 Sci-Fi plus book club plus members of the community. I know for the book clubbers you're all like, what's this microphone doing here? But it's also open to the public, so we're pleased to present two authors, Katherine Arden and Kay Chess. Give them a warm welcome, please. We do have a seat right up front or in the back if you'd like. I'm going to pass around our newsletter. If you'd like to learn about future Bear Pond Book events, please sign up. We have a fabulous fall lineup this fall, including Tommy Orange coming to read from his novel, There, There. That'll be October 4th. Next week we have author Sharon Lam. She's coming with her memoir, The Not Good Enough Mother. It's a fabulous look at the Vermont opioid crisis as it pertains to family attachment and mothering. So again, welcome. Kim will take over and talk about famous men who never lived. Brilliant title. And I'm just going to speak a moment about Katherine Arden's trilogy and The Winter of the Witch. I decided to read all three books, The Bear and the Nightingale, The Girl in the Tower and The Winter of the Witch. Straight through. Like that was like my month of May, I think. Maybe into June. Yeah, and plus I read Small Spaces, which I had to bring down from upstairs, because her sequel to Small Spaces, Dead Voices, comes out next week. Next week. Next Tuesday. And let me tell you, that book is a scary book. And it's very middle grade readers. And I was like in my bed with the covers over my head. It's scary. My heart was racing. I was like, please don't get off the bus. It was fabulous. And if you haven't read the whole trilogy, I highly recommend it. I could have more knowledge of Russian folklore than I probably need, and you probably do too. But the writing was just so beautiful and the characters, you know, I just couldn't, I couldn't let her go and I needed to read the whole story. So I hope you have a wonderful discussion. I hope you pick up books if you haven't already. We do have them here at the counter and I'll be there doing books. So everybody's having a discussion. Thank you. I'm going to stand on top of the speaker so that it feeds back. And you're all probably also the group who usually makes a saying, will Kim make you take the microphone? So I just barely finished Famous Men Who Never Lived. And I can tell you that it's, I really think it's an amazing book. And it's a book for this time because we are talking about what we're all dealing with right now, which is otherness and feeling like you're where you're supposed to be and dealing with greed. And so if you haven't read it, read it. It's really amazing. So I'm really glad to have both of you guys here. And I have read The Girl and the Bear and the Nightingale, but I haven't read the next two yet because I am lame. But they're on my shelf to read. And I also felt like the characters in this book were, you couldn't leave them, you know. And at the end of this book, I felt like, ooh, maybe a little bit more, even though I think that's just, we're voracious for characters once we meet them. So I'm excited to have these ladies here. And I also want to know, one of the things we wanted to know was the direction of this conversation tonight. When we meet for Science Fiction with Club, we usually say, who hasn't finished the book? Do you care about spoilers? That's one of the things. So there are people here who don't want to be sort of let in on spoilers, raise your hand. Okay. And so one of the questions we asked tonight is, you know, do you want to hear some excerpts from the book? Would there be like, yes? Anybody want to have a little bit of reading? Okay. Okay. And this is our opportunity to get their autographs to their John Hancock. I was going to say the Catherine Hancock and their Kay Hancock. Yeah. So it's kind of a fun night. So what we will do is we'll try to be judicious about what we say for the ending, but we can still talk about a lot of juicy stuff. And we've got the mics partially so because we're filming and also so we can keep the air conditioning on. So everybody's like, oh, yeah, got it. Super. So I don't know where to stand, so I'm afraid I'm going to make that hiss. Well, if you want to pass it to me. Yeah. So I'm just like, I'm going to be up here and do whatever we need it. We can sit on the chair. In the middle. Because it's starting to do it already. But so this is unusual. We've had people come in before but not two at a time. So I'm like, does anyone have a preference for talking about either one of you have a preference? Like I always like to go last. I mean, it almost seems like it'd be interesting to discuss commonalities and differences in our work because we're both in this giant genre of speculative fiction, which is such a broad term that it's almost meaningless at this point because all fiction is speculative to a certain extent. But I think in our books we both ask ourselves, like what if, you know, and then try to fill in the answers in different ways. So I think that's the fun part about having two authors really is being able to compare and contrast, like even very different kinds of work. Maybe I'll just start by saying a few words about what my adult books are about and their origins and then maybe you want to also, so we type on the same page and then just start talking and see how we do. Sounds good. You're moderating like a champ. Oh, it's not my very first rodeo. The best time was in a convention panel and they had forgotten to give the panel a moderator all together and so we all just walk up and there's just us and an audience and we're like, oh gosh. So John Scalzi, very famous man as the other, he's like, alright guys, give me the microphone. He starts to moderate like a champion just without missing a second. And I was very impressed and wish always to be as cool as John Scalzi in that moment in his Hawaiian shirt. Anyway, so I'm Katherine Arden. I wrote a trilogy of books called The Winter Night Trilogy. The first one, as we said, is called The Baron of Nightendale. The second one is called The Girl in the Tower and the third book, which came out this winter, is called The Winter of the Witch. And they are set in what is now Russia in historical Muscovy in the 14th century. So before Russia was Russia, right at the end of the sort of Mongol overlord ship of Russia. And they deal with the independence of Russia. They're a mix of Russian history and Slavic folklore and fairy tales. And they follow a young girl named Vasilisa who was born with this power to see the spirits, the creatures of Russian folklore and able to interact with them and this power is good and not good for her in many ways and it kind of pushes her on this like three book long journey. So in short, that is the book. I started them in 2011. I sold the trilogy in late 2014 and published the first book in 2017. And yeah, the last book just came out so it's been quite the odyssey of that trilogy and it is so nice to be able to talk about them as a whole now. Especially since they're continuous chronologically and they make one long story. So it's great to be able to feel it's done, happen here's a story and we can talk about it tonight. You're really teasing it. It sounds great. Am I doing the microphone right? Does this sound all right to all of you? Thanks for coming out MKHS. I'm just curious, is anyone here a writer? A couple people, yeah. I think I'm hearing Katherine talk about her books. I want to ask her questions about craft and about how she wrote them and I'm also sort of interested in questions about publishing and I'm wondering what the focus of the book club, if it usually ever goes that direction. All right, great. Good to know. I feel like it's always interesting, even if people aren't trying to be published themselves just like, what are the nuts and bolts of getting these things? I don't know what it's like to be an auto man. It's like a long process. Yeah, hearing about how people's jobs work. Yeah, right? Can you all hear me un-miked? Because it's kind of awkward to pass back and forth non-stop. So if I am audible and for the video, I'll speak up. Is there some place like happy meeting? It's all right. I won't pick up. I can just project. It's fine. Should I keep this? I feel like I'm wearing stilts. I got stilts on and I'm just next to a very tall person. It's going to be great. All right, I'm going to try it without. Yeah. It's a small room. No one's that far from us. What? No. Oh, God, oh, God. Sometimes you have people who can't hear. Yeah, if anyone's struggling. Tell people to speak up. Okay. Loudly, I'm K.H.S. and my book is called Famous Men Who Never Lived. It's my first and it's a standalone speculative work that I think would fall under the science fiction category or the alternate history category. But it takes place in our world, but a world in which a large number of refugees from another version of the world have passed into New York City and are stranded there. So the main characters are people who grew up in a world much like ours, but which diverged from our timeline in around 1910. And they have struggled to fit in because even though they're not visually distinguishable from anybody else, they don't have the same job skills. They don't have the same memory of the 20th century because the 20th century went completely different in their world. And they're everyone they've ever loved for the most part except for the 156,000 of those people who were chosen in a lottery to escape, everyone else is dead. So they're dealing with ordinary human grief and also trying to assimilate to a very similar but completely different culture. And the main character is obsessed with the last existing copy of a science fiction book which from her own world, it doesn't exist in our world. And so she's trying to find that and getting into trouble as she searches for it. And I think one thing that I think would be interesting about is writing about stories and storytelling and why stories are important to us. That seems like something we might have in common. It's interesting because one thing that struck me as I was reading your book was that it's a book about in part the power of books and the power of memory as encapsulated in books. And the Bear and the Nightingale, the characters aren't literate because it's set in medieval Russian. It wasn't a literate time period. But the power of stories is very important to them. And each of my books starts with a retelling of a Russian fairy tale, which is then echoed in the novel itself. Each book has a fairy tale touchstone that becomes a starting point and a thematic sort of origin for the rest of the longer book. In the same way, you have the book Pyro... Pyranos? Pyro the Pyranos, that's right, which is kind of the book that gets your character going in her world. So I guess why books, why stories? I love them. I thought other people who read my book would love them too. And I'm sure the same is true even today when we have other choices of entertainment. Fairy tales are really powerful and enduring. It's true. And it kind of embraces the story within a story method as well. In the sense that you have a book within the book that is important. And then in The Bear and the Nightingale, you have a fairy tale within the larger novel, which is also significant. And the themes in the smaller work are echoed out larger throughout the novel. Which I think works from a storytelling perspective, because it allows you to distil the themes you want to bring up in a small, clean format and then kind of elaborate on them. It's like a theme song and then variations a little bit. That's so well put. That's interesting. Kind of, right? It's like how you do a music when you have a four note run, which is the essence of what you're trying to get across in music. And then you add chords and you add different keys and you just add variations on it. But you can always bring it back to this very clean, small, sort of like Urr story. Yeah. Which is, I don't know, find it interesting. And in your case, it's like a way to get on the same page with the reader too. Here's the story that we all now know and the characters in the world know it too. I think fairy tales in general, they're great for a writer because they're always familiar. People know fairy tales. You have these tropes. You have these stories that are repeated over and over again. But you also, they're endlessly malleable as well. You can put them in different time periods. You can change the plot. You can change the characters. You can add different faces. So they're both familiar to a reader. You recognize things that draw you in. But they can also be endlessly strange, which can first draw you in and then intrigue you or excite you or make you curious. So they're really great vessel for a writer. They're old and new. Yeah. Yeah. They're just eternal a little bit. He's like very basic, basic stories. What made you pick the 20th century? I was thinking about, I guess just about pop culture, high culture and low culture and everything in between and how much nostalgia even people of my generation and Catherine's I suspect were probably around the same age. People are always taking quizzes online about which Saved by the Bell character are you or something like that. Culture and nostalgia for sure. Culture and nostalgia. Culture that hasn't been taken from us. It's not like Saved by the Bell has gone anywhere. We could probably find it on streaming or yeah. But I was thinking about if that was just something that you remembered really well and remembered really fondly, but you didn't have access to it. Every copy of it had been destroyed and people on the street didn't know what you meant when you said Saved by the Bell. What a strange new importance it would take on. I mean especially nowadays talking about immigrants and immigration and people fleeing violence and coming to new cultures you can be in different parts of the world and really shorn of your cultural context. Nobody understands your stories, your culture at all and I think it's interesting that you brought that experience or a version of that experience to New York like to America. So it's like being an immigrant in your own country which is just super interesting and I think really relevant to today as well. New York's a city of immigrants it's been an entry port for immigrants throughout its long history and it's also this, it's a really really old city so if everything was the same up until 1900 but then you were from a world where things had gone differently a lot of the buildings would still be there the Manhattan Bridge would probably still be there because it was planned shortly before 1910 so it was already underway really like it was built in I think 1912. A lot, like the skyline would look mostly the same but different and if you think how collectively traumatic it's been for us for instance the skyline changing when the Twin Towers fell just that one difference it's the same but it's different. I've felt that way in big cities before even though I wasn't missing anything where I felt like everything seemed sort of familiar but wrong and off and that's a powerful and resonant feeling that feeling of being alone when you're surrounded by lots of different people everywhere where people are pressing you in but you still feel like no one really knows you I think that's something that's, that's relatable and I wanted to externalize that metaphor and make it literal and think about what it would be like for a class of people who were invisible immigrants in the wrong city. Like nobody sees these people and says like oh those folks were definitely from elsewhere you think like oh it's just like a normal native New Yorker but they have this essential inner difference I think it speaks to alienation as a concept it's like what makes you feel alienated in your own country I grew up in Austin, Texas which is a city that has changed immeasurably in the last like 20 years when I was a kid in the 90s Austin was pretty small it was pretty sleepy it was cookie and a little weird and very chill and then about 20 years ago stuff started to happen there and now Austin is huge and it has a skyline and it has millions of people no one was born in Austin anymore like you go to Austin and it's like where are you from, oh everywhere except for actual Texas and it's just people came hundreds of thousands of people just poured in and it's absolutely transformed the city and it's great the city is thriving but it's not the Austin that I grew up in in any way does this sound familiar to anyone from Vermont? I mean not to that extent but there's some changes yeah it's different good things and bad things it was awful stuffy so what was your when you got the idea for your book what was the process of going from the kernel of the idea to building it out to a full story what was the first thing you thought of, was it? yeah I'm interested in hearing you answer that one as well I was thinking about again like that collective memory if every single copy of Tale of Two Cities was just destroyed like most of us had to read it at some point in high school or middle school and if I, I don't know has anyone read Tale of Two Cities at some point in your long life? okay so like what's the thing that's in Tale of Two Cities? the first line? yep, the first time yeah, totally what else, anybody remember anything else? uh huh that's kind of different yeah I mean there's the whole bit with the woman like there's the man who had the bad life the man who was really doing well the two men that looked just the same and they swapped places there's the guillotine, the tumbrels going through the streets and the woman that's knitting while people are getting their heads cut off there's the guy who was in prison and he wrote a letter in his own blood and it's like a really long Dickensian letter and you're like wouldn't you have been more concise if it was your own blood these are some things that I remember from reading it when I was 15 but I couldn't really tell the story I can say that and maybe you'd not be once familiar or maybe you'd remember some stuff better than me but even if a group of us got together we probably wouldn't be able to recreate it it's like tantalizingly almost there but not there yeah, I mean you can't, a book, once it's written you're not going to write it again it's a unique moment in time what about like the million monkeys writing randomly on a million typewriter right, for infinity, but in reality books are written once even an author who loses a week's worth of work on your computer the work's gone, you're not going to write those words again, you're going to write new words new sentences and it's going to be hopefully as good you'll tell yourself that it's better yeah, like oh it's better now but it's still like you know that what you had is gone forever, it's not going to be the same so words are permanent and also very ethereal, which is cool so that was where the kernel of mine came from people trying to preserve a group of people who remember this book that doesn't exist anymore, trying to preserve it somehow and then I wrote a short story about it and it was a very bad short story and it was in a creative writing program at the time and there were these two guys who hated each other and I wasn't friends with either of them and they were the only two people who liked it it was like this kind of like uptight guy who like wore a little bow tie and had like ankle boots and he was like really fancy and then the other guy that liked the story was like this like stoner side-by-side guy like those are like MFA like stereotypes and these were two MFA enemies, okay they hated each other and this was like the only time they ever agreed on anything was everyone else including my now wife was like throw this story in the garbage, it's cool but like this stoner guy and the fancy guy were like this is awesome I feel like there's a short story in that, right the two like MFA rivals who are both like MFA archetypes like coming together about a story I feel like there's something in there yeah I think if it were fiction then the story would of course actually be bad made both people know about it I mean or it ought to be terrible or a work of like unheralded genius, one or the other like there's no middle well that's how I created my unheralded genius how do you write a trilogy the first book in your trilogy was your first published book did you always had really huge ideas did you think it was going to be a long story when you started writing it that's an interesting story well I didn't, when I started writing The Bear and the Nightingale I didn't know how much plot you can put into one novel I really didn't, I was quite an experience and it turns out you can't put as much plot as you thought you could into a book like more than a couple of big events and it just becomes overwhelming you gotta have enough time and let your events breathe but I had too much story I discovered quickly as I began to write for one novel so I was like oh it'll be three I can make it three, is this fine again there was a certain degree of like naivete and like an experience involved I didn't really know how I wanted to start I just knew that I wanted to write a book based on a Russian fairy tale and since I was a little bit forgetting how to start it I ended up just writing out the fairy tale I wanted to use in the first chapter I took the first chapter to retell my chosen fairy tale and then as I kept on I began riffing on that fairy tale which is how sort of the first books plot came together and I finished it and got under contract with Random House but there was a bit of a wrench in the process at that time because my editor wanted me to take the book that I'd written and discard the second half and rewrite the first half and have that be the book take the book but discard the second half and rewrite the book in her defense there was a very large structural flaw in the middle and the only way to fix it was to either cut one half or the other it was truly my first book so I was like alright it's terrible but okay I cut 80,000 words and I put them into a different document and it was sad and it was gone and I took this denuded 60k that I had left and began to rework it into what became my first book but then for the second book I was like okay new plan I have 80,000 words wait so it worked that was the bear in the night yeah it worked out I have this like extra 80,000 words on my hard drive that'll be a book too like short cut because I had a contract I had to do it so it was like great short cut so I pulled it out and started working on it and I worked and I spent 6 months on it I was like trying to make it work and then at the end of 6 months I called my editor and I was like it's never gonna work and she was like that's why I had you cut it in the first place she's very wise she knows so I was like it was sad so I put it away and I wrote second book the girl in the tower just from scratch just start it and go and it's actually I think my favorite book in the trilogy and I'm proud of it actually it just took a lot of pushing through hard times also like second book syndrome that many authors talk about and I think it's real writing your second novel is very hard because your first book you have no expectations no people expecting it to be good it's just you and the material and no pressure because like what sorts can happen you just don't finish and it's fine both your second book still puts pressure gotta finish expecting people hoping you'll finish expecting you to finish hoping it'll be good too and so you start demanding that each day be a good writing day that each paragraph come off good the first time and no book is good the first time no draft is good it's a process it's like when you're packing up your house to move it always looks worse before it looks like it's packed absolutely if someone came by and expected you're packing every day I don't know drafting a book is so messy even with outlines I'm not an outliner you just have to put it on the page and keep working at it until it gets to where you want it everything comes out of the drawers it's a mess with purpose so second books are stressful because you're not experienced yet you have no faith in the process but you still have to go through it I struggled but I finished it the third book by then my story had gone off the rails I was expecting a book to go this way but it had gone this way and so I had to totally reconceive what I wanted the third book to be and I did and it was an exercise and I guess lateral thinking in a certain way and I guess patience also and persistence I managed to end the story where I intended to end originally but nothing from the first chapter of the first book to the last chapter of the last book has stayed the same except for those two chapters wait the last chapter stayed the same conceptually so I knew I wanted to start and end but the three books worth the thing in the middle they went off in direction that I had no anticipation that's wild too so do you think the end of it that having that end insight helped you? no I mean for me when I'm writing I have to be in the moment in the writing and try to figure out the logical end I have trouble writing towards it some authors I have friends who do 200 page outlines before they start and get everything very dialed and then write what about you do you outline, you just go not like that, wow I have a friend who's like six months of outlining and then like three of writing it's wild but I mean everyone's got a thing everyone's got a thing I outlined on note cards I had to move them around and add things but it was the longest thing I ever written so I needed something to keep momentum going and that way I could be like okay I'm closing this document and I'm going to the next note card and I'm writing a brand new document that's about this new thing and I won't look at the bad thing or worry about that problem later were you doing it chapter by chapter or were you in word? were you in Scrivner or what was your no just different word documents yeah I use Scrivner at the very end if anybody's a writer it's like a tool that allows you to sort of move whole documents around in a spatial sort of way I have some friends who use it it's a novel writing or a book writing app so it helps you manage long chunks of text I think more easily than say word does you have to convert your document out of it back to word in order to get it to your publisher who will only ever use word ever ever in history but until then like authors have a wide variety of ways to write their books I think it's just very individual I use word it's just easy I grew up with it it's not a pain I use find and search to find where I'm in document for me it was like to reduce the temptation to look at my own to naval to naval gaze and like look at the first sentence again and be like maybe I could just find a synonym for that word and you know keeping going is so important I feel like that's the key is like not stopping do you have any tips for that not stopping I have word count goal every day I think it's important just to like meet your word count goal so you keep moving forward otherwise it's so tempting just like rewrite and the problem is you can't really fix the beginning until you know the end I have a friend who says the butt has to match the face and you don't know if that can happen until you've written the face and the butt and so get right to the end and then make them match but like you have to have the whole thing first whatever works for you conceptually like it's just you know different stories different folks right how are we doing Kim? you're doing great I was going to say one of the things that I found helpful in writing was joining a group of other writers and then there was an online group called other worlds of wonder writing one woman facilitates it from Hawaii and the other one lives in Australia but we would do what's called book and a week challenges and everybody would choose their number of pages to write and you'd post it and so then you had people saying you can do you can do just getting text out is such a is such the name of the game especially in the early stages saying I'm not allowed to edit just keep writing what about your editorial process did you have like a ton of rewriting to do once you drafted I my agent didn't want me to do very much at all but then with my editor I did have some stuff but it was like it was really interesting he looked at it in a way that I wasn't able to look at it and I wish I could learn from this and apply it to other things but I feel like there were like multiple story arcs happening simultaneously in time in the book and he figured out that like one character needed to have a revelation earlier and one needed to have one later so like all the events are the same but they needed to be stretched in different ways interesting I feel like editors they can always see things you can't because they're further away from your material they just have perspective because they haven't spent hundreds of hours looking at it and they're less precious than you I've definitely been in a place where I'm like I love this paragraph beautiful paragraph it expresses this delicate human emotion my editor's like this is terrible take it out you know so yeah so I think editors can be like clear eyed than authors for sure well reading as a reader is different from reading as an editor the paragraph might be great but maybe it's just not working actually maybe the paragraph is beautiful maybe they don't think it's beautiful but maybe the paragraph is beautiful but it just exists in a chapter that is too slow and is clogging up the works I think it's funny whenever I get feedback whenever someone says this wasn't working I always believe them because readers know but when they tell me how to fix it I never believe them because their fix is always wrong like the identification is right but their fix is like no wrong fix but you are right the fix the problem is there my kind of like go to mindset is like I believe you if there's a problem but like I'm not going to put a monkey in this like one scene to like add this one thing no and a good editor won't tell you exactly how to do something either I mean mine will like make suggestions and they're sometimes good and sometimes not what I want but like it's nice because I think she tries to especially early on she tried to not just give me tons and tons of work like fix these 18 things without making me feel like she had thoughts to help out with those fixes you know because each big fix is like dozens of hours of you like just squinting and sweating and swearing at your computer once a book's written making a major plot shift or like a major character shift is hard because it's like dominoes like one thing goes and there's 18 more things that go to so it's like it's very delicate kind of process fixing a book because by like cutting out a whole half of a book and rewriting the first half was like sort of an editing baptism by fire a little bit it was did you start to get a sense of what readers wanted when your books were being published I mean yes and was it too late anyway were they all done but like I feel like and I'm sorry I feel like you can't write for readers really because there's so many readers and then they'll have different things yeah right like some folks will be like I love character X some folks are like I hate character X you know some folks are like this is my favorite part this beautiful thing and next person's like that part was my least favorite part you know so yeah you can't you can't please everyone all you can do is please yourself I think is really just you know otherwise it'll go insane you know trying to please everyone so speaking of do you want to hear a little bit you can also take questions too if y'all have them questions I thought this was wonderful how beautiful wait is it actually real on the inside oh that's such a cool thing oh my god that's amazing I had a kindle edition my cover designer thought of that I know right kindle editions don't all kind of goes to him Jacob Bala he's really smart yeah that's really cool yeah that's right that's the book within the book that she discussed so the outside of the book looks like it's the pyronex underneath the jacket underneath the jacket so cool that's such a cool concept there's two kinds of people in the world are people who take the jackets off right away and see it before they even read the book and then there's people who never ever take the jacket off exactly they put them in and they seal they do so much work so maybe you kind of already gave it away with the reference to Charles Dickens on the tale of juicies I kind of had in mind that you thought was pivotal in the way that the Ezra S. Light book was in terms of if it wasn't there then so many cascading effects would I think that's a trick question because the characters in the book are some of them anyway the characters in famous men who never lived are obsessed with finding the pyronex because it's so quote unquote important but I don't think it actually is it's important to the protagonist Helen because it represents something to her and it says even though it's a work of speculative fiction it says more about the real world that she comes from about her home than it really says about the made up world within its pages but I don't think it actually like changed the course of history the way that she may think that it does but I had fun doing a kind of like mid-century sci-fi pastiche in the sections from the pyronex that I included I really enjoy reading books that have sections of other books in them like the Princess Bride almost the whole thing is S. Morgenstern Princess Bride Misery by Stephen King I love the Misery sections I wish those were real books I wish there was a whole series about Misery Chastain even though the character is so disparaging I would love to read that so that was fun for me to write in a different voice and I was thinking I kept thinking about it doesn't have a similar plot really or even a similar style but I kept thinking about the Heinlein book Adore into Summer was my uncle's here tonight I was just telling him my grandmother had the paperback of it at her house and it's like they go forward into the future to 1999 and I really enjoyed reading that as a teenager and I was thinking about that they have they have flying machines they have the suits the Kevlar suits everybody wore Kevlar suits? 1999? they had robot servants for sure oh really? we do too, they're called robot with the alternate history sections how did you balance trying input dumping versus sort of keeping what was just strictly necessary because I know I could have read quite a bit more of this alternate world but it's obviously a story of traits you know if you don't want to just lean too much there so what was your balance in that? I think that you want the reader to want more so if I have to err on one side or the other I'm glad to have done it that way the whole book takes place in our world but characters are reminiscing about their own world and thinking about how the 20th century went and thinking about the brands of oatmeal that you could buy at the store that don't exist here and stuff like that so I think that's what you're talking about when you're saying they're thinking about geopolitical events that happen and the names of countries that are different from the nations that we have and because I think it's kind of a cheat actually to be writing a book that takes place in our world because instead of being introducing the reader constantly because the setting is that other world like you have to do a lot of info dumping you have to do a lot of world building right away so that readers don't feel alienated but they also don't feel overwhelmed by small details that aren't plot or character by having it all at a remove where the characters are in a familiar world but they're thinking about this world it made it easier for me to limit what I like to keep it to keep from doing the info dumping I think just a little bit of a twist on something was interesting to us as we read it I felt like a little of it went a long way and I didn't want to be self indulgent because those were the most parts the most fun parts of the book to write but it's like if you just rewrote Russian fairy tales for the whole book there would be no momentum there'd be nothing happen nothing that you invented happening it would just be a different kind of book there'd be a book of fairy tales which is certainly another artistic endeavor but it's not a novel it's different it's like apples and oranges with novels of course you want them to go somewhere that is the point but I think I write because it's fun for me but it's not always fun every minute and some things are more fun to write than others and I think even a lot of us in our jobs or in the craft that we practice it's like well I have to eat my broccoli and then I can have you know my frozen Snickers bar or something like that like there are bits where you know you need to get a character to a particular place but it's not going to be that much fun for you or you don't have an idea at first for how you'll approach it and then there are parts where you're almost playing and those parts are to be treasured though you can't do them all the time I'll definitely like fill in like oh cool thing happens here keep going like I've definitely filled in like witty remark here but I don't know what it is but just keep going like this is clearly funny here keep going like you know so you don't have like an inspired thought for a certain sectional to skip it and like continue on because often like you can backtrack and have a good idea later but if I'm like must be clever must be clever must be clever it won't it won't work just won't come nothing will think like you know cat dog tree boy hop hop like the words won't come properly so I think it's important just like like you said play and it's like he moving and not put a ton of pressure on yourself for any given paragraph day scene character just kind of come back on a funny day yeah come back when you're feeling funny or get a funny friend to like just a joke I don't know what you saying here any other question yeah did you have to read Russian fairy tales at the point in your life I spent two years in Moscow as a student and I was a Russian major at middle grade college so I had kind of a background in the subject before I embarked which was very helpful do you have any Russian roots? no I don't my family is Russian-German for the most part but I spent two years in Moscow and I studied quite a bit of Russian and so I had sort of a spiritual love of the subject and a respect for it for sure how did you pick that era of Russian history? I feel like when writing about Russia in the west we have a lot of cliches about it like there's a kind of almost a visual shorthand for Russia there's like snow and onion domes and like toycas and SARS and jewels and Frickin Anastasia Anastasia other topics but I wanted to write about a time period that didn't have those cliches those shorthand visuals because I wanted to approach Russia from a fresh perspective that would be free of baggage for a western reader I was like well before SARS before onion domes before all these things happened in the 19th century when it was just becoming a nation instead of a collection of cities and the event that culminates my series is an event that arguably first created Russia as it is now so I wanted to speak to the creation of Russia in my books and also have a book that embraced Russian folklore Russian spiritualism paganism orthodoxy without a lot of baggage that's why I see you in the purple so can you speak a little bit about your research to that effect of that historical period did you have to do all the research first and then all the books could fit into what you already knew or did you find as you were writing you had to go back and wait I don't know as much about this or I actually need to research this thing so research and writing is an interesting like pairing for me I like to write and research because I feel like the research informs the writing but the writing informs the research too so I'll be like oh interesting fact I want to work that in and keep writing and then be like oh I need to know more about this go back to the research find a new fact go back to writing they nourish each other I think a danger of only researching is you can research forever there is always a new thing to learn and there would be a full and complete expert I will say medieval Russia has very few primary sources and so my reading was largely in secondary sources and in primary sources from like 100 years later as well and so I had to get to a place where I knew I could and then guess exactly how people lived in the 1350s you can kind of guess because you know about like the 1450s but never 100% but it's fun for a fantasy author because you can fill in like oh I think I know why something happens like for example the final kind of battle in the final book happened in history it's a real battle and everything in the book goes down the way history has it however the reasons for things occurring which are unknown in history were filled in in my books by my plot by me like I added reasons that I mean could have been we don't know um but it was fun to take real historical bones and kind of add backstory to the bones and that was a fun way to combine history and fantasy let's have one more I was kind of curious back to the like how much do you include not having much exposure to Slavic lore I loved having the characters the domovoid and risoka and these different ones kind of crop up periodically throughout the books I assume there's more of them that exist so there are many how do you choose when to have them and how many to have I mean it was more like what the story needed I was trying to tell a certain story and I would pull in characters that had personalities or skill sets the plot required um or just ones I thought were extra cool writing is a very fluid process you kind of do what you feel is right in the moment and keep going and often rewrite it many times so um one reason I wanted to write about the Russia is that in Russian folklore you have this vast variety of spirits you have household spirits for every building on your farms there's like a house spirit and the house spirit has a wife and then you have a bath house spirit and a freshing house spirit cow shed spirit, stable spirit doryard spirit like there's one for everything and their personalities kind of match their building like the um bath house is often a little rickety dangerous shack on the edge of town it would burn down often because you know it's like a bath house so the bath house spirit the banek is kind of malicious he'll like scald you he'll light fires he's kind of lascivious he like spies on girls like he's um but he can also like tell the future so I didn't invent any spirits of any kind they're all in Russian folklore so um invented folklore characters or folk tales in a book they're all actually from a question for you you have a book that straddles genres so when you were creating it did you feel any sort of pressure to like push it towards one or the other or you know find a home for it it's the first book thing you can do it, no one's going to read it anyway except for the two guys yeah no I'm from a literary fiction background more than a science fiction background but I've always enjoyed reading sci-fi and watching sci-fi tv but I didn't feel like I wrote I started writing this book while I was in an MFA program where everyone was like oh this is trash man MFA that sounds kind of brutal they're mean it's weird but I felt like in a way I wanted to really be conscious of the history of speculative fiction and not feel like I was doing something for the first time just because I don't know about it but I was really just I think the the beauty to me of speculative fiction is I think this is related to what you're saying about filling in gaps in the historical record with events that either you make up or that are fantastical that are beyond the realm of reality like I think speculative fiction allows you to take what we know about people and change one big detail and then see how how it scales out from that I'm thinking of the Underground Railroad but Colson Whitehead I think it's a huge example of like just a switch in history illuminating history yeah I mean that's alternate history like right everyone's read that book or heard of that book about what if the Nazis won World War II or something like that but beyond alternate history and was of sci-fi and fantasy too like what if there were two cultures that had a conflict and they had a sort of colonialist relationship but it wasn't a race thing it was about one being one kind of alien and that breeds water and one being this other kind of alien that doesn't breathe water or something you know like it's we can see problems that exist in our real world in a different way when we're viewing them through a context of fantasy or science fiction and it frees writers I think to explore and it frees readers to be maybe more open-minded or see things from a different direction seems like a new perspective on your own own reality I guess are there any more questions? as a first-time novelist you can't sell a project on spec so without having written it first you can sometimes like I did sell a series on the strength of one book but they're not gonna just like take your concept or your treatment and say oh great write that that's not a thing as you move on career wise that can be a thing you can say I have this idea and they're like great do that Colson Whitehead's like hey guys or like Stephen King he's like so grocery list and they're like sure please Stephen here's money Stephen yeah for sure but that's a future career thing so I really want the trilogy and my agent said this is gonna be a trilogy and they're like okay three books so when we sold the books in the UK they bought the first two and then bought the third one separately which can be a thing to limit exposure for publishing house if the first two books tank they don't want the third one it's just a cold hard reality of a series and there will be some fringe people in the UK and it's brutal but like because series can be great because the first book can support the other ones you know because like readers want to continue but also you know that it is very unlikely that the subsequent books will do better than the first book because it's like diminishing returns right you're gonna have like X readers read the first book and then maybe hopefully 80% go on and then 60% go on it's always like a diminishing game for trilogies yeah my book has interview transcripts they're fake transcripts with different individuals who are part of this group of people that traveled through this sci-fi gateway and it was just those were also really fun to write it was fun to write in different voices and to talk about things that the main characters don't know about but I was also I was influenced by to have in 2008 when I lived in New York City and worked for the city of New York as an investigator of allegations of police misconduct it's a really cool job yeah it was crazy I was like 21 years old you know like I'm trying to look older and speak with a very deep voice that's so intense um yeah it was weird but one thing I did a lot was I transcribed interviews that I had conducted so I would have a conversation with somebody and it would be on a max out of that tape and then I would listen to it and try to write down everything that they said and like rewind and listen to it again and I just really I love dialogue as a writer and I love the way that people speak and I also like you get so many different versions of a story in the case of these investigations it would be like five people who had all seen this traffic stop and they all had a different version of like what the officers looked like who had spoken first the officer had hit the person in the car not you know so there's like a different take on the facts and there's also just a different way of telling of like speaking like how do you present your story yeah that's why I'm trusting and I wanted to play with that a little and I also wanted to one thing that I value about New York is the different kinds of people that live there and I wanted to though I am a white woman I wanted to write about different kinds of folks and show that New York isn't like Seinfeld or Girls or something like that that there are other people who live there old people and young people and people of color and immigrants from different cultures and queer people and so I wanted to go beyond the two characters I chose as point of view characters and have the opportunity to to use those interview transcripts and I wanted to write an interesting book about you know people who are grieving and so it's fun to have a section that I can read out loud that stands alone that's about someone lying to her neighbors and telling them she drinks her own menstrual blood yeah right would you ever write a full on epistolary novel like just go full like letters interviews emails and like I love reading those aren't they fun they're really fun I would be really hard especially in like super emotional moments it's always second hand or it has to be but when it's done well it's like so dazzling too so it's like it's really hard like structure for a book I know you're all a sci-fi group here but has anybody read an American Marriage by Terry Jones she's got a character who's in prison for almost a decade and they write letters back and forth and it's a way of getting it's a way of avoiding the research of what it's like to be in a men's prison which I'm guessing the author never has been in and it's a way of cutting out the boring parts because being in prison is a lot of routine and tedium it's a way of like cutting out some brutality that isn't what she wants the book to focus on and then she can show how the characters relationship with each other changes because the way like they start out so and so and then by the end it's just like initials and shit you can tell when they're mad at each other just by seeing how they write letter I think there's a lot of tricks you can do is what I'm getting at I'm thinking of dangerous liaisons too which is kind of the original epistolary novel is that epistolary? I only, sad to say know that from cruel intentions the novel is really worth it's a totally epistolary novel and manages to like find the emotion even though it's all people's letters which is really great oh yeah original epistolary too it's like I think it was yeah let me waste try to book which is the great thing about it it's a very flexible art form I feel like we've been an hour like it might be a little late for reading unless people are super super mega keen on a short reading thank you dad if you want to read something go ahead so do people want to have a chance to maybe get books on or purchase books? ask more questions show oh yeah there's snacks all this stuff cool let's just do that awesome thank you guys so much thank you