 So I just thought I'd start in advance by thanking you for your time, patience, tolerance. I used it and we were talking earlier and we thought it would be interesting to get the ball rolling really fast and he wanted to read a section from his book. I was actually going to show some images but that didn't work out today so figure it out. Take from the entropy of bones. The main character is an African American Mongolian girl who kicks butt and takes numbers. And there's not much to really set up here. This may sound a bit familiar to some people. A moron of an under-trained Oakland police officer had fired a gun point blank range at a 22-year-old Oakland kid who was unarmed and handcuffed, face down and black. The cop was white and lived in the rich suburbs of Antioch. The kid lived in a part of Oakland known as the Bottoms. The cop's excuse was that he thought he was pulling his taser. Oakland wasn't buying it but the jury did. They gave the cop the lightest sentence possible. Oakland answered by lighting its streets on fire. That's what the news report said at least. In truth, it wasn't the mourners of the dead Bottoms kid or the righteous anger of the Oakland protesters that started lighting garbage cans on fire. It was bandana-faced, trustafarian, so they got off calling themselves anarchists alongside the usual opportunistic, infection-type people that availed themselves of whatever tragedy they can find to grab whatever they can find. They were the ones who maintained the chaos on the streets. In response, the Oakland police department strapped on their ride gear and swung for the fences, trying desperately to maintain whatever crumbs of water they could find. Of course, I knew none of this at the time. I just walked out of my first and only high school party and found a full-scale riot jumping off. Parties over! If anyone wondered how they could hear me over the music, they didn't bother asking. They were all following instructions, packing up and figuring out how to get out of the sandwich shop except for the little kid. What the hell he yipped at me as I went up to his balcony, riot, big time, all downtown by the smell of the fire. He understood quickly enough and killed the music just as the sound of the breaking wood from the beer garden behind him made me jump. Only I leapt off the small back window and onto the second floor balcony to see the beer garden. A skinny dread anarchist had already made his way over by the time I landed. His friend was trying to make it over the fence as well. I let his ass meet my knee. You're not welcome here. I whispered as I threw him back over the fence. Freakin' pigs are everywhere! The remaining white dread moaned as I stepped off the keg resting on the balls of my feet softly. Your problem, not mine. The smell of his fear came in waves, almost masking the smell of the burning tires from Franklin Street. You get one chance to leave here on your own. He did not choose wisely. Back inside, nine math leads and debaters formed a circle around the little kid. They'd been smart enough to lock the front door and turn off all the lights. The front gate to the plate glass window shop had already been locked down. Across the street, we saw a troop of talented baton-building police officers making their way from the headquarters to the border of Jack London Square to the main riot in front of City Hall. Did I stutter the first time? Go home. They were going to stay here. The little kid stepped up as the others retreated. Riot equals change of plans, no? Where are we going to go? A mousy girl who made me ashamed to be female cried. Bryce called. He said some of the others had been attacked. Bart is closed. They all told their parents they were going to stay out all night. At each other's houses, but we're going to spend the night here kind of like a sleepover. We even have sleeping bags. For the love of all things non-nerd, I beg you to stop talking. I looked at them in earnest for the first time. They were the last of the 200 who had come and the first, the intelligent outcast. They were as new to fashion as I was. It was a costume for them. For many, maybe all, it was their first night out. Around 190 bolted and some paid the price. But these 10, plus the little kid, they had stayed loyal through the fidelity and the fear. With what little sentimentality I had to assert, I knew I would get them home. So I'm going to start with the obvious question. Why did you pick that passage? Because we're in the bay, and I love the bay. And I love Oakland. I love an Oakland that I fear is disappearing. I feel like the bay that I love is disappearing. There's a pock line only in Cali do we riot in our rally. And I just love that we rioted. I love that there was a time when we stood up and just said no. And yeah, there are politics with it and yeah, there's drama with it. And people did stupid things. But there was a point where we said no. And now we're saying okay. And now we're not saying anything. And now we're forgetting to speak. And that, I don't like that. So, you know, a good thing about a novel or about a book is you get to hold on to a moment. And that's a moment for me. A moment where we said no. Well, and I'm really interested in that moment in particular because it's in the context of a series of novels. You know, the liminal people, liminal wars and entropy of bones that are about people with superhuman abilities. And yet that's in there. Well, I mean, you know, you have a movie like or, you know, even the book like The Martian, you know, and it's like, you can talk about how much fuel it takes to get to Mars and biodomes and other scientific stuff that I'm not really sure about. But when it comes down to what's the story about, it's about a person trying to figure out how to get through their life, how to stay alive, how to survive. And, you know, that's a good story. And I think that story should be expanded out. And the people who get to survive should be expanded out. Do you know what I mean? Like, I'm interested how an African American Mongolian girl deals with the riots in Oakland when police are going nuts. You know, I'm interested in how people of color survive this world when it's pretty clear that there's a lot of things set up to say that we shouldn't. Well, also, I mean, going back to the world that this is a part of, for some of the people in the audience who haven't read all the books, how would you describe the series? It's about a bunch of people who can do weird things, getting into some weird situations, making bad decisions, and coming out the other end of it. Well, give an example of weird things and bad decisions. If your God tells you not to go back in time, don't go back in time. If your father figure is a sadistic weirdo that says that he wants you to find a girl that can control animals and bring him to her, the smart thing to do is to do that. If you don't do that, then you have to deal with the consequences of that. And what I like writing about is the consequences. I like seeing what happens when people don't make the right decision, because I rarely make the right decision. And that actually leads into something that we were discussing just before we came up here, where I have jokingly asked you, so when's that last book going to come? Knowing that that's like the worst question to ask anyone. Ask my parents who didn't get to talk to me for months when I was finishing my dissertation. But you had some really interesting comments about why you wanted to end, why you want the next book to be the last book in this. Yeah, so they're novels, they're not comics, and I love comics, and I'm working on a comic with John Jennings, and it's going to be great and amazing and it's going to change the whole face of the universe. But these are novels, and novels have ends. It doesn't seem like that, thanks to Harry Potter and every other series that has 9, 10, 11, 12 books in the series. But what I like about a novel is that there is a definitive end to it, and it's so tempting in this world, it's so rich, I can spin off a thousand and one different things in it again and again and again. But in the end it comes down to a family, and a family who has to make some rough choices and deal with the consequences. So once they've sort of made those big choices, in my mind I want to give them that time to rest, to go away for a while. So you want this story to end for the family, but what about the world that you've created around them? There's some other writing projects that I want to do, and I'm fortunate in that nobody knows who I am by and large, so there's not a huge clamor of like, I'll give you $50,000 for the next book, but if anybody will, then I'll write it right away. I will totally do that. But since nobody's asking for that, I have that freedom to be like, I get to say when this ends, and that's a rare thing for a writer. So I'm like, okay, this one's going to be done. I'm going to write some other stuff. I'm going to take over the comic book world. And then when I'm done with that, if I want to come back to the world, the world will still be there. There's still one dangling character that we don't see in the last book that can come back and cause trouble. Well, something that you've kept coming back to also is family, and I've read a recent interview where they asked you about your take on radical politics, and it even came again in the passage that you read. Could you talk a little more about sort of what you see the role of radical politics in relationship to family? Yeah, I mean, I think family is not blood, as far as I'm concerned. I'm not trying to tell anybody else how to live, but family is not blood. Family is choice. And the people that choose to back me up, and some of them are in the audience, and the people that I choose to back up, that's my family. And it's been that way from the beginning, and I don't really know another way to live. I don't care if you're my second cousin once removed, because you're a great grandma. I had sex with my great uncle. That's not family. Family to me is like, I'm hungry. I'm poor. I'm starving. Will you back me up? Yes, or I'm confused. I don't know what I'm doing. Will you back me up? Yeah. So I have black family, I have white family, I have queer family, I have straight family, and it's not like different families. They're all linked. And in politics, when you hear it in these political circles, I think everyone is political, that's why I did the weird finger thing. When you talk about politics and everybody's talking about family values, they're not even talking about my type of family, so how could they be talking about my values? A person who, in my mind, is as close to a big brother, father figure for me, is in the hospital right now, and they're cool on insurance right now, but after 30 days, they don't necessarily have insurance. I got terms of insurance that I never use. That's my family. Why can't he have my insurance? That's my politics around family values. In this country, we're so not even in that dialogue that I just stay out of the conversation by and large. Would you say that, to the extent that you are in the conversation, that it comes more through your writing? I'm really weird Facebook post. I just have some weird Facebook posts. I'll come out publicly. I support Bernie Sanders. I don't know. I feel like how one lives is political. How you vote is interesting. How you live is political. How I live is political. To the best of my ability, I try and live my politics. I don't skirt the poor, for I am the poor. I work in education. I work in education as much as I can. My politics are my life. I just feel like they're connected. One thing I want to do is I'd like to open up to questions now, knowing that we'll probably come back to asking questions for each other. I prefer there to be more time for questions than for just dialogue between two people up on the stage with things in front of them. I think some people want cards. I'm going to take questions also from people raising their hands, but I also had a question handed to me. How does gender express itself in your writing? That's a good question. A critique that I had on the first book was that it was very Madonna-whore-complexed. I think that was true, but I think that was true of the character. That's the way that he saw the world, and so that was his impact. I think with entropy of bones, I didn't realize this was my first attempt to write a female character. As I wrote her, I found her gender expression to be not... I found a gender expression. What I wanted to write was a young woman who hadn't been impacted by all the BS that I've seen so many young women impacted by. Because of her skills, because of her training, she never felt at the mercy of any man. That creates a very different young woman than I've seen in most of my career. That's what I was trying to do in that book. Limital war, gender expressions generally tend to be more like... Everybody's a badass. Everyone's a badass in their gender. They know who they are, they know what they want to do, and damn the consequences. One of the characters that I love, it's a minor character, is a black woman who owned a gin joint in Louisiana in the 1930s. I had to think about who that woman is, and that woman tolerates no shit from anyone. I like badass women. That's pretty much what I'm saying. Really a big politic in the first book was there was a character, a bad guy, who raped another character off-scene. I love that the main female character was like, there is no forgiveness for this. There's no walking around it, and she chops the dude in two. Well, actually she explodes his brain, but it's just like that sort of like, nope, there's no equivocating about this. I like those kinds of characters. I hope so. So just for the mic, for those that didn't hear us, how do you live your politics when your career path doesn't necessarily support that? First and foremost, I'm giving no advice to anyone who lives their life. I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm making things up as I go along right now. So that said, two, I'm going to make an assumption here. You are a black woman. Okay. You identify as a black woman. You living your life as a healthy, happy person in San Francisco is a political act. Like, there are so few black people in the Bay or in San Francisco. Like, I'm surprised there's not a riot going on. There's too many black people here. To be a happy, healthy black person in this country, like in this country, definitely in this city, whatever it takes to do that, that's political. I love, I work in San Francisco and I can't stand coming here every day. But when I see black people smiling in the street in San Francisco, you did it. I think after that it's like, you know, where's your energy? Like, you know, I'm not from that martyr complex of like, you have to suffer so that everybody else is happy. Because nobody's happy. You know, it just doesn't make sense. Like, the way, whatever ways that you can spread joy in your world and spread joy to other people, do that. Like, play your part. Do what you do and do what you do well. That's what I would say. This is one, I'm going to do one of the next card. You have the titles of your three books, Limit of People, Entropy of Bones, and the Limit of War. The Limit of War. Limit of Wars. What inspired you to give these titles their names? The title, Limit of People comes from a book, Blackskins, White Mask, by Franz Fennell. And if you haven't read it, you should. I will say that. I've read that book probably once a year from the time I was like 10 until now. And in it, I'm talking about the post-colonial subject. So that individual liberated yet not free from a colonial mentality. He says that we are liminal people. We are people in an in-between space. And so that line always stuck with me. And I was like, okay, so, you know, go big. I used to say, what's broadly liminal? And, you know, the notion of humanity, because connected in that liminal space that Fennell is talking about is this notion of what it means to be human. And that was an idea that only, you know, the colonists had, that the colonists was human and that they were dealing with these subhuman subjects. I mean, 1463, the Catholic Church says that those of African descent are not fully in-sold. I love that term, because then it gets sold. Anyway, but are not fully in-sold. And as a result, it's okay to enslave us. So we're not human. So I'm like, okay, so then if you're not human, there's another option of being like a slave. If you're not human, you could also be divine. So there's this, that's what liminal people is. It's like, where are you at? Are you a slave or are you divine? You know, and that's kind of what they're playing with. So the first book was liminal people. The second one, liminal war, is what happens when those fools start fighting. And that's what goes on. And then entropy of bones is the secret to this young woman's martial arts skills. The ability to find the decay and the bones of all things. And that plays out in a broader sense in the final novel. That doesn't have a title yet. Cool. Did you have a question? Yes. I agree with everything you said. We have a question that was given to us on a card. Do you think it's hard to make it in the comic book industry as a person of color? And I would add to that as a novelist as well. Hell yeah. Jessica, I mean, I was, man, they pulled this quote. I had this interview and they pulled this quote. So it's a great time to be a person of color in the comic book industry. I'm like, yeah, there's context to that. I know, because I know people are looking at me like, yeah, for real, dude, for real. I've been trying to make my comic for like 15 years. This is what I think. I think if you're going to sit there and wait for Marvel or DC or even Image or Dark Horse or whatever, to look at you and tell you that you're good enough, it's going to be a long time until you get anything you want. And I don't know how you live your life, but in general, that's how it is for people of color. That's how it is for any group that isn't the dominant minority. If you're sitting there waiting for people to tell you fill in the blank, it's going to be a while. If you are a maker, make. Like, I wrote the first book, The Liminal People, and I self-published it. And I had it, and yeah, you remember a little book, it was like this big, and took it to comic book shops and took it to bookstores and sold it by hand. And Nalo Hopkinson, who was just up here before, awesome, amazing friend of mine who I've known forever. She was like, hey, she sent that to these publishers. I think they might pick it up, sent it to them, and they're like, yeah, good, go for it. Yeah, and tell us when you have another one. If I sat there and did the query letter and hear the first two chapters of the book, and I hope you like it, and blah, blah, blah, and hear some glitter in your letter or whatever, I don't know, I don't know. When I say it's a good time, what I mean is like for five grand, you can create your own book. I was listening to an interview with Robert Kirkman, the creator of Walking Dead. That dude made like seven comics before he did Walking Dead, like different series entirely. And what he did was he had a job where his boss would give him a payday advance. Please don't go to payday advance places in Oakland, they'll rip you off. But his boss would give him a payday advance. And the payday advance at the time was $1,500, and $1,500 was enough for him to print 500 comics. And so he printed the comics for $1,500, for $1,500. If he made the same amount off of it, he had to pay back the loan and got a little bit extra. And he did like $100 extra, and he got like $200 extra, and he lost some money sometimes. But he just kept doing the thing. You got to just do the thing, like whatever it is, just do it. And then you get better at it. And then as you get better at it, then maybe people will be like, oh, awesome, I'm a big publisher, I want to do your thing with you. Or you're making enough money that you don't need them. Like, damn, I wish Bill Campbell was here. He was a publisher from Missouri and publishing Bill Campbell. That man, in the past three years, has started putting out some of the most awesome, amazing stuff. He's going to be here tomorrow, you should totally check him out. Bill just got on it, and Bill was like, this is what we're doing. And he started publishing digitally first, and then he started printing stuff. He's got the, what is it, the quantum guide to assimilated Santerria. And that book is coming out. Like, it's on hit, but he did it himself. So I'm all about getting it done yourself. That way you control it, you own it. You control your masters. We learned this from hip hop. Always control your masters. That's what I would say. Next question. Yes. He gets everything from the TV series. No, I mean, and that's the thing. Like, that's what we, like, you know, I'm from hip hop generation, and we just didn't get it. We sold our masters to whomever who signed contracts, like, owning different parts of our artists. You remember Prince, remember Prince changed his name? Prince changed his name because they had his name under contract. My man couldn't make no money. He's like, okay, well, whoop, new name. So, yeah, now this age, I'm like, control what you make. You know, I had a potential movie deal for liminal people. And, like, for no money, they wanted the rights to everything in perpetuity for forever and a day. I was like, I don't even know you like that. Like, you know, like, buy me a drink first. Like, just don't just reach around like that. So, just saying. It's just me. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. I'm nervous now. Oh, no worries. That's my job in life. Hell, yeah, I need some illustrators. Yeah, man, give me your card. Serious. I've been writing my whole life, but I was a very bad writer for most of my life. Like, seriously, like, I looked back at some of my early stuff and I was like, why did I do that? I had, like, a ninja that could lift 90 tons in the store. It was weird. It was really weird. I wrote, like, all this, like, weird, bad stuff. But like, as a writer, I fully and honestly believe you have to get the bad stuff out. Like, you can't just sit there and expect that everything you put down on paper is going to be great. Like, you just have to just, just the worst stuff ever is just going to come out. But in doing the writing, you're practicing and you're seeing, like, oh, that actually works. That line works. That this work. That that works. Yeah, I've been writing since I was seven years old. Six, seven years old. I was dyslexic. It looked like chicken scratch. Like, nobody liked what I wrote. I kept writing it and I wrote in high school and it was weird because I was working through issues. I was at a boarding school in New Hampshire. It was weird, weird stories. And then I wrote in college and was writing screenplays and some of them were okay, but a lot of them were very derivative. They looked like everybody else's stuff and then I was living overseas for a little bit. I started writing what I saw there and that was the first time I started being like, oh, I kind of like what I write. And then just kept writing and kept writing and kept writing. I've written, like, not even the middle people. I've written, like, five novels and none of them are ever going to get published. So, you know, you just put it out there and then just, you know, maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, but you keep putting it out there. I got this note that says, should probably wrap up now. So, what we're going to do, what we're going to do is we're going to do a quick, just, if we could do just some rapid fire questions, you know, some short questions and then kind of wrap it up. Yes? Yeah, I tell a story. The story has to lead. The other stuff is what's going on for me and my world as you see, the politics around me, the most important thing for me is to stay on tasks, stay on plot, stay on character, stay on development, stay on conclusions, stay on demo, all of it. Like, story is what drives it. People don't want to read my, if you want to read my political statements, go on my Facebook page. You'll see tons of them. But if you want to read a good story, then you pick up the novels. That's where I stay focused on. I went to a boarding school in New Hampshire. And I didn't even meet her like that. What I meant was, what I meant was, my family, I come from reading people, you know, like, despite the disorder in my house growing up in terms of organization, there was, it was stacks and stacks of books everywhere. And you could always pick up a book and read something, and you can ask my family something. And you can ask my fiancé in the back. It's the same problem now. There's stacks and stacks of books everywhere. She's not too happy with that. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. He's in there. He's not in the third book. He's in the final book. He's a big part of the final book. Okay, we got like two more questions. People who haven't asked a question. I felt like however you got, in my respect, how do I learn from those who have come before me in terms of adjusting to this strange society? I kind of, I look at all of it as whatever it takes to get through. I'm gonna, despite some people's opinions, I'm a fairly non-judgmental person. And however it takes, the right, the right people are laughing right now. However, I'll speak specifically to the American Americans. I, you know, that whole slave, slave-nigger, field-nigger dichotomy, I never fell for that. I was like, whatever it takes to get through, however you survived, good. Like, you survived, because I don't know who I came from and I could have come from a bunch of field-niggers and I could have come from a bunch of house-niggers. I survived and they gave me the option to make that choice for myself. So, I don't, you know, that's why I say my politics are a little different in that everybody's like, a radical politic, I come from a radical political family and I've seen the consequences of that. I think the most political, radical thing a black male can do is raise his kids. Like that. Someone who like, you know, has grown up with their, you know, like, grown up with their mother, nothing wrong with my mom, you know, but like, who has a dad who's incarcerated for political stuff, like it's not, you know, cool, that's a decision that he made, but like, there's consequences to that. You know, you got an entire, I mean, listen to Odd Future. If you want to hear their musical soundtrack for a generation of black males who didn't, like, grow up with their fathers, listen to Odd Future. They'll tell you everything you need to know. So, whatever it takes to get through, I respect it and learn from it. Excuse me, um, excuse me, there's, you would ask a question, you raised your hand earlier? Yes. No. Okay, so, okay, so here's, here's what I think about that. I think that our visions of the future have already been colonized. Okay, so people are making this big thing about, like, oh, look, there's a black guy in Star Wars, first of all, Orlando, second of all, I'm like, don't y'all remember Billy Dee? In Cloud City? Running stuff? Running, anyway. So, they're like, oh, black guy in Star Wars, ah, ah, ah, and I'm like, why is there only one? Like, what, like, why is, because we, it's not like Hollywood is this, like, this, like, meritocracy of story, right? There is an investment in a certain type of narrative that continues to perpetuate a certain type of political social hegemony that dominates the world, right? And, like, the movie industry is an industry that is heteronormative. Oh my god, it's so heteronormative that if there is a bunch of aliens attacking the planet, all you have to do is have a white man and a white woman kiss each other and then, all of a sudden, everything gets better. I'm serious. Any movie, any movie, watch any movie, you will see it's all going on, we're not going to be able to survive. Don't worry, baby, I got it. And then, all of a sudden, right, you're like, what? Is that all it took? Is that all? So, there are these certain, like, stories that, like, Hollywood needs to say again and again and again in order for it to work. White people are the norm, heterosexual people are the norm, people of color can play a support role and make sure that the white guy always wins. It's important that that story is told again and again and again for that industry to work. But that's not all story. That's what I like about novels is that they have more access for more stories to be told. So, like, about comics, more stories get to be told. But again, if we're looking for ourselves in Hollywood right now, best of luck, you know? Like, keep looking, you'll find one or two and they'll be like, yay! And then, they'll die in the end, you know? Yes. I agree. So, I want to do one last question because I want to hear a younger voice because we haven't heard a young voice. Please ask your question. On a story? Oh, God, yeah. Like, the one thing... Oh, sorry, the question was, have you ever given up on a story, gone away from it and then come back to it later? And actually, there's Nala Hopkinson in the back and she's my awesome friend who I love more than life itself. And I remember when, before I was published at all, and I was writing very bad stuff, and I told Nala about something and I said, yeah, I threw it away and Nala said, don't throw things away. Put them away. She's like, because if you throw it away, you can never see it again. But if you put it away, you can come back to it and look at it later. So, if something, if I write something that I just absolutely threw it away, and then there's a big trunk in the living room that has all the stuff that I don't really like, and then every now and then I'll open the trunk and look at it and be like, oh, no, that's a good sentence. And the way I figure it, if I can pull a good sentence out of ten pages, that's good writing. Well, on that note, I'd just like to thank you all again for your patience and for your time.