:

The first Big Idea for my horror novel The Redemption of Morgan Bright wasn’t even my idea. In fact, it’s one of the oldest tropes across virtually all genres, that is, the falsification of one’s identity as a means to gaining entrance to some place. In the case of asylums, perhaps the most famous account is that of young journalist Nellie Bly, who did so in 1887 at the age of twenty-three.

In order to investigate patient treatment and conditions, she assumed the name “Natalie Brown” and had herself committed to the infamous Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island in New York. The administration was convinced she was mentally ill, calling her “positively deranged” and attempting to have her committed permanently. Her editor had to intervene to have her discharged. Bly wrote a book about her experience called Ten Days in a Madhouse and published it that same year.

The Redemption of Morgan Bright is a contemporary gothic tale. A woman (Morgan) assumes the false identity of a troubled housewife named Charlotte Turner and has herself committed to an “enlightened” mental institution called Hollyhock House. She’s doing all of this to find out why her sister died in the same place a year earlier.

I’d originally set out to write the entire novel from Morgan’s perspective, whether as herself in relevant flashbacks or in the leadup to her commitment, or while behaving as Charlotte. But in early drafting, that setup quickly disintegrated—and not because of any outlining or planning on my part. I couldn’t have planned what happened, which was that as I wrote Morgan playing Charlotte, Charlotte became real.

It was from writing the dueling points of view of both Charlotte and Morgan that this new dynamic emerged, what I’ll call Chris’s Accidental Big Idea. Charlotte’s identity bled into Morgan’s and eventually took over. As a Proud Pantser™ (those who write “from the seat of their pants” rather than outlining), this was the type of interesting angle you hope to stumble upon. 

And so it was that Charlotte quickened from a character created by Morgan, into a fully realized individual. She has a distinct personality, desires, flaws, the full range of human emotion, and most importantly, goals. Charlotte has goals. The problem, of course, is that what she wants and what Morgan wants aren’t aligned. In fact, they’re entirely incompatible. That can be problematic when they both live in the same head—and it was that tension that really propelled this story forward.

I’ll leave it to the reader to decide if the dynamic between Charlotte and Morgan is better characterized as psychological (a possible manifestation of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), historically referred to as “multiple personality disorder”) or as paranormal (possession), or even a hybridization of the two. 

Unlike a demon, Charlotte is not an invasive entity that comes from an external place—indeed, she was created by Morgan—nor is Charlotte an identity created as a response to trauma, as is often the case with DID. In this story, she’s a new thing. Regardless of the characterization, one of the story’s central conflicts is a case of battling identities stemming from the sober, rational, and sane creation of a mask that takes on a life of its own and eventually subjugates the wearer. Two standout books that explore the opposite ends of this spectrum are Sara Gran’s Come Closer (demon possession) and Catriona Ward’s sure classic The Last House on Needless Street (DID). 

They say ‘write what scares you’ and the crossroads of lost identity and lack of control make my blood run cold. I’m just happy that my lawless pantsing led me to this fantastic source of conflict.

The Redemption of Morgan Bright: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Books-a-Millon|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author Socials: Website